tells my boyfriend im overwhelmed lately bc ive had 0 alone time for almost a full month now bc we have a friend staying with us until we can get set up in the new house and he goes "oh yeah that sucks im sorry :(( but hey soon ill be working till 10 every night just like (roommate) so whenever we both work youll have most of the day to urself!" i go hide in the closet come out to make a drink and he sits in the kitchen and silently watches me make the drink the entire time

OKAY. SO YEAH. BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS FOR UH, QUITE SOME TIME. PLS STOP ME IF I GO OFF THE RAILS THOUGH LOL

i guess i kinda went over it in my last fic, but i think when it comes to the belt and its curse, it's not gonna leave easy. like, no. not happening. losing isn't a "get out of being cursed free" card. it gave them fame, power, prestige. it tried to eliminate every possible distraction to ensure complete focus on retaining the title. if someone were to lose the title, there has to be repercussions.

so when one loses the title, i think at first, they need to appear okay. like back to normal, everything's fine, the belt's gone and they lower their guard enough to think that they can finally move on from this nightmare. but then after that false sense of freedom, that's when the real effects kick in. like the hallucinations, which i've been tying to their fears and reasons for wanting the belt. so like for oc, wanting to be taken seriously, afraid that maybe he just got lucky in his career and he is more of a joke, the orange punch failing him because of his arm injury etc. for kip, i know he's talked about that injury and other health issues being a dark time in his life, so incorporating this fear of never really recovering and wasting away, being outcasted for his "weirdness" in the company, wanting validation for his efforts in overcoming all of that.

and of course the more graphic ones where these events are perceived by oc and kip as someone else doing something to them, whether it's enemies, friends, or even themselves or something not even of this world. but from an outsider's perspective, it always looks like they're doing it to themselves (and i tried to be clear on this in my fic but they don't actually want to hurt themselves or anyone else. it's the damn curse of the belt doing this because if you're gonna lose it, it is going to make you suffer for as long as it can, even if that means destroying friendships/relationships).

and then the senses thing. i like to think that the belt sort of dulls things while holding it to make it easier to focus or fight through the pain, so without it, it just turns everything up to 11. sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, everything. it all just goes through the roof and makes even the buzzing of lights sound like a fireworks show. it was probably already enough of an adjustment to go back to normal those first few weeks, but it only gets worse instead of better.

i like to think after they acknowledge that this was the belt's doing and they're not crazy or sick or anything, the hallucinations die down as the message got through, but everything else just comes and goes and it's a matter of adapting to it. like kip says, time doesn't heal you. it changes you. and it's going to change them with how they interact with people, how they interact with each other now knowing what happened to them and that no one else gets it, getting back in the ring and whether they accept opportunities to go after gold again or not (like, could you imagine oc and the best friends getting a chance at the trios titles and oc being the only one hesitant because god. what could those belts do to him or his friends? life isn't the same anymore). it's just a journey to learn how to cope at this point. it's not going away. that belt will forever be around haunting them in one way or another, but they learn to live with it together, helping each other out to keep living as much as they can.

... yeah, this was really unhinged. i'm sorry lol

IM SO LATE TO THIS (and right now probably not in the best condition to reply to this but i finally remembered it existed cause theres so many things in my inbox OH GOD) BUT

first of all. absolutely yes to the normal period after losing the title before the real repercussions, cause ive been thinking about that too. there needs to be a false sense of normalcy for a while, as if its because the belt is gone - the adjust period, but its more or less framed under the sense of them just not being a champion anymore, and not actually the true meaning of losing the belt, which is being free from the curse and corruption. i really love the added layer of it directly targeting the corrupteds fears tho (especially through ones self, seeing the one doing the damage being someone they love), that is a really good touch and tbh im just gonna steal that one for the canon of this au now lol

YEAH YEAH YEAH THE SENSES THO!! ive always thought about the dulling pain part tbh, how it makes sure the host fights through everything no matter what, cause holding the belt is what keeps the curse alive and as the challenges get tougher and the champion more worn out, the stronger the curse needs to be and that means feeling less about the punishment you are going through. so it would absolutely make sense to have it be the opposite after its all gone, and especially during the adjust period that would just be. absolute hell. god yes i love this

also i had absolutely not thought about the part about how going after other belts afterwards would feel like oof. but that would be so true tho. for both of them, single and in teams, that would be such a hard task to undertake and i love the added drama of that tbh. even tho no other belt is cursed (as far as we are aware of? idk house of black is holding the trios titles rn and we know what happened with the elite before), thats such an interesting take to it and absolutely something both of them would think about really hard before going for the titles, or letting their friends go for them. absolutely love this one OOF

i wanted to touch the 'time doesnt heal it changes you' part last cause this is an important topic to me personally, but like. thats so true for this tho. how time wont heal their wounds, physical or mental, about this and what they had to go through, it WILL change them. and it does over the course of the time/story too, as they do both learn to cope with the aftermath of this, both together and separately. they do understand each other better now, they can hold each other up and survive on their own. but its a positive change, they cant stop to dwell on healing wounds that will always be there, but they can move on, learn how to change things. and thats just. thats just what this is about in the end, i think. i just hope they, too, realize this on the way

Striving for enlightenment level ups. So much trauma acknowledged. So much causes and effects self-dissected to realise the cause so I can change the effects, reactions and outcomes. Even when I feel like I’ve levelled up and think I can transfer this knowledge to every trauma or negative feeling that warns me - I can choose to feel this way or not, if I figure out the root of it… I still get new surprise hidden trauma causes and effects popping up every so so triggering old habits to return to make sure I behave immaturely and hurt others like I feel in that moment instead of remembering all I have learned; old unenlightened me has no trouble returning to take charge of driving my old faithful, unhelpful behaviour with a well known outcome that will cycle round and round until I figure out the trigger.

Even with these unacknowledged traumas and my reactions - which comes the hind sight and light bulb moment of me being self-aware and decision to not feel that unhappiness again and my enlightenment helps me to still learn after old habits die hard.

I have reached a level in my abilities of living the happiest life and growing my ability to perceive human behaviour and psyche in an intuitive, 6th sensey type of way that I never used to and that I thought not possible.

Im now stuck in my ‘living my happiest life’, mental health journey, at a higher level I have experienced, than ever before. Where my ability to see and read other people’s trauma causes and effects, behaviour meanings, body language and coping behaviours is so clear and obvious, like an anomaly, standing out and calling attention, that I didn’t notice before, on people I know, and people I don’t.

To be able to see all this trauma all around me with only 1 person with the same knowledge or willingness to learn the knowledge, feels so lonely. It feels like I’ve tried my best to work on my mental health for the happiest life ever and genuinely make the most of my one life time being alive during entropy decay and guaranteed death and when my perceptions have widened so far and all I can see is people who don’t know what I know, and who can only know when or if they are mentally ready.

Living my happiest life is my goal but my drive to deeper enlightenment has led me to an existence of someone, who is an empath, to constantly without choice, sense or see so many people unnecessarily living with their inner hurt child’s traumas. An existence that is a new experience of being unable to save everyone that crosses my path, no matter how much I want to.

How do I get out of a depressive funk that is because I’ve become too aware, with a self-described superpower that I’ve been nurturing to get to this point and further? I want this enlightened awareness, but as an empathetic person with empathy overdrive it has given me a new perspective to discover and learn about that has to teach me : I can only control what I can control and I cannot save every-single-one. I did not expect this kind of depressive funk to be something that will send me on another cause-effect-outcome lesson… which will then level up my enlightenment.

Tell me I don’t sound crazy and someone on here is where I am and is relating to what I’m trying to say.

stuff with gender anguish about not fitting in with today’s current gender constructions

From another post I made: I need to talk about 20th century gender norms at some point as a living breathing 20th century fossil and how different it was. To most straight people, being gender non conforming meant gay, trans was on the far end of the gay spectrum, and gay was associated with being socially Not Normal at a time when you had to be Normal to get a white collar job. (The whole Normalhood thing im gonna talk about is VERY connected to mid-late 20th century construction of the white middle class.) Apropos of gender specifically... I’m not sure how 90s/00s genderfluid/genderqueer map to NB, or whether they do. It’s a big reason I am weird about IDing as NB - because it seems to mean something else than my particular understanding of my identity as it was formed in the 1990s. (Another thing is my social world being more people over 45 at this point and also I’m in a hetero relationship.) Part of 90s GQ stuff was that you could identify as a man part time, a woman part time, you could contain multitudes. “Woman-identified person with a male side” was a legit identity within that, so was “man-identified person with a female side.” You could be one person in the streets and another in the sheets. You could be several people in the sheets, especially if you were aligned with kinky culture. (And for a long time... I was.) There was a greater sense in the 90s and early 00s in genderqueerness culture that you could be GQ for no other reason than wanting to be and it wasn’t assumed to be bundled with physical dysphoria or even desire to change your public social identity. Some spaces - like West Coast geek culture and goth culture - had enough flexibility baked in that we didn’t really need to go to LGBTQ culture to explore our identities, and there was a whole geek queer sensibility that was evolving alongside of the broader LGBTQ culture that was definitely its own... thing.  And while people *say* that NB doesn’t mean any one particular thing or any of these things, that’s not always the message I get when visible NBs on TV/in film are almost always at present one very specific image or “type” of person, and that doesn’t resemble me. NB representation on TV amounts to presenting NB as a third gender with very specific codified behaviors (androgynous AFAB person who binds and has body dysphoria).   The message I get is that whatever my experience is, is better described some other way. Also the discourse around relationships with NBs is that a relationship with an NB is necessarily a queer relationship yet having been in relationships in and out of LGBTQ culture, I’m not really sure how to distinguish “a queer relationship.” My relationship is non-traditional in lots of ways and we’re both gender non-conforming in lots of ways though it doesn’t parse to most people because it’s along the lines of stuff that shouldn’t have ever been gendered in the first place. What my partner does not ever question however is his actual gender identity.  The thing is, actually publicly identifying as anything but a woman would create weird problems in my life in terms of social dynamics, and other stuff, and probably an unpredictable series of ripple effects downstream. But - that... just means I’m closeted, right? And closeted doesn’t mean your identity doesn’t exist or isn’t as unreal as someone who isn’t? And what if - as a “shapeshifter” - my relationship to myself within my relationship *is* part of that shapeshifting?  One of the things is that I’m in a heterosexual relationship. My relationship *is* one of my few spots where I’m happy in my skin, let alone happy in the world and I have no complaints with how I’m perceived in this relationship, and part of it is that practically every assumption about my gender is true, or has been true at some point, including the fact that I’m fine with being seen as a woman in the context of my relationship.  It’s in other spaces besides the intimate, that gender stuff makes my skin crawl. My deep interior gender identity is “pixels floating in the ether, which can assume any shape or form.” My gender identity among other people in non sexual friend spaces is “friend.” My partner identifies as a cis het man. I don’t feel like my relationship has any special quality that’s different from queer relationships I’ve been in, other than identities people have. If my partner doesn’t feel our relationship is queer then I don’t feel it is, either... though it’s not exactly *traditional.*  I don’t feel like our relationship is different from our hetero neighbors’ relationships regardless of whatever history I have. I have no way of knowing what my ostensibly-female ostensibly-heterosexual neighbors’ interior identities really are, or what their history is. And because we’re monogamous, it just never ever comes up. Our social world is about half queer and half not so nothing has changed. After decades of only dating people who had LGBTQ identities, and having a particular social world, now I’m with a cis het man from that same social world and nothing really has changed about the shape of my life.   I’ve moved between different spaces my entire life, sometimes I perceived myself as a boy in a girl’s body, but sometimes I didn’t, and don’t. And gender is one of the spaces in which I feel like a chameleon. There seem to be a ton of gender expression based communities that disappeared since the 90s that either disappeared or were erased from discourse and that makes this weirder/harder to talk about.  Another thing is that a lot of the discourse around pronouns (if pushed I’ll say I’m she/they but I am literally comfortable in anything, depending upon context) makes me really uncomfortable. Even in LGBTQ spaces it makes me uncomfortable. There’s the me that my friends know, and some of my family knows, and it’s a big enough world to contain that part of me at this point. I would rather not put my identity under a microscope in any space that matters. It’s weird but I wish I could just be “they” in the work, creative, etc, spaces, without the loading of what “they” means. I wish it meant nothing about the people who love me, or who I love, or how I love, or how I live my life, besides what pronoun I use. But it doesn’t mean nothing. That is why I hope more cis identified people will actually identify as they in the public sphere. There are plenty of spaces in the public sphere that I don’t think should be gendered at ALL. My wanting to be a “they” is in some ways more about wanting public anonymity and having formed my sense of self - at a tender time - online, than about my gender identity. Which means I’d be potentially appropriating “they” from people for whom it IS a deep identity, and yet... haven’t I spent half of my blog talking about how I’m not exactly the gender identity I advertise?? Haven’t I spent a long time up to now advocating for “they?” Isn’t feeling like a they, evidence that I’m a they?  And the thing is, this is such a YMMV issue and the problem is that EVERYONE has competing access needs with EVERYONE ELSE. Anything one queer person wants or needs seems to oppress some other queer person, and it sucks. But sometimes I wonder if I even need to just recognize how cis het passing my life is and acknowledge my privilege. The thing is though at that point... is it how much oppression we’ve experienced or are currently experiencing, that alone makes our identity? That’s as silly an idea as saying I’m less of a Jew because I haven’t personally experienced a hate crime. And yes there’s a lot to shared oppression experiences forming group identities, but I’m not talking about group identity. I’m talking about personal feelings of identity.

