#[ it would be by the notion that os left without their being an argument between them ]

[unladylikc]

NAME: Vivian Kong ( Wai’yeen Kong is her actual name, but she officially goes by ‘Vivian’ because it’s a cultural practice for Chinese people to adopt English names while living in western countries; therefore, to people who aren’t her direct relatives, she’s simply known as Vivian. )

NICKNAME(S): Vivi, Vi, Vivi-tan, Vi ( By Osyleus, but if addressed as that from others in a non-alternate ending where they didn’t leave on better terms, you can bet she won’t be happy. Basically, only Osyleus can refer to her by that nickname, because being called ‘Vi’ by anyone else will literally just remind her he used to call her that. )

AGE: 20

SPECIES: Human

PERSONAL.

MORALITY: lawful / neutral / chaotic / good / grey / evil

SINS: greed / lust / gluttony / sloth / pride / envy / wrath

VIRTUES: chastity / charity / diligence / humility / kindness / patience / justice

PRIMARY GOALS: Graduate from college, get a job, and publish a novel.

Of course, in threads with Osyleus, her goal had shifted to running away with him at some point, but that didn’t exactly end up panning out, so she’s trying to move on with her life as best she could now that he’s gone; only... it’s proving to be quite a difficult ordeal.

PHYSICAL.

BUILD: scrawny / slender / bony / fit / athletic / curvy / herculean / babyfat / pudgy / fat ( While Vivian may appear skinny at first glance, she does have some fat around her thighs and stomach, so despite being on the smaller side, she doesn’t really have the most hour glass looking figure. )

HEIGHT: 5′2

WEIGHT: Varies around 49 - 53 kg

SCARS/BIRTHMARKS: Aside from acne scars on her face, she doesn’t really have any that hasn’t already healed

ABILITIES/POWERS: None, if we’re going off her modern verse.

FAVOURITES.

FAVOURITE FOOD: She can’t really choose one, because she likes eating almost everything besides expired or inedible/poisonous foods.

FAVOURITE DRINK: Coffee, matcha green tea

FAVOURITE COLOUR(S): Blue

FAVOURITE MUSIC GENRE: Does Vocaloid music count? If not, then either J-Pop or Japanese alternative rock/indie. ( Listen... Tsuki Amano is her idol and you cannot convince me otherwise. )

FAVORITE BOOK GENRE: Fantasy

FAVORITE MOVIE GENRE: Comedy

FAVORITE SEASON: Autumn

FAVORITE CURSE WORD(S): Fuck, shit

FAVORITE SCENT: Matcha powder, but the smell of Osyleus or Alex’s cooking is a close second.

FUN STUFF.

BOTTOM OR TOP: The answer really depends on the gender of who she’s sleeping with, because if it’s a girl, she’d prefer to top, and if it’s a boy, she’d prefer to bottom, but if it’s neither, then she’ll switch.

SINGS IN THE SHOWER: ...Sometimes, but only if a song happens to be stuck in her head.

LIKES BAD PUNS: Yes, as someone who has a sense of humor, Vivian does in fact love horrible puns.

tagged by — @s-talking and @whisperonn ( To be honest, they happened to tag me ages ago, but I only just got around to doing it now, because I happen to be a lazy bitch, otl. ) 

tagging — @sirsharp ( edgar ) ; @divergentdisparity ( alex ) ; @spiritpyro ; @cosmicstardreamer ; @illdivine ; @steamedcup ; @tsuugen ; @nxrakunohana ; @tenkeimuun ( shirou ) and anyone else who like to do this!

[helshades]

Far from me to use the crude tumblr speech but, here I have to say, I believe you're "reaching" quite a bit. As much as i agree that a lot of people involved in fandom(s) have… unusual… taste… I'm skeptical about the idea that sexual fantasies have much to do with political or belief systems. One fantasy can be more or less encouraged, sure, but overall, the big ol' classics stay in fashion. Usually a variant of "what if something that's supposed to be horrible happened… and I liked it???"

