#*caveat is that I can see how it is valuable to many people as a genre of storytelling

[onewomancitadel]

I had a hell of a time the other day and I ended up reading some slashfic out of distraction and honestly I've come back around to being an apologist to it... it was very interesting because the characters were really psychologically small, the question of misogyny which normally infuses hetfic was totally absent (by virtue of what it is) but even the question of gender was relatively minimal, a lot of it was sexless and when it was sexy it was weirdly - juvenile? - genuinely like smushing Barbie dolls together. I almost feel like the word I'd use to describe it all was 'innocent'; it was innocent psychologically, socially, sexually, in narrative consequences.

It's interesting because the much-maligned fujoshi - even I have partaken in the sport - is usually termed as an oversexed A/B/O nightmare busy getting men pregnant. And it's true that they exist, but in their own way I kind of find them quaint: the sex they always have is outlandishly perfect and bereft of all psychological complexity. Even pregnancy, in this case, is turned into something even if difficult, always beautiful and nongendered, not the experience it is in the real world (even hetfic at its happiest is not ignorant of the implicit place pregnancy has cultually).

I find the angle of psychological simplicity a surprise because the way it is normally termed is that male characters are capable of psychological complexity women lack (or lack in writing). Whereas I think the thesis is actually kind of the opposite: it can be simple because it is not painful. There's something existentially deeper here which is that I think what we find is that we believe the other gender(s) has it easier; existential meaning is located along the border of it. It's very human. Simplicity seems desirable. (It's not to devalue feminist analysis in any way).

And I think that this generally speaks to the issue that I have with a lot of storytelling atittudes - the desire to escape that complexity - for people who really do just seek out storytelling as an avenue for fluffy pleasure. For me, the idea that the full spectrum of human experience is elided from something very fully, deeply human - literally narrating someone's perspective of the world - is essentially existential horror to me, the worst of all kinds of horror. I don't think this is an issue found simply along slashfic/hetfic lines (and indeed femslash, for similar reasons), but is more apparent in slashfic just because it really offers the optimum escapist experience.

There are surely exceptions, but you find this in the genre of whumpfic; even that sort of melodramatic pain is played out in a nearly childish, thumping-the-toys way. You'll notice that I've pretty much ignored the question of sexuality - it's beyond the purview of this post, but also because I don't think it's really that straightforward. And there is slashfic which isn't 'childish', to be sure; there's a difference between simplicity and childishness, and I think you can surely make the case that this applies to the mainstream romance genre. The two have a lot in common.

But the thing I find valuable here is that there is something essential, maybe even deeper than any other argument put forward about why slashfic draws such an overwhelming audience, to be found here.

The most valuable thing to me was considering that it is not about male characters being more complex than female characters - it's the exact opposite. What they profess, I think, is not true, and to take it at face value - that male characters (with one line? With none?) are simply universally better written than women as a consequence of nebulous misogyny which can simply not be contended with - is a grave error I've made in the past. I would dispute that complex female characters scare people; not that they can't understand them, but that it is precisely the sort of thing a lot of people really aren't looking for. It's not safe, it's not comforting, it's not reassuring. And this crosses over with all the people afraid of conflict, afraid of any narrative complexity whatsoever. The issue was not, as it happens, poorly written women.

[gffa]

*slams The Glass Abyss down on the table* OKAY, I HAVE FINISHED IT AND I HAVE SOME THINGS TO SAY.

In a lot of ways, this was a complicated read for me and I think the best way to describe my feelings on the author's take on Mace is that we diverge at the fork in the road that is, "Who is Mace Windu without his internal balance/his connection to the Force?" but that, as we walk along separate paths, I can still see the author clearly from where his path takes him and where my path takes mine. Like walking on separate sides of the street, still in view, just not perfectly aligned.

Further, I think my biggest criticism of the book is one I have to give a caveat of my caveat to, where I very much felt the absence of the Force in this book and as a presence in Mace's life. That, as he's being unbalanced and has trouble reaching the Force, it's not a bigger deal. That there's very little sense of spirituality connected to Mace's connection with the Force.

But the caveat about this is--that's kind of necessary for the story that the author is telling, because I think this is a book about Mace walking alongside the road of another life that he could have had, that he finds a connection with the people and romance (which I think is furthered by how thin the romance felt because it was serving a point about Mace's life more than it was a fully-fledged romance, in my opinion) and family--and that that life is valuable, that that life has love and warmth and connection and righteousness.

And that Mace Windu still chooses the Jedi.

That he would not be anywhere near as complete a person as he is without the path of the Jedi.

I think ultimately the point of the book is to give Mace that other path so that he can realize, yes, he did choose the Jedi, yes, the Jedi were loving and fair with him, yes, the Jedi are his family, yes, being a Jedi is what fulfills him even when there are other options. That those other paths are valid and yet the Jedi is the path for him.

There are things I would quibble with in the writing (primarily that I think there has been more joy in Mace's life than the author writes), but beyond that I think this book is incredibly thoughtful towards what I really needed it to be--that, while it may not mean the same thing in a galaxy far, far away, we're still reading it from our society and Mace Windu is a Black man and that comes with a lot of underlying context, especially when it comes to his anger.

This book felt to me like it was always aware of that, that the author (probably as a Black man himself) didn't shy away from that there was a riot of feelings in this character, that he felt protective anger and was a lethal warrior, while also being stern of face much of the time, things which are often demonized in this character, but here it was always in service of how that gave Mace depth and made him both a worthy central character and a good man. Mace cared deeply and part of that care was his anger that he turned towards Vaapad (which has been recanonized now!) in a way I ultimately found very fitting on a grand scale.

I was nervous going into this book, because Mace is a character that I'm so invested in and feel protective towards because of the shit that gets flung at him, and I feel like this book and I were at the very least in the same chapter and often even on the same page together with regards to him. I always felt that this book loved Mace as a character even if I might disagree on some particulars, and let me tell you that was a joy to read.

There are so many moments in this book that were an absolute joy to read (there are two different scenes between Mace & Anakin that sent me over the moon), so much of Mace's value of the Jedi and his path as a Jedi are at the heart of the book--even when it might not seem like it, ultimately the point is that, yes, Jedi can and do question their path, because they want their people to be certain this is the right one for them. This is a book about separating Mace out from that path, both physically and psychically, and having him rebalance himself and recognize that being a Jedi just is who he is and who he chooses to be, every day.

I can only give my view of this book and I will admit to stumbling a time or two with it, but by the end of it, I felt it was incredibly supportive of Mace as a character, that it was very Jedi-positive (even when it might not seem like it, it's usually going somewhere with the structure, somewhere I was vindicated by), and that the author wrote some absolutely banger lines that I'm going to be screaming about in a liveblog and that the worldbuilding was so good, I wish the author had had more space for building Jedi stuff.

It's an absolutely wild ride of a story (the action was really good and the harshness of the fighting added a necessary edge to the story that I thought worked really well for what the author was building with Mace's character), the story sailed right along smoothly, and I'm satisfied with what we got of it, I would definitely recommend to Mace fans and even Jedi fans. A few caveats about how I would let the story play out if you get wary in the middle, that it's not perfect, but that it's good and it loves Mace Windu as much as we do.

[joys-of-everyday]

Luo Binghe: Envy, hopelessness, and breaking out of spirals

I have recently gotten into incels. No, not in that way. Perhaps with PIDW being “toxic male power fantasy”, this was an inevitable pipeline.

You know, through many hours of video essays and interviews, I have come to the conclusion that taking a good long hard look at incels is a valuable life lesson. While incels are most known for their extreme misogynistic ideology (which tbf, is hard to look past), they really are a good demonstration of the abject misery of loneliness. Scrub away all the obsession with omegaverse and cuckoldry, and the fundamental behaviour of incels is actually… very human. And the fact that it manifests in ways that are cringe and insane really only adds to the tragedy. Forget darkness and monsters – there is an incel in all of us. And like all good things in life, I want to link this back to SVSSS and discuss the most chad of them all… Luo Binghe (Bingmei ofc. Bingge is a beta cuck).

Note: Much of this is based on ContraPoints’ Envy (which is almost nothing to do with incels sorry) and HealthyGamerGG’s interview with an incel (which is also not really about incels, disappointingly).

Envy and Jealousy

Did you know that envy and jealousy are two different things? Envy is wanting what other people have, while jealousy is protectiveness of something you have, or feel entitled to. You might be envious of someone for having effortless skin a la Liu Qingge, or feel jealous of a fellow disciple who is unfairly stealing your milf shizun’s affections. In common usage, envy and jealousy are basically interchangeable, but now you can feel smug knowing the proper definitions.

We all know that Luo Binghe is a jealous man-child… but for intellectual curiosity, we should ask: is Luo Binghe envious, or jealous?

As in, I’ve kind of spoiled my take by putting it in the header, but I should justify (unlike in exams where I simply assert what I want to be true and hope the examiner doesn’t notice). Yes, Luo Binghe is fighting for the affection of his one-true-milf, but note that during the periods where his envy/jealousy is strongest, he doesn’t think he has Shen Qingqiu’s affection, nor does he think he deserves it. In fact, he thinks he is unlovable monster who couldn’t possibly dream of having his daddy’s attention. *sad sigh*

To him, Shen Qingqiu is the embodiment of tender and loving affection, of grace, of wisdom, of morality and all things good etc etc. For the purposes of Luo Binghe’s negative feelings, the man himself might as well be an abstract idea. He sees what other people have – Liu Qingge receiving companionship and trust, the other Qing Jing disciples getting attention, the random stair sweeper getting sweet smiles… and feels anger at the fact that they have what he does not. I think it’s envy people.  

Now caveat, I do think Luo Binghe is definitely also feeling jealousy, particularly after Shen Qingqiu defends him in the Mausoleum. But he grapples with an internal conflict, where despite the fact Shen Qingqiu continuously demonstrates his care for him, he’s also sending what Luo Binghe deems as “mixed messages”, so really, how is Bingbing meant to decide if daddy loves him or hates him? Feelings do be complicated.

Now envy leads to shadenfreude – the pleasure of seeing another’s downfall. The sentiment of “if I can’t have it, then nobody can”, which is a destructive, malevolent force that wants no good for anyone. At Maigu Ridge, Luo Binghe is the embodiment of this. What he wants is Shen Qingqiu’s affection, and um… probably killing all of his friends isn’t going to help him on this endeavour. But he is so far down the envy line that it blinds him. “If I can’t have Shizun’s love, then nobody can.”

