finchsflight

[finchsflight]

You never clearly state it, but its obvious Killie missed his brother. Charlies absence is seen in all the cracks Killie has. But did Charlie miss Killie? Its easy to say: "of course he did! Thats his twin! He must have missed him!" But did he? Did he allow himself the time to grieve? Did he tell his partners there is a carbon copy of himself walking around somewhere? Or did he lock up this part of himself as secure as he was able to not look back and live his life? Do Charlie and Killie ever talk about this? They dont seem to be like people, who talk about feelings. eww feelings

(in reference to Killie to jockey OC, who was estranged for a long time from his twin brother Charlie)

Charlie was the one who left. and when he left, he went scorched-earth. By leaving, he cut himself off from not just his immediate family, but his career path, extended family, horses, horse racing, his friends, horses, his native country, his magical-realism-psychic connection to his twin, horses, the family's religion (probably a plus side but definitely a framework); and, when you remove the load-bearing explanatory bit about "being a generational jockey", quite a strange relationship with his body/exercise/nutrition/self-care/pain tolerance/masculinity. Charlie went to England, sheltered with his horrible English family and took their last name for a bit, played along to get them to pay for his uni, went to uni in a panic, took up weird jobs, sheltered with his friend Ken and lived on his boat, and pursued an absurd career trajectory, largely in a panic at the thought of Ken going to graduate school without him. At the time of reuniting with Killie, Charlie had a rich life full of partners, kids, friends, career, hobbies, and therapy. He was Winning at Life and Mental Health! and sang with his friends and did healthy things like KNITTING! and was a PRESENT AND INVOLVED FATHER and had TWO! WHOLE! SPOUSES! which looks like a perfect life. it looks like Charlie did very well for himself. it looks like he Won. And he did! He's a good father and a good husband (husband²?) and has a job and everything. But, if you squint, and think about how what society deems "winning" is milestone-based; and how a lost person who is viscerally, addictively competitive might view "bagging life milestones" as an excellent replacement for "bagging horse-shaped golden trophies"; and remember that Charlie is off his hinge in a way that LOOKS healthy but is, nonetheless, off his bloody hinge, then you go: hmmm! Charlie you are POWERFULLY and OBVIOUSLY off your bloody rocker, and you only get away with it because it's all in ways that are charming and/or marketable.

this implies that Charlie needed to find about 25 people to replace Killie; that he needed to study, out of nowhere, astrophysics at the doctoral level as a way to keep himself from thinking about other things; that he tried on a lot of different masks in order to find one that fitted; that he snatched up as much light and colour and noise as possible to fill his head; and that he was, in general, Extremely Bad at being alone. He did not function alone. without family, structure, direction, ambition - cut completely loose - he is very lucky that he actually had a workable plan, that he found good people, and that he bounced into pockets of uncannily good luck. he's lucky that Ken picked him up and put him in his pocket. he's lucky that he was a good singer. he's lucky that he somehow managed to stay on the straight and narrow and build an entire life. it definitely looks like a life! a life that a Real Person would have! why would anyone grieve that! don't be silly!!! Charlie's mirror-book to Killie's would be On The Straight and Narrow. Ken's The Straight, and the narrowboat (and charlie) are the narrow.

and he would not talk about his family. and he would lie to everyone. I think his partners and closest friends would probably know, eventually, where he came from, and that he'd had siblings. but the light and colour and noise in between (the husband in front of you) and (whatever his childhood was) would be its own distraction and barrier.

Don't be silly! he was raised by pirates! he was raised by wolves! charlie made himself out of junk. charlie was born fully formed in a duck's nest. charlie is actually Ken's ginger brother (he takes after Mr MacKenzie, you see it, right?) Charlie's birth name was definitely and legally Charles Dragonfly. why would you not believe that

[finchsflight]

Guys GUYS

Concept: Throw Your Heart Over as an animated show of some kind but there are, like, educational appendixes at the end of each episode like “the making of planet Earth” but it’s about some Fascinating Fact. So for example, in an episode in which the Celt and his Irish Hobby have been doing weird feats of equitation in the corner of Killie’s eye, there would be an ENTIRE 20-minute documentary video essay in which people like @mylittlehony would be able to explain to you everything about the Irish Hobby, from whether it did give rise to the Thoroughbred, to how it fared in medieval battle, and how it gave rise to the term “hobby.” We’d bring in linguistics and DNA evidence and people would be fascinated, they’d be like “but my horseboy yaoi show” and we’d be like “it was a TRAP to get you interested in……… medieval horse warfare apparently. Uhhh. next episode has a recipe for Sachertorte though. And then we are getting FULLY into… narrowboats… and Kendal mint cake.”

