#things posted in communities with the goal to very clearly fuck people up
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About the subject of avoiding Triggers (cw. self-harm)
What im about to say might sound a bit silly but I wanted to mention it anyways since I feel like this never ever comes up when people discuss Triggers;,
So...
I used to be a very bitter and unhappy person, my bitterness eventually got so bad that just seeing people being happy triggered me sm that it made me self-harm. I'm luckily over all of this now and doing much better but um... I'm guessing what I'm trying to say is that the trigger debate is a bit more nuanced than people might realize?
People always assume that getting rid of everything "bad/immoral/non desired" would help others feel more comfortable online/fandoms and that no one would ever get triggered again but I kinda doubt that. Triggers are so much more complicated and very dependent on the person. Something that triggers someone might give someone else comfort and make them make seen;, something that gives someone else comfort might trigger another person and so on.
The only thing anyone can do is to look out for themselves, know their triggers and know how to avoid them. Block people if it helps but please don't try to control what others post or not.
Like seriously... I used to have such weird Triggers and It would have been so so sooo silly and shitty of me if I had asked the people around me and online not to be outwardly happy because it triggered me.
(Sorry if I was rambling too much, the point kinda got lost but I hope you understand what I meant)
I hope you dont mind me just sharing because…. yeah this, exactly🙂↕️ I still have INSANELY weird and specific triggers as well and honestly? sometimes I will randomly see something that fits the description and it might even ruin my day (even with blocking everything I can) to be quite honest and transparent here but never in my life would I imagine to go and blame or even hate whoever posted that because it‘s…. it‘s me. It‘s a personal thing, no one else is responsible for that
#blakemail#the only exception to this is obviously you know. things that are clearly posted to be triggering to someone#things posted in communities with the goal to very clearly fuck people up
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I'm gonna attempt to make another post talking about stuff I've seen after q's stream, because I saw people say that the last one I made made them feel better, so here we go:
why is he speaking spanish: this is not something I necesserly saw after yesterday, but I did see it last time he streamed a statement regarding qsmp and the fact that he had to start this stream fucking explaining why he's speaking his native language to formulate what he wants to say better is fucking vile to me and anyone that said that last time does not have a right to stay in this fandom or to even talk about this situation.
he does not have a right to sound mad: i'm sorry, but he has every right to sound frustrated, he is not mad at the admins that choose to leave the project, he explicitly says he understand their decision and wishes them the best, he is frustrated at those that have caused damage to the server in the first place and are still the reason why he can't be more open about what's happening. We are talking about his passion project here, of course he's frustrated that this is happening, even if he completely understands why some admins are leaving.
he is enabling hate against lea and others! (people that have leaked information): quackity has every right to cite the reason as to why he can't openly communicate the way he wants to, especially when those leaks have been twisted and used against him by the people that were initially harming the server in the first place (those he fired). He openly says the he doesn't necesserly think that the people that are leaking stuff are aware of how those leaks are actually being used, so he's not blaming any specific person. Actions have consequences, no one is the exception to this rule in this situation.
he says any criticism is invalid!: no he just straight up doesn't. He says he's not bothered by people that give non-constructive critcism and whose goal is clearly to see the project destroyed. If you feel like this statement is a call out to what you have been saying, then maybe you should reflect on what you actually want here and potentially leave. If you have constructive criticism you want to say, once again keep in mind that quackity does not have twitter on his phone and the best way to commuincate something to him is through his public email.
As quackity himself said multiple times, if you're not happy with how things are going and don't want to wait for visible change it's fine, but do not twist and nitpick stuff because you don't want to step away from something if you don't have a "moral" reason to do so. I said this multiple times, but this is just a shitty fucking situation that does not have an easy and quick solution to it, and people will make decisions or mistakes that you will not like on all sides, it does not mean there is malicious intent behind those decisions. Again, we may not know their names and how many there were, but we know who is actually to blame for all of this and I hope quackity is in the process/is gonna be able to sue them. The admins that choose to leave because of any reason have every right to do so, something that quackity himself also expressed on his stream. It is very possible to support them completely while understanding why things are the way they are, as much as everyone fucking dislikes it.
I genuinely hope qsmp is able to come back stronger, however long it takes, because I personally think this project is good and does not deserve to end this way. Much love to everyone, once again remember to have empathy to everyone.
#I might add more depending on what I see but for now this is it#also#do not force the admins to fucking make statements#about if they're leaving or not#let them do what they want#qsmp#qsmp discourse#qadmin situation
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okay listen I'm so tired lol
I am a fandom old. I've been around the freaking block like eight dozen times. I'm at the point in my life where I enjoy media because it's FUN and ENRICHING for me personally, rather than something I base my identity on. I adore the community that happens in fan spaces (mostly).
here is why I never trust an anon that's clearly just being a dick: I've been in way to many scenarios where people who aren't even invested in the thing just think it's so fucking funny to watch segments of a community fight with each other. it tickles some part of their lizard brain. their mom never taught them not to be an asshole to strangers. idk.
there's a political term that you may or may not be familiar with called astroturfing. it's frequently used in marketing and politics to falsely create the image of vast public support for something that doesn't actually have all that much natural support. for example, people who don't especially have strong feelings about trans issues being encouraged/paid/instructed to respond to any and all trans support a certain way. responding to blogs, sending letters to the editor, posting on message boards, etc. their goal is to create a broad public perception that most people are anti-trans (untrue).
and it works. entire fucking laws and legislation and protests and fearmongering come out of that shit. people make up FAKE PROBLEMS (cis men dressing up like women to go be pervy in public bathrooms???) and spread the word via bad actors and controlling the public discourse. the media conglomerate that gamed Facebook to disproportionately support asshole authoritarian alt-right clowns and got them elected was EXCELLENT at it.
a similar thing can happen in fandom, ESPECIALLY when that fandom is a haven for women, POC, queer folk, and other minorities. you guys might remember GamerGate and SadPuppies? yeah all those fuckers are still active and still purposely being shitty at every given opportunity because they think it's funny to make the "libs" fight amongst themselves.
look up #yourslipisshowing if you're not familiar. it was a movement by Black Twitter (specifically Black WOMAN Twitter) to expose bad actors who would create accounts posing as Black woman activists, learn the surface-level terminology, and just purposely cause discord in leftist spaces under the ever-familiar activist method of "being morally pure is a thing that can exist."
anyway: any time I get an ask or comment without a name attached that is very obviously intended to poke me in a sore spot, I delete that shit and assume it's some fucker trying to start fan drama for kicks. even if I'm wrong, I still don't need to feed into that shit. this is my fun, happy space. I'm an activist and do activist shit and get angry at the world in real life, I don't need it in my little fandom corner of the internet too.
which is not to say that shitty fans and shitty fandom takes don't really exist. they very much do. but I don't give them much air unless there's an actual name attached. and even THEN it can be hit or miss because people can and do create fake accounts if they're especially dedicated to being a shithead.
so: if you're minding your business and some goober comes into your ask box with shit that's clearly intended to push a button, give it like 24 hours to cool down and decide if it's actually worth it to respond. for me, most of the time I determine that it's not.
don't get me wrong. calling out bad behavior in fandom IS IMPORTANT and SHOULD BE DONE. I just also think it's important to try and find the joy and camaraderie in these spaces as much as possible and that people who try to disrupt that for jollies suck real bad and give a disproportionate perception of "what X fans are like."
in summary, my philosophy is be the best person you can be, be as kind as is warranted, focus on the parts of your fandom that make you happiest, and carry a big stick for when the jerks won't take a hint.
also like. shitting on other characters to prop up your fave is such a freaking middle school move. are you in middle school? if so, I'm sorry. if not, I'm still sorry, but for a different reason.
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aside from saying 'white' once in the original post, how does the original post talk about white fragility in nonbinary people? i understand that your addition does, and i agree with a lot of your addition, but the original post is very clearly complaining about nonbinary people being upset and hurt by not being seen as their gender. which i do genuinely think is kind of a fucked up thing for you to platform and was kind of startled to see.
i think the original post wasn’t worded very well, and they clarified in i think a reblog and other posts, but the post did absolutely touch on white fragility, and they were correct in a lot of what they said. when i reblogged it, my goal was to dig deeper into what they were trying to say and give it more context and nuance. also the original poster is nonbinary and is talking about a phenomenon they have seen in their own community among people who are like them.
sometimes we have to read things that are jarring, things that make us feel defensive, because that defensiveness often points to blind spots. if the idea of white femme nonbinary people leaning on white fragility to try to center themselves in conversations they don’t need to be centered in makes you feel attacked, it’s probably a good idea to examine why.
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HONEST QUESTION by why do u think no one (until shauna did at their fight) ever called jackie out on being oblivious to other people’s feelings? Like we all know jackie is never mean on-purpose nor does she ever want to cause any harm but there are times where she has no idea that she is indeed doing so.. or is somehow influencing that.. And its like why has no one else ever tried voicing this out to her? BC we can clearly see she would’ve done something to change her behavior if it was pointed out. I just dont get why no one tried to other than the fact that it was probably just pretty privilege or people just being too scared to say so
WELL okay this question really got me thinking lmao my answer is sort of twofold so walk with me here…I don’t fully think jackie IS oblivious to other peoples feelings and I don’t think people have any issues calling her out when she misreads tone. The people who do tend to snap at the others when they say stuff that annoys them—off the top of my head shauna (obviously lol), tai, nat, mari, and van—all do at jackie at some point.
I think in canon, with the group as a whole, jackie is actually very in tune with their emotions. She corrals them at the kegger and they genuinely react positively. I think she’s honestly extra in tune with people’s emotions, perhaps partly because has to work a little harder at things. I think that’s why she’s captain.
When I say “off” in my original post, I mean that I think people can sense the way that someone picks up on and addresses behavior (aka loading time/processing/trying to problem solve when that isn’t what’s desired/etc) more than I mean that jackie is saying shit that upsets people regularly. I think that, other than shauna, jackie doesn’t upset them much more than anyone else until later in the season when things get bleaker.
Once they’re in the woods, jackie has lost her entire social script. It’s funny to me how people say she was the enforcer of society, because really I think society has kicked her ass and she’s simply learned how to exist within it and doesn’t know how to adapt to change. This isn’t the setting she’s used to, she doesn’t know how the people she’s learned and adapted to will react to these things, because who the fuck does?? It’s now unpredictable and she’s just really lost in a compounding way. We see her actually cheer people up again when things fall back into a script that she has access to—the seance, doing mistys makeup for her, etc.
As far as shauna goes, she has NO problem letting Jackie know when she’s upset with her lol. She just gives her no clue why. Shauna doesn’t communicate her feelings with anyone really and she certainly doesn’t delve into big picture things. (There’s a tai shauna tangent here that I’ll go on one day but besides that relationship, shauna is really just closed off and expects people, especially jackie, to read her mind.) Shauna snaps or gives the cold shoulder and Jackie adjusts and readjusts, until she’s fixed it the best she can.
I think that shauna’s reaction to being called out for cheating with jeff is something that greatly colors a lot of peoples’ views on jackie, when really it says a whole fucking lot more about shauna herself. Shauna is a horribly fucking unreliable narrator. We see her get confused and forget what her own lies are when she’s fessing up to callie about adam. She was writing her own narratives and letting resentment build even before the crash. So to me, taking what shauna says during that fight at face value, over what we actually see of jackie and their relationship, is a mistake. Shauna’s backed into a corner. She’s caught out. Little miss I’m with homeland security, first panic instinct is to lie is going to make shit up. She was trying to hurt jackie. That was the goal. For a myriad of reasons—I love shauna shipman don’t get it twisted lol. (And we see jackie realize shauna is tying to hurt her. Jackie tries to hurt back for a bit and she sucks at it lol and then she slips back into shocked hurt.)
So anyway, yeah. I think shauna clearly felt overshadowed, but she just does. In general. All the time. We got to see that in 2x09 when she spells it out for us in her journal lol. So using this scene to read jackie as someone who actually does the things shauna is accusing her of feels like a big jump to me.
Shaunas feelings were real. But I don’t fucking think shauna hated soccer. I don’t think jackie ever actually pushed her into her shadow, unintentionally or not. I think that jackie couldn’t navigate shauna’s emotions in any way other than placating when she could and trying to cling to her, because she was constantly terrified that shauna would leave her. Why did jackie expect shauna to go to rutgers? Probably because that’d been their entire fucking plan and jackie had no way of knowing that shauna didn’t want that anymore. I’m gonna talk more about their fight one day when it isn’t a tangent on a different topic lol, but basically I think reading what shauna says in the fight as truth is a common and inaccurate take.
