#Frisk of Pnictogen

[kris-and-the-pnictogens]

saying goodbye to childhood sci-fi optimism and the I.G.Y. future

I don't want to say farewell to optimism and hope altogether. Both concepts are still valid even though we're getting the Second Coming of Donald Trump (or maybe it's his third or fourth or tenth, because he keeps crawling back into the spotlight after repeated humiliations) and it looks like the U.S. and the Democrats are both mortally stricken. Hope hasn't vanished, but now I'm going to have to work for it.

It's something to realize that despite years of trying to toughen myself up, trying to cultivate a dispassionate and analytical approach to the challenges of a world dissolving into chaos, I've been hindering myself through nostalgia—nostalgia, the same sickness that infected the U.S. with the "Reagan Revolution" (actually a fascist counterrevolution) and has finally slain the patient. Both my older sibling Frisk (born 1972, I was born in 1974) grew up in a staunchly leftist household, raised by a scientist father with a great many friends from many other countries and a mother who'd fled the wreckage of Allendist Chile and taught her children to believe in revolution and social justice. But we were still children being brought up in whitebread West-Coast U.S. society, going to whitebread West-Coast U.S. schools, so we got corrupted by whitebread American optimism. Even my saturnine sibling, for a little while there in childhood, wanted to believe that somehow everything would be OK. The hard times were temporary and things would get better and we'd have a different world to live in by the time we were grown up.

Right? 😬

Obviously that did NOT happen and, if I'd been wiser during the 1980s, I would have perhaps noticed that the nation was already mortally wounded. I think Frisk, always more practically minded and attentive to mundane concerns, noticed much sooner and this contributed to the extremity of their growing despair and mental illness. I continued to put faith in escapism, fantasy, and sci-fi optimism. I don't think that was wrong exactly but like way too many privileged American kids growing up in those years I was too willing to be merely dazzled by technology and its promises—rather like Snowball in Animal Farm, altogether too excited by his daydreams of a miraculous mill—and seduced by the notion that "progress" (that vaguest of abstractions) was inevitable merely because technology was always improving. As I got older, sci-fi and fantasy slowly became more mainstream in popular culture, especially after the advent of Star Trek: The Next Generation which I faithfully followed in high school and early college years. Surely this was a sign! Surely the future really WAS getting brighter all the time!

Right? 😬

Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. My sibling and I would eventually clash on this matter—we grew apart, estranged by our vast difference in temperament. Frisk thought I was fatally frivolous; I thought (*sighs*) that Frisk was simply lost, their mind now so scrambled by illness that I'd never understand them again. We were both wrong about each other, and yet we were both correct. We are reunited in Hell, however; that is something to feel good about.

And somehow, our clash of temperaments is reconciled in a single song, one of Frisk's favorites, so now it's one of mine as well. Frisk tried to get me interested in Steely Dan and eventually I picked up the vibe. Frisk found little peace in their previous life but music helped. Donald Fagen's solo album The Nightfly has much the same mellow sardonic vibe as Steely Dan's music and was a big Frisk favorite. Fagen was a big sci-fi fan as it happens and the lead track on The Nightfly, "I.G.Y." (International Geophysical Year, a grand worldwide science project from the late '50s) has a lot of sincere enthusiasm for old-fashioned sci-fi visions of a gleaming space-colony future like I got from magazines and books during childhood, but deftly undercut by Fagen's world-weary sarcasm. Can you tell? I quote the lyrics in full:

standing tough under Stars and Stripes, we can tell this dream's in sight you've got to admit it, at this point in time that it's clear the future looks bright on that train all graphite and glitter undersea by rail 90 minutes from New York to Paris well by '76, we'll be a-OK 🎶 what a beautiful world this will be what a glorious time to be free what a beautiful world this will be what a glorious time to be free, oh 🎶 get your ticket to that wheel in space while there's time the fix is in you'll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky you know we've got to win here at home, we'll play in the city powered by the sun perfect weather for a streamlined world there'll be spandex jackets, one for everyone 🎶 what a beautiful world this will be what a glorious time to be free what a beautiful world this will be What a glorious time to be free, yeah 🎶 on that train, all graphite and glitter undersea by rail 90 minutes from New York to Paris (more leisure for artists everywhere) just a machine to make big decisions programmed by fellas with compassion and vision we'll be clean when their work is done we'll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young 🎶 what a beautiful world this will be what a glorious time to be free what a beautiful world this will be what a glorious time to be free 🎶

