#unending horrors etc etc | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

norcumii · 1 year

Text

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR D20′S NEVERAFTER

(This was started the weekend after the finale, then my spoons ran away for awhile. -_-; Hopefully this is coherent anyways, even if late.)

I have been...struggling with this season of Dimension 20. As we’ve gone from episode to episode, I keep coming back to the issue of foundational rules – not in the sense of mechanics of world-building, but the thematic underpinnings and models. You’re telling a story about stories. We have these elements of horror and free-will; themes of consumption and corruption; cycles and multi-verses.

And I haven’t been able to tie it all together. My metaphorical wall-chart of photos and string has been an unending tangled mess (and my brain staunchly refuses to stop fixating on Aesop’s Mouse and Lion, aka the mascots of Disney and MGM so obviously that’s been a heel-turn of Capitalism waiting to happen >_>). After the finale I just sat there blinking for a bit, feeling like that certainly was a thing that had happened, but what did it all MEAN?????

There wasn’t anything that felt wrong with what happened, but there wasn’t any narrative logic I could grasp, no themes to tie things together other than “things are better now and what people chose for themselves” which is...nice, but vague enough to be unfulfilling. I couldn’t find anything to the Adventuring Party episode to help, so in growing frustrating I went browsing through the related tags on the tumbls.

This deceptively simple post broke me because it explained matters so well. It’s trauma. The whole season, all the horror and meta themes are about trauma. Suddenly all the oddly shaped puzzle pieces I couldn’t stop pawing at fit.

This is why the dark times began in the first place. People worried so much about trauma that they managed to traumatize themselves. Look how Sleeping Beauty’s vines literally smothered her in an attempt to protect her. All these population centers withdrew from each other, borders closed between the various kingdoms, and thus people pulled away from the potential for community support – everyone was left to struggle and fall on their own.

It wasn’t what I originally thought, some nebulous fear of fear itself inevitably leading to the darkside nonsense, but instead how we isolate ourselves into our little echo chambers – each person caught up in their story and their story alone. How we become mired in those events/trauma until one’s entire life is framed around That Horrible Thing What Happened At One Point In My Life.

Which in turn addresses the Authors – as a storyteller myself, I was mighty uncomfy with the presentation of the Authors as a unified bloc of uncaring eldritch horrors from beyond that only wanted the suffering of their playthings. I couldn’t figure if I was picking up on the wrong vibe, or if this was one of those learning moments where “if you’re uncomfy that might be ‘cause it hits too close to home and you need to sit with that for a bit to chew it over” or whatever. With the trauma context, it makes sense. On the one hand, the Authors are the external force: just like the characters, they’ve been corrupted by the fear of the Dark Times, and thus spreading that to their creations, which spread it back to them, etc. On the other they are very much an internal force: when we are traumatized, we tell ourselves stories to contextualize what happened. That can be done in a healthy way – this is one of the reasons we tell stories to begin with – or one can become mired in that narrative, telling and retelling it while fixating on the worst parts (that fear of the Dark Times thing again) until all that one sees is the worst iteration.

Which is why there was the multiverse aspect, and why each one could/did get worse. For that matter, it addresses the evolution of Pib’s minis, which baffled me when they were revealed. He begins as the dapper rogue, then becomes the hardened stray, then the scared little cat. Trauma wears at people, and oftentimes the immediate reaction is to withdraw, to be emotionally distant and appear tough – Rather like Zac’s choices on how Pib changed between incarnations. From there its so easy to get ground down further, into something so tired and hurting that it’s difficult to expect anything other than to be hurt further. Or look at Rosamund, increasingly isolated by her briars, which are choking her as they “lovingly” work to protect her from the big bad scary world – until she is puppeted by them.

Honestly, a lot of character choices make a lot more sense. Ylfa’s separation, how she believed that “the girl kept holding the wolf back.” The Stepmother’s everything, exemplifying that old saying about how “hurt people hurt people,” and a classic example of how easy it is to repeat generational trauma, especially when you don’t have a model for other ways to approach matters. The princesses’ utter nihilism, the exhausted desperation to just have the suffering stop. The fairies as the well-meaning but misguided faction endorsing placating the/a source of trauma to keep things from getting worse is all too familiar of those caught up in traumatic cycles but want to exercise some, any kind of autonomy. Meanwhile look at how Rapunzel grew able to lash out at literally everyone, and how she was utterly honest without ever needing to be truthful. How so many people just needed to rest in Mother Goose’s book, to get some reprieve from the relentless cycle of trauma (and how it helped them, and in return helped the party).

This explains the horrible Worst Case ending that was mentioned in the Adventuring Party: the Stepford Wives society of terrifying seeming-perfection crystallizing everyone into a semblance of how Everything Is Fine, Nothing Is Wrong, and no lessons are learned, no changes can be made, and the core is often rotting away unseen. All too often, society pressures us to pretend trauma didn’t happen, or that it wasn’t so bad. (How many times have you heard that PTSD is only for military folks, or those who survived massive natural disasters or whathaveyou?) The lesson we internalize is to pretend that all is peachy-keen, no problems whatsoever, and when that happens the trauma is never addressed. One can’t heal if all your energies are devoted to keeping up the facade of an idyllic existence. To be stuck in that cycle is indeed pretty apt for the worst end of a horror season.