To the last point, I think prettiness definitely impacts a person’s life on like every scale and makes people overlook things they might not normally, but I don’t necessarily feel like jackie got off with no feedback basically. And I don’t think she was actually that hurtful. I’ve talked about the nat situation here and how it’s unique, but that isn’t jackie being oblivious, that’s jackie trying to get an outcome. She is clearly oblivious sometimes (when she tries to give a pep talk post insane leg breaking lol, when she tells travis about who nat has hooked up with, when she is pragmatic about things like rationing food) but really she rarely says overtly hurtful shit, even on accident. She does less so than the other girls.
So I think it all comes back to that thing that a lot of viewers do—view jackie as fake. The fact that she doesn’t really give any evidence of meanness sort of was my point. Even when there is nothing bad said, general social awkwardness can be taken as an indication of insincerity. I think this is sometimes especially true when someone is overall decent at masking, at least enough that they’re superficially seen as well liked. Because then people see a hiccup (which is really an adjustment to new input) and take it as an intentional behavioral change.
(Grain of salt, I am someone who had a keen fucking interest in being as pretty as possible at her age lol, to the degree that when I was asked how I got so good at “beauty stuff” I said “well, you can be weird if you’re hot enough!” Until I learned that was actually NOT the answer people were looking for of course lmao so I am close to the subject of performative attractiveness to skate by and I also know that it only tends to cover more superficial likability—aka homecoming queen, but you’re only got like 1-2 close friends and your teammates have no issue giving you bizarre looks when you miss the mark lol)
Thanks for the ask, clearly it got me thinking. Like a lot. Many tangents and I’m not even sure how well I addressed the questions lol but I don’t feel like going back and making it more focused so this is the ramble we get!! <3
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well… we found out that someone *cough cough* @sophieinwonderland … said that she thought we falsely reported eeveecraft to get them banned.
this is not true at all. she has no basis for this claim. the post we wrote responding to eeveecraft, we wrote specifically because they linked to our document in order to discredit it. that is the entire reason why we wrote that response. we would not have made the post at all if they had not brought up the document we compiled. our response was made in good faith. and never in the post did we explicitly call eeveecraft racist.
did we say that tulpa language is racist? yes.
did we say that alexandra david-neel is racist? yes.
did we call eeveecraft racist, anywhere in our response? not to our knowledge (though we did say that, by saying racist things, they were being racist)
we never reported eeveecraft, nor did we encourage anyone else to do the same. to claim otherwise is slander. on sophie’s blog, she is slandering us, despite having us blocked, to our knowledge! we only knew about these posts at all because a concerned friend saw them and brought them up to us. we don’t view sophie’s blog except in cases like this, where we find she’s been referring to us without our knowledge in order to lie about us.
it’s hurtful. it’s unkind. it’s disrespectful.
how can she claim to ever be engaging in good faith when this is the sort of shit she does? we’ve seen sophie block evading to spread false rumors about those she disagrees with many times over the past year or so. this isn’t something new for her.
like, the entire time we have been in syscourse spaces, our goal has been to learn more, have honest conversations, and to discuss system issues with those of differing views in good faith.
that has been our goal here since day one.
we genuinely didn’t know eeveecraft wouldn’t be able to see our post. we thought tagging them would make that post visible to them. if they resurface, we will absolutely remake that post onto our main blog and @ them there so they can view it.
why spend so much energy railing against us, when we:
1) didn’t respond in bad faith (and did not attack them as she claims, for fuck’s sake) we responded with concern, hoping to genuinely gain some clarification.
2) didn’t know that @ ing eeveecraft wouldn’t make the post visible to them. we’re not blocked by many users and we don’t know how that sort of thing functions.
3) we literally have a partner who is a tulpamancer. we have been in tulpa spaces (frequenting r/tulpas, tulpa.io, tulpanomicon, and tulpa.info) for over a year. tulpamancy is not new to us. this language shift, though, is.
yes, it is possible to be pro-tulpa as a practice, anti-tulpa terminology. like. i don’t know how else to tell you that it’s possible to separate a concept from its label. especially when that label has clearly racist roots and many poc have spoken up about it.
yes, it is possible to believe in endogenic systems and support them fully, even while being syscourse unaligned. “syscourse unaligned” does not automatically mean anti-endo or sysmed, as others might like to believe. like please, we’re begging you, learn some nuance.
note we didn’t call any tulpamancers racist! just the terminology, and people’s actions regarding that terminology. ignoring that fact, brushing it under the rug, or claiming that the terminology isn’t racist doesn’t make it any less true.
if someone says something racist, yeah, we’re gonna call it out. it’s part of learning to be antiracist, and part of learning how to stand up for marginalized people in your communities. even (and especially) when it’s hard. it has been very difficult for us, going down this path. we have been targeted and harmed more by speaking out against tulpa language than we ever have in any of our time in syscourse.
but we cannot let this go. i mean yeah, it’s getting to us, and we’re getting beaten down by people like sophie making wild assumptions about us, talking about us behind our back, and spreading rumors about us that assume the worst in us without ever asking us directly. but idk, like, it should not be up to buddhist poc to have to fight tooth and nail to defend themselves. there should be more white people on their side, listening to them, rallying behind them, and willing to stand up for them.
that’s what we’re trying to do here. that has always been what we’re trying to do. we are not trying to destroy the tulpa community at all!! and if anyone could read our posts without assuming the worst in us, actually read what we have to say without jumping to conclusions… they could see that.
idk. idk. this has been extremely fucked for our mental health. we’re not in a good place. we want to do what we can to keep standing up against racism within the community, but it’s so hard when the people being racist:
1) immediately block you
2) still read your posts, even though they blocked you
3) make posts assuming the worst about you, claim that you did things that you simply did not do, and come after you for things that they never reached out to you about personally
(not to mention in her posts referencing us she treats the survivor’s network discord server like a group of evil sysmeds who plot together to bully endos, when in reality… it is a recovery server for trauma survivors with dissociative disorders. again: the survivor’s network is a recovery server. for trauma survivors. with dissociative disorders. it is a space to come together in order to heal, share resources, and learn from each other. it is a survivor space for those in recovery. we are shocked to find sophie calling the members of this server, a trauma and recovery space, morally bankrupt…)
in our disclaimer in our response to eeveecraft, we said that it’s not our goal to block evade. the post was genuinely meant as a response, one that we put a lot of thought and effort into! we honestly did not know that eeveecraft wouldn’t be able to see the post. we thought @ ing them directly would make it possible for them to view that post in particular. it definitely was never meant as an attack.
and to see folks claiming otherwise while dragging our name through the mud… idk it has us at our wits’ end.
posts referenced for transparency:
#syscourse#long post#tulpacourse#slander#sorry this is such an emotionally charged rant… we just had to get this off our chest#about to post this then fuck off because this shit has really messed us up#but also shoutout to sn y’all have helped us in our recovery so much and i know we lurk mostly#but we are so grateful to be in that space and our therapist loves that we’re finding community with other survivors there!
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first of all, apologies: this may sound like needless bait and or agressiveness, it may not be my place, as a non usamerican, to comment on usa's politics, i can't hit enter on anon ask for some reason so this will be a block of text, and my english is of dubious quality when it comes to expressing my points. But as a non usa citizen, or even a non global north citizen, but honestly the bidencourse or whatever feels like its distracting... from the actual point? 1/?
Okay, first, Very Sorry it took me a while to answer. I wanted to wait and give this a proper response, and then real life got to be a Lot. Second, your english is better than my french, and your phrasing ends up saying things more clearly than native speakers because you’re trying to communicate, not say something with clever words.
Actual answer now. It’s below the rest of your asks, which I copied all into this. I’m going to talk about Americans as ‘We’ in this. I know that there are exceptions, I hope I am an exception to it, but its easier to talk like this.
like, yeah, sure. american politics are horrifyingly influential on a global scale in such a manner no single country should be. yeah, sure, deciding whether your president did something bad, terrible even, whether your... ok i dont know the name of state guys in usa politics, so biden & folks, and whether you'll vote for or against him to continue supporting your political goals against their current actions is important, sure 2/?
but also, it really feels as a sorta... united states of america main character of the world moment? really bad at wording this, but it feels as though the vast majority of americans right now are using whats happening in palestine as... performance, sorta? political performance, or using palestine suffering as set dressing to their own issues. theres a really strong vibe of "see all these people suffering, *arent you, white american liberal* feeling guilty about your choices?" 3/?
its like... it really feels as though the whole things is abstract or like, superficial to most people posting about it right now. sure, theyre making a big show, or whatever, but instead of heres how you can actually help, heres what you can actually do about this, american posters are doing the equivalent of asking for a manager about a building thats on fire. theyre complaining more about their own politics than actually helping 5/?
and it circles back to how could my politician do this, or im not voting for him, and, sure, by all means, feel this way, act on it even, but like. grips their shoulder. Can you please not make it about yourselves. once in your lifes. can you please not think about people who are dying, who are being killed, who are being oppressed - in terms of set dressing for internal american politics? just this once? 7/?
this is going a little offtopic, but like, fuck yknow? i saw more people commemorating the death of kissinger than discussing on how to undo the shit he did, and most people commemorating were... americans. i celebrated too, because i was born raised and live in a country that got its dictatorship through american involvement, but it always ends up being how the world impacts america than the opposite, despite how ppl phrase it. sorry. idk. this ended up venty as hell. 8/8
As long as the USA continues to shove into the politics of other nations, especially in the global south, you have the right to comment on what is happening here. I’m happy to be a place for you to vent. You’re also right that the USA is acting like a Main Character. We have done that since Isolationism went out of style. Lots of American politicians on the right talk about ‘America First’ and staying out of other countries’ problems, but they just mean they don’t want to send aid money. Almost every American politician still wants to get involved when it suits their interest (oil, money, personal agenda, personal religion)
Talking about Biden is an intentional distraction here. In part because our politics is a mess of blame shifting and personal attacks. In part because it’s election time, and anything a president running for re-election does is heavily scrutinized. But also, because most americans don’t know enough about global politics to actually talk about it. Instead, we make it about ourselves.
That gets amplified online, and especially on tumblr bc there’s a lot of americans on english websites. We are used to everything being about us.
You’re right that our politics have a huge impact globally. That’s also true for Russia, China, and some key European countries. For the most part, the global south is considered unimportant. Not saying that’s a good thing, but it’s definitely true right now. The next american election could, genuinely, collapse the USA as we know it. I don’t mean the country will turn into anarchy and the purge overnight if Trump wins, but it would be very bad. I’ll ignore the problems we would have domestically for now and how those filter into the rest of the world. That’s an entire essay. They’re huge, but you asked about why we only see things through our own lens.
I kind of want to say that we just suck. That it’s ego, and nothing else. But, we’re actually taught to think this way. That won’t help your frustration, but it is the Why.
Americans get raised with an american perspective, obviously. We’re taught, pretty specifically, that we are a superpower who can change anything we want, and the rest of the world can’t stop us. Having veto power in the United Nations is a good example. We don’t see things that aren’t filtered through American media and reports unless we go out and look for them. Hell, we’re at a record high right now because 60% of americans have passports. We don’t go to other countries, when we do, we expect them to cater to us. We never see anything but the american side of things.
And if America is the only one who can really have any impact, we see our elections as the Most Important Thing. It isn’t completely wrong. How our politicians think about other countries has a direct impact on the rest of the world. We supply a huge amount of money, weapons, and aid to countries. Right now, funding for aid to Ukraine and Gaza are really contentious in Congress. Congress has to pass the bills that let Biden send help. Our system is a mess, and we have people who are elected thanks to a few thousand, or a few hundred voters, that are going to be critical to get those bills passed.
But that’s the bigger picture. That’s officials, and why, in a lot of ways, it DOES matter to the rest of the world how our politics change. I don’t like that, but so long as it’s true, then any american who cares about the rest of the planet needs to focus on effecting our government’s choices.
As for individuals. You are very, very right about this. We treat global events as set dressing for our leaders. Like I said, it does matter, but the way we talk, especially online, is performance.
Lots of americans WANT to help internationally. We feel helpless to do that. If you don’t have the money to donate to charities, it feels like all you can do is scream. Media and news in America doesn’t talk about the rest of the world, so we pour all of that anger onto our politicians, and expect them to fix it. We feel weak, we don’t know what to do, so we do the only thing we know. We don’t know the names of Knesset leaders. We don’t even know about UK politics unless it’s really dramatic, and they’re our closest ally and culture.