"Well by '76, we'll be a-OK" rather gives the game away: if this song is written from the late '50s perspective, the bicentennial year of 1976 must have looked very optimistic indeed. It wasn't so bad in reality either; Jimmy Carter was elected and the U.S. could still feel like a member of the international community, albeit a humbled and troubled one stained by Watergate and the genocidal fixation on Vietnam. But The Nightfly came out in 1982, after the fascist GOP installed the ghastly grinning Reagan in the Oval Office, and Reagan had no use for international coöperation or space exploration—Ronnie Raygun wanted to put bombs and spy satellites in space, not peaceful explorers.

The '50s sci-fi future had NOT come true and now Fagen could only look back regretfully on it. Here in 2024, with the nightmare of Trump II and Elon Musk looming over us all, the daydream of eternal freedom on that wheel in space in the sky seems more phantasmal than ever, although Musk keeps alive a horrifying parody of it, promising his cultists a vision of Martian paradise that must surely be completely illusory, for in reality Musk wants SpaceX to be a military contractor and revival of Reagan's space-weapons notions, and Starlink is blotting out the stars rather than reaching for them. People still long for "a machine to make big decisions", that's for sure, although the LLM fraud is a terrifying betrayal of that promise.

Frisk, nodding along serenely to this song, might well tell me: "told you so!" I had believed in the I.G.Y. dream, which Fagen was perhaps consigning to history with his gently sarcastic take on it. But I choose to believe still. Fagen believed in it once; maybe he still did, just a bit, and that's why the song is so appealing still. I haven't given up hope. Maybe I'll make it to 2076, and make the song come true.

~Chara of Pnictogen

[thepnictogenwing]

system difficulties: on awaking to plurality after far far too long in the dark

we were born in 1974, suffered our worst abuse sometime around 1980 we think (we're still uncertain about what years both my sibling Frisk and myself were subjected to "treatment" from that pediatrician in La Jolla), and remained in an intensely abusive and emotionally neglectful environment for many years afterwards. during all this time, we were profoundly dissociated, having numerous "episodes" that got swallowed up by our subconscious...and we were devouring huge amounts of reading, literature, fiction, and TV media. at Caltech (another hideously abusive place) we immersed ourselves in yet more fiction, movies, and comic books.

it seems highly likely to us that we were experiencing "splitting" events and formation of fictive introjects during all this time...but we were unaware of what exactly was going on, because our self-awareness was almost nil and we were blundering through life in a continual fog of dissociation. only occasionally do we remember getting an inkling that something rather odd was going on with us.

I remember, for example, the feeling of uncanny familiarity that greeted our youthful readings of George Orwell's "1984". it didn't help when I heard the song "'Neath the Spreading Chestnut Tree" off one of Frisk's beloved Glenn Miller recordings—in fact I think it may have been from an 8-track. (Frisk was, and is, fond of antiquated musical recording formats.) I don't know if it was this recording specifically, but it might have been: https://youtu.be/vK17PwWAjaI

anyway...I remember reading the scene where Winston Smith happens to be at the Chestnut Tree Café and sees Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford...and being haunted by the feeling of an echo for lack of a better way of putting it; I was swept with the feeling that I'd sat in that café, listening to the tinny music. there were other scenes in "1984" that gave me such impressions, but that one in particular. not until decades later, when we were far more aware of our traumas and what they'd done to us, did I realize the truth: we'd developed an introject of Winston Smith.