TW// Drugs n such

you asked for it smh, but I've been thinking a lot about that one scene in Neverseen in Exilliums healing tent (or whatever its called)

I had a whole rant here about what the implication of this 'serum' might mean in the lost cities but it kinda spiraled into nothing so I'm cutting it out. (main point was just the mood towards drugs, Shannon has had previous mentions of both alcohol and drunk people, so (though im not saying she should incorporate this into a middle grade book series a t a l l), Id be curious to see her take on drugs, (if they exist and how they effect people and the elven population // how is it treated? Is it looked down upon or even forbidden (why we might only see it in Exillium territories) or is it so normal and inconsequential that its just part of the norm in the lost cities?

but anyway, back to the thing I was originally thinking of - i feel like this is something rarely talked about but pls tell me I'm not the only one who has picked up on how weird Keefe's relationship with sedatives is. It's such a contrast to Sophie, where she's openly opposed to taking any type of sedative he seems to be really open to them, in fact in Unlocked every time he's knocked out by a sedative his language is pretty much always positive, like he really enjoys it. This probably just ties into something you mentioned a while back about Keefe and dealing with stuff by running away but I find it really interesting.

(Sorry if this is an uncomfortable ask to get, I know not everyone is comfortable with drug talk and I hope this Isn't overstepping a line.)

you're fine, don't worry! no lines overstepped. I appreciate you including the warning at the top, even though I'm alright talking with the subject. if there's something I'm uncomfortable with, that's not on you to know or worry about because I haven't shared any of my specific triggers, and the more anxiety-inducing ones are so specific to my personal experiences that I highly doubt they'll ever have any effect on any conversation ever. but I do genuinely appreciate your concern <33

I don't remember specifically what I asked for, but this is a topic I hadn't even realized was so fascinating, so thank you for bringing it up! That scene is kinda funny (as in weird) looking back on it, but Keefe was completely out of it and being a lot more vulnerable than he probably wanted to be due to his state of mind. I think it was intended to mirror something like anesthesia or laughing gas (note: in my brief research trying to find info about the boobrie dude I made a mental comparison between tam and sandor, so I'm just making note of it here so I don't forget), at least as far as Keefe's reaction goes. I think part of this was strategic so that we could get some information and vulnerability (although unwillingly) from Keefe and get that first glimpse of "the boy beneath all that swagger" (paraphrased from Sophie). But that's not what your ask is about so I'll move on before I get even more distracted.

wine, at the very least, exists in the lost cities. we've got fizzleberry wine, which is blamed by some for Caprise Redek's accident. Aside from that we've seen no mention of it, as this is a middle grade series about a young teen girl in a fantasy world, and in a "perfect" world there isn't a lot of talk about recreational substances. And I agree with you! this isn't to say that I think drugs and alcohol should be this huge thing in keeper or that it even needs to be address, just commenting that the attitude the general public has towards substances and intoxication is likely even more severe in the elven world, as has been the pattern with other things. We can tell from Caprise's incident that their wine functions similar if not identical to ours, as it was said to have impaired her motor control and thinking, hence how she fell off that balcony. So I think we could assume that drugs in the Lost Cities would be similar to those in the Forbidden Cities in function. Not in name though, likely named after some strange elven thing. Though if we go with the wine example, Fizzleberry is likely an exact description of what it is--the wine probably fizzes and is made from berries.

the elves highly value the mind, so I anticipate that anything that messes with it past beneficial medicinal uses prescribed by a physician are frowned upon. they think of your mental capacity and capabilities as integral to who you are, and composure as essential. drugs take that away and can impair your reasoning, hence my conclusion they're not well liked. however, I propose that this mindset is mostly those who are very proper, for example Lord Cassius. Dex was more than ready to take concentration serums of his own making--and convinced Sophie to take one (note: dex has almost killed both Sophie and Fitz. that can't be fun to know)--which directly messed with his limbic center. However, as he was raised in an apothecary and is already a little less in line with all other elvin values, I don't think him being an outlier is enough to completely through out my assumption. overall: looked down upon because it messes with the mind and the mind is crucial to elven society, and the way it impairs your thinking would make you a lesser person

and you're right! keefe's relationship with sedative is weird. we have this teenager who grew up without stable supports or a loving family having very little regard for how substances will effect his body, prioritizing the possible--not guaranteed, possible--benefits over all the risks. this is not to say drug use is inherently bad, just that the situation he's in makes me very cautious because he feels more at risk of falling into bad habits. also, your observation about tying that into him running away is very astute! i've talked a lot about him running away from his problems in more ways that physical, and I think this is an excellent example of that

he doesn't like his reality, the world he lives in when he's awake and aware and lucid. it's full of all these problems and people and he doesn't know what to do. but when he's asleep? he doesn't have to deal with any of that. he doesn't have to do anything, but he's also troubled enough and anxious enough that sleep doesn't always come easy, and he can be plagued by nightmares. but those sedatives mess with his mind and not only make him sleep faster and longer, but they can mess with your dreams and alter the reality you experience while asleep. i guess it could be a way of trying to take control of a situation he had very little control over, especially in unlocked when everyone else was trying to fix things without consulting him. with his waking world that bad, of course he's gonna like anything that takes him away from it.

it stands out especially when we switch to him as a narrator and he's praising these things and wanting to be sedated, as we've spent so long in Sophie's head and she's so against them from the trauma she experienced in the first book. that could mean his attitude them is more jarring just because we're used to Sophie and it wouldn't seem as dramatic if we'd switched from say, Fitz's head. but that doesn't mean there's nothing here.

i think i've said it before, but Keefe doesn't have any healthy coping strategies right now that he consistently relies on. his deference towards avoidance and making the problem go away, even if it's just in feeling induced by drugs, is a more extreme example of how he doesn't know how to just exist without hurting.

I jumped around a bit between topics so if I missed something you wanted to talk about more in depth please feel free to send another ask! Keefe's relationship to experiencing reality is fascinating and covers things from denial and refusal to change all the way to drugs and literally altering the way his brain perceives reality. This boy is on a collision course with destruction in both body and mind.

my ask didnt send i am going to murder. anyway BEEP CLASSPECTING... now im thinking abt that and aimsey. from the top of my head/only briefly thinking, beep as rage or void vibes with me? (obvs not the typical rage player you see, more like the nuance we were discussing). and aimsey as a life player?

oooo void beep would be suuper cool :oc rage too, he is very fucking stubborn and does have outbursts rather often (also rage players in canon usually have connections to magic, and then the homestuck rage players all had religious themes so, god stuff). meanwhile void fits beeps heavy "this is all irrelevant and you could never understand any of this", and his own belief that even what he does just doesnt matter. personality under a veil (not necessarily a facade), fundamental inability to understand and truly perceive it all.

id say he doesnt fit rage enough, if only because rage players are fundamentally about survival instinct, and, well. beeps already dead, and he seems to be perfectly fine with the fact that one day he just wont exist at all. hes not scared, though he is easily pissed off, but in the end he just sort of likes messing with shit and being in control. lil dickhead (affectionate)

honestly, since he almost fits rage but not quite, he.. almost acts like a prince of hope (unfortunate eridan kinnie). destroying beliefs and asserting his reality as the Absolute Truth, dragging others like aimsey into his delusions and being in a situation where aimseys putting her faith into him even though hes not a good person because she feels the need to believe in him and connect with him, because she genuinely feels like hes the only friend they have left, and because aimsey wants desperately to believe in what beep is trying to show her, desperately wants to understand. he shuts down things he believes to be false, to the point where he can make them false by simply destroying the problem.

hes a force of outward destruction, destroying what he believes to be flaws in others. theyre heavily defensive, putting everyone beneath them, believing hes the one thats doing it Right, and ultimately, he believes its his right to control things. he doesnt trust anyone, he reacts to any fear he may have with anger, lashes out, and the "TELL. NO ONE" scene almost showcases beep shattering and hurting aimsey before he steps back and give a quick "sorry!". his arc seems to be leading up to him realizing he can care about aimsey, that he can trust her to believe him and in him, and he seems to be dealing with the concept of trusting aimsey with his beliefs

hes definitely not a general hope player, but specifically prince of hope could fit. onto possible void class combos, with, first, the notable fact that we dont know what kind of person beep may have been in the past, other than that he was destructive. we know about some events in his past, and how he feels about them (kinda), but generally, this means hes very versatile and has many class possibilities, depending on how we want to interpret what we do know.

for example, he could be a maid whose now in the apeshit stage, stubborn and repressive. its entirely possible he got so tired of listening to the other spirits that he got to the unhealthy stage, exploded, and now without anything stopping him, hes doing whatever the fuck he wants, because hes decided none of it matters, that its all irrelevant and he doesnt have to care because its his fucking universe and no one can stop him from playing god. he spends his time doing menial things, because to him, its all equally unimportant, so why not waste time? he cuts down unnecessary tasks, weeds out what he finds useless, etc etc. basically, he should still be independent, but he needs to be brought back down to earth (metaphorically), because hes kind of burnt himself out and is now fucking with things because he feels none of it matters anyways

sylph of void sort of works too, mainly his meddling and tendency to shut down anything that could reveal something he doesnt want revealed, as well as shutting down others viewpoints and he covers up shit whenever he wants. his motivations are, really, mostly unknown to us, other than that he seems to think this is fun. otherwise, he also has a tendency to try and fix things he thinks needs fixing (like getting rid of fairies and space creatures), and will often try to fix mistakes he sees in mortals. however, slyphs are ultimately healers, and beep just. is not a healer, and he doesnt necessarily invite creation of void in any way, since void isnt really destruction of anything, and what he does invite is destruction of things. hes also just too active to be a slyph

so, with the previous prince assession, theres also the possibility of him being a prince of light, which would mean he would act more like a void player. hed destroy light with light, destroy the importance of information with information. they strip away the importance of things, uses plain fact to force the perception that nothings really important. he dismisses the importance of things, purposefully acts ignorant to draw away from what he knows, destroys knowledge itself from a power standpoint (wiping aimseys memory), and in extreme cases, can physically destroy anything in his way, or assert over and over that what he said/did isnt real, that nothings true or important other than what hes saying. again, little shit. if i had to make up my mind, i think prince of light fits the most

as for aimsey, i think life does fit him really well, shes definitely got the similar "girl next door" kind of vibes, while still being really interesting in her own right. she definitely starts out as a typical fictional life player, enthusiastic, energetic, genuine, wanting to effect the world. shes a normal girl (and this isnt an insult, rather, her being so normal ties the magical themes of the bear smp together really well, and its a perfect way to use a life player, make them be a catalyst for both the normal life player and eccentric others to shine). however, as she struggles with losing trust in bear and not being treated well, not having anyone that cares about them specifically, the energy starts to falter, but comes back when they feel the need to be rebellious. notably, while aspects arent super literal, she contrasts beep so much in just how alive she is, which fits her being a life player rather well. except, as i said, aspects arent literal, which means aimsey being a life player translates to her showing what life means in a metaphorical sense.