2. Protective hopelessness and the destructive cycle

When you decide, for whatever reason, to believe something, several cognitive biases come into play. For example, confirmation bias – where you are more likely to find and interpret evidence which supports your opinion. Belief perseverance – where you continue to believe something, despite evidence contradicting it. Another unhelpful actor is the fact you change the way you behave, which creates situations that affirm your beliefs. Those with a neurodivergence like BPD, or a mental health disorder such as depression may struggle with these much more intensely.

Take the classic incel problem. You struggle to get a girlfriend, you believe yourself ugly and unlovable, which makes you sad, which means you struggle in social situations, which makes it less likely for you to start a relationship, and so the cycle continues. I’ve talked about these destructive spirals with Shen Jiu.

Luo Binghe, Luo Binghe! Wherefore art thou Luo Binghe?

Luo Binghe runs straight into this problem like the strong independent man he is. He believes that (Shen Qingqiu thinks that) he is an evil demon. So he goes full blood feeding vampire mode, and naturally Shen Qingqiu freaks out. So Luo Binghe’s suspicions that Shen Qingqiu thinks he’s an evil demon are affirmed. Everything that happens is warped to fit this worldview: Shen Qingqiu’s silence in the Water Prison (which could mean anything really, such as thinking emotion is cringe) is interpreted as hostility. Shen Qingqiu telling Luo Binghe to leave for his safety, is interpreted as abandonment. Nothing can contradict this view – not even Shen Qingqiu getting all plant-bodied to keep Luo Binghe safe.

All of this is to say, that once you are in a bad place, it is really hard to get out, because at every stage your mind is sabotaging you. But there’s more to it than this. The honey glazed trap of abject hopelessness is… that it feels kind of good.

You know, Luo Binghe at Maigu Ridge comes across as someone who’s given up in a cathartic “throw it all down the drain way”. And yeah, putting yourself out there to feel rejection time and time again… kind of sucks. I really feel this. It really sucks. Sometimes, it is just so much easier to write yourself off as an unlovable freak and move on with your life. The hopelessness shields you from future rejection – what Dr K from HealthyGamerGG describes as protective hopelessness. But the relief here is temporary. Soon the loneliness and isolation kicks in, and you end up screaming at the walls so your neighbours now think you’re insane. Well done.

So you defend your hopelessness to protect yourself, but your hopelessness reinforces your situation. And to top it off, this cesspool of self-loathing and self-flagellation is a perfect breeding place for envy. In fact, envy plays a huge role in directing the spiral downwards. Afterall, bitter and toxic behaviour isn’t conductive to getting you liked.  

Ultimately,  I don’t think Luo Binghe actually hates Liu Qingge, or even Ming Fan, or any one person. I think Luo Binghe resents his situation and projects that onto everyone. “I didn’t get to keep happiness for a single moment of my life, so why should anyone be allowed happiness?” And yeah, he kind of ends up almost ending the world, which is not stella behaviour. But you know, under all that aggression is a child pleading for help.  

3. Breaking Out

You know, it occurs to me that I seem to be equating Luo Binghe to an incel, which I think is an unfair comparison. I feel like incels fundamentally misunderstand how privilege works, while Luo Binghe… eh… he did get chucked off a cliff. Ngl that would scar anyone.

Anyway, whilst clearly SVSSS is the ultimate reflection of reality, I suspect that the love of your life telling you they would totally die for you if you were their unborn child doesn’t happen often irl. How. Disappointing.

But I think something we can take away from Luo Binghe is that breaking the spiral is essential. When Luo Binghe loses control at Maigu Ridge, what he ends up doing is monstrous. It’s ultimate evidence of all of Luo Binghe’s fears and could easily have pushed him further down the spiral to self-destruction. But Shen Qingqiu pulls him out notably not by promising to stay with him or leave his friends (i.e. not by playing to Luo Binghe’s delusional desires), but by affirming that Luo Binghe already has what he wants. His mother loved him. His adopted mother loved him. Shen Qingqiu loves him. It’s removing the substance from Luo Binghe’s envy, and that’s enough to pull him back from insanity.

In reality, breaking the spiral isn’t one action or one conversation. It’s continuously relearning how to think, a process that can take years. And we see this with Luo Binghe. He doesn’t stop being a jealous freak, but he learns ways to deal with it that are much less destructive. In the conversation at Cang Qiong post Maigu Ridge, we see that he doesn’t immediately stop thinking that Shen Qingqiu wants him gone, but in a better headspace, he is able to accept evidence which contrasts this.

And yeah, most people don’t have a milf/dilf/obsessive freak to help us when we have our world-ending breakdowns, but that’s okay. I don’t have a good solution to this. Maybe get life-sized posters of Shen Qingqiu telling you that he would totally die for your if you were his unborn child or smth.

[citadelofmythoughts]

https://www.tumblr.com/citadelofmythoughts/751229871102001152/i-swear-people-who-think-like-that-about-yang

I think what makes it truly frustrating is that it's very much about constantly moving the goalposts, because it's ultimately born from the fundamental belief that:

1) RWBY is bad when it isn't just another action waifu show.

2) non-heterosexual relationships are inherently bad and always inherently "not good enough".

3) The men of RWBY aren't treated as inherently more important, or that the women don't "know their place".

All of the justifications and reasons and bad faith are reverse engineered from that fundamental goal and mindset, and thus can constantly shifted depending on the varying degrees of personal biases and bigotries of the people, while it's always consistently evident that they'll basically never accept the above is any different until what they dislike is removed.

And you see this kind of rhetoric constantly, even in supposedly tolerant fandoms, or where stories don't center the men as being the most valuable and special person in the room. Even as they pay lip service to the idea that women should be more important and more focused on in stories where they aren't given enough, there's always the underlying caveat of "so long as they don't overshadow the men".

And there we have the perfect summation of the HTDM. Just throw in some hurt feelings because their pet ships didn't work out and it's perfect.

I've said so, so many times that there are so many shows that cater to men, I mean, even though I do love it, My Hero Academia is almost totally male-centric. Out of a class of twenty, SIX girls and none of them are all that important to moving the main plots forward, to the point that the show tends to forget that characters besides Midoriya, Bakugo and Todoroki exist.

RWBY is a show where not only are the main four women important, they're the most important characters in the overarching plot. Men are either support or they're obstacles. None of them have the same importance as Ruby, Weiss, Blake or Yang.

Even now, with the show in temporary limbo they still can't help whining about it which shows how much having a show that doesn't cater to them hurts.

Tough shit. This show is OURS.

[transmutationisms]

I'm curious if you've come across any examples of what you would consider effective communication or collective organizing around Covid? I know of a few groups who I think are doing good work to get people access to masks and rapid tests, making connections to broader issues such as lack of sick leave, barriers to healthcare etc, but they're also relying on things like questionable wastewater data extrapolation to make their points. I don't really know what to do about the latter issue, since we've just had access to all data taken away from us by the government. (I know it's not an effective tool for collective action, but tbh I also struggle with the idea that all alarmism is bad, because I am high risk and I am scared!)

well 1st of all to be clear, i think wastewater data are valuable and i do look at them. what i don't do is make wildly overconfident guesses from those data about exactly how many people are infected, how many sick people are standing in any given room, how many people will eventually qualify for a long covid dx, etc. i think wastewater data are a rough proxy but still an important one, and generally more useful at the local level (where they can be cross-referenced with factors like vaccine uptake, circulating variants, and municipal public health policy) than at national or regional levels (where the necessary amount of aggregation makes it difficult to tease out much useful information about any one town or city).

2nd, i don't know what country you live in but i do look in on CDC's covid dashboard, which includes data on hospitalisations, emergency department visits, deaths, vaccine uptake, test positivity rates, &c. if this is applicable to you i strongly encourage always reading the footnotes as these statistics vary in accuracy (in particular, test positivity rate is very unreliable at this point). i consider a lot of these numbers useful primarily as indicators of comparative risk: eg, i assume hospitalisation numbers have been inaccurate lowballs for the entirety of the pandemic; however, it is still useful imo to see whether that number is trending in a particular direction, and how it compares over time. again, local results are sometimes more helpful as well. i also glance in on the census bureau's household pulse survey results, which come out numerous times throughout the year and include questions about duration of covid symptoms, ability to function, and vaccine uptake. these numbers skew in the opposite direction to many of CDC's, because the phrasing of the covid questions is intended to be broad, and does not attempt to distinguish between the sort of long covid that entails a 6 or 12 month recovery period, vs the sort of long covid that turns out to be me/cfs or other chronic long-term post-viral complications. again, i still think these numbers are useful for viewing trends over time; no data will ever be completely 100% without flaw, and i'm not holding out for that. what does frustrate me, though, is people (with any and all ideological axes to grind!) interpreting any of these numbers as though they are in fact perfect flawless representations of reality, with no further caveats or critical analysis needed. that's what i'm pushing back on, whether it comes from the "pulse survey says long covid prevalence is decreasing, so fuck it!" crowd or the "biobot says last week was a micro-surge so we're all going to die!" crowd.

as far as local orgs or groups doing actual action, like distributing masks or vaccine clinics, i don't put so much stock in what they say on instagram or whatever because frankly i think it matters very little. the masks and vaccines and air filters and so forth are useful in themselves; that work is valuable. if someone's positioning themselves primarily as a communicator then yes, i'm going to scrutinise their communication methods more. if it's an action org i'm honestly less concerned, unless there is egregiously unreliable information being propagated or they're communicating in the sort of stigmatising manner that many peak Posters have adopted (people who got sick are stupid / immoral / deserve it, etc).

i'd also just like to make it clear that like... i live with someone who is at high risk, i accordingly treat my own covid precautions as though i am also at high risk, and i wouldn't want covid regardless... like, please understand that when i talk about this i'm not coming at it from a perspective of someone who's unaware of the need for caution! my concern is, again, that caution and risk discussion are not synonymous with "making frightened guesses and asserting them with 100% confidence" or "selectively attributing truth to data because they agree with me, regardless of the actual methodology and any problems therein". i understand that when people are behaving recklessly and being encouraged to do so by state and medical authorities, it is tempting to look at that situation and think that communicating the seriousness of the virus is worth risking a little bit of inaccuracy if it protects people. however, i do not think that strategy actually pays off in the long or short term as far as changing people's behaviour (if it did, wouldn't it have by now?) and i think it is playing with fire to encourage this manner of interpreting and disseminating scientific information as though it is a kind of ideological buffet requiring no further verification or investigation beyond a cherry-picked deference to the stated objectivity and ideals of The Scientific Method.