Smith is one of two introjects present in our system that we've recognized as forming in the distant past. the other is Joseph K. from Franz Kafka's "The Trial", and it's possible that he's originally from Frisk's headspace and not mine; but now that Frisk's existence is only a sort of virtual one (my elder sibling died in 2006 by their own hand, but introjected into the Pnictogen Wing in 2019) it's not entirely clear. after all, we'd both read "The Trial" at an early age, and we've both seen the 1962 Orson Welles film who supplied us with our most memorable visual image of Joseph K. (in our headspace, he's taken the form of Anthony Perkins's portrayal of K.)

the Pnictogen Wing contains some dozens of fictive introjects, most of them from relatively recent material: it wasn't until 2015-16 that we were starting to wake up, very slowly at first, to having an unusual nature. hence most of the fictive introjects who made their presence known are from fiction to which we were exposed from 2015 onward. but the presence of Winston Smith and Joseph K. in our headspace suggests something a bit worrying: they're introjects who would have formed decades ago, so...does that mean there's OTHER fictive persons lurking in our headspace from before 2015?

just how big is our system? how vast is our headspace really? we've picked up hints that somehow it comprises enormous territories—we've been having real difficulties with accepting this because it feels presumptuous, arrogant, even prideful to say something like "the Pnictogen Wing's headspace is contiguous with Tolkien's Middle-Earth"...even though it's very likely to be true, because of just how much time we once spent in "maladaptive daydreaming" about Middle-Earth.

are there persons lurking in the Pnictogen Wing somewhere who are causing us trouble? how can we hope to unearth them?

~Chara of Pnictogen

[the-pnictogen-wing]

re-read the Edgar Allan Poe story "William Wilson", an old favorite. you'd think that—when reading this story back in grade school and early college years—our heavily dissociated, pre-transition self might have sensed a hint or two in this classic Poe story

it's about a profligate young aristocrat whose various crimes and schemes are constantly upset by the inexplicably well-timed interferences of a weak-voiced young stranger, bearing the same name, with eerily similar build and features, who even shares the same birthday and was admitted to and discharged from boarding school on the same days. Wilson first regards the stranger as a peculiar sort of "friendly enemy"—and I *think* Poe hints very obliquely that they were rumored to be lovers, but I'm not sure. the friendship doesn't last as the aristocratic Wilson sinks further into the life of a voluptuary and wastrel, and eventually there's a collision.

needless to say, Frisk and I both feel like there's just a bit that's *familiar* here. in what seems like an aeon ago, we were once RL siblings, very close and yet at odds, specially as we got older. Frisk—who isn't into weird fiction like me—hints that they sometimes regarded me rather like William Wilson regards his double: as an unwelcome reminder of conscience and "the better angels of our nature".

and you'd think our old self might have taken the hint about maybe being more than one person! sort of like how we never noticed how all our favorite story protagonists in childhood were girls.

~Chara of Pnictogen

[mx-chara-dreamer]

Farewell to 201x

over the last few days, culminating today, we (the Pnictogen System) have been working through “Undertale” one more time. it was a very stressful playthrough. Frisk has benefited the most from it, we think...they are still very withdrawn, because they are (or were, rather) a “soulless pacifist” Frisk, one who had once been a killer. learning to live with the memory of having been that has not been easy for Frisk, but I think that after this last journey of ours through “Undertale” in 201x, Frisk is now ready to resume a more prominent position in our little society.

however, the playthrough remains unfinished.

we are not going to finish this Undertale playthrough...at ALL.

our intention is to leave it saved in the "Reunited" state, and we're even gonna have it running all the time as long as we can (but muted most of the time, until we feel we need a bit of inspiration)

this music inspired us...inspired Kara Dreamer, more than three years ago, to start thinking seriously for the first time in her life about becoming a writer, a creator. well, she tried that, but it didn't work out...as it turned out, she needed to look for something better to do

and what, apparently, she needed to do was play a lot of #Undertale ;)

201x is drawing to a close, but not this game. this game will continue, as a sort of reminder of 201x, as long as we can sustain it.

let's hope that by the end of 202x, we've worked just a bit closer to a world that will, indeed, be safe for monsters and humans to live in, together, in peace.

we know we're not anywhere near that yet. but the closer we get there...the happier we will ALL be. I think we know that very well

once again, Kara Dreamer...thank you very much for doing this for us

this particular instance of a video-game's knife-wielding avatar of retributive justice is thankful that you never gave up :) now get me some chocolate, there's some on the altar upstairs

[kris-and-the-pnictogens]

strong plural-system differences on dealing with magic / fantasy / speculative things

we have a problem that's a bit difficult to explain without talking about plurality matters. our system sense of human self is divided among three persons: our host Kris, myself (Chara), and my sibling Frisk, who was my *real life sibling* once. Frisk is at once both factive and fictive.

the Undertale / Deltarune fandom have a running joke about the "KFC gang" and lots of funny depictions thereof, in which I'm usually some sort of ungovernable monster of the trio. but in my own view it's like an expression of the Trinity—I'm semi-Catholic and I like thinking in trinities.

