cresvalkyrie

[cresvalkyrie]

Just in case Trump wins:

right after Trump was elected in 2016, suicidality skyrocketed. If you’re considering suicide in the wake of the election this year, at least wait until after it’s absolutely certain that he’s won - after every vote has been counted, every state certified, and maybe even after he’s been sworn in (IF he wins), just to make sure he doesn’t go to prison instead. Watch the results come in live here, but don’t obsess or let them sway your vote. (To be clear, I don’t want a single person to commit suicide over the election results, no matter what. But I know from experience that “don’t do it” is thoroughly unhelpful, so instead I’m saying at least wait.)

if you’re considering suicide because you fear worsening material conditions, you might think a hotline can’t help with that. and it’s true that they can’t change legislation or promise you’ll be safe. but it’s worth double checking whether what you’re actually hurting from is in fact unfixable. right now, just getting through the emotions can help you regain a more objective view of the situation, and then you can work on surviving it. plus, when something bad happens, we tend to vastly overestimate how bad it will seem in the future, no matter how bad it actually is.

In my experience, it might take a few tries before you find a hotline that picks up, either because they’re so busy, or they’re closed at that time, or they simply don’t serve your location or demographic, so under the thingy I’ve listed more than just the same handful that tend to show up on other websites. Even if you’re not actively suicidal, you can talk to them about your hard feelings, ask for material resources, or just vent to a compassionate listener.

FIND HELP

HopeLine - call/text: 877-235-4525

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline - call/text: 988 | chat

Crisis Text Line - text HOME to 741741 | chat

help getting out of the military

for underrepresented adults:

Thrive Lifeline - text THRIVE to 313-662-8209

for pre-teens, teens, and young adults:

Your Life Your Voice - call: 800-488-3000 | text VOICE to 20121 | email

for teens (limited hours):

Teen Line - call: 800-852-8336 | text TEEN to 839863 | email

for trans and questioning people:

Trans Lifeline - call: 1-877-565-8860

for people with substance dependency:

Never Use Alone Overdose Prevention Hotline - call: 877-696-1996

for BIPOC (“with an LGBTQ+ Black Femme Lens”):

BlackLine - call: 1-800-604-5841

for college students of colour:

The Steve Fund Crisis Text Line - text STEVE to 741741

for LGBTQ+ young people:

The Trevor Project - call: 1-866-488-7386 | text START to 678678 | chat

for homeless or runaway youth:

National Runaway Safeline - call/text: 1-800-786-2929 | (has chat and email, but I think the link includes tracking)

for Muslim youth (limited hours):

Naseeha Youth Hotline - call: 1-866-627-3342

Amala Hopeline - call: 1-855-952-6252

for Jewish queer youth (warmline, may take up to 24 hours to reply):

JQY Warmline - call/text: 551-579-4673

for veterans:

Veterans Crisis Line - call: 988, option 1 | text: 838255 | chat

for veterans and their families:

Lifeline for Vets - call: 888-777-4443

for pregnant people:

Crisis Pregnancy Hotline - call: 888-628-3353 | text: 714-448-8323

for parents unsure of their ability to care for a newborn:

National Safe Haven Alliance - call: 888-510-2229 | text SAFEHAVEN to 313131

International Council for Helplines Member Organisations

Warmlines - for emotional support, if you just need to talk; a lower level of support than crisis hotlines

NAMI Helpline directory

Key warmline directory (unclear if 317-550-0060 might also be a warmline, I haven’t tried it)

Wildflower Alliance Peer Support Line (limited hours) - call: 888-407-4515

[cresvalkyrie]

parenting is tough

[cresvalkyrie]

hey (with the intention of rubbing your back until you fall asleep)

[cresvalkyrie]

Inner peace (Battle) and the Rivals Battle theme

I want to talk about these battle themes and when they played.

Inner peace:

When the song first starts it gives the feeling you are fighting a focused and well-trained person. It feels intense, yet it's so calm.

Then 1 minute and 9 seconds in it changes.

It feels more chaotic, out of control. After that it gets back to how it first played, but there is still a feeling of unbalance at that point.

Inner peace is first played when you fight Kiki. This theme is the battle of the Apophyll Academy sensei.

Kiki is the sensei who has learned about inner peace and control.

But she's dying and it's taking a toll on her.

She is dying and she can't do anything about it, yet she still has a school to run and puts up a facade for her students.

There's no more inner peace.

The second time it plays when you fight Victoria in Devonyx.