[spiderfreedom]

gender around the world

thinking of making an effortpost elaborating on my 'gender is about power' post. a lot of people don't know just how common gender roles are across the world. like, every society that we know of has gender-segregated labor. they're not all equally strict, but this division is one of the few human universals we know of. and another one is that in every society we know of, women are responsible for childcare.

not all societies denigrate women. the extreme denigration of women is basically societies that imprison women at home, because to appear in public is to be 'indecent' and therefore mark you as a bad woman worthy of punishment and violence. these are called ideologies of female seclusion. examples include, to varying extent, ancient athens, modern iran, ancient china, the modern christian fundamentalist movement. these societies also tend to culturally devalue women's contributions to society. lip service will be given to the importance of mothers, but the most important and recognized people in society will be men. any influence women have tends to be behind the scenes influence on particular powerful men. this type of seclusion is somewhat more common in europe and asia.

some societies culturally recognize women's value and allow women to become high-status individuals publically. women appear in public, have spheres of power they control, and are not systematically degraded (but a caveat, which i explain soon). these societies include the ancient oyo benin of western africa (modern day descendants are the yoruba), the iroquois, the inuit, the !kung people. this type of cultural recognition is somewhat more common in africa and the (indigenous) americans.

now for the caveat - even societies that viewed women as valuable, important, powerful, often have anti-women organizing principles. arranged marriage exists among the inuit and !kung people, for instance, with an older man betrothed to a girl or young woman. there are multiple yoruba proverbs that denigrate or patronize women. these societies are not feminist utopias. they are societies that believe in the complementarian value of women's work, recognize it, and where women are expected to be full members of society. this does not mean that men and women are utterly equal in dignity.

there are many manifestations of the arrangements above - the lamalerans of indonesia don't have a culture of seclusion but do value men's labor over women's. even among fundamentalist christians, we see different levels of female seclusion and leadership among the different subgroups. i note trends, and trends are not absolute.

why does this matter to us? because it proves that gender is not a liberatory principle. gender is not even primarily an aesthetic principle. gender is a script handed to people that they must play so society can function. some scripts say that women's roles are important and valuable and ought to be celebrated. other scripts say that women's roles are less important and women are shameful and should stay secluded. but it is worth noting they are scripts nonetheless.

understanding that gender exists to organize labor, values, reproduction, also means you understand why feminists should study economics. male anxiety about female empowerment rises when male employment is threatened. in other words, rising unemployment for men = increasing anxiety about women "replacing" them = increasing desire for strict gender roles that "assure" men places in society. (btw - many women also feel the same in societies where they depend on men, and employed women are viewed as enemies.)

until we figure out how to get men to stop being existentially concerned with their place on the masculine hierarchy, decreases in male employment and male success will continue to be boons to anti-feminist. and so, in addition to being worried about unemployment because of how it affects women's labor directly, feminists should be worried about unemployment because it ferments anti-female resentment. (could managing unemployment levels thus turn out to be a way to control anti-feminist sentiment, so that feminists can lay groundwork for more advanced feminist points? instead of always worrying about maintaining the gains we have? food for thought)

[communistkenobi]

Hey sorry for bothering you, but I cannot find it in the tags. I believe some time ago you were reading a book about facist personality? Do you recommend it? And do you know were we might find it?

Not bothering at all! The book is called The Authoritarian Personality, and this is the tag I used for liveblogging/discussing it (I’m on mobile so if the link doesn’t work, it’s just “#the authoritarian personality” tag on my blog).

My short answer is yes I would recommend it. It’s given me a much more robust way to approach fascism as a political project, and it echoes a lot of other profiles of fascism that I find useful.

The big caveats I would offer about the book are:

This was written in the 1940s in the United States, and 3 of the 4 authors are psychologists. The back half of the book has large sections that are dedicated to psychoanalysis of “high scoring” (ie, those who scored as very susceptible to fascism according to the surveys the researchers created) and “low scoring” participants. I skimmed or skipped these sections entirely. I don’t want to say not to read them, but you should do so with a high degree of skepticism. The psychologists employ Freudian psychoanalysis quite a bit and I have very little respect for that approach to fascism (or anything for that matter, but I think it’s an especially poor analytical tool for understanding ideology).

This book’s description of fascism is that it is an intellectual product of capitalism, but there is very limited discussion of white supremacy or settler colonialism - two historical processes (I use the word historical not to imply these things exist only in the past, but that they were developed alongside other political and social forces over a period of many centuries) that are integral to understanding capitalism. I think the book is very good at diagnosing how antisemitism is integral to fascism (and the point of the research is to investigate antisemitism as the primary or original bigotry of fascism, a position I generally agree with), but it has limited utility for talking about how fascism is an imperial/colonial project that cannot be decoupled from white supremacy. This book should be used to better understand antisemitism, but you should seek out other discussions of fascism that attend to its colonial and white supremacist histories (Aimé Césaire’s essay Discourse on Colonialism is a great starting point for this).

Adorno (the one sociologist who authored this book) is a great writer but his writing can be kind of dense sometimes, and his chapters tend to be in conversation with his other work on mass culture, but he doesn’t explicitly state that in this book, so if you see him going on a two-page tangent about industrial cultural standardisation and are like wtf are you talking about, that’s what he’s doing. I actually like those tangents and think they add valuable insight into how fascism functions in capitalistic societies, but they can be kind of inscrutable sometimes if you aren’t familiar with his other work. Also in general don’t feel bad if you aren’t getting everything he’s saying, his writing can be dense and jargon-y sometimes, which I know not everyone is a fan of.

This book’s focus is on fascism as it is expressed through the personality structure (which is a complicated framework for thinking about individuality that I have conflicted feelings on, but they use “personality” as a coherent object that can be analysed, a thing that exists in all people), so this research doesn’t directly deal with the economic and social forces that inform fascism. It definitely does discuss those things (primarily in Adorno’s chapters), but it doesn’t do it comprehensively. They will mention race as a factor in fascist belief, but they won’t really discuss like, systemic racism in society. The same is true for gender. They talk about class more, but again not systematically. I say this so that you don’t go in expecting them to tackle the economic/societal elements of fascism in a comprehensive way.

I have the 2019 edition of the book, which has a forward by Peter Gordon (not familiar with his work) that I generally liked. It also has a chapter dedicated to Adorno’s reflection on the research as a whole after it was initially published that I really enjoyed. This edition is just shy of 1000 pages long. It’s a thick ass book and it took me about a year to finish.

I got it off the publisher’s website (Verso I think it was?) when they were having a sale. It’s pricy (~$50 CAD), so if you don’t want to invest in that you should be able to borrow it from a library. It may also be on libgen or zlibrary online.

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

[trekwiz]

Seeing that bad advice makes me want to provide a more useful set of advice.

So you've got an interview. What does the interviewer want?

(Caveat: I've only conducted interviews for one role, but I've been a panelist for 5, and conferred with recruiters and managers to make sure I was on the right track first.)

How you answer is more important than your answer in many cases. If I ask about an achievement in your past role, don't say you don't have one--it shows you're not very thoughtful about your impact on the job. Achievements don't need to be giant career-defining things. Did you complete a task your peers struggled with? Did you succeed at a project that threw some challenges your way? Just show that you understand the context of your role and took ownership of it. It's the difference between someone who will follow a set list of instructions even when a scenario doesn't fit neatly into the box vs someone who's going to function independently and offer suggestions to improve the workflow.

Don't just tell me what I want to hear. We both know you're going to do it to an extent, but when it's obvious that's what you're doing, all of your answers are now suspicious. How are we going to tell which answers are honest and which are lies, if you signal that you're not being honest? I can't assess your fit. That would increase the risk of hiring you. Hiring is disruptive: if I'm interviewing you for an hour, I've probably looked at your resume for 15 minutes, conferred with panelists for 1.5 hours (split before and after the interview), and spent 15-30 minutes with the recruiter to provide feedback. And I've done that for additional candidates. That means I'm probably going into overtime to finish the rest of my work. It also means there's a chunk of time where I just can't put out fires for the team. And if you don't work out? For every hour I work to coach you, I'm spending 2-3 documenting it, planning training, and reporting to my management. That time increases if we have to let you go and gets compounded with the new candidate search. I'm not going to risk being miserable at work for weeks on someone who's just telling me what I want to hear. And let's be honest: as a person, if my impression of you is that you're a liar, what reason do I have to offer you an opportunity? Especially if I'm going to be training you. No one wants to work with someone they can't trust.

You're not the only candidate. I have one role. I can't just give you a job any more than I can do that for the other candidates. You need to show me what sets you apart from them. A great attitude stands out. I need to know that you're going to interact well with our clients, because if they really don't like you, your contract will be terminated and I have to go through the hassle again. I also need to know you can work with the team in that role: if your personality or attitude will cause our top performers to leave, your contract will be terminated. You can be amazing at the tasks, but if you're going to drive away the people with institutional knowledge, you're not the right fit. I need to see enough of your personality to know if you're going to be a net benefit to your coworkers, or a nuisance. If I can't get that read on you and you're my only candidate? I'm going to ask the recruiter to keep looking.

Interview me back. You don't only need to convince me that you're right for the role: I need to convince you that the role is right for you. Interviews are supposed to be mutual. You're intended to assess if you'll be happy enough in our workplace culture. You're intended to determine if the tasks we want you to complete are satisfying enough to stick around. If you're making the effort to understand what the role is beyond what's on paper, it's a good sign that you're going to take ownership of your role and be a valuable contributor to the team. In my environment, even the most tedious role isn't mindless: there are things to think through and investigate, and determine if it's a special scenario that needs some kind of exception to usual process. If you can't gather information back from me, that does demonstrate that you can't do the job even if your qualifications suggest that you can. Also. We both know work sucks. I don't need you to pretend otherwise. But I do need to know if the ways this work sucks are compatible with your expectations of work, and if the positives of this work aligns with this you actually consider to be positives. Happiness in a role is a different concept from being happy that you're working.

If you got the interview, we already like your background. We may have concerns, but overall, you can probably do the tasks. We're looking for opportunities to let you shine. We want to hear about your successes that make you valuable. We want to hear about the failures you learned from. We want to see how you grow and adapt so we can picture you doing the same in our role. And we really, strongly, want to see how you'll make our job easier. In the age of lean staffing, if our management approved additional headcount, we probably have a pain point we're addressing. It's probably workload. Show us that you're going to ease that workload instead of creating more work for the team. If it seems like you're going to make my job, and your potential coworkers' jobs harder, I can say with certainty that you don't have an achievement big enough to land the job. We assess that by looking at how you approach work and your attitude.

Show me that you're the safe choice. I want to see--from your behavior, how you answer questions, how you make sure you're understanding my questions--that you'll be great with clients. That you'll help your colleagues. That you're going to make sure you understand the work and will ask questions until you do. That you're not going to do anything that will damage our reputation. That you're going to be satisfied enough in our culture to stay. That you're going to want to grow with us, but also that you're not eager to jump to a completely different type of role and force us to re-hire in the near future. These are things I need to assess from how you formulate an answer, but I'm suspicious if you directly tell me any of this because that comes off as an attempt to tell me what I want to hear. Show, don't tell.