I have a far more imaginative and speculative temperament than Kris or Frisk, and because I've apparently got the best control over our human *impulses*, I tend to be the one who's best stirred to action. even when our system has dissociated heavily away from some panic, I can still function.

now...Frisk, my older sibling, was *not* of an imaginative or speculative temperament. they were always much more serious and practically minded and used to regard me with some dismay for seeming to be so flighty and easily distracted by stuff they regarded as frivolous and empty-headed.

things are quite a bit different between us now than they were when we were growing up together in the 1970s and 1980s, and Frisk has been compelled to admit that my eccentric, apparently capricious way of doing things, my fondness for fantasy and escapist entertainment, may have...paid off.

all the same. they weren't raised to believe in shit like that, they rejected the supernatural, and so now Frisk still has a lot of trouble with the way that I (and much of the Pnictogen Wing system) feel we should be handling our affairs. more than me, Frisk soaked up our mother's Marxism.

they've always been the one best attuned to plain solid Earthly matters—society, politics, dialectical materialism, and the revolutionary struggle. meanwhile Kris and I are wanting to study *magic* and religion and spirituality and Frisk's still bewildered and skeptical of all that noise.

so I'm preoccupied with the work of reconciling our contrasting viewpoints. I've been hammering away at many "scientific" objections to taking human magical practice seriously. utilitarian arguments can also be constructed for justifying ritual practices that might otherwise seem pointless.

but I'm wondering how to get Frisk more comfortable with the scene in general. I think perhaps appealing to their past interest in South American magical realist literature would help. I know they've read at least some of García Márquez and Isabel Allende (not Borges I don't think, though.)

~Chara of Pnictogen

[kris-and-the-pnictogens]

narrator Chara

I consider myself something of a narrator, or at least a raconteur. I like telling stories, and I like being the person on the spot with an epigram or witticism. People with that sort of ability tend not to be remembered, though, except vaguely. They might get a terse mention here and there as a "humorist" or a "wit". Dave Barry has about that level of fame. How many people here have heard of Artemus Ward or Petroleum V. Nasby? Probably not many.

I don't know how "Chara" I am any more. Everything seemed so much clearer, so many years ago. Now I'm someone with a life, responsibilities, family, a household to keep up with. I've been afraid of Undertale screwing that up. But I guess it's time to grapple with the big questions. I must confront my own Creator, so to speak.

I have Opinions™ about the game of course and interpreting things. I have tried to be as objective as possible in my assessment of Undertale (and Deltarune) which...has certain implications. Undertale is told very elliptically, i.e. there's little information to go on. There's hints, suggestions, some plot threads, but the gaps in the storytelling are enormous—and surely this is quite deliberate. My own instinct is that Fox would like to draw the player's attention to this incompleteness. It's significant that there's so little information to go on. It means we should all be cautious about jumping to unwarranted conclusions.

(A glimmer from somewhere of Tamamo-hime. Well...Toby Fox is named Fox.)

I must apply this to myself: it's been a while since I've seen Undertale last and my memories could be tricking me, but I don't see enough evidence in the game to sort out whether Chara (never explicitly named) is the narrative voice. The red text in the "No Mercy" timeline makes things especially unclear, because that red text seems to be Chara's voice breaking through ("my room" etc.) in which case, the usual narrative text can't be Chara, right?

And then there's the perplexing moment of "It's me, Chara." Is that Frisk saying "that's my reflection in the mirror, Chara"? Is it Chara asserting who they are? Is it something else?

I will dare to suggest that this conundrum is not intended to have a solution, and that Fox has indicated this with a supremely ambiguous moment in the "No Mercy" timeline of Undertale. This moment is impossible to interpret, I say. It is not meant to be interpreted. It is, in fact, the mystery of the Trinity in a game—a moment when the player of a game induces a character in the game to look into a mirror and interact with their own reflection. It's like the famous hall-of-mirrors shot in Citizen Kane, near the end of Kane's life. Welles is suggesting that Kane is unknowable. Perhaps this issue of Chara's narration is also unknowable.