To use your metaphor; we’re screaming at the manager because we think he has the keys, and we’re in the fire too. He doesn’t. We don’t know how to handle that. So we’re just screaming.
As for Kissinger, it ties into the above, I promise. A lot of the hate for him, and the celebrating that he died, is because we know what America has done is fucked up. He was a symbol of that. Lots of young americans hate what we did. Shit, lots of americans who were young back in the 70s hate what we did. Him dying felt like we’d gotten rid of some of the baggage tied to us (it doesn’t, we still interfere all over the world) It was a bit of good news when we are facing the fact that we can’t force other countries to obey us.
I’ve talked before about how conflicted I am about this. I badly want America to step in Fix It. I want us to help the Rohingya. I want us to stop Putin in Ukraine. I want us to force a peace deal in Israel and somehow make things right. I want that so badly because I hate what’s happening. I also hate the idea of America continuing to act like we’re the main character. But. I hate that we could do more, and we aren’t. I think a lot of Americans feel that way.
Americans who are watching the rest of the world feel weak right now. Younger Americans - who are more likely to be online talking, AND more likely to be watching the rest of the world - feel weak in every part of our lives. Money, politics, social stuff, corruption. We feel like we aren’t able to do anything. So we’re screaming at the manager because staying quiet hurts too much, and we don’t know how to change it.
This is already long, and I don’t think it will make you or anyone else feel better. But I want to add this.
Everyone pays attention to their immediate surroundings first. The people of Guyana are focused on Venezuela trying to annex them. The people of Sudan are thinking about how everything is falling apart for them. The problems in the US are pretty privileged. The danger for trans americans is bad right now. It’s not wrong to think about keeping yourself alive and safe first. You put on your own oxygen mask first. Everyone does.
I don’t know if I missed something that you want me to talk about. I don’t know if this was helpful at all. Really, I just sympathize with you. It isn’t fair, it isn’t right, I want to shake americans by the shoulders, and I can’t. And I hate that.
#us politics#principles - strife#this is 1300 words of answer#I don't know if it really answered anything#because the answer comes down to:#Americans can't imagine things except through how it impacts america#the rest is me saying that with more words
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Rundown on the vocabulary of oppression - Ideology and Diplomacy
In the face of current events™, some of my students felt lost and confused and one of them asked me to help them understand what words such as fascism, nazism, antisemitism and zionism mean. My guess is they're not the only people feeling that way. So let's take a look at all those words being thrown around and what their actual meaning is.
This is gonna be a long post so all the material is going under the cut. I will, once again, be very serious about my sources and use Wikipedia because come the fuck on it's right THERE.
Fascism: far-right authoritarian nationalist political ideology, often suppressing any democratic aspect from political life (be it through forbidding all but one party or reducing the number and political range of parties available to make sure the result of any election will only further the political ideology and its goals). It entails a strong militarism, forceful suppression of political opponents, violent repression of protests and social struggles, and often has roots in racism (or simply white supremacy) to reinforce the nationalist aspect. Historical examples of fascism justified themselves through their ultimate goal to create a perfect society for perfect people; nowadays the blunt racist übermensch-creating ideas are a little too old-fashioned and we can reconsider the workings, ideological tennets and goals of fascism in a globalized neo-liberal world (tldr: protecting the people in power and reinforcing oppression of everyone else).
Nazism: German-flavored fascism created by an obscure Austrian painter. Despite it originating from "National Socialism", there is nothing social about Nazism; that was a PR stunt to bring in the communist voters after a strong communism diabolisation campaign. The idea was that a natural hierarchy or races existed and at the top of them was the mythical Aryan race the German people were supposedly the descendants of and that the farther a population strayed from the Aryan race ideal, the lower it was in the race hierarchy with, at the very bottom, Jews. Because why not, antisemitism was trendy in the 30's. They were however not the only targets of the Nazi movement and Nazis up to today's neo-nazi groups will indiscriminately attack all kinds of people they judge undesirable in their perfect society; foreigners, people from so-called "inferior races", queers, neurodivergent people, disabled people and so on.
Racism: discrimination and prejudice against people based on their race or ethnicity, be it social or enforced by a state and its laws (Apartheid). It relies on two ideological basis: good old xenophobia (discrimination and prejudice against foreigners) and the nazi race hierarchy theory (which itself rests on eugenics, which were very popular in the US in the 20's). It leads to direct actions or discriminative measures against people perceived as inferior or undesirable, the inaction of legal authorities when those happen and serves as basis to ideas such as Supremacy.
White supremacy: the eugenics-based idea that North-Western Europeans and their descendants ("White" people) are superior to all other races/ethnicities/cultures/civilisations on Earth because they happened to develop technologies earlier and to have a clearly understood (to them) progression from idealized Ancient Civilisations to perfect "modern societies" (industrialized oppression-based capitalism). The whole thing being backed by religious ideas to make it even smoother. Reality is that Europe just had a very nice climate, plenty of easily available resources which boosted its development and a whole bunch of Intellectuals™ to affirm that yes they were superior and therefore meant to Reign Supreme on the Earth. Today, White supremacy can be seen in violent groups and institutions such as the Aryan Brotherhood, the United States Government and the Israeli military.
Minority: theoretically, a minority is a group of people within a population which finds itself in so small numbers they end up never getting their voices heard through democratic processes. The truth is that gerrymandering and state-enforced measures (such as Apartheid or race-targeted police brutality) make the demographic aspect irrelevant and really the people in power make the populations they don't like minorities in order to dismiss them or diabolise them even more easily. Think about "immigrants", "arabs", "pedophiles" (when referring to queer people) and so on. You must have stumbled upon it at some point.
Jewishness: to be Jewish, aka to belong to a matriarcal bloodline which can be retraced to the original 13 tribes of Israel. Jewishness is an easy target (see: antisemitism) because it affirms itself and its existence through both cultural/religious aspects and an admitted racial aspect. Following an important diaspora, Jewish people can be found in almost every country and within almost every culture; there are Jewish people of color and Arab Jews. Which is a problem to some (see: Zionism).
Antisemitism: Jew-targeted racism. Mostly found in non-Jews, there is however such a thing as "auto-antisemitism" which is antisemitism perpetrated by Jews upon Jews (See: Association of German National Jews, aka "Jews for Hitler"), be it as self-loathing of one's own Jewishness (Karl Marx and Henry Kissinger were examples of this) or as a way to distinguish between "good" and "bad" jews. Historically, antisemitism was first motivated by the old "They killed Jesus" argument and their often immigrant status, but in more recent times ideas such as Jews being parasites feeding on the societies of "good people" (the Aryan race, for Nazi Germany) or the fact that some Jews ended up in pretty important positions of power (see: Rothschild Family) gave traction to plenty of conspiracy theories, which only got backed by the rise of Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel, which is why antisemitism is often brought up whenever criticism of its policies and actions are made.
Originally, the term "Semitic" on which the word is based designated "Arabs, Jews, Akkadians, and Phoenicians"; it has now been reduced to Jewish populations only.
Zionism: ideology born around the 1820's according to which the territory of the "Promised Land" (then: Palestine) had to be returned to the exiled Jewish population and a Jewish ethno-state be created there. Early on, acquisition of Palestinian land by wealthy Jewish families was the first ways of expression of Zionism, but after the Second World War the horrors of concentration camps were used as an argument by Zionists to ask for the creation of the state of Israel. Today, Zionism refers to the defense of the State of Israel, its policies and its legitimacy, as well as the existence of an "ideal Jewish population"; thus Zionists reject non-white Jewish populations and do no shy away from affirming their racism or comparing themselves to Nazis in a positive way. Zionism can be considered as the a flavor of Jewish Fascism.
Colonialism: derived from White Supremacy, colonialism is the ideology affirming that White people have the moral imperative to conquer the Earth, subjugate local "barbarian" or "savage" populations and bring them "civilization"; this resulted in countless genocides, forced conversion to Christianity and theft of land and natural resources from native populations, as well as settling of White people on said stolen land. Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Australia and Israel are examples of modern, still existing Colonial Nations, and all still enforce oppression of native populations in varying degrees, the worst being genocidal campaigns and apartheid laws.
Imperialism: practice of maintaining or extending power over foreign nations, particularly through expansionism, employing both hard power (military and economic power) and soft power (diplomatic power and cultural imperialism). Imperialism focuses on establishing or maintaining hegemony and a more or less formal empire. While related to the concepts of colonialism, imperialism is a distinct concept that can apply to other forms of expansion and many forms of government. For example, the US interventionism in the Middle East (Gulf wars of 90-91 and 2003 onward) and its backing of Israel's expansion are imperialist measures, as well as the veto power of China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States over the UN.
#thanatopolitics#vampire economy#disambiguation#fascism#nazism#racism#white supremacy#minority#jewishness#antisemitism#zionism#colonialism#imperialism
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Compromise In-System: 18+ Edition
For this (incredibly long) post, I wanted to discuss how various parts can feel about sex, and how we, specifically, found compromises -- as well as a few other options for compromise at the end. Keeping in mind -- hello, this is Numb, a part designed entirely to have us numb our emotions and feel nothing. This, obviously, included pleasure. My only goal was to keep us safe by not letting us feel at all, and being quite smug about that.
Enter: Curtis (who co-wrote this post).
TL;DR (for those uninterested in an enormous ramble):
Regardless of how unsafe it can feel, it is vitally important to reach compromises with your parts and make them feel welcomed. This includes parts who are seeking sexual gratification. Making those parts feel welcomed to be sexual is crucial to make them feel welcomed in other areas. This can help lower dissociative barriers, help strengthen communication, and... okay, yes, lead to some fun sexual things.
Numb: Bear with me, as this post will be primarily me rambling about my love for my in-sys husband. The thing is, I did not start out loving him. When Curtis first consciously became part of the system -- there's a time before that, but it's unimportant to this story -- he split to hold the sexual desires we were facing toward people (of any gender, which is where the most controversy in our system arose) and the gender identity issues we were facing. And, frankly, he was horny as hell. He often would front just to check out people on campus, as we were in college and no longer a minor, and suddenly, he could fuck around. And he wanted to fuck around. He wanted to do incredibly unsafe things, because we were finally free from our abusers, and he was rebelling in the loudest way possible -- that is, by trying to get dicked down.
And, each and every time he set out with that intention, I stopped him. Which... was frustrating for us both, to say the least.
Curtis: I wouldn't say I hated hated Numb -- but I thought he needed to lighten the fuck up. What could one, safe, consensual fuck really do to hurt me? (A lot. It could've hurt me a lot. I had a lot of sexual trauma that I was ignoring, or using to make myself feel "cool" in some ways. Because I was still a teenager and still just doing my best.) Numb was the nagging voice in the back of my head reminding me that my body was shared, and so, if I wanted to fuck, I needed everyone else's consent.
That's where the first compromise really came up, and it wasn't quite a compromise. "None of us have consented, so you have to avoid sex." This isn't necessarily a bad discussion to have -- it can really help some overly sexual parts calm their tits a bit. But it left me with no outlet, and I really needed one. I was getting pent up, and angrier, and I was also severely depressed. I needed something to feel more... okay. More like who I really was (an incredibly sexual individual).
Numb: Cue him trying to bend the rules as much as possible. Primarily, with... some... er. We'll just boil it down to "very kinky self-play" for ease of this post, and so we can save that particular kink for another post of its own. Now, while the other parts were... mostly okay with this (some more than others), I was firmly against this. There were too many variables: what if our roommate walked in on us, or our parents tried to call while we were "in the moment," so to speak? There were too many things for me to plan for, and so, I spoke with him repeatedly to try and dissuade him away from masturbation.
Curtis: This, clearly, did not work, cause I took one look at this stiff ass man and went "Alright -- what if it's all in my head then? Let's fuck, me and you."
Numb: Now, we don't mean that legitimately (yet). We mean that he mostly saw me as someone he could aggravate via aggressive flirtation, and yes, that was accurate. I was disgusted by the idea. Particularly, he was someone who was purposely trying to upset me via pleasure, via emotions, and I'm not good with those. Or, at least, back then, I wasn't. And he riled me up, which is what he wanted -- if I was angry, I was different, and that meant he was making an impact on me and getting the attention he wanted. And, conversely, he wasn't going out to fuck because he was enjoying arguing with me so much.
Oddly enough, this did reach yet another compromise. We had a few along the way, sort of in this order:
No, you may not fuck or have any sexual desires.
You can fuck yourself, so long as you do not fuck others, and so long as it is according to everyone else's preferences.
You may argue with me about fucking yourself or flirt with me, so long as it prevents you from actually fucking.