Kiki has passed and Victoria is now the sensei.

Although she does an okay job seeming to be in control she breaks more easily.

She is unbalanced before you even fight her. She was forced to take over the academy before she was ready, Kiki her beloved mentor and mother figure died and now she also has to help with rebuilding Reborn City.

She continues to unravel, but still puts on a facade even though it continues to break down.

Rivas theme:

The rivals all share the same battle theme, a remix by GlitchXCity.

The team plays when we test each others abilities as league challangers, however at some point during main game the theme stops playing for them.

First time is against Fern in the Fiore Mansion.

You are fighting him not as your rival in this part, but as a team Meteor member. However it's not the Team Meteor battle that is playing, it's the Misc theme. This is played for characters who aren't quite your rival, but are also not your enemy.

This theme is also played for for Blake, who although is on the side of team Meteor doesn't really believe in their cause. Neither Solaris's or Lin's.

He's just there because he wants to be on the winning side (although for him more specifically it's to be safe).

For Fern it's pretty much the same, he's on the side of the winners. Not because he believes in their causes. He's still your rival obviously, but this is not a battle to test each others abilities. He at this point (from what I understand) is no longer taking the league challenge.

When we fight him in Victory Road he has the Meteor Admin theme.

Now he does believe in the cause, Lin's to be specific. She told him they'd be at the top and he wants that. He's also the only team Meteor member remaining that isn't a grunt, which is why he is given the admin theme instead. The others died or quit.

He doesn't feel like a rival anymore, he feels like a threat. He wants to take what is his and will hurt you for it.

I already explained Victoria's theme change when fighting her at Devonyx. She told us she quit the League challenge for the academy.

She also doesn't feel like our rival at this point anymore either.

When we fight Cain in the glass gauntlet we hear the Team Meteor Admin theme.

That's because we're not fighting him, we're fighting team Meteor controlling him.

Like the other two, this isn't a battle against our rival it's against other forces where he is a part of even if it's not of his own choice.

Spoilers to the Celebi quest:

When we fight Champion Shelly we don't get the champion theme, but the rival one.

We are a champion ourselves and don't have to prove ourselves against her. Shelly herself at this point is also a champion, although she didn't get to fight us she still went through the league and earned the title.

We are not her final obstacle, we are her equal.

Anyway I'm insane about reborn okay bye.

[cresvalkyrie]

Before you decide to have feelings for someone, I suggest you:

Stop

No

Don’t do that

Drink a glass of water

Don’t be an idiot

Stop feeling things

Become cynical

Transcend your corporeal form

Ascend from this planet

Become an otherworldly being

Thank me

[cresvalkyrie]

My Collection

[cresvalkyrie]

advice rewritten

[cresvalkyrie]

Got hit with rejuv brain rot again

Sketch under the cut:

[cresvalkyrie]

would be ok to still consider reborn characters to be around the players age, despite irl aging? if that would be fine to ask about? i get worried my fondness for certain characters would make things weird now

oh, darling

okay, let's talk about this. this is probably going to be a long breakdown.

so first off, let's establish some ground principles:

1- our goal is to prevent harm from being done to vulnerable populations.

2- a huge gap in agency between two parties of a relationship creates a situation where it is extremely easy for one party to abuse the other.

3- that gap in agency can occur for many reasons. age difference is the most commonly considered, but others might include disabilities (esp cognitive), positions of power, or financial dependence.

4- the age of consent is a well-meaning, insufficient attempt to bandage the most numerically tangible of the above situations. however, while an adult can extort a minor, similarly can a 15 year old extort an 8 year old, or a 60 year old extort a 20 year old. so already the concept of age of consent is woefully inadequate

5- in addition to the above, humans develop at different rates. it is perfectly possible for a 25 year old to have a great difference in agency between a 23 or even 27 year old, and thereby create a scenario of control and abuse. we are cognizant of this a lot with youtubers lately. though cases involving minors get more attention, often times older victims come out of the woodwork to report similar patterns of inappropriate and controlling behavior.

