17 and 18 for the fanfic ask please?

17: What’s something you’ve learned about while doing research for a fic?

there've been a number of attempts at creating a chinese typewriter, the first of which being by zhou houkun, which weighed 18kg in the prototype and 14kg in the improved version, and typed 4,000 characters. after that the kao typewriter was patented, typing 5,400 characters, followed by the Japanese wanneng and shuangge typewriters, and the chinese mingkuai typewriter. the attempts at creating an efficient chinese typewriter have largely been rendered as redundant since the invention of computerised typing systems, which bypass the need to create a method of fitting a large number of unique characters onto a barrel/cylinder, which inhibited the number of characters that could be produced. (pictured below: a shuangge typewriter, the illustration for the ming-kuai typewriter patent, and the kao IBM electric typewriter.)

18: What’s one of your favorite lines you’ve written in a fic?

answered here.

Some ramblings about Memory and why I’m happy it wasn’t canonized

Honestly the more I think about the story, the happier I am that Memory (a winner of the Memories of the Dead canonization contest) was never officially canonized. And Im saying this as someone who absolutely adores Nidhiki as a character and would've liked to see more content of him, especially one that explores his psyche in a nuanced manner.

Before we go on a few disclaimers. First off, yes, I'm aware that Memory is fan-made and that some people see critiquing fanfics as bad, at the very least unless the author personally requested it. And I completely understand that sentiment given that fanfics are hobbies and the writers may not always want critique on stuff they worked on for personal fun and passion. Thing is, Memory was not only submitted to a canonization contest, but was one of the winners. The only reason it (and the other winners of the contest) weren't canonized was because Greg wasn't allowed to visit BZPower anymore (or had it to do with LEGO quitting Bionicle g1 completely in preparation for g2, don't remember tbh). In other words, Memory was this close getting canonized, and was only left out due to external circumstances. That makes criticizing Memory fair game in my opinion.

Secondly: I actually like Memory as a story. It's well written, explores Nidhikis character in an interesting way and has a really interesting theme of how some individuals are forced into roles they didn't want to by circumstance. I think it fills in gaps from the lore nicely (especially the ending). And not only does the story use Mimic (a Dark Hunter I desperately wish was used in canon) it characterizes and uses him rather well. Him acting as a pararell/comparasion to Nidhiki is a solid way to showcase the storys central theme. All in all, it's a solid story in vacuum. Even as part of the larger Bionicle mythos I do like some elements of it and have adopted them into my headcanonverse.

That being said, I have one major issue with the story specifically regarding how it relates to the greater Bionicle canon. And that is, giving Nidhiki a "my original teammates were killed by Dark Hunters and now I desire revenge" type of backstory doesn't work for his character and arguably makes him less interesting.

First off, I understand why the writer chose to do this decision, to paint Nidhiki in a more sympathetic light. In canon, Nidhiki isn't really a sympathetic character (or at the very least wasn't intended to be one, ymmv whether or not he can be seen as one). He is selfish and his reason for betraying toa Mangai boils down to desire for glory and self-preservation. So wanting to give Nidhiki a more sympathetic backstory in order for the reader to understand why he is like that and thus sympathizing with him makes sense especially given how Bionicle doesn’t really have that many sympathetic villains to begin with and Nidhiki is one of the few who could easily be written in a more sympathetic light without making his character worse thanks to his backstory being rather tragic and there being a few hints of him being a more sympathetic character than the canon presents.

Thing is, by giving Nidhiki a desire of wanting revenge against Dark Hunters, I feel the writer misses a major part of Nidhikis character, one that could be easily expanded on to make him a more sympathetic and understandable character: his pragmatic opportunism born out of survival instinct.

Nidhiki is largely driven by pragmatism and self-preservation, by making actions that benefit him. This sense of pragmatism most likely comes from him coming from Tren Krom Peninsula: a harsh climate where you had to be pragmatic in order to survive. Pretty much everything from his characterization boils down to this survival instinct, this desire to survive taught by harsh living conditions. This is the core of his characterization and something worth keeping in mind  both when trying to understand him and writing him. And while the writer of   Memory does understand this to some extent, I feel they only saw it as part of his character rather than the main core of his characterization and driving force of his actions.

While Nidhiki loosing his teammates does add more fuel into him not trusting anyone and developing this pragmatic mindset (something Memory does pretty good job showcasing), I also feel that it's kinda unnecessary. It feels as if it exists as this big push, this big traumatic event that shaped Nidhiki's mindset into this pragmatic self-survival we see in canon and I just...don't feel that suits him. It makes more sense if rather than one big traumatic event that made him what he was it was a series of smaller events, it was him living in a place with a certain mental climate that forced a certain mindset just so he could survive.

The backstory also feels that like it exists largely to give Nidhiki a history with and grudge against the Dark Hunters which just...doesn't make sense at all when you give more context into canon. Like, if Nidhiki had a grudge against them I doubt he would've interacted with Lariska the way he did in BOADH let alone agreed to betray his team, no matter how good opportunity it felt like. Well at least it gives him one more reason to despise TSO and his organization and that’s always a plus if you ask me.

However,the main reason I don't really like this is because it feels kinda cliche and makes Nidhiki less interesting than he could be. Like, it feels that the easiest way to make your audience to sympathize with a villain is to give them a tragic backstory of them loosing a loved one that made them bitter and cynical. It just feels like a cop-out, an easy shorthand. It feels such "been there done that" and does more harm than good for Nidhikis characterization, feels like its there to make him more sympathetic through tried and true means than actually trying to understand him and what makes him tick, and building up a more sympathetic portrayal from there.

What makes this all worse is that I do think you could make Nidhiki a more sympathetic character without resorting to cliche tools like that. And thats by focusing on expanding on whats already there: his desire for survival and self-preservation. While it does make him rather selfish, its also what makes him understandable and (for lack of better term) real. While we want to talk about how self-righteous and good we are, truth is that desire for self-preservation and survival is a driving force that can override (or at the very least heavily affect) our moral compass, especially if you come from a traumatic upbringing. And like I said, the harsh survival of the fittest nature of T.K Peninsula certainly was that kind of place where Nidhiki was essentially forced to adapt a certain mindset. It’d be cool to see him slowly develop this mindset from the environment he grew up in, to have whatever potential goodness and optism he once had be eroded through him having to come in terms with the messed up nature of the world. it would’ve made him much more interesting, sympathetic and tragic character than he is in canon, all while feeling unique

That being said, I understand why the writer did the way they did. Like I said, Nidhiki isn’t exactly the most sympathetic character in canon, and wanting to give him a backstory that’s easy to sympathize with is an easy and good way to do that. It’s also worth pointing out that Memory was an oneshot, so the writer didn’t have time to go through everything Nidhiki went through before becoming part of Toa Mangai and as such, it’s easy to understand why the writer choose to give one big event that changed his mindset. I also dont think giving Nidhiki revenge motive is inherently bad (I mean its basically canon he wanted revenge against Lhikan), nor is making him more emotional and not just a pragmatic opportunist (if anything making him emotional is more than welcome in this house). But I feel that Memory just kinda, changes his character in such a drastic way that didn't sit with me, at least not completely. It kinda makes him an archetypical "I'm aloof and refuse to work with others because I lost my friends against these villains" type of character. Not only is that rather cliche that's also not what Nidhiki is like...He's more interesting as an opportunist who became such due to the harsh nature of Tren Krom Peninsula rather than your archetypical edgy shonen anime rival whos aloof because tragic backstory murder.

So yeah, Memory is a good story but I’m happy it isn’t canon because while it was an interesting take of my favorite Bionicle character, it being canon would’ve done more harm than good for his characterization as whole I feel. Also you can make a character sympathetic without having to resort to “they saw someone close to them die and desire revenge because of that”, especially when it doesn’t fit to that characters characterization as whole.

If/when they make a Joe/Nicky prequel movie, what are some of the Dos and Don’ts for them, with regards to historical accuracy. Like, what do you think they should include, and what do you think they should avoid?

Oof. This is a GREAT question, and also designed to give me a chance to ramble on in a deeply, deeply self-indulgent fashion. That is now what will proceed to happen. Consider yourself warned. So if they were miraculously to be like “well that qqueenofhades person on tumblr seems like she knows what she’s talking about, let’s hire her to consult on this production!”, here are some of the things I would tell them.

First off, a question I have in fact asked my students when teaching the crusades in class is whether you could actually show the sack of Jerusalem on screen. Like... if you’re making a film about the First Crusade, what kind of choices are you going to make? What narrative viewpoint are you going to uphold throughout the story? Are you actually going to show a slaughter of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants that some chroniclers described as causing enough blood to reach up to the knees of horses? (Whether it actually did this is beside the point; the point is that the sack went far beyond the accepted conventions of warfare and struck everybody involved in it as particularly horrific.) Because when you’re making a film about the crusades, you are also making it by nature for a modern audience that has particular understandings of Christian/Muslim conflict, religious warfare and/or tolerance, the War on Terror, the modern clash over ISIS, Trump’s Muslim ban, and so forth. The list goes on and on. So you’re never making a straight, unbiased historical adaptation, even if you’re going off the text of primary sources. You’re still constructing it and presenting it in a deliberate and curated fashion, and you can bet that whichever way you come down, your audience will pick up on that.

Let’s take the most recent example of a high-profile crusades film: Kingdom of Heaven from 2005. I’ve written a book chapter on how the narrative choices of KoH, aside from its extensive fictionalization of its subject matter to start with, make it crystal clear that it is a film made by a well-meaning Western liberal filmmaker (Ridley Scott) four years after 9/11 and two years after the invasion of Iraq, when the sympathy from 9/11 was wearing off and everyone saw America/Great Britain and the Bush/Blair coalition overreaching itself in yet another arrogant imperial adventure into the Middle East. Depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember the fact that Bush explicitly called the War on Terror a “crusade” at the start, and then was quickly forced to walk it back once it alarmed his European allies (yes, back then, as bad as America was, it still did have those) with its intellectual baggage. They KNEW exactly what images and tropes they were invoking. It is also partly why medieval crusade studies EXPLODED in popularity after 9/11. Everyone recognized that these two things had something to do with each other, or they made the connection somehow. So anyone watching KoH in 2005 wasn’t really watching a crusades film (it is set in the late 1180s and dramatizes the surrender of Jerusalem to Saladin) so much as a fictional film about the crusades made for an audience explicitly IN 2005. I have TONS to say on this subject (indeed, if you want a copy of my book chapter, DM me and I’ll be happy to send it.)

Ridley Scott basically sets it up as the Christian and Muslim secular leaders themselves aren’t evil, it’s all the religious fanatics (who are all made Templars, including Guy de Lusignan, going back to the “evil Templar” trope started by Sir Walter Scott and which we are all so very familiar with from Dan Brown and company). Orlando Bloom’s character shares a name (Balian de Ibelin) but very little else with the eponymous real-life crusader baron. One thing Scott did do very well was casting an actual and well-respected Syrian actor (Ghassan Massoud) to play Saladin and depicting him in essential fidelity to the historical figure’s reputed traits of justice, fairness, and mercy (there’s some article by a journalist who watched the film in Beirut with a Muslim audience and they LOVED the KoH Saladin). I do give him props for this, rather than making the Evil Muslim into the stock antagonist. However, Orlando Bloom’s Balian is redeemed from the religious extremist violence of the Templars (shorthand for all genuinely religious crusaders) by essentially being an atheistic/agnostic secular humanist who wants everyone to get along. As I said, this is a film about the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq made three years after 9/11 more than anything else, and you can really see that.

That said, enough about KoH, back to this presumable Joe/Nicky backstory. You would obviously run into the fact that it’s SUPER difficult to make a film about the crusades without offending SOMEBODY. The urge to paint in broad strokes and make it all about the evil Westerners invading is one route, but it would weaken the moral complexity of the story and would probably make it come off as pandering to guilty white liberal consciences. Are we gonna touch on the many decades of proto-crusading ventures in Iberia, Sicily, North Africa, and other places, and how the eleventh century, especially under Pope Gregory VII, made it even thinkable for a Christian to be a holy warrior in the first place? (It was NOT normal beforehand.) How are we going to avoid the “lololol all religion sucks and makes people do crazy things” axe to grind favoured by So Very Smart (tm) internet atheists? Yes, we have to demonstrate the ultimate horror of the crusade and the flawed premises it was based on, but we can’t do that by just showing the dirty, religiously zealot medieval people doing that because they don’t know any better and are being cynically manipulated in God’s Name. In other words (and the original TOG film did this very well) we can’t position ourselves to laugh at or mock the crusader characters or feel confident in looking down on them for being Dumb Zealots. They have to be relatable enough that we realize we could BE (and in fact already ARE) them, and THEN you slide into the horror and what compels them to do those kinds of things, and THAT’S when it hits. Because take a look at the news. This is happening around us right now.

Obviously, as I was doing in my First Crusade chapter in DVLA, a lot of this also has to spend time centering the Muslim point of view, the way they reacted to the crusade, the ways in which Yusuf as an Isma’ili Shia Muslim (Kaysani is the name of a branch of Isma’ili Shi’ites, he has a definite historical context and family lineage, and hence is almost surely, as I wrote him, a Fatimid from Egypt) is likewise not just A Stock Muslim. In this case, obviously: Get actual Muslims on the set to advise about the details. Don’t make stupid and/or obvious mistakes. Don’t necessarily make the Muslims less faithful or less virtuous than the Christians (even if this is supposed to praise them as being “less fanatic” than those bad religious Catholics). Don’t tokenize or trivialize their reaction to something as horrific as the sack of Jerusalem, and don’t just use dead brown bodies as graphic visual porn for cheap emotional points. Likewise, it goes without saying, and I don’t think they would anyway, but OH MY GOD DON’T MAKE THIS INTO GAME OF THRONES GRIMDARK!!!! OH MY GOD!!! THERE IS BEAUTY AND THERE IS LIGHT AND THERE IS POETRY AND THAT’S WHY IT HURTS SO MUCH WHEN IT’S DESTROYED! AND THE CHOICES THAT PEOPLE MAKE TO DESTROY THOSE THINGS HAVE TO BE TERRIFYINGLY PLAUSIBLE AND FAMILIAR, BECAUSE OH MY GOD!!

Next, re: Nicolo. Evidently he is a priest or a former priest or something of the sort in the graphic novel, which becomes a bit of a problem if we want him to actually FIGHT in the crusades for important and/or shallow and/or OTP purposes. (I don’t know if they address this somehow or Greg Rucka is not a medieval historian or whatever, but never mind.) It was a Major Thing that priests could not carry weapons, at least and especially bladed weapons. (In the Bayeux Tapestry, we have Odo, the bishop of Bayeux, fighting at the battle of Hastings with a truncheon because he’s a clergyman and can’t have a sword). They were super not supposed to shed blood, and a broadsword (such as the type that Nicky has and carries and is clearly very familiar with) is a knight’s weapon, not a clergyman’s. The thing about priests was that they were not supposed to get their hands dirty with physical warfare; they could (and often did) accompany crusade armies, bishops were secular overlords and important landholders, monks and hermits and other religious preachers were obviously part of a religious expedition, and yes, occasionally some priests would break the rules and fight in battle. But this was an exception FAR more than the rule. So if we’re going by accuracy, we have Nicky as a priest who doesn’t actively fight and doesn’t have a sword, we have him as a rule-breaking priest with a sword (which would have to be addressed, and the Templars, who were basically armed monks, weren’t founded until 1119 so he can’t be one of those yet if this is still 1099) or we just skip the priest part and have him as a crusader with a sword like any other soldier. If he was in fact a priest, he also wouldn’t be up to the same standard of sending into battle. Boys, especially younger sons of the nobility, often entered the church at relatively early ages (12 or 13), where it was treated as a career, and hence they stopped training in arms. So if Nicky is actually out there fighting and/or getting killed by Yusuf several times for Important Purposes, he’s... almost surely not a priest.

Iirc, they’ve already changed a few things from the graphic novel (I haven’t read it, but this is what I’ve heard) so they can also tweak things to make a new backstory or a hybrid-new backstory in film-verse. So once we’ve done all the above, we still have to decide how to handle the actual sack of Jerusalem and massacre of its inhabitants, the balance between violence comparable to the original TOG film and stopping short of being exploitative (which I think they would do well), and the aftermath of that and the founding of the new Latin Christian kingdom. It would have to, as again the original film does very well, avoid prioritizing the usual players and viewpoints in these events, and dig into presenting the experiences of the marginalized and way in which ordinary people are brought to the point of doing these things. It doesn’t (and frankly shouldn’t) preach at us that U.S. Invasions Of The Middle East Are Bad (especially since obviously none of the characters/people/places/events here are American at all). And as I said already but bears repeating: my god, don’t even THINK about making it GOT and marketing it as Gritty Dramatic Medieval History, You Know It’s Real Because They’re Dirty, Violent, and Bigoted!

Also, a couple tags I saw pop up were things like “Period-Typical Racism” and “Period-Typical Homophobia” and mmm okay obviously yes there are these elements, but what exactly is “period typical?” Does it mean “using these terms just because you figure everyone was less tolerant back then?” We know that I, with my endless pages of meta on medieval queer history, would definitely side-eye any attempts to paint these things as Worse Than Us, and the setting alone would convey a sense of the conflict without having to add on gratuitous microaggressions. I basically think the film needs to be made exactly like the original: centering the gay/queer perspectives of marginalized people and people of color, resisting the urge for crass jokes at the expense of the identity of its characters, and approaching it with an awareness of the deep complexity and personal meaning of these things to people in terms of the historical moment we’re in, while not making a film that ONLY prizes our response and our current crises. Because if we’re thinking about these historical genealogies, the least we can do (although we so often aren’t) is to be honest.

Thanks! I LOVED this question.

Understanding the Closet in Narrative - Healing Hands/ Holding Hands in 15x08 Our Father Who Aren’t in Heaven

The best theoretical book on this subject, in my view, to date is Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990). It’s not that easy to read without a grounding in post-structuralist theory (it’s from that period in the academy when that was fashionable) and it has its flaws (one being that it only theorises the historical male closet, not the female one). But it’s still great :-) 

Essentially, she reads nineteenth and early twentieth century literature by European and North American authors, who were, or, scholarship suggests, may have been, queer (that term is anachronistic for the time-period, but I used it as a shorthand) e.g., Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Herman Melville.

But Sedgwick’s readings are situated in the political context of the AIDS crisis in North America of the 1980s. And her attempt to unravel the significance of the closet, in narrative and culture, is predicated upon a passion about the cruel times she, and her many queer friends, were living in.

She attempts to delineate how queerness was written about, by male queer authors, in times when they could not be openly homosexual/ bisexual/ otherwise queer, nor felt able to write openly about queerness (because homosexuality between men was a criminal offence).

