#<- an example to describe the larger point before it’s assumed that’s the only argument I’m making

[bigcryptiddies]

Sometimes people will criticize a piece of media for things about it they don’t like and some bozo-on-the-internet’s advice will be “well if you expanded your horizons and interacted with media that fundamentally Does Not Interest you…”

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

Shortly after last year’s midterms, when Republicans failed to take the Senate and eked out only a thin majority in the House, Paul Ryan gave an interview to ABC’s Jonathan Karl in which he described himself as a “Never-Again Trumper.” It’s worth recalling what Ryan and other Republicans said about Donald Trump the first time he ran to see what a sham this feeble self-designation is likely to become.

In 2015, Ryan, the House speaker then, denounced Trump’s proposed Muslim ban as “not conservatism,” “not what this party stands for” and “not what this country stands for.” Then-Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana privately complained that Trump was “unacceptable,” according to the G.O.P. strategist Dan Senor, before he accepted the vice-presidential nomination. Ted Cruz called Trump a “sniveling coward” for insulting his wife, Heidi, before declaring that “Donald Trump will not be the nominee.”

They all folded — and they all will fold again. Their point of principle wasn’t that Trump had crossed so many moral and ethical lines that they would rather live with a Democrat they could honorably oppose than a Republican they would be forced to dishonorably defend. Their point was simply that Trump couldn’t win. When he did, they became powerless to oppose him.

Seven years later, they’ve learned nothing.

In his interview with ABC, Ryan said he was “proud of the accomplishments” of the Trump years, citing tax reform, deregulation, criminal-justice reform, and conservative Supreme Court justices and federal judges. So why oppose Trump in 2024? “Because I want to win,” Ryan said, “and we lose with Trump. It was really clear to us in ’18, in ’20 and now in 2022.”

The best that can be said about this argument is that it’s a half-clever way for Ryan and the type of “normal Republicans” he represents to salute and absolve themselves at the same time — to claim, in effect, that the conservative policy wins of the Trump years were all their doing, while the Republican electoral defeats were all his.

But the analysis is shaky in its premises and dangerous in its implications, at least to Republicans like Ryan. Shaky, because does anyone remember the conservative policy achievements of the Romney-Ryan administration?

Trump, the man everyone assumed couldn’t win in 2016, did. He brought millions of voters into the G.O.P. fold, including former Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders supporters. Did his manners and methods repel an even larger share of voters, particularly centrists who in previous years might have voted for Republicans? Probably. But the inescapable fact is that without MAGA voters there would have been no victory in 2016 and none of the conservative victories of which the former speaker is proud. For Ryan to say “we lose with Trump” may or may not be right, but it fails to wrestle with the fact that Republicans can’t win without him.

As for the danger of Ryan’s argument, it’s that it fails to come to grips with what really ails the Republican Party.

The trouble for Republicans does not lie in the difficulty of holding together a fractious coalition of MAGA and non-MAGA conservatives. That would be politics as usual in any major party. It lies in the depressing combination of MAGA bullies and non-MAGA cowards, with people like Ryan being a prime example of the latter. If there’s anything more contemptible than being a villain, it’s being an accomplice — less guilty than the former, but also less compelling, confident and strong.

That’s what became of Ryan’s side of the G.O.P. in the Trump years. Every policy victory they helped achieve was a political victory for Trump and his side of the party. But every Trumpian disgrace was a disgrace for the Ryan side but not for Trump. The 2020 election lies and Jan. 6 and Trump’s blatant obstruction of justice in the documents case may trouble the conscience of Ryan. The MAGA crowd? They’re cool with it.

This is why Trump is now cruising toward renomination, much to the chagrin of those conservatives who assumed he would have faded away by now. With the honorable exception of Asa Hutchinson and the intriguing one of Chris Christie, none of Trump’s most notable so-called opponents have actually bothered to oppose him. Vivek Ramaswamy wants to be a younger version of Trump; Ron DeSantis an angrier version. But just as people will prefer a villain to an accomplice, they’ll take the original over the imitation.

Even at this point, it may be too late to change the fundamental dynamic of the Republican race, particularly since every fresh criminal indictment strengthens Trump’s political grip and advances his argument that he’s the victim of a deep-state conspiracy.

But if the Paul Ryans of the conservative world want to make a compelling case against Trump, it can’t be that he’s unelectable. It’s that he’s irredeemable. It’s that he brought shame to the party of Lincoln; that he violated his oath to the Constitution; that he traduced every value Republicans once claimed to stand for; and that they will not support him if he is the Republican nominee.

That may not keep Trump from the nomination or even the presidency. But on any road to redemption, the starting point has to be the truth, most of all when it’s hard.

[who-is-page]

We sort of started this discussion at Chimeras' Othercon panel, but I wanted to keep it going so I figured I would send an ask. What do you think it would mean for our community to drop the focus on voluntary and involuntary identities? I agree that we fundamentally should, but a bunch of things immediately jump to mind.

Our community has spent years leaning heavily into the lines between voluntary and involuntary identities and taken special care to make massive distinctions between them, leaving little to no room for grey area. It's no bit surprise that alterhuman spaces have had actual, legitimate, longstanding issues of grilling and gatekeeping. Nonhumans with nuanced and complicated identities are forced to shove themselves into a box to fit into the community, and the ideas we have about certain identities needing to be involuntary are absolutely baked into many aspects of our community and its history.

At the same time, we have used this unjustified gatekeeping in part to protect the community from genuine threats and appropriation of our terminology. The way we have limited our concepts of who is allowed to identify in what ways is generally wrong and has no doubt harmed a subset of kin, but at the same time is understandable in the sense that it has a cause. Yes, this was an issue even before KFF, but KFF certainly don't make it easy to create space for genuine voluntary kin and other voluntary alterhumans.

How do we create the space for nuance and fluidity and complexity in these terms and identities after we have spent so long defensively creating rigid boundaries and restrictions regarding the ways people are allowed to identify? How do we address community gatekeeping while also protecting our community from the people who use our identities and terminology in bad faith?

I have a lot of ideas, but this is obviously a very complex topic that we can't just solve in a day. I was just curious to hear your thoughts, if you had any. Hopefully once our personal website is up one of our first essays will be about this issue. (Also, how is Page? /hj)

So I know we’ve been sitting on this ask for... -checks watch- ...almost two weeks now, but it’s genuinely because I just wasn’t sure how to answer it for a good long while, and I didn’t just want to throw out some haphazard, half-hearted answer to such important questions. So here’s our thoughts on the debacle.

Voluntary and involuntary is a focus I doubt we’ll ever see any of the alterhuman communities permanently drop, for several reasons.

The first and foremost being that, by the definition of the term “alterhuman,” defined here as “a subjective identity which is beyond the scope of what is traditionally considered ‘being human’,” both experiences at their most extremes technically fall underneath the label, rendering the distinction (to some) vitally important to helping understand and define their identity/identity labels. The difference between KFF as an alterhuman identity and forms of otherkinity as an alterhuman identity, for instance, as you mention.

And then there’s the societal factors to consider. People like nice, neat little boxes: people like to be able to compartmentalize their communities, with no overlap, with no spillage, with no complications or grey areas or nuance. It’s a fact of life that people often instinctively want to water down labels and identities into more easily digestible formations, though there are arguments around why people precisely do it. And, as you point out, that often means alterhumans and nonhumans with more complex or nuanced identities typically get shoved into one box or another that they may not perfectly fit into.

When we zero in on specifically the otherkin community, this becomes even more complicated given the community’s rife history: abusive p-shifter groups, the appropriation of language by roleplayers and fiction writers, zoophiles attempting to forcibly associate otherkinity with pro-bestiality movements, and the blatant general misinformation spread by laymen and academics alike, just to name a few relevant problems the community has faced and continues to face. The community is stubborn to a fault, largely because it’s had to be in order to survive. It holds to its preconceived notions and rigid boundaries like a dog with toy aggression to their favorite plush stegosaurus. Fittingly so, really.

So how do we take that stubbornness and change it to be more inclusive to our own? How could we, while still surviving all that onslaught and more? That’s the big question.

In regards to the larger alterhuman community, we’re blessed in the fact that it’s still such a young concept: it hasn’t quite yet had to face the “pathological anger” Religious Studies professor Joseph Laycock has described otherkin as bearing the brunt of. It’s still a community figuring itself out, with much of the anger you find related to it aimed at specific subsets of community within it, rather than at alterhumanity as a whole. And I think the fact that the alterhuman community is still metaphorically air-drying on a table means we have the opportunity to prevent anti-nuance and anti-complexity attitudes from taking hold in it. How we do that is another battle in itself-- I feel like the encouragement of inclusive dialogue, of open discussion intermingled with considerate or civil attitudes, within alterhuman-marketed spaces is a good starting point. I also think that the encouragement and legitimization of “alterhuman” as its own standalone term would be a positive force, where it functions as a broad, diverse identity label in addition to being an overarching, joining umbrella label. A label where someone doesn’t have to give details away of their identity if they don’t feel comfortable doing so, or shove themself into a box they may or may not actually feel they fit into. Something functionally similar to how many people use “queer,” if you will.

But that still leaves aside the issue of identity and terminological misuse, I am aware. And that is...an abstract thing to ward against, at absolute best. I think that the defining of our own spaces not only through our words but also through our actions would perhaps be the best thing we could do, realistically. The cultivation of websites, of group projects--books, zines, comics, pictures, forums, anything!--, of community-led conventions and meet-ups and howls and gatherings. Things which foster and build a community identity of sorts is the best defense against those who would try and distort that which makes us, us.

Zooming back in on the otherkin community, these answers change slightly, because--going back to the clay metaphor--the otherkin community has already metaphorically been glazed and baked (in the fires of hell). That history is cemented, the ways people have wronged it and continue to try and wrong it is cemented, the assumptions and attitudes are cemented.

With the otherkin community, I think that the burden of changing minds and pervasive attitudes falls a bit more onto the shoulders of “community leadership,” because of how the community functions and values both community experience and articulation. There’s a reason we don’t have a term comparable to “greymuzzle” in any of the other alterhuman communities, after all-- it’s a well-known and often aggravating quirk of the otherkin community, to hold certain individuals in such high esteem and put them on a pedestal because of their longevity and the things they’ve done and said. I hate to say that they have to set an example, but in the otherkin community that really is one of the best ways to advocate for change, or to push against those gatekeeping and grilling attitudes--by those who are largely well-respected putting forward ideas that have previously been mocked or disavowed, pushing debates on their legitimacy into community consciousness until it eventually trickles into community normalcy and foundation.

(This is, as you can imagine, a double-edged sword depending on how it’s used. But that’s a discussion for another day.)

That’s not to say that the ideas of creation and creativity with the goal of cultivating an inclusive community identity, like I suggested for the alterhuman community, is inapplicable to the otherkin community: but the otherkin community already has a long-term community identity, so it’d moreso be creation and creativity for the sake of formative inclusion. “History is always written by the winners” is a very, very literal phrase in its application to the otherkin community. Our community memory, for lack of a better way to put it, sucks from individual-to-individual. The future of the otherkin community, its eventual-history, is determined by its historians and creators of today: day-to-day arguments and discussions, unless deemed historically relevant by one archivist or another, disappear to the sands of time, and much more long-term recordings such as essays, websites, comics, etc., often go far beyond just its creators hands and get passed around and down for years, potentially. If you want a more nuanced and inclusive community, you have to dig up the clay for it, shovel by shovel, and bake it yourself, brick by brick, and eventually, with luck, or enough backing prestige, or just because those bricks are so astoundingly solid people can’t resist taking some to build their own foundations to nonhumanity, things will change. It will take time above all else, but once it’s there it will be impossible to remove, because people will just assume those bricks have always been there given enough years.

But those are just some of my thoughts and opinions on it. It’s an issue with so many layers of complexity to it, that there’s really no perfect answer out there that I can offer, and I know even what I’ve shared here has its flaws and drawbacks. I’m sure plenty of my followers also have additional thoughts on the subject, and I’d love to hear from other people what they think in the replies and reblogs.

(Also, Page is a very tired boi.)

[qqueenofhades]

Some additional points about that grave find in Finland that you may or may not find interesting. And that may or may not be dated, because I studied history 20 years ago. That said, I'm not sure if 1000 years ago is firmly middle-ages in this context? At least back in my uni days, they told us that here middle ages got going slowly during 1100's and 1200's when Sweden started converting the population to Christianity and the prehistorical era gradually ended. Maybe they teach differently now.

More about the grave. I don't know why The Guardian would talk about Vikings in this context at all, because the erstwhile population of current day Finland is not considered to have been Vikings, afaik. They were similarly warlike, and the graves from that era have a lot of weapons, and they certainly encountered Vikings, but they never participated in the raiding, and isn't that what makes Vikings Vikings? Their language and religion was also different. But anyway. I don't mean to correct you because the larger point stands. When I saw the headline in a Finnish news paper about that grave and traditional gender roles my first thought was, well, maybe the gender roles hadn't become traditional then yet. Just some additional context, which could be illuminating or could be totally dated.

I did the stupid thing and sent you asks about the Suontaka burial before reading the Cambridge article about it: I'm reading it now, and my comments seem fairly useless. Feel free to ignore with extreme prejudice. We're in agreement on the guardian article.

Aha, well, we all make mistakes from time to time, so no worries! However, since you do touch on a few points that I would like to discuss, I'm going to go ahead and answer, whether for you or anyone else who might find it useful. (It's the teacher in me, I'm afraid.)

First, I have to say that I had a definite "eeegh" moment at the idea that the eleventh/twelfth century isn't "medieval" in Finland just because it (at least prior to the Baltic/Northern crusades, if we're considering them to begin with the Wendish Crusade in 1147) wasn't yet fully Christianized. Scholars pretty universally accept "medieval history" as referring to the time period between 500--1500 CE (the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the Renaissance). These, of course, are horribly Eurocentric frames of reference, but there you have it. Any event or culture taking place within that span of dates, no matter where in the world it is or what its socio-political circumstances may be, is medieval. We have to call out the pernicious equivalence of "medieval" with "Western Christian European," since that seems to be the underlying assumption. This is also what makes people mistakenly think that the medieval world (which, y'know, was just as big as it is now) is exclusively about white Christian Europe, and that no other global regions have a medieval history. Either way, the eleventh/twelfth century is actually closer to the end of the medieval era than it is to the start. I'm certainly not suggesting that you were consciously implying this; I have no trouble believing that that is indeed how they taught it twenty years ago. But yeah, the idea that still-largely-pagan eleventh-century Finland couldn't be "medieval" until it's Christian is definitely not the case as understood now.

The idea that anywhere in eleventh-century Europe is still "prehistorical" in any sense of the word is likewise a little baffling, tbh. Once more, it associates "history" only with "Christianity," and that would get quite a bit of pushback if included in a paper on medieval studies today. That is what also annoys me deeply when I see people describing the pre-Columbian Americas as "prehistoric" (read: pre-white-people-historic). If the chief marker of "history" is "written history," sure, there is a very narrow pedagogical argument to be made that these societies don't have narratives or chronicles in the standard historiographical sense. But also, uh, European colonialism and conquest destroyed vast swathes of records that we have never been able to read, understand, or even access, because they're just not there anymore. There is ample evidence that the ancient (and I do mean ANCIENT, up to thousands of years BCE) and early-to-late-medieval Mesoamerican societies had complex systems of writing, astronomy, calendar-keeping, and other history-recording practices, right up until 1492. There are something like four (FOUR) pre-Columbian Mayan scrolls still in existence, out of probably thousands and thousands, because the Spanish destroyed the rest. So "prehistoric," unless you're literally referring to the Stone Age, is never a politically neutral word or a word to use uncritically...

...and speaking of the Stone Age, we actually have histories for that too! Or rather (iirc) the Ice Age, because for example, Aboriginal Australians transmit their history orally and require each new generation to memorize it, word for word, exactly as taught to them. Some of these histories stretch back over ten thousand years, which means that we actually have first-person accounts of life during the end of the Ice Age, and scientists recently discovered that these traditional narratives accurately reflected the archaeological and geological record of Australia during the time period in question. (Indigenous people know what they're talking about and should be listened to, example number 85,000.) Of course, the Western-white-supremacist model of historiography calls these just "legends" or "myths" or "folktales" rather than history, because I guess not writing it down in a chronicle as a monk in a European Christian monastery in the year 1015 or whatever doesn't qualify as history for some people. (I don't have strong opinions about this or anything. Welp.)

I likewise don't know why the Guardian article brought up the Vikings, aside from the fact that they were quoting someone who explicitly used the Vikings in a hypothetical scenario about "traditional gender roles." This person expressed surprise that an intersex person living in a medieval Scandinavian society could rise to a high social role, by citing the widespread belief that "Vikings" were all dedicated to being very manly at all times and nobody with feminine qualities/feminine-coded social power could rule over them. I don't know if this was just a bad phrasing (plus, it obviously overlooks the often-egalitarian nature of medieval Scandinavian societies and plays into the favored white supremacist stereotype of the Vikings as some Master Aryan Race Where Men Were Men, etc) or what, but yeah, it's wrong across the board. Viking is the name of an occupation, not an ethnicity. It comes from the word wicing, meaning "seafarer" or "sea raider," and referred only to those guys who went out on their longships and stole a lot of stuff from their neighbors, most notably in the eighth to eleventh centuries. Their families back at home were part of the exact same society and benefited from those raids, but strictly speaking, they weren't vikings. We use the word "Viking" to describe any member of a medieval Scandinavian society, but it's similar to describing everyone living in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, no matter who they were or their social status or ethnic background, as "pirates," which is obviously inaccurate.