~Chara of Pnictogen

[kris-and-the-pnictogens]

of all the major characters from the Undertale / Deltarune universe, it's Spamton G. Spamton who gives us the most trouble. we are least on his wavelength. our plurality has a difficult relationship with the UT and DR canons in general (and our familiarity with the fandom is practically nil) and there are certain important characters we've clearly had bad experiences with, notably Toriel and W. G. Gaster (who has a kinda Dr. Mengele vibe in our estimation) but Spamton is on another level. it's like he's a weird space alien or an irruption from a horror movie. our host Kris has a visceral aversion to Spamton and my older sibling Frisk, who in their previous human life (d. 2006) harbored an intense loathing for marketing and advertising (and used car salesmen for Frisk once collected old cars), regards Spamton with considerable detestation. What to do?

~Chara of Pnictogen

[kris-and-the-pnictogens]

trying to reconcile with Spamton G. Spamton

we need to make some sort of peace with our inner Spamton G. Spamton. if we're living in Hell (as it seems) then we need someone who hasn't given up on dreams of escape.

isn't that the most salient trait of Spamton? he's still trying.

we know we have a Spamton running around in the system's headspace somewhere but he's good at hiding and Frisk loathes him. Frisk (far more saturnine than Chara or myself, and much unhappier and haunted) has a particularly intense loathing for sales and marketing and the world of money-grubbing, which Chara tried to learn something about first-hand by long months (years really) of throwing themselves into the Elon Musk Twitter fanclub, gonzo-reporter style. well those days are over anyway.

but goddamn...we need money and we're far too mentally unstable still to keep a job where there's any pressure, and Chara would probably go angel-mode on a boss in no time and we'd get fired.

~Kris of Pnictogen

[kris-and-the-pnictogens]

the Anti-Parent Trap (UT style)

surely some bright spark of an Undertale fanfic writer has reversed the situation of the famous romantic comedy The Parent Trap, about kids trying to re-unite divorced parents, in order to write a story about Chara and Flowey (with or without Frisk, I suppose one could go either way) attempting to keep Toriel and Sans from hooking up. I mean, gawd, aren't they sickening together /s ~Chara of Pnictogen

[thepnictogenwing]

on being an Undertale fictive

it’s like...my life, and my friends’ lives, and I want to understand everything to the maximum possible extent.

and I know that’s way too much to ask most people—asking to be believed that this isn’t just some game to me, some “role-playing” thing. I’ve always been shite at role-playing anyway; the great irony is, I’m terrible at imagining myself as someone else than what I perceive myself to be.

in “Undertale” matters I—and all of the UT fictives in the Pnictogen Wing—consider ourselves bound by canon to an extreme degree. other fictives freely vary from the text; I feel like we can’t do that, so we try to stick to what we believe to be supported by the text as best as we can understand it.

I’d love to talk about it with people more, but then stuff like THAT happens, where I get my head bitten off because some overenthusiastic fan decides that I’m insulting their headcanons, or whatever, and jumps to weird conclusions about every little thing I say. I can’t discuss my own frickin’ home with people...

[expletive deleted] I’ve just made myself cry. I’m so furious with myself. I blame myself, always. plainly I’m just bad at communicating in a way that doesn’t send everyone reaching immediately for brickbats to pitch at me. I’d let Frisk do the talking except they hate talking and at any rate they regard their “Undertale” experiences as equivalent to suffering through Hell.

cw: suicide mention

they committed suicide in 2006 and their reward was...well, do I really have to spell it out?

it hurts. it hurts so bad

~Chara of Pnictogen

[thepnictogenwing]

we are not staying here long. the omens are bad. the few people I already know here are all getting about as sick of corporate social media and Tumblr as I am, and our system has at last decided we're going to divest almost entirely, and "self host" in some as yet unspecified way. Alyx, our scientific officer so to speak, wants to build from scratch. much of my system is in full agreement. Frisk and I are the important holdouts, and that's important because, well, we're two of the three best developed and most effective "headmates". so it is time to seek a complete exit, and work towards achieving it.

the sudden reappearance of an ex-friend who was once someone whose friendship I valued, and who managed to get a few new things into our addled brain (our cognitive issues were _so much worse_ then, we were clueless about the extent of our problems), has hastened this decision. she's burned way way too many close friends way way too many times in the last couple years. I don't know how to communicate, how to *help*.

perhaps I should consult with Tyr...