I'd like to have a conversation with you. If we're both relying on our personal rehearsed scripts, I'm not going to feel connected to you. It also puts up red flags about the role and training. If you don't understand something in training, are you just going to fake it with the same rehearsed script? That tells me I'm going to be fixing a lot of your mistakes instead of doing my job. It tells me you're probably not going to be friendly with your coworkers; I can assume from that, that communication between you will be strained. But we thrive on good communication.

The things we list as preferred on the job listing are nice to have, but won't guarantee we pick you. If you are 100% equal with another candidate and you have the preferred qualification, we're going to pick you. But that's a gamble on your part: how do you know you're an exact match with the other top candidates? You should find out--yes, in the interview--why we prefer those qualifications. We might be listing it just to weed out people who would be intimidated by work that occasionally uses that skill, but don't actually need any real competence. For example, I might list HTML because you'll need to be comfortable adding a bold tag after we show you how, but we need to know you're not going to fail the task because the sight of code makes you panic. If we have 2 candidates with equal qualifications, but only one has the preferred qualifications, and the one without does a better job of making us feel confident that they'll fit within the team? We're choosing the person without the preferred qualification.

You really do need to be candid about your preferences. Yes, that will mean sometimes you don't get the job. But workplace cultures do differ. Being able to do the task is not enough to determine if you'll be satisfied in that environment. Are you very uncomfortable working in groups and only do decent work alone? Some environments are conducive to that! Others are not. If you're applying for a job that's highly collaborative and you'll almost never work alone, then you're not only going to be unhappy, but you're probably also going to make the existing team unhappy, and negatively impact their work. This is the kind of mismatch that will eventually result in the termination of your contract. Depending on how long management would tolerate the discord, you could end up being fired at a time that's especially inconvenient for you; maybe when you most need the income. Especially if it risks losing experienced members of the team. I say this as part of a global company in a large team split across countries: being dishonest about workplace preferences isn't going to do you any favors. Worse, if we have another role that does suit your preferences (especially if it's a higher level role you may apply for in a few years), you're not going to be considered for it if you lied to us prior. If it's in another department, they will ask us about you if you were hired. And if during an interview we caught that you weren't being honest about a preference in a way that would impact us negatively, we're giving that feedback to the recruiter. This will impact future opportunities for you.

[gotjacobian]

Thinking about the 'you learn more from failure than success' platitude (in the context of a lot of things, but in particular about being frustrated with my struggle to reach a publishable endpoint on any project since starting my PhD).

I think it's... not wrong, necessarily, but is maybe misleading. It's very easy to learn the wrong things from failure, and often harder to learn useful and correct things, especially because so many people who 'succeed' are wrong about the reasons they succeeded, or just don't interrogate their success at all. Sometimes 'success' isn't even aligned with what I actually value and want to learn to achieve. Which is what the original quote is addressing. But I think a more useful framing, maybe, is whether failure is keeping you from learning what you need to learn to develop maturity in a particular pursuit - by which I mean knowing why some things work, and why some things don't, and how to integrate that knowledge into your decision-making with confidence.

And I think failure rarely actually prevents that. Like, people learning to draw are often warned they'll need to develop both their 'hand', their capacity to create, and their 'eye', their capacity to understand and critique what they see in the world and in theirs and others' work, to be successful. And that those two will develop at different and sometimes frustrating rates. I think developing your hand, in this example, is very difficult without some kind of positive signal, which is why it's so often broken down into simple and repetitive exercise to make sure even beginners can find that signal and grow. But you don't *need* to, yourself, be producing 'successful' art to develop your eye. You need to get better at understanding what success means, what contributes to it, what conditions (internal and external) foster it. But you don't actually need to have it, you know? I think critique can be equally valuable at nigh-any subjective quality of output. And if you can stomach it, you can learn to critique without ever once producing something that you think, or that you're told/signalled, is 'successful'.

There's a big caveat, though, that failure also frequently means withheld external feedback. Or worse, losing the material conditions that let you try again. It's just as easy to learn bad lessons from no feedback as it is to learn them from undiscerning positive feedback, and impossible to learn if you can't keep trying. But I don't know, I'm thinking about how I became more confident about things like art and research even through the most frustrating points of those pursuits, when I felt like I wasn't producing anything of value. I didn't just get better, I felt more mature and certain in my abilities over time, even if I felt like I had no believable 'evidence' of why that should be true in the form of external validation I wanted. It sucked sometimes, for sure, and I think could've sucked less if I felt like I wasn't failing. But I also find it reassuring to know that like, 'success' isn't the only, or even a primary indicator of growth. And that it's important to know where it's actually useful, or in any way necessary, to put energy into pursuing it.

[marginaletchings]

fandom advice from someone who has been an active participant since the 90s*:

*- I am aware some folks have been active in fandom since long before that, you pedants don’t need to crawl out of the woodwork at me.

* * *

Learning to shut up/not say something is a very valuable skill, and it’s #1 on this list because I like dramatic irony. You don’t always have to comment on something that upsets you, even if/when you are right to do so. Sometimes you need to realize even if/when you are justified and correct, it’s better to just... stop. Learn to pick your battles. Most hills are not worth dying on whether you’re in the right or not, and that’s something that I’m still learning to keep in practice. But trust me: It is well worth the effort and it will cut down 90% of the drama in your fandom life, and life in general.

Try to step back and reread someone’s comment or whatever in good faith, not bad. Stop assuming the absolute worst of everyone around you. Even when someone says something stupid, going at them with pitchforks and torches is going to do nothing but cause unnecessary public drama and misunderstandings. Are some people worth calling out publicly? Sure! And are many others putting their foot in their mouth and don’t need to be pilloried? Absolutely! I don’t know how to tell you all this, but many of us, especially fandom folks in their 30s/older are still working on un/re-wiring some old shitty microaggressions and patterns of behavior. No, the time you grew up in isn’t “an excuse”, it doesn’t make Saying the Stupid Thing unhurtful; and yet, dogpiling someone who otherwise has a chill track record still makes you an asshole. You can’t say “intention doesn’t matter” and then publicly lambast someone for a recent Tweet they didn’t think enough about making. Don’t get me started on people freaking out over Tweets someone made 7-15+ years ago. There was a LOT of cultural change in the 2010s, please allow people to have personal growth and move the fuck on.

If you have a problem with something someone has done/said, once or twice or several times, but they appear to have a decent track record otherwise? JUST TALK TO THEM. Send them a DM. Be like, “hey, I noticed [x thing]. [x thing] was [hurtful/upsetting/disappointing] to see because [y reason(s)]. I feel this could have been [handled/said/expressed] better. Are you willing to talk about this? Thanks for listening.” Yeah sure there will be people who react poorly--and I guarantee you, there will also be plenty of people who genuinely don’t want to be hurtful to others either.

Learn how to apologize graciously. No matter what your intentions were, and even if someone is reacting very strongly to something seemingly innocuous--learn to apologize. Swallow your pride. Even if someone is being rude, and shitty, sometimes all they want to hear is an acknowledgement of their sense of having been done wrong. The best you can do is offer something along the lines of, “I am sorry [person’s name/handle], I’m sorry that what I [wrote/said/did] was [hurtful/harmful] to you. I’ll do my best to avoid [writing/saying/doing] [thing] again, and I’m open to feedback if you have any on what I could’ve done better. Thanks again for reaching out to me about this.” It shows that you’ve taken the time to sympathize with how they’re feeling, you’re not making excuses or making it all about you/your feelings, you redirect the conflict into a positive forward progression, and finally, you show graciousness and thank someone for their time, humanizing their efforts.

Learn how to accept people’s apologies. Don’t be a nitpicky asshole. (See advice #1 & #2.) Sometimes you need to thank someone for their apology, mayhaps offer critcism as calmly/constructively as you can if they ask for it, and then step away. Also, if they don’t ask for criticism, don’t dump an essay of it onto them. You can even offer to give it to them with the caveat that it will only happen once you and they have had a chance to cool off and mull things over. Not all conflicts need to be resolved in the immediate moment and most of them CAN’T be anyway.

Try to understand that even if you do your best at all of the above, sometimes people will never be happy, and you are allowed to calmly take your leave from situations once you have communicated to the best of your ability. Then refer to advice #1.

Remember when engaging in disk horse/discussions to consider the “yes, and...” principle: listen to and get on the same page with their line of thinking, then expand upon it so you don’t leave the other person hanging, or leave them with the burden of the discussion, or give the impression of shutting the discussion down. If you don’t understand a person’s line of thinking, then ask for clarification. Conversations/discussions are just two people writing a back and forth dialogue and what makes conversing more difficult than writing a script (ime) is you don’t know what the other person is thinking, so you need to do your best to communicate as deliberately and levelly as you can. There is a progression to talking to people and should be a forward movement. If someone says, “I think it’s interesting how many wars the United States has had with its current allies” and you reply, “The American Continental Army fought the British in the American War of Independence”... that... doesn’t offer anything, there is no movement, and seemingly you have failed to give the other person the benefit of the doubt that the AmRev is one of those wars to which they referred. Now you’ve left them with the awkward burden of trying to redirect the conversation or just disengaging entirely. A better way to respond would have been, “Yeah, absolutely! I’m interested in the American Revolution in particular” which first shows that you have listened to what they said, enough to pull a specific thread from their thought, and now you have expanded on it by relaying one of your own thoughts/feelings which will give the other person incentive to either say something about that war, or to ask you their own questions. In short: You have showed someone that you heard them, and are now giving something in return for them to expand upon. It’s the difference between talking with someone and AT them, and doing too much of the latter can be extremely offputting for everyone around you.

[zaneisfuller]

I agree that this is good advice, in particular that research experience and internships are more valuable than prioritizing a high gpa. I especially agree that finding a lab early and working there for 3-4 years as an undergrad is usually the best strategy to get experience beyond grunt work and actually get published, the caveat being that you don't really get to see if you would enjoy or be better suited to research in a different field or modality (e.g., wet lab, dry lab, computational, field work, survey-based etc).

I can also see the value in setting your goals early - planning from your freshman year on the course you need to take to get into med school or a PhD, or specific career certainly gives you a leg up. I do think that many undergrads find that they actually don't like or are not interested in the trajectory they planned for themselves at 18, or are exposed to fields of study they had not even heard of before starting college and it's important to have the leeway to change directions.