Of course, this leads to the big question: what makes the players different? HOW did they manage to break the cycle? By literally crafting a new narrative – by allowing EVERYONE to make their own, new narrative, to shed the weight and burden of generational trauma. Some of them, like Pinocchio, had already internalized their own story – in his case, that meant taking up the terrifying responsibility of autonomy, taking up his own strings and destiny. Pinocchio learned and understood his story, stepping forward to not be ruled by his past experiences – like Gerard, choosing to leave his humanity and stop chasing the old goals that everyone said he should desire. Even though they both grieved the loss of that goal, and all the ramifications of leaving those hopes behind – even as it meant accepting the scars and changes it wrought upon them – it helped them and others in their stories break out of the cycle of trauma.

Stories are doorways to other places – sometimes a temporary haven in someplace better, where no matter how bad things get, there is a ‘happily’ at the end of it. Sometimes they’re models of how things could be horrible, and we can learn how others deal with grief/tragedy/horror – so we in turn can acquire those skills and life lessons. Vicarious experiences can help mitigate/understand trauma, and somehow, without me even noticing it, this season leaned wholeheartedly into it.

I think I need to rewatch it all through that lens, and tbh? I’m looking forward to it.

#dimension 20 #d20 #neverafter #neverafter spoilers #spoilers #meta #analysis #thinky thoughts #stories #story telling #trauma

97 notes · View notes

miralines · 2 years

Text

actually I also want to talk about the mechs’ approaches to the concept of good and evil and why literally none of them are anywhere near good

under the cut because it got so so long

I truly believe there was a point in Jonny’s life when he wanted to be good. That time was a decade past even by the time he met Carmilla. I think Jonny learned pretty early on that good was not an option for him, which soon morphed into a deeply-held belief that good is not something he is capable of. In reaction to this, he leans heavily into being terrible (see Interview Transcript). He believes there are good things and evil things (and plenty of ambiguity as well), and he finds good admirable, if uncommon and more than a little naive, but I think he fundamentally believes that any part of him that might have once been good was broken beyond repair before he became a teenager.

Nastya, on the other hand, views herself as capable of goodness. Sometimes. If she’s lucky and not missing anything and nothing goes wrong (see the storming of the Winter Palace). She even tried, post-mechanization, to continue to be good. But between the events leading up to her death and the unending horrors that followed, she came to the conclusion that good is not worth it. Good gets you hurt or killed or blows up in ways that make things even worse. She keeps to herself, looks out for herself and her own, and will actively hurt anyone else (because given the chance, they’ll almost certainly eventually do the same).

In a similar vein, Ashes probably figured out “good” doesn’t get you anywhere by the time they were eight. Good got you taken advantage of or killed. They do value loyalty-- if you’ve formed a relationship with someone and you value it, you will help them out, or at least not sell them out (cough mickey). This is honestly more pragmatism than anything, though-- they had no issue leaving Daedalus to die, despite having a “deal.” Mostly it applies to people they’re stuck with. Not betraying people makes things much easier when you have to spend a lot of time around those people. Do they care, in some weird way, deep down? Yes. Are they personally hurt by betrayal? Also yes. But for them, it’s the consequence of picking the wrong person to do business with, and bad things happening is as natural a force as stars shining-- including when they’re the person doing the bad things.

I think Ivy actually values good and sees it both as a desirable trait and one she’s capable of. She just has... a really skewed view of what constitutes good. A combination of trauma, personality, and the inevitable corruption of immortality have led her to an extremely utilitarian set of ethics (”for the greater good”). The “greater good” is very often preservation of knowledge, and that comes above everything else-- human life, continued existence of planets, etc. I firmly believe that at least once, the mechs have been on a planet where some authority was trying to destroy Terrible Knowledge before it could make it into the hands of their enemies, and Ivy brought it to those enemies for the sake of keeping it known. This may have led to the destruction of the whole planet, but at least the survivors fleeing from the wreckage still had the records! Ivy’s perspective is so zoomed out that most petty immoral actions (murder, theft, whatever the hell “neuro-arson” is) don’t really register as important one way or another.

Brian. Brian is a master of moral justifications. His two settings correspond to the most extreme possible version of the moral philosophies they represent: EJM Brian might destroy an entire planet to prevent the possibility of an interplanetary epidemic, whereas MJE Brian might give corrupt authorities the information that leads to mass arrests and executions because it would be wrong to lie to them. Also I think he enjoys coming up with these justifications and playing with being the moral equivalent of the monkey’s paw.

As far as the Toy Soldier is concerned, it’s not a person. Good and evil are person things. It’s exempt. I very much read its backstory as it slowly coming to reject humanity and all the things that come with it-- emotion, responsibility, even pronouns that don’t traditionally refer to objects (the latter of which can absolutely be read as voidpunk, but there is certainly room to criticize the other two). TS does what it wants, because it doesn’t see itself as part of the group obligated to follow moral rules.