As you correctly point out, the Finns aren't considered quite the same as the Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes (as anyone can tell from looking at their written language; N/D/S are mutually intelligible and derive from the same linguistic family, while Finnish is COMPLETELY different and comes from an altogether separate branch of the tree) and therefore it's even more baffling that the person quoted in the Guardian article would cite them as an example of a "Viking" society. Likewise as you note, the whole phrase "traditional gender roles" is intensely problematic in most contexts, and especially here. It assumes that modern Western ideals of sex and gender have been static and unchanging throughout history, and that means that we tend to read our own (biased) assumptions onto the historical record and then get surprised when, shock of shock, they don't fit. The burial at Suontaka seems to have been of a biologically intersex person (i.e. someone with Klinefelter syndrome), but this is also the case when it comes to people assigned the usual male or female at birth, without any complicating genetic conditions. I'm working on a book review for an entire edited volume that discusses the intense gender-fluidity and proto-transgenderism in some medieval saints' lives, and how obviously the fact that they have been held up as a holy example, while explicitly subverting the so-called Traditional Gender Roles of the Middle Ages, means that it was (and is) a lot more complicated than shallow stereotypes and Bad Medievalism would have it.

Anyway, this is long enough (especially considering that you graciously offered me the chance to ignore it) so I think we'll stop here for now. But yes, there you have it. :)

[itsnothingofinterest]

Have you heard? Apparently, Horikoshi said Hero Academia might be headed to a conclusion soon. This was surprising to say the least; not just because fans don’t want it to end but because it doesn’t really feel like it’s anywhere close to it’s end (plenty think it’s closer to halfway, with a select few like me thinking it’s closer to the 1/3 point). This has led some to speculate, partially in denial, if the conclusion Horikoshi is talking about is not actually the series’ “conclusion” concussion, but instead a Naruto Shippuden style “new name for the next part” type of deal. (Or if he’s just having the word “soon” put in some serious work.)

So I want to discuss that; go over as many reason I can think of for why the series could end within the next year or 2, or for why it could see another 5+ years to it’s life. It mean it sounds fun, right?

(Going into this though, I would like to state my bias. I don’t want the series to end soon; and if it kept at it’s current pace to conclude Deku’s academic life in chapters 800~1000, I would be a very happy camper. I’ll try not to let this affect my judgement, but I’ve got no oversight but myself here so...)

Anyway, here we go.

Reasons for the series to end soon.

I think a good point to start is that Horikoshi once stated he planned to end the series at around 30 volumes, roughly what’s already been covered, before finding he needed to expand the series further than that. That’s understandable, it’s easy to see how this arc could’ve been the end of the series had things played out differently enough in the last few chapters; but if he’s already said he’s expanded beyond that, what does that have to do with this discussion? Well for this side of the argument, it means 2 things: 1) all that’s left can be considered the ‘expansion’ on Horikoshi’s original idea, so how likely is it that there’s a lot of that, & 2) that Horikoshi likely didn’t intend for the series to last for Deku’s full school life, a major belief for those expecting the series to last a significant time.

And when we look at the actual content of the series, yeah there’s certainly things that could point to the series ending soon; namely all the arcs and plot threads that kinda just got resolved rapid fire. Dabi’s reveal, Mirio getting his quirk back, Hawks launching the attack he’s been orchestrating since his first appearance, Compress’s face, Bakugou letting go of his resentment for Deku; just to name a few. True, this is nowhere near all of the arcs & plot threads; but it’s a sizable enough portion if we’re assuming the rest have the next year or 2 to resolve themselves. A few more arcs like this last one and yeah, the series won’t have anything really tying it down from ending.

There’s also Deku’s rate of vestige quirk acquisition to consider. I mean in the 3 arcs featuring him since we learned about his extra quirks, he has acquired 3 quirks. At that rate, he’d have them all in 3 more student arcs and basically be at all but full power by then. Not that him keeping up this rate of quirk acquisition is guaranteed, but it sure seems like a sign of the series not lasting too long.

It’s also worth mentioning that there are ways for the series to end soon, easy paths to the finish line available to Horikoshi. It wouldn’t be that hard, for example, to get to confronting Dabi & Toga and resolving their arcs in some timely fashion. And AFO’s presence as a bigger bad over Tomura could allow for him to pull a Kaguya to his Madara, allowing for the plot to resolve with his defeat without really needing to address a lot of Tomura’s issues. And heck, that might’ve even become more likely after this latest chapter, wherein AFO acquired his very own army. That would likely involve finding too-easy solutions a lot of the more complicated issues, or worse, brushing them under the rug; but it can’t be denied that this is an option for how Horikoshi could resolve the series in just a few years.

Last piece of evidence worth mentioning is the simple nature of shorter series being the “path of least resistance.” You can argue all you like how the series lasting longer makes more sense or might result in a better story (and I’m basically about to); but in the end it can’t be denied that the less the series has left, the less work it is for Horikoshi. And that’s just gonna make it inherently more likely; a largely equivalent result for less effort is never not gonna be attractive for people.

Reasons for the series to last a long time.

Okay, I’ve done my best to be fair and included as many points as I could think of in favor of a shorter lifespan; but I won’t lie, this 2nd half is gonna be the fun part of this post for me.

Let’s start at the opposite end of the other side’s first point; Horikoshi planned to originally end the series at around 30 volumes. This past arc, ending in Volume 30, took place in the space between Deku’s 1st and 2nd school year, or you could say it took place during the end of his 1st year. This implies that while the original plan was not to go through Deku’s whole school life, he did intend it to end at a point of significance; the end of a school year. And what that implies is that he won’t end the series smack in the middle of the 2nd year, which would be where the series would end if it only lasted less than 3 more years. It implies he’d likely aim to end the series at the end of year 2 at the earliest, a significant ways away. (And before you ponder about a time skip; remember that year 1 had a time skip and still lasted ~30 volumes & ~6 years.)

Another reason to think the series is gonna last a while; it’s quite slow, in an overall sense at least. It’s hard to describe but; It doesn’t always feel that way because the moment-to-moment pacing is very good & it always feels like something is happening and stuff is getting tackled. But this is because it tends to tackle plots one at a time; so while plots make good development while in the focus, they can stay out of focus for a significant duration. For example; the ‘Shinsou becoming a hero’ plot was introduced in the Sports Festival, only saw real development during Joint Training, and has still yet to resolve with year 2 not starting yet. Or for another example, we learned over 150 chapters ago that All Might had his future predicted where he’ll die at the hands of a villain, setting up a plot where he’ll try to twist his future and survive this unknown threat to his life. His life has not once been in danger since. Not even in a broad sense like someone’s targeting him; no, this man has not has one risk to his life since the plot thread was introduced. There’s tons for plot threads like that, I’m barely scratching the surface here. And that’s actually fine...if the series has a long future ahead of it. This system of pacing actually works wonders for BNHA; because while people can occasionally miss their faves and their plots, crying out “where’s Shinsou” and all that, they generally like what’s being focused on when it’s handled and paced well (which it usually is). As long as the series itself has time to get to all of these plots and develop them to their resolution, this pacing system works like a well oiled machine.

Deku especially is a useful measuring tool for how slow this series can be. He’s not like the other plot points see, because he’s almost always around so he’s made to develop at a more even pace until the end. This is in contrast to characters like Shinou, Aoyama, Kirishima, Toga, or Shigaraki; who get bursts of development because they don’t spend consistent time in the spotlight and Horikoshi can’t be entirely sure when he’ll get the next chance to make use of them. So with that said, how slow is his development & how far along is it? Well, not very actually. Aside from in terms of powers, his development has been a bit lacking. Not to say he hasn’t had character moments, but they have been a bit scarce & minimal; and a lot of his major flaws (such as his self-destructive tendencies, his self-esteem issues, and his toxic hero worship) have barely been addressed, let alone resolved. In general, his character feels like it’s barely changed since he got into UA; in stark contrast to characters like Shigaraki, Todoroki, Shinsou, & even Bakugou. And that kind of implies a long road a head of him.

To bounce off another point from the “short future section” I mentioned how a lot of overarching plots just ended. The thing about that is, I actually made a post talking about that and how a lot of how they ended seems to set up more overarching plots then they seem to end. To not repeat myself too much, because this post is already really long; it’s like the series resolved the greater part of 6 years of content only to set-up up to 6 more years of content, and all in one arc. (Goodness that was a busy arc.)

And that’s just the advancement of already existing plot points. There’s a lot it can feel like he hasn’t even touched on yet. Mostly characters. There are just. So. Many. Characters in this series. That are in positions of seeming importance, but have done nothing. For example, Horikoshi’s been known to suddenly focus on class 1A students to make them feel important, and has gotten through maybe over half; but hasn’t really touched on Sero, Sato, Koda, Ojiro, Hagakure, & especially Shoji (who really, really feels like he has something planned, but nothing’s happened yet). And that’s just the guys below Mineta’s development level, which itself is pretty low. To say nothing of Class 1B, or Ms. Joke’s students, or most of the 30 faces known in the PLF, the main antagonistic group of the series! And yeah, this could all just be because Horikoshi likes introducing characters in larger groups than he’s actually equipped to handle; I’m not denying that. I’m just saying it’s also possible that he could be doing this because he feels like he has the time to explore them whenever he wants. (Heck, it could very well be both.)

Conclusion:

...I don’t know dude. I mean a longer series looks more likely to me; but I am very well aware that I’m not unbiased enough to make any real conclusive statement. Maybe I should consider that to mean it’s more even than that.

Perhaps we’re just too far away from the ending to really be able to tell either way. I mean low estimates still give the series at least a year. But even so, I do think this was all worth considering; because if nothing else, I did get a feel for all that’s likely to happen between now and the inevitable end. And I guess it turns out to be kind of a lot. So that’s neat.

[ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is]

Hello! Love your blog. I was wondering if I could get some typing help? I have a general idea of what I am, but that’s not saying much since I have a tendency to hop between a few of them (INTJ, ENTJ, ESTJ specifically). Either way, hopefully you can help me settle it.

I’m 22 and about to graduate from college. It’s been a journey, because I’ve transferred twice and changed plans a few times, but that’s the proper college experience, I think. One transfer closer to home can be owed to depression and Covid, while the first was simply me not meshing with the campus. I’m not too worried about how it’ll affect my grad school apps due to good grades and valid reasons.

Despite the schooling-related indecision, I tend to get an idea of what I want, then fixate on it heavily. Example: I recently tried to publish a novel I’ve been working on for years now. Realistically, I know the odds of getting your first work published and making enough money to start a career on it are beyond low, but a big part of me thought “yeah, except I worked on this draft consistently all these months and this feels right, so it has to pay off” – of course, it didn’t. That’s not to say it wasn’t worth it, but I’ve come to accept it won’t be that easy, so I’m going to focus on a job with more security first lol. That means proceeding with law school. Some friends might think I’m selling my soul by putting my dreams on the back burner. I disagree, though, because if writing is meant to be I can still make it happen this way but with more security. Plus, I’m used to having some higher objective to motivate me through each day, and I don’t like feeling aimless. To me, that would be settling for less: wasting time working next to minimum wage at some place I can’t see myself staying.

I’d like to think of myself as spontaneous despite knowing I’m really not. When I’m with friends, maybe, but I’m more than happy to do nothing on Friday nights, knowing I’ll be able to wake up early tomorrow and do whatever I’m doing at a decent time. That being said, I would be happy to hop on a flight across the world if someone offered to pay the way. I love travel, so I’d hope to find a career that makes that possible. The same goes for whatever work I’m doing. Ideally, I could move from place to place as I do my job, because I fear being rooted will keep me from seeing everything I’d like to see.

I’m definitely an introvert dichotomy wise, but if group work appears, I’m happy to make a plan and remind everyone when a due date is near, and I expect them to follow through or provide some forewarning. I’m not outright nasty when someone inevitably slips up, but I’m not going to give them an excuse either. Can’t relate since I’ve never had a problem with procrastination. Like, I’d say I’m procrastinating, but to me procrastinating is choosing not to get ahead on the project due next week while I have spare time now. That makes me sound like a robot or a liar, but I’m mostly just very aware of my limitations and have learned how to manage work in a way that keeps me from having to stress.

I have no idea how to end this. Quick notes? I’m ambitious but not competitive – literally cannot relate to envy, because I don’t think someone having something means you can’t have it too – you just have to work on/for it. I’m not very curious lmao. Like, I’m as curious as the average person, but I don’t care about how things work (Ti slacking?). Uhh, fandoms annoy me. Like, seeing fans distort characters and needlessly project onto them in cringe ways makes my brain itchy. I’ve been called insensitive. I can easily cut someone off after finding, for a fact, that they’re being manipulative. Whatever baggage they have, I don’t care. I don’t see the point in fighting for a relationship when a “friend” is working against you. I’m also the “advice friend” because I don’t have drama and seem to know how to diffuse it easily or cut it out completely. Now that I think about it, all of my closest friends have a lot of anxiety, so maybe I collect them and care for them a little since I have none.

Hopefully that wasn’t too much useless info. I think I’m mainly struggling on differentiating between lower Ne vs Lower Se. My indecision comes in rare bouts, so maybe that’s the weak Ne manifesting. Or maybe I’m lower Se for forgetting the larger scheme by focusing on material things like getting to travel and making a high salary? Whatever. These are things most people prioritize, though. Let me know if you need any specifics. Also, thank you for taking the time to read this! I really appreciate how informative your blog is and all the resources you share.

Hi anon,

To be honest I am really not sure based on this, and it might be good for you to revisit this after a little bit of time out of school. I would rule out the Ti-Fe axis, but I can actually see arguments for either high Te or high Fi My guess is high Ni if you have high Te you don't really sound like a high Si user - and part of what is tripping me up the most is that you said a lot of things that make me thing of high Fi and the spontaneity of Se or Ne, but there's a lot here that really sounds intuitive but distinctly not like an Ne user. So I actually think there are arguments for either INTJ or ISFP, and I actually lean a little more towards "ISFP with good discipline/time management" than INTJ.

Here's my thought process, which hopefully can get you started.

I do feel like transferring twice is a little abnormal (not bad, just more than the typical college experience of maybe one transfer and changing one's major once or twice) but COVID did fuck with things more than usual so no conclusions there.

The fixation on writing a novel and the long-shot of gaining enough success to focus on that full time - particularly right out of school or even before graduation - is either intuitive or possibly high Fi. I really do not think an ESTJ would have that idea - not that they wouldn't be a writer, but I don't think they would have had the same expectations surrounding payoff and would have assumed from the start that this will not be their career initially. For that matter I have my doubts on ENTJ, but it could be possible for INTJ.

The part about spontaneity actually fits really well with auxiliary Se or Ne, in that those types at your age will have moderation from Ni or Si respectively and will often want a combination of stability but also the ability to travel a lot and move around. The example you gave actually still seemed very spontaneous; a lot of ExTJs for example might really dislike doing nothing on a Friday night and would instead have something planned. What you describe sounds very go-with-the-flow, just in a low-key way.

The part about procrastination indicates that Ne is probably off the table but Se is possible; some SPs are pretty good at being realistic about getting things done and it sounds like you don't have the high Te motivation of "I must get this done early" (not that high Te users can't procrastinate or do things on time but not down-to-the-wire).

I often tie ambition/competitive nature to enneagram more than MBTI, but I will say a lot of Te users and especially Te-doms tend to be both. They don't have to be (and if they're only one, usually it's ambition over competition), but it's pretty common. Curiosity is complicated but not caring about how literally everything works does seem like it would rule out Ti and I'd fully agree there. The part about being frustrated by fandom distortion of characters is relatable to me and I feel that comes from a place of sensing, ie, were you not paying attention to canon, so that seems like a point towards high Se for you. The parts about advice and interpersonal relationships mostly just reinforce that you sound more like someone on the Fi-Te axis, which you already suspected, but again...being the advice friend, particularly from a caring position, seems more high Fi to me than INTJ; a lot of IxTJs (and definitely ExTJs) at your age are just not emotionally ready for that level of patience with anxiety. I know I wasn't.

I would also say focusing on the material things (travel, a liveable salary) is more in line with higher Se! Te users do have a measure of pragmatism, so again, can't rule out INTJ, but the travel especially is what's making me think Se is pretty high in your stack.

All in all? My guess is an ISFP with good time management skills, possibly with an enneagram 6 adding to the stability/pragmatism. That said I wouldn't totally rule out INTJ (possibly also enneagram 6?); I just think it's less likely.

[xoxo-ren-xoxo]

smptwt as of 04/07/2020

Right. You asked for it, so you shall recieve. Below the cut is probably one of the most thought-out, in-depth, hopefully unbiased (but probably not) and above all helpful accounts of what the fuck is happening in the smplive and lunch club fandoms right now. I will be covering everything I can- but in the case that I’ve forgotten something, please let me know so I can have a crack at making an update.

Before the cut, I’d just like to link my first three posts about this same topic, covering my thoughts and the events of the last couple of months of drama. It feels so strange that I’ve made so many of these, but as long as they help people, I’ll keep making them.

Part 1: https://crunchy-corvid.tumblr.com/post/619547090403622912/the-cscoopsmptwt-drama

Part 2: https://crunchy-corvid.tumblr.com/post/619746266158661633/more-on-smptwt-long-post

Part 3: https://crunchy-corvid.tumblr.com/post/619886809143476225/smptwt-part-3-030620

I’d like to preface this with a huge thank you to everyone who helped me collect and compile information for this post- and those who helped censor twitter handles and edit screenshots. Without you, this post would have never been made. 