Something I found strange though was both of you insisting that it is difficult or impossible to find research opportunities as an undergrad at an R1 university. My undergrad was at an R1 school and I am now a 5th year PhD student at a different R1 school (both large state universities in different states), and my wife's undergrad was at yet another R1 university nearby. Almost everyone I knew in stem majors did undergrad research, and most of those people started in a lab in their freshman year. I've also not known it to be that unusual for undergrads to be on publications - my research experience as an undergrad was somewhat lackluster and I wasn't published but I had several friends who were.

From my perspective as a current PhD student, we have had ~10 undergrads do research in the lab since I started in 2019 (including a substantial slowdown in in-person work in 2020-2021), and they are regularly included on the author list for our published papers. We have not had any first-author papers from undergrads but several have been second author. As far as recruiting undergrads, my advisor's preference at least is to recruit sophomores, with the reasoning that they have a better idea of how realistic a time commitment they can make than someone just starting college but will still be able to be in the lab for multiple years after being trained and becoming productive researchers.

I agree with your points about accessibility however; having access to these opportunities does largely rely on knowing you need to look for them and that it is important to get that experience in the first place. It's also the case that many professors expect students to do research on a volunteer basis for 10-20 hours a week while also taking a full course load, which makes it inaccessible for those students that can't afford not to have a paid job or who are unable to burn themselves out with a full course load + unpaid research job + another job on top of that.

Sorry for the long response on a post that I largely agree with, I really think you gave valuable advice.

So if the professors don't like writing the exams

The students don't like taking the exams

The TAs don't like grading the exams

The education experts generally agree that our exam systems are largely stupid

Then....

[slightlyrebelliouswriter23]

What’s your favourite scene from each of the Folk of the Air books?

okay i've taken a long time to answer this one, nonnie, because how could you make me choose just one per book?? but i think i've boiled it down to one scene each, with the caveat that other scenes do rival these for greatness in my mind, but the ones i've chosen are all pivotal moments on which the series hinges.

The Cruel Prince- this book, to me, is all about the realisation of Jurdan's attraction to one another. there is a lot of shock, a bit of denial. also pain, because change is painful, especially when it goes against everything you believe in.

of course, i considered the "I will shame you with my defiance" scene and the dagger kith scene (🥴✌️), but these are not pivotal moments, in my mind. they only serve to prove things the characters already know, but have never had the guts to express aloud.

my favourite scene in TCP is the ear tracing scene in the clearing, when Jude takes Cardan with her to entreat the other courts.

on the surface level, it is the first time they choose to work together, not because they are forced to as a matter of life or death. granted, Cardan is in service to Jude by this point, but she doesn't command him to help her. he does so of his own free will. just as she chooses to confide her troubles to him.

i also think it's the first time Jude sees Cardan as anything more than the usefulness of his title. in this scene, she finally sees him as a player of the game, instead of merely a valuable piece on the chessboard, to be sacrificed or saved at her bidding.

but underneath it all, the ear tracing shows them (and us) just how utterly futile their attempts at denying their attraction for one another will be.

Cardan's hand moves to trace Jude's ear involuntarily. Jude doesn't pull away, but rather shivers (involuntarily) and leans into his touch. it's the first time they've allowed themselves to be vulnerable around one another, even if only for a fleeting moment, and they hardly realise it's happening. like breathing.

guess neither of them like breathing too much, though, cos we all know what happens next.

The Wicked King- this book is all about anger and bargaining and, of course, bargains. it's about coming to terms with their feelings, as well.

top contenders for this book were the Queen of Mirth scene, ch. 15 (🥵), and the marriage scene. but ultimately, i went with something different.

my favourite scene in TWK is the scene at the banquet where Cardan is poisoned.

i'll keep this one brief because i've already analysed the scene in this post. but essentially, i believe this scene highlights the moment Cardan stopped regarding Jude as a sickness and started thinking of her as a cure. (the aforementioned post goes into much more detail about why)

The Queen of Nothing- this book is all about the hurt they've caused, the reconstruction of that hurt, and the true acceptance of their feelings.

there were honestly so many scenes i wanted to choose: the scene where they see each other for the first time since Jude's exile, the scene where Cardan tells Jude he knows it's her, the one where Jude knees Cardan in the balls, the one where Jude falls from the ceiling onto Cardan's dinner party, the slapping scene, ch.21 (🥴🔥). just to name a few.

my favourite scene from QON is the hugging scene.

because, for two people who are rarely tender with anyone, what could be more of a transparent show of acceptance than a hug?

How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories- as a bonus, i'll include the Cardan novella in this. i don't really think i can assign it any specific stage of grief like the others, but it definitely serves as a prelude for how and why Cardan was feeling the things he felt.

my favourite scene from HTKOELTHS is the "I hated you" scene.

i think this has just generally become my favourite line of the novella. for all of which reasons, i've mentioned in this post. but essentially, it's about the past tense, your honours. 🙌

–Em 🖤🗡

more analysis & theories

[cyb-by-lang]

Hewwo! Hopefully Im not using much of your time here but, question: How do you write about medical stuff? Like, how or where did you find these information? I really liked the amount of detail you put in to make casualties logical and reasonable, and would very much like to know. I also do know that wikipedia exists, but I wanted to ask because wikipedia pages could branch off in many ways due to terms and other context. Im not quite there in being a writer, so these are really inspiration. Thx!

I kinda recommend doing research as the particular injury comes up. See, there are blogs like @howtofightwrite and others that deal with the particular techniques that go into fight scenes, while sites like WebMB deal sometimes with the symptoms of specific problems if you know what names you're looking for. When looking for conditions as opposed to injuries, listening to the people who live with [insert condition here] is even more valuable than research papers or the like.

And as for Wikipedia, the Simple English edition is very useful to get a basic grasp of a concept if it feels impossible to parse.

Also, I used to watch a lot of war documentaries when I was a teenager, alongside a frankly unhealthy number of crime dramas like Law and Order and so on. My concept of how a person can get dead is definitely partly formed by media, but I’ve learned to do research since.

Completely random list of tips and reminders, with the caveat that there are always ways for fiction to write its way around these. It’s just that they tend to be written off entirely for drama purposes, with no in-universe actual explanation.

1. Losing an extremity usually makes someone go into hypovolemic shock in fairly short order, and then death ensues unless medical care is immediately available.

2. Arrows can and will kill you, which is why armies used them for so long even after the advent of gunpowder. RPGs have lied to you. Hit points are an abstraction that has never mapped well to real life.

3. Head injuries are complicated and a "tap on the head" can cause irreversible brain damage, because brains don't work like they do in movies.

4. Actual, real-life fights rarely last longer than a few seconds. Battles can easily be much longer, but individual human bodies generally don’t like using a ton of energy in one go.

5. If you need a character dead, just go for decapitation. Readers don’t argue with that one except in special cases, which have their own problems.

6. Any sufficiently large open wound, left untreated, can be fatal. Infections suck like that.

7. Zombies might not feel pain, but they can definitely suffer structural damage. A zombie with no kneecaps is going to be about as dangerous as a human in a similar situation.

8. If something is attacking too fast to be seen, it’s breaking the sound barrier at absolutely minimum and should have realistically reduced itself and its target to paste. Anime ignores this, because anime and physics never saw eye to eye.

9. Explosions do not generally vaporize things unless the explosion is very large and the potential casualties are very close by. Treat anything that might take one’s fingers off with extreme caution.

10. Hollywood wouldn’t know a realistic battle scene if it attended a thousand TEDTalks. It’s about the drama, there.

[monstersdownthepath]

Demigod Dossier: Velstrac Demagogues, part 1

Pictured: Aroggus, the Abbey-Maker

Lawful Evil Mad Artists of the Shadow Plane

The Complete Book of the Damned, pg. 120~121 Additional information is also present in Adventure Path: Return of the Runelords: The City Outside of Time, pg. 74~79

Our second-ever Demigod Dossier, now fully in-swing! The Velstrac Demagogues are the rulers of the Shadow Plane and all the lives within, though many of said lives within aren’t really fans of them. Natives to the Netherworld find the presence of the Velstrac an annoyance at best and a threat to their lives at worst, and would much prefer if they went back to Hell where they came from, but unfortunately for everyone everywhere they don’t appear too eager to throw themselves into the jaws of the inferno just yet. Instead, they’re busy throwing themselves into the jaws of one another.

The Demagogues represent the pinnacle of a specific subset of the Velstrac’s twisted senses of ‘art’ and ‘perfection,’ either because they’ve mutilated themselves into something wholly unlike anything else that can, did, or could exist, or they’ve pioneered a form of artistry that other Velstrac couldn’t even conceptualize in the first place and gathered a fandom. It takes some very twisted, alien forms of thinking to become a Demagogue and get others rallied behind you, even moreso because the Velstrac themselves are, putting it kindly, completely out of their gourd. When your audience already expects the insane and outlandish, you have to go even further, and many of the fiends you’ll soon see have.

We’ll only be covering four in this initial post, with the rest to be saved for later...

Demagogues view mortals as little more than primal clay to be shaped, and thus see little worth in investing true divine power into them, worshipers receive Boons that are are relatively simple: a trio of spell-like abilities, each of which may be used 1/day. Boons are normally gained slowly, at levels 12, 16, and 20, however entering the Evangelist, Exalted, or Sentinel Prestige Classes can see the Boons gained as early as levels 10, 13, and 16. Note that while they are Lawful Evil fiends originally from Hell, they are not devils, thus you cannot enter the Diabolist Prestige Class to obtain their Boons without DM fiat.

Aroggus, the Abbey-Maker

Demagogue of Possibility, Revenge, and Sanctuary Domains: Evil, Law, Protection, Trickery Subdomains: Deception, Defense, Fear, Tyranny

Obedience: List the names of those who have wronged you until the writing covers a page, then consume the parchment. Benefit: Gain a +4 profane bonus on saving throws to resist compulsion effects.

What a completely normal, sane, and healthy thing to do! As the first of the Demagogues to flee from Hell, Aroggus is EXTREMELY angry at the devils for locking them up in the first place. Angry enough to want revenge on the whole of the diabolic race, as well as the Asura... Angry enough that he hasn’t yet even started getting around to enacting his revenge, instead just constantly thinking about and refining it as if no iteration of suffering is perfect enough to match his fury.

True to form, he wants you to ruminate in your anger rather than doing anything to enact your vengeance, blacking out a page with the names (or just one name) of all who’ve wronged you no matter how petty or insignificant the inconvenience they may have caused. Unfortunately, no two ways about it, you’re going to look insane (in the literal definition of the term) doing this every day, especially if you only have one or two people who’ve wronged you enough to get onto your list. Scrawling their name, front AND back, until the page is filled and then eating it is behavior that will raise eyebrows no matter who you’re adventuring with. Best to keep this one behind closed doors. Make sure you have a glass of activated charcoal after, because all of that ink day after day (unless you write with, I don’t know, berry juice or blood) is going to do amazingly terrible things to your constitution.