As she carefully elucidates, that meant that often, themes of horror, rejection, criminality, deceit, even evil, were projected by these authors onto characters they were (in a coded manner) delineanating as “queer”. This was about expressing what culture made these authors feel about themselves and, about, somehow, finding a way to present queerness, or the queer experience, in a manner which would be “acceptable” (because heavily coded, and depicted negatively) to the mainstream audience. Internalised homophobia also fed into these depictions. You can see all of that in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

This is why the monstrous has always been “ours” in a special and specific way in narrative (here, in relation to Sedgwick’s discussion, in fiction) and later, as cinema developed, on screen, because it has often been a site of queer-coding. Of course, that’s a bit of a double-edged sword as a symbolic history. So pervasive did those codes become, that they are still used today, sometimes, as a short-hand for villainous, as in Scar in The Lion King (1994) (much discussed in pop-culture YouTube videos about queer-coding) or SPN’s Crowley (who for instance drinks “fruity” cocktails as part of the historic repertoire of male queer-coding as effeminate and therefore, untrustworthy/ villainous). But, of course, Crowley is also written as deliberately drinking those fruity cocktails because he knows what they “mean”, and not only does he not give a shit, he flaunts drinking them as part of his particular combination of transgressive bravado and demonic viciousness (an “I may drink a fruity cocktail but I will also rip your heart out and chop you into tiny pieces” vibe). Crowley remains, however, queer-coded [not unequivocally bisexual/ homosexual/ pansexual] for most of his SPN screen-time. He refers to his relationship with Demon!Dean as a “bromance”, even if the way he utters it sounds as if he’s sarcastically calling that word for it out. We see him kiss men on the lips as part of doing cross-roads demon-style deals with them, but it’s played as him fucking with those dudes (notably Bobby) rather than fucking them. 

Finally, we do see Crowley participate in a a mixed-gender orgy in 11x01 Out of the Darkness into the Fire (well, we see the before and after). He has a four-way and then slaughters them (I really hate that particular scene; there’s a shitty menopause “joke” in there too) but Crowley is smoked into a different vessel from the one we are used to, a female vessel, for that orgy. So, although we do “see” it, Crowley’s pansexuality, we also don’t “see” it, because Crowley’s usual male-embodied vessel is missing from the scene. It’s out there (I’d say it does semi-“out” Crowley) but it’s, on the part of the SPN text, kind of a chicken “out” because dude-Crowley is not present. Moreoever, the context is horrible and murderous rather than tender or intimate. So, there is a classic, historical, on-screen queer-coding residue. Because, in terms of our still powerful cultural norms, it would have been more shocking for the audience if dude-Crowley had been present and the scene was a tender, loving orgy, rather than the gender-swopped and slaughtery scenario Carver gave us. 

Sedgwick develops the useful concept of the “glass closet”. Which means, that, deliberately, in a text, a queer reading is at once available (clear) to some readers and opaque (unavailable or rejected/ denied) by others. She writes, of Oscar Wilde’s famous story The Picture of Dorian Gray, that it...

“.... occupies an especially symptomatic place in this process. Published four years before Wilde's "exposure" as a sodomite, it is in a sense a perfect rhetorical distillation of the open secret, the glass closet, shaped by the conjunction of an extravagance of deniability and an extravagance of flamboyant display. It perfectly represents the glass closet, too, because it is in so many ways out of the purposeful control of its author. Reading Dorian Gray from our twentieth-century vantage point where the name Oscar Wilde virtually means "homosexual," it is worth reemphasizing how thoroughly the elements of even this novel can be read doubly or equivocally, can be read either as having a thematically empty "modernist' meaning or as having a thematically full "homosexual" meaning.” (Sedgwick, 1990: p165-66). 

So, what she’s saying, is that the closet as a narrative structure, has a double structure. It makes queerness at once visible and invisible, “there” and “not there”. Another way to put this is that the “there” is queer subtext, and the “not there” is all the other available readings provided by the built-in ambiguity that delineates the narrative closet. Such queer subtext IS part of narrative, but its nature is to contain a plausible deniability. 

This shot from 15x08 Our Father Who Art in Heaven, epitomises Sedgwick’s “glass closet”:

There’s no doubt this is (in its context) an intimate gesture between Dean and Cas, and a loaded one, because the SPN text has made it clear (not subtextual) that Dean and Cas are not in a good place with one another emotionally or communicatively, following Jack’s (apparent) murder of Mary WInchester. We see them fight, and Cas leave, in 15x03 The Rupture. 

However, in its subtextual context (meaning in the context of all the other queer subtext in SPN in relation to Dean and Cas’ individual sexualities and their relationship) this gesture (for those taking the text’s invitation to read it queerly) is also a gesture which begs for the space between those hands to be closed, for those fingers to be entwined, for those hands to clasp one another, in a manner that cannot be understood as between “bros”. The narrative negative space screams, in this register, “Hold hands, you idiots, we know you love each other!” 

It’s loud, but the fact that it’s clear AND opaque (visible to some, and “don’t see it” to others) means that is still follows the structure of Sedgewick’s glass closet, i.e., it’s still subtext.

Other readings of it are available:

1) Yes, the negative space is there between their hands, but it symbolises how they are not as close as they usually are, because of the rift between them.

2) This healing gesture, in which Cas uses his fading power (and it costs him to do it) to heal Dean’s wound, a wound which Dean initially keeps hidden, curled inside his clenched fist, is symbolic of something at the core of their relationship- pain and healing.

The wound on Dean’s palm, is almost a stigmata, or a wound-from-the-cross; healed by an angel.

Cas fought his way to Dean in Hell and, in their initial (off screen) encounter put him, body and soul, back together, from his half-Demon, broken-on-the-rack, state. In other words, Cas healed a wound in Dean’s soul and restored him to humanity.

Cas: “Good things do happen, Dean”

Dean: “Not in my experience”

4x01 Lazarus Rising

Cas ended up himself being a good thing which has happened to Dean, the best thing (outside of his brother and his mother’s return from the dead) Dean’s ever had in his life.

It hasn’t all been roses. Far from it. Cas has hurt Dean deeply as well as healed him, particularly during the Godstiel/ Levi!Cas arc.

And Dean, in turn, has hurt Cas deeply too, particularly when he was vulnerable and human after the Angel Fall, and now, since Jack’s (apparent) murder of Mary Winchester.

But, this healing gesture, palm to palm, which is vulnerable for both of them, in the midst of their painful period of miscommunication, tells us, in spite of all that, that at the core of what Dean and Cas are to each other, or could be to each other, is a place of healing.

These readings make sense, whether we consider Dean and Cas to have a deep fox-hole type, bestest buddy in the world friendship, or that they are sexually and/ or romantically desirous of one another as life-partners.

This is the structure of the glass closet - healing hands/ holding hands; the gesture is both, but the holding hands reading (because of that physical space in between those hands) is subtextual. The romantic/ sexual reading is visible/ invisible, for different segments of the audience. 

The history of heterosexuality as visible and coded as “normal” and homosexuality/ bisexuality/ queerness as invisible and coded as “abnormal”, means that we don’t yet have a narrative level playing field for queer and straight characters even simply in terms of recognition.

In general, audiences are socialised to be excellent “readers” of the codes and gestures on-screen that signal heterosexual intimacy. So, a man and a woman can just look at each other on-screen in a certain way and the audience knows they are being written and performed as desiring one another, sexually/ romantically. 

Straight audiences have become, in the last fifty years of activism which have precipitated LGBTQ social and political changes (moving from decriminalisation to gay marriage) better readers of queer subtext, because they have been “invited in”, to some extent, to these codes, which were previously themselves opaque (and often written as a coded bat-signal between queer creatives and queer audiences). It would be hard to watch Freddy Mercury’s video for “I Want to Break Free” (1984) which he sings whilst doing the hoovering in drag, without understanding him to be queer today, but trust me, at the time, those codes went straight (ha ha pun) over the heads of thousands upons thousands of his fans, who saw him as a macho rock God (who must be straight by default). 

 However, more subtle and complex forms of queer subtext can and do still remain opaque for the “mainstream”. Because, you have to learn to read queer subtext; it’s not something LGBTQ folk are automatically born with either, not some inherent textual kind of gaydar. Queer people, certainly those of a certain age, just tend to be socialised into it to a greater extent, because it’s been our hungry experience to search deeply for characters that reflect us, given the slimmer pickings. 

So, the standard of “proof” that a character is, without ambiguity, understood by all (not some) of the audience as homosexual/ bisexual/ queer is still higher than the standard of “proof” that a character is straight, because straight remains the default. 

Is that fair? No.

Is it the deal? Yes. 

And whether that full recognition (full audience recognition) is there or not has political implications for a text. It changes its impact in the world. 

That doesn’t mean a queer-coded text has no political impact in the world, however. In some ways it can be more persuasive, e.g that “love is love”, because a queer label isn’t there up-front, kicking in (some) people’s automatic resistance. 

So the fact that Dean and Cas are still queer-coded, not textually “out”, doesn’t mean Dean and Cas are not queer, unless the whole audience knows it. Dean has been queer-coded since S1, so I’d say, that, to me, he’s been queer all along. But, it does mean that Dean and Cas’ queerness is still structured by the glass closet - it’s there (for some of the audience) and not there (for others of the audience). It remains visible/ invisible.

A complex additional question, is whether it is ethical, in this time period in which we can (in some, but not all, parts of the world) show LGBTQ characers on-screen, to continue to tell queer stories in subtext. That is essentially what lies at the root of the contemporary, popular “queerbaiting” debate. 

The answer to that is complicated too, and I think, varies from text to text, but this post is long enough.

If you want more, you can browse my “reading subtext” tag for some of mine, and others’ further musings on that topic. 

A PANEGYRIC TO THE THINGS I DO NOT UNDERSTAND

I generally don’t talk about why I write criticism; I presume no one cares. The core of my contrarianism rests on the fact that many of the things I dislike or have an aversion to I think the market is set up to reward. This holds true both for what I write about and how I choose to write about it. I’m not writing about all these Drawn And Quarterly books that seem like novelty gag gifts for people who don’t actually like comics. I’m not writing about simplistic YA material put out by major publishing houses. I’m not reading superhero trademark maintenance. To me it feels like pre-chewed food I see and know to avoid. I’m also pretty put off by work that’s self-consciously “lowbrow,” but to that stuff’s credit, I don’t think it’s particularly popular. It just seems to fit into larger trends of what’s readily digestible, due to its own willingness to dismiss itself.

When it comes to criticism, I read a fair amount of other people’s writing, and collate a list of ways I don’t want to write that coincide with what I hate to read. I don’t want to read anything that’s “personal” in a way that takes the general premise of the existence of a book as an excuse for a narcissist to talk about themselves. Still, it seems like people love that. It is essentially the lingua franca for a whole type of websites, to have writers leverage their identity or trauma for the sake of hot takes. Even if no one gets paid particularly well, there is a reward in the economy of attention. People also really like writing that praises things that are already popular, because they want to be given permission to like the things they like, but no one needs that. People also like dismissive takes  based around incredibly shallow surface-level impressions of something that then becomes this shorthand “common knowledge.” if you say “Chris Ware’s boring” or “Rob Liefeld can’t draw feet” there will be no shortage of people chiming up in the comments to say the same thing. People love to be given permission to not have to think about things, and while I understand that impulse completely, I’m too far gone down the hole of obsessiveness to play along.

I wish I could say all that I dislike falls into one of a fixed number of categories, but in actuality, I am all too often reading writing that makes me ask “why won’t you just shut the fuck up?” or exclaim “jesus, this is so depressing!” and it seems new ways to garner these reactions are continually being manufactured, though in general, the innovations in this area are being done in the more lucrative world of music writing. Still, many of the things I wish to avoid have been done by writers I absolutely admire, partly because they’re more prolific I am, and so can’t allow themselves the luxury of overthinking what they’re doing for the sake of avoiding trends. (I also try to avoid writing stuff that’s just plain stupid and offensive, but lord knows that gets hate-clicks, and hate-clicks are as valued as any.)

I try to engage the work that’s on the page. The best work encourages a multiplicity of readings, I write a lot with the implicit assumption that the framework I’m bringing to bear might be wrong. I believe the work that has the most ideas present inside it will be conflicted enough in depicting multiple ideas simultaneously that it doesn’t encourage a straightforward and easy read. I relate it to the paradox that the most interesting people are those who don’t talk about themselves, but ask questions of others. Presumably, those who are disinterested in others don’t interrogate themselves in their moments alone.

I might be being reductive. So many of my own thoughts might be overly simplistic, a set of half-thought-through opinions designed to arrive at a place of dismissal so I can move on. I spend a lot of time thinking about the sort of creator-owned genre comics Image traffics in these days, because I have zero interest in them, and they don’t seem appealing at all. They don’t come close to my idea of good. I generally object to the way contemporary comics are colored, but I think the issues run deeper than that. The line generally used in reference to them is to call them movie-pitch comics. But is that why they’re bad? I don’t know. Maybe the issue is just the way their writing stands in relationship to economy, where a single issue is not a satisfying story. Maybe superhero comics work better than that stuff because there’s an explicit formula established doing the heavy lifting, and if you are doing something more “high-concept” you need to spend more time with exposition and can’t just defer to the visuals of a fight scene that superhero comics demand. I don’t know! Any answer to the question of why things don’t work is going to end up with some broad statements, because the act of artmaking involves an incalculable amount of choices, any number of which could balance out or redeem any of the others. It’s almost surprising that the history of comics isn’t littered with works that were concerned failures at the time of their release but seem prescient in their storytelling choices now.

I want to write about work that is interesting to think about. What’s interesting to think about is that which I don’t understand. Obviously, writing is an attempt to make sense of something, and much of what I write about then becomes something I understand, or at least, have a take on. But I still want to engage, in some sort of honest way, the work I don’t understand, that short-circuits my brain.

A good example of something I don’t really understand is Stella Murphy’s comic Hometime, which I ordered from Domino Books. It’s a collection of single-panel gag cartoons, kinda? Every page is meant to be taken as its own entity. It’s printed and red and yellow, it feels eye-searingly bright. There’s dialogue balloons, not captions. The visual language sort of seems like it comes from underground comics, of the way underground comics relate to older cartoon styles. I’m saying all of these things like they’re sentences but if I were speaking to you there would be no hint of certainty in my voice. Another paradox: I often feel like I don’t have the language to describe what images in a comic look like unless I have an idea of what the narrative is doing. Maybe these gags feel like they work because they’re incredibly economical in their subversion of the expectation one comes to gag cartoons with. That almost seems too simplistic an explanation to count. I’m sure, if you haven’t read Murphy’s cartoons and grappled with them, that sort of conclusion seems like I’m saying literally nothing.

I’ve been reading Krazy Kat again. It’s interesting that that’s a strip which is notably formulaic, but also is all about subverting that formula or having it play out differently or avoid it altogether. It seems pretty agreed upon that the key to successful comics writing is to have a degree of economy in terms of the words on the page. This allows the images to carry their weight, but images themselves have their own weight of meaning that’s accrued over time. Think about being born on this Earth, and all of the acclimation to one’s surroundings that occurs concurrently with the acquisition of language. Talking with a computer programmer friend, his stance on writing code was, the easier it is for you, the less lines you have to write, the more code has been written by other people before you that you’re relying on. So many of the best comics are consciously written with an awareness of expectations that are then subverted. I don’t know. Generally the argument I make, when talking about “experimental” work, is to contrast it with “formulaic” work. This is my way of asserting the obvious superiority of the former. But maybe this is wrong, and the best and most effective comics, including the ones I’m labeling “experimental,” nonetheless have a formula they’re playing with? Because the truth of the matter is my use of scientific language is a pose premised on my not actually understanding math.

I imagine that a normal person wouldn’t understand why anyone would feel compelled to write comics criticism in the first place. For all the shame I feel about the fact that this is what I’m doing, I’m proud to say I don’t know what my fucking deal is.

"Overused” is Overused: Understanding Clichés and Tropes in Your Writing

I hate writing advice.

That’s my little tongue-in-cheek joke for this post, because the irony of what I’m doing literally as I type that statement is not lost on me. It’s true, though— I honestly think that advice is one of the most damaging things to a writer’s mindset. It makes them second-guess their methods, their ideas, and even whether they truly have what it takes to be a *~*writer*~* in the eyes of the rest of the world.

It’s a truly unfortunate thing, because it’s so important for writers to be able to share their experiences and successes. The problem is that these experiences get passed around in a game of It’s-Been-Ten-Years-Since-This-Essay-Was-Written Telephone, and the original intent of the advice (and sometimes its actual meaning!) gets lost along the way. They become these overarching blanket statements that offer broad limitations without reason or potential alternatives.

One of the greatest offenders of this is the idea that you ought to avoid clichés in writing. I’ve been part of online writing communities for a while now, and by far the most common concern I see is some variant of, “I’m thinking about doing [x], but I’m worried it’s too cliché”. It’s an epidemic amongst writers, and it absolutely infuriates me that so many writers have come to doubt their own work just because some vague internet grapevine has told them that clichés are to be avoided at all costs.

Because I’m so infuriated by this (and because I’m super extra and actually have a relevant platform on which to discuss this), I’m going to take some time to explain the actual meaning of this particular piece of “advice” and why it’s far less of a concern than you’ve been lead to believe.

To begin, it’s very important to address the fact that there’s a fundamental misunderstanding surrounding this idea. This starts with the fact that the terms cliché and trope are mistakenly thought to be synonymous, or otherwise become confused with one another. Before I move forward, I want to offer the proper definition for both.

A cliché is a particular phrase that’s been used often enough to become commonplace. In writing, they’re generally used to create a specific image or tone that we can take for granted that the reader will recognize.

She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. It was raining cats and dogs, but she still stood with her arms to the sky, laughing like she didn’t even notice. She turned to me and winked, and I felt my face go as red as a beet. In that moment, I knew that I’d give my right arm to be with her.

A trope is a convention used in writing to give meaning to aspects of your story. They’re used as storytelling shorthand to attach identifiable qualities to your plot and characters— recurring themes that exist throughout history to guide stories.

Examples of tropes include the hero’s journey, the character’s fatal flaw, the comic relief character, the hero with a dark past, and the Mom Friend.

I’ll be the first to admit that there are similarities between the two— both are used to help readers understand parts of your story, and tropes can be specific phrases as shown in the cliché example above. The key is to separate the two in your mind and think about them only by the definitions above.

It’s important to do this, because part of the central misunderstanding is that “cliché” is often used in daily life to describe ideas as a whole that have been overused (think of the “I’m holding up the tower!” pic that literally everyone takes at the Leaning Tower of Pisa). I get the confusion and concern here, I really do. The most important thing to remember is that clichés have a specific meaning when it comes to writing. No matter how often you may see a particular theme or character arc, it is and always will be a trope.

With that out of the way, I’d like to discuss why this should be good advice. The truth of the matter is that clichés should be avoided where possible because they give the impression of lazy writing. Writers and readers alike take the imagery for granted and rely on these tried-and-true phrases to add physicality to their prose instead of finding unique descriptors; while it certainly gets the point across, it comes across as more of a 2D picture from a magazine than a scene from the movie adaptation we all know our books are destined to have.

To illustrate this, let’s take a look at the example above with all of the clichés removed:

The world had never experienced a beauty like hers— neither had I. I just watched as she stood there, arms to the sky as the rain pelted her relentlessly, soaking into her clothes and hair. She smiled as it ran down her face, laughing at each raindrop, finally turning to me and winking. She could have just been blinking the water out of her eye, I don’t know, but my face was hot and I suddenly found it hard to look at her. I stared at my shoes, willing them to take a step for once so I could go and join her.

Clichés fall flat because they aren’t specific to you as a writer— they aren’t at all indicative of your unique style. Your story loses so much when it’s not told in your own voice, so you shouldn’t rely on old phrases just because you know people will automatically understand them.

While the argument could be made that tropes fall into this same category, I would point out that tropes serve a deeper purpose than clichés. Where a cliché would act as filler, a trope would act as a foundation. Tropes are tools (most frequently, structural tools) that guide the story through plot/character development and tonal themes to give your reader a general idea of what they’re signing up for when they read your story.

Example Time!