Human beings are bizarro primates, after all, and if left to their own devices in the company of most inanimate objects, will probably try to either eat it or have sex with it, it’s true. Add to this the fact that bodice-ripping novels have been a thing for way too long for many of fandom’s twistier fantasies to look that new (although you can bet your sceptic arse that the whole Alpha-Beta-Omega item is a strictly postmodern horror) and you’re quite right in assuming that in spite of numerous variants, overall fannish forays into Sigmund Freud’s censored nightmares aren’t that original. On the other hand…

Nevertheless, I’ll contradict you on a few points:

When I was sardonically linking fandom’s most hive-minded tendencies to a certain state of contemporary society, and I used the term ‘liberalism’, I wasn’t either announcing my conversion to Trumpism or alluding to a system of beliefs, rather to a structural phenomenon pervasive in our Western societies—and one must never forget that politics is by essence a res publica: civic life, what is common to all in the public space, and on which all can operate equally provided that they concert… Fiction doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it reflects a great part of our current preoccupations, personal ones indeed, but also ones we’ve absorbed from social osmosis, you might say.

Liberalism in Occident isn’t a mere set of political beliefs so much as the default structure of our respective and common economies, dictating the way States interact with one another in regards to a common market. This is capitalism triumphant, where in the initial idea resisting absolutism has long dissolved into pretty antisocial individualism as social constraint has come to be perceived as the worst kind of oppression possible. This has to be conjugated with the rise of consumer society—which, symptomatically enough, doesn’t have a Wikipedia page—in the 1960s, whose core issue is that the desire for consumption eventually overrides most ethical principles.

Economy completely informs social interactions, and that includes the way we educate children, actually. Did you know that an entire social phenomenon and bona fide psychological condition happens to be a direct consequence of mass consumption? In French we know this as the ‘kid king’ issue, what happens when a whole society is encouraging parents to spoil and coddle children so much that they grow into adults incapable of handling frustration, or indeed any type of adversity. Bear with me, because this is actually fascinating:

▬ Human beings are in a way programmed to seek pleasure and flee discomfort; they instinctively seek to fulfil basic needs, and once these are satiated, try to find as much comfort as possible. Any human infant and young child is ruled by this principle of pleasure, and the role of education is to basically teach children the reality principle, that they aren’t alone in life, that others exist and have to be taken into account, that impulses have to be controlled; this is done essentially by setting limits for the little child not to cross. Balance between the two principles is paramount to the construction of the self.

▬ Psychological resilience pioneer Boris Cyrulnik commented on the fact that if animals regularly abused in their infancy tend to find themselves as adults at the bottom of the social scale since they’ve acquired a certain aptitude for subjection, those never exposed to aggression tend to stand outside the group because of their inaptitude to participate in socialising rituals. Yet, adversity is absolutely needed to set sane limits to one’s behaviour: deprived of any real frustration, a child will grow up still believing himself omnipotent, becoming hedonistic, selfish, egotistical; throwing tantrums at any opposition. Typically, these children end up suffering from attention disorders—with or without hyperactivity—anxiety issues, oppositional disorders…

▬ This is also an unplanned consequence of widespread contraception, as most children nowadays are born of the

desire

of their parents to have them meaning that family no longer makes the children as much as a child makes a family; the main problem being that as the immutable centre of his parents’ attention, a child tends to become a perpetual consumer of everything that a society of mass consumption is ready to provide to keep him sated in his own desires. French psychologist (specialist of cognitive immaturity) Didier Pleux listed the ‘five Os’ of the overattentive parents: overconsumption, overstimulation, overestimation, overprotection and overcommunication; the parents will spoil their child with toys and sometimes food, seek to keep him busy at all times because boredom is perceived as yet another form of violence (but it is crucial in the development of creativeness), laud every single of his realisations, prevent him from making any real effort and prioritise his expression (letting him interrupt others when they speak, for instance) at all times.

▬The thing is, contemporary society harasses all of us with the injunction to consume, perpetually, at every opportunity, and in the case of good-willed parents it furnishes with the means to spoil their children just as advertisement convinces them that if they don’t cater to their every supposed need, they’ll be bad parents.