Tim had a moral compass at one point. Maybe even a decent one. But then the horrors of war, etc. Tim believes and behaves as if all of his goodness died with Bertie. He can do whatever he wants now, because what’s the point?

Raphaella does not believe in good and evil. At best, it’s a nice fairy tale, at the worst, it’s a fiction designed to repress freedom and independence. Like Ivy, Raphaella is driven by knowledge, but where Ivy preserves it, Raphaella discovers it-- at any cost. Nonconsensual human experimentation poses no issue to her, because it will yield knowledge. Of course, being rude or hurtful exists, and doing bad things without sufficient reason may be rude or hurtful, but it’s not evil or wrong. Mostly in those cases the main problem is that other people don’t like it.

I’m going to be honest, I’m still very shaky on my characterization of Marius beyond Funney Man (death of byron von raum WHEN), but at the moment I see his crimes as falling under impulsivity or revenge. He feels like killing someone? Sure. He’s really annoyed at someone so constructs an elaborate plot to drive them to madness? Sounds fun. He might have felt bad about it at one point, but by the time he settles into immortality he cares more about A) whether it made him personally feel better and B) welp, can’t change it anyway. In this way, he can be a bit like Jonny, but while Jonny will do bad things for the sake of doing bad things, Marius most often has at least some reasoning, or something he hopes to gain.

If you’re still here thank you for reading and I’d be very curious to hear other thoughts

#the mechanisms #the mechs #jonny d'ville #nastya rasputina #ashes o'reilly #ivy alexandria #drumbot brian #the toy soldier #gunpowder tim #raphaella la cognizi #marius von raum #this ended up being 1k words somehow #character analysis

266 notes · View notes

no-psi-nan · 1 year

Text

Chatting with a friend about our most "deranged" works (affectionate), and was inspired to create this 4D scale based on what I think are the most common attributes of "deranged" works:

Distance from canon: This can mean the amount of difference in setting, tone, and/or characterization from the original work. The lowest possible score would be canon-compliant work during the timeline, like a missing scene or a scene from another perspective.

Hypothetical examples of high-scoring creations:

Lord of the Rings AU where Sauron is a corporation buying out a small community of locally owned shops to place a cookie cutter mall there

Crack/parody My Little Pony roleplay where hatred is magic

Violence / Horror: The amount of violence, gore, horror, severe angst, etc. that exceeds what is shown in canon.

Hypothetical examples of high-scoring creations:

Comic of a more "realistic" Pokemon battle where Pokemon are sliced apart, lose limbs, and otherwise face graphic injury and death

Yu-Gi-Oh! fic focused on the people who have been "mind-crushed", from both the perspective of the victim experiencing unending torture and their family/friends struggling to cure them

Sex: This refers to not just the amount of sex, but also the level of explicitness, addition of kinks, number of people involved, monsterfucking, etc.

Hypothetical examples of high-scoring creations:

Supernatural fan drawing of Dean and Cas performing a BDSM scene while Cas is in a "biblically accurate" angelic true-form

Naruto AU where the demons can go into heat and often fuck indiscriminately in groups

Time spent creating it: Some works may rank very low in all the other categories and yet reach the status of "deranged" purely based on how long the creator has been working on it / rotating it in their mind! The development of incredible detail/lore tends to fall naturally into this category.

(All examples made up off the top of my head and not meant to call anybody out lol)

Just thought it might be fun for everyone to think about where their most "deranged" creations might fall on this (tongue-in-cheek) scale!

#fanfiction #ao3 #archive of our own #fanfic #fanart #writing #nopsi nonsense #nopsi graphics

153 notes · View notes

goobdesk · 6 months

Text

The internet's unending urge to fill anything vaguely Horror centric with heaps of world building and lore until it isn't scary anymore (e.g The Backrooms, Slenderman etc) is such a perfect representation of how ancient people created mythology to explain scary weather phenomenon.

#mythology #history #creepypasta #internet culture #the backrooms #slenderman

23 notes · View notes

cassi-pokeblogging-hub · 1 month

Text

Heyo! I'm Cassiopeia!

The following blog is an ooc hub for all my pkmn irl accounts, and where the follows for all the accounts listed later in this post come from! This blog USED to be the rp blog for a character I no longer use and have no motivation for anymore, and is the main blog on this account, so I figured changing it into a hub blog of sorts would be a good idea.

I'm free to answer questions about my ocs ooc here, plot arcs, and generally talk about stuff in the pkmn irl community. I'll also possibly be boosting some accounts I think are cool, reblogging important posts and ask games in the community to hopefully spread them around a bit more, and just generally using this to store some posts about pokemon in general that I think are neat.

Info about the Mod and General Boundaries!