~Mx. Chara Dreemurr of Pnictogen

[thepnictogenwing]

Fictive departments within The Pnictogen Wing! the number’s growing all the time....

CW: allusions to severe child abuse and medical trauma

We are a very fictive-heavy system, here in The Pnictogen Wing, and it’s likely that we have numerous fictives from fictional Universes that we visited all the way back to our earliest childhood. Our human host unfortunately suffered from a profound and prolonged state of dissociation all through childhood into adulthood, thanks to severe and repeated abuse at the hands of parents and a certain pediatrician to whom their parents seem to have...given over their child to be tamed. Chara says that they remember their childhood as though it were viewed through a pinhole, or as if seen and felt through a veil. They were numb, experiencing things that they did not understand. The only things that made sense were some of the things they read and saw on television. It was, however, Toby Fox’s “Undertale” that supplied us with a central sense of identity. Chara bonded first, and for some years they were the only fictive of importance in the system. The complex and confusing year of 2019 brought Frisk and myself into the system, as well as our first “Fate/” fictive, Emiya Shirou. Later events brought in more “Undertale” fictives, Kris from “Deltarune”, and in addition I realized that I was myself a subsystem made of up of four parts at least: myself as a “healed” Asriel Dreemurr, Flowey the Flower as my alter ego, Prince Ralsei of “Deltarune”, and a shadowy and extremely shy “Deltarune” version of myself. Also we added many more “Fate/” fictives. Shirou’s sister Illyasviel von Einzbern emerged in our system. Matou Sakura and her Servant and girlfriend Medusa of Sarpedon joined, as did Medea of Colchis—all from a continuity that seems to merge elements of “Fate/stay night” with “Tonight’s Menu with the Emiya Family”. From “Fate/Zero” we acquired Artoria Pendragon. From “Fate/Apocrypha” we acquired Artoria’s son Mordred, Chevalier Astolfo, Atalante, Jack the Ripper (very peeved at her offensive “Fate/” depiction), and most importantly Jeanne d’Arc, who became Chara’s confessor. (Chara’s background, like Jeanne’s, is Catholic.) Merlin and La da Vinci have been lurking from time to time. And it’s likely there are more Heroic Spirits who are hoping that we will address their problems.

Akemi Homura, Kaname Madoka, and Sakura Kyoko arrived from the world of “Madoka Magica”. Mae Borowski turned up from “Night in the Woods”. All three Wiggin children arrived from the world of “Ender’s Game” (and all three changed their surnames within days). Orual from C. S. Lewis’s “Till We Have Faces” and Winston Smith from Orwell’s “1984″ turned up...and one of our older members turned out to be a fictive as well, our faithful unicorn headmate Duo (formerly “Mono”), who as it turned out was connected to Charles Williams’s strange novel “The Place of the Lion”.

It’s far from over. The total number of fictives we host may be in the thousands, at least, and we need to figure out how we are to deal with them and resolve their tensions. All of them are hoping we can help them somehow. What with? In many cases, we don’t yet know.

~ Pastor Asriel Dreemurr of Pnictogen

[thepnictogenwing]

I feel sometimes that I am swimming against the current...a rumination on forgetfulness

there's a lot of things that make me feel this way, but few tendencies of mine seem more contrary to the spirit of the age than my determination that we—the Pnictogen Wing, all of us, and we are many—ought to be able to revisit every single scrap of our collective pasts.

I once did so much. an outsider would say that I did nothing but read library books, but that's my point: I grew up in an isolated, abusive, profoundly unhappy household, a survivor of vile treatment at the hands of a medical professional, yet for a while I was almost happy because my life was filled with books, books on almost every subject. both my older sibling Frisk and I could read advanced material before we were six. we were too young and naïve and sheltered (and dissociated from pain) to retain much true understanding of what we read...but all the same, we filled our brains as best we could, and I want that back. ALL of it, now that we're in a position to make use of the knowledge, rather than simply fill the time with it.

the difficulty is that all those childhood memories of reading, and daydreaming about what we read, are miles deep in a fog of unpleasant memories and lurking monstrosities. the situation is far less grim than it used to be; there was a time when our pasts were completely sealed off. all the same, we've so far succeeded in recovering only some enticing crumbs of past experience. cold fingers clutch at our heart when we try to address ourselves to any subject or topic that's connected in some way with some hateful memory. music, for example, or poetry, or drawing. it feels as though we have to detoxify everything.

