#I should write that one post talking about how I interpret the chaos system in each game separately

[no-light-left-on]

So the Death of the Outsider lacks a chaos system and it makes perfect sense

(I recommend reading my other post on how chaos works in the DH universe first but it is not mandatory.)

The point of the chaos system is, at its core, a reflection of how a world already at its tipping point reacts to the player's actions: Dunwall ridden by the plague and oppressed by the Lord Regent’s rule, Karnaca bloodfly-bitten and slowly torn to shreds by the Duke with people scared after the recent coup.

Billie, however, simply exists as a person once the world has been tipped towards the better, Emily having reclaimed her throne and Karnaca slowly but surely steering towards better times. Her quest is not motivated by politics or by a falling empire. It is entirely personal to her, Daud, and the Outsider.

Billie is an ex-assassin. She puts the world on a tipping point, but she does not decide whether the world rights itself or comes crashing over the edge. She takes jobs from the black market, sometimes killing people for money, because that is all it is to her - a job. And while she may kill innocent people while at it, there is no more terror it can bring atop the cruel rule of the Duke and people dying in the mines. In the end, she will disappear into the shadows. It is just another mugging, another unfortunate murder of a father coming home in the evening. Nothing more, nothing less. No responsibility to take over it after.

She is dedicated to her quest, and that quest is not even hers - it is Daud's, and she is just going along with it out of maybe guilt, maybe old times' sake. She is not even that interested in killing the Outsider herself, has very little stakes in it, and decides to go through with it because it's what Daud wanted. There is no world that can react to her because she is the world that is reacting, in a sense, to Daud's wishes and the Outsider's subtle interventions.

Compared to, say, DH2 which takes place months before the events of DotO, Billie has very little to lose, no place to reclaim, no world to save. The results of her actions, no matter what they might be, won't change how the world is at the end of the game. Emily can choose whether a brilliant doctor lives so she can save lives, she decides whether the Howlers or the Overseers take over Batista, dictates who rules and with how much power, with what level of cruelty. Billie is killing a god, no matter what it takes, and there is little need for consideration of how this result is achieved.

The game does not even have targets, save for one, the Outsider himself. All the missions are about gathering intel and preparing for the job. The structure of the whole game is very different to serve the purpose of the plot and honestly it's a clever choice so that the focus remains on the one thing only - killing the Outsider.

One thing I did not mention in relation to chaos in my other post is that the chaos also influences the Outsider and his speeches at the shrines. Which, fair enough, it is just one more change in dialogue among many. But in the case of DotO, he is directly involved. He is not an observer anymore. He has real reason to be emotionally invested in what is happening and what Billie is doing. He needs to bait her into murder, or change her mind to spare him and free him from his eternal imprisonment. There can't be a change from interest to cynicism as Billie kills more people to get to him, because in the end, he is the target. He wants out of the Void by any means necessary, which means he has to be fully invested at all times. He has no reason to suddenly go soft and make subtle comments. He comes across as so much more malicious in this game, maiming Billie and being so incredibly cruel when he tells her that Daud has passed while she was away. All this because he can't risk her changing her mind, thinking to herself, “Hey, maybe he sucks but he’s not That Bad” and then turning on her heel to leave. He is trying to influence Billie instead, which he didn’t do with his Marked (unless you count his mentions of multiple possible outcomes as influencing, or him telling Daud about Delilah).

So no, the world won't change for you, the player. It won't change because you chose not to kill anyone, not even the contract targets, because if you don't do the dirty work, someone else will. And the Outsider cannot change either, because Billie is not changing the fate of an empire. She is changing the fate of Him, personally, and he cannot afford to let her choose the only bad choice - indifference. So there is no point in a chaos at all.

No matter what Billie does in the end, the outcome will be the same - the Void will change. sShe will change the universe as they know it, but no matter how she goes about it, the change will come. She is not faced with a question of what she wants the world to be. She was guided there by others, expected to do one thing - kill a god. The world has set her up, and now she has to react.