▬The phenomenon, because that type of behaviour, essentially consumerist, was being so encouraged by the rise of neoliberalism (a more aggressive form of that rapidly-globalising capitalism), quickly snowballed into public education, and I can tell you, most especially because I used to teach for a living, that in France a whole educative system got based on the notion that collective education would be better off if it was made to cater to the personal needs of pupils—but this is a can of worms to be opened on another day, preferably one when my cold has abated and I’ve stopped sneezing my brain away all over my keyboard.

Believe it or not, I’m not digressing that much. We are the grandchildren of the first mass consumers and the kid-king phenomenon is a Generation Y thing. My generation is having children of its own. Most importantly, this is the generation that got to grow up with the Internet first, meaning that we were born in a very, very different world. You noted that fandom fantasies aren’t really unheard of and I concur, but I’d argue that the Internet allowed for fantasies to be shared on a massive scale and amplified into becoming cultural phenomena that have much to do with group emulation. Psychologically and sociologically, it’s pretty fascinating, too: there is this uncanny collection of intensely personal feelings, really intimate stuff, stuff that used to be considered private (for some good reasons and a couple bad ones as well, I suppose), now exposed very publicly on the ground basis that the Internet preserves a certain anonymity—which isn’t untrue, mind you, unless you carelessly sign into one of those many websites and applications that syphon your data and manipulate your online browsing, but I digress again (if only a bit).

Sexuality has become incredibly public, as of late. Let me remind you that there are political movements asking governments to give an official status to their sexual habits (or lack thereof, in the case of ‘asexuality’) or, more aggressively, their feelings. Sorry, folks, but that’s the whole basis for the ‘transgender’ movement, and as far as I’m concerned people may live as they choose but I’m not entirely certain that the State has a rightful place in this? Anyway, the frontier between ‘private’ and ‘public’ has been melting, unfortunately so, and most of this must have to do that Western societies have been considerably depoliticised over the last few years, inasmuch as we’ve been rapidly losing our means of popular representation, decent public information, or generally civil services, due to an overabundance of capitalism, precisely.

Sex in fanfiction… it’s not quite sex in fiction, either. Oh, granted, there’s quite enough raunchy literature out there to make you doubt, but the particularity of fanfiction is that most works are an ongoing affair between an author and her readers, who often swap places, very much informed by public demand, meant to cater to very specific desires. In that, it’s not too different from many a published novel, albeit not the best ones probably, only fanfiction is… unbridled. But that’s not actually the point.

The point is, simply, that fanfiction is a cultural product issued from a certain period in time and it reflects part of the expectations of a society; because its producers are mostly young women, it has a lot to tell on the mechanisms of a modern young woman’s psyche—I can tell you it contains a lot of misogyny, for one, if not even gynecophobia…—but it also proposed a certain picture of the modern world that acts a little too much as a two-way mirror for my intellectual comfort. It’s not that every single writer of a Baby-Daddy kinkfic is going to develop paedophilic tendencies growing up, but one, although one mustn’t indulge in full-blown paranoia either, one absolutely has to consider the fact that sexual pleasure is the most powerful incentive out there. For realsies, I mean, it’s actually one of the most prominent arguments to be made against pornography, because we know its devastating neurological effects for regular consumers, who rapidly become incapable of dissociating the unrealistic portrayal, notably, of women, to the detriment of all real-life relations and rapports male consumers of porn could have with women. Sex rewires the brain with exceptional efficiency, because it’s linked directly to our reward system and programs us to want more of the pleasurable thing.

I assure you there’s no pearl clutching in remarking that pornographic fiction written by fans can have enormous influence on the budding sexuality of young people in a day and age where we have this paradoxical relationship to sexuality as a social concept: on the one hand, it’s absolutely everywhere and even children can’t escape it, since magazines and clothings brands do their worst to groom them into mini-pimps, sexy baby Barbie dolls and overall future (antisocial) disasters; on the other hand, we seem to have somehow revolved into the most shameful anti-intellectualism possible, and nobody needs to bother being rational anymore, and adults make desperate attempts to look like kids for fear of growing old, and they act like it, too.