The following is some general information that might be useful. Like I said earlier, I'm Cassiopeia, but you can call me Cass, Cassi, or Pea! I use any pronouns, and I'm an adult (Adult meaning 18 or older in this case.) I'm the host of a system, and a splitroject (or whatever the term is I cant remember) with multiple sources, but notably several pokemon characters. Pokemon has been a systemwide special interest since we were a little kid, and we have a lot of opinions and headcanons, as well as know A LOT about the series as a whole. Our main account is @dragontypess but this is a seperate account so follows for pkmn irl stuff will come from here. A warning that we occasionally reblog heavy stuff or more adult oriented content on that blog (nothing outright nsfw, but usually some suggestive stuff and sexual humor, so minors beware)

Any pkmn irl rp account is allowed to interact with p much any of my blogs! Sentient pokemon, legendaries, eebies, etc etc etc. I run on Rotomblr being a multiverse. I may not interact much if our canons diverge too strongly for personal comfort but usually it's whatever cause of the previously mentioned multiverse thing. Some general stuff I go by on all my blogs are people do eat pokemon, and pokemon do eat other pokemon. There are small bugs and bacteria and shit thatre still. alive but not pokemon. Not all pokemon lay eggs. A more mammalian pokemon like stoutland would give live birth like a real dog, and stuff like the more plant like pokemon like sunflora or oddish produce seeds. Not going to go too into details but thats something that happens.

While I am an adult, I prefer not to engage with more suggestive or outright nsfw content on the pkmn irl sphere. There's a lot of minors in this community, and I'd like to keep my blogs generally safe spaces for them to interact. If it's anything you wouldn't joke about with a middle schooler or high schooler, probably not. I try to tag stuff that can be upsetting on all my blogs, and I'll usually ask before doing anything big with anyone elses blogs. There's other stuff, but DNI's don't usually work, so I'll probably just block you if I don't like your vibes.

My tumblr dms are always open, so if you'd like to plot anything out, I'm free to chat here or on the rp account in question! You CAN leave a message on my main account too, but I'd prefer to keep rp stuff here. If you already know my discord and we've chatted in dms there before in the past, that's also an option, but otherwise stick to tumblr.

Pokemon IRL Blogs I run:

Putting these under the cut cause there's a lot. Includes summaries.

@yveltalreal - A blog for the legendary pokemon Yveltal, and their specialest little guy (chosen). Yveltal is the very same from Pokemon Y that was captured by Lysandre and Team Flare, although from a canon where both X and Y are true. Reaper Sys are just OCs that experiance horrors unending. Used primarily in a Discord RP

@northernwindsglory - A slow eeby deeby. And I mean slow. Glory is a big fan of Legands and Myths, and wants to learn all there is about them! Unfortunately, this has... consequences...

@fruitbasket-gossip - A joint blog with 3 friends. I play Mod Starf. A group of NaraUva students and Blueberry students fucking around on Rotomblr. What will they do? Who knows!

@vital-spirit - A joint blog with a friend! A pmd blog in a setting inspired by various western movies. A whole new set of towns, dungeons, and characters unrelated to those in the various games. I play Lucario.

@blazingvictory -the blog of a bba student with so many problems and issues.

@crater-champion - A blog for Florian, protag of SV, specifically violet in this case. Linked to the Juliana from the blog @union-circle, who is from Scarlet. Another scenario of both games being true yippe. Post DLC and Epilogue. Don't ask him about what happened to Blueberry's League once he left (Please do. He's going to dodge the question like mad and it'll be funny.)

@shields-down - The blog of a VERY excitable Blueberry student named Electra. They're just here to have a good time and be silly.

@dread-plate - A semi-doccumentation of a Challenge Run I'm doing of Ultra Sun. Rift is a dark typed human and former big shot battler who's trying to get away from it all, retracing the steps they did as a child on their Island Challenge.

@redwoodrevival - Redwood Revival and Rescue is a research facility and sanctuary for various pokemon, especially those from the past. The blog is run by the owner of the facility, Professor Redwood herself, as well as her two assistants, Fern and Ginkgo. Mostly just a place for me to ramble about my pokemon hcs lol. Please ask her shit <;3 Semi-Inactive due to lack of asks.

@capricious-syrpents - A blog run by a Blueberry Academy student by the name of Malus! Formerly a member of the League Club but kicked out during Kieran's Reign as champion for bullshit reason, Malus is now in the music club and also not happy about no longer being allowed within League Club. Used primarily in a Discord RP

@snug-as-a-bugtype-in-a-rug - An eeby deeby from Alola by the name of Deb. She's been turned into a cutiefly, and is not having a good time. Free her from the hell that is minimum wage. Inactive due to lack of motivation.

@acetrainerchrys - Chrys is a skilled trainer from Johto who moved to Paldea about a year ago. Following strange events that led her to hatching an egg that contained the legendary pokemon giratina, she has not known peace since. She's the cousin of Reaper Sys from @yveltalreal. What do you expect? Used primarily in a Discord RP

@a0ranger - Venus is the father of Reaper Sys from @yveltalreal and a ranger stationed in Area 0 in Paldea. As him about his work sometime! Mostly a place for me to talk about my headcanons regarding pokemon, especially those surrounding Area 0 and give some silly stories. Semi-Inactive due to lack of asks

@lucias-narauva-hell - Lucia is actually normal. Her biggest problem is Ms. Tyme's math class. Why are there people at her school with absurdly strong pokemon and basically superpowers? What the fuck. Used primarily in a Discord RP

@festivalofmasks - A blog of Carmine from the games, post DLC and epilogue. Inactive due to lack of motivation and uncomfortable asks I got early on into running the blog. May come back to it one day.