But but but the funny thing will be that a pennywhistle-based musical motif that pops up associated with the ghost horses would be “concerning hobbies”. and you THOUGHT this was a LotR joke combined with wry commentary about how WORRYING these interests are. But then halfway through you hit the Irish Hobby infodump, find out that it was a joke about hobby horses, and put a KNIFE THROUGH YOUR TV SCREEN

[finchsflight]

Blood test results are back. 0’s across the board, dry as a bone under the hood, they’re not sure what they’ve got in those vials but it recoils from light and lunges towards living tissue, which is all normal for girls these days.

[finchsflight]

- @zeebreezin

help me why did i notice the amogus before i noticed grace

(i agree but also thank you so much i'm honoured grace gets to hang out with a group this cool 😌😌♥︎)

[finchsflight]

Well. Uh. You see. Nemesis.

So, you know, they loved their twin brother like no one and nothing else in the world and haven't really been chatting lately!

Anyway, other than that: they don't talk to their family anymore. The whole vengeance quest thing wasn't super anyone else's plan for the Investigator's life! Things were strained by the time they left to hunt down his killer, and didn't get much better. They have an aunt, obviously, who's probably a spy or something. They don't talk either. The Investigator's emphatic response to their showing up at Christmas was a pretty well-driven wedge.

They don't have any found family really. While their brother tried quite hard to get them to enjoy wine (he was a bit of a wine snob and loved it) all he really managed to get into them was a very painful sort of nostalgia for his favorite vintage.

#3

What is your character's family like? Do they get along well with their family, or are things more strained? How frequently do they interact? Do they have a found family? Do they have no family at all? Have they picked up any specific traits from their family?

[finchsflight]

Honestly bizarre that tomatoes get all the flack for “not being a vegetable” because they're technically a fruit when:

A) There are a ton of fruits that get categorised as vegetables. Like this also applies to pumpkins, squashes and cucumbers.

B) The fucking mushrooms are standing there at the back of the crowd in this witch trial, trying to look inconspicuous because they somehow got into the vegetable club with no fucking controversy despite the fact that they're not even plants.

[finchsflight]

┐(´ー｀)┌

[finchsflight]

Finally finished 😭 Timelapse at the bottom! I had an idea for my Wings of Pages series, where instead of text, it's a book full of botanical illustrations. The majority of the time was spent on the individual flowers for each feather/page of the wings. I really love the look of old botanical books with the water color paintings and the scientific names written in cursive. So I spent way too many hours painting out 20 of these flower pages, and even then, it wasn't enough for the wings so I did have to duplicate some.

Here are the 20 flowers! The HD image of Atlas Botanicus, and all 20 HD flower studies without watermark will be DMed on Patreon.com/Yuumei on May 5th, along with the hours long video recording of how I painted everything.

[finchsflight]

idk man but something about Stanley "taught himself extremely advance physics/math/probably many other things while running a relatively successful business" Pines and Stanford "is wanted in almost every dimension with a judicial system of some kind" Pines is sooo fucking funny to me

[finchsflight]

a single andes chocolate mint from the olive garden can fully nourish an adult human for up to 96 hours

[finchsflight]

Got reminded again of my old coworker who was a massive misogynist but also trans inclusive. Told me he believed trans women are indeed women because "only women would be stupid enough to want to be women"

I wonder what he's doing now

[finchsflight]

Do you think ethics are just an attempt at being a healthier form of selfish?

In one of your Detail Diatribes where Batman confronts Catwoman and tries to stop her from killing Falcone, you highlighted the fact that his reasoning was not to protect her father, but to try and save her. Ever since, some very strange ideas about the nature of selfishness and selflessness have been rattling around my head.

It only started coming into focus when I tried to put into words why it was a bad thing that D-16 killed Sentinel Prime. My best answer right now is because it made D-16 into Megatron. Orion wasn't trying to save Sentinel, he was trying to protect the cybertronian people. Maybe if Orion focused more on saving D-16, they wouldn't have lost their friendship and all of Cybertron would be better for it. Of course, in the end, Megatron was the deciding factor in making himself, caring more about his pride than his current identity, but this highlights a strange selfish quirk in sustainable selfless behavior.

If you are purely selfless you suffer from spending more of yourself than you have to give. If you're too selfish you can't maintain the human connections that are a requirement for being a complete and healthy person. It leaves the best options as being selfless to make your environment an easier one for you to live in. Where your actions for others are repaid by the selflessness from your community. Or, being selfish with your charity. Taking care of what you care about because their well being positively contributes to your own.