life is about agency. its about what you do, your ability to do so, its about asserting your will. not what drives you, but simply you doing at all. interesting enough, life players can be hard to pin down because life is about desire and agency, while the players class defines their ideology. life players can become obsessed with an idea that they need to do something, that they need to change how systems work, and often can cloak their want to fulfill their individual desires as altruistic want to fulfill others needs and desires (i.e., aimsey wants a friend and someone who pays attention to her and is genuine towards her, she feels like shes found that in beep, and as such starts to cloak her want to be his friend as aimsey wanting to help beep rather than aimsey themself).

as for said class.. this was, hard. because of how heavily influenced life is by the class its paired with, and because aimseys arc right now is trying to deal with feeling like shes too much and unneeded, it means that i have to really consider how that connects with which classes struggles. so, i ended up with sylph. aimsey is a creator, and she tries to heal as well. "allowing creation/healing of life or inviting creation/healing through life". from a literal standpoint, she tries to help bear heal by trying to get him to open up, to live, to make friends and interact with people. this could almost seem like a blood player move, but while a lot of aimseys arc is about bonds and relationships, shes not really a strong connecter or leader, shes just good at inspiring others to be, to her own detriment.

also notably, unhealthy sylphs crave, whether craving more of their own aspect, or craving another aspect when they feel theirs is not enough. aimsey talks a lot about how she grew up doing things by her lonesome, and now that she feels like people are moving on without her, she may be craving blood (that sounds so awful out of context). she wants attachments, wants to be the person that brings everyone together, but.. she isnt, not in a way thats appreciated. and due to her insecurities, she sees this as a flaw within himself, and as something to fix. so, she latches onto beep, and desperately tries to have as much of an effect on their life as they do on hers. like life players in general, sylphs try to solve their problems under the guise of helping someone else with theirs. currently, aimsey seems to be trying to find what she needs to do, because when she tried to do what she thought she needed to do, she (from her perspective) failed, so now shes trying to make up for her perceived failure within herself by trying to help herself through helping beep. i would think into it even more but i think its probably best to just leave it here KEKW

Hello! In January I asked you to elaborate on "this hate propaganda made young Greeks feel ashamed of their ethnicity etc" & 1st off thanks for answering both my questions it means a ton. What you described was basically me, only I didnt manage 2 leave & it got worse over time. I even wanted to get British nationality fml. Im still trying to grapple w' this. Im trying to understand how it happened. & to reconnect with my culture & deal with rising anger. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

(This is anon asking advice on how to deal with how hate propaganda made me feel ashamed of my country and being Greek) I figured I should send both asks in English since you make the efforts to educate non-Greeks about such issues. Μακάρι να μπορούσα να κάνω κι εγώ το ίδιο με ένα μπλογκ σαν κι αυτό αλλά δεν μπορώ αυτή τη φάση, ελπίζω πάντως να γίνει κάποια στιγμή

ASK END

Hello again and thanks for sticking by! 💙🤍

So, I am not sure I got this right but what I understood is that you planned to go to the UK but something went wrong and that made you even more vulnerable to internalise that anti-Greek sentiment once more and you try now to address this.

So, the first thing I am gonna say might seem a little harsh but it is the truth as I perceive it. I believe what you feel is intense and whatever I might suggest will likely not be but of temporary help. I believe the most helpful thing for you now would be to indeed visit / stay for a while in a different country. I don’t mean to scratch the wound or imply you need to do this right now - I only mean that by experiencing a foreign lifestyle or living in someplace else for a little while you will be able to for sure re-evaluate effectively the way you feel about being a Greek and living in Greece. I am saying this because I feel that you want badly to get out and as long as this need is not met, it is going to be twice as hard to suddenly see everything that troubles you under a positive light.

But this does not mean that you should despair over not getting the chance to leave just yet. In the meantime, the first thing I suggest you did is to accept the fact that you indeed have internalised this negative sentiment and not beat yourself up for it, because I sense that on the top of the national frustration you also feel frustration against yourself for feeling this way. Accept that you are vulnerable to this propaganda / negativity and try to address the reasons why you are vulnerable and also the reasons being a Greek living here can also be objectively difficult sometimes or for some people.

After you start trying to not blame yourself (or the propagandists because who cares about them) for the way you feel, the next thing is to understand you don’t owe anything to anybody. Do you believe that any person in this world owes anything to others as an individual because of their race, ethnicity, religion, ancestry, economy or state of their country? If not, then always repeat mentally that it works exactly the same for the Greeks just like for billions of other people. You are not responsible for the foreigners’ romanticised and often illogical expectations from Modern Greeks just like you are not responsible for ignorant, toxic or corrupted Greeks who exist because such people do exist and it’s largely irrelevant to ethnicity. If a foreigner ever directly tries to make you feel bad for being a Greek, don’t ever assume an apologetic stance and don’t take it to heart either. Take it the way you would take it in any other case not involving you: this person is simply a racist, and go on with your life.

The third step is that you should give a pat to yourself for fighting this internalised toxicity. The fact that you care this much to cleanse yourself from the propaganda shows that you are not as vulnerable to it after all. Some people I know would not even accept to listen to counterarguments. So, the desire to fight this shows that you will get there but like I said in the beginning you probably need some exposal abroad to achieve this more easily (not that it is impossible otherwise, it is just harder).

The last step for the time being would be to try to understand and analyse why things are the way they are specifically in the Greek society. Every society is a product of its people’s struggles, its mishappenings, its achievements and its external influences. No society is inherently or completely problematic/ bad. There are always reasons for what is happening. For instance, if some of your concerns is that the Greek society is more backwards or conservative than West Europe or that the Church is too powerful or that there is too much political corruption or that people are too polarised, there are reasons in historical truth, in our past that have led to how things are today. So, my suggestion is to read Greek history, with an emphasis on Byzantine and Modern era. I think this will help more than try to enjoy Greek culture, almost with a sense of obligation. This could be a side thing or leave it to come naturally in its own time, if it comes at all. Don’t push it. But when you read history, don’t have a judgemental stance. Don’t try to find who’s to blame - only what’s to blame or simply try to figure it out without condemnations at all. Understanding its reasons even if you don’t like something is the best way to come to terms with it and with your emotions about it.

Here I would like to note that when I say staying abroad for a while would help, I don’t mean that you will go there and suddenly “see the light” about why Greece is “better”. For all I know, you might find the new place and the society agreeing with you in particular more indeed. What I mean, however, is that it will introduce you to a more spherical way of thinking as well as the inescapably flawed nature of humanity regardless of ethnicities. And the distance could make you feel calm enough to re-assess everything in a more objective perspective.

I am sorry if you expected clear culture recommendations and I came up with this! I sincerely believe being cool and accepting about your feelings, trying to avoid judgemental thoughts and prioritising Greek history over culture would be the best steps to follow for the time being x

The Untamed and Mo Dao Zu Shi

These past eight days have been surreal.

I have drowned so fully in this story that it feels like I am just surfacing.

On Valentine’s Day, fandom on tumblr reblogged this fanart of WangXian by qulfeeh and I was intrigued. The reblog was tagged with two important key words ‘Wangxian’ and ‘The Untamed’. In the brush of a few keystrokes I came across the Wikipedia page for a show known as the Untamed that was available on Netflix. The thing that stood out was that it was based on a BL novel and that both the very male protagonists were described as each other’s soulmates and somehow that was enough. So, I opened Netflix and after like a second of hesitation I started watching the show and I didn’t stop. I started at eight in the evening and I watched nine episodes in a row which basically meant I was up till five in the morning. What followed seems like a record for me. I finished all fifty episodes of the Untamed in under seventy-two hours.

I put hardly five minutes of thought into my decision to watch this story and ended up dedicating the past eight days straight. The first three days to the live action drama and the past five to reading the novel.

If it isn’t obvious this story is that good.

The Untamed

The Untamed is a first for me on so many levels. I have never watched a Chinese show before ever and that seemed extremely significant to me because China is actually a neighbouring country yet as far as my mind is concerned it might as well be on another planet. Which seems particularly odd considering shows from English speaking countries like the UK and the US are a staple for me which makes these countries feel so much closer though they are geographically on the other side of the planet. Of course, a major factor is the language barrier but another is the political scenario between our two countries and amazingly this show made me realise how much of an impact perceiving different cultures can have on your perception of their people. It has literally opened up a whole new world for me that I have just realised I have never taken the moment to discover. Well, considering this is me we are talking about, how appropriate, that it would be a drama based on a BL novel that unlocked this whole new world for me.

I have tried reading a Danmei novel before which was awful and it completely turned me off the genre but it did have a side effect of educating we about elements of a wuxia novel which made this xianxia world seem a little familiar but even if it hadn’t, I would have still been hooked.

It didn’t take long for The Untamed to find a new fan and I have been obsessing over it ever since.

The Untamed is an amazing drama which revolves around the love Lan WangJi and Wei WuXian have for each other and the plot is so intriguing that you wouldn’t be able to stop even if you tried (I didn’t because that thought didn’t even manage to enter my mind).

It’s a love story and that is undisputable for me, they don’t say it, it isn’t mentioned but there is this palpable force influencing events and you know they love each other. I have somehow really disregarded how much a show can show you stuff without ever explicitly stating it but The Untamed set me straight in that regard. I doubt anyone who watches the show would mistake it for anything but the love story it is.

Wei WuXian was an instant hit for me. He is a lovable, gregarious character always up to mischief but is someone who always wants to be on the side of justice and I have a weak spot for characters with a hard on for justice. He is just such a lively character who keeps smiling all the time that it’s just hard not to fall for him in minutes. His antics and his demeanour are so charming that you’re hooked. He would have easily been my most favourite character in any other drama that doesn’t have a Lan WangJi.

Lan WangJi is an amazing character. In a world, which has become increasing about everyone voicing their opinions (like I’m doing at present) it is hard to believe that people like Lan WangJi exist. People who are quiet, who don’t speak unless absolutely necessary. He is literally the embodiment of tranquillity and more important he is Wei WuXian’s hero. Like literally he protects him like he’s protecting his life which on second thought he definitely is.

I literally had second-hand embarrassment from how obviously romantic these two are.

Hands down the best thing I have watched in 2020 by far! The characters are amazing, the plot is intricate and it is so, so interesting. I watched almost fourty hours of this series non-stop and I don’t remember a single point where I felt like the story became boring for a second which now that I think about it is, is… astonishing. How can such a large drama be so engrossing? This isn’t binge-worthy there is literally no other way to watch the show!!!

Mo Dao Zu Shi

But after coming down from the high of the first seventy-two hours of being submerged in this world, I was reluctant to leave this world so much so that I didn’t even contemplate it. I had a wide variety of media to choose from. The story is based on a web series by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu that was made into a manhua, followed by an donghua, followed by an audio drama followed by The Untamed. It must speak to the universality of the story that the people are willing to read the same story in so many different formats, I know I’m not done.

But, high up on my list was the source material, one of the articles described the show as being extremely faithful to the novel, which made me want to jump on that wagon posthaste, and I agree whole-heartedly. I read the translation by Exiled Rebels Scanlations and what struck me was how the show and the novel were tonally the same. I had switched mediums but it didn’t feel like a different story or like I was reading different characters which is shocking because that’s literally how good the show was at translating words into video.

Differences

One of the startling things about the book is that it really ties up the plot neatly. There are tons of plot points that aren’t as completely resolved on the show as they are on the novel which I only ever realised after reading the novel. A lot of this had to do with how certain details of the plot are different. A classic example that the reason behind the scars on Lan Zhan’s back is different in the two. In the novel, LWJ whisks WWX away from the Nightless City after he massacres and pretty much beats-to-a-pulp the entire alliance of sects. LWJ then has to tend to WWX so they remain in hiding for three days. When cultivators from the GusuLan Sect finally discover the two, LWJ has to defeat all of them to keep WWX safe and that’s why he is given one whipping for every cultivator he defeated. Of course, since WWX dies on the battlefield in the show this couldn’t be the reason behind the scars so they have LWJ defend Burial Mounds which wasn’t all that fruitful considereing the LanlingJin Clan does end up with a lot of WWX’s artifacts, there was no point in defending Burial Mounds as he couldn’t have kept it up in the long run but him going to Burial Mounds after the massacre at Nightless City is important to ensure they story can credibly reveal Lan ShiZui to be A-Yuan. So, yeah differences, the show focuses on the Wen Clan and the Yin Iron while the novel doesn’t have the Yin Iron at all and focuses on Jin GuangYao. But, despite the differences the story still feels coherent between the two mediums mainly because the relationship between LWJ and WWX that is at the core of both remains central to the plot at all times.