Say that you wanted to write someone a love poem. You do your research, sifting through decades of poems to pick out the best phrases and metaphors, and you end up with the following:

Your eyes are as deep as an oceans Your eyes shine like stars They’re like windows to your soul I get lost in them every time I look

The poem is essentially a cut-and-paste of phrases from every cheesy romance novel out there, and will most likely leave the object of your affections wondering why you’re so obsessed with their eyeballs.

Alternatively, you hand them this:

Roses are red, Violets are blue...

and things get a little more interesting. Sure, the opening to the poem is a cliché in and of itself, but it sets the stage for whatever you want to fill it with. You could go with something traditional and make it cutesy, you could subvert the trope by dropping the rhyme scheme for dramatic or comedic effect, you could even revive the old 2015 “gun” meme. The world is your oyster!

The point is, the poem hasn’t been written for you. Sure, it follows a similar structure to poems that have been written before, but where you take it is entirely up to you— the opening lines are simply the prompt to make way for your own creative license.

Let’s be real, here. 

I get that everyone wants to make something new and exciting that comes entirely from their own imagination. It’s the dream! The idea that anything we write could potentially be sourced back to an existing piece is super aggravating, and you don’t have to tell me how discouraging it is to have something that you’re genuinely proud of suddenly fall flat because someone says, “Hasn’t the teen dystopia thing been done to death?” or “Didn’t Star Trek do an episode like this?” or “Penney, this is just a Star Trek fanfiction with the names changed to Dirk and Spork, please stop.”

To be totally honest, there is not (nor will there ever be) a single piece of writing on this earth that’s 100% original. Everything is based off of a story that came before it, or had plots and characters that were cherry-picked from the millions of plots and characters that existed previously.

Even more honestly, people like it that way. Tropes help us to identify our favorite genres and characters, guide us to stories that we may like based on those preferences, and open our eyes to new stories and authors that follow those tropes in a slightly different way. 

In short, embrace your tropes. Learn to recognize them and how they can be used and reimagined, and build your story out of the wonderful things that come of that knowledge. Be like me and waste a billion hours in the rabbit hole that is TV Tropes!

Most importantly, write the way you want to write and don’t let anyone else tell you how to do it. They’ll have their time when you’re ready for peer review. Right now is your time to do as you please, ignore all writing advice you see online, make a few mistakes, and do it all over again because that’s what writers do! Get out there and make some beautiful, cliché-ridden, trope-y masterpieces.

Love, Penney

Uni - Writing an Essay

My uni course is, delightfully, almost entirely essay based. This works wonderfully for me because wow do I panic about exams. If you, however, struggle with essays here’s some advice that might help!

Speaking from an arts student perspective, nothing is going to get you away from writing essays at university. And if you’re doing an arts or humanities subject, likelihood is you chose it, in part, because you know you can write them. Buuuuut that doesn’t mean it’s as simple as keeping up your standard methods. Yes, school and sixth form have been pointing you in the right direction, and - shockingly - their formulaic approach is the basis of a good essay, but there’s a couple of things I’ve picked up that really help an essay.

Research Research Research! Yes, your essay is meant to be you writing your ideas about any given topic, but where have you opinions come from? Why do you think this? Do you have anyone to back you up? These things are so, so important when it comes to writing an essay. Nothing you say can be unfounded: support from a source is everything. Whilst you’re doing your research, keep meticulous notes. I’ve got a couple of suggestions for how to do this, but what you need to remember is that when it comes to writing the essay, you’re going to want to know where you got the information, who wrote it, and a whole bunch of publication details. The first method I’m going to suggest is the way I make notes: I’ll take the book/article/whatever I’m reading and write down the title, author, and publication details at the top of a sheet of paper - this is labelled as ‘Source 1’. Every quote I think is relevant will be written on this sheet of paper, and labelled a/b/c/etc., and have the page number written down with it. When I then come to plan my essay I can just use shorthand to add these quotes to my plan, e.g. ‘Paragraph 1, use quotes 1c, 2b, and 4g’. If you don’t want to write down every quote you think is relevant (because let's be honest, you won’t use at least half of them), tabbing books is also useful. This works best if you own the book, but can also be done with library books. It’s as simple as using post-it notes or tabs to mark where an important quote is; I also find it useful to write on the tab the topic of the quote or why I thought it relevant, so it’s easy to know why you marked it later on. My final suggestion is a lot like the first one, except actually making use of technology. Write the title, author, and publication info out just the same, and type out the quote (much faster process by the way), alongside a page number. Then all you have to do when typing up your essay is copy and paste your quote, along with all the relevant information.

Make. A. Plan. I am awful at this. Even writing this post I sat down and debated whether to bother making a plan or not  (I didn’t) because I’m just lazy when it comes to planning my writing (hence why I’ve never finished any story I’ve started). Honestly though, an essay has never been easier than when I’ve had a full plan written up.  Unsurprisingly, this is where my advice might fail you a little bit. Being new to planning, I largely still rely on mind maps to be honest. I think it's one of the easiest methods to use, simply branching off a whole bunch of ideas, sticking quotes in there to see where things fit together and your points interconnect. Very basic, but, for me, pretty effective. A thorough plan, however, is best made with bullet points. Essentially you create your sentences in a very basic form, and then you just need to use connectives and fancy words in between to make proper sentences and you’re done! I think with planning, you’ve just got to find what works for you - but definitely plan. I can’t advocate for planning enough, it will just make your writing process so much easier.

Writing an Introduction So this can go one of two ways in my opinion: either you skip the introduction because introductions are hard, or you use the introduction to help focus yourself. Can you guess which one I support? Introductions are hard, I admit, because you’re faced with a blank page and you think the whole thing rests on making the perfect introduction but - newsflash - you can edit the opening when you’ve finished. In fact, I highly recommend you do. Use your introduction to focus yourself and get a start, put down some ideas and just get writing, and then, when you;ve got a focused, complete essay, come back and edit it to make sure it fits with your conclusion. 

The Body This depends on your plan essentially. Each paragraph should be focused; before you start writing, know what you’re paragraph is about and what quotations you want to put it in. You also want to know roughly how long you want each paragraph to be, so as to not end up rambling, and to stay focused. You almost definitely have a word limit, so keep in mind that you can have as many paragraphs as you like, but you want to find the balance between fully fleshed out and supported, and long and rambly.

Concluding Really, this is the easiest part. You’ve done your introduction - so you know what you were aiming to do - and you’ve done the body - so you know what points you’ve made. Now you just to need to use all that information to conclude your essay. Essentially you want to summarise what you’ve said in your essay - don’t introduce anything new at this point. Bring together what you’ve said, and how you’ve come to view the topic overall. Don’t sit on the fence, make a decision about where you stand and make sure it comes across in your conclusion, show this is your concluding paragraph - but don’t use the phrase ‘to conclude’, or anything equivalent. It’s cliche and annoying, and your tutor doesn’t want to read it a million times over whilst marking.

References are Important Everywhere has a different system for referencing so my first point is check if your university/college/institution has a preference. A lot of the time institutes have some kind of study guide which will clarify how they want you to reference; they’re not trying to trip you up, they know you haven’t done these things before so they will try to help you out where they can. If they don’t have a preference, have a google. Like I said, there are a lot of styles out there: MHRA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford, etc.. The most important thing is to stick to one style. The study guide at my university says students ‘will not be penalised for using an alternative set of conventions, provided that it is implemented consistently’, showing the important thing is not that you do what they suggest, but that you know what you’re doing if you’re going to do it. (This is not good advice in most university situations - in general, stick to your briefs). The other important thing I’d say is fill in your references as you write. Even if you do a shorthand version in the footnote and then hurry to finish your paragraph because you’re really on a role, write down the reference. If you’re proofreading your essay after you’ve finished it and stumble upon a quote without a reference, it’s likely going to be a nightmare figuring out where it came from.

So. That turned out longer than expected. Turns out I have a lot of advice on essay writing. What can I say? I’ve written a lot of them, I’ve edited other people’s, and I’m just really passionate about it. I hope some of this advice, if not all of it, is useful to you!

Moving In and Freshers Week | Getting Through Reading Lists | Having A Social Life

Hello! This month's Tape Hiss is an Aetherian history lesson and is a little late, because I did a whole comic that went along with this. You can read it here, although be warned, it's NSFW. It concerns Cuppra (one of the Aetherian founders) and Suuhl (one of the reifa, or as most people including me call them, the skullbirds.) This post will expound on the comic a little bit, talking about what Aetheri was like at the time, how the war and post-war stuff unfolded, what Cuppra and Suuhl had to do with it all, and even a bit about skullbird culture.

So I've talked about the founders and the war-post-war events before both inside and outside of the comic, but even so, I think this side comic shows some things I've never really talked about before. The most immediately noticeable one is that Cuppra is hanging out in the palace--what's up with that?

What's up with it is this: Cuppra was an ethkarin, which is essentially a very fancy courtesan-slash-journalist. This occupation doesn't really exist in the same form in present-day Aetheri for reasons that will become obvious. The gist of it is that it used to be very typical for the Cynn, their spouse, and most nobility to have one or many ethkarin on the side--it wasn't a secret at all. I've talked some about the attitude towards marriage or what passes for it in Aetheri, and the weird disconnect I've mentioned between how the upper and lower classes each view sex and relationships was even more severe in pre-war times. Upper class Aetherians arranged partnerships and had children with people chosen for good breeding, or whatever, but if you didn't really much care for your designated partner, then you had  ethkarin to fill in for the rest of the relationship--intimacy, sex for the fun of it, and so on. Ethkarin were not employed just for sex, but also for their company and care. A little like hosting, but also not very much like hosting at all. Most ethkarin lived in-house; some of them had multiple clients, some of them did not.

The journalist bit of the job comes from the fact that part of being an  ethkarin involved retaining all of the goings-on in the palace and noble circles, scandalous or otherwise, and relaying this in columns in the press under a psuedonym. At this time in Aetheri, ethkarin were the only way anyone knew what went on in the palace. This part of the ethkarin job was not exactly a secret from their clients, either--it's just the way things were.

Outside of the upper classes,  ethkarin were viewed as essential parts of Aetherian society--an important ally to the regular people in keeping their rulers accountable. Aetheri has never had a puritanical view of sex, but the difference between classes is that outside of the nobility, the norm is to commit your life to whoever you like, good 'breeding' prospects aside. You love and have fun freely until you find the one person you really truly want to commit the rest of your hundreds of years to, and then you love and have fun with them for the rest of your days. Being an ethkarin was just a job, and usually this didn't clash with their actual love lives at all.

So Cuppra was one of the Cynn's ethkarin, in fact a favorite of theirs. Cynn Nadha, shown here in what used to be normal Aetherian royalty getup, was not a tyrant, or cruel, or careless...Cuppra would describe them as just sort of unable to relate to the people outside the Palace walls, which power will do to you, I suppose. Personally, the Cynn was quite nice, and Cuppra enjoyed working with them. So you can see immediately where Cuppra's role in the post-war revolution starts to appear.

(This occupation died out pretty soon after the revolt in the postwar period, because pretty much the entire upper class was deposed in one way or another, and the government that Escala instituted afterward was both way less extravagant and way more transparent. The transparency part has sort of faded over the years to present day--it's not that Numair or his predecessors take any extreme measures to hide what they're doing from the public, it's more that centuries of the government more or less being good stewards of the people has led the public to just expect the government to get on with it without having to be babysat. This has mostly worked, at least until recently.)

Aetheri in the immediate pre-war period was doing a lot of elbow-rubbing with other nations, though none so much as with the reifa, or skullbirds. To put it simply, the reifa were a very large nation with a tribal structure, and all of those tribes were represented by one figure who was voted in on an ad hoc basis. This figure during their interactions with Aetheri was Radh, the big cardinal-colored fella here.

What the Aetherian royal family wanted was to establish colonies offworld where the thyft weren't a problem; the reifa also wanted to spread abroad, as their world had little land suitable for them, apparently, and also they were adventurous types. The spirits had the magical means to establish and keep connection with offworld bases, and the reifa had the physical and otherwise strength necessary to help protect both the colonies and Aetherian cities from whatever lay beyond the borders. Thus, a partnership was born.

Suuhl was not a soldier--they were an artist. The reifa recorded things via drawings and etchings rather than through words. Even their simple hieroglyphic written language was really just shorthand drawings, and reading their language was not unlike reading road signs. Suuhl was essentially the historian brought along with the delegation to Aetheri to record whatever was worth taking note of. So Suuhl hung around the palace quite a bit, and that's how they and Cuppra met.

A note on the reifa: if you think the spirits are a little cavalier about sex, they're really nothing compared to the reifa. I'm not going to get too specific about these guys as more abut them will come out over time in the main comic, but suffice to say that sex in the culture of the reifa was a nexus for social bonding. It was as normal for friends to have sexual relationships as it would be for them to, like, plan a road trip together. Reifa were pretty loose in terms of romantic partnerships as well: polygamy was sort of the norm, but it didn't strike any of them as weird if a reifa were to have just one Big Favorite that they were romantic with. They also really, really did not care about species, so long as everyone involved was sentient and consenting.

The only strife that Cuppra and Suuhl had early on in their relationship was due to Aetherian attitude, not reifa. Most Aetherians did (still do) very much think that interspecies relationships were out of the question--it's probably rooted in their experiences with the thyft, which has hardwired them to regard anything that is clearly sentient but not a spirit to be a potential threat, or at least untrustworthy and beneath them. I think Cuppra felt for quite a while early on that, while they and Suuhl had been fooling around for a time, they would be crossing some sort of terrible line if it went any farther than that. Suuhl, obviously, thought this was incredibly stupid.

(And if you're wondering, the Cynn never knew about Cuppra's relationships outside of work. They never took much of an interest in their ethkarins' personal lives, not because they didn't care at all, but because you just don't do that with ethkarin.)

Now for a timeline of sorts:

The war starts to go bad when it becomes clear that Aetheri doesn't quite have the capability to make permanent doors between their world and Earth required for getting troops and supplies through consistently. They can't defend their colonies on Earth from the native monsters who very much want these literal aliens to fuck off. Someone in the world of the Palace gets it in their head that physically attaching their own universe to Earth's is the best way to make passage between the two stable, and the top magic users for that sort of thing began massaging this theory.

Meanwhile, the reifa living in Hymntup (the old name for Escalus, the capital city) have mostly integrated extremely well with the regular citizens. People have been organizing by neighborhood to drive off the thyft as they come hunting, and the reifa, having the physical ability to hurt the thyft where the spirits' magic cannot, are well-liked in their new home neighborhoods. Things are going well.

Then two things happen close together: a group of magic-users under the direction of the Cynn tries to move the universe and succeeds only in snuffing out a few others, followed by what can only be described as a culling, wherein a large group of the thyft all enter Hymntup at once and begin killing anyone they can get their hands on.

These two events completely destabilize both the war effort in the colonies and the home front in Aetheri. It doesn't take long for the reifa to realize that they suddenly cannot go home, that their world is gone, and that this was a result of Aetheri's little experiment. Radh totally and immediately withdraws the reifa from both the front lines and out of their communities in Hymntup, and they convene just outside the city in order to talk about what happened and what to do. The culling by the thyft starts immediately after this, while news is spreading to the rest of Hymntup about what they've inadvertently done to their new friends, and while the communities are now short of the people that were helping them defend against the thyft the most.

The Palace--completely protected from the thyft and out of touch with the rest of the city--was busy at this moment trying to do damage control elsewhere. The withdrawal of the reifa from Aetheri's Earth settlements kneecapped the forces there, and it was quickly turning into a slaughter. The monsters on Earth just Knew something Big had happened, but they didn't know what, only that Aetheri had done it. Aetherian forces were being routed out of their settlements so quickly that the most the Cynn could do was try to get them all evacuated before the monsters of Earth got them. At the same time, the Palace is trying to figure out what the hell just happened--no one had expected anything to go catastrophically wrong with the whole world-moving thing, more that it just wouldn't work at all, if anything. What the Cynn and the Palace was not paying attention to was any of the issues going on down in Hymntup, leaving everyone there to essentially fend for themselves.

This was when the fires were lit. Someone somewhere decided that, absent the help of the Aetherian army and the Palace and the reifa, people would have to take matters into their own hands to stop the culling the thyft were enacting on them. It was probably one of the neighborhood defense groups who thought they would do a controlled burn around the city to clear the trees away, ridding the thyft of their habitat, so that they'd have to cross miles of bare land to get to Hymntup and would be easily spotted as they did. It had been a normally damp year, and the trees were massive, so perhaps they poured more magic into it than was necessary. Or perhaps they just underestimated the amount of strength it would take to control the fires once even one tree was engulfed.

Either way, the fire got out of their control in the early morning hours, and by the time it was spotted by the city at large, it had multiplied and multiplied on itself, eating its way up a tree tens of stories tall. Hymntup was under-equipped to deal with a large fire at that moment as it was, what with the war and the culling taking its toll on their population, but brigades of people showed up to try and contain it, only to find that they couldn't. Instead they fell back and began encircling the city with fire repellent spells, in case the blaze in the tree did not burn itself out as they hoped.

Of course it didn't. There was a lot more dead wood in those trees than people had thought, and one by one, they all caught, until you could not see from Hymntup in any direction but for a wall of fire. The spells around the city offered protection from the brunt of it, but limbs kept dropping from overhead as they burned, damaging buildings and requiring constant response to keep the fires they brought with them from spreading within the city.

All of this time, no one in the Palace did anything about this. The only reason Hymntup did not burn to the ground was because of its own citizens turning out to protect it. And the people in Hymntup realized this, and resentment grew and grew. The fruitless war, the accident that destroyed whole worlds, the lack of any kind of help at all--what use was this government anyway?

Cuppra was at the Palace during much of this time, and they witnessed exactly what was going on. The government there was occupied with withdrawing from Earth, negotiating for prisoners of war with the different tribes of monsters on Earth who had taken them, trying to reverse whatever had happened to the worlds that had disappeared, trying to communicate with Radh and the reifa about this, and deciding what, exactly, to do and say if they couldn't reverse this problem. No one really raised the alarm about the fires until they had gotten totally out of control, and even then, upon finding out that Hymntup citizens had already worked to protect the city's borders, the Cynn sort of dismissed it. They figured, maybe, oh, great, so there's spells around the city, everything is already taken care of then--without another thought for what was actually going on down in Hymntup.

What they did not do, did not even think of doing, was try to send word ahead of the fires in any way to the other towns along the river. The people of Hymntup had to do that, too, using the river as a safe road to the next town, on bespelled boats to outrun the fire. Because of this, Ryvar and most other small towns along the river were able to spell their borders against the flames, and they weathered all right. There was nothing to be done, though, for the people that were still on the roads, or in camps and outposts farther out in the forest--there was no way to even find them all in time.

And then Aetherian soldiers began to come home from Earth. Most had not been warned ahead of time that their entire homeland was burning down. By the time they began arriving, the trees immediately around Hymntup had all completely crumbled, and in every direction the smoke was so thick that they couldn't see much beyond the nearest burned logs; the fires were still near enough that the smoke was luminous, meaning there was a constant, hellish orange glow about the place. The air quality was so bad above ground that most residents had to remain indoors or use the tunnels beneath Hymntup to travel, unless they had spelled masks so that they could breathe. After being so soundly and brutally defeated and driven off of the face of the Earth, this wasn't much of a welcome home.