To be fair, the opening sentence now looks like an incomplete thought. It probably should be asking if you think ethics is just an attempt at being a more healthy form of selfish and selfless. Really, just asking if ethics is meant to make you better at being a person, which seems like a question that can answer itself. Still, it feels like an important insight to highlight that to be ethical isn’t about how much of your own life you're willing to sacrifice. It's hard to be a good person when you're not a person anymore.

This is a fascinatingly deep question, and I'm very tickled that our two touchpoints in it are a transforming robot tank and Batman.

My personal opinion is that ethics and morals are not reflections of some universal truth of Justice and Goodness, as they are often framed, but are instead best-practice guidelines on how to function in the big, messy world without causing undue suffering to yourself and others. A facet of this is determining, case by case, how much you need to prioritize yourself vs how much you can afford to help others - in the framing you've proposed, selfishness vs selflessness.

Taking the specific examples we're focusing on - two cases where someone attempts to prevent a revenge killing for the benefit, not of the victim, but of the avenger - I think they reflect this worldview, that the killing is not seen as some innately universally-judged evil act that must be prevented for its own sake, but that the act of killing will harm the killer in a way the person trying to stop them doesn't want to see.

For Catwoman, committing premeditated murder wouldn't solve any of her problems in any way that arresting Falcone and having him legally unraveled would. It'd just park a first degree murder charge on someone who'd up til this point only dealt with petty larceny, and it would potentially weigh her down with misery and regret as she grappled with the trauma of taking a life.

For Megatron, killing Sentinel Prime wasn't a bad action because he deserved to live. They just spent that whole fight scene tearing through enemies. They're warriors on track to spend the next four million years killing each other; the whole "taking a life" ship has already sailed. The problem is that Sentinel is a symbol and a structural part of the political narrative in the founding of the next stage of Cybertron's society. If the first thing the new regime does is bloodily avenge itself on the face of the old regime for the personal wrongs it did them, that proves that the only thing they care about is personal satisfaction of their individual desires - just like Sentinel. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. If they can instead take a step back, think of the good of Cybertron as a whole, enforce a rule of law and a fair system of justice that applies equally to everyone, even on someone they personally loathe, that would signify integrity and credibility and the hallmark of wise, just and fair leadership capable of setting aside personal feelings for the greater good. It's not about Sentinel; it's about whether the satisfaction of killing him is worth the price of enforcing forever that personal vendettas are more important than the well-being of the people of Cybertron. Which makes it really obvious which one Megatron is going to pick.

My hottest take, and I mean this very genuinely, is that most of the human perception of what constitutes goodness and justice is one thousand percent based on vibes, and is extremely susceptible to narrative reframing. We see an unsympathetic victim (Sentinel Prime, Falcone) who has gleefully caused suffering to innocent people (so judged because they are framed sympathetically, not because we've actually enumerated their lifelong actions to determine they've never done anything wrong) and we feel (feel) that it would be right and just for them to suffer consequences (emphasis on suffer) because that would balance the scales on this vibes equation and that would make us feel like justice had been served. Would this suffering lead to any material good? Not inherently. Would it heal the victims? Not usually. Would it remove the source of the problem? Categorically not, what with how negative reinforcement works (or rather does not work.) It also wouldn't do anything about the other people empowered by the same system to be just as shitty in just as many ways that just happen to be offscreen from our POV. But it feels fair. So what is justice, if it reduces down to "I want them to hurt for the hurt they've caused me"? If it can be sated with a spectacle or distracted by a long nap and a good joke to let the feeling fade? What purpose does this justice serve if it is devoted wholly to the satiation of a bone-deep chordate-brain hunger for Retributive Violence rather than towards actually ensuring that the lives of those harmed are healed and supported and built up again after being broken down? (This is the entire core character arc in The Batman, btw, I'm not just monologuing for no reason here. He calls himself Vengeance for a reason, and the reason is he's doing Batman wrong)

That feeling - that white-hot burning core of Righteous Fury - is the unexamined heart of many systems of morality that focus, not on doing good, but on exacting satisfying retribution on Bad People Who Deserve It, categorized as People Who I Can Hurt Without Feeling Bad Myself. It's a very tempting concept for people who have suffered at others' hands. That feeling, that powerful instinctual understanding of "that's unfair," is incredibly strong. In my opinion, most systems of ethics are built, not around relitigating what is Good and what is Bad per se, but in trying to shape and curb that bone-deep, unbelievably powerful desire to rend the flesh from the bones of your tormenters.

But I mentioned that feeling is susceptible to narrative reframing. This is, as I understand it, a huge part of lawyering. Tell the story of what happened using true events and adding no falsehoods, but highlight the parts that make it feel like your client is the one who is being treated unfairly. They're not an unsympathetic wrongdoer who you can punish without personal moral stain - they're a loving spouse, a parent of three adorable children, they have a really cute puppy, they donate to charity, they're a wonderful conversationalist, a kind friend, etc etc. All those things can also be true of people who do terrible things, but thinking about them defuses that White Hot Core by making us sympathize with the sympathetic parts of them.