The benefit is good. Compulsions are typically Save-Or-Suck effects, so having more Save means less Suck for you later on. It’s useful at any point in your adventure, so I can’t say anything bad about it! My only wish is that it was a little stronger, since some other gods give +4 vs compulsion and charm effects.

Boon 1: Nondetection Boon 2: Forcecage Boon 3: Imprisonment

Nondectection is a good spell for those times when you need to sneak by diviners, hide magic items from scrutiny, avoid the gaze of a Paladin who’s a little too judicious with Detect Evil, or to add another layer of shroud over Invisibility and the like. It’s a spell that’s a pain to prepare every single day, but useful to have when you need it... but you only have one casting of it per day, so using it wisely is paramount. Ironically, it combines well with your own Divination to find out if you’ll even need it later.  More often than not you won’t be using it at all except to idly ward yourself when going into town or diving into a dungeon.

Forcecage is a completely different animal, the offensive and defensive applications of the spell simply mind-blowing, to the point that keeping this to just one paragraph to save space is going to take some herculean effort on my part! So, the basics: Forcecage has two versions, both of which halt all movement through them: A 20ft square of force bars that allow spells, projectiles, and line-of-effect through, and a 10ft cube that blocks line-of-effect and all forms of magic and supernatural abilities. A Forcecage is effectively invincible (having Hardness 30 and 20hp/level) and impossible to move, so anyone trapped inside without the ability to teleport is likely to stay there for the spell’s duration. Also, to put it simply, shoving enemies in the cage is the main point, but if you cannot, a 10ft/20ft square is an enormous roadblock to stop up narrow passages with.

Which leaves Imprisonment, a portable hole you can shove all sorts of problems into, which will likely create new problems down the line if the target had anything you needed on them. I recommend knocking out a foe, stripping them of their valuables, and then shoving them into their baby jail for all eternity! With the Freedom spell being the only means to undo Imprisonment (even Wish and Miracle fail), you’ll have no actual way to undo the spell against any target you cast it on for one or two more levels, if at all (depending on the party composition). Make sure to use it only when the villain has no MacGuffins, or is a powerful recurring threat. Imprisonment works on anything and everything capable of failing the Will save (take note, anyone wanting to fight Kaiju, Great Old Ones, or Spawn of Rovagug), which gets a -4 penalty if you know the target’s name and some facts about its life, so famous villains are even more vulnerable to being thrown into the Eternity Marble! 

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Barravoclair, Lady of the Final Gasp

Demagogue of the Elderly, Fatalistic Insights, Resurrection Domains: Death, Evil, Healing, Law Subdomains: Murder, Restoration, Resurrection, Undead

Obedience: Practice breath control, holding your breath until you nearly pass out. Benefit: Gain a +4 profane bonus on checks to resist drowning and on saves against inhaled poisons.

A hell of a step down in terms of unhealthiness in terms of Aroggus, and significantly less suspicious, too. Breath control is practiced by people of all stripes, from athletes to explorers to simple monks attempting more profound meditation. While ‘nearly passing out’ is skirting an edge most people won’t approach, it’s not exactly as dangerous for you as, say, inhaling water or eating poison every day. Without any materials needed, the Lady of the Final Gasp is one of the simplest and probably the single cheapest Obedience ritual one could ask for! There is a minor caveat in that races who can’t breathe can’t technically do this Obedience at all, but those aren’t the audience Barravoclair wants anyway.

Unfortunately, the benefit is as weak as the Obedience is easy to do. Drowning is unlikely to come up as a danger unless you’re physically dragged into the water by a monster (which means holding your breath likely isn’t an option anyway), and inhaled poisons are the least common poison type in the game. Against the odd Catoblepas or Green Dragon it will come in handy, but it’s protection from injury poison you really need, which the Lady of the Final Gasp doesn’t provide.

Boon 1: Speak With Dead Boon 2: Resurrection Boon 3: Soul Bind

Alright, let’s face it. Some days, you need Speak With Dead to keep the plot running smoothly. Whether your overzealous DPS kills everyone in the room, your Fireball-lobbing Sorcerer kills everyone in the room, or your summoner’s unchained beasts kill everyone in the room, chances are at some point in your career you’re going to save the party a lot of headaches by being able to pull answers from a corpse. Having Speak With Dead available every day will likely not matter 80% of the time (meaning you can typically use it at your leisure just before going to bed), but much like with Water Breathing and spells like Remove Curse and Neutralize Poison, having it for those 20% of times you need it can keep the wheels spinning and stop unneeded side quests.

... And speaking of side quests and things you’ll need once in a blue moon, Resurrection? For free? Even 1/day? With the hefty cost of 10,000gp for the normal spell, even a well-off party will feel the impact every single time they have to use Rez, but the removal of the cost ups the power level of the spell by a margin so enormous that it doesn’t really matter what Boon you get before or after this one; THIS boon rewards worship of Barravoclair enough to justify putting up with her empty benefit. Even without factoring in the ability to raise party members, you can now curry favor with people of all stripes and demand all forms of insane payments for your ability to raise centuries-old dead at no cost but time... or do your work for free and call in favors at a later date. Do note, however, that you’ll also need someone else on standby to remove the negative levels/stat drain caused by the resurrection process.

I said it didn’t matter what the third Boon was and I stand by it. Unlike with the free Rez above, Soul Bind’s enormous cost still makes its use as anything but a once-per-campaign finisher of an annoying enemy irritating and unfeasible. Spell-likes normally require no components, but Soul Bind operates in a gray area of the rules in that its focus component becomes the subject for the spell, meaning that a DM can very easily and very rightly say you DO require the  gemstone whose value must equal or exceed the target’s HD x 1,000. Binding even a simple 5 CR creature requires the tall order of a 5,000gp gemstone, and if you want to use it on a target that’s worthwhile, it gets expensive fast. It’s way cheaper and easier to just hire a Cacodaemon. 

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Fharaas, the Seer in Skin

Demagogue of Experience, Murder, and Patterns Domains: Evil, Knowledge, Law, Repose Subdomains: Ancestors, Fear, Memory, Souls

Obedience: Study the interior of a freshly severed limb. Benefit: You are immune to bleed effects that deal 6 damage or less.

This Obedience is deceptively simple for what its implication is. You’d best get yourself a Sack Of Rats or have access to a lot of disposable prisoners (or the Regenerate spell)! But thankfully, there’s some wiggle room in the wording: ‘freshly severed’ means no cheating and using Gentle Repose on the same arm over and over, but it ALSO means you can carry around a single corpse and slowly slice it apart, as the limbs themselves don’t have to be fresh, just freshly cut off for the purpose of the ritual. Also, you can use the bodies of Undead, Constructs, and any other creature that technically has severable limbs! Though Fharaas, the Seer In Skin, will likely punish you if your ritual doesn’t involve the examination of actual flesh.

You’re going to look really weird, is what I’m saying. At least if someone barges in on you, you can claim you’re inspecting them for something or other. Infection, signs of magic, etc, whatever you can come up with to blunt the blow. You can cover yourself moderately well by being a butcher or a hunter in your day job, as the severed limb doesn’t have to be human, or even sapient (hence why I suggest a Sack Of Rats), letting you freely slice up and examine your kills.

Bleed effects are fairly uncommon in the grand scheme of things but are also a pain in the neck to deal with in the middle of battle, so this giving a +4 bonus aga--wait, sorry, hold on no, this isn’t a bonus to saving throws? Or skill checks to heal bleed? It just... Stops them if they deal 6 or less damage? You don’t even have to make a save?

Okay. Okay, alright. So you’re just immune to bleed, then?

More or less, really. There are very few monsters that deal more than d6 bleed damage with their attacks (be warned that higher-level ones can sometimes stack their bleed!), and this ability also works on the rare but dreaded stat bleed, and off the top of my head there are NO monsters that deal more than a d4 dice in stat bleed damage. My main problem is that it doesn’t reduce the bleed damage you take by 6, so taking even 1 more point of bleed damage makes this ability useless. Still, though it’s fairly narrow, being effectively immune to a dangerous and irritating status ailment at level 3 or so (when bleed is at its most threatening) is well worth taking up butchery. 

Boon 1: Keen Edge Boon 2: Vision Boon 3: Foresight

Keen Edge is a spell you absolutely want to slap onto any vaguely pirate-y or hoity-toity party member you may have, as cutlasses, rapiers, and scimitars all leap from a dangerous 18~20 critical range to a terrifying 15~20, meaning they threaten to critically strike 1 out of every 4 attacks instead of just once every other fight or so. With a duration of 10 min/level, the enchantment will likely last multiple fights even if you only have it 1/day, but unfortunately it refuses to stack with any crit-boosting enchantments or feats the wielder may already possess, lessening its usefulness as your adventure goes on and your martial party members pick up increasingly fancy gear and pad out their collection of feats. Still, it’s useful for when you get it, and will remain useful for several levels after.

Vision is a whole different beast, and a dangerous one at that. It operates as the Legend Lore spell but vastly accelerated, allowing you to scrape the public consciousness for any information it may have on a specific person, place, or thing. I’ve complained about the general niche uses of Legend Lore before, but Vision grants the information in a much shorter time (a single standard action) at the cost of a potential for failure and a slap of fatigue whether you succeed or not. I don’t like 1/days that do nothing on a failure, but since Vision is purely a downtime spell (unless you need to know the boss’ weakness or info on the Evil Doom Artifact right now immediately), it’s not as much of an impediment to lose out on whatever information it could give you. That being said, the DM will likely have ways for you to do whatever plot-relevant research you need anyway, so Vision is more of a way to speed up the process than anything.

Which leaves Foresight, a spell whose main benefit relies intensely on DM cooperation, as I’ve ranted about here. Mechanically it’s fairly unimpressive, but if the DM reads the spell carefully, they should realize it gives whoever you cast it on a 6-second glance into the future at all times. Whatever horrors befall the victim 6 seconds from now should spring into your mind before they happen, making you the best trap radar on the planet, and the spell’s warnings for the best ways to protect yourself will urge the DM to grant you information about the enemy’s capabilities you may never otherwise know... but what do you expect from 9th level magic? It SHOULD be filling you in with details you’d never figure out!

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Inkariax, the White Death

Demagogue of Preservation, Absolute Cold, and Solitude Domains: Evil, Law, Void, Water Subdomains: Fear, Ice, Isolation, Slavery

Obedience: Inventory your collection of hoarded knickknacks, reciting your unique name for each item as you do Benefit: Gain a +4 profane bonus on saving throws to resist effects that would petrify or paralyze you.