The plot of the novel though is extremely intricate and the author does an amazing job of deconstructing it which makes it easier to understand what’s happening while the show in hindsight does get away with sweeping up certain loose ends.

Of course, the kisses and the sex are gone but I will gladly take that cliff scene in exchange. I was actually shocked that the novel actually doesn’t dwell on WWX’s first death at all. Like, we don’t even know how exactly he died in the novel and this was hsocking given how pivotal that cliff scene is in the show.

Characters

Surprisingly though a lot of the roles of side characters were expanded for the show, the novel seems to have delivered a better understanding of these characters. The biggest example for me being Jiang Yanli.

She has an elaborately expanded role in the show which does highlight how deep her bind with her brothers particularly WWX is but somehow she seems like a timid character among a bunch of very strong characters. What the novel does is that it gives you a very realistic picture of her, she might not seem like a significant influence on the story but her impact is far-reaching. The novel doesn’t showcase much of her character but the scenes that feature her in the book are some of the most poignant ones and incidentally those are the same ones that stand out in the show. I feel like novel did a better job of showing off her strength. While, in the show I couldn’t look beneath her timid demeanour the novel manages to showcase the strength of her love. She cares deeply and loves deeply and the novel manages to show you the courage it takes to love someone so deeply. I definitely admire her character more and in fact I’m kind of in awe that someone who appears so traditional was so awesome. It felt easy to dismiss her character but reading the author’s words made me realise that I would be very, very wrong in doing so.

Wei WuXian might be the luckiest guy in the world to have a shijie like her followed by a husband like LWJ who both seem very determined to spoil the hell out of him. I might be experiencing some jealousy right now.

The author somehow manages to imbue her characters with qualities that makes them real and unique. Like WWX forgetting everybody’s face which is a real world problem that I have never seen anybody suffer from in a novel but just the fact that WWX doesn’t immediately bring his old hang-ups in his subsequent meetings with side characters didn’t only have hilarious consequences but made everything that much more intriguing and credible.

This author also does an amazing job of flipping characters. There are very few villains who are black and white in this story. WWX himself is a character caught in the gray of it all, universally reviled for standing up for the right reasons. This is a theme throughout the show and the novel where bad characters might be good and good might be bad but the author endeavours to show us all sides to a character. While this most definitely applies to Jin GuangYao, I’m surprised with how it resonates with Xue Yang who’s relationship with Xiao Xinchen can only be characterized with the words “It’s Complicated”. I don’t actually know what to think of these two Xiao Xingchen was definitely betrayed but can we ignore the fact that he found himself a companion in Xue Yang his sworn enemy and Xue Yang’s feelings for Xiao Xingchen are enough to drive me crazy. This guy has no idea how frustrating he is, that piece of candy clenched in his fist will drive me crazy for the rest of my life. The entire Yi City Arc is a big mess of grey there are no whites and blacks and the show underscores that with this quote –

Once upon a time, there was a little child who liked sweets very much. But because he had no parents nor money, he could never have such things. So he’d been dreaming if only someone could give him a candy every day.

Don’t even get me started on the music that plays in the background when this quote is being narrated.

There are just so many amazing things about the show and the novel. I mean the show might have actually worked harder to make things more romantic and one scene that I’m surprised isn’t from the book is the lantern scene with both of them making pledges like that particular scene neatly underlined who WWX is and would become. The hand-fastening scene is also not from the book but then there are other scenes and other delights to be found in the novels.

This story is definitely worth reading and watching for years to come. If anyone has any apprehensions about the novel I will be glad to clarify but the everything about “The Untamed” and “Mo Dao Zu Shi” stand in the same breath.

Can I please ask for a Star Wars (either clone wars, prequels or originals)? I am 5’1, with an athletic build, tanned brown skin, dark brown eyes, and medium wavy black hair. I wear purple cat eye glasses and have either one of three styles - tomboy, edgy, or preppy (it depends on my mood). I am 19. I would like to be shipped with a male. My pronouns are she/her.

I’m an intp-a. Im quite the sarcastic person and have a witty sense of humor. I’m quite cunning and clever person as well. I tend to thrive on my own and am very much a lone wolf. Im very content with living in my own world in my brain and forgetting the existence of reality. That however doesn’t mean I’m quiet. When it comes to a topic I’m interested in I can go off for hours. I’m a bit standoffish when you first meet me. That’s usually due to my intense need to hide my feelings and pretend I don’t have any (oops). As a result I can come off as having the emotional intelligence of a goldfish. But I do care it just takes me a while to open up.

As for hobbies I love art. Ive been an artist since the age of nine and am getting my degree digital art now. As for fine art I love sketching, printmaking, wood carving, and cut paper. As for digital art I tend to stray towards graphic, visual effects and video game design. I also adore art history. My favorite artists to study being Botticelli, Leonardo Da Vinci and Raphael.

I love gaming and watching movies as well. My favorite games are rpg and my favorite movies are either sci fi, historical fiction, historical thriller or fantasy.

Apart from that I’m quite active as well. I adore working out. I kickbox and weight lift most days of the week. It helps me get my stress and energy out.

My preference of love language is acts of service. I’m pretty sure my least is physical touch. I’m NOT comfortable with people (even if it’s my friends/family) giving me physical affection. I just get really awkward and tense up.  

Sorry this is so long I got carried away. I hope it’s okay!

Hey there! Sorry it took a while for me to get this back to you, but you’re my first ship request and I really wanted to put some thought into it and do a good job. So without further ado, I ship you with…

Commander Wolffe

Let me just start by saying, you and Wolffe would be everything the other needs. Workout buddy? Check! Fellow perceived grumps? Check! Partners who can make the other crack up with the most inopportune witty quip? Check! Neither of you are one to open up to anyone you’re not close with. Or even much to the people you’re close with. Wolffe is a commander, and that comes with a lot of responsibilities. He can’t be seen as emotionally needy or compromised. He has to be there for his brothers. Not the other way around. But we all know that everyone needs someone to open up to. Wolffe would need someone who understands what it’s like to not be comfortable showing every and all feelings. He needs someone who would never judge him for being standoffish, even with a romantic partner.

And speaking of standoffish, Wolffe would be the perfect man to understand not being comfortable showing you have more emotions than a goldfish lol. So he and you would totally have an inside joke that your relationship is based on the fact that you both have exactly zero emotions and no one else would put up with it.

You and everyone else knows the truth though. What’s special about you and Wolffe though is that you don’t need to explicitly say how you feel for the other to understand.

I also think you and Wolffe would balance each other out. You tend to get lost in your head, ignore reality, but Wolffe is a very grounded person. He’s the one who can drag you away from your thoughts and focus on reality if you need to. And vice versa, Wolffe sometimes needs to loosen up. Show him your art, or rant about your day and the idiot at the local restaurant who ordered “decaf water” and it’ll help him relax. The man has permanent knots in his muscles from stress, but your voice could lowkey get rid of most of them.

Wolffe also would 1000000% respect your aversion to physical touch. He himself isn’t big on it. He will ask for permission to hug you, every time. And if you both find yourself binge watching a show, or marathoning a fantasy series, your cuddles will be casual — your feet in his lap, his shoulder simply leaning against yours. And he lets you initiate everything. That’s how respectful he is. I headcanon Wolffe’s love language is quality time, giving and receiving, because he gets so little of it. For him to spend his meager leave time with you speaks to how much he cares about you, and if he just so happens to do the dishes you’ve been procrastinating for three days? He’s practically in love at that point.

So this turned into a little ramble, because my brain kept saying “ooh, make this point too!” so I’m sorry about that 😂 But overall I hope you enjoyed this little ramble and thank you for requesting!

wow i made this draft on november 1st i really took a break from this huh anyway tgcf chapters 121 - 142

i realize now this coffin scene was inevitable. feel kinda weird about hua cheng  back and forth from Teen to Big Man but it is very funny that theyre having their “dude dont look at my boner” moment while in the jaws of a water dragon

pei ming: why didnt you guys make a bigger coffin so you didnt have to squish together like that? xie lian: haha yep!! anyways what brings you here?

“In the grand, spacious centre of the entrance hall sat a person. And this person, dressed in all black, its face snow-white—was a corpse! Instantly Xie Lian shut the doors soundly.” - king of minding his own business.

okay this is where i stopped putting notes here for a while but i did save some in my e-reader so here’s some of the highlights

“Guzi used to have a good sleeping form, but perhaps with his cheap dad’s bad influence, now he was also spread out on top of Qi Rong’s stomach like a dead fish. Lang Ying himself was curled neatly in the corner, and was covered by a few shirts. Xie Lian lifted the blanket covering Qi Rong, suppressed the urge to smother his face, and covered the two small children.” - xie lian funny moments. also it would be really funny if qi rong redeems himself by learning love through these misfit chiildren and it might actually endear me to him but i hope that doesnt happen

Every heavenly official was yelling, and even Ling Wen was throwing a fit. “DON’T THROW EVERY BIT OF USELESS INFORMATION MY WAY, HOW MUCH DO YOU THINK I HAVE TO GO THROUGH EVERY DAY? DON’T YOU ALL KNOW TO USE YOUR BRAINS A LITTLE BEFORE ASKING ME?!” - ling wen marry me right now

“An expression like “seen a ghost” that only mortals experienced was now showing on his face for the first time. Shi Wudu’s pupils shrank to the smallest they could, and he blurted, “You’re still alive?!” “I’m dead!” He Xuan said coldly.” - okay everythings going tits up rn but i did laugh

i did see spoilers re: ming yi/he xuan reveal + shi wudu’s fate beforehand so i dont have a genuine reaction other than oh shit

“He slowly enunciated each word. “I won’t touch your fate. But, here in this place, chop off your brother’s head for me.”  CLANG! He threw a rusty blade onto the ground. Shi Qingxuan stared at that blade, his eyes wide. He Xuan continued, “Then, never show yourself before me again, and I will pretend you’ve never existed in this world.” - okay idk what else is going to happen but rn im concerned that this is like the 2nd biggest ship. i guess we’ll see?? i mean i am really curious whats going to happen to them. shi qingxuan keeps calling he xuan “ming-xiong” and i... sad

shi wudu im not really invested in you as a character but these next two bits... interesting

“If I don’t die but have nothing, then that’s truly a fate worse than death. If I’m not the Water God, I can’t take care of you. I won’t even be able to protect myself. I’m scared that we won’t even last two days…TAKE IT!” - damn. something about the wealthy losing everything and not knowing how to live without it bc thats their entire life and identity

“EVERYTHING I HAVE TODAY, I FOUGHT FOR MYSELF. I WILL FIGHT FOR WHAT I DON’T HAVE. I WILL CHANGE FATE I DON’T POSSESS. MY FATE IS UP TO ME AND NOT THE HEAVENS!” - okay so the whole committing spiritual fraud by tormenting a man and his family to get your brother a cushy title thing aside this was kind of badass. heretical? possibly. but still. also is he intentionally riling up he xuan so sqx doesnt have to kill him? if so damn...

also okay as long as im here im just gonna say it. the choice that he xuan gives shi qingxuan is fucking brutal but i actually think its probably as fair as it could be. sqx didnt know about or participate in what happened to hx but they did benefit from it greatly while hx lost EVERYTHING and i can understand he xuan’s thinking of “if you really feel bad for what happened to me then you have to make a sacrifice and understand the suffering and this is as clean as its going to get” and theres a bit where sqx is trying to beg for mercy but cant get the words out which im guessing is bc theres no good argument!! what happened was fucked up!!