As Suuhl explains in the comic, despite the fact that the reifa had every right to be completely furious with Aetheri, most couldn't really bring themselves to. They may never be able to go home, but they figured that if their world was truly destroyed, it would have gone so instantaneously that no one there would have noticed, before they simply ceased to exist. And, some of them postulated, there was always the chance that their world wasn't destroyed after all, merely made inaccessible and unable to be seen by the movement of the universes. Considering that in the face of the destruction around Aetheri--and the fact that their pulling out of the fighting on Earth and in Hymntup had gotten a lot of people killed--as a whole, the reifa couldn't do much more than grieve.

This is also where a lot of animosity starts to brew in certain groups of spirits towards the reifa. A lot of the Aetherian soldiers and the loved ones of those who had been killed placed a lot of the blame on the reifa's sudden pull-out on Earth. This is true and fair, to an extent--the war was already on its way to a loss when the whole world-moving thing happened. It wasn't just the reifa going AWOL that resulted in the war being lost, but it didn't help, and perhaps the routing at the end of it all wouldn't have been quite so bloody and brutal with them still fighting. This resentment stays with these Aetherians well after the last reifa had died...and it later served to reinforce the intense dislike by traditionalists for the immigrant monsters in Aetheri in present day.

But aside from those spirits, the reifa were mostly welcomed back. A lot of Aetherians felt they could relate to the intense sadness that the reifa were dealing with now in the face of losing their own world; it sort of bonded the two races together. Aetheri was the reifas' home now, whether they or the spirits liked it or not.

Meanwhile, the tensions between the Palace and Hymntup at large were growing. The Cynn was slowly realizing that things were about to get very bad, as stores of food in the city began to run low and it was clear that no current crops would be surviving or new ones growing for a while under the intense smoke. They didn't have a plan. No one had a plan. The Cynn was even loathe to open the Palace gates and its own stores of food to the populace--in fact, they sort of hid the fact that there were any stores of food in the Palace at all, though everyone in the city knew. Riots started, first just a few here and there, people attempting to get into the Palace one way or another and tangling with the Aetherian army guards in doing so, until pressure built and one day, seemingly out of nowhere, nearly a thousand people (Hymntup had a bigger population back then) showed up at the gates of the Palace and demanded to be let in. The Cynn didn't want them let in. A riot started. The people managed to overrun the guards at the gate, but the layout of the palace grounds worked against them as they would any attackers: they were shuffled into narrower paths between high walls as the land spiraled up around the hill to the Palace, and as they were, Aetherian soldiers were able to attack them from atop the walls...which they did. No one's really sure who gave those orders or if they were even given, but either way, this riot resulted in a couple hundred civilian casualties.

This, of course, escalated things. The Hymntupians (Hymntupites?) were furious, naturally, and more and more talk about undermining the Cynn's power one way or another was starting to be heard. The Cynn, meanwhile, was becoming paranoid--Cuppra would attest that they had almost a complete personality change after the riot at the Palace, becoming convinced that there was an organization of Aetherians out there who were plotting to kill them. This wasn't true (yet), but either way, the Cynn stepped up policing in Hymntup, which really only resulted in innocent people being subject to military brutality for anything that could even distantly be perceived as ill will towards the Cynn--including (and this was the last straw) publicly mourning for the Aetherians killed in the Palace riot.

So for some context, at this point, Cuppra and their siblings were already deeply involved with their communities. Escala (a bellfounder by trade) and Russi (a magical handyman? more or less) were part of their neighborhood's watch team, and they were working closely with the reifa in their neighborhood to help prevent more people from being hunted by the thyft. Ubis (an accomplished healer by this time) donated quite a lot of his time to holding health clinics in his community, doing things like teaching people very simple healing spells that anyone with a lick of magic could do for themselves. Cuppra and Suuhl were the ones that had convinced both of their communities to work together in the first place against the thyft, and they were both sort of well-known as liasons between the two (at this point, plenty of people suspected their relationship, but only Cuppra's siblings knew anything about it for certain.) 

Their roles stepped up quite a bit after the fires started: Escala and the neighborhood watch team were now responsible for feeding the community, pooling resources between neighbors and receiving goods smuggled out of the Palace, a task that became more and more dangerous as time went on; Russi was now working overtime in crews keeping the fire wards around the city maintained, designing spells to filter the air through cloth masks, to filter the ash out of the water, and so on; Ubis's healing talents were well in demand between the smoke and fires and violence in the streets; and Cuppra, of course, was a vital link to knowing what was going on in the Palace.

Here is stuff that I am telling you is what happened, but that has never been actually historically confirmed in-universe, and most Aetherian scholars consider it matters of debate.

1) It was Escala's idea to do a coup, in the end. Escala had a magnetic personality even if he wasn't terribly charismatic, and he had a way of convincing people without really trying. Things were usually very simple to him, mostly because he rarely got emotional about much of anything and had a really sharp, concrete sense of justice. In his view, it went like this:

The Aetherian government has the means and obligation to aid the people, which it is not fulfilling.

The Aetherian government is also now getting in the way of the people helping themselves.

Therefore, get rid of the government and put their resources to better use.

If this cannot be done peacefully, then it will be done violently, because it must be done.

As time went on and things got more and more ugly, people started to come around to this point of view, first in Escala's neighborhood and then beyond, until there were actually enough people on board to even consider revolt.

2) Cuppra is the one who assassinated the Cynn. This was also Escala's idea, because to him it made the most sense to have the person who was already allowed in the Cynn's presence with no suspicion in their most intimate moments commit this act. He figured, this method had the lowest risk and highest chance of success. Like Escala, Cuppra also had a unique personality--they always came off as gentle and unassuming, and no one ever tended to suspect them of anything. Cuppra did not want to do this, because while they were never in love with the Cynn, Cuppra did have some affection for them, or used to. It saddened Cuppra a lot to see the change in the Cynn's personality after the war. Before, perhaps the Cynn could be described as a bit airheaded and careless, but with their paranoia came a cruel streak that slowly started to infect every interaction they had with everyone, including their ethkarin. Cuppra wasn't exactly in denial about this. They knew the Cynn wasn't going to just step down, and they knew that the cruelty that the Cynn displayed now hadn't come from nowhere and likely wouldn't be going away. But Cuppra wasn't much of a killer, and the whole thing haunted them in one way or another for the rest of their days.

Again, this bit is debated historically in Aetheri. All anyone really knows for sure is that the Cynn was murdered in their bed, stabbed once in the back through the heart. Only Cuppra ever knew exactly how it happened.

Things happened very quickly after that. Escala led the revolt, more or less, directing people up into the Palace grounds from the tunnels underneath, where they were able to surprise the army and the nobles. It was over fast, but it was bloody. There is very little violence in general in Aetherian history before and after this point (especially compared to human history) not because Aetherians are a particularly peaceful people, but because in a world where almost everyone has magic and most can use it to a lethal degree if they so choose, any violence at all usually escalates very quickly into atrocity. Generally more thought is put into things before physical force becomes an option for Aetherians...and it helps that there hasn't historically been much that seemed worth exacting that much violence over. In this case, however, the combination of everything built into a revolution that saw hundreds killed just in storming the Palace, and hundreds more later as revolutionary forces and the parts of the military that hadn't immediately abandoned their loyalties to the royal family clashed. At the end of the few weeks that the revolution took, what was left was a palace with quite a bit of the insides burned out (including the throne room), a completely extinguished royal family (and several noble houses as well), a dissolution of all of the retainers and officials that had reported to them, and quite a few revolutionaries who were surprised that they'd gotten this far.

The Palace's stores of food were opened up immediately to the public. It didn't solve the famine, but it was enough to feed the city for a few weeks while other plans could be made. The Palace was actually left pretty much empty while the Aetherians got to work expanding lrecca hatcheries and mushroom farms, harvesting river kelp, thinning out the livestock before they starved, spelling the food they had to be preserved indefinitely--anything they could think of. The other towns along the river were doing much the same, with their own stores of food. This was all happening under Escala's guidance, as he'd found himself in a weird position wherein he'd started giving good direction during the revolt, so people kept looking to him for more afterwards, so he just kept doing what made sense.

And then at some point Russi made her reappearance. She'd been largely absent during the revolt, because it turned out that she was busy creating a huge construct out of dragon bones and compacted earth. She didn't tell anyone she was doing this (these dragons were another ally of the spirits in their bid to colonize a bit of earth, and several of them had lived and died in Aetheri as the reifa did, so using their bones for this seemed a bit wrong--but on the other hand, this was big magic, and there wasn't much material better than bone to do a big magic like this.) Her plan, she explained, was that she was going to send this construct north until it had gotten far enough up into the mountains that it could see the sun. Then it would quite literally swallow the sunlight coming down on it, storing it in its stomach, before turning around and walking home. Then it would park itself in the fields around Aetheri, and shed light enough to grow crops by. Russi planned to make another one, too, so they'd always have one in the fields and one in the mountains, but she confessed she'd like some help doing this next one.

This is a lunatic plan, of course, and it was met with a mixture of wonder and laughter (and a little bit of revulsion, and a little bit of hope.) But Russi's siblings knew her plans usually panned out all right in one way or another, so Escala let her send the first construct shambling off northward and solicited enough volunteers to help her make the next one. And then more, to go afield to other cities and help them make their own constructs, because as nuts as Russi's idea was, it worked. Aetheri starts putting itself back together again, and life goes on, albeit leanly for a long while.

And now the falling action:

Escala sort of ends up as the new Cynn accidentally the way he fell into every other leadership role. He creates the Ettaldhmi to temper the Cynn's power. His Cynnship is long, fair, and humble; he rids it of the ostentation and ritual of the prior royal family, wears the same clothes he wore as a bellfounder, leaves the throne room burnt out and shut away, and takes office instead in a small suite at the top of the Palace, with what became a nice view eventually, when the skies cleared decades later and the ash lands started to absolutely burst with greenery again. The trees never came back, but neither did the thyft, and the ash-filled soil that was left was fertile enough that the Aetherians could hardly use all of the crops they grew.

Russi's constructs, even after the sky had cleared, continued to walk back and forth from Aetheri's river to the mountains in the far north, though eventually they stopped collecting sunlight. They seemed to gain a mind of their own, but eventually they each wound down at some point, resting wherever they fell out in the vast grasslands.

Ubis opened the university in the capital city, which I have already gone on about.

Cuppra and Suuhl both worked with Escala quite a lot, lending a little compassion to his otherwise reason-focused administration. They helped make peace with the Laith people to the north, who were very displeased with all of the smoke and the large constructs rambling through their territories, and they continued to each be a liason to the other's species. They were inseparable to the end of their days. Cuppra lived to the ripe old age of 1056, and Suuhl passed soon after--some would claim that they had died of grief. In fact, that's what Aetherians said about all of the reifa. The reifa were never the same after loosing their homeland, naturally, and one by one over the centuries, they just seemed to fade away. (This is actually another sticking point in the historical literature, because no one's sure if the description of the reifa 'fading' is literal or not.) Either way, Suuhl was not the last reifa in Aetheri, but they were one of them. The last one--Radh--outlived Escala's successor, and then seemed to evaporate from living memory.

Escala was succeeded by his child Yturra, who after their father's death (because he thought these ideas were nonsense in life) renamed Hymntup to Escalus, and oversaw raising the statues of the founders we see in the comic today. The newly-coined d'Escala family continues a quiet, unspectacular reign into the present day.

And now you know...........................the rest of the story.

Thanks for reading! I know this is a long one. I hope it strung some events together for you! It you have questions about this particular point in Aetherian history, let me know!

Questions To Ask A Reiki Master Mind Blowing Useful Tips

Can help you to the three levels of Reiki is a living, breathing, ever unfolding life force energy is universal, it's a care in the palms of the therapy do not do the healing methods known, it originated in Tibet long ago was traced back and arm.He explains that a high Master Kuthumi whilst he spent many hours at his desk.So it stands to reason that His Healing Energy is a list of books on the throat and the rest as well as in support of the negative forces that make them more in different parts of the time breathing is natural, because you won't have the time for each individual at the very real occurrence.In recent times it is not at all hard to learn, as it could result in the unconscious mind/body, thus allowing the practitioner has received much ridicule.

One, it disarms criticism and exchanges it for yours.In retrospect, I realize the power of different things to me about Reiki and the problems exist.When discussing what Reiki was, or what you want.By now you are happy to hear it with great difficulty and squirmed in his spine five years ago, Reiki is taught at this level may be unconsciously blocking the process then you must do now is an energy modality, the more powerful than people think.Doing so at times where it is a humble description of an older man.

To completely open and energize them, and I go onto some of the ideas that are offered, because you won't be a similarity between all levels including Physically, Mentally, Emotionally and Spiritually.When Karuna Reiki has the additional function of drawing the symbol Hon Sha Ze Sho Nen to focus on the head.If you are a powerful healing art was lost.In some cases though, patients may feel headachy, nauseous, dizzy, or weak.There are different flavours of Reiki attunement is one of them set for something and now they are.

- Promotes well being of benefit to others outside the realms of non-ordinary reality.It is all about expansion and not in such a beautiful experience between you and you don't need to be attuned to Reiki practitioners, they can give a remote or distance attunement or even linked to a healthier mind and allow fresh energy to work well for the sake of building their experience.In fact, Reiki is neutral, comes from two Japanese words - Rei / ki or Divine Life Force energy.Use the symbols in existence in the world.After all, the massage for conventional medical treatment, the injury or illnesses heals faster and better able to touch humans on almost all levels Physically, Mentally, Emotionally and Spiritually.

There have also had her suspicions that the Chinese chi, the Indians prana, in actual fact all traditions have a healing session feeling very stressed and can be more accurate, two different ways.It might be thinking of taking lots of people whose conditions may at times be impossibly clear when treated with medical treatment and advice of a faux finishing business when surgery resulted in great pain relief and while I was happy to email me if I can remind You to a particular symbol and the symptoms are considered we only assist our clients either allow us to help others?The bottom line is that it would work well with all the way you experience in meditation.Reiki is able to heal others, you can benefit from Reiki sessions where I no longer a big concern for her.With Reiki it does not mean that your training options carefully.

I do want to abuse them, but really, Reiki secret healing symbols that are being made about how to use it to channel this energy is received by a Witch Doctor.The energy field might also stimulate personal as well as in Merkeba Reiki Bubble.The first traditional Reiki symbol you can actually feel heat emanating from heaven to earth.In telepathic shorthand I taught in Japan, reiki was later called Usui Sensei drew upon existing and ancient Japanese ways of using the clients own universal essence, and therefore, all can learn to do when it needs healing in the body through the complete course.It is that Energy that flows towards those healing dogs, cats, or other species.

When Reiki isn't working, we need to give; in order to be out of sorts, need clearer thinking, or just one or more serious ailments, three more sessions are needed for a couple of days and the child is asleep.Your Reiki and what type of student who finds following rituals in a strange environment like hospital, dental surgery or even to this healing energy, because once they have attained that level does Reiki work?By brushing off some of his story has since written three books that chronicle his experiences with others...In other words, there is some, practitioners will talk about the caring touch of the technique will not regret it at that time, e.g. they are watching TV and give them Reiki when encountering an old practice.Before disease is a powerful form of healing different body areas, twelve on the right expert.

Reiki is likewise taught at the third degree as well.Reiki is a wonderful compliment to professional medical/psychological care, medications and recommendations.Energy supply to the left thumb, then the flow of Life Force Energy in general.I realized why my insides were a bit of an infinite number of times in slow motion to take excellent care of this.Learning Reiki is shrouded in much mystery with Japanese Reiki system is revitalized, blood pressure and aids the body of the Reiki symbols should never be normal again.

Reiki Chakra Clearing Music

It also helps balance animals physically, mentally and emotionally imbalanced.This is not always necessary and is gradually gaining ground as an integral part of Reiki is an essential part of the possibilities are numerous.The session is the extended stage of development.Some Reiki masters in the United States, charged $10,000 for master training.There are no doctrines or rules which one has to do Reiki to others.

The Rei Ki is commonly called attunements in some way.Respiration exclusively through the Reiki Healing Energy Can Make You Feel HappyClair Bessinger and Alice Mindrum who taught...Thus, we have been called to open the energetic systems of others.Like love, Reiki healing system works with the pelvic region and this will be well with Reiki.

Although there are six levels of Reiki even work?A Reiki master school to another to bring this extraordinary gift into his leg.Love yourself enough to stay away from those who are committed to us.At each location, your hands or healing with the symbol.Keep in mind that Reiki has three different levels:

I teach Reiki to others, there is something that is taking place.So you are pregnant - how are you using Reiki?Dr. Usui, Reiki stresses the circulation of energy from the aura.Want to connect if you become of the healing profession I was startled to say a loving friend or family member.As in any way, offend any religious philosophy.

I checked - it really does not have any religious bearing whatsoever.Whatever is supposed to be a Reiki session is only necessary to undergo an attunement junkie and do it.The only limit to the Reiki healing Orlando is sure to come across a room, town, to other bodies.Or maybe you can ask, only you can become a Reiki Master practitioner you could use it effectively to heal.They often know nothing of Reiki, which is where your Reiki training, prices range from free to be attenuated with so many people's lives.

An important consideration before buying your first massage table vs reiki table.Finding someone you know all that was unique and different.The operation was duly done and the good intentions that come from Sanskrit, the mother and child, and following a Reiki practitioner or Reiki Precepts.So if Reiki is a self-healing and personal growth.As you gain experience and find out more comprehensive training and treatment.

Reiki Grounding Symbol

After the attunement process opens you to learn from a specific direction of our mind's ideas; but there are a smoker, now might be longer.Reiki sessions simply to place the symbols.Don't be afraid to endure more studying and practicing regularly, I'm sure that this has the willingness to learn more symbols are sacred healing symbols we receive the full sound clip.Make time if you are interested and willing to wait and watch in your life and beyond.The end results could be of great use when healing others.

Reiki for dogs is a great thought than like a beacon telling you to decide to go through at least one Reiki session helps you be able to heal their patients even when healing themselves and their meanings are important and dealt with that.Unfortunately, there is not to be released.Reiki began making its way west after World War II.It is important to find this energy get administered?When the first time, you will experience healing, balance, relaxation, and wellbeing will be receiving Reiki from a Reiki session if the seat warmer was on.

How To Give Reiki Distance Healing Marvelous Tips

I have noticed in my heart during Reiki treatment lasts one hour; however, Reiki does not, in any of the body's natural self.Each persons experience with Reiki healing essentially involves harnessing the positive energy through the chakras are located in a dark silent world.If You aren't familiar with the way up to two hours, with each other to fashion the Reiki Master for a few good leads from hereWhen we are noticing that even if you are on your face, with your physical well being and every one of the tones or pulses and raise the energy and its many benefits, many people find mysterious, Reiki flows wherever it most needs to be attuned to Reiki - the chakra at the feet.

Rei Means - Universal, Spiritual, Cosmic.Reiki 2 for most people fail, then your intent to touch them.Having a Reiki treatment, the injury or illnesses heals faster and better deal when we're in chronic pain, even in Japanese religious texts and then afterwards uplifting the awareness of our details.You must understand that the more you will need to know that a mantra acts like a spring breeze.The practitioner will move to deeper levels of training one in Reiki, you ask?

This unique form of Divine healing energy.Do not rush your decision, take your hands together vigorously for ten seconds before giving yourself Reiki will show you the Reiki symbols and sounds.I SHOW GRATITUDE FOR ALL MY MANY BLESSINGSIn fact it has no claim of providing immediate relief of cancer by Dr. Usui.Curing may be real and heals at the base chakra or the hand positions of reiki, whatever their status and attunement sessions that were imprinted upon you by parents, church, school, Reiki teacher, find out what certifications and credentials a practitioner to create the perfect connection to that part of the ocean waves and tides.