There's a few others but they're completely dead and I have no intent to use them again for a while, and are still attached to my main rather than this blog.

9 notes · View notes

randomfoggytiger · 10 months

Text

How the Ghosts Stole Christmas In-Depth (Part III): Mulder Imprisons Himself

Picking up where Part II-- explaining how Mulder is Scully's ouroboros (really proud of it, actually)-- left off, Part III separates Mulder from his crutches (Scully and speedy legs) and forces him to confront a mountain's worth of unresolved emotions.

This episode is a very Mulder-centric exploration of the depths of his loneliness and fear, a parallel and precursor to Scully's deep-dive in Milagro. Scully does have an arc-- realizing her reticence feeds her partner’s fears and doubts-- but it’s not the in-depth excavation of the soul in the same way that her partner’s is.

Without further ado, here we go!

The doors that Scully had banged on over and over opens without trouble for Mulder; and the two of them stumble into the adjoining room… which is a mirror of the previous room they were in. Their terror momentarily melts as they stare, baffled, at their surroundings, pivoting automatically to cover each other's blind spots: while Mulder peeks back into the first room, Scully eyes the next. The two then swap their searches, taking in what the other had seen.

In another gesture of partnerly mind-reading, they stalk over to another door, testing their theory without a word exchanged (with Scully boldly leading the charge and Mulder filing close behind.)

“Alright…” Mulder stumbles, “I’m beginning to uh--”

“Yeah,” Scully agrees.

“--get this.”

She cuts through his indecision (because her mettle rises when Mulder’s flounders) making an effective route of attack: “You go through that door. And I…” here she pauses, wondering if she wants to commit to this “split up, gang!” plan.

“I should come out…” Mulder drops off, miming his mental configurings rather than finishing the sentence.

Neither of them looks comforted or convinced by this mutual scheme; but he makes a hammed-up face to lighten the mood before taking off, and even turns back to give her a genuine “here we go” smile of encouragement before stepping through the door.

Mulder doesn’t come back in.

After quietly searching the vacated room for a second, Scully hastily retraces Mulder’s steps, calling for him just as he starts yelling for her, too. The slam of both doors stops them in their tracks, yet another jump scare in this unending night of spooks.

Mulder’s annoyance snaps him out of his supplicating hands pose (having expected either a righteously furious little spitfire to come racing after him or an equally frightening appearance from the entity playing games with them), and he stomps back to sort out whatever new problem Scully’s gotten herself into this time. Falling back is no help, since his partner has vanished from the house entirely.

“Scullaaaaay!” he yells.

And when no Scully answers, Mulder’s Panic Face ™ really sets in.

NOW Mulder is ripping at doorknobs and banging on doors.

“Scully, can you HEAR ME???” Mulder yells.

But there is silence from her. And while it’s not an “I’m fine” or “I want to be alone” or even a “What do you want me to say?”, it still hits that core fear of Mulder’s: Scully’s withdrawal, silence, departure from his life. And here is when (after shooting the lock to smithereens) he hits the brick wall-- the one, as Maurice later explains to him, he built and chooses to keep up between himself and his partner.

A crucial detail that changes how one fundamentally views the characters: at this point, the episode makes it seem like Scully has been lost to or trapped by The Horrors-- or, in a meta sense, her own reticence, fear of commitment, etc.-- with the camera framing Mulder as the rescuer trying to find his way back to her. Why this is interesting is because Mulder is about to realize he is the trapped one-- caged in by his own walls-- not Scully. Scully, meanwhile, realizes her eye-rolling routine is a front even to herself, and she does want to be “out there with you"; and she hadn’t realized how bone-deep and crushing Mulder’s loneliness was, too easily disguising how much being with her partner means to her.

“Hey!” yells another voice; and Mulder flips around, gun still drawn. When he sees it’s a friendly (if annoyed) old man, he puts the gun down and begins to interrogate the stranger.

Maurice treats the situation like a completely normal circumstance, flicking on the lights casually and blustering like a disgruntled homeowner. “This isn’t one of those ‘home invasions’, is it?” (A very specific choice of words there, Chris Carter.)

Mulder-- brain short-circuiting with the overload of twists and turns-- is aggressively taken aback, outright scowling in bewilderment and answering with short, hostile responses.

“Good. Would you like me to show you the door?”

Here Mulder gets really sarcastic, sensing a game with words and snapping that the jig be up. “That’s very funny,” he says with smooth, deadly intent.

Maurice throws him off the trail with honest lie: “I wasn’t making a joke.” This loosens up his interrogator, who points at the door with a petulant “Have you looked at the door?”

“Uhuh, I’m lookin at it now.”

“Tell me what you see,” Mulder pop quizzes.

Maurice knows this game, tucking away his enthusiasm as he proceeds to spin the younger man around. “I see a door.” He adds a pointed, “With a lock shot off of it.”

Mulder gives an “oh, is that so?” head nod, amused despite himself at Maurice’s practical “You gonna pay for that?”

“That is a door with a brick wall behind it.”