“When Pei Ming saw that reinforcements had arrived, he didn’t appear particularly delighted; instead he threw the sword into the ground, then rubbed his nose and said, sounding grim, “You all just had to come just as I finished making these, what the heck.” - pei ming making coffins chopping down trees with his sword i love it #wastehistime2k17

“Xie Lian brought that basket of eggs along, and gave them away as souvenirs from the mortal realm. Many who received the eggs were overjoyed; some deciding to eat it along with their own blood, and some proclaiming they would hatch an eight-foot monster.” - GHOST CITY GHOST CITY

“Placing the brush down, he blew lightly at the ink and smiled. “If I like something, then my heart will not have room for any other, and I’ll always treasure it. A thousand times, a million times, no matter how many years, this will not change. This poem is the same." - thats nice and all but king... get therapy. i actually have further thoughts but tbh i dont want to put them into words bc they are simply too personal! moving on

didnt take any notes but somewhere in here was the bit with mount tong’lu opening and hua cheng losing it and kind of um. hm. that scene. thats another trope i really hate tbh i dont care for it as a way of including physical intimacy between characters and idk if it really ever adds anything but whatever moving on

The Half-Maquillage Woman - kind of interesting monster idea bc women and aging…. yeah. however i think this would be a lot stronger if there were a) more girls and this was b) discussed or illustrated at all prior to this moment. still interesting that its included knowing the author is a woman tho and there’s been comments on how ling wen is perceived vs pei ming. this book does keep giving me hope for interesting female character arcs i really want it to deliver something

quan yizhen..... i get u

lmao i have a note on a bit with lang ying that says “please dont be hc in disguise” and..... my clown nose was on but at least i knew that. for real this is bothering me how much he’s just. always. there. i know he’s a lead but we didn’t really need him around for a lot of this. oh well.  okay now to my current notes

“Yet it was precisely because it wasn’t cooked that it had to be eaten quickly. Once Xie Lian cooked it, it wouldn’t be edible anymore” - fucking fantastic

“Xie Lian hugged his belly. “Of course! Only after having met you did I rediscover that it’s such a simple thing to be happy, hahaha…” Hearing this, Hua Cheng blinked. Xie Lian’s laughter quieted a bit, realizing what he just said was a little too revealing.” - okay i know i said what i said about being tired of hua cheng being everywhere but... the line…. the fact that theyre laughing together…. :pleading:

“It’s not,” Ling Wen said. “At least, I believe, there will definitely not be another in history who can create a dish called ‘Incorruptible Chastity Meatballs’” - and truer words were never spoken

“I, DO NOT WORSHIP GODS. “I, AM GOD!” - this was every bit as badass as i hoped but no one told me it was immediately followed up by a little bit of the ol dinner theater fjalkdsfjsd. also puqi shrine noooooooooo

“Xie Lian sighed as he thought, “Qi Rong has taken Guzi away, who knows if the poor child was eaten or abandoned. Wind Master...... ..... who knows if Black Water took him away. Pray they’re both safe.” yeah hey are we going to fucknig. find out what happened to the child???

and yeah i dooooont really care for the age regression? thing thats going on. i just dont like that trope tbh. but tiny hua cheng whipping out his fat ghost king wallet in the store was funny tho. it is really funny that hualian are just like wandering around some random towns while the heavens are in an uproar. i guess theres not much else to do but its funny

“Me too, me too. You all know of my shixiong, right? Talented, with an infinite future! He only had one small vice: he loved playing women. Decades ago, a little prostitute ghost seduced my shixiong and sucked him dry into human jerky, and that Hua, Hua, Hua, that ghost king dared shelter her.” - yes omg give me the forbidden hua cheng lore i love this for him for real it goes along nicely with xie lian’s principles about giving another cup. god i love shared values

“Hua Cheng poked again, and a small hole appeared on the wall, as if the wall was made of tofu.” - how’d he do that. why is this a ghost king power. its useful tho

*me shaking qi rong when he pops up* WHERE IS THE CHILD

mu qing fu yao is here okay im happy now. once again no one has a good grasp on their secret identity and i love that. this inn has descended into chaos and im delighted and im glad lan chang is back

“The good ol’ kitchen was suddenly squished and crowded, loud and noisy. Fu Yao was chasing that fetus spirit leaping up and down, Lan Chang was chasing after Fu Yao like she had gone mad. Half of Qi Rong’s face changed shape by the way Xie Lian was pressing him down on the chopping board, his back turning into a target for those yellow talismans Fu Yao hurled while being observed by a crowd, and Lan Chang would step on him from time to time.” - this is pure chaos. i love that mu qing was in that room when the mob checked and he didnt say a word didnt open the door just sent out a talisman as a warning. king your disguise is transparent

“Xie Lian remembered the way Feng Xin laughed until he was hoarse when he first heard that verbal password all those years back, and couldn’t help but feel nostalgic, even though it wasn’t the right time.” - awwwww omg im emotional about this... faithful friend feng xin laughing at xie lian’s stupid joke password and remembering it!!! ;_;

“They have, but they’re not effective,” Feng Xin said. “Usually they’re the most diligent in scorning the Palace of Ling Wen, like they could do the job way better if they had the position. Now that we need them to take up the task, not a single one can do even half of what she does.” - typical... typical typical typical

also emotional about the fact that feng xin contacted xie lian at all.....

also!! emotional about lan chang as a mom and wanting to help out sick lil guzi.....

xie lian forcing “fu yao” to let him help “his general” is making me.... what is friendship if not playing along with your buddies little shenanigans while also making them accept your help

“Someone like Mu Qing, even though he’s narrow-minded, petty, sensitive and skeptical, has a bad personality, constantly guessing, doesn’t say nice things, likes to nag, always offending people and has a lot of people who dislike him, has no friends, can remember small, unimportant details for a long period of time…” ”Xie Lian went on in one breath with a straight face, but in the end he concluded with, “...But I’ve known him since we were kids, after all, he’s still got principles.” - XIE LIAN PLEASE AFJDLKSFJDL omg ive seen this quote before but i figured he was talking to someone else not actually to mu qing himself fgjasdkfjsl. god thats amazing. hey im gonna help you out because i care but i will roast you first <3

waaaaaait so is lan chang aka jian lan that girl from book 2 we took a page to talk about and then disappeared? that has to be it why else would we have stopped to discuss her

“Jian Lan spat on his face, then choking his neck, she slapped him twice again. “WHAT SHITTY SUPREME! YOU SURE KNOW HOW TO BLOW YOURSELF UP! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, THINK YOU’RE EVEN WORTH TO BE THOUGHT OF AS EQUALS WITH THE OTHER THREE SUPREMES? WHAT ARE YOU EVEN GOOD AT? YOUR THICK SKIN? OF COURSE I DARE HIT YOU!” - oh this feels so good i cant lie. YES GET HIM!! CHOMPING AND VIOLENCE YES!!!!

okay this description of cuocuo.... im... that sure the hell is a creature

this book is so entertaining bc i already saw spoilers for the feng xin/jian lan/cuo cuo reveal and yet i could never have predicted the circumstances that brought it about. imagine being feng xin. the heavens are in an uproar and your only friend/enemy has been jailed for possible fetus spirit-related crimes but he escapes along with this female ghost who keeps causing problems. you figure “fuck it lets see if dianxia kept his old phone number” and he has but then he hangs up on you. you’ve got fuckall else to do so you go find him. mu qing is there but he’s in his disguise the two of you were using so you could watch over his highness while staying aloof. you think you see hua cheng only he’s a chiild for some goddamn reason but who knows at this point. the female ghost is also there and theres a fetus spirit climbing trees and biting your arrows in half. you realize the female ghost is your ex and the little demon is your son. it bites you. what do you do

amazing that despite everything going on everyone is still playing along with the “fu yao” persona when it would probably be easier to drop pretenses at this point. then again tbh if i could explain my actions to my friends while pretending to be a third party.... i probably would so.. carry on

“With all his devotees gone, only Feng Xin still treated him like the Flower-Crowned Martial God and His Highness the Crown Prince. ” “...his protection charms were all seen as trash. However, Feng Xin was still determined and tireless in handing them out; telling Xie Lian, look, you still have devotees.” “After all, he was the darling of the heavens since birth, high and mighty. Feng Xin so naturally spun around him like he was the world, so how could he possibly have his own life, his own heart” “Whether or not that fetus spirit was Feng Xin’s son, if it was that period of poverty that made Feng Xin lose the girl he loved, Xie Lian wouldn’t be able to forgive himself no matter what." ohhhh my god this relationship i. im...

oh my god i still have 30 more chapters until book 4............ its naptime now i think

things about time lords that was new to me and/or i forgot about that i’m now going to consider canon for basically every time lord in a fight:

Time Lords' physical forms are only fragments of much vaster multi-dimensional ones existing in a realm invisible to humans; this aspect is able to create coincidences around a Time Lord. (and everyone is so surprised by how strong they are. gallifreyans are (possibly) stronger than the hulk and captain marvel full force. k bye)

While the human eye was just a dish of light-sensitive cells, leaving the brain to do all of the processing, the Time Lord retina was capable of thinking on its own. As a result, on Gallifrey, the retina replaced fingers as the main method of communicating with machines. (a brain for the skull and a brain for each eye and just holy shit. they can feel people with their eyesssssss.) Gallifreyan eyes were better at seeing in general, as well as in the dark, as they could gather and enhance available light. They could notice incredible amount of detail from distances of at least one hundred yards away, as well as people that were well beyond the human line of sight. Gallifreyans had incredibly precise control of their eyes (which explains a shit ton on why the doctor’s eyes just get bigger when they can’t find a companion and have to resort to yelling their name. it’s like that meme about yelling something to get them to respond but extreme sports edition. like extreme marco polo or waldo like holy shit).

Gallifreyans could survive some falls which would shatter the bones of humans.

If pushed from a height into a liquid, a Time Lord body was capable of protecting them, sealing up the lungs to conserve air for a short period (see Hell Bent and 12′s constant diving)

Gallifreyans could survive extreme cold, due to having a "souped-up metabolism"; they could even withstand exposure to a vacuum for a few minutes with the only consequence being blindness rather than death. They could also survive extreme heat. They could even survive the subzero temperatures and extremely low pressure of vacuum for around six minutes, and survive electric shocks that would be fatal to humans. 

Röntgen radiation affected Gallifreyans so minimally that Gallifreyan children were routinely given radioactive toys in the nursery. They could, at will, absorb very high doses of Röntgen radiation, transform it into a form harmless to humans, and expel it from their bodies. Radiation of other kinds could be fatal, but even then a Gallifreyan could handle much higher doses than a normal human could, and could hold out much longer than even most terrestrial life-forms, although a unique form of radiation around the Lakertyan System was only fatal to Time Lords while being harmless to humans.

Gallifreyans needed less sleep than humans, and could make do with as little as an hour.

A Gallifreyan who was severely injured without actually needing to regenerate to heal the damage would generally slip into a healing coma, and devote all his or her energy to healing the injury. While in the coma, they would appear to be dead.

Time Lords also seem to have an increased resilience to higher frequencies of sound.

Gallifreyans could be disabled by a blow to the left shoulder, which possessed a vulnerable nerve cluster.

Gallifreyans were capable of resisting attempts to disintegrate their bodies, despite being shown capable of disintegrating other organisms.

Early Gallifreyans deliberately infected themselves with the Yssgaroth taint to give themselves a biological advantage.

Time Lords occasionally displayed, or referred to, the ability to fly. (cough cough mary poppins, saxon, missy, that time lord messenger, tenth doctor when he got back to normal and cradled the master and cried after lucy shot him cough cough)

Even without regeneration, Gallifreyans had considerable lifespans. Within one regeneration, Gallifreyans could live for hundreds of years, yet look much younger than a human of equivalent age. (which means the curator in the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who is 500 yrs old in that face so like imagine young tom baker but with just the short curly cut like wow)

Physical stress could cause Gallifreyans to age.

the Time Destructor may have contributed to ageing

Gallifreyan children grew at about the same rate as humans of the same age. After this point, ageing would slow, with the Gallifreyan looking like a teenager for decades. ( @girl-in-the-tardis @gallifreylegacy so basically those kids end up being like twilight minus the disco ball vampirism when they graduate college and get the highest occupation of their job. like they could be considered both the youngest president but also the oldest being visually a teenager but actually 90 yrs old. like No. 5 from Umbrella Academy)

90 is teens, 750 is middle-aged and senility age when one time lord gets over 12,000 years old (depending on the regeneration i guess???)

Gallifreyans had all the senses possessed by humans, and to generally superior degrees. Gallifreyans also had extraordinary reflexes and precision timing, literally superhuman.

In the space of four nanoseconds, a Time Lord can move fast enough to dodge shots fired at them whilst devising a plan to escape. (so that trailer where 13 is like a speedster? fucking canon y’all)

Gallifreyans showed great hand-eye coordination and dexterity with a wide variety of tool and weapons.