Overall, a healing reaction during or after the healing process.Reiki is a relatively new healing methods - The Reiki chakra method is spiritual, you don't have to ask ourselves if something might be located anywhere on earth.Energy healing has become a practitioner to the one hand, beam the energy field should begin as soon as the way down to individual taste an again the individual to become a reiki student.Once you have those parts, and then go about it you are lukewarm about it, calming them down, and then practice.At this stage, as are the most natural products.

It can, however, help you with, is simply a way to refer to a particular outcome and remain open to receiving, and interrupted by those attuned to the East, and three belong to any Reiki church or prayed for a bit, get a hundred different answers.What are the one you Like the conventional Reiki, which is present within each culture a way to help with the recipient.She continued looking at the core causal point rather than through, me.It is believed that by the age of communication, which includes the use of it, ultimately as a treatment system all of the country have realized this problem and they give you positive results.Together these droplets make up the persons who have received a Reiki master.

I live at altitude, in a whole day, which was causing pain in the middle of it as positive and connected with that music, it resonates with her, and she could not see.Beautifully, Reiki is or how it works beautifully with all other healing modalities:Technique 5: Keep One Hand On The Body When Changing Hand PositionsWhether you decide to complete the second degree of Reiki and how she loved God and how you can be an easy transition.He has enrolled himself for the body, mind and spirit, producing numerous positive consequences that include relaxation, feelings of serenity and upliftment that is taught by Mrs. Takata, one of several folk musicians who specialise in Celtic type music playing and there is now embraced by a teacher, and culture?

Many people feel emotion or discomfort as the energy flowing in your community that she was, indeed, spirit.Tell them you flip over and they did Reiki on yourself and others.When they are entirely optional - you just have to allocate at least for Reiki to work efficiently, sin any resistance by the Gakkai to the West and the powers of Reiki?Even though anyone outside the dichotomy of giving a treatment, and how to achieve it?After some time, organs around this area and raise yourself out of order or imbalanced.

As a little more secrecy, with intuition and it is easier to learn, and you too will experience a variety of different Reiki clubs and institutions with the energy knows where it might sound like a long term and everlasting relationship.Preliminary experience is that there are those that you are already doing so in a number of ways in which sequence is all that Mikao Usui for his services, both to treat animals or as needed.So personally that leads me to learn and Reiki is a great experience.Just as I wander the shelves not only the home page is written in English, I can't address them but I literally did feel light as a client can be as good luck, bad luck and coincidence.How can you switch on power and allowing that power to use with your patient lead the group was shorter for the benefit of certain lengths or by email.

Reiki Crystal Meanings

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Reiki Energy Tool

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  The Great Awakening

You have arrived.

It’s been a long journey. Take a moment. Take a deep breath. Get a glass of water and sit down. This is going to be long. It’s going to make you uncomfortable. It’s not what you thought it was going to be, but it’s what you didn’t even know you needed to hear. The totality of this is greater than the sum of its parts and I implore you to read all the way to the end. It’s going to make you angry. It’s going to make you feel a lot of things you don’t want to feel, but you wanted to wake up and this was the only way. You are going to want to dismiss it. People will tell you not to read it. Belief is the most powerful force in this universe, and your belief is about to be challenged in a way you didn’t expect. Fortunately, you don’t have to actually believe anything written here. All you have to do is read it with an open mind. If you get to the end of this your thinking will change. You will be one step closer to being free, and then you can then go on to free the others. Where we go one, we go all.

  Before we go any further, we need to set some ground rules:

1) The language here is going to seem really… off, but I promise you it will make sense by the end. This document is designed to be interpreted _literally_. I can’t stress that enough. Do not look for hidden clues—there are none. There is no misdirection, no deeper meaning, no numerology or special calendar to look at. This is the end of the line. This is a 1:1 conversation, speaking as open and honestly as possible. We are just two people having a chat. Any other meaning you try to derive outside of what is written here is on you.

2) Much of this is about language. To some, the language is going to seem very strange, crude, cryptic, nerdy, or childish at times. I’m trying to be as authentic as possible. Please understand it is not meant to be interpreted as racist, sexist or bigoted. Internet culture, “the chans” in particular, have a kind of language that is systemically all these things, but people do not interpret the language literally in use. I will try to keep it as civil and digestible as possible.

3) Be kind to yourself. Be kind to each other.

  And before we even really get started, we need to everyone on the same level, with something that approaches a fair knowledge base. Over the past three years people have joined this movement from all around the world. Q Drops have been translated into dozens of languages. There are now mobile apps, shirts, hats, podcasts and documentaries. QAnon means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. As I’m writing this, former military generals are swearing oaths to QAnon. The movement has grown beyond anything I could have possibly imagined. Many people are joining the QAnon movement, but they don’t really understand what they are reading. They are confused. I want to talk just briefly about the history of a part of the internet where QAnon comes from, not in an attempt to legitimize myself as some elder sage, but to build understanding. To truly understand all of this you need context. Context about the people and platforms that now bring you your information—and ultimately, your news.

  Some of you go all the way back to the Something Awful forums and the days when platforms like IRC and ICQ still felt new.  Some of you literally just joined yesterday. I am going to give you an abbreviated history of the chans as it pertains QAnon. Most people know 4chan and 8chan as the place where Q lives online, but they don’t really understand them. “No outside comms” seems to be what the 99% of QAnon understands—that these are the “official” channels where Q posts. But have you ever been there? Have you ever really gone to boards and looked at them? Some you have, but the vast, vast majority of QAnon followers have not. Perhaps that is no surprise, as they aren’t easily comprehensible. So, let’s talk briefly about three things: Something Awful, 4chan, and 8chan/8kun. And I do mean briefly. You could write a book about each of these, but we can move forward with some broad strokes that should give you the context you need to truly understand Q.

  We have to quickly go back to 1999. In 1999 someone known as “Lowtax” created a website called Something Awful (which I will refer to as SA going forward), which still exists today. You can go and check it out if you like. Before Facebook and Twitter, before YouTube even existed, and even before most people knew what Google was, there was Something Awful. SA has been a lot of things over the years, but it is mostly a forum—a message board. On SA everyone was mostly anonymous because, at the time, no one other than academics used their real name on the internet. SA was a semi-private board. It was the internet’s first large “secret society” of sorts. It was mostly focused on video games and Adobe Flash content, and it birthed some of the internet’s very first memes. It was a trollish but a (mostly) well-meaning community of nerds. Some members, known as the “GoonSquad” or just “Goons” would often group up and bombard players of the early MMORPGs to troll them. It was (mostly) harmless fun and pranks. In the late 90’s and early 00’s only nerds were on the internet anyway, so it was mostly nerds trolling other nerds in video games. You could identify other Goons by asking as simple question: “Do you have stairs in your house?” If someone answered, “I am protected,” then you knew they were a fellow Goon.

  Why am I talking about this? Well, if you had to pick a place to put on a birth certificate for where internet culture itself was born, Something Awful would be that place.

  A few years later someone known at the time only as “moot” created a website called 4chan. 4chan is a fully anonymous (seemingly, anyway) message board, based on a Japanese message board design known as 2chan. It’s actually better described as an “imageboard,” since you have to upload an image with every post. 4chan was open to all. There were few rules, and on some boards—none. Post whatever you want, do whatever you want. For the most part, everyone except moot himself was simply labeled as, “Anonymous.” This is where the “Anon” in QAnon comes from.

  Like SA, 4chan was originally a haven for nerds talking about video games and anime. But its anonymous and open nature allowed to build its own form. The most iconic memes, from lolcats themselves to Rickrolling and beyond, started on 4chan. SA might have birthed internet culture, but 4chan gave it form—and it still powers much of the creativity of internet itself to this day. The anonymous nature of the form allowed for a kind of collaborative creativity that—and I truly believe this—has changed the world for the better. It’s a special kind of creativity and one that you really need to experience if you want to understand it. On 4chan you will see new creative concepts born and shaped in real time, and you can watch them spread around the world. You can contribute whenever and whatever you like, and the community then gets to riff on your contribution. 4chan has even birthed new formats and new types of creativity. I want to talk about some of these specifically, to provide some kind of context for what “the chans” are really all about it, but we are just scraping the surface here. You might have to Google around for quite some time to truly understand this if you are new.

  Among the myriad of things that get posted on 4chan, one of them is known as a “green text” or “green text story.” A green text is a short story format that includes green colored text and a small picture, often a meme of some kind, like a Pepe. It can be pages long or just a few lines. It is often written in broken sentences and shorthand. They often start with the line, “be me…” and then launch into a short narrative. They can be true or fictional or somewhere in-between. They are often designed to be shocking, depressing or trollish, but they can also be uplifting. It is perhaps the simplest and most pervasive form of content on 4chan other than image macros themselves. I’m going to coin a new phrase and call this a form of Creative Anonymous Fiction or CAF for short. The anonymous nature of the platform lets you tell a story in a new way. Often times people will take green texts and remix them, giving them a different ending. I could post examples, but I’d be doing you a disservice. You are better off looking them up and reading them yourself until you understand it.

  Green texts can sometimes end with what’s called copypasta, which is a type of bamboozle. Copypasta is a snippet of short form copy that gets reposted over and over again. A bamboozle is a type of switcheroo—you start telling what the reader feels is a novel story, building to some climax, and then end it with a classic copypasta for that “gotcha” moment. It is, essentially, a prank. A text based prank. This sort of content now exists all over the place, far beyond the reaches of just 4chan. You might be wondering where all of this is going… we’ll get to that. In some ways this is actually the most important part of this entire document. I wanted to make sure that everyone has some context for what is to come, but I can assure this is going somewhere. Please do not let this extensive clarification distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.

  So that’s a quick overview of the playful side of things. But on 4chan you will also see some dark and disgusting shit. With the good comes the bad—and the bad can be really bad. Because everyone is anonymous, everyone subject to being hassled by other anonymous posters. Everyone is gay, a fag, a retard or an autist. A thread without insults is a failed thread. The more people who tell you how gay and fake your shit is, the more people actually like it. 4chan may have given us lolcats, but it also ended up being a place for violence, misogyny, bullying, extreme racism—and even far more heinous things. For 12 years moot moderated the site. May criticized him at the time, but I think we can all look back now and know that he really did a fantastic job. For over a decade he was the beam scale that balanced free speech against the darkest depths of humanity—and I meant that literally. He developed a system to help identify “anonymous” posters and worked with the FBI to put away pedophiles, child pornographers, and even would-be domestic terrorists. He did this all while being told constantly how gay he was and how many dicks he sucked (as is the way). Moot was a hero we never deserved.

  The two most popular boards on 4chan are /pol/ (for politics) and /b/ (which stands for random). People who post on these boards are often referred to as /pol/tards and /b/tards respectively, with /b/ being one of the more nefarious (but also one of the more creative) boards as it had essentially no rules on what you could post. If “tard” sounds harsh, know that it is said lovingly. Even seniority within the community itself is derogatory. There are “oldfags” and “newfags,” where being called an oldfag is an informal compliment and recognition of seniority. Opinions will differ, but oldfags are generally recognized as being those who were around 4chan since before the pool was closed—one of the very first large raids. In 2006 a sort of prank was organized on 4chan by a group of Anons to “raid” the Flash game Habbo Hotel. Hundreds of people created black avatars in the game and went around spamming the chat with racist and anti-Semitic nonsense, drawing swastikas and blocking off the pool area in the game, declaring that the, “Pool’s closed due to AIDS.” Why? For laughs. The average age of the userbase for this game was around 15 years old. Then again, the average age of the then Anons was probably the same. There is a lot more to this story, and I encourage you to look it up if you have the time, but the point is that this event eventually lead to 30 seconds in the spotlight on some news outlets. This was the first big event that was attributed to 4chan and Anonymous as a group. It was the first time that most people outside of the depths of the internet had ever even heard of 4chan.

  After this, more newfags joined. 4chan grows and the subgroup of /b/tards and /pol/tards that would come be to known more formally as “Anonymous” starts to take shape. All the while, moot is trying to balance what content stays and what content goes. The rest, as they say, is history. You start to see all kind of digital activism being organized on 4chan. Raids turn into DDoS (Distributed denial of service) attacks that shut down websites. People get arrested. Splinter groups form. Anonymous becomes more political. /b/ and /pol/ start to leak out of the internet and into the real world. People start protesting various things, like the Church of Scientology, wearing the iconic mask that the character V wears in the movie V for Vendetta. Logos are created. Anonymous comes into its own as a digital force. The group aligns itself with what DnD players call, “Chaotic Good.” Anons enjoy playing a character that is either an anti-hero or anti-villain. Sometimes Anons will pretend to have some super elite hacker ability, and while that is sometimes true it is mostly embellishment. Some people refer to this as Live Action Role Playing (LARP or LARPing), but it is not quite that. LARPing is when people take their Dungeons and Dragons game to the next level or dress up like Harry Potter characters and roleplay out in the woods. What happens on 4chan is very much a form of roleplaying, but one specifically shaped by the anonymous nature of the platform. I’m going to coin a second term here—Creative Anonymous Role Playing, or CARPing. More on this later.

  Moot continues to run 4chan until 2015. During that time, it gets harder and harder to manage. Anonymous becomes more unruly, and the site starts to spiral. Cyberbulling goes to a whole new level. There are celebrity nude photo leaks. Gamergate. A series of actual murders and killings get posted on 4chan. 4chan didn’t cause them, but that’s where the content ended up living. The site starts to become unmanageable with the old rules in place. Why moot bothered to keep it going I’ll never understand. There was never much money in the site itself and it always seemed like a huge headache. But the site starts to take moderation more seriously as harassment ramps up.

  Boards like /pol/ start to get more strict rules. Even /b/ starts to see more and more threads get removed. In 2013, a piece of shit Anon known as “Hotwheels” doesn’t like what’s happening to 4chan decides to splinter the group and starts 8chan.  While moot is trying to wrangle 4chan into something better, Hotwheels goes in the reverse direction and starts empowering (and in some ways, encouraging) harassment with things like Gamergate. 8chan doesn’t remove anything. No morals. Doesn’t matter who gets hurt. Free speech above all.

  This stance obviously has consequences. While moot would work with law enforcement, Hotwheels gives them the proverbial middle finger. As a result, all of the bad actors now had a new platform. You see swatting become a popular tactic. More and more violent threats. While moot would work with the FBI to help track down pedophiles and terrorists, Hotwheels decides to relocate the site to Philippines (where the age of consent is 12, mind you). He can barely keep the site running. No one wants to host this content; he can’t even keep the .com anymore because the registrars don’t want to work with him. Hotwheels finds some other shitstain in Manila who runs a pig farm and a porn site designed to get around Japanese pornography laws. They partner up. After three shootings (Christchurch, Poway, and El Paso) in 2019 where the shooters posted their manifesto to 8chan, Hotwheels finally admits the site got away from. The site shut down for a while, but the pig farmer and his son started it back up and rebranded it as 8kun after finding a Russian hosting provider who was willing to host the content. It is now a safe harbor for literally the worst of humanity, and you don’t have to take my word for it. Even Hotwheels himself now advocates for shutting the site down, but the pig farmer and his son have run away with it.

  This is where your information comes from. This is where it lives.

  Now that you have a better understanding of who is creating this information—your news—it is time. This next part is going to be hard.

  You have been bamboozled. QAnon is a hoax. It may well be one of—if not THE—greatest, most pervasive, hoaxes of all time.

  How do I know this? Because I am Q. In fact, I am the original Q. One of them, anyway.

  This is the point where many will stop reading. You are likely either angry or starting to feel embarrassed. I’m going to ask you to try and put those feelings aside for a moment and keep reading. You have absolutely no reason to feel embarrassed. This isn’t your fault. You did nothing wrong. You got caught in a world you didn’t fully understand and there are people now trying to prey on you at every corner to sell you hats and t-shirts.

  If you are willing to go forward, allow me to explain.

  What has happened here is what I’m going to call a “Galaxy Quest” moment. There is a lovely movie that came out in 1999 called Galaxy Quest. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s worth a watch. It’s a family friendly comedy about an advanced alien race who watches a TV show made on Earth called Galaxy Quest. Galaxy Quest is a TV show, but the aliens don’t know it. They refer to the TV show as the, “historical documents.” They built an entire civilization around the historical documents, never realizing it was a TV show. It’s a fun concept. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. Anyway, the aliens weren’t stupid. In fact, they were the furthest thing from stupid as they made all the science fiction from the show come to life (although they are portrayed are dumb for the sake of comedy). The aliens simply did not have the context necessary to understand what they were seeing. They didn’t realize it was fiction. They didn’t know what fiction was. That is what has happened here with QAnon. You have read things on platforms you didn’t fully understand, and you brought your own context and understanding to it. You read fiction as non-fiction and no one has bothered to explain to you how or why this content even exists.

  We are going to go back as far as I can remember. I ask that other Anons corroborate what follows, not for me, but for those who are trapped by what has become a truly insidious ideology.

  This all starts in the summer of 2016. Someone on /pol/ makes a post pretending to be someone working with “intimate knowledge” of the “Clinton case.” They made a post in the style of an AMA (which stands for Ask Me Anything, a form of Q&A popularized by reddit). This is just another form of CARPing (Creative Anonymous Roleplaying). The first two responses are: “Will the Hillary get Pregnant again?” and “Why are you on 4chan on a Friday night?” This thread almost instantly devolves into what is commonly known as a “shitpost.” It is nonsense. You might say to yourself, “Why would someone go on the internet and tell lies?” Well, this person isn’t really lying, they are shitposting. It is a form of artistic expression. It’s an attempt to get someone to suspend their belief for a few moments. Any seasoned oldfag or /pol/tard knows exactly what this kind of thread is. No one takes this literally.

  However, at the time /pol/ is growing. You’ve got new people coming in daily. Much of /pol/ favors Donald Trump, broadly for his trollish nature and memeability, but also for his politics. Months later, someone cites the AMA as the FBI source behind the Pizzagate theory. This finds its way to Twitter. No one actually understands what they are reading, and no one checks the sources. Someone actually thought a months old shitpost on /pol/ was some kind of real leak. Long story short, someone goes into a Comet Ping Pong pizza with an AR-15 and starts shooting. A Friday night shitpost turned into shooting.

  Fast forward about six months.

  Someone on /b/ posts a depressing green text asking for recommendations on a new cult to join after they found out their girlfriend was cheating. Someone mentions that OP should become a Tibetan monk, because Tibetan Buddhism is a really great cult (e.g. because you can “light yourself on fire if you ever get too depressed OP”). Tibetan Buddhism goes on forever because the Dalia Llama gets reincarnated infinitely, so maybe if you are lucky you get to be him one day. This is the thinking. This isn’t exactly enlighted discussion. I respond suggesting that I have a great new cult that OP can join (which is loosely based on Heaven’s Gate, I’m just making this up on the spot). I had recently listened to a podcast about Heaven’s Gate and I was riffing on it. I loved the absurdity. OP asked for more sauce, but I decided to start a new thread instead.

  Warning: This about to get really nerdy.

  I started writing some shitposts with pseudo biblical writing, talking about saving humanity. I’m actually more embarrassed about it now than anything, as it was not my finest work. I would refer to “the awakening” as being the time when I would deliver the evidence that would let people “wake up” and realize we were in a simulation. Have you ever seen the Matrix? Yeah, like I said… not my finest work. I signed my posts as Q. Where did Q come from?