The thing being, over time, I did grow to have feelings for Curtis. This is understandable, as I began to realize he was more than just his sexual desires. He was a very hurt person, same as the rest of the parts with me, and he was hurting more than the ones I could currently access. Only, he wouldn't let me numb that emotion; I couldn't protect the stubborn fool-- he would push me away and let the feeling grow worse and worse until he just... combusted. And this culminated in some incredibly traumatizing moments.
Curtis: Woohoo, October is a Traumaversary! Didn't expect the sexual alter to have a backstory, huh?
Anyways, I constantly pushed him away, despite the fact that he could always numb those emotions if I just let him. After all, he'd been handling Wade's bullshit for years -- but even when I did let him numb my feelings, it didn't help -- because that was just... hurting me. What it finally took in the end, as always, was communication.
Numb: We stopped arguing and I really started to listen to what I thought was always bait or simply fodder for an argument. I began to hear and recognize just how much this man hated himself, but moreover, how he wanted to feel that. How his emotions made him feel alive, and present, and while they sucked and made him want to die, at least they confirmed he was real, that we weren't insane. I began to understand that his emotions were him living as loudly as he could, and while it wasn't healthy, perhaps -- just maybe -- my way wasn't any healthier either.
So, we continued to find compromises. I didn't numb his pain so long as he let me comfort him in other ways. Holding him while he screamed, fixing his wounds innerworld when the time came for that to be needed; we worked together. This was long before any semblance of "recovery" was on our minds; we simply saw each other as equals, hurting and trying our bests, wishing to help another person. And... well. He needed someone who understood all that, needed someone to help him, who loved him in that way.
One thing led to another, and here we are now, madly and deeply in love. And yes, we do have sex. We'll make a longer post at some point detailing how innerworld sex can, in fact, exist, in many forms. For the purposes of this post, it's enough to merely say it happens. And it's something we enjoy, because we've come to realize through these compromises and through these conversations between us that it is safe. Sex can be safe in ways Curtis never tried for, and for ways I refused to even consider.
Curtis: Now, the reason we rambled about our whole romantic (blugh) fling is... Well, so many systems I talk to nowadays talk about conflict innerworld. They talk about that One Part who just Won't Listen and will NEVER listen, and... Jesus christ y'all, we do be having sexual trauma. There are a LOT of hypersexual systems out there. And I feel like people don't talk enough about how their sexual desires as parts need to be compromised with, same as all the other things.
Had Numb not compromised with me on the sexual stuff -- just by letting me, be me, in the safest ways possible -- then Wade wouldn't have ever tried having sex. He wouldn't know he's trans now, because I was the one who did the gender stuff. If I hadn't have felt safe compromising and communicating with Numb, I wouldn't have let him help me with my depression, and he wouldn't have let me feel it, and I would've just kept spiraling over and over again.
Because he let me find ways to be myself -- yes, sexually -- I could be myself in other ways. Which, in turn, has led to lowered dissociative barriers.
So...
Compromise, bitches. Try it.
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haunting adeline review
I put this up on goodreads but no one is going to read it so I figured I'd post it here too.
To paraphrase my hero Jenny Nicholson, I've ordered my thoughts into a numbered list. General warning for spoilers below.
1. The paperback version of this is 583 pages, and the font is not large. Furthermore, this feels like a 583-page long book, which is interesting because it's not some grand epic with years and years of events to cover. As the main character realizes right at the end, the whole book covers about three months. Which brings me to my next point.
2. I really feel like this could have worked with at least 100 (but preferably 200) pages shaved off. I sped through the first 300 pages, and everything fell off very quickly after that. My patience for the characters, my patience for the writing, the speed at which I was reading, my will to finish the book...
3. But, you may be wondering, cutting out that much of the book would surely cut out some of the plot, right? Well, yeah. And that's a good thing. Zade's whole weird Batman/John Wick thing was not enjoyable. I didn't pick up this book for cringey descriptions of a hacking coalition and our indestructible hero going all Jason Bourne on some henchmen. I picked this up for the romance, dammit! All of Zade's stuff and the murder mystery felt like subplots that got way too big for their own good and overshadowed what parts of the book were actually fun to read.
4. Speaking of Zade's big motivating cause, his crusade against human trafficking, it felt to me like a very obvious move by the author to make Zade's mission in life so undeniably good, that all the bad and unethical things he was doing with Adeline would seem fine, because he's actually a really good person, okay? Which felt like a weird inclusion to me, because this is clearly a dark romance. We don't need the fucked up hero to be redeemable, but that's exactly how this went down. Adeline finds out about how Zade has made it his life goal to save trafficked women and children and it gives her this whole crisis of "Well, he can't be all that bad. Look at all the good he does for these people!" And like, whatever. But Zade could have just been a pediatric neurosurgeon or something and it would have accomplished the same thing, without the pages and pages of his own little action novel shoved into the plot.
5. Zade's whole trafficking takedown plot is the reason there's a warning at the beginning of the book that says, and I shit you not, "The conspiracies found in this book have nothing to do with QAnon or antisemitism." The next time I find that preceding a story I'm taking the red flag for what it's worth and not reading the book. Essentially, there's a secret society of rich and powerful people in government and across the planet (who are literally called The Society) who do terrible things to women and children, perform literal blood magic rituals, and supposedly sell their souls to Satan to commune with "otherwordly entities" to achieve Eternal Rebirth. There are so many reasons for this plot not to be in the book. And also, if you notice the conspiracies in your book are VERY similar to real-life conspiracies that have harmed people for years and continue to do so today, maybe just don't leave that in the book? In addition to that, the book also says a lot of stuff that I found super uncomfortable along the lines of "Beautiful women get kidnapped into human trafficking all the time. It happens in grocery store parking lots, or even on the front porch of your own home. All it takes is for the wrong person to see you, a beautiful [read: white] woman, and they're going to come after you." Ugh.
6. The writing is just not good. Think of the most stereotypical example of "fanfiction writing" you can come up with. This book is pretty much that, down to literally calling eyes "orbs" more than once. There's also a lot of explaining things that the book was actually showing and not telling just fine on its own. Adeline is being stalked and is clearly not reacting to it the way a person usually would. That's evident from the book. But the author still felt the need to include paragraphs of inner monologue from Adeline here and there just to make sure you're really getting it. Stuff like "I know a normal person would be calling the cops right now. But I've never been that kind of person. It's fucked up, I know. But the adrenaline is making me feel some type of way." (not a real quote, but that's the essence of it)
7. I'm telling you now: if you don't like the way Sarah J. Maas writes smut, you are not going to like this. There's a lot of "to the hilt," "our tongues battled for dominance," "he consumed my lips with his own," stuff like that. Don't say I didn't warn you.
8. I will say, had this just been a dark romance and nothing more, I would have liked it. The smut was not written super great, but the scenarios were creative, and I liked them. It's a shame they end up not even feeling like the focus of the book.
#haunting adeline#booklr#book review#reading#books#romance books#dark romance#booktok#review#two stars
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something sorta lame about having neurodivergence or spicy cooties or whatever the fuck the internet calls Autism and ADHD is that i will always weird people out. i give people uncanny valley because if im strange i must be unhuman. its frustrating! i am very much human, but i suffer from disorder and disability and i am unchangingly weird.
i will want to pour my life story early on in the day but not in the afternoon. i may not have time for you, and prefer indoor activities and staying home, but please still invite me to leave the house as much as possible because i deserve to have the option and i will often take it. i may act in a pattern which will cause your pattern-seeking brain to define my personality, but my patterns will always be determined by complex problems and the personality you see is a miscommunication. for example, i may say i want to talk to you more often, but seemingly not make effort to do so. you may think its rude, and that's fair to think that, but the motivation is not to be rude or hurt you. my days are defined by a pattern of different obstacles and pains to overcome, and i post about them here to give insight into why i act the way i do. these obstacles drain me, so unfortunately by the end of the day when my friends just woke up, all i want to do is rest my mind and do something like watch mha, south park, or play sims 4 - really whatever im into atm.
this doesnt mean i dont make mistakes or misbehave, im not making excuses. i admittedly have emotional problems and for as long as i can remember i have been evolving and working to change them. this means be critical. dont be abusive or criticize things that are utterly out of my control, but truly criticize every action i take. i have a behavior disorder as well as ADHD and anxiety, the lines often become blurred and i cant tell right from wrong in the moment. if you feel frustrated with my behavior or see habits you disagree with, and you either want me to apologize, explain why i acted that way, and/or change my behavior, you should clearly express how you feel and what i did that was wrong. correct my behavior in the moment and dont be afraid to be critical, i can take it. my feelings may become hurt and i may be confused, but in that moment it is not your job to comfort me, i only expect information and what i can do to better the situation. truth is that in person i lose my temper quicker, and its very hard to have this conversation if we're not close, so i definitely recommend doing this over text/message. its fine to do it in person if there is a safe space, but i only really have successful conversations like that with someone im extremely close in (ie. my parents!) when online i can hold more emotional strain and effective communication is easier to pull off.
i know that sounds like a lot of work, but the truth is that relationships (yes, especially friendships) require an extreme amount of dedication and effort. again i should not be babied or excused, however it isnt fair to assume we're friends if you ghost me or launch anger at me all at once. the most effective way to conmunicate with me, with the intention of repairing a relationship, is to directly and clearly communicate with me your feelings and expectations, and work to come to a solution.
i will tell myself that this is because i struggle with communication, because im autistic and cant read your mind, but the truth is that everyone deserves this treatment. it is not an attack to privately hold a friend accountable for mistakes, misbehavior, bad habits, or hurtful words. as long as the goal is to fix a problem, mend feelings, and make yourself feel safe and worthy in a relationship.
if you dont value these aspects of communication, i dont want to be your friend. this post started out as a little ramble about how autism can affect first impressions, and now its devolved into a vent about how i expect friends to engage conflict. i know i got off track, but i have a point.
my point is, every sort of relationship (friendship, love, allyship, business partners, whatever) absolutely REQUIRES direct, clear communication.
ive decided that i will not put up with people that ghost me, that add dramatics to genuine conflict, that jump to conclusions without asking, people that engage in conflict in unhealthy ways. my expectation is that if you have the slightest anxiety or frustration, you reach out calmly and clearly, you express how you feel and what you expect, and we have a conversation about why it happened and how we can find a solution.
it sounds like a lot, but its geniunely not hard. this is how relationships are held over time, and people refusing to do this are why relationships online and in person, especially with neurodivergent people (or just people who prefer direct communciation), do not last long.
uhh sorry for all the negative tone, rant over!
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👀 PLease tell us your thoughts about the Jedi babies re-growing up among different cultural contexts.
Oh fuck okay
Context: original post, chrono
The specific post this ask is referencing: here
Summary of the AU: Disaster lineage got tossed back in time. Anakin stayed 21-ish, but Obi-Wan and Ahsoka got deaged, took new names for time-travel reasons (Ylliben and Sokanth, or Ben and Soka), are now staying with the True Mandalorians under Jaster Mereel because the Force said to, go back to the Temple after about a decade. They grabbed Shmi about three months after arriving.
So as far as the cultural background goes, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka had similar upbringings. She spent a few years on Shili first, but both spent the majority of their childhoods up to age 13/14 being raised in the creche. So that's the basis that they would default to, in a vacuum.
Nobody is raised in a vacuum.
Along with the Jedi cultural background, they're being raised by Tatooine natives in a Mandalorian environment.
Shmi and Anakin are both former slaves who have desert survival baked into their bones. The longer Anakin spends around her, the more his accent slips, the more he talks about old folktales, the more he uses idioms that don't exist on a cityplanet like Coruscant. All the things that he tamped down to be a Jedi come floating back to the surface, and Shmi's never known anything else. Anakin's knowledge of slave customs make her feel more comfortable, which in turn makes him feel better, and so on.
Mandalore is just... the culture they're living in. You don't grow up in a new culture with a new language without picking up on it personally. (Source: I moved to the US when I was a little under two years old.)
I think the thing I'm going to focus on as an example is the way each of these cultures approaches family, and then maybe how they approach the keeping of peace/what peace means.
Jedi: Where you come from means little, only the legacy you leave behind in your students.
Mandalore: You protect your clan and your children; adoption is a major cultural value, if not actually practiced consistently.
Tatooine: You can lose your family at any time, so you value what you have in all its forms. You don’t forget where and who you came from, to family of blood and family of choice alike. You cling to your memories and what little you still have of them, to what your master cannot take away.