Thank you to everyone on the Cancelled Heaven discord server:  https://discord.gg/emrh2u

Now, onto the thing.

So we’ll start at the beginning with the easiest ‘drama’ (I hate calling it that) to cover. Charlie (slimecicle) tweeted on his second account and it caused a little upset. It’s not much but it feeds into a greater conversation that I think is relevant here: 

We’ll start with Charlie’s original point, then move on to the reply. Obviously, this post was poorly timed, because everyone thought it was about the Cooper (cscoop) drama, when in reality it was just a general comment. I saw a lot of replies along the lines of ‘it’s okay you can @ cscoop’ and similar things. If you’ve read my previous posts you’ll know how I feel about the Cooper situation, but regardless, there are a few reasons why this is a Bad Take/poor interpretation of what Charlie said.

Charlie and Cooper are friends. They haven’t fallen out as far as we know. Charlie is left-wing, and definately doesn’t seem like the kind of person to be friends with someone who is racist/transphobic/sexist etc. So why would he be talking about Cooper in this post? 

Also, Charlie is clearly talking about people who still say slurs, not people who have said slurs in the past. This is how I read it, a jab at streamers and gamers who use ‘dark humour’ to justifty their actions. A lot of people seemed to relate this to Cooper, despite him never trying to justify his use of slurs. The people who did try to justify his actions this way were fans, not the man himself. So again, this post doesn’t relate to Cooper.

On to the reply, which sparks a different conversation all together. While I see where the commenter is coming from, and agree with them to an extent, Charlie is allowed to have his own opinion on the matter. And he is right. Using insulting language against heterosexual people does create a larger divide and doesn’t get anyone on our ‘side’. It just makes us look immature and causes a lot of straight cis people to assume that we hate them. 

On the other hand, I do think that saying things like ‘disgusting hets’ can be a funny joke if you are saying it to your friends who don’t have any issue with it. You probably shouldn’t get into the habit of saying things like that though, just in case you actually hurt someone with your words. Both sides of the argument have pros and cons, so anyone angry at Charlie for his opinion really have no reason to be.

Charlie’s reponse to this comment was reasonable, responsible, and mature, and he is clearly showing that he understands the concerns of his audience. This is all I’ll say about Charlie in this post. Honestly, he’s generally unproblematic and ‘safe’ to keep watching, if you enjoy a very drama-free environment. Have fun!

Now I’ll move on to Ted. He’s made some great points recently about cancel culture which I strongly agree with. Here’s his first tweets:

I don’t have much to add here, this is perfectly valid in my opinion- though I feel like sometimes you can tell a lot about a person by the people they follow. For example, if someone follows Trump, Ben Shapiro, and a bunch of right-wing youtubers, they probably agree with a lot of the things they say. But I think the point Ted is trying to make is that he shouldn’t be harassed about drama his friends fall into. If he isn’t involved, leave him out of it. 

Next we’ll take a look at his tweets on stans, probably sparked by the drama with Carson, which I will be talking about later. 

Again, I have no issue with what Ted is saying here. His idea is a good one, and a fun way to distinguish casual fans from people who create art, content, and (appropriate) fanfiction for the ‘flandom’! 

Basically, how I see it, is that a ‘fan’ is a casual viewer who doesn’t really get involved in the flandom, maybe posting about smplive and/or lunch club occasionally, but not being too involved. A ‘flan’ is someone who interracts a lot, creates art and fiction that respects boundaries, and posts more about the boys than a casual fan does. A ‘stan’ is a stalker-fan, creepy and obsessive, too invested, maybe creates art and fiction that crosses boundaries, and obsessively posts about the boys.

I think this new terminology is really cool and Ted is smart for coming up with it (also, probably hungry when coming up with it too). I think that the term ‘stan’ should be thrown out and used to describe the ‘bad’ side of fandoms. There is a risk that people will hide behind the term ‘flan’ to disguise the fact that they are a stan, but this is still a good step foward. 

But you’re not here to listen to me ramble about Ted or Charlie. You’re here for Carson. So let’s get on with it.

Carson made a series of tweets talking about stans, much like Ted did later. He seemed tired of stans harassing him about his friends, a sentiment shared by Ted (who faced very minimal backlash over his tweets). Here’s what he said:

Which is something I fully agree with. For big content creators like Carson and his friends, stan culture is absolutely insane. Recently they’ve been trying to ‘catch out’ many people who are part of smplive and/or lunch club, most obviously with Cooper and Schlatt but I’ve seen the others getting ‘called out’ too. Carson’s anti-stan stance is well-known in the flandom (yes I am using that word get used to it) so these tweets didn’t surprise me. 

For some reason stans seem to think that if one creator is okay with their behaviour, every other creator is too. This is not the case. Carson was within his full right to say these things about stans.

Obviously the replies got out of hand. People became horribly angry very quickly, and clearly Carson had already had enough because pretty soon he started blocking stan accounts- which only made them more mad.

Of course, there were supporters and anti-stan comments out there too, such as this fun exchange:

But a whole lot of people got angry. Carson was trending for a while, too, after he started blocking stans. Unfortunately some people did get wrongfully blocked, which sucks, sure, but use of an alt account or logging off of twitter can solve that problem (this can also be said for stan accounts. Carson didn’t stop any of them from viewing his content, just blocked them so that he didn’t have to see their tweets).

Carson did this for his own mental health. After a long conversation with older people who have been in fandoms for decades, I can tell you that being at the top is always hell. New threads created about you every day, friends you can’t trust, and people giving you shit for things other people said. I can’t imagine how someone as popular as Carson has dealt with this for so long.

People who were blocked started to claim that they were having panic attacks, that they hyperfixate so they can’t help being obsessive, and that Carson doesn’t care about mental health for these reasons. They said some pretty toxic and manipulative things and a lot of people clearly didn’t know what they were talking about:

First of all, these comments on the Katerino and Fitz situation are honestly disgusting. These people are only proving Carson’s point that stans will be super supportive one second and turn around to hate you the next. To bring up something like this, something completely unrelated and highly personal- knowing Carson will see- is disgraceful. To speculate about a relationship that Carson has explicitly stated he doesn’t want people to speculate about just to try and make a point? Horrible.

A lot of stans seem to have this ‘we made you famous so we dictate how you feel’ mentality, which I hate. Exactly as the reply says, they sound like toxic parents with these words. To think you deserve ‘respect’ from someone after accusing their friends of horrible things and harassing them to the point that they block you is so manipulative and quite frankly cruel.

Again, Carson has the right to block anyone he wants. Creators are not your friends, they are entertainment. If you are making them upset and harassing them, you shouldn’t get mad when they block you. 

Listen. It can be tough, finding out that someone you look up to has blocked you. Yes, I’m sure people had a not-so-nice time with their mental health when it happened to them. But in most cases, they were blocked for a reason. Some people were even literally asking to get blocked and then got mad when they did. But again, no one has been barred from viewing Carson’s content. He simply blocked people who he didn’t want to see in his comments section.

You have freedom of speech, but you don’t have freedom from consequence. If you say something that hurts someone else, you’re not always going to be free from their judgement. 

Carson has been very open about his own struggles with depression and imposter syndrome recently, and people are viewing his actions as... hypocritical? This is flawed logic. Carson blocked stans because they were bad for his mental health, the fact that some claim to have had ‘panic attacks’ as a result is not on him. He has the autonomy to block who he wants to block. 

Wilbur Soot made some comments about the situation, which can be found in this video from 7 minutes 30 seconds in, and goes until 10 minutes and 11 seconds in:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/667971714

What Wilbur says here is completely understandable. He doesn’t have a problem with stans, but doesn’t speak for anyone but himself. Just because one person is okay with something doesn’t mean someone else is, too. 

Also, a lot of people think that it’s okay to hate on someone like Carson or Schlatt, then turn around and stan Wilbur, which is kind of fucked up, because they’re friends in real life. How would you feel if someone was super nice to you, then turned around and harassed your friends?

A lot of people claimed to have ‘hyperfixations’ on Carson or lunch club, which they used as an excuse to be obsessive and creepy. This is bullshit, but someone else explained it a lot better than I could:

And I absolutely agree with this. You cannot use neurodivergence to explain away your creepiness. That’s just offensive to people who do hyperfixate, and leads to even more problems and misunderstandings.

Carson did a stream much later where he talked about all of these things, and boy did that go well (not). Here is a clip of him talking about hyperfixations:

https://m.twitch.tv/clip/SuaveBlushingDotterelBCWarrior

Now, here’s where my support for Carson falters. He should have done more research on what hyperfixations really are before he said things about them. He hurt some people with what he said, and just saying he’s uneducated on the topic isn’t really an excuse.

HOWEVER. Carson was given very little time to research (about 24 hours between his original tweets and his stream) and, more importantly, it is very obvious that the use of the term ‘hyperfixation’ has been warped and manipulated by stans who are misusing the term to excuse their behaviour. Carson probably saw stans using it and assumed it was something synonomous with ‘obsessions’.

What he said was poorly worded, but the point he was making is the same as the (much more researched and informative) tweet above. Anyone getting mad that he is somehow ‘invalidating mental health or autism’ with his comments clearly don’t understand the point he was trying to make in the first place.

And here’s a clip of Connor talking about it, too, as well as defending Carson’s right to block people as he wishes:

https://www.twitch.tv/connoreatspants/clip/YummySlickPlumageSpicyBoy

https://www.twitch.tv/connoreatspants/clip/JazzySpotlessMelonMoreCowbell

What he said here is completely valid, a little poorly worded in the same way as Carson’s statement, but overall something I stand behind.

Some people are claiming that Carson is being manipulative or ‘gaslighting’ fans and stans:

Carson is not against fans who create cool stuff for him and his friends. He is against the people who harass him, accuse his friends of horrible things, and try to look for every little thing they’ve said and done wrong. This is what he said, and people got mad at him for it, and so he blocked them. That is it. There is no gaslighting. There is no manipulation. I’ve seen much more manipulative things coming from the stans’ side of things.

Now we move on to Noah’s reply to Carson’s tweet. Which, yes, caused a whole new can of worms to be opened.

Now, for those like me who have trouble figuring out Noah’s way of speaking, let me translate: ‘stans are insecure people who start to feel entitled because they’ve started to view a streamer they like as a friend/someone who shares their pain.’ 

For those of you who don’t know, this is what ‘don’t negotiate with terrorists’ means:

However, almost predictably, stans saw the word ‘terrorist’ and lost their goddamn minds. That, coupled with the complicated phrasing of Noah’s words, caused a lot of stans to freak out.

This conversation is full of Bad Takes, but my main issue is that they are trying to diagnose Noah with an actual mental illness. That is not only offensive to people who have that illness (especially calling him ‘insane’ in the same sentence, as well as implying that having said illness makes you a bad person) but is also highly hypocritical since so many stans claimed to all be neurodivergent themselves. 

Also, 90% of his fans aren’t stans. They’re mostly fans or flans. You are a loud minority. You aren’t as powerful as you think you are. Noah even started to retweet hate comments, that’s how few shits he gave. He also shows that he is concerned about people making things up about him, which is understandable.

Plus he outright said that stans are not fans of him, which in most cases, they’re not. Noah’s content isn’t as widely watched as some of his friends’ stuff, and a lot of stans don’t watch his streams.

But anyway, here’s one good take I saw floating around:

After this, before his stream, Carson deleted his original tweets and spent some time with his family, which was a sensible and mature thing to do at this point. 

During Carson’s stream, someone notified him that his ‘fans’ had started to doxx stans. Here is his reaction:

https://m.twitch.tv/callmecarsonlive/clip/SpicySassyGerbilArgieB8

A lot of people got mad that he didn’t do more to stop the doxxings, but I want to raise the question: what was he supposed to do? He can’t control his ‘fans’ (another breed of stans who don’t call themselves stans were doing the doxxings, to be honest) and he said not to do it. He was streaming, he didn’t know how serious it was or even if it was true, at that moment, what was he supposed to do?

It did get serious. People I know were doxxed. Anyone posting anything (positive or negative) about lunch club, smplive, and Carson were in danger. It was not fake like some people claimed. The twt handles in this post are blurred out because of the doxxing threats. I am making this post at my own risk, but I do feel that tumblr is safer than twitter at the moment.

This being said, it is in no way Carson’s fault how out of hand this has become. He has been against doxxing in the past and his sentiments haven’t changed. He has said more about the doxxings in replies to tweets such as this one:

Also, here’s what the mods on Carson’s discord server had to say about the situation. They’ve clearly talked about this with Carson, and are strongly against anyone who is doxxing these people (especially since a lot of the people being doxxed are minors).

A similar sentiment was shared on Ted’s discord server:

Here is what ItsAsaii had to say:

So that’s basically where everything stands right now. If you want an even fuller update on everything, check out Carson’s stream ‘afternoon fellas and fellettes’ where he talks about everything.

Here’s the last tweets I have from Carson regarding the whole situation:

And I agree fully with what he has said. And again, Carson doesn’t owe stans anything. Just like what was said here, he had subs and fans before he had stans, they did not ‘make’ him, and they cannot control him.

This is all I have to say, for now. If I have missed anything or you’d like me to cover anything else, please let me know. If I have hugely missed the mark and said something super wrong/offensive, let me know. If you’d like me to talk about a streamer or youtuber not related to lunch club, throw me a DM or an ask and I’ll try to compile some things, even if I don’t watch their content or know who they are.

If you’d like up-to-date information about drama in smptwt, streamers, and youtubers, join the Cancelled Heaven discord server- which I linked at the start of the post. 

I thank you all for reading, and suggest that you reblog this so that as many people as possible can see it. If you want to risk it, go ahead and link this post in a tweet or something, but please do be careful. 

For some ‘extra reading’ (watching) I highly recommend Contrapoints’ video on cancel culture: https://youtu.be/OjMPJVmXxV8

And Philosophy Tube’s video on artists and fandoms, there’s some really insightful things about parasocial relationships: https://youtu.be/3IG0Y63LkDM

Lots of love, and have a great day <3

[good-omens-classic]

Hi Good Omens fans, ever since making this blog, and trawling through the archives for old art, I have been thinking again about trends from before the TV-show, and the way people draw Aziraphale and Crowley.  I wanted to make this post addressing it but this is not “discourse” or to start a fight, in fact I would be perfectly content if all I did was make people think critically about what I am about to say and not even interact with this post at all, but I feel like I need to say it.

Talking about any racist undertones to the way people draw our two favorite boys usually makes people dig their heels in pretty fast.  This is not a callout post for any artist in particular, this is not me trying to be overly critical of artists especially since they have more talent and skill than I do, and I’m going to address some common counterpoints that I frankly find unsatisfactory.  Let’s just take a moment to set aside our defensiveness and think objectively about these trends.  It took me a while to unlearn my dismissive attitude about these concerns so maybe I can help others get over that hurdle a little faster.  Now let’s begin.

I’ve been kicking around the Good Omens fandom since maybe 2015 and for art based in book canon, whether it was made before the TV show came out, or because the artist is consciously drawing different, original designs, I’m going to estimate that a decent 75% of all fanart looks like this

Aziraphale is white and blonde and blue-eyed while Crowley is the typical “racially ambiguous” brown skin tone it’s become so popular to draw podcast characters as nowadays.

And the question is why?  With the obvious answer being “it’s racist,” but let’s delve a little deeper than that.

A common thing I hear is that people get appearance headcanons fixed in their mind because the coverart of the book pictures the characters a certain way.  My first point is this only shifts the question to why the illustrators drew them that way, when there aren’t many physical descriptions in the book.  My second point is that while there definitely are cover arts that picture Aziraphale as cherubic, blonde, and white and Crowley as swarthy, dark-skinned, and racially ambiguous...

(side note: why is Crowley’s hand so tiny?  what the hell is going on in this cover?)

It’s much more common for the covers to simplified, stylized, and without any particular unambiguous skin tones

I don’t know about the UK but the most popular version in the United States is the dual black and white matching covers

And while you could make an argument that the shading on Crowley’s face could suggest a darker skintone, it seems obvious to me that lacking any color these are not supposed to suggest any particular race for either of these two, and the contrasting colors are a stylistic choice to emphasize how they are on opposite sides.  If anything, to me it suggests they are both white.

In short I simply do not buy the argument that people are drawing Aziraphale and Crowley this way because that’s how they were represented on the cover art of the book.  If you draw them the way they are on the cover then whatever, I don’t care, but I don’t believe that’s what’s driving this trend.

The second thing people will say is that Good Omens is a work of satire, and it’s based in Christian mythology which has this trend of depicting angels as white, and it is embodying the trope of a “white, cherubic angel” paired with a dark-skinned demon for the explicit purpose of subverting the trope of “white angel is good, dark demon is bad” since Aziraphale is not an unambiguous hero and Crowley is not a villain.  “It’s not actually like that because Crowley isn’t a bad demon, and Aziraphale isn’t actually a perfect angel” is the argument.  This has a certain logic to it and allows some nuance to the topic, but to this I say:

Uncritically reproducing a trope, even in the context of a satire novel, is not enough to subvert it.  Good Omens is not criticising the racist history of the church, and while the book does have some pointed jabs at white British culture (such as Madam Tracy conning gullible Brits with an unbelievably ignorant stereotype of a Native American) it is not being critical of the conception of angels as white and blonde or the literal demonization of non-white people.  That’s just not what the book is about.  So making the angel white and the demon dark-skinned, playing directly into harmful tropes and stereotypes, is not somehow subversive or counter-cultural when doing so doesn’t say anything about anything.