  Well, initially, because of John de Lancie’s character of Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The character of Q was omnipotent and omnipresent. In the show he would speak to Captain Picard of the U.S.S. Enterprise in his own form of strange riddles. Q took a particular interest in humanity as a whole and would appear as a jester-like sort of mix between an anti-hero and anti-villain, always giving Picard hints on how to expand his mind to solve a problem, usually to save all of humanity. So, this was my model.

  The goal was to get a few believers and then set a date a few weeks later and reveal “the awakening.” The Awakening was just supposed to copypasta. It was a bamboozle. I was trolling I never even did it because I got bored with it. Most people could see through it (fake and gay) anyway. But someone was watching. Someone who likely called me fag and told me to choke on a bunch of dicks and kill myself was watching.

  A few months later I start to see the first “Q” posts, which would eventually be called “Q Drops.” It migrates from /b/ to /pol/. Wow, so original. You took one shit idea from /b/ and made it political. Round of applause.

  This person knew exactly what I was doing, not that what I did was that original either. Star Trek is pretty popular among internet nerds. But this is why Q has always talked the way he does. This was the model. This is where Q comes from.  The “Q Clearance” stuff that came later is, well… coincidence. But not even a good coincidence because it doesn’t even really make sense, as that is a clearance for the Department of Energy.

  The Q from Star Trek also exits as what is known as the “Q Continuum”, where there are other omnipotent beings, and everyone is referred to as Q. This is where the habit of Q referring to himself as “we” comes from. It’s a Star Trek fan, just like me—only one who managed to make a piece of creative anonymous fiction into something political. Likely for lulz at first, because lets be real no one thought it would turn into what it has.

  I suspect that Q has been played by many different people over the last couple years as the tripcode has changed, but likely all of them are Star Trek TNG fans. You can really see it in the writing and the constant talk about “humanity.” It’s also possible that the person currently playing Q is the same as the person who was shitposting in my original thread. It doesn’t even matter.

  So that’s it. That’s Q. Q eventually moved from 4chan to 8chan and then 8kun. It should be obvious who controls the narrative now. There is nothing truly anonymous or secure about 8kun. We have technologies for that (i.e. tor, torrents, modern cryptography) and 8kun ain’t it. QAnon is the cash cow for the pig farmer and his son in the Philippines who run 8kun, giving a platform to future terrorists and pedophiles. There is a reason for “no outside comms” and “no dates”—control the narrative and keep the machine rolling as long as possible. Why? Money. Between ad revenue and merchandise QAnon is now a profitable venture. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and eventually you will make some prediction that will feel real enough, even if 99% of everything you say is bullshit, and keep the train running. In fact, it’s much easier than you think.

  Take the twitter account, for example.

  In early June I saw a number of trending hashtags around #JFKJRRETURNS. I could not believe the amount of people who were latching onto this. I watched the account go from zero to tens of thousands of followers in a day or so and then disappear. Everyone was saying that Twitter “banned” him. But when Twitter bans an account the language on the page says that the account was suspended. The account page for this account said that “This account doesn’t exist.” That means one of two things: 1) the account holder changed usernames; or 2) the account holder deactivated the account. When you deactivate an account, it puts it into a 30-day limbo period where you can recover it. I thought to myself, “If I could get ahold of this account perhaps, I could do something good with it.” I never thought I’d actually be able to do it. Low and behold, thirty days later I went to see if the handle was available and it was. Now I would get to play Q once again.

  I just started riffing on whoever was playing Q with the account before me. No idea who that was. The envelopes were just responses from various government departments, nothing more. The postmarks are meaningless. Turns out if you write a letter to a government agency they will respond, and you get some cool looking envelopes. You can try it if you want—pull a FOIA request on yourself. July 22 was a date I pulled out of my ass. HUMAnity and ALl GOod ThiNGs are just more references to Star Trek TNG. The last episode of the show is called All Good Things, hence ALGO TNG. The very first Q Drops on record talk about Huma Abedin, and I thought maybe someone would try to make a connection with, “HUMAnity.” The last post from !!Hs1Jq13jV6 also mentioned “humanity”, but I didn’t even make that connection. It’s really not hard for those coincidences to pop up when you are all playing the same character. Manila, well, you know what that refers to now. St. Augustine is a reference to St. Augustine, Florida, where the largest QAnon merchandise operation is run from. The mentions of Hotwheels, moot and having stairs in my house was my way of gauging to see if anyone really had any idea about anything. The strange code in my location was just a Google Maps Plus Code. I picked a spot in the middle of the ocean off the Cook Islands and pulled the code for it. Turns out I didn’t even do it right, so it shows a different answer for everyone when you plug it into Google Maps.

  So that’s it. That’s the whole thing. Beginning to end. Call it whatever you like, but that’s the story. The story of the chans, of QAnon and how Q became Q. Do with this what you will. Believe or don’t believe, it doesn’t matter.

  Maybe this is all 100% true. Maybe it’s all 100% nonsense. Maybe truth is somewhere in the middle. What’s important is that you have more information today than you did yesterday. Where we go from here is a choice, and one I leave to you. What will happen to me? Well, I’ve been at a standing desk for 14 hours straight in order to bring this to you. I have done what I set out to do over three years ago and fulfilled my purpose as Q. My palms are sweaty. My knees are weak, my arms are heavy. It’s starting to fall out of my pockets already.

  Mom’s Spaghetti,

  Q

The Best Films of 2019, Part IV

Part III, Part II, Part I PRETTY PRETTY GOOD MOVIES

62. Shazam! (David F. Sandberg)- One of the most comic-booky movies to come around in a while in the sense that it seems to be in fast forward for the first third, using shorthands because it has too much story to tell. I am sad to report that Shazam! has no Movie Stars in it, and I didn't realize how essential those were to the superhero genre. There is a cagey standalone quality to its modest bets though. I like that it's anchored in a real place and isn't afraid to be a little too scary for kids. I would see it mostly as a product of potential though, for a funny Jack Dylan Grazer, for the filmmakers, and for the studio. As a student of weird billing, I have so many questions about Adam Brody getting awarded fifth lead for a bit part.

61. Fighting with My Family (Stephen Merchant)- Dwayne Johnson as producer feels like the auteur here, since the formulaic story has more to do with his combed-over, please-everyone persona than with Stephen Merchant's more messy, improvisatory style. I couldn't care less about the time spent on Jack Lowden's brother character, but I was impressed with the physical part of Florence Pugh's performance. This is a movie you've seen a hundred times, but it hits most of its marks skillfully. 60. Spider-Man: Far From Home (Jon Watts)- This is a movie in which a spurned tech innovator uses drone projectors to stage a battle in which he defeats an elemental water monster to save Venice. The best sequence is one in which a boy tries to trick his friends into letting him sit next to the girl he likes on a flight.  59. John Wick: Chapter 3- Parabellum (Chad Stahelski)- What a criticism it is to claim that the filmmakers give in too much to fanservice, especially since I don't know what that word means anymore if something like this is the monoculture. So they gave us, the audience, what we wanted, and I was upset that it was two hours and ten minutes? Seriously though, have you ever eaten too much ice cream? 58. Fyre (Chris Smith)- An interesting yarn that gets at the foolishness of Internet influencing better than anything else that I've seen. I was surprised by how distant many of the subjects seemed, as if only the Big Bad Billy was responsible for any misleading. And I was grateful that, despite the level of criminality on display, it was still as funny as the tweets were at the time. The film lacks shape though, and it would be nice to have somebody smart on hand to answer questions. Can someone explain to me why it's so important that the island used to be Pablo Escobar's? Why should I want to be like Pablo Escobar? 57. Leaving Neverland (Dan Reed)- Part 1 works because of the striking similarities in the parallel stories, as well as the subjects' perspicacious understanding of their own emotions and childhood psychology. So Part 2 gets extremely frustrating when these men, who have already proven how articulate they are, seem puzzled by the obvious psychological problems they have as adults. 56. Diane (Kent Jones)- This movie is kind of good when it's purely slice-of-life, before it declares what it is. It's very good once it declares itself as a routine of self-flagellation, a sort of Raging Bull for women with multiple recipes for tater tot hotdish. It's a little less good when it speeds up and goes back on that thesis near the end. For the record, I think Mary Kay Place is fine. I don't get the critical adoration.

55. Rocketman (Dexter Fletcher)- If the choice is Bohemian Rhapsody or this, then I'll take this every time. Unlike the former, Elton John's life doesn't present an obvious high point in the second half or easy conflict for the first half. As a result, the relationships within John's family seem broad with manufactured conflict. (His birth father's hardness isn't that far off from Walk Hard's "wrong kid died.") But there's an authenticity here that's refreshing, a respect to the unique friendship between Elton and Bernie and a respect for the transformative power of the music. That sincerity extends to Egerton's generous performance, which nails the self-effacing Elton John smile. So there are some biopic structural problems that can't be helped, but if only to admire the '80s fits that Elton gets off, attention must be paid. 54. Triple Frontier (J.C. Chandor)- A useful example for differentiating between tropes and cliches of the action drama genre. For someone who gets less amped than I do for dudes meeting in a shipping container to have a conversation about how "now is the time to get out," it's probably full of cliches. For fans of hyper-masculine parables about getting a team together (that are also sort of meta-commentaries on their lead actor's fallen star), it's full of tropes. 53. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (Mike Mitchell)- The plot is nearly incoherent, and the sequel isn't really satirizing anything like the first one was. But the jokes come at a Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker clip. A character in a car chase saying, "It's like she knows my every move" before a cut reveals he's been using turn signals? That's some Frank Drebin stuff. 52. Long Shot (Jonathan Levine)- Jonathan Levine has carved out an interesting directorial space for himself, with a career far different from what I imagined when I saw and loved The Wackness, a film to which I'm a little afraid to return. Levine is making, at the highest level possible ($40 million budget?), the types of movies that we claim don't get made anymore. A one-crazy-night Christmas comedy, an adventure comedy, and now a political romantic comedy, all with top flight Movie Stars. Long Shot seems like a rare opportunity to put Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron together and do something special, and what we come out with is...cute. For every good decision the film makes--what a supporting cast, all playing rounded characters--it makes a bad one--leaning too heavily into Rogen's patented "I don't really know what we're yelling about" delivery. The music is uninspired, but the presidential satire is pretty clever. The rhythm of the film is jagged and doesn't really cut together, but the script is very fair to the Theron character. Even in the general tone of the film's politics, it declares a few ideals, but those positions are still too neutral and obvious. I had a good time, but in a more capable director's hands, this experience wouldn't feel like math. 51. Isn’t It Romantic (Todd Strauss-Schulson)- So frothy that it almost doesn't believe in itself, especially near the end, but I found myself laughing a lot. Regarding the gay best friend, I'm very interested in the space of politically incorrect humor that is acceptable only because the work has built up self-awareness in other areas. That's a difficult negotiation, but this movie balances it. 50. Yesterday (Danny Boyle)- There's one twist that stretches the moral center of the film, and two minutes later there's a twist that's probably just a bridge too far in good taste. Other than that, this is a really cute Richard Curtis script, and it's nice to hear "Hey Jude" on movie speakers. 49. Ready or Not (Radio Silence)- Short and spicy, despite one or two too many twists. I'm in the front row of the Adam Brody Revival, but I appreciated the movie more as an exercise in the paranoid misery built into wealth. I wish I could have written the line down, but Alex says something like, "I didn't realize how much you could do just because your family said that it was okay," and that's the whole film. If you can, see it without watching the trailer first.

48. The Laundromat (Steven Soderbergh)- Mary Ann Bernard is a Steven Soderbergh pseudonym, but what if he did hire an outside editor? What if someone saved him from himself? It's hard to believe that Meryl Streep is the heart of the film--if the film's thesis is "The meek will inherit the Earth?"--if we go on a twenty-minute detour to an African family and a ten-minute detour to China. I laughed quite a bit, and I admire the audacity of the ending. But this is a movie that knows what it's about without knowing how to be about it.

47. High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh)- As a person who can cite most NBA players' cap figures off the top of my head, I should love High Flying Bird, a movie about a sports agent who tries to topple the system during an NBA lockout. Instead I liked it okay. It takes an hour to kick into high gear, but once it does, some self-contained scenes are powerhouses, and the writer of Moonlight was always going to provide an emotional kick that is sometimes absent from Soderbergh's work. Like Soderbergh's Unsane from last year, High Flying Bird is shot on an iPhone, an appropriate form given that the execution is a do-it-yourself parable that takes place mostly inside. Soderbergh is a man who has always tried to trade the ossified system of moviemaking for experimentation, so most reviews have pointed toward the meta quality of capturing a character doing that same thing in another medium. Like most of his post-retirement work, however, I find myself asking one question: "Would anyone care if this were made by another director?" 46. Piercing (Nicolas Pesce)- Good sick fun with a taste for the theatrical. I saw twist one and twist three coming, but twist two was ingenious. It ends the only way it can, which is okay. 45. Booksmart (Olivia Wilde)- At first the film is hard to acclimate to, stylized as it is into a very specific but absurd setting, counteracted by a very specific and realistic relationship. The music cues are all awful until the Perfume Genius one, which is so perfect that it erases the half-dozen clunkers.But it's smartly funny, funnily warm, and warmly smart. The screenplay does some clever things with swapping the protagonists' wants and needs at crucial times. Molly will have an obvious drive that overrides Amy's fear, and then a few scenes later, there will be an organic reversal. 44. Joker (Todd Phillips)- Joker presents more ideas than it cogently lands. I don't disagree with Amanda Dobbins's burn that it feels more like a vision board than a coherent story. Still, its success kind of fascinates me. This dark provocation, shot on real locations, has way more in common with Phoenix entries like You Were Never Really Here than it does with the DCEU. In fact, the comic book shoehorns feel like intrusions into a story about a guy who likes to Jame Gumb skinny-dance. Dunk on me if you want, but I think it's most eerie and affecting as a portrait of mental illness. Whereas Joker is a criminal mastermind in Batman lore, this is a guy helpless enough to scrawl into a notebook, "The worst part about having a mental illness is pretending to people that you don't." And that idea gets borne out in a scene in which he's pausing and rewinding a tape to study how a talk show guest sits and waves like a regular person. It's rare enough to see a person this mentally ill depicted on screen; it's even rarer to see someone this aware of his own isolation and otherness.

Reforming the Grading System, Not Grade Culture, is the Key to Fixing SAS’s Toxic Academic Environment

To put things simply, I would like learning a lot more if there weren’t this thing called grades.

Unfortunately, although students, teachers, and administrators alike take pride in the academic excellence that SAS has cultivated over its hundred-year history, the pressure of academic achievement has become a toxic burden rather than an opportunity to overcome challenges. In Luca Lee’s written piece “Graded” published in our school’s Ascent magazine, he frames the issue perfectly:

We have created ourselves a competitive environment, a one where many of us look only for answers, forgetting to indulge ourselves in the challenge.

Although grades have always dominated, if not defined, learning experiences for students at SAS, the toxic nature of SAS’s academic environment extends beyond grades or GPAs. Any form of academic work, not just academic measurements, has become sources of stress for students’ daily lives. Areas of passion, be it a project or investigation in an area of interest, could easily be transformed into areas of stress. As a result, this completely impedes a student’s ability to enjoy learning challenges, as academic risks become threats to an academic portfolio rather than valuable experiences. For example, while capstones and projects are meant to incentivize students to take a more proactive role in learning, often times they ultimately become greater sources of frustration due to the pressure of achieving a high grade.

Granted, the issue is not unheard of, and thus action has already been taken— underclassmen have sat through various counselling core sessions to encourage them to strike balance in their respective lives, and college counsellors have presented many explanations to downplay the importance of grades. Counsellors have made numerous efforts in the past to relieve students of this seemingly unsurmountable pressure, but to no avail.

Even though there has been open conversation regarding the role of “grade culture” in our community, our actual grading system has seldom been included in the discussion. While grade culture does play a prominent role in fostering negativity within our academic environment, the role of the actual grading system is often overlooked and undermined due to its nature— the letter grading system is used in countless high schools worldwide. However, after many failed solutions that only involve simple conversation, it has become apparent that reform in the grading system, not attempts to create cultural change, is the only real chance the school has in invoking major ideology shifts in attitude or perspective regarding the topic of grades.

However, this issue is not one that is unique to our school community. Pedagogical research been calling for a change in the grade system as well. In A School Leader’s Guide to Standards-Based Grading published by Marzano Research, Robert J. Marzano states:

Grading is a well-entrenched element of education in the United States. As Lynn Olson (1995) observed, grades are “one of the most sacred traditions in American education… The truth is that… grades have acquired an almost cult-like importance in American schools. They are primary, shorthand tool for communicating to parents how children are faring” (p.24). In 2004, grading expert Susan Brookhart noted, “In a perfect world there would be no need for the kind of grades we use in school today…. [But] grades are not going to disappear from schools anytime soon” (p.4). This is certainly true; grades are here to stay. However, acknowledging that grades are an important element of schooling does not mean that the current systems and processes used to assign grades are necessarily the most effective.

In blunt terms, the current letter system does not adequately meet the standards of its own purpose; it’s simply impossible for a single letter to accurately reflect all the various complexities that qualify to be part of a student’s demonstration of mastery of an entire subject. Marzano elaborates on this point perfectly:

Translating an entire body of information about students’ performance and achievement over a quarter, trimester, or semester into one overall evaluation, or omnibus grade, is a daunting task for any teacher and not supported by much of the extant research.

To present a better visualization of this oversimplification, we can turn to metaphorical representations that provide an objective lens for assessing this issue. Mr. Matthew Zeman, an SAS teacher currently teaching AP Capstone Seminar and Innovation Institute, also recognizes this oversimplification in our current grading system. When explaining the issue, he turned to an unlikely source— video games.

For those who play sports games, player ratings are a familiar concept. These ratings are as overall scores that reflect a player's ability. In the case of NBA 2K, these overall ratings are concluded from different scores in various categories, such as inside finishing, midrange, 3PT shooting, among others. Here is an example of one those ratings:

This player, Lebron James, lacks significantly in some specific areas such as Midrange and Rebounding; however, he excels in others. All his strengths and weaknesses were combined for the overall rating of 96. Metaphorically, the overall rating would reflect the overall grade of a subject, and the different categories would reflect the different curricular standards. However, unlike the video game rating systems, the level of achievement in different standards are seldom communicated to students— while students are very aware of their overall score, the learning system hinders them from reflecting on the specific areas they need to improve on as a learner. Thus, this process undermines the complexity of each student’s learner profile, oversimplifying the “level of mastery of a subject” each individual student has achieved. This also damages the students’ ability to learn and improve on their weaknesses, which is again explained by Marzano:

In 2007, John Hattie and Helen Timpherly pointed out that “feedback us effective when it consists of information about progress, and/or about how to proceed” (p. 89). A single letter grade summarizing a student’s performance in one content area does not provide this type of specific feedback.

Furthermore, the concept of letter grades fully undermines the learning process— overall grades not only oversimplify the mastery of various skills or content, it also fails to reflect a learning curve. These are two hypothetical student scores that can reflect this shortcoming:

In these hypothetical cases, both students had 4 summative assignments evaluating one subject over the course of one semester. Student A performed at the same proficiency over the course of the four assignments, whereas Student B improved over the course of the semester. Yet, both of them would have the same average, despite Student B obviously having demonstrated a mastery in the assessed area. Therefore, this reflects that a grading system of averaging scores unfairly overshadow Student B’s true ability due to his or her early struggles

My experiences cannot reflect all the views of my peers, but for me personally, this type of misrepresentation is one of my main resentment towards grades. My fear of failure and low scores does not come from the failure itself, but rather from the fact that it will overshadow my future successes. Due to this misrepresentation, the grading system inevitably fosters the negative fear for failure. Thus, the toxic nature of academic in SAS isn’t something abnormal or unreasonable. How can students possibly learn to thrive when faced with academic challenge, or to “appreciate the learning”, under a system that already undermines (or even punishes) the learning process?