This is incredibly well-understood in fiction. It's the whole reason the tropes Kick The Dog and Pet The Dog exist. When you want the audience to root for a character's destruction, leave aside any of their potential quiet moments of sympathy - their tragic backstory, their cute pet, their adorable relationship with their mom - and instead show them going out of their way to commit some minor act of petty cruelty, say Kicking The Dog. The audience will infer that this badness is 24/7 and they have no reason to curb their enthusiasm for Righteous Vengeance. But if the writer wants the audience to see a spark of good in them, to sympathize, to believe they can be redeemed, they'll highlight one of those small moments of charming kindness, and allow them to Pet The Dog instead.

Neither of these acts, in the grand scale, have any bearing on the morality of this person's actions. A pet dog doesn't counterbalance a razed village; a kicked dog doesn't negate a generous contribution to the local soup kitchen. Goodness and badness is not a linear scale added or subtracted to by opposing deeds. BUT showing them to an audience reframes them narratively, and THAT is what shapes the judgment of the White Hot Burning Core. In the space of fiction, this form of bottom-shelf emotional manipulation is one of the cleanest ways to get the audience to root for the messy destruction of what is ostensibly, in the universe of the fiction, a wholly complex and living person who definitely has reasons for everything they've done, even ones that could be framed sympathetically when shown.

Meanwhile, in the real world, ethics are an attempt to judge what is best in a given situation without trusting the White Hot Burning Core to make the call, no matter how compelling "but it would feel really good though" might seem. They try to give someone perspective, context, other priorities to consider. The White Hot Burning Core might want you to rip someone's arms off for driving slow when you've got important places to be, but Ethics can present a number of compelling reasons not to do that - even if it's just "ripping their arms off will definitely make me even more late." And yes, this can be a balance of Selfishness Vs Selflessness. You are one of the people whose wellbeing ethics is designed to make you prioritize improving even if it feels weird, and when all other things are equal, your own health and happiness can be the deciding factor. In a world with an overarching Moral Force that weighs the goodness of your soul by sifting through every grain of action and intent seeking negativity to punish you for, absolute selflessness to the point of self destruction would still probably be seen as Morally Wrong, simply because the universe is a better place with you in it trying your best.

Anyway, if doing the right thing was simple, easy and painless, we probably wouldn't have so many thousands of years of arguing about what it looks like. Good luck out there everybody 👍

[finchsflight]

Going to give two here, firstly the Investigator's job pre-Dawnburning and. well. That.

For the first: they were a Licentiate! And yes, it was actually their job. They enjoyed it in a satisfying sort of way. Like puzzles and exercise. (They are very well-adjusted and normal.) They were, and are, exceptionally good; they're a brilliant poisoner, horrifically dangerous, and plenty stealthy enough to get by. It worked out... surprisingly well. For being. Well. That. (Sometimes they got a little poisoned but that's fine.)

For the latter: They are currently the captain of the HMS Vanguard's Daybreak, and works incidentally in assorted places for the advancement of the New Sequence, and they're having a great time. They're very good at dealing with things that need to be... dealt with, but not as good at the Great Game-style trying to maneuver existence into their path. It's... uh, well, it's a little hard to know how well it's going to work out for them! They're doing well now, but it's... not necessarily a good long-term life prospect if you have. other friends.

#2

What does your character do for a living? Do they enjoy it? Are they good at it? Is it working out well for them, or not going so great?

[finchsflight]

When Safety Is Optional

[finchsflight]

forever ago i stumbled across a velvetlinedbox post with "COULD TRANSITIONING HAVE SAVED HER" scribbled next to a sort of baffled looking poor edward and it cracked me up but also i never stopped thinking about it. i dont think this would fix her i think she would be just as bad. but u know. support womens wrongs

[finchsflight]

Hello! I just (finally) finished reading TTOU. So, uh, Derin. Not what the fuck -- this all seems perfectly normal and reasonable -- but ow??? My eyeballs? They hurt when I cry and I was sobbing for a good twenty minutes and have been vaguely teary for the past hour. Mean to me.

(Kidding, almost entirely. You wrote a very good book. Dandelion continues to be my favorite. Aspen is pretty great. So is Denish. And Tal. And -- all your characters are great. Incidentally, if you bothered to figure it out (which it seems like you would?) and are willing to share -- what exactly was an Angel of Death?)

An Angel of Death is a doctor who illegally and non-consentually mercy kills their patients