Please consider fully the ramifications of the conception of white and blonde people as innocent and cherubic and dark-skinned people as infernal and mischievous, especially in modern contexts...

Black people are more likely to be viewed as violent, angry, and dangerous.  Priming with a dark-skinned face makes people more likely to mistake a tool for a gun.  Black people are viewed as experiencing pain less intensely by medical professionals.  Black men are viewed as physically larger and more imposing than they actually are.  The subconscious racial bias favoring light skin is so ingrained it’s measurable by objective scientific studies, on top of the anecdotal evidence of things like news stories choosing flattering, “cherubic” pictures of white and blond criminals while using unflattering mugshots for non-white offenders.

This is why I say that if you’re going to invoke the “whites are angelic” trope, you better have a damn good subversion of it to justify it, because this idea causes real harm to real people in the real world.  And Aziraphale being a bit of a bastard despite being an angel, I just don’t see that as sufficient.  I am especially cautious of when it’s my fellow white fans that make this argument, not because I believe they do this out of any sort of malice or hatred of people with dark skin, but because I know first-hand it stems from a dismissiveness rooted in not wanting to think about it for too long because it makes us uncomfortable.  Non-white people do not have the luxury of not thinking about it, because it’s part of their life.

Now the strongest textual evidence people use, in the absence of much real descriptor, is this:

"Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide. Two of these were wrong; Heaven is not in England, whatever certain poets may have thought, and angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort" 

This piece of art has circulated in the fandom for so long I don’t know the original artist and it’s been used for everything from fancovers to perfume.  This is where I found it and it’s one of the first things that come up when you google this quote about Aziraphale.  

Doesn’t it just feel like this is the man that’s describing, some blonde effeminate gay man?  Well guess what, there’s the “blonde as innocence” trope rearing its ugly head again, because the stereotype of gay men and effeminacy as being a white and blonde thing is--ding ding ding you guessed it--racism.  And why would intelligent suggest a white and blonde person, except if the stereotype of a dark-skinned person is less intelligent?

Now the point of “people assume Aziraphale is British” is another sticking point people will often use, claiming that the stereotype of a British person is white and blonde.  I guess this has some merit, since the British empire was one of the biggest forces behind white colonial expansion, and it seems disingenuous to assign “British” as “nonwhite” as soon as we’re being satirical, in the same way I found it distasteful that the TV show made God female when so many of the criticisms of the church are about its misogyny and lose their teeth as soon as God is no longer male.

However consider that 1.4 million Indian people live in the UK.  I heard a man say aloud once that the concept of a black person having a British accent was a little funny, as though Doctor Who doesn’t exist and have black people on it.  And I’m not overly familiar with the social landscape of the UK, but I understand they’re experiencing a xenophobia boom and non-white Brits aren’t considered “really British.”  The stereotype of non-white people not being British only exists because of reinforcement in media.  If you really want to be subversive, drawing Aziraphale as Indian goes way further than drawing him as white IMO.

Now let’s talk about Crowley.  He is almost always drawn with a darker skin tone than Aziraphale, even when they are both white, and while I’ve outlined above how this is problematic on terms of linking light skin with innocence, I think it does have an extra layer.  I think it also has to do with the exotification and fetishization of brown skin and non-white people.

This artist’s tumblr is gone now but their art is still on dA and while it’s definitely beautiful and well-done, I think this is a very good example of what I’m talking about.

Crowley and Aziraphale necessarily contrast each other, so describing Aziraphale as “British” might suggest that Crowley is “foreign-looking.”  I also know *ahem* that the fandom generally thirsts over Crowley to hell and back, so making him a swarthy, tall dark and handsome is not necessarily surprising.

An interesting thing happened when the TV show came out, and everyone started drawing Michael Sheen!Aziraphale and David Tennant!Crowley more and more often:  It’s not ubiquitous, but it does happen that sometimes artists will draw David Tennant’s skin darker than it actually is.  The subconscious urge to see Crowley with dark skin is for some reason that strong for many people.  And I really encourage people doing this to think about why.  Not naming any names but I’ve working with fanartists before for collabs who I had to ask to lighten “bad guy” demon’s skin tones because it looked like they were making the skin darker on purpose to make them look scarier.  This person is a perfectly pleasant person who tries not to be racist!  And we both still fell into it accidentally, and it took me a while to notice and point it out, because the ingrained stigmatization of darker skin is pervasive yet often goes unnoticed.

What is the solution?  I don’t know, and as a white person I’m not really qualified to make that call.  Do we draw them both with the exact same skin tone?  Is it better to make them both white?  Should we make both of them non-white?  Should we only make Aziraphale non-white?  I am consciously aware of the fact that the Good Omens fandom is mostly white people, so most of the art we make is being both made by and consumed by white people, so I don’t feel comfortable saying “draw these characters of color specifically” because that can also veer into fetishization territory very quickly.  This is not specific to good omens but I think we should pay attention to what fans of color say in all fandom spaces and weigh our choices even if they seem insignificant.  And it’s important to realize that fans of color will not be a monolith in their opinion either, and it’s our responsibility to recognize that everyone can be affected by racism and social issues differently, the same way all women are affected by misogyny differently so just because one woman says such as such is misogynistic and another says it’s not.  I’m sure there are non-white fans who think it’s perfectly fine to draw Aziraphale as white and Crowley as ambiguously non-white.  I’m not saying they’re wrong.  And I’m not saying you can’t reblog this kind of art, or that people who make or made it should feel bad about themselves.  But so often this sort of thing goes unaddressed just because people don’t like thinking about it, and well, avoiding hard questions never really goes well I think.

[creativitycache]

ngl asking for people who self-identify as "antis" is already biasing your results because the term originated from fans being defensive over getting called out (eg the types who sincerely think fandom culture is ""puritan""). fair number of people started to use the term ironically and it might be evening out but overall the post calling for responses on the survey still comes off as something written in bad faith?

I wrote a rather long and involved response and then tumblr ate it. Goshdarn.

Fair warning, this is a hyperfixation and I’m coming off of a migraine so this may not be very cogent. Please read this in the over excited tones of someone infodumping about emulsifiers, with no animosity intended.

So, tl;dr and with a lot fewer links, I’m incredibly interested by your perspective that “anti” originated as a derogatory term.

As far as I am aware, the etymological history of the word “anti” being used pejoratively is coming from some very new debates.

I’m also noting that you had no feedback regarding the content of the questions themselves, which I would be interested in hearing as I am genuinely coming from a place without censure.

The term “anti” actually is a self-descriptor that arose in the Livejournal days, where you’d tag something as “Anti ___” for other like minded people to find. (For example, my cursory google search pulled up 10 Anti Amy Lee communities on LJ).

I’m a self-confessed old. I was back in fandom before Livejournal, aaaall the way back in the Angelfire days. Webrings children! We had webrings! And guest books for you to sign!

I’m going to take a swing for the fences here Anon, so if I’m wrong please let me know, but I’m going to guess you became active as a fan in the past 5-8 years based of your use of the term puritan.

There’s actually a HUGELY new debate in fandom spaces! Previously, it was assumed that:

a) All fandom spaces are created and used by adults only.

b) If you were seeing something, it’s because you dug for it.

These assumptions were predicated upon what spaces fandoms grew in. First you had Star Trek TOS fandom, which grew in 1970s housewives kitchens. They were all friends irl, and everyone was an adult, and you actively had to reach out to other adults to talk about things. (By the way- a woman lost custody of her children in the divorce when her ex husband brought up to the judge she kept a Kirk/Spock zine under her bed. The judge ruled this as obvious signs of moral deficiency. That was in the 80s! Everyone is still alive and the parents are younger than my coworkers!)

Time: 1967-1980s. Is Anti a term? No. Who is the term used by? N/A Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

Then, when the internet came about, it was almost exclusively used by adults until The Eternal September. 1993 was the year that changed the internet for good, but even years after that the internet was a majority adult space. Most kids and teens didn’t have unlimited access if their parents even had a home computer in the 90s.

This is the rise of Angelfire, which were fansites all connected to each other in “rings”. You had to hunt for content. If you found something you didn’t like, well, you clicked out and went on with your day because you’d never see it again unless you really dug. This was truly the wild west, tagging did not exist and you could go from fluff to vore in the blink of an eye with nothing warning you before hand. All fannish spaces were marked “here be dragons” and attempts were made to at least adopt the “R/NC-17″ ratings on works to some limited success, depending on webmaster.

Time: 1990-1999. Is Anti a term? No. Who is the term used by? N/A Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

In 1999 LiveJournal arose like a leviathan, and here is where the term Anti emerges as a self descriptor. Larger communities began to form, and with them, divisions. Now, you could reach so many fans you could reach a critical mass of them for enough of them to dislike a ship. The phrase “Anti” became a self-used tag, as people tagged their works, communities, and blogs with “anti” (NB: this is at far, far smaller rates than today). Anti was first and foremost a tagging tool used and created by the people who were vehemently against something.

You could find content more easily than in the past, but you still had to put some serious elbow grease into it.

In 2007, Livejournal bans users for art "depicting minors in explicit sexual situations”. The Livejournal community explodes in anger- towards Livejournal staff. The account holders/fans view this as corporate puritanical meddling. The outrage continues as it is revealed these bans were part of a pre-sale operation to SUP Services. SUP Services, upon taking over Livejournal in 2008, proceeds to filter the topics “bisexuality, depression, faeries, girls, boys, and fanfiction”.

The Great LiveJournal Migration begins, as fans leave the site in droves.

Time: 1999-2009. Is Anti a term? Yes. Who is the term used by? People self describing, seeking to create communities based off a dislike of something. Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

Where do fans go? Well, in the last decade, they migrated to Tumblr and Twitter (sorry Pillowfort- you gave it a good try!)

What’s different about all of these sites? Individuals are able to create and access content streams. These are hugely impactful in how communities are formed! Because now:

a) finding content is easier

b) finding content you dislike by accident is easier

c) content you dislike requires active curation to avoid

d) truly anonymous outreach is possible and easy (for example, you anon! Isn’t it much easier to go on anon to bring up awkward or sensitive topics? I’m happy you did by the way, and that’s why I keep my anons open. It’s an important contextual tool in the online communications world!)

Now the term Anti gets sprightly. Previously, if you didn’t like content, there was nothing you could really do about it. For example, I, at the tender age of way-too-young, opened up a page of my favorite Star Trek Deep Space 9 fansite and pixel by pixel with all the loading speed of a stoned turtle a very anatomically incorrect orgy appeared.

I backed out.

1. Who could I contact? There was no “message me here” button, no way to summon any mods on Angelfire sites.

2. If I did manage to find a contact button, I would have had to admit I went onto a site that wasn’t designed to keep me safe. I knew this was a site for adults, I knew there wasn’t a way to stop it from showing something. There was no such thing as tags. I knew all of this before going in. So the assumption was, it was on me for looking. (Some may have argued it was on my parents for not supervising me- all I can say is thank GOD no one else was in the living room and my mom was around the corner in the kitchen.)

But now? On Tumblr? On Twitter? In a decade in which tagging is so easy and ubiquitous it’s expected?

Now people who describe themselves as antis start to have actual tools and social conventions to utilize.

Which leads to immediate backlash! Content creators are confused and upset- fandom spaces have been the wild west for decades, and there’s still no sherriff in town. So the immediate go-to argument is that these people who are messaging them are “puritans”.

And that’s actually an interesting argument! A huge factor in shaping the internet’s social mores in the latest decades is cleanliness for stockbrokers. Websites can become toxic to investors and to sales if they contain sexual content. Over time, corporations perfected a mechanism for “cleaning” a site for sale.

Please note there is no personal opinion or judgement in this next list, it is simply a description of corporate strategies you can read during the minute meetings of shareholders for Tumblr, Twitter, Paypal, Venmo, Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo Answers, and Livejournal.

1. Remove sex workers. Ban any sex work of any kind, deplatform, keep any money you may have been holding.

2. Remove pedophilia. This is where the jump begins between content depicting real people vs content depicting fictional characters begins.

3. Remove all sexual image content, including artwork of fictional characters.

4. Remove all sexual content, including written works. If needed, loop back to step 2 as a justification, and claim you do not have the moderators to prevent written works depicting children.

I would like to reiterate these are actual gameplans, so much so that they’ve made their way into business textbooks. (Or at least they did for my Modern Marketing & App Design classes back in the early 2010s. Venmo, of course, wasn’t mentioned, but I did read the shareholder’s speeches when they banned sex workers from the platform so I added them in the list above because it seems they’re following the same pattern.)

So you have two groups who are actively seeking to remove NSFW content from the site.

A) Corporate shareholders

B) People are upset they’re seeing NSFW content they didn’t seek out and squicks them

Now, why does this matter for the debates using the term “puritan” as an insult? 

Because the reasons corporate shareholders hate NSFW material is founded in American puritanism. It’s a really interesting conflation of private sector values! And if Wall Street were in another cultural context, it would be a completely different discussion which I find fascinating!

But here’s the rub- that second group? They're not doing this for money. If there are any puritanical drives, it’s personal, not a widespread cohesive ideology driving them. HOWEVER! The section of that group that spent the early 2010s on tumblr did pick up some of the same rhetoric as puritanical talking points (which is an entirely separate discussion involving radfems, 4chan raids, fourth wave feminism, and a huge very nuanced set of influences I would love to talk about at a later time!)

These are largely fans who have “grown up” in the modern sites- no matter how old they actually are, their fandom habits and expectations have been shaped by the algorithms of these modern sites.

Now HERE‘s the fascinating bit that’s new to me! This is the interpretation of the data I’m getting, and so I’m out on a limb but I think this is a valid premise!

The major conflict in fandom at this time is a struggle over personal space online.

Content creators are getting messages telling them to stop, degrading them, following them from platform to platform.

They say “Hey! What gives- we were here first. The cardinal rule of fandom is don’t like, don’t read. Fandom space has always been understood to be adult- it’s been this way for decades! To find our content, you had to come to us! This is our space! This is my space, this is my blog! If you don’t like it, you’re not obligated to look!”

Meanwhile, at the exact same time, antis are saying “Hey! What gives- this content is appearing on my screen! That’s my space!  I didn’t agree to this, I don’t like this! I want it to be as far away from me as possible! I will actively drive it away.”

This is a major cultural shift! This is a huge change and a huge source of friction! And I directly credit it to the concept of “content stream” and algorithms driving similar-content to users despite them not wanting it!

Curating your online space used to be much simpler, because there wasn’t much of it! Now with millions of users spread out over a wide age range, all feeding in to the same 4-5 websites, we are seeing people be cramped in a technically limitless space!

Now people feel that they have to go on the offense to defend themselves against content they don’t like, which is predicated upon not only the algorithms of modern websites but ALSO talking points fed from the top down of what is and what is not acceptable on various platforms.

Time: 2010-2020. Is Anti a term? Yes. Who is the term used by? People self describing,and people using it to describe others. Is fandom space considered Puritanical? Depends!

So I, a fandom ancient, a creaky thing of old HTML codes and broken tags, am watching this transformation and am wildly curious for data.

Also...I uh....I can’t believe this is the short version. My ADHD is how you say “buckwild” tonight.

Anyways...um...if anyone has read to the bottom, give me data?

[duhragonball]

oh yeah jojo, uhhh foo fighters for the character ask too

Give me a character and I will answer:

Why I like them: I was trying to do a first-come-first-served order with these, but I’m gonna skip ahead to FF, because I feel like I need some positivity after roasting Hit earlier.  

I don’t want to get too spoilery with this, since Part 6 hasn’t gotten an anime adaptation yet, and a lot of folks haven’t read it, but Stone Ocean is one of my favorite parts, and Foo Fighters is one of the highlights in it.  

When I went through Parts 1-7 (and most of 8) in 2017, I got really burned out on Stands somewhere around Parts 4 and 5.    I sort of hoped that Araki would introduce some new big concept every few parts, the way he switched from Hamon to Stands in Part 3.   Instead it was sort of like “Hi, welcome to Part 5, we’re still doing Stands, so good luck learning all their names and powers.” 

Since then, I’ve come to appreciate why Araki stuck to his guns.    The whole point of Stands is that they can be used to do just about any kind of story you want to do.    If Araki wants to do a zombie story, he doesn’t have to scrap everything and invent a zombie scenario; he can just introduce a Stand User with zombie powers.  Parts 7 and 8 introduce new concepts and powers, but the Stands are still there, because the idea is versatile enough that it can take a back seat when needed.    

Anyway, FF is a good example of what I’m talking about.   At first, Mista felt like a warmed-over Polnareff, and La Squadra seems like they’d fit right into Dio’s gang, but Foo Fighters didn’t seem much at all like anybody I’d seen in JJBA before or since, and that’s one of the reasons I like Part 6 so much.   It’s a prison story, but for her it’s this whole new world to explore, and I like that fresh perspective she brings to things.  

Why I don’t: Nothing to see here.

Favorite episode (scene if movie): That fight with the Feng Shui guy was pretty cool.  

Favorite season/movie: Part 6 was the only part she was in, so that, I guess.

Favorite line: “Fred Hoyle, an astronomer, once said 'It is wrong to assume, even statistically speaking, that organisms spontaneously appeared on this Earth... There is a preexisting intellect of the cosmos that designed the origins of lifeforms...'... so, it can be said that intellect preceded even the big bang and that every organism and matter itself is guided by that intellect, and is part of that larger intelligence.”  