...so, in consideration of all of the above points, what we have here is a situation which A) cannot adequately be represented in terms of pure numbers B) must be represented by numbers in order to create laws to protect the most clearly vulnerable of populations C) is difficult to understand without even in the first place having a good grasp on what concepts like 'agency' and 'abuse' even actually are D) has resulted in laws and taboos which are aggressively safeguarded by people who do not understand the core reasons behind those laws and, E) concerns a highly volatile and often deeply damaging, personal offense against other humans which is naturally going to result in intense feelings by all parties relevant

so there's a lot of intense feelings, not a lot of understanding, and an easy-to-understand but insufficient law to attempt to bind all those things together.

all of this is to show exactly why the internet is so Extreme about these issues. forty years ago you had to have a master's degree and a publisher to write anything about the subject that would actually get read. now all you need is a tumblr account and a bit of spare energy. the greater internet is lovely, but it is seldom nuanced.

but let's set that aside for now. as with any law or taboo, there are going to be people who are willing to violate it. as with any crime that has victims, it is best if we can identify when or who is likely to enact such crimes and preempt it, thereby protecting the would-be victims. unfortunately humanity hasn't created minority report or the cybil system yet, so the best way we have to preempt such crimes is by looking at signifiers, or red flags, of who is likely to be willing to violate those laws.

now this should start to feel familiar. some obvious red flags for people who might be willing to violate the taboo of not exploiting children might be... - a person reposting explicit l*licon - someone arguing that the age of consent shouldnt exist - a legal adult dating a legal minor that last one might already raise some hairs-- isn't that what we're literally trying to prevent? but remember point #5 above-- the age is not what matters. what matters is the difference in agency, and the abuse in question. that situation could be a newly-18 year old who had already been dating her junior for several years... or it could be an older man dating a minor who hasn't done anything to create a victim yet. we are talking about how to predict who is going to cross the lines and create an actual victim. we can infer the newly-18 year old probably won't. we can infer the older man probably will.

but how often are people that overt, especially online? too often, and yet not so often enough that we can rely on it. so we look for subtler red flags: - someone having a l*li as their pfp - someone flirting with minors - someone saying it's okay to like X character because even though she looks like a child she's actually a 1,000 year old dragon - someone who seems to go out of their way to message a lot of female-presenting or underage people online -or even someone who's just a little too willing to talk around the age of consent as if it were any thing but a hard and fast iron wall.

how many of you have tensed up since reading this, evaluating if i am an unsafe person, who might be willing to violate these taboos? someone has already tried once to cancel me on twitter for talking seriously about p*dophilia as a mental illness that should be better understood-- as opposed to just taking the simpler stance of "p*dophiles bad". with as many influential figures as have been outed as exploiting their position and fans, we unfortunately have to be too-often on guard. so, we are always looking for these red flags.

then going back to what i said before-- how this is a situation ripe for high feelings and misunderstandings on the internet. we are looking for these red flags, and we know everyone else is looking for them. this has created this sort of performative feedback loop within cancel culture. it's almost like McCarthyism. we can prove that we are safe people by being extra vigilant against other people with potential red flags. and we have to be extra vigilant, lest someone else call us out for being willing to step over that taboo, and thus necessarily an unsafe, predatory person.

--

so the above is my assessment of the current state of online culture. now back to reborn.

when i say "people keep being weird about character ages" this is a perhaps unhelpfully vague statement on my part because i am lumping both the willingness to violate taboo and the over-vigilance against taboo violation into this.

we have had cases of people saying they would like to be stepped on by our child characters. back when i suggested cain might be a teenager, we have had cases of people saying that anyone over 18 who liked him was a p*dophile. people have suggested that perhaps i am a p*do for writing a teenager as flirtatious and sexual, as if that isn't the primary time of sexual self-discovery in one's life. then we were going to retcon the character ages, and before we had even announced anything people, going by a made-up list, started accusing me of promoting p*dophilia because cain, who was (again by the made-up list) now a legal adult, flirts with charlotte who was (again, by the list of ages that was not ours), not. i have now since been accused of promoting p*dophilia by not posting our retconnned list of ages because some people see that as a free pass to let people imagine whatever they want, even if that allows them to cross a taboo in their imagination.

so when i very vaguely say "people keep being weird about the ages" i am lumping all of the above together-- both the red flags we're guarding against, and the McCarthyistic vigilance against those red flags-- and opting out of the game because there evidently is no winning move for me.

and now finally to the actual question.

"would be ok to still consider reborn characters to be around the players age, despite irl aging? if that would be fine to ask about? i get worried my fondness for certain characters would make things weird now"

anon, sweetheart. you may imagine i am gently taking your hand and looking into your eyes, or you may not imagine that if you feel that would be too sexually-charged since even basic human gestures have the ability to be wildly misinterpreted by our current culture,

i fear that you have mistaken my prior summation of "people being weird" as me participating in the McCarthyism.

please do not police your likes and thoughts based on my, or anyone else's, opinions.

our responsibility as people is point #1-- we make sure that we are not causing harm to the people around us. can you be a safe person? will thinking of the player as a different age negatively impact your ability to be a safe person? i suspect that more than anything, you are just causing more harm to yourself by worrying so much about what i or anyone else thinks. i suspect that's true for a lot of people.