These are all valid ways to approach family, and each of these approaches can have significant meaning to different people. But they do all, to a certain degree, conflict with one another, despite all three being fairly communal cultures.
The Jedi have a culture, one that’s built on a shared ability and religion over thousands of years. It’s not just an organization, but a continuous community with legends and traditions and art and records. But it’s one that is built on new blood coming in from the outside, volunteers who join because the religion speaks to them (near literally, given the nature of Force Sensitivity), given up by families who couldn’t or wouldn’t teach them in a way that let their talents flourish instead of pushing it all down.
For the Jedi, a culture built on people coming together due to something they have in common intrinsically that their families of blood do not, it makes sense to put emphasis on letting go of that past when they can, and to place importance on teaching lineages. It’s not just the official master-padawan pairs, either, but that’s the most obvious and easily paralleled element. Moreover, a lot of the Jedi culture is about gaining knowledge, so obviously spreading it is good, and also on supporting the galaxy to make it a better place; to view the Jedi order as a heavily communal culture would make sense, since their values are all about selfless betterment of the universe, which on a larger scale is about the galactic conflicts, but on a smaller scale is about supporting their own community, the children and the ill and elderly.
So that is the specific culture that Obi-Wan and Ahsoka grew up in, one that holds blood family as relevant but not particularly crucial to one’s identity, but is structured so people leave behind legacies through education in a manner that often becomes adoptive family (depending on your definition, I guess). Jedi are encouraged to connect to their home cultures, if not their families, with practices like the coming of age hunt for Togruta leading to the young Jedi taking a trip out to Shili to engage in that cultural milestone. This can also be viewed as a way for the Jedi to maintain personal connections to the wider universe, a (not entirely successful, but certainly attempted) way of keeping them from becoming too isolated and insular from the universe at large, and losing touch from what the galaxy actually needs of them.
They’re now growing up with two cultures that do place emphasis on blood and found family.
Mandalore, as presented in The Mandalorian, has their traditional values set as being heavily associated with their armor, battle skills, and childcare. While that’s clearly a set of values that aren’t actually followed by everyone with full sincerity, we can assume that these stated cultural values do have at least some impact on the way the society is structured, since we do see more traditional characters (Jaster, Din) adopt orphaned children and then have the Mandalorian elements of their immediate circles support that claim.
(We’ll ignore Jango and the whole clone army thing because the amount of Sith influence is up for debate and also holy trauma, Batman.)
However, we also see that a lot of Mandalorian culture is built on their family histories. On the New Mandalorian side, we see emphasis placed on the fact that Satine is House Kryze and that she’s a duchess. Her bloodline is relevant, though not the most important thing about her. On the Death Watch side, we have Pre and Tor placing emphasis on the fact that they’re Clan Vizsla, descended from Tarre, that this is important to why they deserve what the darksaber represents, this is part of why they not only deserve to lead, but should for the good of Mandalore.
Bo-Katan’s armor is a family heirloom. Boba’s armor was Jango’s, but before being Jango’s, it was Jaster’s. Armor is important enough to pass to family, but the family can be adopted. This all tracks.
The resol’nare specifies loyalty and care for the clan/tribe among the six tenets.
These two elements seem relatively well-balanced: the importance of adoption and the importance of family as a larger unit on the level of a house or clan.
And then you have Tatooine, which also balances blood and adoption, but for entirely different reasons, that being this: it can always be taken from you.
For all that a Mandalorian could historically expect their family to die in battle, and a Jedi could expect to lose their master the same way if things went poorly, those were usually choices. A Mandalorian was raised to walk into battle, and then they could make that choice to do so. It wasn’t often much of a choice, but they could feasibly turn their back and choose to be a farmer or a doctor or something, and support the people who went out to do battle instead of being the one on the field themselves. A Jedi could choose to be a healer or an archivist or join one of the Corps.
A slave does not get that choice. A slave can be killed or sold on a whim from their master. It’s not a one-time trauma, but an ever-present fear. Your parent, your child, your sibling, your spouse, all of them can be separated from you at any time. You can always lose them, and you have no choice but to grin and bear it, or try to run and die before you reach freedom.
In a context like that, I imagine Tatooine places a very heavy emphasis on family, both of blood and of choice, and on treasuring what you have while you have it. A person is always aware that they can lose whoever they have in their life, and so they make the most of their times together, have clear and consistent ways of expressing that love (I imagine primarily direct verbal confirmations and physical contact, practical gifts like water and fruit). Childcare is important, elders are venerated. Those who survived that far have valuable wisdom, and the children are to be given what happiness they can have before reality wipes that ability from them.
The family ‘networks’ among Tatooine slaves are smaller and tighter knit. There’s less trust for outsiders, but once you’re in, you’re in until you are taken away. Still, families are torn apart regularly, and often can’t contact each other after being separated if they’re sold far enough away, so families stay small because they’re always being broken up. Unlike Mandalore’s tribe/clan system, or the Jedi’s wide, loosely-structured community, Tatooine’s slaves form smaller groups that cling for as long as they can, and try to support each other. (There are selfish ones, of course, especially the newbies, but... well. Most try.)
Tatooine is also much more likely to assign a familial role (e.g. referring to an elder as ‘grandmother’). It’s not uncommon in the others (multiple Jedi refer to their masters as a parent or sibling, like Anakin’s “you’re like a father to me” line), but it’s not as baked-in that such a role should be given.
So on a structural level, we have two people from a community culture with little emphasis on blood family or formal familial roles are now being raised in a community that has them asking “what can you do for the people around you first, and then the wider world?” by people who tell them “your family, blood and found, is the most important thing you have; never let anyone take more from you than they possibly can.”
And that shit has an effect.
For all that Sokanth and Ylliben were once raised with a knowledge that their duty, their goal, was to better the galaxy as a whole, they are now being told that the community that raises them asks their loyalty back, because societies are built on support networks, and if you support the tribe, it will support you. There are parallels to that kind of thinking among Jedi, because it is basic social theory, but it’s not presented as the same kind of cultural value. It’s not given as something to strive for, just a basic fact.
This, for instance, means that once they’re back at the Temple, they have a tendency towards suggesting study groups and other ways of supporting people in their immediate circle, often structured in very unfamiliar ways. Again, this isn’t uncommon among Jedi, but it’s not done in the same way, or with the same emphasis. The Jedi also often approach problem-solving in a different order, so the step of “meditate on it and you may find your solution” often comes before “gather information from people who know more about it than you do,” while Ben and Soka have by this point learned to do it the other way around, because that’s what the Mandalorian system taught them: rely on your family first.
Meanwhile, the Tatooine element of their upbringing has them being much more willing to just... casually refer to ‘my dad’ and ‘my sister’ and so on. They use those words. It’s not just “my master is like a father to me,” but “this is my father.” They don’t hesitate to talk about the family they had and still have in Mandalorian space. None of the Jedi begrudge them it, really, but it’s always a shock to hear for the first time, and between the Tatooine refusal to pretend the connection is gone and the Mandalorian tendency to err on the side of roughhousing as affection, they’re just... odd. It’s not like none of the other Jedi know family outside the Order--some of the old books had Obi-Wan visiting his brother on Stewjon once in a while--or like none of the active Jedi are loud or boisterous, but the specific manner in which Soka and Ben interact with the Order, especially when their dad is around, is very weird.
More Soka than Ben, really, but that’s mostly just because Ben’s a very quiet person until he gets a little older, so it’s harder to notice on him.
Point is, while they still hold to their duty to the wider galaxy and will continue to keep that duty above almost anything else in their lives, the way they talk and act about the subject of family, especially in private, is heavily influenced by their new cultures.
This is already very long but I promised I’d talk about peace so let’s go:
The Jedi seek peace as an absence of war and conflict in the portion of the galaxy under their purview, in hopes that they will prevent as much suffering and death as they can.
The Mandalorians are varied, but Jaster Mereel’s group (which is the community the Skywalkers are with) is likely to view peace as unrealistic to achieve in the long term. They do not seek war, but they know the world they live in, and are prepared to protect against violence as their first resort. They always expect an attack, even if they don’t seek it.
The Slaves of Tatooine view peace as the calm in a storm. It is the status quo. Nobody has escaped tonight, for the guards aren’t searching, but neither is anyone dead. The Master you have is in a good enough mood to not sell you, to not kill you, to not beat you. Peace as an absence of suffering is impossible, so you seek for your master to be peaceful, that is to say: not raging at you.
The scope of each of these narrows significantly. From the known galaxy, to the wars that meet Mandalorian space, to the household one serves.
A community like the Jedi can choose to address peace as something to be sought on a large scale as an absence of war. They primarily function within the borders of the Republic, which has its problems but is largely structured to prevent such things from occurring until the Sith interfere. The Jedi have a structure that allows them to address peace as an ideal to be sought, at least within the borders of the territory they serve.
Mandalore, meanwhile, has been at war on and off for... ever. When they are not at war with themselves, they’re at war with someone else. ‘Peace’ is just the time between wars, and they know that if they do not attack first, they will be forced to defend. Jaster Mereel was known as the Reformer, and part of that was that instituting a code of honor, one that was intended to prevent Mandalorian warriors from acting as raiders and brigands, but rather acting as honorable hired soldiers, or taking roles such as the Journeyman Protectors. Given that, I imagine that he views war as something inevitable, but also something that can be mitigated.
War doesn’t touch Tatooine.
Oh, it might raise taxes and import rates. It might prevent visitors who come for the races. It can do a lot of things.
But to a slave, these are nothing. The only thing war does is affect the master, the person who chooses when their slaves get water, when they get beaten, when they are no longer useful enough to keep around or keep alive.
The peace of a slave’s live is dictated by how much abuse they are subjected to by the person who owns them.
What this means for Soka and Ben is... well, they are viewed as war-hungry by the people who don’t know them very well. They have armor. They focus on fighting, both with and without their sabers. They know tactics better than most masters. They claim that war is coming, and don’t seem too sad about it.
(It is a fact to them. War will come. All they can do is meet it. They’ve already done their mourning once.)
They also... well, Shmi tells them things in hidden corners. How to duck their head to hide the hate or fear in their eyes. How to watch for the anger in the tendons of a hand. The laugh of someone who enjoys the pain they’ve caused, not just the adrenaline of a fight. She is free, and so are they, but she has not forgotten how to hide in the shadows until the master’s ire has turned elsewhere. How to be small and quiet and unseen until the danger passes.
A Jedi’s first resort is words. Their second is their saber. But the Jeedai hold their heads high, and the Mandalorians do the same.
“You rely on the Force, and you have your pride,” she tells them, her hands on their own. “But there will come a time when you will not be able to remind people that you are free. You will not be able to say that you are a person, that you deserve the respect of a living sentient. Perhaps it will be a politician who treats everyone like that. Perhaps you will be captured by an enemy. Perhaps you will be undercover. You will not be able to fight, with words or with weapons, and you will have to know how to survive.”
Tatooine does not have peace. Tatooine only has survival.
And while Jedi fight for the survival and peace of the universe, they are refined and composed. Mando’ade fight like warriors of old, and Tatooine slaves fight like cornered, rabid anooba.
The galaxy comes first, but when the chips are down and the Sith come out to play, Soka and Ben do not need refinement, because they know how to toss aside their pride and live.
#Tatooine#Mandalore#Jedi#culture clash#star wars#the clone wars#Anakin Skywalker#Shmi Skywalker#Ahsoka Tano#Obi Wan Kenobi#Jaster Mereel#family#war#Phoenix Posts#Anakin and the Jedi Babies#Phoenix Answers Asks#I have no idea how accurate this is but it's what I'm working with
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my biggest bone to pick with pro-endos is that the majority of what i’ve seen them say when it comes to issues that they face pretty much all revolve around (mostly internet) invalidation and exclusion, to the point where i’ve seen some endos say that at least we (DIDOSDD anti-endos) are recognized as “the real ones” or like “well fakedisordercringe is laughing at all of us anyways you don’t look any better in their eyes” (the latter was a post semi recently in the syscourse tag and the former was an ask on the syscourse confessions blog). not trying to call out any particular person with this, just that it very clearly shows how unaligned the goals of pro-endos vs anti-endos are. and it blows my mind that they seem to think that not only being recognized as a DIDOSDD system is a GOOD thing, both online and offline, but that it means you’re immune from getting fakeclaimed harassed etc, or that it’s a good thing that FDC laughs at us too in the end. like, i don’t want to be “validated,” and being fakeclaimed over the internet is an annoyance to me at worst, and i don’t want to be unconditionally and radically accepted and included for everything because that leaves no room for me to potentially be wrong or grow as a person. and tbh this is why i think there’s no broader “plural” community because there’s a complete misalignment between the endo community vs the DIDOSDD community, and we as anti-endos know this by now because so many DIDOSDD systems have come out about how endo bullshit harmed them. sorry to dump a novel in your inbox lol it’s just been on my mind
Yep. they're also ignoring the fact that a lot of people who wind up on FDC are minors, who probably aren't safe being recognized as having DID/OSDD/UDD in their household, even if they have a therapist or have been professionally recognized. It doesn't make us feel valid, it just sucks. I've also had friends/mutuals from other platforms wind up on there, and the harassment they face is fucking horrific on a level you wouldn't believe, not to mention winding up on cringe comps just for being mentally ill on the internet. They don't see that people don't believe us. They don't believe that we exist, or they believe that we're too rare to be real. It's an uphill battle to get people to even listen to us, and it's exhausting.