I don’t know why she said all of that, since she was trying to handwave her own existence, but whatever.   I sort of want that to become a meme, like the opening monologue of the Bee Movie. 

Favorite outfit: There’s only one, as far as I’m concerned.  Sometimes I try to come up with my own sort of JoJo outfit, something inspired by high fashion, but I really have no clue how any of that works.    And I probably never will, since Araki clearly based FF’s signature look on Mr. Green Jeans from Captain Kangaroo.

OTP: None.

Brotp: Jolyne.   

Head Canon: There’s a minor dispute in the fandom over whether that green thing on her head is a really chic haircut or a ridiculous hat.   I personally think it’s hair, although I can see the hat argument has some solid points.   

But let’s say it is a hat.   What’s her hair look like underneath, then?   Is she bald?   Yeah, maybe, I could see her pulling that look off.  Just this layer of green stubble, that’d look cute.    If she has any hair at all under that thing, it can’t be very long, since you never see it poke out from underneath.   

So maybe if she took the hat off, you’d see the exact same hairstyle that all the fanartists make the hat look like.   And that way we’re all right.

Unpopular opinion: Everyone from Part 6 should have just crashed Part 7.   Imagine Foo Fighters strutting around in lime green chaps, drinking water out of spitoons.  

A wish: I don’t see a lot of glamour fan art of FF.    There seems to be three main approaches to depicting the character: Cute, goofy, and chubby.   It all works, that’s what makes the character so appealing.    One minute she’s gulping down a big cup of water, the next she looks badass.  

But, I see a lot of fan art of Hermes where she looks like she’s at some red carpet event, and Foo could pull off that sort of look.    I say this mostly because she has this ultra mod hairstyle/hat.   You look at all the Hot Pants fanart of her in modern clothes, and Foo Fighters could rock that just as easy.  

Of course, that sort of thing is probably out there somewhere, and I just haven’t found it.      

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen: It already did, though : (

5 words to best describe them: She is the best Pokemon.

My nickname for them: Foo, I guess.

[amillioninprizes]

Some thoughts on Veronica Mars, fan service, and noir

I’ve been on winter break and at home with a nasty combo cold-ear infection-stomach virus the past couple of weeks, and as so often happens when I don’t have much going on, my thoughts have turned to ruminating over the steaming pile of excrement that was season 4 of Veronica Mars. Why yes, almost six months and one cancellation notice later and I’m still complaining about it--as I told someone on Twitter, it was so stupid that it’s going to take years to unpack.

This particular rant is brought to you by a common refrain seen in both professional critics’ and S4 supporters’ reviews of S4: the movie was schlocky fan service, while S4 is TRUE NOIR. I’m here to argue that neither of those things are true, and that in the grand scheme of things trying to definitively call Veronica Mars noir or not isn’t the best qualitative judgement of the series.

A note on “fanservice”

Something that’s been very strange to me in the critical discussion around S4 is that the fan-funded movie has been retconned as a fanservicey failure. This is weird because it did get a positive Rotten Tomatoes score, actually turned a profit despite the unorthodox distribution model, and was overall well-received by fans except for maybe the 5 Piz lovers out there (he absolutely did not deserve better you guys; he works at This American Life and lives in Brooklyn, he’ll be fine).

A lot of the things pointed to in the movie as fan service actually weren’t. In every interview about the movie and S4, RT and KB always talk about how they started with the image of Veronica punching Madison at the high school reunion and worked from there. The problem is that almost no one had been asking for that. If they had bothered to read any online discourse about the show (and we know RT definitely does), they would know that fans are actually somewhat sympathetic to Madison--after all, she was the intended recipient of the drugged drink Veronica received at Shelly Pomeroy’s party, plus growing up in a family that she wasn’t meant to be a member of must have negatively impacted her. When the preview scene of Veronica encountering Madison at the reunion welcome table was released, Veronica didn’t come off sympathetically. In a similar vein, as much as I liked Corny as a side character in the original series, I didn’t need him to come back for that random scene at the reunion. Nor was anyone asking for an out-of-nowhere James Franco cameo (which given what we know about him now is super gross in hindsight).

So why was the movie well-received by fans? Veronica was in character after an unevenly written and performed S3, and she was back in Neptune, doing what (and who; Ay-yo!) she was meant to do. So while the mystery was subpar (and what Rob Thomas mystery isn’t?), the character side of the story made sense and was satisfying. I wouldn’t call that fan service so much as good writing. Plus, what is even the point of wasting time, money, and effort on making a tv show or movie if it’s going to actively alienate the audience?

S4: more trauma porn than true noir

Admittedly, I’m not exactly the world’s foremost scholar on film noir (in my opinion, the height of cinema is teen romcoms c. 1995-2005), but I do feel I have enough pop cultural knowledge to have a working understanding of what film noir is, and as internet folk would say, S4 ain’t it chief. Sure, S4 was bleak subject matter wise, but that does not automatically equal noir. HappilyShanghaied, who does have a film studies background, wrote a pretty excellent post about why that is shortly after S4 dropped that I could not improve upon, so I will just leave it here. 

In addition to this analysis, I would also point out that S4 was lacking in a unique visual style common to noir films, especially compared to the original television series and the movie. The original series made use of green, blue, and yellow filters to fulfill a high school version of the noir aesthetic (quick shoutout to Cheshirecatstrut’s color theory posts for more on what we thought this meant before it turned out that Rob Thomas did not actually intend to imbue meaning into any of this), while the movie adopted a more mature muted blue-grey palette. S4, however, was more or less shot like a conventional drama and was brightly lit, perhaps signifying Rob Thomas’s apparent plans to turn the show into a conventional procedural.

The movie: more than fan service 

If anything, the movie was more noir than S4. Take Gia’s storyline for instance. While Veronica was off obtaining elite degrees, Gia spent 9 years in a virtual cage being forced into a sexual relationship without her total consent (because that’s the only storyline women can have on this show), and then set herself up to be murdered at the very moment she could potentially break free. That’s pretty fucking grim.

Then there is the whole police corruption storyline, which is a hallmark of noir fiction. The glimpses we get of the Neptune sheriff’s department point to a larger conspiracy at play than just crooked cops; Sachs lost his life trying to expose it and Keith was gravely injured. This was the story I was excited for future installments of Veronica Mars to address, especially given its relevance to today’s politics. Unfortunately, this thread was entirely dropped in S4, where the police department (because, as Rob Thomas revealed in interviews but not onscreen, Neptune has incorporated) is merely overwhelmed by the scope of the bombing case rather than outright corrupt. (Side note but Marcia Langdon was also a more complex and morally grey character when introduced in the second book than she was on screen in S4. Another wasted opportunity).

Noir is also marked by a sense of inevitability or doom as a result of greater forces at play. An example of this in the movie is Weevil’s storyline. After building a life and family for himself, he ultimately ends up rejoining the PCHer gang he left as a teenager due to a misunderstanding based on his race and appearance and the assumptions authority figures make about him because of those things. No matter what he does, he is still limited by an unjust and racist society. Contrast this with the final explosion in S4; it’s not inevitable, just based on Veronica’s incompetence. Rob Thomas claims that he tried to create a sense of doom to LoVe’s relationship between the OOC Leo storyline and the last minute barriers before the wedding, but those aspects just served to make the story unnecessarily convoluted.

What is noir anyway? Was Veronica Mars ever noir? Does it matter?

But this is all assuming there is a set template for noir anyway. This New Yorker essay points out that trying to definitively establish a set of rules for noir is difficult and that the classic noir films were more a product of midcentury artistic and political movements than a defined genre. The noir filmmakers working at the time would not have described their work as such. The kicker of this essay is the final sentence: “But the film noir is historically determined by particular circumstances; that’s why latter-day attempts at film noir, or so-called neo-noirs, almost all feel like exercises in nostalgia.” I found this particularly amusing because as Rob Thomas infamously proclaimed in his S4 era interviews, he wanted to completely dispense with nostalgia going forward. Rob Thomas and S4 supporters have said that Logan needed to die because noir protagonists can’t have stable relationships; but, if there isn’t a defined set of rules other than “an element of crime”, then was it strictly necessary? Hell, writing a hardboiled detective who does have a stable relationship and maybe even a family could have been an interesting subversion of genre expectations. Unfortunately, Rob Thomas isn’t that imaginative.

There’s also the issue that noir and hardboiled detective fiction aren’t interchangeable genres. This article lays out that idea that they aren’t the same because noir is ultimately about doomed losers; in contrast, detective fiction, while dark, contains a moral center and has an ending where a sense of justice is achieved. An interview with author Megan Abbott makes a similar argument; she states that in hardboiled detective fiction, “At the end, everything is a mess, people have died, but the hero has done the right thing or close to it, and order has, to a certain extent, been restored.” Based on the descriptions laid out here, I would argue that in its original format Veronica Mars far better fit the detective fiction model; while she wasn’t always right, she was never a loser, and she solved the mystery. S1-3 all had relatively hopeful, if not totally happy, endings, but you never see anyone complaining that they weren’t noir enough; if anything, they were more emotionally complex than the ending of S4, where Logan’s death is essentially meaningless. One could make the argument that S4 did push Veronica towards a more noir characterization by the definition of these articles by making her more incompetent and meaner than she was in previous installments, but that is a fundamental change in character, which is not coherent writing.

And that is ultimately why S4 was so poorly received by longtime fans and why there will be no more installments of Veronica Mars anytime soon (at least on Hulu). Even if S4 had been noir (or at least shot like one), the serious issues with plotting, characterization, and lack of adherence to prior canon that this season exhibited would still exist. Defending the poor writing choices made in S4 with “it’s noir!” does not mask them or automatically heighten the quality of the product. Perhaps ironically, in ineptly trying to be noir in S4, Rob Thomas likely prematurely ended Veronica Mars by failing his creation and fans with lazy storytelling.

[d33-alex]

Quantum weirdness isn’t real – we’ve just got space and time all wrong

A radical new idea erases quantum theory's weird uncertainties – by ripping up all we thought we knew about how the universe works

QUANTUM mechanics is often called a theory of the very small. In reality, it explains phenomena on a vast range of scales – from elementary particles and their interactions, through atoms and molecules, all the way to neutron stars and the supernovae that spawn them. So far, essentially all its predictions have been confirmed by experiments. It is the most successful theory of material reality we have ever had.

So why have so many physicists, from Albert Einstein onwards, taken the view that quantum theory is wrong?

The reasons lie in its mysterious nature, in the phenomena it doesn't explain and the answers it doesn't give. That is reason enough to seek what might lie beyond it. I believe we already have the outline of what this deeper answer looks like. We are only at the start of this work, but by digging down into the fundamental principles that underlie reality, and weeding out what is right and what is wrong about our current ideas, we can see glimpses of a truly unifying picture of physics. It comes at a price: to go beyond quantum, we must totally upend long-held ideas of how the universe hangs together.

How do we bridge the gap between quantum physics and gravity? Find out from Vlatko Vedral at New Scientist Live 2019 in London

It is easy to state the basic problem of quantum mechanics as a theory of reality: it doesn't tell us what is happening in reality. It has two different laws to describe how things and events evolve. The first applies most of the time, and describes quantum objects as wave-like entities embodied in a mathematical construction known as a wave function. These objects evolve smoothly in time, exploring alternative realities in "superpositions" in which they aren't restricted to being in any one place at any one time. That, to any intuitive understanding of how the world works, is distinctly odd.

Curiouser and curiouser

The second law applies only under special circumstances called measurements, in which a quantum object interacts with a much larger, macroscopic system – you or me observing it, for example. This law says that a single measurement outcome manifests itself. The alternative realities that the wave function says existed up to that point suddenly dissolve.

These two laws exist in parallel, in apparent contradiction of one another – a fundamental failure of our understanding known as the measurement problem. Attempts to do the obvious, and derive the second law from the first, have so far failed. We are left with only statistical predictions of what is going on in the quantum world before it is measured.

The mysteries don't end there. Quantum theory also seems to violate the principle of locality, which says that objects or events must be near one another to interact. In classical physics, for example, the gravitational or electrical force between two objects depends on their distance: the closer they are in space, the stronger the force between them. Quantum theory, meanwhile, introduces entanglement, a phenomenon that allows objects to seemingly influence each other instantaneously over any distance.

Einstein notably believed that these blemishes indicated that quantum theory was wrong, and that a truer, deeper description of nature was out there. He wasn't the only quantum pioneer to express doubts. Louis de Broglie, who first predicted the wave-like aspects of matter, was another sceptic, as was Erwin Schrödinger, whose famous thought experiment of the dead-and-alive cat was designed to highlight the absurdity of quantum theory's prediction of alternative realities. In the present day, quantum dissidents include notable physicists such as Roger Penrose and the Nobel-prizewinning theorist Gerard 't Hooft.

Arguments about whether quantum mechanics is a complete theory of reality have usually been carried out in isolation. But the route to a deeper and truer understanding of nature may lie in connecting the problems of quantum theory with other big, open problems in fundamental physics.

The most obvious one is how to develop a quantum theory of gravity. Gravity is the only one of nature's four fundamental forces not to have a quantum-mechanical description. It is described by Einstein's general theory of relativity as an effect resulting from massive objects warping space-time around them.

General relativity and quantum theory seem to be fundamentally incompatible, not least in the way the former describes a smooth, malleable space-time. By contrast, quantum theory suggests that it must at some level come in discrete chunks, or quanta, of space or space-time.

We have at least half a dozen ways to get part of the way across this divide, among them string theory and loop quantum gravity. Indeed, the latter idea gives precise predictions for what the quanta of space-time must look like. But we have no idea whether any of the suggested routes are the right one because none predicts an experimental test we can perform with current technology.

Quantum theory and general relativity clash in other ways, too, notably over the nature of time. Relativity makes it impossible to establish one objective "flow" of time of the sort we perceive, with a past and a future separated by a universally defined now. Quantum theory, meanwhile, characterises time as a metronomic "beat" set somewhere outside the universe. So is our perception of a flowing time real, or an illusion?

Back to basics

There are other deep questions. The quantum descriptions of the other three fundamental forces – electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces – can be bundled together into the so-called standard model of particle physics. But why do these three forces have such very different strengths within the standard model? Then there is the nature of the dark matter and dark energy that dominate the cosmos on a large scale, but which the standard model doesn't mention. These questions and others concern how our universe came to be, out of a vast number of seemingly equally probable universes allowed by the laws of physics.

To solve all these issues, we need to wipe the slate clean, go back to the first principles of quantum theory and general relativity, decide which are necessary and which are open to question, and see what new principles we might need. Do that, and an alternative description of physics becomes possible, one that explains things not in terms of objects situated in a pre-existing space, as we do now, but in terms of events and the relationships between them.

This endeavour starts with a few basic hypotheses about the nature of space and time. First, that the history of the universe consists of events and the relationships between them. Second, that time – in the sense of causation, the process by which future events are produced from present events – is fundamental. Third, that time is irreversible: causation can't go backwards, and once an event has happened, it can't be made to unhappen. Fourth, that space emerges from this description: events cause other events, creating a network of causal relationships. The geometry of space-time arises as a coarse-grained and approximate description of this network.

A fifth hypothesis is that energy and momentum are fundamental features of the universe, and are conserved in causal processes. These five hypotheses define a class of models called energetic causal set models that my collaborator Marina Cortês of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, UK, and I introduced in 2013. I have since added a sixth hypothesis, a version of the holographic principle first stated by 't Hooft. This says that when two-dimensional surfaces are defined in the emerging geometry of space-time, their area gives the maximum rate by which information can flow through them.

In this picture, every event is distinguished by the information available to it about its causal past. We call this the event's sky because it functions rather like the sky above us does. The sky – or the horizon of our sight more generally – is a snapshot of what we see at any one instant, a two-dimensional surface formed by photons of different colours, informing us of our relationships with the things around us. Because nothing travels faster than the speed of light, only things within an event's sky can influence it, so the sky is also a view of its causal past.

Sky's the limit

This picture allows us to describe how information and energy flow through events as the universe evolves. Ted Jacobson at the University of Maryland in the US and Thanu Padmanabhan at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India, have independently shown that the sixth hypothesis, together with the first law of thermodynamics, which governs the amount of useful energy available to a process, can be used to derive the equations of general relativity, and hence gravity.

Their work assumes that space-time is always smooth. By marrying their reasoning with the picture of a prototypical discrete, quantum space-time in our models, we can derive both general relativity and smooth space-time as emerging from a dynamically evolving causal network.

As well as providing the seed of a quantum picture of gravity, this immediately solves the problem of the flow of time in Einstein's cosmos. In a causally defined universe, the most basic interaction is the creation of an event when two "parent" events come together to make something new happen. At each stage in the construction of a space-time history, the future doesn't exist. But we can postulate a limit to the number of events any parent event can give birth to. Events that have had their full allotment of progeny cannot have any further direct influence on the future, and are relegated to the past: time flows.

The most exciting prospect, which Cortês and I have been exploring over the past few years, is that quantum theory might also emerge from this picture. That comes from building energetic causal set models to answer the key question of which events interact.

Events differ from one another in that each has a different sky, a different view of its causal past. We can define a measure of how similar two events' views are, and pick the pair with the most similar views to be the parents of the next event. The idea is that the similarity of views can play the role that distance in space does in conventional classical and relativistic physics. The more similar the views of two events, the more likely they are to interact.