“Oh-kay. Sure,” Maurice placates-- as we know later, plays into Mulder’s paranoia by lacing his words with doubt and denial to basic facts. It’s a trick that Mulder, as a person painted as paranoid his whole professional career, is used to; and it doesn’t deter him… at first.

“...You’re playing tricks on me,” he comprehends.

“If I am, I’m sorry-- I don’t know any tricks.”

Mulder is correct here (though he sounds like an overly suspicious nutcase): “Yeah, well, that’s a trick in itself, isn’t it? You’ve been playing tricks on us since we got here.”

It’s natural for Mulder to naturally include Scully with an “us”, something which Maurice picks up on and uses to his advantage.

“Am I to take it we’re not alone?” (I see you, Chris Carter.)

Mulder laughs heartily at this on-the-nose-but-out-of-left-field answer-- “Ahh! That’s very funny, coming from a ghost.”

Maurice roars with laughter, clapping his hands together; and surprises Mulder so suddenly that the other jumps back, hands raised and finger pointed in warning. Ghosts, it seems, terrify him just as much as Scully.

The old ghost brushes off Mulder’s theories, handwaving them away as ghost hunting tomfooleries. Mulder sees the way the wind is blowing and doubles down on his questions.

“Strange folks?”

“Mhm.”

“Like those strange folks under the floorboards--” he’s halted in the midst of his Poirot gotcha by the glaring lack of dead bodies in the middle of the room. Walking over doesn’t seem to recover them from thin air, either; so he’s simply left with a new question: “How did you do that?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

Mulder makes a couple word-adjacent noises before eeking out, “Th-there were corpses here-- bodies… buried under the floorboards.”

Victorious, Maurice sidles up and asks, “Why don’t you have a seat, son?”

Mulder does. He answers Maurice’s clipped inquiries (“You drink? Take drugs? Get high?”) with his face buried in his hands, embarrassed and questioning his own sanity. (Where’s his one-in-five-billion when he needs to be believed?)

A funny little note: Mulder answers straight 'no's to the first two questions, but squeaks out a surprised “no” at the “get high” question; which implies he was surprised anyone would think he’d try drugs (I guess ketamine and holes drilled in his head don’t count as recreational, do they?)

“Are you overcome by the impulse to make everyone believe you?” Maurice asks, voice level even as he reaches his selling pitch.

This rouses Mulder, drawing him up into a prayer-hands pose before his own ‘god’ of divination.

Of course, his oracle would be a trickster disguising himself as a professional in the field of mental health. “...I specialize in disorders and manias related to pathological behavior as it pertains to the paranormal.”

Mulder’s impressed. “Wow, I-I didn’t know such a thing existed.”

Here Maurice lays out his and Lyda’s goals: “My specialty’s in something called ‘soul prospectors’: a cross-axial classification I’ve codified by extensive interaction with visitors like yourself. I’ve found you all tend to fall into pretty much the same category.”

“Hm,” Mulder hums in interest before suspicion sets in. “What category is that?”

“Narcissistic, overzealous, self-righteous ego-maniac.”

Mulder sarcastically asks, “Wow. That’s a category?”

Maurice glides over the other’s flippancy. “You kindly think of yourself as single-minded,” he continues, his voice the only sound in the deathly silence, “but you’re prone to obsessive-compulsiveness, workaholism, anti-socialism-- fertile fields for the descent into total wacko breakdown.”

Now the old ghost is correct (so correct that I wrote a post about Mulder’s Freeze-Flight response in relation to his trauma and workaholism here); but it's remarkable that Maurice knows just enough terminology to fudge his way through the rest of his speech... and that he's deft enough to turn Mulder's careful open-mindedness against himself.

“I don’t think that pegs me exactly,” Mulder tries to laugh this assessment off… but he doesn’t decry all of it.

“Oh, really?” Maurice doubles down. “Waving a gun around my house? Eh? Raving like a lunatic about some imaginary brick wall?”

Mulder looks back and forth, stress heightening when the metaphorical rope knots more and more tightly around his throat.

“You’ve probably convinced yourself you’ve seen aliens.”

The knot loosens as Mulder’s defenses rise up, another wall guarding that particularly sensitive spot.

Maurice anticipates another slough-off, cutting in before his patient can morph from pursed lips to full-fledged quip: “You know why you think you see the things you do?”

“...Because,” petty Mulder responds, “...I have seen them?”

Maurice sends his point securely home with a somber tone. “Because you’re a lonely man. A lonely man… chasing paramasturbatory illusions--”

Mulder is both horrified at this picture of himself and struck by the other’s phrasing (his “WHAT” face is priceless); and his expression freezes in an attempt to betray nothing.

“--that you believe will give your life meaning and significance which your pathetic social maladjustment makes impossible for you to find elsewhere.”

On Maurice goes as Mulder’s self-doubts pile higher and higher: “You probably consider yourself passionate, serious, misunderstood, am I right?”

The camera has been focusing primarily on Mulder’s clasped hands this entire monologue, his own face slightly out-of-focus in the background. Even his deflection (“Paramasturbatory?”) can’t save him from the scrutiny of the camera (let alone a bloodthirsty ghost) as it pierces through his defenses and exposes how tightly he is gripping to denial through fear.