Adding onto that, though, you're absolutely right. They want internet validation and inclusion, even if it excludes others. They can't seem to wrap their minds around the fact that being a system is so much more than just alters, so they build a community around one facet of the experience and push themselves into this anti-recovery mindset of "I don't need therapy, because my system isn't traumatic" even though having a system in of itself is only born out of trauma. Hell, a lot of them act like every psychiatrist/psychologist/therapist in the world is evil, so they surround themselves with the anti-psych community and ignore actual scientific facts about things that do, in fact, matter and need scientific backing.
I'm not saying the psych system is good. It's not. It sucks and needs major reform, and my personal experiences with it have been less than stellar. But that's no excuse to act like every professional who knows their shit is out to get you. There are good doctors out there. There are good, helpful people in this field who want nothing more than to see people thrive.
I also absolutely get your point. Blind inclusion and acceptance leaves no room to grow. It's not a foundation for lasting changes, and it actually behaves in quite the opposite manner. It makes it difficult for people to change when they realize what they're doing is wrong, because they've become comfortable just being accepted without any sort of questioning, or being asked to think about their stances. Not to mention, when all your friends are part of that situation, it makes it so much harder to leave.
Also, being diagnosed can lead you to getting more medical stigma in the future. I have BPD. I was not diagnosed by a former therapists choice, because if it was on my chart, that would make so many medical professionals treat me differently. It would make my life harder in the long run. But that doesn't mean that I think people shouldn't get diagnosed, quite the opposite. I just think that people need to be able to get the help that they need.
This is a tangent turning completely incomprehensible, but that's my thoughts. Thanks for the ask!!
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hey! idk if you remember but i'm the person who asked if i could send in my own thoughts on ashura like way back when you were first getting to the celes arc :] sorry this is gonna be long
admittedly my thoughts on him have changed since then, i think i first regarded him as a well meaning person bc, when i was a teen i saw a post in defense of him saying ashura was probably the one who taught fai about kindness and smiles. which with all i know about faux positivity now is. yeah. that's a lot to unpack
ashura's whole thing with morally dubiously manipulating people he has power over (which he shares with clow reed actually) i think first and foremost serves to explore clamp's favorite narrative ploy: what claims to be the conflict between the self vs the world is actually the conflict between people's individual will and how power dynamics play into it. people like ashura (both in rg veda and trc) and clow reed and a load of other villains in clamp's other works expend the power of their will to make changes that they believe are good, in ignorance of others' wishes. but at the same time his relationship to fai is something just. incredibly fucked up and is bound to invite personal reactions
i think ashura really did care, or at the very least he personally believed what he did was the right thing, enough to justify the harm that he knew he was causing. i think in addition to that, it can be inferred that because of his condition he never functioned in the realms of human morality.
another thing to consider is how clamp approaches writing abusive parental/mentor figures. when people explore this kind of trauma it's entirely within their right to not humanize those who abused them. but they may also choose to do the opposite, not to justify the harm that was done but to come to terms with it, see the bigger picture of cycles of abuse, or any meaning they might find in it. i think clamp tends to do the latter. i can't claim to know ohkawa's original intents but, because of my asian upbringing i'm pretty close to the communal way of life that affects how people approach these things; works i know of that employs similar approaches are fruits basket and umineko no naku koro ni and they did a fantastic job with it. within clamp's own works, an example can be found in x/1999 (i'm not sure how far you are into it so i'll just leave it at that).
like you pointed out during your liveblogging clamp clearly laid out the horrifying nature of ashura's manipulation. but at the same time they spare him empathy, it's what they tend to do with their characters (even though people perceive them on the surface to be obsessed with writing suffering and that's another pet peeve i have with clamp fandom jokes...) but (x2) as a reader anyone can have their own feelings and interps of it it and i think that's what's important.
at the end of the day ashura is just one truly fucked up little man. i think we can all agree on that.
Ohoho I do remember! And thank you for giving me your thoughts! They are DELICIOUS, and I absolutely agree with what you say here.
I do think that Ashura cared for Fai, and thought he was doing the right thing for Fai - and was also willing to do great harm to a great number of people to achieve his version of love.
And considering how dark and heavy the entire plot thread is, I like that CLAMP don't present us with a "final answer" for what we should think about the situation. It's a complex and nuanced scenario that absolutely invites deeper thought and reflection, so, let's do that!
But behind the cut, because of spoilers and content warnings and the like.
Just for clarity, the content warnings include emotional abuse, murder, and suicide.
Goodness, I've had a lot of time to reflect on Ashura.
The big thing with Ashura is that he only sees his own perspective. He doesn't see (or perhaps does not care) that what he's trying to do is utterly fucking up Fai in the process. Either his goal/his version of "caring for Fai" completely trumps Fai's own feelings, and this thought comforts him to the point of complete confidence in his actions, or it doesn't particularly matter to Ashura what Fai's emotional state is as long as the curse is broken.
Another big thing with Ashura is we know WHAT he was trying to do, in that he wanted to break Fai's curse and die in the process. But we don't know which of these two things was his original intention, and if it even matters. WAS he selflessly offering himself as tribute to free Fai from the curse, or was he using the curse as a way to free himself from his own dark existence? Was he breaking Fai's curse out of love, or out of a calculated goal? Is he just trying to accomplish this item despite what it will do to Fai, or is he doing this for Fai's sake, no matter what state it will leave him in? Is there even a distinction for Ashura?
The OTHER big thing about Ashura that really starts to sway this in a darker direction is that Evil Wolverine KNEW what killing this would do to Fai. He knew that there was an incredibly undeniably strong likelihood that Fai would immediately kill himself after having killed Ashura, so much so that Evil Wolverine banked on this happening from the very beginning. It was his plan from the start - that Ashura would manage to break the curse by getting Fai to kill him, and Fai would immediately die as a result of his heartbreak. So is Evil Wolverine knew this so easily, how did Ashura not see this coming? Or did he not care about this either? Was Ashura so set in his own correctness that he genuinely did not know Fai well enough to guess what this would do to him, when even Evil Wolverine knew? Or was that also beside the point for him?
Though I think this term has lost a lot of its meaning in recent years, Ashura is presented as beautifully Morally Grey. He does Bad Things to accomplish an ultimate Good Thing. He's doing a Good Thing but it will have a Bad Effect on the people that survive. There are so many varied ways to interpret Ashura's actions that defining them as "good" or "bad" ends up losing all meaning, and I feel that's the ultimate point. CLAMP present Ashura with such an intricate mix of positive and negative qualities that the morality scale doesn't properly encapsulate him whatsoever any more. If he's purely a villain, then how do we measure the loving home he gave to Fai, and how he gave him the longest period of happiness in a life that was purely traumatic suffering before then? How do we measure the idea that his good advice ended up causing life long emotional trauma to Fai and the people around him? And on the other hand, if his actions are "purely good" because he wanted a "good thing", how do we measure the fact that he slaughtered almost an entire world of living people to accomplish it? How do we measure the idea that he broke Fai's curse against the severe emotional fallout that would have caused Fai to kill himself?
There is no ultimate answer to Ashura. It all comes down to an individual reader's interpretation, what things ring truest to them, and what things that they choose to emphasise over the others. And that's how it should be! No two readers will have the EXACT same experience with any text, and the same goes for Tsubasa. The reader's feelings towards Ashura are entirely personal and individual, and by their very nature they will be correct for them, and not necessarily for anyone else.
And that's where I draw a little line about what I'm about to say and clarify that my interpretation of Ashura doesn't need to match anyone else's, and everyone SHOULD be able to judge him individually. But here's my very personal take!
For me personally, Ashura rings true as a depiction of... I don't even know the right combination of words for it. A selfish type of love - a well meaning but harmful love.
Because I do think Ashura cared for Fai, and had a good effect on him at times, and gave him a loving home when he needed it, but that's not the full picture. Ashura's love is a narcissistic type of love that puts HIS views of 'what is right for Fai' above anything Fai himself might feel, robs him of any choice or decision in the matter, and is willing to absolutely destroy Fai emotionally in order to get him to what Ashura sees is the 'correct' result. It's a type of situation that I relate a little too strongly to not have a biased opinion of Ashura -because I do feel like I've lived through a very Fai-like experience in my personal life over the last couple of years, so it's become impossible for me not to project my own experiences on to what Ashura does to Fai.
Even though Ashura meant for a good result, that does not mean his love was not abusive, and it doesn't mean he didn't deeply traumatise Fai in the process, and it doesn't mean Fai ever has to forgive him for what he did. Not that Fai has that chance, because Ashura robbed him of that too - but in real life things get a lot harder to navigate and understand, especially when you're still in the middle of it. Like Fai, you get stuck on some of the positives and think that the 'bad' things can't possibly be real, even while they poison you from the inside and drive you to a destruction that the other person is absolutely fine with because it will give them what they want. And even then, you want to be a "good person", especially if you define your self worth off of making other people happy, so you may find yourself wanting to forgive them, or feeling like you HAVE to forgive them. But you don't. You can choose these things for yourself. You can redefine your whole life and leave behind the people who treat you like Ashura does - even though it hurts you, and it hurts them, because they don't even see that they're doing anything wrong.
But at the end of the day YOU are worth more than anyone else's feelings - and this is what I absolutely ADORE about the way Kurogane treats Fai, because he has ALWAYS been about that from the very start. Kurogane shows us that Fai deserves to live, to be happy, to be safe, JUST because he's Fai, and for no other reason. And he does!
Kurogane's love for Fai has always had Fai's wellbeing as the priority. It causes friction between them in Acid Tokyo when they don't agree on what that means, and they don't always make the best decisions, but at the core Kurogane's love is selfless, nurturing, and protective.
Ashura's love for Fai always had Ashura's love for Fai as the priority. It hinges on what Ashura wants, and while it does have nice experiences for Fai along the way, Fai's thoughts, feelings, and decisions are not a factor that comes into play. This ultimately leads to a situation where Fai's mental distress, trauma, and ultimate suicide are not only on the table but practically guaranteed, if Evil Wolverine is to be believed. At its core, Ashura's love was love, but it was selfish, damaging, and destructive.
So that's my take on Ashura! I'm very happy for other people to have alternate takes on the situation, because that's the beautiful things about stories like this, and it doesn't even need a big thought process behind it. Some people can just like Ashura for no particular reason, because it matches their own experiences better, and that's completely ok!
But because this is my post Ashura is a piece of shit, and like you said, a fucked up little man.
#Not to like#get too personal there#but there it is!#The Ashura Essay no-one particularly asked for#replies#sonoda-oomers#Tsubasa#Liveblogging the reservoir chronicle#Ashura#and like all the content warnings that accompany Ashura
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The Last Semester – Part Eighteen
Pairing: Cillian Murphy x Reader
Words: 1,407
Warning: Pregnancy Mentioned
Prior Parts: https://queenshelby.tumblr.com/post/659814893025902592/the-last-semester-part-seventeen
YOUR POV
Another week had passed and there was nothing but radio silence from Cillian and you were scrambling to think about what to do.
Emma certainly achieved her goal by publishing this most ridiculous article about your relationship. Clearly, it had an effect on Cillian.
You texted him twice, but received no response. You were heartbroken and riddled with morning sickness. Yet, you carried on as if nothing had happened.
You had started your first teaching job after finishing university and finally found a small apartment in Dublin and you still hadn’t told anyone that you were pregnant. Only your stepmother knew and she promised to keep it a secret until you were ready to talk about it or make a decision about whether or not to keep the baby.
Whilst you didn’t judge anyone who chose to terminate, your choice was likely going to keep the baby. You couldn’t terminate the pregnancy. It wasn’t really an option for you and you were almost certain that you would keep the baby. You knew that you were old enough and mature enough to have this child.