The overall effect of choosing the pair with the most similar views as parents pushes both out of the present and into the past. Removing two very similar views and creating a new view that is a synthesis of both – and hence different from both – has the effect of increasing the total diversity of the views of all events in the universe. A measure of the total diversity of an ensemble of views is a quantity we invented in the late 1980s with Julian Barbour at the University of Oxford. We called it the variety of the system.

All this has intriguing consequences. The views are chosen and evolve precisely so that the total variety evolves to its maximum – and it turns out that this exactly reproduces the dynamics of quantum theory.

You can begin to see how this works. Similarity of views only implies nearness in emergent space-time for large, complex events. If an event has a very simple recent causal past, there may be other simple events with similar pasts that aren't necessarily nearby in the emergent space-time. Yet by the principle of similarity, they have a high probability of interacting with each other.

Einstein and others since have proposed that quantum wave functions describe collections, or "ensembles", of systems defined by properties they share, but it has never been clear whether these ensembles truly exist. In this "real ensemble" picture, they do. The continual, brazenly non-local interactions between simple, causally related objects widely distributed in space explain all the probabilities, uncertainties and spooky interactions of quantum physics. They only ever occur between simple systems such as single particles on a microscopic scale because only these can have similar views. Large, complex systems with many degrees of freedom – you, me, Schrödinger's cat – will have a unique causal past. For us, the closer we are in space or space-time, the more similar our view will be. Proximity matters at the classical scale in a way it doesn't at a quantum scale.

In a series of recent papers, my collaborators and I have also shown how to describe an interaction among the members of each ensemble that results in the ensemble's quantum state evolving in time according to the laws specified in quantum mechanics. That gives a simple and elegant solution to the measurement problem.

There remains the question of what happens with systems of an intermediate size, whose causal pasts aren't unique, but which might have an intermediate degree of causal relationship with things far away in space. These, I predict, should be described by a tweaked version of quantum physics in which the superposition principle fails to hold exactly. It is possible that experimentalists can construct such systems, and test this prediction, using the tools of quantum information. If we can create sufficiently large and complex entangled states, which would have no or only a few natural copies within the universe, our picture predicts that their evolution in time will deviate from that predicted by quantum mechanics.

More details need to be filled in. This is just a sketch of how we might go beyond today's quantum picture and construct a unified physics that sidesteps the fundamental problems we currently see ourselves facing, while preserving the best of what we have. No doubt it isn't correct in every detail, and others may come along with other, entirely different ideas. But the current impasse in physics suggests that it is only through bold ideas that we will move forward.

A MANIFESTO FOR A NEW REALITY

Six hypotheses are needed to begin to rewrite physics with causation at its core – and perhaps solve the problems of quantum theory and relativity.

1. The history of the universe consists of events

2. Time causation is fundamental

3. Causation doesn't go backwards: events don't "unhappen"

4. Space is constructed from the web of causation between events

5. Energy and momentum are conserved when events cause other events

6. The amount of information that can flow between events through emerging space is determined by that space's area

Physicist Lee Smolin | New Scientist | Aug 24 2019

[paigesturning]

Race in 5e: Who Is at Your Table?

I had to write an argumentative essay for one of my classes this semester. I was really into the idea I had, and gave it a shot! I think this might be one of the best pieces I’ve ever written.

Word count: 2995 TW: Discussions of race science, orientalism, and references to white supremacist rhetoric

Writing is difficult, and it’s even more difficult to write collaboratively. This applies to TTRPG as much as it applies to novels. Sure, the DM could simply railroad the players into sessions of combat, lock them into a certain path, or make their other options so terrible that they simply must go the way the story is leading, but it’s bad practice. After all, though it’s not a traditional story, written down in book form for distribution, TTRPG relies on the interplay between the DM’s idea for what should happen in the story, and the players’ ideas. Unlike writing a book, however, TTRPGs rely on another influence, rather than just the set of people who have agreed to tell a story. There’s always at least one other person in the situation, who might be completely unknown to the DM and players. I refer, of course, to the game designer. TTRPGs have far more freedom than video games, but the decisions made by the game designer have the same amount of weight in both mediums. In Skyrim, for example, this looks like a prioritization of combat mechanics over puzzle solving mechanics or relationship mechanics. Though both are implemented in the game, there’s not nearly as many options in playstyle for relationships, or variation in puzzle types, for it to be considered a romance game, or a puzzle game. In TTRPG, the influence of the designer is often far less apparent. In 5e, your character can do basically whatever they want so long as the other people at the table agree that it’s something they want to interact with. However, with some exception, you will not be able to run a game set, for example, in real-world Chicago or on a transport vessel in space. Players tend to be locked into a fantasy setting. Like Skyrim, 5e is a system that prioritizes combat in a magical, pseudo-European medieval setting. It’s a mix of mechanics, and built-in worldbuilding that can allow us to come to this conclusion - each spell, if it doesn’t explicitly add or remove hit points from a target, changes the rules for when and how combat can happen, and each class is described in their flavor text in high fantasy terms, often opening with the examples of ways each one can be useful in combat. True as all this may be, it is, at its core a neutral thing, and I find myself blessed to occasionally be at the tables of others as a game designer and homebrewer. All games must make assumptions about the kind of game players want, and must do their best to fulfil those expectations, the same way a speaker might attempt to predict the thoughts, previous knowledge, and counter-arguments of their audience. However, in 5e, there lies a certain set of assumptions that I personally find troubling, and in fact in need of some serious reworking. The way that race functions in 5e represents an old-fashioned way of viewing the world. In the most direct terms, yeah, it’s kinda racist. Therefore, the assumptions 5e makes in their race system, represented in mechanics that both promote archaic ways of thinking and force the narrative in directions the players and DM may be uncomfortable with, means that it is time to either dramatically change the way race works, or pass over the system entirely.

When a DM is preparing to start a new game of 5e, one very good place to start is the Dungeon Master’s Guide, or DMG. In it, theoretically, are the tools for DMs and players alike to better understand exactly what the game they are playing looks like. In many ways, it’s a behind the scenes look at what goes into planning a session. For example, each “encounter”, or a portion of the game in which the players fight enemies or find ways around them, there’s a bit of calculation which can tell you what enemies will be appropriate for your party size and level. However, in a new game, before even doing that, you should go to the beginning of chapter 1, on page 9. It lists the assumptions the rules make about your setting, which is a helpful tool for anyone attempting to rectify the base rules with a far-out, high-concept world. They are as follows: “Gods Oversee the World”, “Much of the World is Untamed”, “The World is Ancient”, “Conflict Shapes the World’s History”, and “The World is Magical”. On paper, that’s all you need to know (though it might be worth noting that on page 43 the book contradicts this and gets more specific about what sort of multiverse is required to support the rules). These are five basic rules anyone can follow, rules that most people working to create a fantasy setting would have followed anyway, especially in such a combat-focused system. However, in the Player’s Handbook, (abbreviated as PHB) there are additional assumptions about the setting you’ll be playing in, most notably in the section on the different races that appear in 5e. For starters, each race has a small box that explains how the other races in the game are likely to view them. Taken from page 37, when the book is discussing how Gnomes (a small race of humanoids with large heads and thin limbs) think about their place among other races, “It's rare for a gnome to be hostile or malicious unless he or she has suffered a grievous injury. Gnomes know that most races don't share their sense of humor, but they enjoy anyone's company just as they enjoy everything else they set out to do.” They give no explanation for why gnomes tend to be “Good”, in terms of 5e’s morality system. Perhaps this isn’t an oversight, and instead they are allowing you to fill in the blanks yourself? Do the gnomes perhaps have free healthcare, while some others do not? 

I am of course being facetious. I am certain the creators didn’t think quite so far ahead, and instead just wanted to paint a picture of the world they envisioned. It’s not some great sin of design, of course, to do this, and I will admit I am guilty of it in my own design. However, this is just one of the smaller examples of 5e making decisions for the DM and the players. Unlike some other portions of the rules, that brief note can be ignored with little to no need for creating a replacement. You could just as easily scribble the note out of the book, and leave a black sharpie stain where it once sat. Unfortunately, there are other decisions made about race that are much harder to ignore without a level of homebrewed (or player-created) mechanics. For example, a little later, on page 43, the book tells you about the specific mechanical benefits that half-orcs get. Two in particular stand out to me as disturbing. The first, Menacing, means that “You gain proficiency in the Intimidation skill”. The other is Savage Attacks, which reads “When you score a critical hit with a melee weapon attack, you can roll one of the weapon's damage dice one additional time and add it to the extra damage of the critical hit”. There is no way in which these cannot be seen as narrative decisions on the part of the creators. Exactly what is it about an orc’s presence that would mean it is more intimidating than any other person? One could surmise that, perhaps they are much larger than most people, or that their rarity means that people are not used to their size and tusks. Perhaps I only speak for myself, but I do not often find myself intimidated by people who look different from what I am used to. The explanation the rules provide is that full-blooded-orcs are barbaric raiders, who wantonly destroy and kill, and are considered evil. Why is it, however, that there’s an entire group of people, people with thoughts, feelings, social structures, who can produce viable offspring with members of other groups of people, that the book deems evil? I submit that, in the minds of the creators, there is some sort of orientalist mystique behind the savage barbarian, one that is physically superior, and yet is still no more than fodder to be torn through by the heroes of the story. This isn’t even the worst example of racism built into the game, but to explain this next portion, I will need to explain a concept. 

At its base level, phrenology is, as per the Encyclopedia Britannica, “the study of the conformation of the skull as indicative of mental faculties and traits of character, especially according to the hypotheses of Franz Joseph Gall”. Gall, born in 1758, measured the heads of his colleagues, convicts, and people in asylums, in order to determine traits such as intellect and potentiality for criminal behavior. As with many things invented in late 18th century Europe, this practice was used to fuel European imperialism. The article Of ‘Native Skulls’ and ‘Noble Caucasions’: Phrenology in Colonial South Africa, by Andrew Bank, explains very quickly that “The leading proponents of the new discipline almost uniformly adapted their science of the brain to issues of racial differentiation”. I assume that from here it isn’t difficult to see the direction I am heading with this. Elves, Tieflings, Humans, and Gnomes are given bonuses to Intelligence. Dwarves, Humans, and Elves are given bonuses to Wisdom. Elves, Half-Elves, Humans, Tieflings, Dragonborn, and Halflings are given bonuses to Charisma. Of the races present in the PHB, Half-Orcs are the only ones that don’t get any bonuses to the so-called “Mental Stats”. Physical stats, on the other hand, include Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution, and Half-Orcs get bonuses to Strength and Constitution. In mechanical terms, this leads to a fairly good balance. The other classes serve as either well-rounded jacks-of-all-trades, or are specialized for certain casters, or help fit an archetype of dexterous fighter/caster combinations, while the Half-Orcs are specialized for non-caster tanks, such as the Barbarian or the Fighter. This makes narrative sense as well; if Half-Orcs are raised by the orcish side of their family, they are far more likely to be brutal in martial combat, trained to fight and kill anyone who might have supplies or treasure for them. 

However much this might “make sense”, I have to ask why this was an addition to the game. I see three possible answers, and by my approximation, they are likely to all be true. The first is that the creators wanted more narrative control than they let on. The second is that they needed those stats to be stand-in numbers to represent various types of spellcaster and are simply ignorant to their implications. The third is that the creators simply find race science unobjectionable. Earlier, I suggested that the game designer joins the players and the DM at the table, through their work. At my table, ignorance and suggestions that some races are simply more intellectually powerful than others is not tolerated, and I should only hope you feel the same way. 

At this point, you’re thinking so loud that I can practically hear it, even in the past. “Ignorance isn’t tolerated? What if the ignorant person in question is willing to change, and well-meaning?”, but if this is what you were thinking, I say with the deepest respect that you’re being just a touch too literal. Of course, if I’ve sat down and agreed to play with someone I know, I am willing to go over why what they said made me uncomfortable. TTRPG is a dialogue, one where the players and the DM must negotiate, not battle, for the story they want to tell, and where everyone must speak up when something happens that makes them upset. The difference between a literal player’s presence and the game designer’s figurative presence is that there is no arguing with a book. In some ways, it’s easier to change a book’s mind. Simply write your own rules, and move on, there’s no need to debate an actual person. You may also be thinking that 5e simply utilizes the mechanics of previous editions. While that is technically true, what is the point of creating a new edition if you can’t change things moving forward? And what’s more, each of my criticisms can be moved onto 1e. The biggest criticism I expect against my argument however, isn’t any of this. Obviously, only one of the races in 5e is human. Nothing in 5e indicates that one race of human is significantly better or worse than any other race of human, and so surely it can’t be racism. Again, you may be thinking a little too literally. In the world supposed by 5e, each race is seen as a person, and (depending on the setting and narrative your group constructs) has the same rights to freedom and life, and yet some are just more mentally skilled than others as soon as they are born. How often in reality do the dregs of society say something along the lines of “it isn’t that I think [members of a certain race] aren’t people or should be enslaved, it’s just that I think that white people are inherently smarter” to make an effort of sounding more reasonable? It isn’t that I think the races in 5e are 1:1 parallels to real-world racist stereotypes. Instead, it’s a matter of philosophy, race-based pseudoscience, and ideology that makes 5e (and previous editions) racist, without major rules upheavals. 

However, in some cases, it would require such an overhaul of a system that it isn’t worth it. Most people would look at the rules for 5e’s races and pale at the thought of changing it completely. Do you get rid of stats completely? Do you select whatever stats you want by yourself? Perhaps you instead get certain bonuses when you select your class, rather than your race? These are all possibilities, and I have played games that utilized some of these options. Aside from the strength of reducing the amount of racism in 5e, it also increases the amount of choice a player has when creating their character. It isn’t unheard of to have a dwarf that uses Dexterity and Charisma as it’s primary abilities, but it is poorly optimized in comparison to the options of Half-Elf or Tiefling, and though it takes a bit more work than just handing a player the PHB, I believe it is worth it in the end. There’s no shame in admitting defeat, though. It’s not every day that I feel like fixing another person’s game, and I design games. And I do it for fun. It is the talent I am blessed with, and my lifelong burden. I understand not wanting to put in the effort. However, my suggestion isn’t that you walk away from TTRPG forever, scorned by the problems in 5e, never to roll a die again. Instead, it might be worth your time looking into other systems of play. Whenever I recommend a system to someone who has only played 5e and is looking for a similar aesthetic, I always turn them toward my personal favorite, Dungeon World (abbreviated as DW). DW is, in many ways, the game that I thought I was playing when I first started playing 5e. Looking through the PHB, it seems very comprehensive to incoming players. But to go back to the example of Skyrim, there’s a suggestion when you start it for the first time that you are about to enter a world of endless possibility, only to be shoehorned into a game that directly prioritizes combat. Dungeon World, while it has far less comprehensive rules for combat, one of its biggest strengths is that it has far fewer rules in general. That isn’t to say that it’s harder to follow. Instead of having intense, complicated rules for combat, every moment in the game is subject to “moves” in which, when you say that your character is doing something, the GM - Game Master, in contrast to the Dungeon Master of 5e - can tell you that the outcome is uncertain, and that it might be difficult. When this happens, you roll two six-sided dice, and the game provides very comprehensive rules to help you resolve it. When you choose a race, you get one extra move and nothing else - an option easily alterable, if one finds it uncomfortable. Blades in the Dark, a similar fantasy system, resolves roles in a similar manner, once again, with a much lesser emphasis on violence, and a much stronger emphasis on magic heists. It’s races have no mechanical benefit, and can be completely ignored if so desired. 

Creating a system is difficult, I know. Playtesting aside, it’s a combination of finding something special that you want to create, deciding what the players will be looking for, and editing draft after draft. It’s also difficult, both logistically and emotionally, to kick someone out of a campaign. It’s my belief though that a line should be drawn when someone in the game insists on adding not only social, but biological inferiority to characters of certain races. It’s a privilege to have your work at someone else’s table, and it’s a privilege that can be revoked. Once again, playing 5e isn’t some ethical failing, or mortal offence. However, it is worth evaluating what changes can be made to 5e’s race system, and if it’s worth it to you to not switch to another system. If you have found any of this compelling, consider your other options. In addition to what I’ve already mentioned, there are designers out there who can bring you into space, cities filled with dark magic and/or under control by cosmic monsters, or honey conventions where there are a few bears trying to steal stuff. Next time you get the urge to roleplay, just consider what I’ve said here, and think about who you’re inviting to your table.

Bibliography

LaTorra, Sage, and Adam Koebel. Dungeon World. 1st ed., The Burning Wheel, 2012.

Harper, John. Blades in the Dark. Evil Hat Productions LLC., 2017.

Works Cited

Mearls, Mike, and Jeremy Crawford. Player's Handbook. 5th ed., Wizards of the Coast LLC, 2014.

Mearls, Mike, and Jeremy Crawford. Dungeon Master's Guide. 5th ed., Wizards of the Coast LLC, 2014.

“Phrenology.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/topic/phrenology.

Bank, Andrew. “Of 'Native Skulls' and 'Noble Caucasians': Phrenology in Colonial South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 22, no. 3, 1996, pp. 387–403. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2637310. Accessed 26 Mar. 2020.

[politicalsci]

In future history classrooms, students will likely be told the tale of the tag-team assault on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn by the mainstream media and MPs.  It will be taught as a harbinger of what is erupting into the most pivotal crisis facing Western politics in half a century: the chasm between ordinary people and the elites.  We are seeing it with the Republican establishment’s failed efforts to derail the Trump train and the Democratic establishment’s more successful efforts to extinguish the Bern. This is an emerging contest in which the opposing sides are defined by an ever-growing wealth gap.  The two groups are now viewing each other as adversaries thanks in part to an internet and social media that exposes the disconnect between the mainstream media (MsM) narrative and what the masses feel.  