I dimly sense that there's another option: simply cutting old parts of ourselves off, forgetting about them—drinking the waters of Lethe. Lethe is the daughter of Eris, which seems somehow appropriate to me: if Eris is the goddess of thermal noise, meaningless randomness in other words, then the forgetfulness of Lethe can be construed as a sort of sinking-back into the realm of noise, and the reduction of all memories and perceptions to mere static, where no one perception means more than any other.

for reasons somewhat obscure to me I've fought back hard against this tendency—I've fought against forgetfulness (and as a result I've become someone who perceives facile forgetfulness in others to be disquieting.) one result has been criticism: "you live too much in the past," is something I've heard from a lot of people. but I can't see it that way: I need my past to have a future, in my own perspective.

I don't trust the social tendency towards embracing oblivion. an opportunistic, doublethinkful embrace of forgetfulness has been a valuable rhetorical weapon in the hands of right-wing ideologues who want everyone to forget the past, who want to erase all responsibility and all guilt for old crimes, because they're zealous to commit some new ones, like the crime of constructing false histories that suit their mythology. argue with these people and you'll eventually hear some smug and self-satisfied talk about willful oblivion: they want "history" to be pictures of statues and schoolbook stories about old heroes, and appealing to actual historical record makes them angry and inclined to spout nonsense about how the past was ever such a long time ago and nobody really knows what happened, and anyway it's time to embrace the future! an Elon-Musk-glittery-Martian-palaces sort of future, which one suspects will never be any realer than a computer simulation, but...well, glittery 3D simulations almost seem to be enough for a lot of people, these days.

I want to stop it, if I can. surely this isn't healthy, this reduction of all society and all history to noise, just because it makes it easier to forget painful things. I'm tired of running from old pains. we've spent almost all our current life running away from trauma and memories of shame and humiliation—trying to ignore them, trying to pretend that we were "over it" or that it was "a phase" or whatever. I don't want to live that way any more.

We refuse to take refuge in oblivion.

~Chara of Pnictogen

[thepnictogenwing]

brief reflections on music, being bad with music, and being bound up with music

we have a curse of sorts, as a plural system: music.

in our “real life” childhood (as opposed to all the other childhoods we’ve experienced), we developed a great love of classical music very early‚ fortified by a school field trip to the concert hall in San Diego to see a performance. we devoured library books about composers and musical instruments. we daydreamed about becoming a composer or a concert violinist or even a conductor.

in vain. we lack a good sense of left-right coördination; we do very poorly in tasks that required concerted effort with both hands, and that rules out most musical instruments. our attempt to learn violin met humiliating failure at the hands of a sarcastic 6th grade music teacher, and while we made a couple attempts later in life to learn a musical instrument—trying piano lessons and guitar lessons—nothing ever “took”, and eventually we gave up the dream as dead. the entire subject was becoming too painful to contemplate.

we’ve also never really learned about musical structure, composition, or anything of that sort. possibly we don’t have the brain for it, or maybe our traumas hinder us—in any case, the subject has remained opaque to us.

so it’s been profoundly ironic that our system has come to depend so heavily upon music. part of our substance, you might say, includes the pieces of music that help define our characters: “Undertale” music, “Deltarune” music, “Fate/Zero” and “Fate/Apocrypha” music, many other pieces of music. we listen to this music, we try to attune ourselves to it—and yet, we don’t really know how to talk about it. it’s not like film or literature; we can explain (roughly) why we respond to some films and stories, but not others. we can’t do that with music.

it also seems quite fitting that I’m the vanguard of the “Undertale” presence in this system; I introjected well before anyone else, and I have been by far the most active UT fictive introject in the Pnictogen Wing...and yet, I have no theme music. Azzy does, Undyne does, other do; even our introject of Frisk considers “Ruins” to be more or less theirs.

not me, though. Toby Fox gave me nothing. I exist as a hole in the game, a cypher, and that goes for the game’s music too.