And so she comes to the Void and is met with the only choice that will matter: Is she going to show mercy, or remain the same?

[that-spider-witch]

On “Dead” Cultures and Closed Spiritual Practices: Why Colonialism Is Still A Problem.

Let me start this by saying that, as far as my knowledge of Paganism and Polytheism as a whole goes, I’m what the internet witch community calls a “Baby Witch”. I’m stating this out of the gate because I know there will be lots of people, including witches who have more experience on the craft than me, who might decide to ignore what I have to say based on that fact alone, stating that I’m not knowledgeable enough to give my opinion about this.

Here’s the kicker: I’m a ‘baby witch’, yes, but I’m also a twenty-six year old Venezuelan woman. I’m an adult. I’m Latina. I’m a Christian-raised Pagan,but I’m also a Latinoamerican woman over all other things including that. I grew up on this culture, these are my roots. It is because of this background than I’m writing this post today.

Looking through the “Paganism” and “Witchcraft” tags of this website, I’ve seen a few posts throwing indigenous deities and spirits’ names around on lists alongside deties of open cultures. Yes, you can know better by doing your own research and not going by what just a random Tumblr user wrote on one post (as I hope its the case with everyone on this website), but the fact that pagan beginners are still getting fed misinformation is still worrisome to me.

There’s nothing like reading a so-called expert putting Ixchen (Maya), Xolotl (Nahuatl) and Papa Legba (Vodou) on the same damn list as Norse, Hellenic and Kemetic deities and tagging it on the tags aimed at beginners who might not know better to truly ruin your morning. I’m not mentioning user names here: If you know then you know.

To quote @the-illuminated-witch on her very good post about Cultural Appropriation: 

“Cultural appropriation is a huge issue in modern witchcraft. When you have witches using white sage to “smudge” their altars, doing meditations to balance their chakras, and calling on Santa Muerte in spells, all without making any effort to understand the cultural roots of those practices, you have a serious problem.

When trying to understand cultural appropriation in witchcraft, it’s important to understand the difference between open and closed magic systems. An open system is one that is open to exchange with outsiders — both sharing ideas/practices and taking in new ones. In terms of religion, spirituality, and witchcraft, a completely open system has no restrictions on who can practice its teachings. A closed system is one that is isolated from outside influences — usually, there is some kind of restriction on who can practice within these systems.”

A counter-argument I’ve seen towards this when someone wants to appropiate indigenous deities and spirits is to use the “dead culture” argument: Extinct cultures are more eligible for use by modern people of all stirpes. It is a dead culture and dead religion. It would be one thing if some part of the culture or religion was still alive, being used by modern descendants, but the culture died out in its entirety and was replaced, right? They were all killed by colonization, they are ancient history now, right?

Example: “If white people are worshipping Egyptian deities now, then why can’t I worship [Insert Aborigen Deity Here]?”

To which I have two things to say:

Ancient Egypt’s culture was open and imperialistic, meaning they wanted their religion to be spread. This is why Kemetism is not Cultural Appropriation, despite what some misinformed people might tell you. Similar arguments can also be made for the Hellenic and the Norse branches of Paganism, both practiced by people who aren’t Greek/Norse.

Who are you to say which cultures are “dead” and which are not?

Religious practices such as Vodou and Santería certainly aren’t dead, not that it keeps some Tumblr users from adding Erzuli as a “goddess” on their Baby Witch post, something that actual Vodou practitioners have warned against.

Indigenous cultures such as the Maya and the Mapuche aren’t dead, despite what the goverment of their countries might tell you. The Mapuche in particular have a rich culture and not one, but two witchcraft branches (The Machi and the Kalku/Calcu). Both are closed pagan practices that the local Catholic Church has continuously failed to assimilate and erase, though sadly not for lack of trying:

“The missionaries who followed the Spanish conquistadors to America incorrectly interpreted the Mapuche beliefs regarding both wekufes and gualichos. They used the word wekufe as a synonym for ideas of the devil, demons, and other evil or diabolical forces. This has caused misunderstanding of the original symbolism and has changed the idea of wekufe right up to the present day, even amongst the Mapuche people.”