Corbyn, the self-effacing, mild-mannered veteran activist who was elected with a larger mandate than any party leader in British history, and had pleaded for a ‘kinder, gentler politics’, has become the most media-persecuted politician since George Galloway protested the Iraq War.  While the right-wing press is expected to be harsh on a Labour leader, biased coverage of Corbyn crosses traditional boundaries, infecting centre-left papers as well. The MsM’s seeming contempt for the people’s decision gives pause to anyone who values democracy, whatever one’s ideological persuasion, whether you agree with Corbyn’s policies or not. The unrelenting bullying of the ordinary Party members’ choice of leader may even represent the death-throes of a ‘politico-media complex’ in futile denial that it has lost the hearts and minds of the masses. We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of what Noam Chomsky eloquently deconstructed in his Manufacturing Consent.  

Since Jeremy’s historic victory, the MsM, seemingly in coordination with some MPs, have carried out hit and run attacks. Trawling the bottom of the barrel, they find what might otherwise be un-newsworthy statements or incidents and in unison, twist events to suit the prior agreed upon talking point: Corbyn is a bad leader. Defamation lawsuits are avoided by inserting phrases like ‘Corbyn seemed to’ or ‘appeared to’ before each outlandish accusation. Like any dishonest or poor debater, once the scurrilous claim, outright lie or flimsy argument is disproved by their opponents, they hastily move on to the next attack, creeping under the hitherto reliable darkness of public amnesia. The cynical objective of this approach is to sully the victim’s image by planting vague, amorphous negative associations in the public mind. 

A recent London School of Economics study provided academic evidence of what many of us had observed since Corbyn’s election.  It found that 74% of newspaper articles on Corbyn did not include his views, or represented his views out of context, with media coverage generally de-legitimizing him as a political actor.

These techniques have been supported from inside the Party by McCarthyist witch-hunts which provide the MsM machine with an endless stream of victims being expelled, banned and suspended for crimes you never hear the full details of, that have been presided over by internal bureaucrats who have unclear authority and less clear mandates.

The techniques have paid off to some extent, reflecting a reality of the last half century described in Manufacturing Consent. As an Australian expat, I lived in Oxford, and up and down demographically diverse London suburbs, from Hampstead to Essex, from Kensington to Kilburn. I spoke to people of all walks of life and differing party loyalties.  Almost all liked Corbyn as a human being.  The few negative comments about him pre-referendum included ‘weak leader’ or ‘incompetent’. When pressed as to why, there was usually silence. When informed of his policies on the economy, foreign policy and social issues, there was often agreement, and if not, there was at least a repeating of the concession that ‘he’s a decent guy’. While their positive views toward Corbyn were due to his policies, record or values, negative associations seemed based on nothing more than the media’s assiduously repeated talking points.

After the referendum chaos, there was something more solid to hang on the embattled man, gleefully provided by Media Inc. People said either ‘he was weak/lazy in his campaigning for Remain’ or ‘he disingenuous as he was a secret Leave supporter’. When it is offered that, in the long line of politicians upon whom to heap Brexit blame, perhaps the guy who campaigned against it should be after those who made calculated political decisions to support it, my fellow converser usually remembers that people like Nigel Farage also exist. 

On the inside, 172 MPs voted no confidence in Corbyn in a secret ballot, avoiding accountability to local party members. The puzzling arrogance and flippant dismissal of the public will was on full display when Ian Austin MP, who opposed an inquiry into the Iraq War at least three times, told Corbyn - who had protested against Saddam in the 80s when he gassed the Kurds and opposed the 2003 invasion (right side of history on both counts) - to “sit down and shut-up“ during his parliamentary apology following Chilcot. Politicians’ antipathy to Corbyn has been as consistent as JC’s record on Iraq. When he began his journey as leader New Labour stalwarts were wheeled out to express their dismay at an ‘unelectable’ being permitted to occupy such a hallowed seat.  

However, in a shocking act of impertinence, Labour members chose someone who actually held the same views as them.  Corbyn won with a thumping majority of 59.5%, annihilating his closest rivals who received 19% and 17%, with the Blairite candidate bringing up the rear with 4.5%, suggesting a repudiation of New Labour.  Who would have predicted that members of a party built on a workers’ movement would have rejected an ideology that Margaret Thatcher referred to as her greatest achievement? Labour membership swelled to vote in Corbyn as old school ‘true believers’ returned to the fold, joining hands with millennials filled with indignation nourished through a bypassing of the MsM and reliance upon the internet which had exposed to them unjustness of the present reality.  In just the final 24 hours before the deadline, the Party received over 160,000 applications to vote. There were three surges in membership in 2015: one after the election, one after Corbyn entered the leadership race and another when he became leader. 

100,000 people joined the Labour Party in the days after the coup was launched, most of them to support Jeremy.  Within hours’ notice, 10,000 people turned up to a pro-Corbyn Momentum rally next to the very Parliament inside which their deepest beliefs now seemed to occupy such low regard; a massive display of passion and sacrifice by people who can’t afford to take time off work, have families to look after and most likely live nowhere near Westminster.  Membership is set to reach 600,000, making British Labour the biggest social democratic party in the Western world.  This is what democracy looks like.

It’s not only Party members whose views are being studiously ignored by the MsM.  The actual electorate’s opinions are also seemingly irrelevant to media assessments of Corbyn’s electability.  In Jeremy’s tenure, Labour has won all four by-elections, including with increased majorities, performed better in local elections than under predecessor Ed Miliband and won the London and Bristol mayoralties.  Overall, polls show Labour trailing the Conservatives by a smaller margin, 4%, pre and post-referendum under Corbyn’s leadership than in the final months of Miliband’s tenure where it trailed by between 6 and 14%.

Additionally, Corbyn’s monumental popularity amongst Labour members and the explosion of membership numbers provides a key advantage in a country without compulsory voting: an enormous, enthusiastic army of volunteers to execute the all-important ground-game that carried Obama to victory twice. With the poor being underrepresented in voter turnout in Britain, this presents a significant electoral opportunity that can be tapped not through centrist pragmatism but via passionate supporters.  People, more than advertising, can convince people to get out and vote. And as the referendum’s colossal turnout proved, when they’re mad at the establishment, they’ll turn out in droves.

Given this and the example set by Bernie Sanders, you could only honestly describe Corbyn as definitively unelectable if you’d stumbled into the Large Hadron Collider and entered a parallel universe which combines Orwell’s 1984 and Seinfeld’s Bizzaro World. That or you obtain all your ‘news’ from the mainstream media, which has created its own Orwellian bubble.  Black is white, up is down. Victims of racism, and veterans sporting battle scars from a lifetime of fighting racism, are labelled bigots. Supporters of the elected leader are castigated for dividing the Party.  Politicians most in touch with the current popular anti-establishment mood are lampooned as relics of the past.

The MsM, reassured within its echo-chamber, has mistakenly continued to assume each one of us believes that all our neighbours buy this, that everyone else supports the officially sanctioned line and you’d be a tinfoil-hat-crackpot not to.  Instead, a thing called the internet and its social media component have empowered ordinary people to, at least to some extent, see what their fellow citizens really think and connect with them. 

When thousands of indignant ordinary people launch criticisms of MsM and political elites on social media, they are dismissed as bullying trolls.  Those nakedly conspiring to destroy Corbyn maintain such a self-entitled mentality that they seem to expect him to drop to his knees and apologise to them for every tiny scratch they incur in the course of jamming knives into his back.

Like Bernie, Jeremy is an outsider in both policy and style: genuine, slightly scruffy, even being castigated to “put on a proper suit” during Prime Minister’s Questions.  He abjures the ruthless, focus-group talking points-led tactics of more polished operators; his mere existence enraging some because it shines light on their own vacuity.  He speaks openly about big issues that impact people’s daily lives. Corbyn’s rise signifies that the game has changed, that values and principles are now political capital, not political baggage. The baby-boomer almost stands out as a festering indictment of some of his colleagues who, through no fault of their own, came of political age in the post-historical 1990s when careerism filled the void left by idealism.

Like with Bernie in America and across the Western world, the people are not fighting for one man.  They are fighting for themselves, for each other and for those overseas who have even less say in the policies that may impact them most.  They are fighting for change.  Defaming, bullying, interrogating and tearing asunder the humble, elderly Jeremy Corbyn amounts to spitting in the face of the alienated masses he represents.  The manufacturing of consent is no longer consensual.  Now, what you do to Corbyn, you do to them. 

[FULL ARTICLE LINK]

[antoine-roquentin]

Mortgage lending is central to the financial system: Housing accounts for over 70 percent of household debt, and housing finance plays a central role in financial instability. Conversely, residential construction is the economic sector most sensitive to financial conditions, and to monetary policy in particular. So the shrinking weight of housing in the economy may be a factor in the Federal Reserve’s inability to restore growth and full employment after the crisis. Looking forward, if conventional monetary policy works primarily through residential construction, and residential construction is a permanently smaller part of the economy, that is another argument for broadening the Fed’s toolkit.

Housing construction may be down for the count, at least compared with historical levels. But — and this is the second trend – it is not down across the board. The recent decline is limited to single family housing. Multifamily construction has been quite strong, at least by the standards of the post-1990 period. Compared with the two decades before 2007, single-unit housing starts in the past year are down by a third. Multifamily starts are up by a third. Per capita multifamily housing starts are actually higher than they were at the height of the housing boom.

These divergent trends imply a major shift in the composition of new housing. Through much of the 1990s, less than 10 percent of new housing was in multifamily projects. Today, the share is more like 30 percent. This is a dramatic change in the mix of housing being added, a shift change visible across much of the country in the form of suddenly-ubiquitous six-story woodframe apartment buildings [note: this is an excellent article that you should absolutely click through and read]. The most recent housing data released suggests that, if anything, this trend is still gathering steam: A full third of new housing in June was in multifamily buildings, an even higher proportion than we’ve seen in recent years. In the areas that the Census designates as metropolitan cores, the shift is even more dramatic, with the majority of new housing units now found in multifamily buildings....

This shift is important for politics as well as the economy. Tenant organizations were once an important vehicle for mass politics in American cities. In the progressive imagination of a century ago, workers were squeezed from one side by landlords and high rents just as they were squeezed from the other by bosses and low wages.  

After World War II, the focus of housing politics shifted away from tenants’ rights, and toward broadening access to home ownership. This shift reflected a genuine expansion of homeownership to middle class and working class families, thanks to a range of public supports — supports, it should be noted, from from which African-Americans were largely excluded. But it also reflected a larger vision of democratic politics in terms of a world of small property owners. Homeowners were expected — not without reason — to be more conservative, more ready to imagine themselves on the side of property owners in general. As William Levitt, developer of the iconic Long Island suburb, is supposed to have said: “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist.”

The idea of a property-owning democracy has deep roots in the American political imagination, and can be part of a progressive vision as well as a conservative one. Baby bonds – an endowment or grant given to everyone at the start of their life — are supposed to be a way to broaden property ownership in a way that opens up rather than shuts down possibilities for radical change. Here for example is Derrick Hamilton in his 2018 TED Talk. “Wealth,” he says,

is the paramount indicator of economic security and well-being. It provides financial agency, economic security… We use words like choice, freedom to describe the benefits of the market, but it is literally wealth that gives us choice, freedom and optionality. Wealthier families are better positioned to finance an elite, independent school and college education, access capital to start a business, finance expensive medical procedures, reside in neighborhoods with higher amenities… Basically, when it comes to economic security, wealth is both the beginning and the end.

Descriptively, its’s hard to disagree. And with homes by far the most important form of middle-class wealth, policies to promote homeownership have been supported on exactly these grounds. Homeowners enjoy more security, stability, a cushion against financial setbacks, and the ability to pass their social position on to their children. The policy problem, from this point of view, is simply to ensure that everyone gets to enjoy these benefits.

One way to keep people secure in their homes is to allow more people to own them. This has been the focus of US housing policy for most of the past century. But another way is to give tenants more of the protections that only homeowners currently enjoy. Outside a few major cities, renting has been assumed to be a transitory stage in the lifecycle, so there was little reason to worry about security of tenure for renters. A few years ago I was a guest on a radio show on rent control, and I suggested that apart from affordability,  an important goal of rent regulation was to protect people’s right to remain in their homes. The host was genuinely startled: “I’ve never heard someone say that a person has the right to remain in their home whether they own it or not.”

There are still plenty of people who see the decline in homeownership as a problem to be solved. But the shift in the housing stock toward multifamily units suggests that the trend toward increased  renting is unlikely to be reversed any time soon. (And even many single-family homes are now owned by investors.) The experience of the past 15 years suggests that, in any case, home ownership offers less security than we used to think.

If more and more Americans remain renters through their adult lives, the relationship with the landlords may again approach the relationship with the employer in political salience. Strengthening protections for tenants may again be the basis of political mobilization. And people may become more open to the idea that living in a place, whether or not you own it, gives you a moral claim on it — as beautifully dramatized, for example, in the 2019 movie The Last Black Man in San Francisco.

We may already be seeing this shift in the political sphere. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of support for rent regulation. A ballot measure for statewide rent control failed in California, but various bills to extend or strengthen local rent regulation have gotten significant support. Oregon recently passed the nation’s first statewide rent control measure. And in New York, Governor Cuomo signed into law a sweeping bill strengthening rent regulation where it already exists — mainly New York City – and opening the way for municipalities around the state to pass their own rent regulations.

The revival of rent regulation reflects, in the first instance, political conditions – in New York, years of dogged organizing work by grassroots coalitions, as well as the primary defeats of most of the so-called Independent Democratic Conference, nominal Democrats who caucused with Republicans and gave them control of the State Senate. But it is not diminishing the hard work by rent-regulation supporters to suggest that the housing-market shift toward rentals made the terrain more favorable for them. When nearly half the population are renters, as in New York State, there is likely to be more support for rent regulation. The same dynamic no doubt played a role in the opposition to Amazon’s new headquarters in Queens: For most residents, higher property values meant higher rents, not windfall gains.

[chille-tid-universe]

Grassroots Heroes for Hire

The mayor looked up from the writ. “And you are the subject of this voucher?” He glanced from the half-elf with her supple cloak and curious longbow slung across her back at the head of the group to its other members; a young woman with twigs in her hair, armor that seemed too big, and an assortment of large weapons; a stocky dwarf with a dour expression and an axe that glowed with unnatural light; a youth with chestnut-brown skin, barely more than a boy, holding a large book that looked like it belonged in a museum, in a robe that he might have stolen from someone with fuller shoulders; a foppy young man with a bored look and impeccable eyeliner, carrying a shield and some foreign fetish; a terrifying young tiefling whose snow-white robes and holy symbol were completely at odds with her horns and ashen skin; and most startling of all, a damned half-orc (a half-orc, in his town!) with a wide hat, salt-stained overcoat, and two sharp blades swinging from her hips. This last one stood in the corner, leaning against the wall, as if she at least had the courtesy to recognize exactly how poor in taste this meeting was.

Robyn cleared her throat and swept her eyes over her little band of misfits, glaring at Charlot to straighten up and at Nula to join the rest of the party. “Yes, your mayor-ly-ness. The duke of Hartfordshire was quite satisfied with our assistance rescuing his daughter. We even saved most of her caravan, as well. Well, most of them who weren’t killed by the time we found them, that is.”

“Indeed.” The mayor’s eyes lowered to the parchment again. Everything certainly appeared to be in place, at the very least. He had never met this duke, but he knew from several books in his meager library that Hartfordshire was indeed a neighboring town to the east of his own, as much as “neighboring” could be used to describe any locations in these lands. Still - he glanced back up at the assortment before him - this lot hardly had the look of heroes. Some of them looked to be barely old enough to be on their own! He couldn’t begin to guess at the half-orc’s or dwarf’s ages, but the rest looked like they should be helping out on their parents’ farms right now. The only people who stood with any sort of authority were their half-elf leader, who at least seemed old enough to marry, and the strange boy with the dark symbol, who reminded the mayor of the pouty prince who had rolled through the town when he himself was just a boy. This young man exuded that same air of boredom, as if the surrounding world existed to entertain him and it was doing quite a poor job of it. That prince had been quite a pest, from what the mayor recalled.

It was the odd girl wearing a tree on her head that stepped forward, smoothly admitting, “We know we don’t look like much, sir, but we’ve heard from your citizens that there have been other adventurers sent after your problem, to no avail. Surely it couldn’t hurt to send a few more?” The mayor found himself nodding to Isolde’s suggestion. His citizens, he liked the sound of that. What could it hurt, indeed?

The mayor nodded more deliberately. “Very well, I suppose the voucher says what it says, and we’d be happy to have your assistance. The mine is a couple hours’ travel to the south.” He made to return to the papers scattered about his desk, but a slim hand quickly poked into his line of sight.

Robyn cleared her throat again. “There’s just the matter of payment…”

~~

The band traveled down the southern road with a spring in their step. The mayor had not been keen on paying half upfront, and Nula had needed to lean over his pretty wooden desk and begin cleaning her nails with her dagger before he would reconsider and offer them twenty-five percent before and the rest when they returned with proof the mines had been cleared. Twenty-five percent! Robyn could almost sing. They were certainly on their way; before long, their reputation would precede them up and down the Sword Coast, and perhaps they would even start being recognized in the cities they visited!