God, finally, someone normal. At worst you’ll look like someone with a few obsessive issues, but at least you won’t look like a menace to society as you lay out your, I dunno, marbles or bone dice or dolls or what have you and make note that they’re still there, cooing to them with names only you know. It’s fitting for Inkariax, of all the Demagogues, to have an Obedience that requires no self-harm, physically or psychologically; unlike all the rest, he was born perfect and doesn’t need to chase after it. Instead, he pursues finding perfection in others, freezing and collecting people and items he believes represent perfection in whatever unusual way he desires that day (having perfect posture, or a perfect scream, or a perfect pair of eyes, etc). Much like him, you’re encouraged to expand a collection of whatever you deem perfect and desirable, which you’re often going to do just over the course of normally adventuring. I’ve yet to see a player character that doesn’t start amassing all sorts of junk in their pockets the moment they get a Bag of Holding or similar.

Indeed, you can just pick up whatever catches your fancy, be it stones, sticks, or severed bits of an enemy, though I’m sure Inkariax will ever-so-slowly raise a disapproving eyebrow if you just pick up any old junk. Make sure to curate your collection now and then! Being able to perform this Obedience with anything you happen to gather is especially helpful if you’re ever separated from your collection (always a danger) and need to start again, but note that each item you gain in your collection must have a completely unique name. That’s only really a danger for especially RP-heavy campaigns, but in such campaigns Worship of the White Death isn’t for everyone who just names all their collected bird feathers Jeffery. Start getting in the habit of stretching out your inventory sheet with names for all your items!

The benefit you get from lovingly counting up all your stolen statuettes and dusty books is resistance to two of the worst status effects in the game. While petrification is relatively rare it typically appears in Save-Or-Suck form, which makes protection against it far more valuable than, say, protection against something like the far more common fatigue or exhaustion. Paralysis is an ailment just short of a death sentence by itself, costing the victim their turn at best and their life at worst, so even a +4 between you and that is something you need to cling to with your entire being.

Boon 1: Sleet Storm Boon 2: Sequester Boon 3: Microcosm

Sleet Storm is a very simple spell with a decent number of functions. Its Long range means that any enemy in your line of sight can potentially be a target, letting you lash out easily at ranged enemies or dangerous casters by creating a 40ft-wide and 20ft-tall area of concealing sleet that’s impossible for any vision to pierce (except the rare and niche Snowsight or Fogcutter Lenses). Anyone inside will have to rely on Tremorsense or Blindsense (though the jury’s out on if the splashing of the sleet would confound those, as well) to navigate it, and 40ft of difficult terrain can feel impossible to clamber through when you start right in the middle of it with no idea which way is the way you need to go. It’s one of the strongest vision-blockers in the game due to its immunity to common tactics that thwart lesser spells (Gust of Wind, True Seeing, etc), forcing enemies to either blow their valuable uses of Dispel Magic or suffer for its entire duration. My only complaint is that you only get it 1/day and that it screws over your party just as hard if you use it incorrectly.

Sequester is as niche a use spell as there ever was for players, requiring a bit of forethought about what or who you’d want to hide with it. The target must be willing or inanimate to be affected, so tricking an enemy via Charm or Dominate into accepting the spell can keep them fresh as a daisy for weeks at a time if you ever have a reason to do such a thing. More often than not you’ll use it to conceal items you seriously don’t want seen or detected, such as a Bag of Holding or similar loaded with your collection of knickknacks or emergency supplies, a particular hostage, an NPC you need to keep alive, or your phylactery if you’re a Lich. If you’re especially sadistic, using it on an item someone else needs and throwing it into a well or a hoard of other objects will keep them occupied for a while. If you’re a more martial character, using it to hide your armor is viable, making it seem as though you’re invincible when enemy blows bounce straight off, or even your weapon to confound your enemies who seem to be taking wounds from an unseen item. Your mime routine will be killer, literally! Just... Just don’t drop the thing, because in the heat of battle you’re never going to find it.

Microcosm is one of the best spells you can hurl into a crowd of commoners or a swarm of foes meant to gum you up instead of actually threaten you. Its 30 HD limit will mean it likely will only strike one or two creatures capable of actually threatening you, but it’s brutal even then. The spell is permanent, trapping your victims in an illusory world in which everything goes right for them even as their bodies starve to death in the waking world. Anything with less than 10 HD is automatically affected with no saving throw, the spell easily mopping up mobs, while anything with 11~15 HD escapes automatically after 10 min... per level you have. On a successful save. There’s Save-Or-Suck, and then there’s the immensely rare Save-And-Suck! No wonder Microcosm is ONLY on the Psychic’s list! Anything with more than 16 HD is unaffected if they succeed their save, but all their allies are likely in an everlasting dreamland now. The big issue is that the HD restriction is way tighter than you may think; creatures, especially at higher levels, usually do NOT have HD matching their CR, but if you’re mainly battling level-appropriate Humanoid or Monstrous Humanoid creatures, Microcosm is fairly reliable in such battles, as those foes typically have HD that roughly matches their CR. But if you’re up against, say, Dragons or Outsiders, good luck bud.

Side note: Microcosm and Sequester used in combination make for excellent ways to start your own morbid collection of living creatures, just like your icy master! Just make sure you have some non-Divination means of seeing them, as Sequester blocks even True Sight.

[gascon-en-exil]

Good points all around. I can fill in some details on the negative perception of M/M content.

In the last decade or so, transformative fandom has been disproportionately dominated by M/M content, equivalent to and sometimes even more numerous than M/F content. You can see this in AO3 metrics, as well as in many of the big-name ships and ship drama of the 2010s, ex. the Johnlock Conspiracy of Sherlock, Destiel of Supernatural, or the Voltron shipping war that kicked off the anti-shipping phenomenon. In more recent years there have been attempts to explain the reason for this abundance of gay male-centered fan content, because it certainly isn't reflected in published media which continues to favor straight relationships or, as the ask points out, marketable lesbianism.

One conclusion has been that it's the fault of horny straight women "fetishizing" gay male relationships, and because horny is bad in some internet circles and "fetishizing" anyone is bad then it follows that all that M/M content is also bad. This results in what I've seen dubbed the "eat your vegetables" mentality toward F/F, where people attempt to push lesbian content as morally superior to M/M for all manner of reasons, and to condemn fans and fandoms that still favor M/M. Focusing on male characters is misogyny, yaoi reduces gay men to heteronormative stereotypes, erotica itself is bad and M/M content, like the hypersexual culture of real-life queer men, is just overall too horny to be truly progressive, (this one from TERFS) yaoi "converts" women into gay trans men, etc.

Somewhat related to this, it's also become something of an in-road for straight men (like...you know...) to enter into the performative social media game of determining the worth of everything based on how progressive you can make it sound. Fujoshi, after all, can always rely on the line of thought that they're women exploring their sexualities and that to oppose this is classic patriarchy, while queer men like me know that our sex, our relationships, and the ways we engage with those subjects in fiction will always be politicized regardless of anything else we do or believe. Now though these men can freely express their revulsion toward M/M content while claiming to be feminists supporting lesbians...provided that it's a safe sort of lesbianism that's still accessible to them (as always happens to be the case when it comes to talking about fictional lesbians) and that that feminism also comes with some oddly paternalistic caveats like those found in a certain notorious piece of fanfiction.

This all however rests on the assumption that M/M and F/F are of equal appeal to everyone, which is patently untrue especially when discussing erotica. This only holds up if you view queerness through an abstract, nonthreatening, and virtually sexless lens, with its existence only valuable insofar as it allegedly proves how progressive a piece of media is - that performative social media game again. I can't imagine anyone who enjoys any sort of queer content genuinely thinks this way - but it's sometimes useful when they're trying to win arguments on the internet.

That brings me to FE and all this recent nonsense. It's clear that what really bothers these people about Dimitri's queer subtext, and that there are fans (sometimes even queer fans!) who enjoy it, is that it threatens their established belief that Dimitri, Rhea, and the Lions represent all manner of conservative/reactionary evils that their fave stands against. It's very similar to their dismissals of Dimitri's mental illness or Rhea's own bi-for-Byleth sexuality for that matter, because that's more axes of oppression they can't be allowed to exist on. As I know personally, it's not enough to even partially buy into the Eagles as the "gay house," because I also ship Ferdibert but have been told more than once that I ship it the "wrong" way - meaning how I see both characters in relation to Edelgard, of course. This has never gotten me to stop shipping Ferdibert, by the way, but rather just left me a bit annoyed, as well as reminded of this meme:

You may imagine who's who.

At least I can probably take some satisfaction in knowing that I likely won't have to hear from that person again, because I imagine that listening to me talk for a solid hour about all sorts of Three Houses/Hopes pairings, including quite a few F/F ones, is too tall of an order. How I'd love for this crowd to try tangling instead with the anti-Studentleths over on Twitter, who'd promptly call them all pedophiles for shipping Edeleth. The trouble with always trying to claim the moral high ground is that eventually someone will claim an even higher ground than your own.

I’m sure sending you an ask off anon will probably get me put on a list of some kind but fuck it, I’ve already got one unhinged stalker, what’s another one in the mix lmao, and i want to make it extremely clear that I support you in this.

Like it really says something that these stannies absolutely do not quit after four damn years of the same thing. Doesn’t matter how factual you are (correctly citing art history in its original intent and context, canon game dialogue and timelines, interviews, etc), how polite you are, how straightforward you and others are because none of that matters at all to these chumps. This is a straight up gamergate-style sealioning campaign that in the end isn’t really about edelgard at all—she’s just the convenient platform for these people to expound their insane maximalist fandom-as-politics viewpoint that has irreparably damaged houses’ reputation for fans and has conflated videogame communities as a testing ground for in-group loyalty metrics.

Aside from what you and others have already said, it’s telling that they always follow a set script: Church Evil and Fascist, Edelgard Revolutionary and Morally Good, alongside truly reprehensible weaponisation of identity politics and socjus buzzwords. It’s not enough to assert that Edelgard is a pure lesbian hero (biphobia what), it must mean that by diametrically opposing her, Dimitri has to be evil, straight (but when they grudgingly acknowledge his queerness, it’s then asserting that said queerness can only exist within him being repressed and tamping it down because of evil Faerghian misogynist politics, never mind that Adrestia is the biggest misogynist of the continent lol), and singularly obsessed with targeting what she represents; Rhea, the chief architect of all that is evil in Fódlan and directly responsible for its misogyny, homophobia, and whatever else alongside with lobbing assertions of her being a “groomer” (which anyone with half a brain cell not dedicated to being chronically online know is now a popular right-wing argot used to directly target the lgbt community with truly heinous accusations equating them to paedophilia), among other things.