Gallifreyans (in "younger" bodies) were, consequently, very physically able and highly athletic

A time lord perceived sounds from the TARDIS, while located several sections away in a larger spacecraft or planet.

Gallifreyans were capable of identification by taste. (see all of tenth doctor) The Gallifreyan sense of smell was equal to their sense of taste. They could do a chemical analysis of the air using their sense of smell. On some occasions Time Lords were also able to judge what time period and location they were in by the smell of the air. (this explains that comic where rose was possessed by the ninth doctor and she basically became the ninth doctor for that strip while also talking to him out loud as he responded in her head: basically 9 was remy the rat and rose was linguini the hair-controlled human k thanks. so that’s a thing)

Gallifreyans were better at coping with sudden changes in position than humans and were harder to disorient. 

As well as the senses shared with humans, Gallifreyans had further senses, with at least a sixth sense. Gallifreyans had time- and spatial-related senses and physical attributes; they were able to resist fields of slow time, notice distortions and jumps in time, retain perception of local time flow, including a secondary "backwards" consciousness during jumps back in time that could overwrite the one prescribed by forward time, directly perceive the interstellar motions of cosmological bodies or their inhabitants — including sensing the "shape" of the world to the extent that they were aware when trapped in pocket dimensions — and perceive all possible timelines. Due to their time sensitive nature, Gallifreyans could retain memories of negate or alternative timelines. (so basically the whole ‘i won’t remember this’ schtick from 50th was a sham. which explains why tenth doctor was looking for rose the second he heard bad wolf but he was on gallifrey and not earth. this boy was looking for the moment but like she just didn’t appear and then the button changed into a rose shaped one like wow ok bye) The form of eidetic short-term memory, able to recall every insignificant detail of even the most moments in time (holy shit there’s no way you can win an argument with them. that’s fucking sad...for any human anYWAY). on a quantum level, their brain could receive information from possible futures, possibly without even realising it consciously. (ahaha do you mean that the tenth doctor saw different futures where he saw all outcomes of doomsday which makes all those edits where he’s living life with rose and donna as his sister fucking true but it’s also true that canonically he went, ‘nah, have tentoo im gonna skidaddle’ and left THEM OKAY BYE AGAIN). Time Lords shared a special mental connection to the structure of history. The chakras of the Time Lord nervous system could detect contours in the Time Vortex and also felt an instinctive gut revulsion towards fixed points in time.

The Time Lord brain was much larger and more complex than the human brain. The size differences effectively ruled out brain transplants from a Gallifreyan to a human, having one, two or three brainstems (so basically that whole plot in Get Out would have backfired so fucking hard. now that would have been a wild movie.) Time Lords could also separate the hemispheres of their brain, allowing them to multitask easily. Records on some planets indicated isolated cerebral hemispheres as a characteristic of Time Lords. Time Lords had an additional brain lobe dedicated to mechanical and other bodily functions, freeing the other lobes for intellectual endeavours. The autonomic functions could be artificially supplanted with a special device, allowing the Gallifreyan to think with their autonomic brain.

Gallifreyans could sense the presence of others of their own species, with the sense being specific enough to allow identification of one another just by sight, regardless of potential recent regeneration. (v and vin tend to turn this off because they like being surprised. surprises are fun.)

Body temperature of Gallifreyans are fucking Arctic or near Pluto levels, hence the layered clothing in the most hottest climate possible like what the fuck. it explains so much on why tenth doctor still donned that luau necklace thing because that was just a nice warm spring to him okay. which means if they get sick, you need oven gloves and a heat resistant suit. that’s what im gonna assume. like holy shit. no wonder that ice didn’t do shit for 10 in the 42 ep. good to know

Time Lords displayed the ability of touch-enabled mental manipulation; this manifested itself in a number of different ways, including hypnosis, mind-reading, thought sharing, the ability to relieve dementia, putting others to sleep, influence on others' dreams, memory erasure and could also transfer knowledge quickly to another person by headbutting them. In addition, they were telepathically linked to one another and could join the entire Time Lord intelligence as one. They could hold telepathic conversations over distances, but this was more difficult. They could converse with each over the astral plane, although this ability required intense concentration, and an interruption might have fatal consequences for the Time Lord. Their telepathy extended to less intelligent animals. Perhaps because of this, they had an innate ability to understand any language. In ancient times, Gallifreyans who were capable of blocking out the telepathic thoughts of other Gallifreyans were called Individuals. They usually had red-gold hair and often went on to become Young Heroes. (THAT’S 👏🏾WHY 👏🏾THE 👏🏾DOCTOR 👏🏾WANTS RED 👏🏾HAIR 👏🏾👏🏾 THEY 👏🏾 WANT 👏🏾 TO 👏🏾BE 👏🏾A 👏🏾INDIVIDUAL 👏🏾👏🏾) They were highly resistant against, if not immune to, other forms of mind control. However, they were vulnerable to more powerful forms of mind control. (so basically Jessica Jones episodes 1 thru whatever episode Kilgrave doesn’t find out about Hogarth trying to inject herself with his DNA, they are immune but, episode where kilgrave injects himself with it and becomes powerful might be vulnerable to it if that same kilgrave did what cartoon kilgrave did with tony stark and used the stark tower to boost and spread his control over everyone...or you know, maybe can withstand wanda vision’s control. maybe. i have to consider pythia and the karn so, it’s a good 50 - 50 chance on kilgrave and wanda being able to mind control a time lord. like properly. so jot that down)

Gallifreyans (Time Lords) don’t have prostates.

i agree with parts of that post but i fundamentally reject that "living as trans" happens in interaction with others. thats almost always pretext for "you're not your gender until you look xyz or do xyz", basically the same idea that you're not a woman until you "live as a woman", which is something that somehow keeps remaining unexamined for its cissexism and the harm in those societal norms. and it makes it impossible for non-binary folk to "exist" because they are not acknowledged by society

thanks for ur thoughts felix !! definitely an aspect i didnt think about on the post.So first up in response, I think that you’re absolutely right about the danger of making transness or ur gender as something that always and only is about how others perceive you. I dont like this point of view at all (thanks, contrapoints).However, on second reading, I wouldn’t be so quick as to nail the post down to this point, I think the post absolutely does incorporate that position of self-realisation and actualisation of one’s own gender:

our transness takes shape and acquires consequence in relation to the world; it is a certain set of behaviors and relationships to our selves, our bodies, and others that place us in opposition to gender as a social system

transness is a way of living, in relation to yourself and the world, and no one needs a psychiatric diagnosis to live a trans life.

so yeah, here i reckon there’s absolutely scope for placing an emphasis on one’s own relationship with oneself. My reading here is that in considering this relationship to the world and the ‘opposition to gender’ we can (and imo must) place our own subjectivity first. When i was interrogating my gender, and questioning the feelings i was having when being gendered as how i was then perceived, it was about the internal thoughts, feelings, and responses i was having when going up against the world. for me, this was the thing that first let me know that something was up, and i eventually found that womanhood was the place that i wanted, and realised later that i have always wanted, to be. Further, this is what matters most to me moving forwards with my transition and my womanhood, my lesbianism. And it is here that similarly i find comfort, fulfilment, and a kind of primacy that allows me to make sense of my life ever since i was a kid.

On to the second point about ‘comforting’ ‘essentialism’ here. I’ll admit that I’m not 100% sure what your second ask means, so pls help me out if i get something off.To clarify this point:

we continue to fixate on the idea of an essential transness because it gives us comfort, as well as the easiest answers.

I think the post is not saying “if you find your identity comforting, it’s essentialism, which is bad.” but instead saying “basing transness on essentialism is done because its comforting, which isn’t necessarily right or a good thing to do.”So like, its not: “oh you’re comfortable with being a man? that must be essentialist!” but rather: “If you say, ‘I was born this way, [or] i was a woman trapped in a man’s body’ you’re finding comfort in an essentialism.”(im not going to say more because im not sure i understand the last bit of your ask: “and considering that as a self independent of behaviours or how i'm perceived by others is not "comforting" to me, which is so often used as a word that dismisses some experiences in lieu of others'.”)I will say that there does seem to be, as you rightfully point out, a tendency for the left in trans theory, to see the system of gender as something that is oppressive and therefore any experience with it must be uncomfortable or degrading. To a large extent I agree with the analysis of gender as a system is something to be suspicious of, in late capitalism especially, however, I disagree with the motion that therefore we must disengage with gender totally, or always find it traumatic to exist within no matter what.My disagreement comes in two parts:1. it often then makes a call for the abolition of gender no matter what, disregarding many native traditions of gender and alternative systems of gender arose and still function largely (if not entirely) outside of western/capitalist constructs. Denying gender carte blanche without applying a postcolonial or aptly historical materialist lens to the case often leads to racist conclusions. I also think that it does try to tack on an ‘if’ or a ‘but’ to trans people’s identification by placing conditions on that identification that do not exist in the world, and only exist by means of a thought experiment. “if gender was abolished, would there be trans people?” “If dysphoria was no longer a thing, would trans people still need surgery?” I think these questions only ever point to a utopian project in which the material conditions in which things like ‘trans’ and ‘gender’ are completely changed beyond recognition. Systems of gender have been in place for most of human history, and employed to various levels of discrimination or celebration. to eliminate these things, it would take the destruction of capitalism and probably a thousand years at least, by which time technologies, social relations, everything, would have changed so completely -so what is the point of time-travelling trans people to this realm? go read about indigenous history if you’re that interested in alternative approaches to gender.2. i think it moves away from what we should actually be doing in the real world with regards to trans rights activism which is advocating for the ability to freely, informatively, and consensually gender oneself. talk of throwing out gender entirely is, although illuminating at times about various subjects, fundamentally disregards the pressing issues of today such as free universal access to trans healthcare, raising kids without gendered trauma (a feminist issue as well), eliminating transphobia etc. etc..I think the post does kinda get at this stuff (in 2.), asking how medical diagnoses are effecting trans people and how we think about ourselves and the bad effects of that, and indeed how cissexist society is only ever talking to itself whilst processing trans people within it.Hope this kinda makes sense???? Again, pls feel free to hit me up with any responses, questions, or where i’ve misread you lol.

can you do one of the breakdown things with bpd and dpd? thanks you a lot!!

okay, so, after an extremely long wait, here we go!

first, as usual, let’s run through the symptoms of each disorder separately.

dpd:

has difficulty making everyday decisions without reassurance from others

needs others to assume responsibility for most major areas of their life

has difficulty expressing disagreement with others

has difficulty initiating projects

goes to excessive lengths to gain nurturance and support from others

feels uncomfortable or helpless when alone

urgently seeks another relationship when one ends

is unrealistically preoccupied with fears of being left to take care of themselves

bpd:

frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment

a pattern of unstable relationships (usually characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation)

unstable self-image

impulsivity in areas that are potentially self-damaging but not suicidal or self-harming behaviors

recurrent suicidal behaviors and/or self-harm behaviors

mood swings

chronic feelings of emptiness

inappropriately intense anger or difficulty controlling anger

transient, stress-related paranoid ideas or dissociation

while reading this post, please keep in mind that while I was, at one point in time, diagnosed with DPD, it is most likely that the symptoms I was expressing were a result of abuse and a combination of some other disorders in response to abuse, so if anyone with DPD and/or DPD+BPD sees something here that they would like to step in and correct me on, or if there’s something anyone with DPD and/or DPD+BPD would like to point out that I missed, please do so.

now, first, let’s talk about the symptoms that enable each other or seem likely to overlap.

my first thought would be that ‘frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment’ would probably work in conjunction with....honestly, a few of the symptoms of DPD. I’d think it’d go alongside things like ‘going to excessive lengths to gain nurturance and support of others’, ‘feeling uncomfortable or helpless when left alone’, and ‘unrealistic preoccupation with fears of being left to take care of themselves’. if you have deep-seated fears of being left alone to take care of yourself and fixate on these a fair bit, it’s probably going to result in harder and potentially more frequent attempts to avoid abandonment, and might even cause seeing abandonment where it isn’t happening more often. on top of that, those of us with BPD are frequently afraid of being abandoned, and coupled with discomfort or feeling helpless when left alone, I could easily see that discomfort fueling the fear of being abandoned that folks with BPD already have. I could also see a person with BPD and DPD going to excessive lengths to gain support in order to reassure themselves that they aren’t being abandoned in addition to doing that to satisfy the need to be taken care of that DPD seems to impart.

basically, DPD and BPD seem like they’re a combination primed for extreme fear of abandonment and going to extreme lengths for attention and care (aka, reassurance the person isn’t being abandoned) and going to extreme lengths to not be abandoned when abandonment is perceived. in addition, given the way the two work, I feel like put together, they’d make a person far more likely to be perceiving abandonment where it’s not really happening.