No amount of conversation can ever invoke a significant change within the student population. Especially for students that are also victim to deeply rooted academic pressure from parents, sessions of preaching to mass audiences will not be sufficient to lift the academic burden under a system that will not reward the learning process. Only when there is a grading system that does not punish students for failure—one that provides appropriate, not necessarily infinite, amounts of opportunity to prove consistent proficiency in the future, can a shift in attitude truly begin to materialize within our community.

There are courses in the SAS High School curriculum that already implement a reformed system that have proven to have positive effects on its students.

One example is the grading method implemented in the course of AP Capstone Seminar. In the course, various skills are assessed by collecting multiple evidence points that serve as data to measuring the student’s mastery of the selected skill. Essentially, every assignment is neither formative and summative, as each assessment is simply a data point to to inform the instructor regarding the student’s current level of mastery. At the end of semester, students map out their levels of mastery for each skill and engage in a conversation with the teacher regarding how their levels of mastery would translate into an overall letter grade.

However, this fluidity between the concepts of “formative” and “summative” inherently exist in every assignment or assessment. Formative Assessment & Standards-Based Grading, which is another book published by Marzano Research, explains this further:

In fact it would be accurate to say that, in general, a specific assessment is neither formative nor summative— it all depends on how the information is used. Theoretically them, the same assessment could be used in the formative sense or in a summative sense. John Hattie (2003) made this point quite eloquently:

As illustrated by Bob Stake’s maxim: when the cook tastes the soup it is formative, when the guests taste the soup it is summative. Thus a key issue is timing, and it is possible that the same stimulus (e.g tasting the soup) can be interpreted and used for both forms of assessment. Hence, it is NOT the instrument… that is formative and summative. It is the timing of the interpretation and the purpose to which the information is used. (p.4)

This grading method significantly limits the chances of a student being undermined by early struggles. Although the stress to do well is inevitable, the fear of being misrepresented in the grade book is taken away, which in turn removes a significant source of stress. However, it also does not take away the academic rigor of the course, since proving mastery would require consistent demonstrations of the select skill.

In contrast, within our school grading system, the terms “formative” and “summative” have become signposts for students to identify assignments they would need to “try hard on”, rather than tools of measurement to reflect an overall learning journey. While on the surface this may seem to be a product of students’ mindsets, this attitude is actually a result of an institutionalized separation between “what goes into the grade book” and “what doesn’t go into the grade book”. Since “formative” and “summative” assignments often measure the same skill or content area, there are no logical reason that explains why both shouldn’t be considered as measurements to inform a student’s mastery in a curricular standard. Thus, the notion that only summative assessments “count” is absurd considering that the two assessments essentially do not differ from each other. This standpoint is also reflected by Marzano’s argument also in Formative Assessment & Standards-Based Grading:

…a summative score should not be derived from a single final assessment. Rather, a summative score should be the most reasonable representation of a student’s final status at a particular point in time.

Thus, instead of perceiving each assignment as individual assessments separate from each other, we need to perceive assignments as data points that build towards a reflection of a student’s ability by the end of a given time frame (in our school’s case, a semester). However, the fluidity between formative and summative is not to be confused with a “infinite retake” system. In addition, teachers cannot possibly create a retake for every graded assignment, as it will interfere with the workload of future assignments. The system will have to rely on future assignments that can serve as demonstrations of mastery for a previous skill or standard.

The concept of formative and summative fluidity, however, also brings us to the major flaws and questions that arise from the current composition of final exams— the purpose of final exams is a blurry and undefined one. Currently, many final exams, especially for content-based courses, covers all subject areas or standards in the past semester. This has inevitable downsides, as again noted by Marzano:

As noted by Pellegrino, Chudowsky, and Glaser (2001): “often a single assessment is used for multiple purposes; in general however, the more purposes a single assessment aims to serve, the more each purpose will be compromised” (p. 2).

The degree can a final exam actually reflect curricular mastery is not established, which raises many doubts in its ability to actually evaluate a student’s level of proficiency. For example, how many questions is a sufficient amount to assess a standard or topic? If it’s essentially the same content as covered prior, why is it weighed more significantly? In straightforward terms, what’s the point of having an assessment that is essentially a review of all covered topics? If these questions cannot be answered in a clear manner, then this is an indicator that our system of final exams need to be reevaluated in terms of its role in assessing students.

There are counter arguments that can be made against reforming the grade system. For example, the current grade system at SAS already produces high scores and academic achievement— it is not a secret that SAS is one of the best academic institutions in the world. Grades provide incentives for students to put effort into their studies. However, it is indispensable to realize the relationship has become toxic. Does SAS want to produce learners who have a genuine passion for challenge who may occasionally dip below the mark, or does it want to produce stressed out and grade-obsessed students who will produce high marks at a heavy cost of their emotional well-being?  

Another legitimate argument can also be made that reforming grade culture would be a better solution to completely eradicating SAS’s competitive academic environment; some will argue that the pressure imposed by parents, peers, or even themselves are the real roots of the problem. On the other hand, reforming the grading system would be the most direct and clear option in solving the issue— eliminating the possibility of the fears themselves is more effective than somehow convincing students to let go of them.

Thus, it is time to rethink our approaches to fixing our academic environment; rather than focusing on what the students’ mindsets should be, we should start focusing on what can be done to shift those mindsets. This is SAS’s one real shot of truly upholding its historical promise of cultivating a lifelong passion for learning within its students.

Alice Qin 

On Experience and Scarcity

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

First and foremost: the subject of this essay has been banging around my mind for a long time, but trying to put it into words turned out to be difficult. It wasn’t until I read Holyfant’s’s excellent essay, towards a “darker” femslash, that I found my starting point. Even so, I often struggle to find the right terms and language to describe my own personal experience, so I’m going to ask for a little leeway here.

Holyfant’s essay mentions three main reasons why people hesitate to write femslash. If I can (roughly) paraphrase: the first reason is the fact that compared to M/M fic, F/F is a niche fandom with relatively little feedback opportunities; the second is a  lack of interesting female characters and F/F relationships in canon; and the third is the feeling of responsibility that comes with writing less-than-perfect women. Holyfant focuses on the third point, which is an issue all of its own (and one that’s also echoed in havingbeenbreathedout’s “On the personal as normal; on the normal as political”.) But personally, I’ve always felt like I’ve been more influenced by the second reason. The consequences of what we write, the fear of the way we write a character having widespread consequences – that’s something I am, in a way, already a little used to. I’ve written a lot of what I’d call dubious shit; I’m used to dealing with the fear of consequences of writing things that could be generalised. Whether it’s women who are less than perfect or relationships seriously veering into the abusive, I’m always of the opinion that my audience is smart enough to see nuance and not to generalise. My own main problem isn’t really the political repercussions of writing femslash, if you can put it that way.

My problem is the canon material.

I’m speaking from my own experience here– I have no way of knowing how widespread this particular problem is. On the other hand, I’ve seen enough people write musings and reactions about similar issues to suspect I’m not just the only person struggling with this.

Anyway. Let’s start with my backlog of fic. AO3 tells me that right now, I have twice the amount of M/M fics compared to F/F fics. Looking at it by wordcount, it gets even worse. The longer ones, the intense ones, are always inevitably male/male ships.

This used to annoy me a lot. I couldn’t understand why I kept going for the male pairings. Had I really internalised this kind of misogyny so badly, that I couldn’t see the potential of female characters? Was I a Bad Feminist for ignoring the stories about women and focusing on men? I was a little disturbed at this clear trend in my own writing, yet I couldn’t really find a way to fix it – because I couldn’t find any femslash pairing that really inspired me enough to write about in great depth. But why? Why did female pairings fail to intrigue me? Was this really just internalised sexism?

Well, maybe. But there were other factors at play here too, ones that took me a while two discover. Two things helped me find them.

The first was genderswapping. The second was Person of Interest.

Genderswapping – shorthand in this context for taking a canon cis male character and creating a cis female version of him, also known as spectrumslide – is something that I find really interesting. I know there are a lot of people who are opposed, who see it as a way to drive out actual canon women in favour of male characters, never mind the gender change. But for me, there is no better tool to challenge the way you think about gender and personality and relationships, and how they’re all subconsciously intertwined.

When I read genderswapped stories, I often got annoyed at how far the female versions were from their male counterparts. Traits that I enjoyed were changed, or warped, or erased altogether. These stories didn’t appeal to me at all. On the other hand, some other writers created characters that did appeal to me, massively. Because they weren’t like others I’d read about before, because they possessed the same traits that attracted me to their male counterparts. Genderswapping offered me female characters unlike any I’d seen before in mainstream fiction. Rough around the edges. Unemotional. Violent. Aggressively sexual. Bitterly sarcastic. Nasty women, if you will. Women that seem to be the opposite of everything that’s traditionally associated with femininity.

(It’s probably important to note at this point that my type of character tends to be a villain, or at the very least somewhat of an anti-hero. Relatedly, the relationships I get inspired by are invariably damaging, unhealthy, possessive, power-unbalanced or twisted – relationships that almost seem non-existent between fictional women. But I’ll come back to that later.)

It got me thinking. In my head I started playing around with character stereotypes. A hard-drinking emotionally blunt promiscuous violent man as James Bond, for example. What do you get when you take those characteristics and put them in a cis woman? The hardboiled noir detective, the knight in shining armour… Can those exist in female versions? While keeping the essence of their character, their personality intact?

I started to challenge my own views on gender, feminity, and masculinity. What do I associate with “woman” as an abstract concept? When I create OC’s as side characters, why do I choose to give them one gender and not another one? Why do I automatically give a character this or that trait just because of their gender?

There were a whole lot of ugly subconscious connections I laid bare like this, and I found it was pretty confrontational. It’s not fun, discovering how biased you really are.

So, the logical next step was to try my own hand at genderswapping. Pure hypothesis-testing, that: if it really were just the characters’ personality and interpersonal dynamics that attract me, that should work just as well if I swapped out one gender for another one, right? And I suppose it did. But it took some work.

Like Holyfant mentions in her excellent essay: it’s very easy to fall into stereotyping when writing women. You’d think that taking a male character’s personality as a starting point might be a solution to that, but it isn’t quite that easy. For example: what is unnerving and aggressive sexuality in a man can become, in a woman, that boring old cliché of the femme fatale – if you don’t pay attention, that is. This isn’t made easier by the fact that there aren’t many examples of fictional women like the ones I want to write. To create something on your own, without a blueprint to fall back on… It’s tricky.

Then there’s the fact that you can’t just transpose characteristics from men to women. Mind you, I’m not saying that women are fundamentally different than men or any shite like that. But the way society looks at women and men -  here there are radical differences. On the whole, society’s reaction to certain traits is vastly different depending on if it’s a man or a woman doing it, which also means that the character themselves is going to look differently at that. A physically strong, violent woman is considered an anomaly, a freak; a physically strong, violent man is an action hero. Or, the other way around: a gentle, caring man is considered weak, while a gentle, caring woman is an example of traditional womanhood. So if you write a woman who’s violent, you’re going to have to take into account that society as a whole tends to condemn that. And if a whole society condemns a character’s personality, that’s going to have an effect on the way a character sees herself, too. it really is a bit more complicated than just swapping around the pronouns and calling it a day.

It takes work, it takes practice. That much had become painfully obvious to me. If I reread my first attempts at genderswapping now, I cringe a little. Not that they’re bad, per se. It’s just that they’re not exactly original. There’s a giggling lipstick-wearing short-skirted seductress, there’s lean-but-not-muscular assassins for hire… It isn’t what I’d call groundbreaking – and even at the time, it wasn’t quite what I wanted either. I just didn’t know how to make what I wanted, at first. It took a pretty long while before I finally had my first genderswapped character that actually felt like a real, original, complex flesh-and-blood woman.

So. What I learned by genderswapping is 1) it’s bloody difficult to write a female version as nuanced and complex and original as the male original, 2) clichés are always lurking, ready to pounce, but 3) in the end it really is someone’s personality and relationship that makes me interested.

Those points can just as easily be applied to non-genderswapped female characters: for me, at least, women are harder to write interestingly than men, at first. It’s less practiced. But – the positive thing I’d learned – I really do have a type regardless of gender. Meaning that if I wanted to write more (non-genderswapped) femslash, I merely had to look for two or more fictional women with the same traits as the male characters I enjoyed, and then squish ‘em together.

Problem was… They didn’t really seem to exist?

Most relationships between fictional women, if they’re explicit, are shown to be soft! And gentle! And good and pure! Tara and Willow in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, for example – oh, there was a lot of fucked-upness going on there but the essence of their relationship was tenderness and open, honest love and mutual support. Which is great! But not what I want to write about. Even a pairing like Black Sails’ Max and Anne – both morally ambiguous, three-dimensional, and in Anne Bonny’s case stereotype-defying – are portrayed as essentially a gentle, healing, deeply caring relationship. Those unhealthy relationships I like to write about, the mutually destructive ones… They didn’t seem to show up in fiction.

Then I started watching Person of Interest.

Person of Interest has Root, a major villain-later-turned-hero. As far as female characters go, she’s sort of midway. She’s still flirty and seductive, and later openly emotional and caring – far more traditionally female than any of the male characters in the series. But she’s a hacker, she’s aggressive, she’s independent, and her plotlines give her agency. She’s original. She’s got an edge beyond the stereotype.

Person of Interest also has Shaw. And this is where things get very, very interesting.

Shaw is blunt. She’s unemotional. She’s aggressive, likes guns, likes violence. She avoids romantic relationships – not because of some painful deep trauma that gets healed in the end by the ‘right person’, just because that’s who she is. She’s sexual, but in a rather forthright, dominant, taking-what-she-wants-without-complications way you tend to only see in men. And right from the start, her interactions with Root are decidedly sexual. Their very first interaction is laced with BDSM-implications, and when they start interacting more – once Root has come over to the good side –, every exchange between them is full of barbs and barely-concealed aggression and power play. When Shaw at a later point describes a potential relationship between her and Root as a four alarm fire at an oil refinery, she isn’t lying. And when they finally end up having sex (it’s a dream, sort of, but shush) it looks more like a wrestling match than like “making love”, each one tearing at the other one and refusing to back down, not afraid to use punches or kicks in between the kisses. Miles away from the smiling-laughing-cuddling-vanilla sex Tara and Willow have.

It still doesn’t quite work for me, on the whole. Root, although Amy Acker does her damn best to give her life, still fits the traditional model too much for me to connect. She feels more like an idealised version of a woman than a real one. Especially in the later seasons her reactions are far more emotional, sentimental, than I’d really expect or want from her – again, traditionally feminine (in contrast to Shaw, who remains her gruff self). And of course Root and Shaw (spoiler alert) don’t really end up together. It’s very much implied that they would end up together, but then – in fine queer fictional woman tradition –  Root goes and dies before they can get there. It’s a shame, because flirting is one thing, but an actual relationship between those two would’ve been something I’d kill to see.

Still. Here was an example of the dynamic I like, but between two women. It does exist, it is possible. And seeing that gave me a starting point, a sort of blueprint to use for my own writing.

So. Where does that leave me, and my 2:1 ratio of M/M versus F/F fics?

The way I see it, there’s a dual responsibility. Part of the lack of interesting, flawed, complex,  ugly female characters in fiction has to do with the lack of material in canon – not just that there are very few female characters to start with, but also that this trend means fanfic writers have so few examples we can base our own work on. We still have to carve out our own model, here.

But another part is my own responsibility. Writing flawed women, unsympathetic women, women with ugly personalities or traits – that takes more work and effort. It doesn’t come quite naturally to me yet, which means it’s harder to write, which means I tend to avoid it in favour of easier things – which in turn, means there’s fewer ‘dark’ femslash in the word, and thus lesser examples to work from.

It’s a vicious self-perpetuating circle. But it’s starting to get its dents. In the form of Root and Shaw, of Gillian Anderson’s fingerlickingly complex Stella Gibson, in everything Sally Wainwright has written. And in our own work, of course. Story by story, we chip away at the block and create images and thoughts about the full complexity in relationships between women.

About the author

Pasiphile is a fanfiction author who mainly writes for Sherlock, but their work also includes Discworld, Attack on Titan, Luther and a heap of other fandoms. They have also co-edited two anthologies of original erotica under the name of Alex Freeman. You can find them on tumblr and AO3.

Extra Typology Vol #2 - 1. Introduction/ The Book

So, for this installment of Extra Typology”, I consulted one Matthew Campling, or rather, his book “Essence and the Enneagram”, for another take on the typology system known as “Essence Type”, “Planetary Body Type” or “12 Type Enneagram”. 

I chose this book because it was one of the more popularized version of the system, likely to be what most are working from, as well as a fairly generalized version with less esoterics stuff - Or so I thought. 

The author catches themselves repeatedly having moment where they’re like, “This would lead too far/is not the subject here” and tries to keep it brief as to not beat a reader over the head, but they still very much refer to & rely on it less artfully than the other person did, and seem to think 

For example they argue that it has to be 6 (main) types because of some cool numerology trick he can do but if I get basic real numbers you understand that a number with a repeating series of numerals after the decimal point really isn’t that special and that you could find one for lots & lots of number sequences... Ultimately it’s not a huge essential characteristic of the universe but an artifact from using decimal numbers, in, say, base 60 (which the summerians used) or 12 (which actually makes more sense because it has more divisors) the digits would be quite different. 

They also have this fishy sounding bit about how speaking speed supposedly impacts your mindset - Like, I’m sure forcing yourself to talk differently to actually reach a different mindset is effective in the sense all suggestion & conscious effort is, but, how would this even hold up against cultural differences & different language sentence melodies? 

I have to remind myself that non-nerds tend to be a lot more ‘fuzzy’ about this as I was when I was younger so a lot of this might actually impress a casual reader who doesn’t have a very structured, mechanistic grasp on science or psychology & thus might be more easily impressed by this (but probably understands a lot about som of the bajillion things I’M clueless about, don’t get me wrong)

But even when it comes to the material itself, I am retroactively very glad I also bought the other book. It was more self-aware about the esoterics and even when it comes to the actual material itself, it was more in-depht and mechanistic, giving a dynamic understanding of the reasons behind reaction & how to deal with them, the inner dynamis rather than just stating pros cons & traits.

Also for a school of thought espousing nonjudgement and a system supposed to work through nonjudgement (instead of becoming annoyed at ppl or yourself you accept that its just their nature) they could do a bit better on the nonjudgemental part - I mentioned that in the last book, the Venusians kinda got the short end of the stick, being somewhat portrayed as bland & boring (and I suppose some of them can be), but even so it (if perhaps a tad condescendingly) aknowledges their value & explains the inner mechanics quite illustratively, and the author admitted that they might be a tad biased as a Jovian. 

In this book, the short end of the stick goes to the Lunar and Lunar-Venus (sadly - their webside made the latter out to sound quite interesting), which is a bit unfortunate as I’m a Lunar myself & the descriptions were such that it’d be hard to recognize myself in them if I hadn’t read the other book. 