--

nevertheless, i am very sympathetic to your concern about IRL aging. especially with so much of the anime and games industry focusing on adolescents and high schoolers... to be honest that was a fear of mine since i was a teenager as well. my favorite characters which i had fictional crushes on as a teenager were also my age then, so would i still crush on them once i became an adult? would that make me a p*dophile?

and even aside from myself, what about everyone else? is the anime industry's diehard commitment to portraying high school girls as love interests and sexual objects en masse not going to eventually result in a pavlovian-style conditioning of anime-likers to think of girls primarily in that way?

i first had those fears a couple decades ago, so let me give you my answers in retrospect: - would i still crush on those specific characters once i became an adult? no, not really. the ones i liked best are a part of my personal development now rather than an object of fantasy. - would i crush on the same kinds of teenage anime characters as i always had? again, not really. i don't really get fictional crushes anymore but i think if i were the kind of person to, it would be towards more mature characters anyway. - isn't it concerning how many anime fans have aged up but their objects of interest each season stay in high school? yeah, that one's actually still kind of concerning to me! i can trust myself that i grew out of that but i can't trust that everyone else has.

at the same time... anime girls are pretty consistently divorced from real women, so i wonder how much it even crosses over to apply. i feel like many people have conditioned themselves out of being attracted to all but the thinnest-waisted of real women in favor of their anime cockroach waifus. i would like to have data and facts to understand this trend better, but i'm not aware of any particular studies about it, so i am going mainly based on anecdotal opinion.

i would also like to have data and facts to understand the attraction to underage people better, but our over-vigilance in policing those things is actually an obstacle to that. who is going to honestly volunteer information to a study when they know they're going to get ostracized and dehumanized for it? who can someone who has those feelings turn to to get help instead of creating a victim?

anyway, i've strayed from your question again. anon, i would argue the fact that you are considering this is a green flag, and you should probably trust yourself and your interests to develop to a healthy point as you grow. not trusting yourself will just damage you.

so you want your OC to be similar in age to some of the characters? ok, great. who is that hurting? it's probably nobody. if those thoughts escalate to fictional crushes on characters who are much younger on than you, you might want to engage in some genuine self-examination as to why or what it is you would find attractive in them. but it's difficult for me to imagine, from your question, that actually happening. and locking it away under being "weird" isn't going to help you unpack that. on the other hand if we're not even talking about fictional crushes then you're definitely worrying too much.

be gentle with yourself, anon.

[columbo voice] oh, but one more thing...

i feel like it's also important to remember... these are fictional characters. i've kind of had this whole discussion as if they were not, but like, let's everyone please remember these characters are not real and do not exist. by psychological study and recommendation, fiction and fantasy are ideal outlets to safely process feelings. yes, we should be sure that we are not cultivating unhealthy thoughts within ourselves, but fantasies themselves cannot hurt anyone, fictional characters cannot be hurt, shipping is not a sin, and we do not need to play thought police.

our goal is to protect people from harm. that includes ourselves.

be honest, be kind.

[cresvalkyrie]

Ephemerist

Head: Far Eastern Beauty's Hairpin - midnight blue / metallic gold Body: Ephemerist's Robe - midnight blue / bone white Hands: Ascension Gloves of Healing - midnight blue Legs: (optional) Idealized Soothsayer's Skirt - soot black Feet: Faerie Tale Princess's Heels - midnight blue / undyed

Earring: The Emperor's New Earrings Neck: Ironwood Choker of Healing Wrists: The Emperor's New Bracelet Right Ring: The Emperor's New Ring Left Ring: The Emperor's New Ring

Main Hand: Augmented Star Gazer - ul brown Off Hand: --

Fashion Accessory: -- Minion: -- Mount: -- Location: The Crystarium - The Ocular

Shader: Faeberry Bloom

[cresvalkyrie]

they should invent a hobby that doesn't require potentially destroying your wrists

[cresvalkyrie]

A bird wanted to join the game.

[cresvalkyrie]

[cresvalkyrie]

[cresvalkyrie]

Stop trying to be productive