“Most people would rather stick their fingers in a wall socket than spend a minute with you.”

“ALRIGHT,” Mulder, burned, sits back and dismisses the conversation as fast as he can. (Note: This hit him right in his Fe Inferior-- see Typing Post here-- which is about his fear of being emotionally rejected or painted as a bad person. It’s how Phoebe Green, Diana Fowley, and now Maurice manipulates him into self-doubt and despair.)

“Now just, uh…” He is visibly wounded, his special stressed-Mulder-smile stretching across his face as he is dragged into himself by invisible weights of pain. It’s sad how quickly he can pivot from such a blow, proving that Mulder is too used to bouncing back from blows to soldier forth and carry on: “Now just back off for a second--”

“You spend every Christmas this way? Alone?” Maurice badgers.

“I’m not alone,” Mulder insists, recovering some clarity and buoyancy in his voice.

“More self-delusion.”

Mulder’s Panic Face ™ is back, briefly shaken but firm in his conviction. “N-no, I came here with my partner. She’s somewhere in the house.”

Ah, yes, that partner that he hasn’t heard from in a couple of minutes.

“Behind a brick wall?” Maurice states.

Yes, Maurice, behind a brick wall-- the one that he keeps carefully caulked and grouted.

I’ve already discussed this ad nauseum, but it’s always been Mulder that holds Scully at arm’s length, not the other way around. Since the beginning of their partnership, she has stepped over unspoken boundaries for a closer bond-- teaching Mulder how to hug (see here), struggling with his stagnation and her wish for more from their relationship (see one of my Never Again analyses here), bringing a celebration to his motel room post cancer (Detour), cuddling up to and getting rejected by him (Arcadia Part II and Part III), and finally ratcheting up her advances in desperation from her own loneliness (Milagro Part I, Part II, and Part III.) Scully’s problem has always been her blustering front while on cases, being “dragged” away from her normal life without admitting she wants to be exploring the unknown with Mulder. Because of this, he fears she’ll decide enough is enough one day, leave, and go on with her normal life, the pattern having been set with her S1 date in The Jersey Devil and continuing into her S7 'illness' in Requiem.

Mulder acknowledges Maurice's point against his will, a tight, false grin cracking across his face and trying to (again) nod the sting away. However, he can’t think up a remark fast enough, stuck in a slow, bobbing motion reminiscent of a dippy bird.

“How’d you get her to come with ya-- steal her car keys?”

The fight is sapped right out of him. All Scully’s actions during this... delightful trip are cast in the worst light; and his own actions as unwarranted and unbearable-- and worse, unwanted. The thought that his partner hadn’t been secretly liking his cajoling and teasing and pranking and wheedling throws fertilizer on the ugly weed of self-doubt and reproach that Mulder naturally fosters towards himself (again: his Typing Post goes into this in more detail.) It’s a dangerously depressing thought, one Mulder can’t fight against.

“You know why you do it,” Maurice persists, “listen endlessly to her droning rationalizations. Because you’re afraid. Afraid of the loneliness.”

It all makes a tangled sort of sense; and Mulder-- as the boy who woke up in the middle of the night, terrified he was alone and as the man who ran through D.C. after accidentally wishing himself the only person left on Earth-- can’t deny that, either (at least, not completely.) He simply stares, clubbed and dazed.

“Am I right?”

Mulder is beaten, and wants to leave the conversation, this house, these memories as fast as he can (as usual.) Once the spell of the newest chase is broken, Mulder will always turn around to look for his partner (who is, hopefully, somewhere close behind him.) “I’d just like to find my partner.”

The old ghost praises him: “Gooood. Easy. Piece of cake.”

Mulder’s tight little nod, tighter smile, and narrowed eyes show his utter lack of patience; but his mood is temporarily muddled when Maurice stands up and walks straight out of the open, wall-less door.

“Brick wall?” Maurice points at the open doorway; then points towards his head. “Or brick wall?”

The shot frames Mulder’s head next to the pointing thumb, separated only by the few feet from the doorway (metaphors, similes, allegories, etc.) to freedom.

“Go ahead!” the old ghost urges his victim. “Change your life!”

Mulder looks genuinely touched, having had his walls (metaphorically and literally) attacked and torn down in this vicious siege; and he is not a Mulder if he is not rationalizing cruelty or abuse in the name of help or love. He can see the beauty in the profane, the tarnished; so it’s not a leap to see the good behind the intentions of a tough, twisted talk.

Still, he looks very childlike in his over-sized jacket and shirt, tilting his head in doubt while awaiting a swift reprimand for trusting someone else in his life. But he ultimately does trust.

…And walks full force into a wall, his nose (which Sanguinarium reveals is his greatest insecurity) taking most of the brunt: egg on his face and a bruise on his ego.

Then the lights flicker once again, signaling Maurice’s departure. Mulder freezes, the reality of the situation settling down around him once more; then scowling as the lightning only now picks up as well. Very convenient lightning, that.