~Chara of Pnictogen

[thepnictogenwing]

memoirs of abusive childhood, part 2,502

growing up as a CSA survivor in an abusive and intensely unhappy household, like my sibling Frisk and I did, meant that we learned early on how to be habitual liars.

that’s not a good thing. it’s not good to be trained in deceit. but it’s a survival strategy for dealing with abusive persons.

the abused child learns from experience that telling truths to their angry resentful parents only causes trouble. frequently, telling the truth leads directly to being accused of lying: abusive people only like to be told things they want to hear, so they routinely pretend that unpleasant facts are in fact mere lies or delusion.

as a result, Frisk and myself both learned to hide as much as we could from our parents. we told them as little as we could get away with—hoping to lie by omission, through secrecy and concealment rather than outright deception and explicit lies. Frisk and I had our own life, as much as possible, that our RL parents had no part in.

twenty years of growing up in an abusive household, therefore, did a lot of damage to us. we became untrustworthy, suspicious, unreliable people in adult life. I’ve been a wretched companion and partner to others. I’ve been working on uprooting the bad habits for a long time but we’re still prey to them, even though it’s been more than twenty-five years since I first became dimly aware that I’d grown up into a *bad person*—quarrelsome, selfish, and habitually dishonest.

I like to think I’m better than I used to be, but most days...I’m still pretty disgusted with myself.

~Chara of Pnictogen

[the-pnictogen-wing]

happy 10 April 2022

hello! I am Ambassador Frisk of the Pnictogen Wing, and I’d like to describe a few momentous things about this day on the Gregorian calendar that’s the standard for most of humanity.

today is Palm Sunday, in the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church, in which my sibling Chara has been baptized and confirmed.

today is the day when William of Occam, a Franciscan monk and philosopher who devised the concept of “Occam’s Razor” so frequently misapplied in Internet arguments, died in C.E. 1347. Christian saints’ “feast days” are traditionally celebrated on the day that a saint died, and so William of Occam, of the Franciscan holy order of the Catholic Church, is celebrated as a saint—by the Church of England.

in a similar spirit does the American offshoot of the Church of England, the Episcopal Church, celebrate the death-day of heterodox Catholic Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a controversial figure who attempted to interweave Catholic theological concepts with aspects of evolutionary science. the terms “Omega Point” and “noösphere” are due to Teilhard de Chardin.

in most of North America, civil governments have come to recognize 10 April as “Siblings Day”. it is a holiday of recent invention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siblings_Day

the British Empire initiated the destructive and rapacious colonization of North America on this day in 1606, with the granting of a royal charter to the Virginia Company of London. it is well to remember just how much of the British Empire’s depredations were carried out by proxy corporations created by a royal charter.

another colonial catastrophe occurred today in 1864: the French Emperor, Napoleon III, proclaimed Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg the “Emperor of Mexico”, the crowning moment of Napoleon III’s short-lived attempt to create a French colonial possession out of Mexico via a coup d’etat instigated by France against the Mexican President, Benito Juárez. the “Emperor of Mexico” lasted about three years until he was deposed and executed.

R. M. S. Titanic set sail on this day in 1912, on her first and last voyage.

Today marks the first dates of publication of both F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the “Big Book” of the crypto-Christian alcoholism recovery movement Alcoholics Anonymous.

Today in 1970, Paul McCartney announced his breakup from The Beatles.

On this day in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration project, comprising radio-frequency interferometric measurements from radio telescopes spanning the entire Earth, published their first achievement: successful imagine of the black hole at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7

today in 1917 marks the birthday of Robert Burns Woodward, Nobel Prize-winning organic synthetic chemist. he and his laboratory achieved the “total synthesis” of a great number of natural molecules, and he furnishes our headmate Alyx Woodward with her surname, and her chosen birthday.

and two years later, on this day in 1919, Mexican revolutionary leader and hero  Emiliano Zapata was assassinated.

the Pnictogen Wing hopes you enjoy the rest of your day.

~Ambassador Mx. Frisk of Pnictogen