Not that Robyn would allow them to venture into a city quite yet; Nula’s bar-fueled argument in their last city had been quite eventful, and Charlot had warned the group that the guards were sure to spread word of the temperamental half-orc pirate-ess and her strange companions to every city on the continent. Robyn felt certain he had been joking, but was unwilling to test it, not before the gang had worked up a level of professionalism that would help to offset the looks of confusion and distrust that greeted them wherever they went.

And this sleepy little hamlet with its classic woes of kobold infested mines were a perfect step along that path. Robyn hummed a little tune as they marched, her left hand upon the flank of their trusty pony. She had taken to calling him Eye-gak, after she overheard Oskar murmuring it to the beast in a town months back. It was a quirky sort of name, but she felt it fit well with what the team had going on. Across Eye-gak’s saddle was a handy portable chest, nothing too ostentatious, just a locked box for them to store their meager riches and the documents they managed to weasel out of their previous employers, vouching for their reliability to their future hopefuls.

Ahead of her, Charlot and Uzza were arguing again. For clerics of the grave and life domains, Robyn supposed she should be happy their discussions were rarely confrontational. At the moment, however, Charlot was trying to convince Uzza that he could render her more palatable in the loftier company they would surely find themselves in before long.

“I’m not saying that tieflings are unheard of in the proper ranks of society, dear, I’m simply saying that you present an odd blend of ideas, and it can be better to go along with what people expect of you than force them to face their own bigotry.”

Uzza bristled as she turned to the boy. “I’m not interested in how your nobles see me, Charlot. I spent my childhood begging for scraps. I won’t demean myself again, not to be subjected to the worldviews of those who think themselves above me. Especially not to appease the normalcy of people with more gold than I’ve ever seen!”

Charlot raised his hands in defense. “Not everyone with wealth is the enemy, Uzza.” He smiled wide and wrapped an arm around her. “Fear not, Charlot will guide you through the scary halls of the rich. Perhaps just a light foundation to even out your skin tone, maybe a nice flowery headband to cover those horns…” Uzza groaned, but Robyn saw her mouth quirk in a smile.

Behind her, Robyn heard Idu going on about his many misadventures as a youth on the streets of Amn (truth be told, Robyn felt Idu still qualified as a youth, but she would never say as much to his face). As always, Oskar clung to every word from the younger boy; Oskar had spent most of his life in the mines of his home, and often found the workings of “above-ground” civilization fascinating. Idu clearly picked up on this an embellished from time to time. Robyn suspected he had run out of factual stories early on, but she had to admit the boy had imagination. As he described a flight from a particularly nasty street-guard, using nothing but the friendship of a wild monkey, his free arm swept in wild arcs. Idu always clutched that fancy book close to his chest, as if he were afraid his wonderful life of traveling would disappear if he let it slip for a single moment. Robyn could sympathize; she oftentimes had to remind herself that all this was real, and that she had indeed managed to bring together such an amazing group with whom to spend her days.

Beside Oskar, Isolde nodded along to the story, gasping at all the right moments and asking the questions Idu was clearly fishing for. Isolde had explained to Robyn when she first joined the gang that they were a lovely example of the balance the paladin wished to instill in the world around her; Robyn sometimes questioned the balance of the team, but was thankful for the comparison. The girl’s hint of a smile and perpetual far-gazing eyes lead many to assume she was none too bright, but Isolde always managed to ask precisely the right question in the most flattering tone to further the party’s interests. She had been quite instrumental in obtaining several of their recent jobs.

As Idu reached the end of his story (with a flourish had Oskar nodding and Isolde politely clapping) Nula snorted and sauntered over to the three, sliding a blade along a whetstone as she grumbled, “Nice story, Books, must’a been real hard running from a fat old man. Ever run… from a kraken?” Idu’s eyes brightened visibly. If Oskar enjoyed Idu’s tales, Idu lived for the yarns the half-orc would spin. “There I was, lookout in the middle o’ the night, naught but a sliver of moon to light the frosty waters o’ the Sword Coast. The crew lay a’bed below decks, a senile ol’ lubber tending the wheel, when I hear a deep rumblin’, like a thousand bellies cryin’ for gruel…”

Robyn chuckled as she listened. She knew Nula was not much older than her companions, but her size and confidence made that easy to forget. Like Idu, Robyn suspected that many of Nula’s tales were far from the truth, but it was much harder to pick fact from fiction with the half-orc.

Nula was just getting to the part where a writhing tentacle, cut from the monster, knocks the captain overboard when Charlot stopped in his tracks, head tilted to the side. It took a moment for the storytellers to notice, and then they slowed to a stop, as well. “Hear that?” the boy asked, eyes scanning the skies above them. Robyn strained her ears a moment, and was about to ask “What?” when Isolde pointed to the east. As Robyn followed her finger and saw a cluster of specks growing larger, she heard an unearthly melody fill the trees around them.

“Harpies,” Nula growled, tucking her whetstone into her belt and drawing her other sword. “Looks like a small group, three, four.”

Robyn nodded, deftly sliding her longbow from her shoulder and reaching for an arrow. “Ready yourselves,” she called, nocking and drawing the arrow. The party fell into position easily, with a familiarity that would have had Robyn smiling under other circumstances. Uzza, Isolde, and Oskar gathered between the others and the approaching shapes, donning shields and reaching for weapons. Oskar flexed his hand, and his trusty battleaxe winked from its holster to his grip.

Charlot and Idu stepped up beside Robyn, with Nula stalking the area around three, leaving herself plenty of room for what she referred to as her “dance o’ death”. Charlot tossed back his hair and fingered his dark talisman, cold power seeping from his fingers as he breathed words of power. Idu flipped open his spellbook deftly, long fingers easily finding the proper worn pages, by earmark or familiar wear, and he held two or three fingers in different places in the book, keeping his place should he need certain spells. Satisfied, the young boy nodded and turned his eyes to the approaching beasts, an excited curiosity tinged with cautious fear twinking there.

Robyn slowed her breathing as the harpies gained definition. Before long, they had entered the range of her longbow, and with a practiced focus the half-elf let fly her first arrow. Before it had struck its target Robyn had fitted another into the nock, and as she pulled the string back to the corner of her mouth, she saw with satisfaction that one of the three shapes had fallen significantly below its friends. She aimed at the lower harpy and fired again, and by the time she had fitted her third arrow, the harpies had arrived.

As they swooped down past the trees, their tempting melody reached a crescendo, and Robyn found herself screwing her fingers into her ears. A moment passed, and then she looked around to see the harpies landing among the group. She noted that Oskar and Nula were the only people who appeared to be affected by the siren’s song of the harpies, and the rest of her band were already reacting.

Uzza gripped her holy symbol and gestured at herself, Oskar, and Nula, chanting in a strange tongue until a faint aura began to glow around the three. Oskar and Nula both grunted a moment later, shaking their heads and jumping upon the nearest harpy.

Isolde’s twig-crown glowed a verdant green, and she struck at the harpy approaching her, thick vines erupting from the ground at the beast’s claws to grip her tightly. Idu took this as a cue, and pointed ominously at the trapped harpy, summoning a skeletal claw that gently passed through the beast’s ribcage, causing part of the melody to turn to shrieks of pain.

Nula directed her twirling blades at the harpy that had snared her attention. With a cry of “Avast, ye!” the half-orc darted around the harpy, slicing this way and that before pulling away with a grin, deftly avoiding a slicing talon as she stepped outside the harpy’s range. Charlot took a breath and held his hand out at the harpy, pantomiming swinging something large, and a second later a deep, ominous DOOM DOOM DOOM filled the air around the wounded harpy. The bell’s tolling almost drowned out the creature’s death wail, and Nula cried out with a loud laugh as the harpy fell still.

Robyn turned her attention to the last harpy, sliding her arm through the longbow while in the same motion she pulled the whip from her belt. She whistled, a piercing sound that had the intended effect of the harpy swiveling its head on an owl-like neck to the half-elf. Robyn smirked and flicked the whip, slashing the side of the harpy’s wing and causing the whip to CRACK as it struck. The beast’s eyes widened at the sound, and Oskar took the opportunity to flourish his glowing battleaxe at the startled harpy, sending a flaming bolt at it to crash between its wings. He then yelled a dwarvish battle cry and darted toward the harpy, swinging his blade down between its shoulder blades and sending it to the ground.

That left one harpy, tangled in vines, with Isolde and Uzza standing on either side of it. Isolde continued to strike from afar with her glaive, her serene face set in grim determination. Uzza closed her eyes and called out, lifting her holy symbol skyward. In response, a pillar of holy flame fell from the heavens, engulfing the screeching harpy and the vines that bound it. As the group gathered around, the charred harpy body crumbled to ash.

Robyn nodded at the group, watching as grins spread across their faces. “Good job, team. Uzza, would you mind seeing to Oskar and Nula? I think the harpies got a few scratches in. Isolde, nice work with the vines. Idu and Charlot, try focusing on the same target next time. But excellent work, everyone!” The party began chatting and laughing, and Robyn went to recover trusty Eye-gak, who had begun grazing at the roots of a nearby tree. She glanced at the sun’s position and looked to the south, seeing the mountains rising there. Still an hour or so to go; still plenty of time. She nodded to herself and began to shepherd the excited comrades, urging them to continue their march.

~~

The group quietly made their way down the dark corridors of the mine. Their talk had diminished as they stepped into the mouth of the cave system, their voices echoing along the walls before Robyn hushed them. Now, they marched down the main passage, torches scattered among the group, while Uzza kept a sharp eye out ahead. Robyn held her longbow aloft as they walked, elegant silver runes flickering across the arms in the near-darkness of the mine. They had been traveling down the mines for less than an hour when Uzza stalked back to them, her snowy robes luminescent in the torchlight.

“Kobolds,” she hissed when she got closer. “Off to the left, a hundred feet further.” Robyn motioned for the group to prepare themselves. A minute later, they had doused their torches and gripped arms, walking as quietly as they could manage with Oskar and Uzza leading the way. A minute later, a series of squeezed palms indicated they were approaching the entrance that Uzza had spied, and the blinded members of the party saw a faint glow up ahead. They waited outside the branched passage, barely able to see each others’ faces, until Robyn whispered, “Now!”

All at once, Oskar and Charlot jumped into the opening, raising their hands as blips of light sparked into life around the cavernous room. Idu stepped out from behind them and took quick assessment of the situation, then gripped a small bag from his cloak and muttered a few words. A miniature sun burst into existence among the thickest concentration of kobolds, who screeched and scrabbled at the rocky ground to pull themselves away. Idu swept his hand in front of him, and the burning sphere began to ominously cross the room, incinerating the scaly hides it collided with.

Now fully able to see, the rest of the party darted into the room, whip, glaive, and swords eager for purchase as the frenzied kobolds attempted to avoid the flaming death-ball and the new enemies. A group of braver kobolds began to swarm the party, some waving their arms and gibbering while the rest darted in and out, poking with makeshift weaponry.

Isolde kept the kobolds at bay with her glaive, waving it back and forth as they tried to approach her, and soon the frustrated kobolds turned to the half-orc who was laughing as her blades left crimson afterimages in the magical light. Robyn used her whip to discourage the kobolds who were attempting to flank the party, forcing them to choose between approaching the heavily armored frontline or the slow advance of Idu’s flaming sphere.

The slaughter lasted barely a minute, and as the sounds of dying kobolds quieted, Uzza saw a flicker of movement across the room. A small cluster of kobolds were fidgeting with a pile of rocks in a corner before one of them seemingly disappeared. Uzza called out to the group and raised her holy symbol, causing an illuminated gout of flame to crash down on the spot of the remaining kobolds. One fell over, dying noisily, while the other yelped and dove headfirst into the rocks, scorched backside trailing smoke. The rushed escape dislodged the larger rocks, and part of the wall sunk in on itself, revealing a tight passage out of the room.

The group turned to Nula, who grunted, “Figures,” as she removed her hat and rolled it carefully. “Alright, let’s follow the scallywags.”

~~

Luckily for the half-orc, the secret tunnel widened to more spacious dimensions several feet in. The kobold had scurried on ahead, and Robyn reminded everyone as they walked on in the dim light of a weakened light spell that they should expect a fight when they reached the end of the passage.

When the tunnel began to widen enough for them to adjust their order, Oskar took the lead. There was a sharp turn, and then the party found itself face to face with a group of orc warriors. Oskar raised his shield and chanted for a moment, a golden aegis illuminating the air around him as arrows flew through the air. Most were deflected, and Uzza was quick to press her hands to the resulting wounds and murmur words of healing. By that time, Nula and Isolde had jumped out of the tunnel and rushed the orcs.

Idu and Charlot stuck behind Oskar, nodding to each other and directing their spells at the furthest orc archer. Robyn stepped to the side and steadied her longbow, focusing on its innate power as she fitted her arrow. Silvery runes flowed across the surface of the bow and into the arrow, lighting it with traces of moonbeams. The shining arrow flew across the chamber to the orcs, a brilliant afterimage tracing its path. As battle was joined, a rumbling came from another entrance to the room, and Charlot’s head snapped around, calling out, “Undead!” seconds before a mangled group of dead kobolds shambled into view. Some were missing limbs, others had crushed skulls, but all moved steadily toward the party. At their rear, a larger orc strode, eyes aglow with dark power, hands reaching out to the zombified minions.

Charlot and Uzza caught each other’s eyes and both ran to the approaching horde, Charlot lifting his dark talisman while Uzza clutched her holy symbol. Both began a similar chant with vastly different inflections, and as one their voices rose in volume. The combination of holy and unholy power swept forward over the marching corpses, and a majority of the bodies shuddered and began to fall back, mouths vocalizing frightened grunts if they worked at all. The orcish shaman growled with displeasure, cuffing one of her turned minions across its collapsed face as it ran by, sending it crumpling to the floor. The shaman turned to the clerics and narrowed her eyes, lifting a gnarled finger to the tiefling. As Uzza’s back arched in pain, an arrow went soaring past the two and embedded itself squarely in the shaman’s chest. Sensing the seepage of the orc’s life force, Charlot smiled and swung his hand out, an echo of bells filling the room as the shaman fell to her knees. Uzza smiled at the boy in thanks, then grimaced as she turned to the foul necromancer. She felt divine might pass through her as she lifted her symbol aloft, and a moment later the orc was engulfed in holy fire.

In the resulting frenzy, wizards and clerics alike picked off the scrambling zombies, while fighters and paladins and pirates took out the remaining orcs. When there was one orc left standing (apart from Nula), the pirate held her blades to his throat. “What were you after down here, ya lubber?” she growled. The orc spat at her feet.

“I answer to no traitor,” he grunted in broken Common. “Found holy site for shaman, born again soon! You pay then!”

He then threw himself at Nula, but simply fell upon her swords. She cleaned them on his shirt and turned to shrug at Robyn. “Worth a shot.” The half-elf nodded in understanding and motioned to Oskar and Uzza. The two headed down the passage the shaman had emerged from.

As they walked down the dark corridor, they heard the grave-moans of the undead that had escaped the slaughter in the previous room. As they came upon the aimless bodies, the two dispatched of them with mystical flame and ensorcelled axe. After a few twists and turns, the passage ended with a foul chamber littered with skeletons, and a sickly slab of granite posing as an altar. It was there that they found cruel instruments and implements of torture, along with crudely written notes and several chalices of liquid that resembled blood. In one corner, a pile of clothes and trinkets were tossed unceremoniously.

Once the rest of the party had been summoned to the final chamber, Idu glanced around and immediately came to a conclusion. “Looks like this is where that shaman was raising her dead,” he remarked, gingerly leafing through the notes, which appeared to have been written on dried, leathery skin. “The rest of the tools here seem a bit superfluous, though the altar does appear to be some sort of locus for necromantic power.”

“Any way you can shut it off?” Robyn asked, not particularly hopefully. When Idu shook his head after a moment’s thought, she continued, “I suppose that was a bit optimistic. Oskar, reckon you can cave in this room?”

While the dwarf silently paced the length of the room, pressing his hand against the wall in certain spots and mumbling to himself, the party did its own search of the room. As Isolde was digging through what were assumedly the miners’ belongings, she let out a gasp and held up a wooden medallion. “An oak medallion! My mentor told me about these. Woodland elves are known to carry these with them as they travel, to always have a piece of their home with them.”

Nula bent down to examine the talisman. “It’s made from the wood of their homes?” she asked, squinting at the carved insignia of a wide tree.

Isolde snatched the medallion away from the half-orc. “No, it summons a tree.” Nula back away, wary of the narrow walls surrounding them.

After Oskar had finished his circuit, he grunted in affirmation and turned to Idu. “Could you shatter these two points?” He pointed to an area of the ceiling and a section of wall that appeared to already be crumbling.

Idu glanced down at his spellbook and nodded. The party retreated further down the passage and waited as Idu sat cross-legged on the damp rock floor and opened his spellbook in front of him. Several minutes of preparation and chanting later, Idu jabbed from the spellbook to the chamber, uttering a binding word and releasing the spells. Two loud cracks rang out from the chamber, and a torrent of boulders fell from above, splitting the altar and filling in the skeleton-strewn room. As Oskar had intended, there was no spillage into the corridor.

~~

Spirits were high as the party emerged from the dank caves into the setting sunlight. It would be full dark by the time the party made it back to the village, but Robyn was eager to return and report their success to that doubting mayor. The gold was certainly welcome, but Robyn thrived off of the looks of astonishment her team invariably earned as they proved their worth. Today the mayors and innkeepers of the realm learned to expect great things from them, but perhaps tomorrow it would be kings and queens who granted them vast boons for completing daring quests. Robyn knew it was only a matter of time.