I also honestly feel like, to some extent, stress-related paranoid ideas from BPD when you also have DPD could result in more preoccupation with being left alone to take care of themselves, and feeling even more paranoid that they’re going to be left alone.

I’d also say that difficulty expressing disagreement with others would probably be compounded by the BPD desire to avoid being abandoned--on top of the fear that disagreeing with others will cause them to be mad at you and leave you alone, which would process as bad for a person with DPD, you’ve got the BPD end of things going “and also, if you say something that makes them hate you, they’ll leave forever”, because BPD can involve predicting extreme reactions to a thing, like a disagreement making someone hate us. this could lead to a person with both trying to literally never disagree with anyone, and potentially even struggling to speak their mind at all, I think.

I could also see the ‘unstable relationship’ working together with ‘urgently seeking new relationships when another one ends’ in some ways, purely in the fact that it could cause a person to be seeking new relationships a lot. I’ve noticed that some of us with BPD have a tendency to, when we’re splitting on people (which has a strong tendency to be the cause of that whole ‘unstable relationship’ thing), feel like that relationship is about to be over, or like we WANT that relationship to be over. this could, in turn, cause the person to feel like the relationship has already ended, and being urgently seeking out a new one. which could create a running cycle of seeking new relationships during periods of bad splitting--and depending on the person, that could be an uncommon thing or a frequent occurrence.

I could also, to an extent, see ‘chronic feelings of emptiness’ and ‘difficulty starting projects’ enabling each other in a bad way. personally speaking, when I’m struggling with the whole ‘chronic feelings of emptiness’ thing, nothing matters, I don’t really care about the things I wanted to do or should be doing, I’m just sort of dead inside. couple that with an already existing difficulty in starting projects, and I could see it making starting projects have the difficulty level of, like, climbing Mount Everest with zero preparation or training.

there are a few symptoms here I could see conflicting, as well, so let’s talk about those.

first up, I could see the whole ‘impulsivity in areas that are self-damaging but not suicidal’ and the whole ‘difficulty making everyday decisions without reassurance’ conflicting to an extent? I’ve heard from some people with DPD that part of the struggle isn’t just everyday decisions, but decisions in general, small or big, and frankly speaking, when I was diagnosed with DPD, one of the factors that got me diagnosed was the level with which I struggled with a lot of decisions. I could almost see the ‘difficulty making decisions’ part making it harder for a person with both to be impulsive about things. on the other hand, it could also go the opposite way, with the impulsivity crashing through the difficulty making decisions, but ONLY in regards to decisions that are likely to be self-damaging, since that’s the most frequent area where people with BPD experience impulsivity (ime). so this could either help to reign in that part of BPD, or....it could make a tangle where the person can’t make everyday decisions without reassurance but can make potentially self-destructive decisions with ease because of that impulsive side of things.

I will also say that given that BPD’s ‘unstable relationship patterns’ frequently result from splitting on people, I could easily see that part conflicting with DPD a lot. while I could see it working to create a cycle with one of the symptoms of DPD, as already said, I could also easily seeing it conflicting heavily with the desire to not be left alone and the preoccupation with the fear of being left alone and potentially even the strong desire for nurturance and care from others. when a person with BPD splits, we frequently lash out and tell the person we’ve split on to go away, or we straight-up try to leave them ourselves. in a person with DPD, though, this seems like it would conflict very directly with the fear of being left alone--if you split on someone and they leave, you’re alone and have to look after yourself, and if you leave them because you split, it’s the same result. I’m not sure how this would play out--perhaps it would cause less splitting, perhaps it would result in more immediate scrambling and fear and desperately trying to make it up to the person after you stop splitting, or maybe it would result in the person still trying to be around and talk to the person they’ve split on while also struggling with the effects of being split. but that symptom definitely seems like it’d strongly conflict with DPD in general.

going off that, I also think, in some ways, the symptom of ‘intense anger and difficulty controlling anger’ as conflicting with DPD symptoms for the same reasons as above. I mean, if you have BPD and you get angry at someone, it’s intense, it’s hard to control, but if you lash out, they might leave you, and while that’s absolutely a thing that those of us with BPD fear, I could see it being an even more intense concern for someone who also has DPD, which means they might be either more immediately upset with themselves for lashing out, or they might lash out less frequently, it’s really hard for me to say. but I could see those two working in opposition. you’d still feel the anger level, I imagine, but it might be harder to express and might lead to you fearing to express your anger, or it might lead to you lashing out still but struggling a lot more with the aftermath of that. or, honestly, given what I’ve heard from some folks with DPD about their dependeds and their relationships with them, it could also make you more inclined to try and bury the anger so you don’t even feel it in regards to that person.

that is....approximately all I can think of; there are some symptoms here I don’t think would interact at all, or that I think might interact but I’m not sure how, like I’m not sure what the interaction of mood swings might be with the symptoms of DPD, if there is one. so I’m just going to cut it here. if anyone with DPD and/or DPD+BPD has input, again, please feel free to offer.

I hope this was helpful, anon! sorry for the wait, again.

I’ve been stewing on this for a while and you seem reasonable enough to mention it to, but I don’t really understand “non-binary” identities, especially because most “non-binary” people are completely gender-conforming to their natal sex. They say they don’t identify as a man or woman or whatever but, like, I’m a “cis” natal female and I have no idea what “identifying as a woman” means like. (1/?)

Or is it just a way to gain the perceived social capital of being trans without the pressure to transition? I also feel like men who do it are just looking for a way to deny their male privilege (again, most are completely gender conforming ime). Is it internalized misogyny when women do it? I have no idea. I don’t understand the purpose and I’m wondering if you had any insight because I have no clue what “identifying as a woman” means, materially.

Like I saw this text post that was like, “nb dysphoria is weird. I don’t want people to see a guy or a girl, I want people to look at me and say ‘what the fuck?’” But like, that doesn’t seem like it’s dysphoria? It seems like it’s about aesthetics or style? And we’re just throwing these words around now and I have no idea what people are talking about like... how can you be non-binary on something that is supposedly a spectrum (gender). Wouldn’t everyone be non-binary then? 

(i assume this is everything)

first up on tumblr/twitter/internet nonbinarism: a lot of it is meaningless. like 99% of it comes from failure to properly assess what gender is (a patriarchal system) and the attempts to classify gender as a “spectrum” really just seems like bogus third-genderism with extra steps (when i say “third-genderism” i mean the attempts to insert a “third gender” into global patriarchy, i make absolutely no claim to know enough to speak on third genders that have historically existed in other cultures). it’s kinda the ultimate distillation of the idea that “gender identity” trumps above all when like.... it really just doesn’t matter. nonbinary people who are visibly gender-nonconforming absolutely face mistreatment/oppression on homophobic and/or misogynistic grounds, but those who don’t.... don’t

some male en bees certainly experience, like, otherwise normal dysphoria in a similar way to a lot of trans women, others are just looking to artificially distance themselves from maleness/manhood for predation, avoiding accountability, etc. imo the important thing here is really just that we can identify the latter when it’s happening

as for female people who identify as “nonbinary”... i think a lot of this is because “binary womanhood” just doesn’t exist, just calling it “internalized misogyny” i don’t feel is accurate. i’m absolutely not the first to observe this but it’s like... with the latest iteration of Trans Discourse™ loads of women are being told that they’re benefiting from “cis privilege” somehow, but then they reflect on their actual experiences and social/material positioning and realize that “cis privilege” has never once helped them in their lives, conclude that this must just mean they’re not cis but they’re also not trans man so they start identifying as “nonbinary”

it’s not the case that being nonbinary doesn’t exist (namely i think lots of dysphoric/gnc LGBT people can/do make a meaningful claim to being nb), but the current presentation of it within many online/liberal/transfeminist circles is really just an obfuscation of the actual social dynamics of gender and trying to group a load of incongruent experiences together as “binary,” the same way they do for “cis”

with regards to “identifying as a woman” and what that means materially, once again, it doesn’t really. nobody faces material oppression on the basis of their identity. women aren’t oppressed because they “identify” as women, LGB people aren’t oppressed because they “identify” as LGB, and trans people aren’t oppressed because they “identify” with the gender they do, etc. social perception precedes material effects, so until you’re actually being socially interpreted as one of these, there’s not really any “oppression” at play and certainly no material ramifications. this isn’t to say there can’t be psychological effects before then (lord knows being closeted LGBT is mentally taxing) but it’s not the same thing

gender identity (and there by extension “identifying as a woman,” being trans) itself, meanwhile, is really just a way of processing dysphoria on an individual level. that isn’t to say it’s Problematiqué or that gender is now an individualist issue or anything it’s just important to recognize that it is an individualized method of navigating patriarchy

i hope all that helps? this is really all just my current thoughts and assessments but Yeah

False Equivalency: Antifa vs the Nazis

    I realized after last week that there might be some people who want to argue “BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT THE LEFT IS EVIL TOO!! THEY DO BAD THINGS TOO!!! WHAT ABOUT BLACK LIVES MATTER!!! AND ANTIFA!! THEY DO BAAAAD THINGS TOO!!! WAH WAH WAAH! IM SO TRIGGERED I NEED MY SAFE SPACE” so let’s nip that in the bud.

    Honestly, this claim is, in and of itself, ridiculous. Regardless of the rest of this argument, there’s one very big point that needs to be stated up front and that makes the rest of this moot.

    The Alt-Right wants to kill people. They want to commit genocide. They will not be happy until every single Jew, Black, Homosexual or whoever they don’t happen to like is dead. I’ll get into the details there in a moment, but right now I just want to focus on that. Their ideology is existentially threatening to people who are not in the demographics they have decided are qualified to exist. If they get into power, which they are already to an extent, then they will tweak the system to deliberately harm those people. We have proof of that already. This was the entire premise of the Jim Crow era. Anti-fascist actions are self defensive actions, and those of you who don’t see that I’m willing to be are privileged enough that you have the luxury of ignoring it.

    But let’s get back to that point of escalation. That’s a slippery slope, I hear the devil’s advocate say. A lot of them just want to stop immigration, stop people from coming into the country to prevent the white race from being lost and mixed away into nothing. And if you believe that, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you, or a mace I want to smack you upside the head with. Think about it - if, say, Mexican Americans mixed with “Whites” to the point where the “white race” no longer exists then the Mexican-American race won’t either. Unless they’re suggesting that, say, a collective of Mexican-Americans will distinctly not have mixed-raced children because CONSPIRAAACYYYYYYY.

    Anyway, I’m sidetracking again. That’s a whole other thing. We have proof historically that this is the case, and consider it. If these people are really afraid of having their blood diluted then it can’t just stop with non-whites being disallowed into the country. Sure, that keeps them out, but what about the people already in your country? Well, they have to be removed from the country. This is how it started in Nazi Germany - Jews were “encouraged” to leave with laws that made it difficult for them to own businesses or be politicians. But sometimes, they don’t. Other times, they can’t. A rich Jewish person might have stayed in Nazi Germany because they thought it was their duty to keep Germany from getting worse. A poor person stays because they can’t exactly afford to leave. There were also plenty of people who actually didn’t even know they were Jewish by Nazi standards - the Nazis considered anyone who had at least 3 Jewish grandparents a Jew, even if they didn’t practice the religion. Either way, not everyone is going to leave. So you have to forcibly move them and separate them from the people you don’t want them mixing with. But that doesn’t always work either, because people might escape those ghettos and take a new identity.

    This is why the Nazis called their executions the “Final Solution.” The only way to solve the Jewish problem was to kill all the Jews in the country. That way they couldn’t possible cause problems. And this is the point where I would say the slope for certain stops. If you believe that certain people are lesser and are destroying you by trying to mix you away, then there’s no way to stop that for certain without killing any of them in your country and stopping new ones from getting into the country.