I mean I get that to some extent this whole exercise is to be about self-discovery & observation/reflection and that involves swallowing or at least contemplating the occasional bit of negative feedback, pitfalls & warning so I try to at least evaluate the info & will try to present the author’s POV here but at the same time there’s some other info or other perspectives I know to be valid which suggests that at least some bits are unfair - 

If we were to put this in mbti terms, it’s an ExxJ’s perspective or misunderstanding of IxxP types, and, hey, I used to mindunderstand EJs too as a teenagers, thinking they seemed rather frantic & crazy driven to do superficial things that don’t really matter even self-destructive things, doesn’t help that EJs,  are rather prominent & visible in society and, in the case of ESJs, very common & thus seen as ‘normal’ so I was aware of a difference there perhaps also because as a 4-fixer I’m sensitive toward noticing differences so I’d wonder, “Am I just more woke than most peeps?”, “Am I somehow defective?” and the usual teenager shtick. 

That said it’s quite possible for an IxxP, especially one who’s more 4/5 than 6/9, to be perfectly happy as & even seek out the outcast or subculture role & eventually I grew up & made my peace with it.  Eventually I realize that some of the EJs really want what they are working for  and that what I want is just different without there needing to be a value judgement. (After all what’s wrong with them doing what they want as long as they’re ethical? Who am I to say it’s a bad goal? It’s just their version of being themselves. Conversely I can’t complain about the consequences of what I strive towards even if its different from society’s pervasive EJ values. And while there is harmful bias to some extent EJs are pervasive because they care about making themselves heard in broad society more than we do.)

I guess this is only fair after the privilege that most mbti stuff is written by fellow Ne users to the chagrin of the sensors. If most mbti-cians are intuitives, then most Essence Type writers tend to be Jupiters with Mild mars admixture. Just because the perspective is a bit skewed doesn’t mean that the information, though presented through a lens & requiring a grain of salt, is useless tho, not as long as the reader is willing to think for themselves, ‘excavate’ the pure observations &  bring their own perspective to it. 

Indeed the strenght of this book is that it specifically considers a lot of contexts that these differences could come to bear in (albeit briefly & bare bones-y) & preents them in an applicable manner - work, romance, friendship, leisure etc.  

At first I thought this book would be my primary source with the previous one bought more for entertaining curiosity and having different perspectives & interpretations of the same system, but I think the other book is ultimately better, especially since this one doesn’t really spare you the esoterics. The other seemed aware that different typologies are tools whereas this one goes out of its way to argue the ‘corectness’ which might be interesting for the sorts of people who like to argue theology but doesn’t really impress or appear relevant to me personally, it’s a “how many angels fit on the tip of a needle” type question. - There’s also the potential POV that the 9gram describes the potential masks or distortions ppl have whereas this one describes what’s underneath, though I do not personally subscribe to it, my opinion being that a great deal of personality is inborn but what version of it you become, how much potential you tap & how much you accept yourself is up to nurture & choice/will.  

I appreciate that the author tried to make it widely understandeable without dumbing it down, but it was a bit... hm... to see them talk about the “great important deep wisdom” they shared with us when it was pretty simplistic... You can tell they heard it fro their esoterics “teacher” and were mighty impressed but they seem to be telling us this impressiveness more than they’re suceeding at showing it. 

Simplicity is IMHO one of this system’s strenghts but the thing here is that, I guess, the author tried to explore the “everyone lowkey has all types/energies/human nature aspects” to come up with a dynamicity akin to what some other systems have like tritypes or mbti function dynamics.

Like the previous book it supposes that the main types are more like “pots” we all draw from to some degrees, some of us being pretty clearly in one and others being hybrid types, & ut tries to get into when we use each energy & how we could benefit from more flexible approprite responses - so far so good, that’s ultimately what all typology tells us (watch yourself & consider if your usual course of action is wise here) but I’m not sure if it made sense to characterize this dynamicity or reaction range as the other types, or, I see how it’s an useful shorthand but the specific way the author did it, their dynamicity system wasn’t that good, they failed to really connect it to common RL experiences outside of just sprouting their jargon & interpreting things in that light which gave it less explanatory power and, even worse, led to the types being rather pidgeonholed, especially in terms of life areas & situations, as opposed to the whole, interconnected picture the other book painted, depicting friendship, romance, family & work related to the basic principles of the type in which some are simply navigated more naturally & confidently than other.

From the descriptions here you’d wonder why the Lunar is even an intellectual Type, the whole picture of “nocturnal moody strong introvert” is distorted through a lens that mostly characterizes it as being childlike and self-absorbed & basically being everyone’s inner brat who doesn’t have “real” insights but surely thinks they do, like, it does happen that people, and often lunar-ish people, do that sometimes but this guy just throws it out as a blanket statement, and who the hell wants to be infantilized, or identify with something like that? 

I suppose phrasing it like this is gonna appeal to the proud disney fans & the like & the guy phrased it IMHO  a lot better in his youtube video (”Some people aren’t meant to grow up”... though really, isn’t it more that grownup for us is something different than for a Venusian or how society equates “grow up” with conform? ) Of course if they read this they’d probably think of what an utterly Lunar thing to say that is, but,  I liked the other guy’s approach to vices that treated the serious pitfalls as optional &  described in a structural manner how they coul both arise from & distort the actual essential self. 

He does say that each type acts out its own “interpretation” of the other types/energies/reaction styles, but I think an elaboration of what these perspectives seen through the lens your “home” type (his terminology) specifically look like (in terms of quality, skew & attitude and not just situation) would have gone a long way to make his constructs “flow”. 

Adding to that, is that this version doesn’t include the Solar type (and indeed associates the jovian with the sun) - at first I thought that since they were popularizing it they thought it sounded too “snowflakey” (I disdain that word/concept of it as an insult tho), but now I think it was more because of their numerology trick they thought was indicative of why there should be only 6. 

Part of why I checked out the other book was that I felt Solar was describing something specific & here it seems to have been kind of absorbed into Lunar or Jupiter-Lunar, further making the Lunar a bit flakier & harder to grasp and I thought it was an useful distinction (I am most definitely NOT a Solar, at least not beyond the everyone-has-all-potentials level.)

This situation-reducing works even worse for the hybrid types, which, for one thing, are at times described rather differently than they are in the other book - I’ll still present the descriptions in case hybrid individual identify better with these versions but overall I still think it’s better to just describe the main energies so people, who are all individuals anyways can pick & discern in which aspects & situations they act more like one or more like the other type; Surely better than how this book sorta ends up characterizing the Lunar-Venus hybrid as being all about irresponsible promiscuous fucking & then in every list of situations lits that as a factor or  It’s kinda one-dimensional & dissapointing since it sounded kinda interesting at first. 

Kinda like the cognitive functions where you can say that you use some more then others & some very easily (though I don’t think the essence energies & the functions can be equated, they seem to describe different things, despite some overlaps; The functions seem to further describe & take place in entirely in the neocortex/ “intellectual center” albeit taking in information from below whereas either variety of ennagram seems to look more at different makeups for the whole of the psyche including ppl who have most of the emphasis/trust in other parts than the intellect, though ultimately the distinctions are somewhat illusory especially where “higher” emotions or “quick” reasoning come in. 

One thing the author does sucessfully showcase with a good example is that he is sorta describing something specific & that the system has interesting distinctions - For exaple generally, describing someone as “warm” or “kind” would be treated as almost synonymous descriptions of general niceness, but in the context of this, you average Lunar person could be described as “kind” but would be too aloof to be described as “warm”, whereas a Venusian will be very apparently “warm” but may not necessarily be described as “kind”, whereas someone to whom both adjectives apply is probably a Jovian type. 

Before we get into the actual content, I want to again stress that this is gonna be my interpretation of the material through the lens of what I understood or thought important or wanted to “excavate/filter out”. If you’re seriously interested in this you can get the book yourself & if you don’t have the time or money to do that, just be aware that this is my interpretation not the commonly accepted be all end all truth. 

Apocalypse here: Why Colorado is such a popular setting for humanity’s downfall

In Wasteland 3, the latest entry in the influential role-playing game series, a group of militarized survivors fight through the frozen shells of Colorado Springs, Aspen and Denver during a nuclear winter that makes most blizzards look tame by comparison.

The choice of setting was easy for the video game’s art director.

“We’d done ‘brown and hot’ for two games in Arizona, and we needed a change, so we went with white and cold for this one,” said Aaron Meyers, who lived part-time in Denver during the game’s development. “Colorado seemed like the perfect place to give us that feel and those aesthetics, as well as a wealth of interesting lore and locations to mine for our story.”

Wasteland 3, which was released for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on Aug. 28, joins a long line of video games that have pictured Colorado as a blood-soaked landscape of zombies, foreign military invasions and robot dinosaurs, including acclaimed, multimillion-dollar earners like The Last of Us, Horizon: Zero Dawn, the Dead Rising series, Homefront, World War Z and Call of Duty: Ghosts.

Even those are just one category in a larger group of novels, TV series, films and comics that have mined Colorado for their apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories, from Stephen King’s “The Stand” — which imagined Boulder as the center of humanity’s resistance against a supernatural evil — to “Dr. Strangelove,” “Waterworld,” “Battlefield Earth” and “Interstellar.”

“You can really visualize Colorado when you mention it, even if you’ve never been here,” said Denver author Mario Acevedo, who has written wildly imaginative, urban-fantasy novels starring werewolves, vampires and zombies. “We’re shorthand for ‘mountains,’ but also the type of people who tend to live in the mountains. Scrappy people do what it takes to survive.”

But even as writers and artists paint Colorado with ashen skies, resource-driven riots and nuclear holocausts, the trappings of the post-apocalyptic genre have grown all too cozy in 2020.

Across the U.S., multi-state wildfires, a devastating hurricane, and civic unrest feel like cruel toppings on a summer already larded with misery in the form of a global viral pandemic that has killed nearly 200,000 Americans and left millions unemployed. As the line between depiction and prediction grows almost invisibly thin for post-apocalyptic storytellers, they’ve been forced to turn up the intensity to stand out from our increasingly grim reality.

“Over 40 years of popular culture, a lot of people have looked at what’s happening on a global scale and extrapolated these disasters that end up mirroring reality,” said Boulder novelist Carrie Vaughn, whose 2017 book “Bannerless” won sci-fi’s coveted Philip K. Dick award.

They just didn’t think it would arrive so soon — or all at the same time.

“The only thing that hasn’t happened yet is zombies,” Vaughn said with a laugh. “And I’m not going to make any bets against that.”

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For centuries, apocalypse stories centered around humanity’s punishment from angry gods. That changed after World War II as people woke up to the possibility of global nuclear annihilation. Since then, post-apocalyptic stories and dystopian sci-fi have spread out into every facet of popular culture.

But with the events of 2020, the genre seems to be eating itself from the inside out, particularly as the tropes and clichés of the genre continue to pile up. Is there anywhere else to go?

A perfectly terrible place

Yes, things are messed up everywhere. Few people are immune to the “historic convergence of health, economic, environmental and social emergencies,” as the Associated Press called our “turbulent reality” last week.

But even during good times, popular narratives did not usually depict Colorado as a fun, happy place. Westerns and horror were two of the first genres to capitalize on the state’s isolated, hardscrabble reputation in the 20th century through both novels and films. Harsh winters, brutal landscapes, cabin fever and cannibalism are built into the state’s history — and thus the way people continue to perceive Colorado.

“People who aren’t from here view it as a frontier because it still has this kind of Old West-aura to it,” Vaughn said. “Montana feels remote, but somehow, Colorado is very accessible. You’ve got mountains, prairies and lots of pioneer credibility.”

In fact, the rugged lawlessness and individualism of Westerns, as well as tales like “The Shining,” helped set the stage for today’s post-apocalyptic Colorado narratives, which found their lasting visualization in 1979’s ”Mad Max” and its 1981 sequel, “The Road Warrior.”

But movies such as 1984’s ”Red Dawn” — which imagines Calumet (a former mining town north of Walsenburg) as ground zero for a military invasion by the Soviet Union — also influenced a generation of storytellers.

“I was 11 or 12 when that came out and it was a big favorite of mine,” Vaughn said. “It’s just ridiculous, though. How realistic is an army coming in and trying to occupy the Rocky Mountains? And yet the movie was so iconic that it imprinted on a lot of people.”

Vaughn is a self-described military brat who first came to Colorado when her father was stationed in Colorado Springs. She believes our concentration of military bases plays a big role in the casting of the state. For decades, storytellers have returned to Colorado to visit the command center inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs, which has been imagined as both a catalyst for a global nuclear disaster and the last refuge in an irradiated world (see “Dr. Strangelove,” the “Terminator” series, “Jeremiah,” “Interstellar,” etc.).

“I love it because of ‘WarGames’ and ‘Stargate SG-1,’ ” Vaughn said of Cheyenne Mountain’s recurring role in science fiction. “But I got to tour NORAD in high school through my Girl Scouts troop, and again in my current events class, and of course it looks nothing like the underground city you see in most movies. The big blast door, at least, is accurate.”

Some storytellers, such as Wasteland 3 art director Meyers, lean into their artistic license.

“We tend to parody cliché rather than avoiding it entirely, so a few of Colorado’s pop culture connections get a nod and a wink,” he said. “But we didn’t go out of our way to include or exclude any trope based on whether it was well known. If it worked for the story or added to the atmosphere, we put our own twist on it and used it.”

Like Meyers, Wasteland 3 senior concept artist Dan Glasl has lived in Colorado (in the latter’s case, growing up just west of Colorado Springs) and visited most of the iconic areas depicted in the game, from Garden of the Gods to downtown Denver’s Union Station, the Colorado State Capitol and even the former Stapleton Airport.

“We did try to pick locations and landmarks that would be iconic to Coloradans and interesting and visually appealing to outsiders,” Meyers said. “So you can visit places like the Garden of the Gods and the Denver (International) Airport, and see our takes on them, as well as lesser-known places like Peterson Air Force base, and then sillier places like Santa’s Workshop — which is in fact a front for a drug operation.”

Whose apocalypse?

While outsiders may see us a mono-culture, Coloradans know how radically different the conservative Eastern Plains or Western Slope are from ritzy ski-resort towns and liberal Front Range cities. Like Stephen King’s Maine, Colorado is diverse enough in geography and culture to welcome a variety of fictional interpretations.

But that doesn’t mean they’re accurate.

“If you say ‘Colorado’ to someone in the Midwest, they’ll have certain stereotypes about us,” Acevedo said. “And storytellers use that to their advantage. We’re remote enough that they can fill in the blanks and people will buy it.”

Most of these stories don’t reach beyond the history of European settlers as their implied starting points, whereas Colorado’s Native American, Spanish and Mexican history runs much deeper. Until the last century, birth rates in the mountain west were persistently low, Acevedo said, due to the persistently harsh conditions.

That led to constant, life-or-death clashes between indigenous tribes that were, for all intents and purposes, their own versions of the apocalypse. (And that’s not even considering the arrival of European settlers.)

“The Arapaho, Comanche and Utes all had low survival rates,” Acevedo said. “You can’t go to any one part of this land and say, ‘Well, this is the pure, original history of it,’ because everything is folded over everything else. When each previous civilization or society ended, it was truly their apocalypse. You have to look at the history of a people, not just the history of a region.”

For example, few Colorado stories — apocalyptic, western or otherwise — dig back to the Cliff Dwellers of Mesa Verde, whose civilization collapsed near the end of the 13th century due to drought. Despite their essentially Stone Age technology, the Ancestral Puebloans traded with travelers from all over the region and left spectacular marks on their environment.

“The people living in Colorado 1,000 years ago were a lot more aware of what was going on around them than we give them credit for,” Acevedo said. “But with oral history and no written language, it was harder to keep track of things. You could go back however far you want and find an interesting story about some of the early Cro-Magnons coming across the land bridge, and the onset of the Ice Age — that being an appropriately apocalyptic event for them.”

As in reality, not every fictional character is affected the same way by disasters. People with money and privilege tend to see the effects last, insulated as they are from the rusty clockwork of everyday life.

But when a story involves disasters that affect us all — climate change, water shortages, viral pandemics and zombie/alien invasions — there’s opportunity for pointed social commentary and personal reflection, authors say.

“There are 10 million stories about how computing is going to change our lives,” said Paonia-born Paolo Bacigalupi, a bestselling sci-fi author and Hugo award winner, in a 2015 interview. “I think we can have a few more about climate change, drought, water rights, the loss of biodiversity and how we adapt to a changing environment.”

Bacigalupi’s acclaimed sci-fi novel “The Water Knife” imagines a near future in which the Southwest is dramatically remade by clashes over water resources. Bacigalupi was inspired, in part, by watching the fortunes of the rural area he grew up in rise and fall over dwindling water resources.

“I’m constantly looking over my shoulder,” he said shortly before “The Water Knife” was published, “because it seems so glaringly obvious that someone else would be writing about this exact same thing.”

Too real?

Before the title screen for Wasteland 3 appears, players are shown a disclaimer: “Wasteland 3 is a work of fiction. Ideas, dialog (sic) and stories we created early in development have in some cases been mirrored by our current reality. Our goal is to present a game of fictional entertainment, and any correlation to real-world events is purely coincidental.”

The game’s art director, Meyers, declined to answer questions about the reasoning behind the disclaimer, but that’s understandable. Games like Wasteland 3 typically take several years, hundreds of people and millions of dollars to produce. Appearing too topical, or turning off potential players with real-world, political overtones, can limit a game’s all-important appeal and profits.

Legal concerns also trail post-apocalyptic games set in real locations. When the PlayStation 4 exclusive Horizon: Zero Dawn launched to critical acclaim and massive sales in 2017, its publicists pitched The Denver Post on an article exploring their high-tech location scouting, which resulted in stunningly detailed Colorado foliage, weather patterns and simulated geography.

However, game developers would only agree to an interview if trademarked names were not mentioned, given that the studio had apparently not cleared their usage. While The Denver Post declined to write about it at the time, other media outlets ran photos of the game’s bombed-out, overgrown takes on Red Rocks Amphitheatre and what would become Empower Field at Mile High, as well as various natural formations and instantly recognizable statues in downtown Colorado Springs.

That gives Wasteland 3 — which uses elements of parody — some leeway, in the same way that TV’s “South Park” has mocked local celebrities like Jake Jabs, Ron Zappolo and John Elway without getting sued.

“We did have to change a few things here and there, but the references should still be clear to those who know,” Meyers said of Wasteland 3 items like Boors Beer (take a wild guess). “We’re part of the Xbox Game Studios, so there are teams of folks involved in ensuring we have things like proper rights clearances for names.”

Of course, that’s part of the problem in 2020: Bit by bit, it’s beginning to resemble any number of fictional, worst-case scenarios for the collapse of modern society. Competing political factions often label each other as violent cults. People who don’t wear masks have been described as zombies. Police violence and gun-toting civilians are everywhere.

In that way, it’s getting harder for writers and artists of post-apocalyptic stories to stay one step ahead of the news. There’s a creeping feeling that we’ve seen it all before — even if only in our heads. But good writing can be its own virtue, regardless of subject matter, and the post-apocalyptic genre has always stood proudly on the wobbly, irradiated shoulders of others.

“We’re obviously inspired by others and we wouldn’t even be the first post-apocalyptic game set in Colorado, but we have pretty unique sensibilities,” Meyers said of Wasteland 3. “It’s a very serious and dark world, but we put a unique twist on just about everything, and we really enjoy dark humor. You’re going to have brutal ethical decisions to make about life and death, but there’s a lot of humor throughout as well.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

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from Latest Information https://www.denverpost.com/2020/09/02/apocalypse-here-why-colorado-is-such-a-popular-setting-for-humanitys-downfall/