I’m ending this long-arse comment on an anonymous post just sent to me, which is bound to ignite some… conversation as well:

I’m reluctant to make this point publicly for a myriad of reasons (mostly my own cowardice), but I think the then-concurrent rise of the Brony fandom, more specifically futa porn and its prevalence in adult male MLP “fans” has had a larger impact on current transwoman narratives.

I’ll be waiting patiently on the sides with a hot drink to see my followers count drop again, I reckon.

[gotinydelusionbouquetstuff-blog]

Intimacy

Even though I already watched Her, my perceptions were still as uncomfortable as before. Someone dating a program? In what world is that normal, or more importantly in what world does that even count as a relationship? I doubted the validity of their relationship and yet I struggled to find solid footing on why the relationship wasn’t real. This blog post, I will analysing Pettman’s views of love as an algorithm, the love vector, the human element of a relationship, as well as  supplementing my argument with examples from Her.

Pettman’s article goes hand in hand with the concepts of Her. It challenges us to forgot our traditional notions of love and intimacy. Instead, Pettman pushes the idea that love is a code. Love is not as spontaneous and special as people may think, contrary to the romantic in people. Pettman believes that there are certain motions in relationships and even goes to explain that some love is binary, just like code. However, it is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Pettman uses the example of the phrase “I love you”, where the phrase itself can be seen as a program that elicits certain responses just like code. Though it differs on social and cultural traditions, the responses are mostly predictable. As Timothy Morton said in the reading, “the most ethical act is to love the other precisely in their artificiality,…” Whether you’re fully committed to repeating the sentence or replying with a thank you, it follows an algorithm. If we were to apply the perspective that love is a code, one can notice the patterns (codes) that is commonplace in relationships. The fundamental concept in code is inputs and outputs, and relationships are no exclusion.

In Her, the typical algorithms of a relationship are still cleverly shown throughout the movie. The initial attraction, the first date, fighting, fall-out, and of course the break-up. Though humans always focus on the idea that love is unique, unparalleled, and unmatched, one would be hard pressed to argue that Sam and Theo’s relationship is any different from a societal norm relationship. One thing I loved and hated about Her, was that I couldn’t contest the validity of their relationship. If I couldn’t completely shut down Sam and Theo’s relationship, then it would only mean that I am bound by tradition, the cultural scripts that form my thoughts. If communication technology can play such a significant role, it is completely possible that relationships could be formed with our technology. If love and intimacy can be viewed as a code, then logically a code could be made to imitate said code.

In the reading, Pettman explores the concept of the love vector. The next generations substitute for a love object. Instead of the traditional fixation of “The One”, love becomes in my words, “The Many”. The qualities and desires of the one are distributed indefinitely, settling in various representations and channels. In Her, Samantha tells Theo that she is his, but at the same time she is not. In this scene, I believe Theo embodies the finite aspect, that love is binary. Samantha, being the clever OS she is, embodies the idea that love is infinite. It does not matter who you share it with, and should not be tied down with the traditional view found in the pronouns of the phrase “I love you.”

One of the roots of my discomfort with Her, was the missing human element from the relationship. Sam and Theo’s relationship bear striking resemblance to a long-distance relationship. However, as Pettman mentioned in the article, the main objection still remains true, the relationship does not lead to the tying back of the flesh and blood of the human body. However, Pettman also goes on to say that psychology leads us to believe that something will always be missing in a relationship. Therefore, we may not be used to the human element missing from a relationship, but it is possible that a relationship can still exist without it. We as humans have so often left true undeniable love exclusively for humans and between humans. Yet Pettman’s evidence show us that this love we hold so dear is not as hard to replicate as we choose to believe. Communication is cybernetic, it is as varying as it is binary, it is as coherent as it is muddled, and love manifests itself as a complex algorithmic form of communication.