Packing boxes was distracting you. There wasn’t much to pack as you hadn’t unpacked the majority of your belongings since moving from London to start with.
Your stepmother was helping you sort through everything and made a list of things you would need in the near future while looking through the basement to see what she had kept from her last pregnancy which, evidentially, wasn’t much.
It gave her a good excuse to also do the annual spring clean and clear out the rubbish that had accumulated over the years.
‘You know, he’s good with his boys so even if things don’t work out between you, I think you will find that he will be a good dad’ your stepmother said before asking you when you were planning to tell him.
‘I want him to talk to me because of what he feels and not because he has to if he finds out that I am pregnant. I will give it a few weeks and see if he comes around’ you huffed, somewhat upset by Cillian pulling away from you once again.
‘You love him don’t you?’ your stepmother then asked and you nodded, tears running down your face.
‘I just wish he felt the same’ you then said as your emotions were getting the better of you and you broke down.
‘I think he does. He is just scared. There is a lot at stake for him and, honestly, with you being so much younger he might be worried about the longevity of your relationship. He is probably waying things up. This not only impacts his personal life, the kids, but also his career and friendships’ your stepmother explained and you knew that she was right. Yet, you were angry and hormonal.
Cillian’s POV
Over the past two weeks, Cillian had done a lot of thinking. The conflict with your father was just one final straw that had been drawn.
For months, when his agent found out about his relationship with a much younger woman, he had been told to break it off. It was bad for his career, making him a cliché of a Hollywood actor.
Then, there were his sons who had asked questions about you and his ex-wife certainly fuelled the fire when it came to their apprehension. She opposed his new relationship and, whilst he cared little about what she thought about him, Cillian had to communicate with her on a daily basis. After all, she was the mother of his children and they shared custody for them.
Then, of course, there was the fact that you were twenty years younger than Cillian and he worried that, one day, you would realise that you missed out on life and should have been with someone your own age, explore, party and travel. Do what people your age do and not be slowed down by someone so much older. The age gap between you was certainly something that bothered him on a personal level as he thought that, one day, you might change your mind about him and what you wanted.
In Cillian’s mind, the easiest way out was to break it off with you. It would solve all of his problems. Yet, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
He loved you, he missed you and he wanted to be with you no matter how illogical it was.
Every night, he flicked through your photographs on his phone and he drafted one message after another to you before simply deleting them all, not knowing what to say, knowing that it was better if he didn’t say anything at all.
It wasn’t until Saturday evening, just as you finished packing up for your move, that Cillian slowly came to his senses about what he wanted and texted you with just a little bit of help from his son Charlie.
‘Hey, dad! Did you listen to what I said?’ Charlie asked as Cillian was, once again, lost in his thoughts.
‘I am sorry Charlie. What did you say?’ he asked, looking up from his phone with some help.
‘I want to go to the movies with Janine tomorrow. Is that ok?’ he asked, causing Cillian to raise an eyebrow and sigh.
‘She is only 18 months older than me and you know what?’ Charlie then said, waiting for his father’s reaction.
‘What?’ Cillian chuckled.
‘According to a very not so relevant book I just read, age doesn’t matter unless you are a cheese’ Charlie then said, causing Cillian to laugh.
‘That’s some deep poetry right there’ Cillian chuckled before agreeing to his son’s request and giving him some money to take out Janine.
‘Thanks dad. You know, this goes for you too and if you don’t make a move on Y/N, someone else will snap her up in no time’ Charlie then said with a hint of sarcasm.
‘Oh, you think so?’ Cillian chuckled and, just as he did, Charlie grabbed his father’s phone and began typing in his password.
‘Hey, give that back. I am not joking. I will ground you’ Cillian said somewhat angrily.
‘Well, I am with mum next week so you can’t really do that’ Charlie said as he finished typing before returning the phone to Cillian.
‘Fuck’ Cillian shouted as he read the message from him to you which simply read ‘I miss you’.
‘You just said a swearword. That’s naughty’ Charlie then grinned, causing Cillian to speechlessly stand in the kitchen and think about what to say now.
‘Well, I suppose this will get the conversation going. Thanks for the 50 Euro dad’ Charlie chuckled before walking into his room.
‘Grounded’ Cillian growled.
‘Fine. At least it was worth it’ Charlie winked back.
Your Father’s POV
The same evening, your father arrived home from work to you pulling out of the driveway and a stack of garbage bags being piled up in front of the front door of the house.
‘What the…’ he growled just as your stepmother brought out the final bag.
‘Spring clean’ she said somewhat satisfied, causing him to huff.
‘Where is Y/N going?’ your father asked as he was just about to take off his shoes.
‘To Marina’s house. Movie night I think’ your stepmother said before asking your father to put the trash into the bins before taking off his shoes.
‘Sure’ he responded just as she disappeared back inside to finish off cooking and, as your father took out the trash as requested, one of the large thin plastic bags got caught on the tyre of the bicycle besides the house.
It tore almost immediately and half of its contents scattered over the wet grass.
‘For fuck sake’ your father shouted to himself as he pulled open the bin and discarded of the half full bag and the two other bags he was carrying before collecting the contents from the floor.
‘Fantastic’ he growled again with anger as he realised that it was the bag containing the bathroom contents which had spilled and, amongst old tooth brushes and a sticky tube of toothpaste, he found something unusual. A digital pregnancy test which clearly read ‘POSITIVE’.
His breath caught in his throat as he picked it up, looking at it is somewhat stunned and surprised.
Was this really happening, he wondered?
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Irresistible Danger - Part 59
Synopsis: After being caught outside the compound on your own, Negan decides to punish you in the best way possible ;)
Words: 4,078
Warnings: nsfw, smut, swearing
ID Masterlist can be found HERE
Masterlist of all my fics can be found HERE
*HIATUS WARNING*
This will be my last chapter update until the end of July or very beginning of August, due to me joining Camp Nano. If people are interested, I can link my nano page HERE if you want to see what progress I make. I haven’t created a Camp project goal yet, but I’ll be adding it soon.
Clearing the Board
You stared at Negan in shock for a long moment, your brain’s frantic whirring grinding to a screeching halt as the subconscious watched with mouth so agape that the gum it had been chewing fell unnoticed to the floor.
Had he been thinking the same questions as you the entire dinner? Part of you wanted to bolt, terrified to know what was on his mind. Was this where he pulled the rug out from under you and said things were getting too cozy, that he wanted to back track? Did he want to go back to his wives? Or maybe he wanted to try and make you into another one of them?
Breathe. Just breathe and see what he has to say, before you start hyperventilating.
Clearing your throat and licking suddenly dry lips, you hoarsely said, “Uh...yeah...we do.”
As if this was the permission he was waiting for, he gave a curt nod and started talking. He was so focused and straight to the point that you wondered if he had rehearsed this prior to you showing up. If so, he had done a much better job of preparing than you had.
“I wanted to apologize for last night. Not just for the way I attacked you, though I do fucking apologize for that, but for how I acted after.”
At this, he paused and ran a hand slowly down over his mouth and beard, and you realized how difficult this conversation was for him, how much he still struggled to be open and honest and sincere with another human when he’d had to learn the hard way to be tough and mean and impenetrable. It made you feel validated regarding your own struggles, as well as grateful that both of you were stepping outside your comfort zones and trying to communicate.
“Doll, there’s just some shit that I don’t like to fucking relive. It has to happen, whether I fucking want it to or not, and once it’s done, it’s done. I don’t always want to rehash events, or talk about how I feel, because the answer is probably that I feel like fucking horse shit. It’s nothing personal against you, it’s just me wanting to fucking move on. The same way you told me the other night that I gotta trust you not to always give me all the fucking details? Well, same goes when the shoe’s on the other fucking foot.”
You sat there and took this in, brain having pulled out a tablet to take frantic notes, and subconscious still staring in shock with its foot unknowingly stepping right in the middle of the dropped gum wad. Of all the ways for tonight’s conversation to go, no part of you had expected Negan to not only take the lead, but go in the correct direction needed to pulverize one of the newly-created questions you had thrown into the padlocked box.
Once he said the words out loud, it did make a lot of sense. You had seen it as wanting to connect with him and support him, if he would just explain what had happened on the run to upset him. However, some things might be better left unsaid, so as not to make the person relive the events and the emotions tied to them. What you had seen as him shutting you down was actually him trying to move on from unsavory events (and actions he’d had to complete in his role as leader). Add to that his comparison to your conversation the other night, where you had expected him to be okay with you not giving all details about certain events, and you couldn’t believe how much you had blown his recent actions out of proportion.
You had been quiet for a few long moments, during which he was watching you closely. He tried to make his expression neutral, but the unnatural stillness of his tensed body and the focused intensity of his hazel gaze gave away how much weight he was putting on what your response might be.
Picking your words carefully, you broke the silence. “Thank you for explaining that, because I did wonder why you turned down my offer to talk last night. I respect your right to not tell me everything about what you have to do in order to keep control of the Sanctuary and other communities. However,” you held his gaze, making sure he saw your sincerity. “I want you to know that I’m always here for when and if you do want to talk about it. Any of it.”
He was unresponsive for a few seconds, as if the tables had turned and now he was the one a bit surprised at how calm and clearly you had voiced your agreement. Then, a soft smile broke across his face, and he said, “I know you are, doll.”
You gave a small smile, beyond relieved to have that topic discussed and out of the way. Your brain was proud of the two of you for talking it out, while the subconscious was preoccupied with cursing and hopping around on one foot while frantically trying to use a stick to scrape the smeared gum off the bottom of its shoe. Like it, you now flailed about for how to move on to other concerns. The door of communication had been opened, and you didn’t want him to slam it shut now that the thing he’d wanted to get off his chest was done.
“There’s some other things I think we need to talk about,” you said. When his eyebrows raised in a nonverbal for you to continue, you started nervously fidgeting with your dinner napkin.
Shit, where did you even start? How to accurately say what you were thinking and feeling about this relationship with him. He had obviously noticed you pulling back that day in the woods, and while you had been quick to start blurting your feelings when in a post-orgasmic haze, the words now stuck in your throat and refused to come out.
That ball of self-doubt was creeping in, telling you to shut the box back up and get out of there. It whispered how maybe now that Negan had fucked you, the “game” was almost over and he wouldn’t be as interested. That the moment you started placing expectations on the two of you, he’d tell you to leave his rooms and not come back.
Looking down at the napkin, which was now twisted and crumpled from anxious hands, you tossed it down on the table and abruptly stood up, unable to continue the farce of sitting still. You pushed the chair into the table and stood there for a few seconds before giving a frustrated groan and pacing over to his armoire and back.
It was quite the role reversal, you pacing back and forth while he sat there, silently watching. Your hands gestured wildly in front of you, as if trying to act out what you couldn’t say. You started to talk a few times, but it came out as a sputter of nothingness, causing you to pace back and forth yet again. After a couple rounds of this, you finally stopped behind the dinner chair, hands gripping the back of it until your knuckles turned white. The two of you stared at one another, his forehead furrowed in concern at your mini meltdown.
“Doll,” he said, voice low and calming. “Tell me.”
Just say it. Tell him you’ve fallen for him.
But you couldn’t. The emotions were right there, but it didn’t feel right to just blurt them out. Three little words that some people tossed around like pennies, and you couldn’t say them when it mattered.
You looked at him desperately, willing him to throw a lifeline and take back over the conversation, to tell you to forget it and act like this moment had never happened. Instead, he finally moved into action, standing from his own chair and rounding the small table to stand in front of you.
He didn’t reach out, didn’t try to hold you, as if he knew that the slightest touch would cause your taut as a bowstring form to burst into a million pieces. His hands instead clenched at his sides in a nonverbal show of restraint. He knew that whatever you were struggling with was important, while at the same time realizing he couldn’t force it, and that the direction of the conversation depended entirely on you.
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
There was more authority to his tone this time, but it was the slight hint of worry making it go up in pitch at the end that propelled your own voice to finally get its shit together and start working.
“There’s nothing wrong, I just…I don’t know how to say it.”
“Fucking say what? You’re killing me here, doll.”
You looked at him, took in this strong and seemingly impenetrable, yet surprisingly caring and passionate man who had shattered all of the emotional defenses you had strategically built in order to keep yourself safe. And suddenly, you knew exactly how to tell him in a way that he, and only he, would understand.
“Remember when you said that the game is over when the king is captured?”
Surprise flickered in his gaze, as he obviously wasn’t expecting that to come out of your mouth. However, he quickly caught up, giving a curt nod.