Thus ends the first time Mulder is forced to sit and face what he has always been dodging: his world-weary desperation to be validated before the denial and mind-manipulation of the whole world (i.e. Pusher, Demons, Kitsunegari, Folie a Deux-- the epitome-- and soon to be One Son, Field Trip, The Sixth Extinction: Amor Fati, etc.) his imprisoning loneliness, and-- most importantly-- his fear of not having Scully’s equal dedication and love to him, not just to debunk his work (as he will bring up at the close of this episode.)

Thank you for reading~

Enjoy!

#txf #How the Ghosts Stole Christmas #In-Depth #Part III #Mulder Imprisons Himself #HTGSC #S6 #xf meta #xfiles #x-files #the x files #meta #mine #analysis #Mulder #Scully #Maurice #Lyda

21 notes · View notes

dr-davis-mde · 5 months

Text

both my personal blog and my work blog. blanket trigger warning for potential gore, medical distress, drugs, and sex (discussed but not depicted)

keep the parahuman politics to a minimum, im trying to stay as out of that shit as i can

DNI if you are anti-Amy Dallon/Panacea, pro-Cauldron, or a Slaughterhouse Nine fanboy/wannabe

FAQ and commission info under the cut.

FAQ

Q: Wait, so your name is Riley Grace Davis?

A: yes my name is Riley Grace Davis. yes I used to go by Bonesaw. yes I used to be a member of the slaughterhouse nine.

Q: Are you the serial killer that (insert crime against nature here)?

A: probably. i did a lot of those. i dont really REGRET them but i wont do it again i prommy

Q: Are you still a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine?

A: its been 25 years and i legit still get this question like every week. NO!!!!!!! we disbanded when Jack died and I was captured and the apocalypse started. im not involved with any of the copycat killer groups either, they all suck :/

Q: You're a monster, you should be behind bars, you should be dead, you tortured/traumatized/murdered my family/friend/loved one, you were part of the chain of events that started the end of the world, its unthinkable that people like you get to walk free just because you're a parahuman while unpowered people are imprisoned for petty larceny, etc.

A: L+ratio+direct all questions about the amnesty to your local PRT chapter

Q: What's an MDE?

A: medical diploma equivalency, established by the PRT of Earth Bet in 2002 AD. allows Thinker-class capes whose powers give them medical knowledge to obtain licensure to practice medicine without needing to attend medical school. after two decades of pestering the PRT nonstop it was expanded in 24 GM to also include Tinker-class capes with medical specialties in what historians call the "for fucks sake riley shut up, fine" amendment.

Q: What sort of surgeries do you do?

A: i am capable of performing almost any medical intervention, though these days i mostly limit myself to cosmetic body modifications

Q: How do you cope with the unbearable trauma of having had your childhood ripped away from you by a serial killer, your mind filled with unending horrors by a fragment of a cosmic being, and trying to find out who you were and atone for the sins of your past while in the middle of a world-reshaping calamity?

hard drugs, amazing yet potentially unethical and illegal sex with my beautiful perfect wife, and staying silly :3

COMMISSION INFO

i AM open to taking clients currently but i live in New Brockton on Earth Gimel and have heavy travel restrictions as a result of my parole so you'll have to come to me. payment in cash preferred but i also take valuable gemstones or drugs, if they are at equivalent value to the price. (for legal reasons the drug part is a joke.) no cards. or well, no credit/debit. i guess if you gave me a giftcard to somewhere that the food doesnt suck id accept it. unfortunately no insurance plan recognizes me but my rates are very affordable ($50-200 for most standard procedures, up to $400 if unexpected complications arise, esoteric procedure price uncapped and depends on cost of materials, legality, ease of operation, and how interested in the operation i am.)

operations i will do include but are not limited to:

gender-affirming surgeries

therian-affirming surgeries

phantom limb replacement surgery

turning you into your fursona

kemonomimi-fication

tentacle prosthesis

non-lethal flaying

genital enhancement

most body plan restructurings (additional limbs, fewer limbs, wings, organs that you carry in a bag outside your body and are connected to your torso via strange fleshy tubes, etc.)

multi-person conjoinment

hard nos:

creation of any virus, plague, biological weapon, etc.

natural weapons - claws/teeth are okay but no ranged weapons, venom, acid, prehensile bladed spines, etc.

ANY operation on another parahuman - too many chances to accidentally become an accomplice to something

anything capable of reproducing. THIS IS A CONDITION OF MY PAROLE. i am allowed to give functioning reproductive organs but any resulting offspring will be baseline human regardless of the state the parent or parents is in

ANY operation without the consent of ALL parties being operated on. this includes if the party is incapable of giving consent and you are their power of attorney (pets, minors, mentally disabled, intoxicated, etc.)

i reserve the right to refuse any procedure for any non-discriminatory reason or for no stated reason.

if you're still interested let me know and we can work out an appointment. i do not use general anaesthesia so if youre coming over for your surgery i recommend you bring a book or game or something. or we can talk, but for some reason usually people dont want to talk to me while im rearranging their limbs

#worm rp #riley davis #riley grace davis #bonesaw #wormblr #parahumans

9 notes · View notes