    But there’s another step that’s fairly easy to take which makes it even worse. Other countries may not have such rigorous standards for identifying what the racists consider to be a race “polluter”.  For instance, England may only identify a Jew as someone who practices the faith, so when they apply for German citizenship, none of that “insidious jewry” comes to the surface. Suddenly the race is being polluted discreetly from outsiders pretending to be insiders. So you have to kill Jews in other countries too.

        We know this because we’ve seen this happen before. Every country that focuses on racial purity has more or less followed this same path. Even if they say they don’t want this, they do. Either because they actually do want genocide and are lying, or they don’t realize that the only way to get what they want is genocide.

    Stopping fascism is a self-defensive action. End of discussion.

    But hey, just because you’re defending yourself doesn’t mean you’re allowed to do whatever you like. It’s no fair if I shoot a man 27 times before breaking his skull just because he made a sexist threat, that’s just excessive.

    To that end, and I’m gonna put this in big bold letters, I DO NOT AGREE WITH ALL ANTI-FASCIST VIOLENCE. Sometimes punching a Nazi is okay, sometimes there are better choices. There’s a lot of problems with the machismo being waved around by some Antifa folk and I think that if anti-fascist movements are to be effective, it needs to be made clear that violence is used as a last resort. Of course, the fascists will always try and make it look like that’s not the case, and the news media is surprisingly interested in spreading the viewpoints of fascists (that’s another topic I’ll talk about some day). But if we don’t do things without reason, then there’s less wiggle room for them to convince us otherwise. Especially with the fascist grasp on the media, it’s important that Antifa put on a good face, at least to an extent.

    But let’s talk usual tactics. What most people don’t know is that most of what Antifa does is background work. Tearing down posters to prevent people from knowing about their meetings, informing gathering places that the people coming there are Nazis, usually causing them not to be able to hold their meetings, data mining information to dox Nazis. All of these, and a few more like them, are the most common tactics of Antifa. In short, Antifa isn’t really interested in doing physical violence. They’re interested in stopping Nazis from doing violence. If they can’t get together because they’re being stopped at every possible turn, then they can’t grow.

    A part of that means coming up and counter protesting when the Nazis show up to ruin the fun. In the same way the Patriot Guard Riders show up to drown out the noise of the Westboro Baptist Church with their motorcycles to keep their message from being heard, the Antifa protesters show up to fascist rallies not to start a fight, but to drown out the noise so people can’t hear it. One of the best anitfa protests I ever saw was a youtube video of a Nazi going on about the white race on a soap box while an anti fascist stood right in front of him and screamed at the top of his lungs every time he tried to say something, drowning him out.

    Sometimes, though, you need to get your hands dirty. While Charlottesville was a mess, I only ever saw Antifa spraying mace into the eyes of fascists when the fascists tried to enter areas not designated for their use, or after their assembly had been called unlawful. They were interested in holding their ground, while we have evidence of the fascists gathering groups to send them out to heckle and perturb the counter protestors.

    Also, note that while both sides exchanged barbs and the occasional fist, only one side drove their car into people. Which brings me to my next point. In the past 10 years, only 2% of extremist driven deaths were caused by extremist leftists, with 72% percent being right wing. (The empty space in between is represented by religious extremists, for those wondering).

    Of course, Antifa will fight back. They have to. The right will also commonly incite violence by feigning attacks, doing things specifically to agitate - like holding a rally in a Jewish part of town - or even spit on Antifa counter protestors. This is a common tactic employed by the police and the right - creating a situation where violence is either perceived as necessary or is made to be inevitable. Which isn’t to say Antifa hasn’t instigated. That famous video of Richard Spencer getting decked in the face was more or less completely unexpected.

The point is, there are times to use violence, and times not to, and Antifa recognizes that, even if they don’t always make the “right” decision. I’ve talked before about when and when not to set your proverbial foot down in that regard, but that’s just my opinion.

But here’s the kicker. Antifascists only congeal out of ordinary people when fascists begin to crawl out of the scum sucking abyssal ponds they belong in. Their primary objective is to stop fascists, and once the fascists go away and back into hiding where they belong, they will spread back out where they belong. Antifa exists not as an organization with an overarching goal and with leaders, but instead as a counterpoint to fascists. If there aren’t Nazis and their ilk going about operating in the open, then antifa won’t need to.

    Now, knowing all of this, can you honestly tell me that the antifa and the right are the same?

Maul, part I: Broken Boys - early life trauma, survival & Ben Solo parallels

This is going to be an evolving meta that will be posted in a series of installments as I make my way through the various sources piecing the picture together and also attempt to tackle the various themes that pull at my heartstrings. I haven’t attempted to write anything in quite this way before, so there will be inevitable cross-referencing happening and it’s likely that I will come back to certain things later on.

There is something that stood out to me right away, as I started reading The Wrath of Darth Maul, and those are Ben Solo parallels. That doesn’t mean that I equate them in any way, but it does point to certain circumstantial factors that shaped their lives and I believe that what we know about them individually can inform us about the other. 

In both of them we see the effects of what it means to be a victim of the Dark side. The destruction of an innocent, impressionable mind being subjected to unimaginable, systematic cruelty with no protection and no hope of escape. Being taught that everything happening to them is their own doing, and a just punishment. They are the Lost Boys. Both their lives could have been very different and neither went down a path they laid for themselves through choice. And in Maul, especially, the connection to the Dark side is not an inherent one, and was about his environment and matter of birth, more so than something he manifested independently, in contrast to what we know of Ben, whose internal conflict had been apparent from the beginning. 

My interest and inspiration here is to look at how the loss, trauma, deprivation, enduring compassion and capacity for love come together and fit into place in the making of this man. I don’t plan to descend into proper psychoanalysis, but to try and open Maul’s path and mind through some of what we know about Ben, who has been presented as a much more sympathetic character. In fact, hardly as a villain at all. And although I already said that I don’t equate them, I hope to show that the patterns and psychology of it is very similar, even if circumstances differ.

A major difference between Maul and Ben though, is the age at which they began their training, and the fact that Maul was trained to use the Force as a darksider from the start. But the way that the Dark side methods and cruelty in his training contrast with his curious and accepting nature shows that while Darth Sidious took him for his strength in the Force, the same way that Snoke singled out Ben, the darkness wasn’t inherently dominating over the potential for Light in either of them. The question of age definitely plays into this matter, because Ben started training unusually late, and Maul on the other hand very early, and so he wasn’t old enough to have yet started manifesting the imbalance or struggle between Light and Dark the way Ben did.

Unfortunately a lot of the material that has provided information on Maul’s early life has been pushed to the Legends with the Disney acquisition. Which is a shame. Because that material was a source for a lot of insight. I’m not going to shy away from using it as a source here though, because it still shows the original intention in his depiction. And there is very little material that has come later that has overwritten any of what came before. It has mostly just left a hole.

But there are some inconsistencies that derive from the rebranding and restructuring because of later-established sources that no longer had to be consistent with published material. To me, one of the most important ones is the circumstance of his birth. 

The earlier information ( Darth Plagueis, 2012 ) reveals that Maul was born on Iridonia, as one of two male twins to Kycina, a human Nightsister mother from Talzin’s clan, and a Dathomirian Zabrak father that by Dathomirian tradition was killed soon after she became pregnant. Kycina was desperate to find a way to give at least one of her sons a life of freedom. Thinking Talzin was only aware of one of her twins, she offered Maul to Sidious to take as an apprentice, hoping that this would at least give her son a chance of a life free of the fate that awaited him on Dathomir.

The later version goes into no such detail of the circumstance of his birth that I have been able to discern, and it is merely established that Talzin was mother to all three boys (including Savage). And that Sidious had formed an alliance with Talzin, having promised to take her as his apprentice in return for her knowledge. It is when Sidious met Maul and sensed his strength in the Force that he not only broke his promise to Talzin, but also kidnapped her “son”. 

Personally, I remain loyal to the original version. Not only does it answer more questions, but I believe that it offers us valuable insight. I’m sure it was no small amount of consideration that went into giving such an iconic character a backstory. And for it to be imagined in this way tells us quite a bit about how the creators wanted him to be perceived, at least by those who would seek that understanding.

Not to mention the fact that there is no plausible child-parent relationship depicted between Maul and Talzin. And to insist that he’s her son would also mean to accept that this mother did nothing to aid this son of hers who was withering away on Lotho Minor... not before it became convenient and useful for her at least.

And as it is a certain development that Im trying to observe here, chronology is relevant to it. So in the following I’m going to look at the backstory that The Wrath of Darth Maul paints us, starting from his early years in captivity on Mustafar. 

Maul was only 3 or even two at the time, considering that he has already been on Mustafar for a while by the time the book starts. Page 1 of chapter I describes where, and importantly how he is being kept. In a small, featureless room, made of metal. With a single polarized viewport overlooking a river of lava leading to a sea of fire. He was completely isolated and left without any meaningful social interaction. A single droid looked after him, simultaneously serving the functions of his caretaker, teacher and punisher. The very second page in chapter I establishes how little Maul wishes he could escape this place.

He was left in complete emotional and social deprivation. Fed bits of raw meat through a slot in the door that remained shut. Then, forced to exercise until point of collapse. Let’snot forget that this is a toddler that we are talking about. Windham repeatedly emphasizes how small he is. For example, how his feet “only extend a few centimeters over the edge of a seat”.

We are introduced to the circumstance through a frightened child’s eyes. Trying to figure out how to behave in the right way that does not grant punishment. He is being actively conditioned in the most awful, cruel ways. Something that has been (with less written evidence) noted about Ben and the way in which it shaped his thinking for years to come, leaving behind marks that he may never entirely recover from.

“Maul hated the Man even more than he hated the droid. The Man frightened him.”

The book doesn’t describe the first few times that Maul met Sidious, but only that his fear of him was greater than that he felt for the droid that routinely hurt him. 

“Usually, the droid brought pain. Once, the droid had delivered a bright green and yellow snake that wasted no time in attacking Maul, sinking its venomous fangs deep into the boy’s arm.”

“One of the first things he learned was not to cry. Crying never made anything better. Crying only made things worse.”

So these two quotes above should give an adequate idea about what his early childhood boiled down to. Not that we can really call this a childhood. Mind you, this is only from the first pages of chapter one so far, and his training, which is in reality conditioning, only became crueler as he grew. The objective was quite clearly to break him down completely, so he could be put back together in ways that served the abuser’s intended purpose. But there’s nothing vague about all the abuse he’s been described to go through. I wont be including the most graphic depictions of abuse here, but let me tell you it wasn’t easy to read.

I feel it’s been somewhat acknowledged that Maul has a backstory, and that there’s certain tragedy to it. But I’m just not sure in what depth it’s been looked at. And there’s the inevitable difference between how the origin story of the hero vs the villain is looked upon. Regardless of whether the dichotomy is really carved into stone in such a way, as long as it is perceived, it is also applied. 

That also extends to the sympathy with which their lives are viewed. I think we have an interesting case in Ben, because people obviously can’t agree on it. We’ve been sent mixed signals, and we can see how that has changed our perception of his becoming, and our willingness to see him as a victim. Because on one hand there’s the way that he has been initially presented as a villain (even though not explicitly defining him that way) and then there’s his ever-expanding backstory that explains how things ended up that way. And it’s the how that has the power to change... everything. Because it has the power to bring understanding which in turn inspires sympathy, that enables a shift in responsibility. Which can change how we view something to the very core.

“More than ever, Maul wished he were the free-floating boy who appeared to exist beyond the window in his own room. He tried very hard not to tremble as he slowly turned and looked up to face the Man.”

His wish to escape has been mentioned multiple times. And it’s more than about setting the tone, the feeling. It’s confirming over and over that this child didn’t choose this path or fate. Depending on whether we follow the original or the later version, he was either given up by his mother in hopes that this would be better than what awaited on Dathomir, or he was kidnapped. In either case, not there by any choice of his own.

“But he survived.”

And I think this is quite clearly establishes that it’s mightily unfair to talk about choices here. What we’re talking about is survival. Once it becomes about survival, it’s what reframes everything else involved, because we’ve stopped talking about choices. I guess what I’m arguing here is that if we can agree that Ben Solo was a victim of the Dark side, of abuse, conditioning and manipulation, Maul most definitely is. Not only were his circumstances likely far more severe, but he had not known a life outside of it. He had no point of reference for what the alternative could even be and no moral framework outside of avoiding cruel punishment.