Only extreme statements and buzzwords for the characters, all the time: Edelgard as a hero, Dimitri and Rhea as representatives of ontological evil that Edelgard must defeat with extreme prejudice.

Let’s also point out the fact that in a true debate—because they’re not really debating at all and I say this as a professional debater myself who has won medals for this shit and trained youth teams in my country—the onus on the opposing side has to accept neutral statements from their counterparts. They cannot seriously say that their statements on Edelgard must be taken as fact while simultaneously discounting yours as fiction, because at best that would obviously be called out as ad hoc attempt to muddy the waters; at worst, blatantly trying to control the debate solely with their own parameters as the only acceptable ones, and thus openly attempting to silence dissenting opinions. If they really want to try to convince others that they’re really presenting legitimate debate, they cannot seriously pretend that their actions support that claim when they:

Approach you first and then continue to hound you

Constantly repeat themselves in an attempt to wear you down and confuse you, which is absolutely something that can be penalised in formal debate

Get offended and then accuse you of abuse when you firmly disagree with them and draw boundaries

Let’s also not forget the fact that their actions as a community absolutely do constitute harassment when they’ve been caught gloating about running moonlitboar off tumblr, the revelation that they keep a list of Edelgard critics to monitor them, forcing vas to apologise for expressing negative opinions about Edelgard (note how Rhea gets called so much bad shit but you don’t see Rhea fans calling for her haters’ blood), and even prompting YouTubers to change entire videos to avoid backlash, if not to simply stay in their good graces (and milk them for views and ad cash)

Aside from absolutely garbage essentialist Pure Lesbian Women are from Venus, Evil Repressed Hettie Obsessed Men are from Mars viewpoints, it’s truly mind boggling that they’ve bought into the belief that f/f is somehow purer and “less problematic” than m/m solely because they’ve decided that the heavy mlm moments for the Lions must point to their inherent moral degeneracy, which I would again like to remind them that that is actually homophobic; hell, I’ve seen quite a few using fujoshi as an insult. Let me take the time to explain that fujoshi and mlm fandom in Asia (explained by Asian fans themselves!) has always been seen as a symptom of mostly women fans being disgusting and “rotten,” and that their interest in mlm relationships is not only a betrayal of their gender (and ofc fujoshi as an insult in the west is a popular argument with terfs), but a sign that they’re degenerate and that something is deeply wrong with them.

Never mind that across the world, ff in media has sadly mostly been used as porn fodder for straight, misogynist men, because lesbian sex titillates them while gay sex repulses them. Utena is the outlier in a sea of garbage and said ff garbage is mostly shown as porn anyways. Gengoroh Tagame, a popular gay mangaka, has spoken about how female fans of mlm in japan are often big supporters of lgbt rights. Let’s not even get into the fact that the demographics of most edelgard spaces (like r/edelgard) are of straight men.

I also really despise how they’ve discovered “antisemitic” as a new buzzword. I’m Jewish. I loathe how most people only seem to care about opposing antisemitism when it’s in a videogame or movie, instead of in real life when we get hatecrimed. But it’d be remiss of me not to mention the way my blood boils when edelstans seriously repeat church slander of the nabateans being fake humans, evil reptilians wearing human skins as a disguise for them to manipulate the world from the shadows and using a fake, evil religion as their cover (not to mention how they describe the tenets of said religion as evil and conveniently forge and misrepresent its texts to make it look worse…where have i seen that before), who impede societal development to keep themselves on top, and, as the cherry on the shit cake, as miserly hoarders who keep monumental wealth to themselves and refuse to use it to help others.

Really makes you think then that it doesn’t take much for them to admit they see the Nabatean genocide as a positive, that its completion is necessary for edelgard to succeed (even if they hem and haw about what they think would happen to byleth, Seteth, and flayn), and borrowing from blatant irl genocide denial rhetoric saying that the agarthans (who are literal moustache twirling evil villains) were the original inhabitants who actually got genocided by the nasty coloniser lizards and that their retribution is absolutely justified and understandable. I laugh to think what their though process will be like if they even play the jugdral games.

And finally, since it bears mentioning, they should keep byleths name out of their fucking mouths. As a huge self admitted Byleth stan, seeing them whinge and whine and bitch and moan about poor Edelgard getting criticised really grinds my gears when the last four years has been seeing me constantly trying to navigate a fandom space that relentlessly shits on byleth and says they ruin the games and are nothing but player pandering or when people fucking celebrated the scene of shez killing them in hopes. Edelstans don’t get to try and use them as a prop to prove how edelgard is so good to them (and is so pure as a whole) when we have quantifiable data showing that Byleth smiles the most in verdant wind, has an incredibly strong character arc in azure moon, and that for THREE ROUTES OUT OF FOUR in houses (two if you count hopes scenarios when they’re kept alive) they always end up opposing her, because that is their actual character. Let’s talk about how r/byleth is mostly populated by r/edelgard fans who mostly post porn of fem byleth but have admitted to actually hating her, but liking the fact that she’s got big tits and can be used for yuri fanservice. Or let’s talk about feh: all their alts so far show their loyalty and closeness TO THE NABATEANS. And fuck it, I’m of the opinion that actually the devs’ edelgard bias is what ruined byleth and what made them silent. Because when they’re separated from houses (and thus not in her immediate focus), they fucking shine!!!

Tldr: hi raxis, what’s good!!

Addendum: edelgard has the most 3h alts in feh, cipher card art showing her naked and/or with suggestive costumes, is the most attached to the avatar characters in 3h/hopes/feh of her roster, is named first in the dlc for 3h in engage, has the tea set paired with hreslveg blend, ETC. if that’s not obv favouritism by an obv mostly male dev team, then, well…

Hey, how are you? Hope things are well!

When thinking about that exchange from the other day, @butwhatifidothis had an excellent post that put into words more eloquently than I could about issue:

They are right - I never mentioned it myself because my brain didn't quite go there, but many of the arguments were basically "this character would do this hypothetically", which is nothing more than mere headcanon.

Full disclosure, but I am not a professional debater. I am not even trained. Back in school I famously hated debates because I always felt they relied on twisting facts rather than empirical data. I liked data, that's why I went into the Sciences.

The only debating in Science is whether your results are accurate and if your method is indisputable. Is this ethical? What are we basing our ethnics off of? Proper science doesn't care about your opinions, or how bad so and so was back in the 1700s. Science - and Math - liked numbers, and numbers are cold and inflexible.

So I must admit that debating (not discussions, but debating) do tend to make me nervous at times. I like to learn, and to be challenged on how I view the world. But debating is not a skill I am honestly good at. I can lost track of the original point. I can get discombobulated by the lexicon and factoids when they are rapid fired at me.

That's why I engage in them. It's practice. If I don't do it, I will never get better.

And my untrained eyes could see that this debate... was not really a debate, but a shake-down. I was curious to see where it would go.

If anyone else finds this in this situation, here is my unprofessional advice:

Do not insult or use language that could be misconstrued as aggressive. Remain polite and sincere. Remaining polite does not mean agreeing to everything they say. But, instead of saying something like "You are wrong!" re-word it as "I don't agree with your view" or "I do not believe that is correct".

Do not let yourself be bullied. If this means you wish to disengage, just disengage. Make it comfortable for yourself. In my case, I was comfortable to keep going, but that may not be true for you. They make take this as a win, but you aren't being graded on this and this isn't politics. It's video game stuff.

Use only facts, do not use headcanons or opinions. This makes it harder for the other person to fight you, because you are remaining neutral. If you wish to discuss or bring up something that is not based on text, be sure to make it clear.

Call out when they twist your words. One user claimed that I had once used their name in my post. I never did, so I asked them where I had said that. It forces the other user, if they wish to respond, to either acknowledge they made a mistake, or they risk making themselves look like liars.

Never take it personally. They don't really know you. They are just bored and angry.

Always try to get them to think. This one I am still trying to master. When they make a claim, ask them why they think that. Why are they drawing that conclusion? What if they thought about it this way? If they are regurgitating whatever they have heard from others, they may get tripped up by this. This does run the risk of irritating the other person, but I find it is a helpful tool to both learn and to challenge your opponent to explaining themselves better.

This is the hardest one of all. Do not lose sight of the topic. It is not uncommon for these discussions to go a million different directions. If you lose sight, you may end up on a path you don't want to be on. Stay on topic. I'm still working on this too.

It's really cool that you are a trained debater. If you have any other further advice, or if my advice is terrible, I would love to hear it!

Ultimately, I think many of these types of fans just want to use whatever buzzwords and language they can to not only guilt the other party into bending a knee to their opinions, but to also shame anyone who likes another fictional character.

It's really a shame that other fans feel the need to go to such lengths over someone who is not real.

But per your addenhem, it is true that Edelgard gets a lot of love and attention from IS. She is popular. She doesn't need someone to come sweeping in defending her fictional honor.

Poor Claude really gets the shortest end of the stick in all this. This guy doesn't even have the same number of alts as Dimitri in FEH.

The sexuality stuff confuses me the most. Perhaps it is because my particular sexuality makes up 1% of the population, but I usually don't see why it is such a big deal when it comes to FE. FE doesn't make statements about sexuality. It is not try to teach about sexuality. It is not trying to push an agenda of any kind except the Make Money Agenda.

This weird vilifying fans of who likes mlm content, often framed as disgusting straight fujos who fetishize men. I find this an odd statement. From my point of view, anything that has any sort of sex is fetishizing, period. Straight, gay, whatever.

Well, regardless, thank you for the nice ask. I hope I could give is an answer that gives it justice. :)

[fr-economics]

is it possible to make money investing in fest skins? any idea of how to tell which ones will be more valuable later?

I thought about this recently. Early in my FR career I stocked up on "Xanadu" (Brightshine 2018) for no apparent reason and later sold a few for 600g each, though they're not that valuable now. It was then tempting to invest in fest skins, but I haven't put a lot of effort into figuring out what sells. I think it's similar to reselling UMAs in general, with the caveat that fest skins can skill be obtained through Joxar boxes.

My hunch would be that you can see what's popular in the UMA market and apply it to this. Right now, Skydancer and Wildclaw skins are pretty popular, as are jewelry/silks type skins. However, since everyone can obtain as many fest skins as they want, people will probably stock up on those popular ones during the fest week so supply will be higher even later on. Skins that are harder to obtain (ie: coli/brewing) may be more valuable later due to lower supply.

A good project for someone with free time would be to track fest skin prices (as well as how they're obtained during the fest week) and see if any patterns emerge.