“I know technically the queen is expendable, and the game can continue on without her, but-” voice cracking a bit, you paused to take a deep breath before continuing. “What the hell does one do when the opposite happens?”
You saw the moment the realization hit, making him go completely still. Saw the moment he pieced everything together but still held back, as if afraid maybe he was misinterpreting it.
His face looked wrecked when he husked, “What are you saying, doll?”
Emotion welled in your eyes as you verbally let go, whispering the confession that had been held in for long enough.
“The king’s captured me.”
He broke the physical distance then, his eyes bright with emotion as he wrapped one arm around your waist and cupped your face with a warm palm. Leaning down, he placed a kiss on your lips that was so soft and gentle you almost wanted to cry. When he lifted his head, you felt overwhelmed by the adoration in his gaze, but that was nothing compared to the words he then spoke.
“Well doll, I’d say that’s only fucking fair, since the queen’s captured me too.”
Shock coursed through you, followed by a rush of emotion so strong it would’ve knocked you on your ass if he wasn’t there to clutch onto.
He feels the same! Holy fuck, not only did he understand, but he also feels the same!
The two of you kissed again, long and slow, until your surroundings faded away and there was only him. It could’ve been mere moments or long minutes before your lips parted from his, as time currently had no meaning outside the count of his breaths on your face and beat of his heart under your palm flattened on his chest.
You felt dizzyingly happy, and the padlocked box was tons of pounds lighter. However, there were still a few spiky balls of questions sitting in the bottom of it, and it was time to empty them out. All of them.
“So,” you said, fingers tracing up over his exposed collarbone and strong throat. “What happens next, after the king and queen capture each other?”
Giving a much softer version of his usual devilish smirk, he replied, “They lay down their weapons, recall their fucking armies, and rule the board together.”
Grinning like a fool at that, you wound your arms up around his neck and murmured hesitantly, “So what does that mean for the others? What does the king do with the five of them?”
Once again, the metaphor was not lost on him, and you felt the slightest stiffening of his body against yours as he pulled his lips from where they had been tracing along your ear lobe and looked down at you.
Shit, did you go too far? Maybe you should’ve just stopped while you were ahead and not crossed into that topic of conversation just yet…
“What do you want me to do with them, doll?”
You definitely weren’t expecting that as a response, as shown by your staring blankly up at him for a few seconds before saying, “Isn’t that your choice?”
He gave an amused tsk of disapproval. “No, that’s not how it works when we both rule the board. Each partner gets a say, and then we figure it out together.”
Did he just...call you… “Is that what I am?” you asked, heart inflating like a bubble at the possibility.
“I mean, we can stick with just calling you my queen, if that’s what you want, but I think partner also has a nice fucking ring to it.”
His partner. Not his wife, or girlfriend. Partner.
Stretching up to give him a kiss of approval, you said, “Partner is perfect.”
Deciding to go all in, you added, “And I only want you, no one else. I want you to be the person I snuggle up against each night, and the one whose bed I wake up in each morning knowing that I belong there. I want to walk proudly beside you and know that you’re mine, as much as I’m yours.” You hesitated, a small dart of worry at the brutally honest words making you feel the need to ask, “But what do you want?”
The playful light was back in his eyes, that sinful tongue running over his bottom lip. “I thought I already made that fucking obvious, doll. But if I didn’t, then listen very closely.”
His lips traced over your face, leaving butterfly kisses on your cheeks and nose and forehead as he spoke the words. “I want you. Fucking simple as that. I’ve wanted you, and only you, since the day you fucking kicked my ass at chess.”
This was technically information you already knew, thanks to Trixie, but hearing it from him made it that much more real. It was as if even though all the signs were there, you still didn’t want to fully believe you were the reason for his change in behavior with the wives, not until he confirmed it himself.
Trying to add a bit of lightness, you hummed in pleasure at his lips kissing the sensitive spot on the curve of your neck and quipped, “Who knew all it would take was a game of chess for me to stand out.”
Giving a huffed laugh, he said against your skin, “If you think that’s the only way you fucking stand out, you’re even more oblivious then I fucking thought.”
“Hey! Are you telling me I’m weird or something?” you laughed, playfully tugging at his hair so that he raised his head to look at you.
“Wellllll…” he joked, smiling broadly before his expression got a bit more serious. “In all honesty, doll, I’ve respected the hell out of you since the moment you arrived here.”
Eyebrows raising, you said, “Oh? Do go on.”
His eyes danced with mirth, but his words were uncharacteristically sincere. “Despite being scared shitless when my men first found your little group, you never fully submitted or lost your fight. You marched right into the Sanctuary like you were gonna own the whole fucking place, or at least own the kitchen, which you did in a ridiculously short amount of fucking time, I might add. I felt like a fool for asking you to be another wife and expecting you’d be happy just sitting around looking pretty.”
You gave a haughty grin, but let him continue, knowing that confessions such as this were few and far between with Negan. And you were going to soak in every affectionate word like a desert does the rain, because as much as the actions and nonverbals fed your heart, his words were what now fed your soul.
“I knew you’d be trouble the the first time I walked in the kitchen to check on things and you refused to fucking kneel with the others, staring me down in a way that said you were demanding to be treated at my equal, and just daring me to try and fucking do something about it. It was that same daring each time we were alone that drew me in like fucking catnip, and while the smart thing would’ve been to stay away, when I found you out in the fucking woods about to be walker chow and totally going against my orders, it gave me the perfect opportunity to force you closer. I knew I should stop sending for you, stop finding reasons to visit the kitchen or order you to bring me trays, but damn doll, you were too fucking exciting to walk away from.
“The day you beat me at chess, you were so fucking proud of yourself, and I realized that instead of being pissed, I was proud of you too. I knew I had a spitfire on my hands, and damn if that didn’t make my dick hard.” His voice lowered a bit, so that you held your breath in order not to miss a single word. “But it wasn’t until that first outing together in the woods, when you killed that walker and saved my fucking hide, that I realized I was done for. That I might as well throw down my crown because the king had been captured, and the game was over.”
You thought back to that day, to the kiss and the look in his eyes afterward. Had you known back then? Possibly, but you never would’ve admitted it to yourself, not at that point. You felt a lump start to form in your throat, eyes blinking rapidly in an effort not to tear up. And you would have succeeded, damn it, if not for his next words.
“I tried to fight it, to fight you. Hell I almost got you fucking killed by chasing you out of here, and all because of my own fucking stubborn pride. I’d never hated myself as much as I did in that moment, when we found you lying injured in the fucking woods. I’ve loved and lost, more than any man should, but...the thought of losing you was what almost ruined me.”
Tears trickled down your cheeks in cool rivulets. “Why didn’t you tell me?” you whispered. Hell, if you had known all of this a bit earlier, maybe you wouldn’t have hesitated to talk things out. Wouldn’t have held back as much as you did.
Giving a self-deprecating smile, he said, “Because I’m a fucking idiot. But also because every time I considered it, you’d fucking pull away. I would’ve claimed you publicly as mine weeks ago, but you about had a god damn heart attack anytime there was a chance someone might see us getting fucking cozy together. I could practically hear the fears and doubts whirring around in your head the last few days, so I took the coward’s way out and tried to halt those thoughts by repeatedly fucking you any chance I got, until you were too exhausted to overthink.”
He had meant the words to make you laugh, but instead you suddenly felt overwhelmed. Your stupid eyes wouldn’t stop watering, and if you weren’t careful your nose would start clogging up too. You had always been jealous as hell of women who could cry prettily, because you definitely weren’t one of them.
You tried to school your features, tried to put on at least a thin mask of “I’m fine, totally fine” but more tears followed by a hiccuped sob escaping your lips said otherwise. You unwrapped your arms from his neck in order to press a hand to your mouth in an effort to try and stifle the emotions leaking out.
“No,” he said, stern enough to jolt you out of the overanalyzing spiral your brain wanted to jump down.
Pulling your hand away from your mouth with a gentle but firm grip, he clasped it between his own hands. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” you asked.
Lifting one hand, he used his thumb to brush away the tear sitting stubbornly on the middle of your cheek. “Don’t do what you did last time. Don’t hide from me again.”
Sighing, you nodded in agreement. “Fine, but it would be nice if one of these times it was you crying and not me.”
Humor was a mask of its own, one both of you used to cover up emotions. However, since you were standing there with red-rimmed eyes and he had just verbally confessed his emotions more in the last few minutes than he probably had during the rest of the apocalypse combined, you both deserved a bit of humor.
“The day that happens, I might as well just chop off my dick and fucking hand that over as well,” he joked back, causing you to smile and shove at him playfully.
Giving an exasperated sigh, you said “I can’t believe I’ve been so dumb about all of this, thinking...well, assuming totally incorrect things. Guess that’s what I get for not trying to just talk it out.”
He gave you a mock-stern expression and said, “Well, then let this be a fucking lesson.” He used two fingers to point at your eyes and then at his own, and back to yours. “Partners, remember.”
God, you loved the way that word rolled off his tongue. It was exactly what you had always secretly hoped to find with a man: an equal partnership. Sure, Negan was still the leader of the Sanctuary and had the role of badass motherfucker to uphold, but at the heart of things you stood on equal ground, and your thoughts and feelings and opinions mattered just as much as his own. Not to mention, you would dare him to deny that you were the leader of the kitchen staff. And hey, there was a lot of power in being the one in charge of making sure the entire community was fed. And the fact that he didn’t want to take any of that away from you, that he was proud of your accomplishments, made you fall for him even more.
“Partners,” you agreed with a nod, running a hand up over his chest. Fingers traced his strong, masculine features before running up into his hair to map the streaks of salt among the pepper.
Eyes brightening with desire, he stared with laser focus down at your mouth, his nostrils flaring as he watched your teeth subconsciously nibble on your lower lip as you took in this handsome man who was yours. All yours. Seeing the intent in his gaze and knowing where this was about to go by the sudden tensing of his muscles for action, you pressed your other hand against his chest lightly and said, “Wait, one more thing. I have a request.”
“Name it,” he said without hesitation.
“Um...this might seem a bit random, but is there any way you could bump Simon up to having a single room?” When Negan looked at you in slight bewilderment, you continued, “That way Ben can visit whenever he wants.”
His brows lowered, and you were afraid he was going to dismiss the issue as not important, so you pressed on. “In all honesty, it was Ben’s insistence that I be honest and talk things out with you that helped push me to say what I did tonight. I kinda owe him.”
The unspoken words were that Negan kinda owed him too, and his scowl said that he heard them loud and clear. With a slight huff, he grumbled, “I’ll see what I can fucking do.”
Giving a wide smile, you stood up on tiptoe and planted a very grateful kiss on his lips, with tongue included. Pulling back a bit, you whispered against his mouth, “I’d love to see what you can fucking do.”
At that, he scooped you up into his arms with a growl and strode into the bedroom, where he then proceeded to spend a good portion of the night showing you just how thoroughly captured the king really was.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Extra Author’s Note: Holy crap, was I nervous af to post this chapter. I feel like so much has been building to this conversation between You and Negan, and I wasn’t sure how readers were going to feel about it. I know some people were expecting more drama and angst, especially since this is about the time that romance novels usually throw in the so-called “third act conflict”. However, I personally find it pretty annoying when that conflict is some form of unneeded miscommunication or lack of communication, followed by the characters being apart for a period of time and then coming back together in one grand gesture before bam, an abrupt ending where you’re to expect them to live happily ever after with no more issues.
Instead, I had You and Negan do that earlier in the fic, with the “Confrontation” chapter where they royally fucked up and had to stumble their way back together, followed later by the pregnancy test argument where they started to fuck up but then both broke their unhealthy fight cycle (You did this by walking away and Negan did it by going after her and deciding to actually listen). And now, with this chapter I wanted to showcase their growth and how they’ve learned enough from past mistakes to move forward. Some people might see this chapter as too fluffy, but I saw it as a way to show two grown ass adults finally laying down their emotional shields and communicating in an open and healthy manner. At this point, I thought Negan and You deserved that, and I hope y’all agree.
Whether you loved it, hated it, didn’t care, all of the above, etc, please feel free to let me know. I’m so so curious to hear what people thought of this chapter, and if what I was hoping to showcase came across in a satisfying way. Thanks for reading! I’ll be back with more updates after Camp Nano! <3
#negan#negan fanfiction#negan fanfics#irresistible danger#the walking dead#negan's thirst squad#ash writes#twd#negan fanfic#negan x you#negan x reader#slow burn#fanfic#fanfiction#twd negan#the walking dead negan#jdm#jeffrey dean morgan
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