For context, the Wefuke are the Calcu’s equivalent of the Familiar, as well as reportedly having more in common with the Fae than with demons anyway.

This and other indigenous religions are Closed because it is wrong for foreigners to just come and take elements from marginalized groups whom are still fighting to survive and that they weren’t born into. To just approppiate those things would be like spitting in their faces, treating them and their culture like a commodity, a shiny thing, a unique thing to be used like paint to spruce up your life or be special.

I know some of you are allergic to the word “Privilege”, but on this situation there really ain’t a better word to explain it. You weren’t born here, you don’t know what it is like, you are only able to see the struggle from an outsider’s point of view.

If a belief or practice is part of a closed system, outsiders should not take part in it. And with how many practices there are out there which are open for people of all races, there is really no excuse for you to do it.

Why Colonization Is Not “Ancient History”

If you have kept reading all this so far, you are probably wondering “Ok, but what does Colonization has to do with any of this?”

The answer? Everything.

With the general context of culture appropriation out of the way, let me tell you about why the whole “dead culture” argument rubs me the wrong way: Here in Venezuela, we have a goddess called Santa Maria de la Onza, or Maria Lionza for short, whom’s idol statue I have been using to illustrate this little rant. If you happen to know any Spanish, you might recognize the name as a derivative of Santa Maria, aka the Virgin Mary, and you are mostly correct: Her true indigenous name is theorized to have been Yara.

And I say “theorized” because it is a subject of hot debate whether she was really ever called that or not: Her original name, the name by which she was adored and worshipped by our ancestors, might have been forever lost to history.

That’s the legacy of colonization for you: Our cultures were stolen from us, and what they couldn’t erase they instead tried to assimilate. Our ancestors were enslaved, their lands and homes stolen, their artwork and literary works destroyed: The Maya and the Aztec Empire were rich in written works of all kinds, ranging from poetry to history records to medicine, and the Spaniards burned 99% of it, on what is probably one of the most tragic examples of book burning in history and one that people rarely ever talk about. 

People couldn’t even worship their own gods or pass their knowledge of them to their children. That’s why Maria Lionza has such a Spanish Catholic-sounding name, and that’s why we can’t even be sure if Yara was her name or not: The Conquistadors couldn’t steal our goddess from us, so they stole her name instead. Catholics really have a thing with trying to assimilate indigenous goddesses with the Virgin Mary, as they tried to do the same with the Pachamama.

On witchy terms, I’d define Maria Lionza as both a deity and a land spirit: Most internet pages explaining her mention the Sorte mountain as her holy place, but it is more along the lines that she is the mountain. 

You’d think that, with Venezuela and other Latinoamerican countries no longer being colonies, we’d be able to worship our own deities including her, right?

As far as a lot of Catholics seem to think and act, apparently we are not.

The Catholics here like to go out of their way to shame us, to call us “cultists”, to ostracize us, with a general call to “refrain from those pagan beliefs” because they go against the Catholic principles. Yes, the goddess with the Catholic-sounding name, a name she happens to share with a Catholic deity, apparently goes “against Catholic principles”. You really can’t make this shit up. (Linked article is in Spanish)

This is just an act of colonization out of many, of not wanting to stop until the culture they want to destroy is gone. Don’t believe for a second that this is really their God’s will or anything like that, they are just trying to finish what years of enslavement and murder couldn’t. They might not be actively killing us anymore, but they still want us dead.

So no, colonization is not some thing that has long passed and now only exist on history textbooks: It is still happening to this day. It is by treating it as old history that they can keep doing it, and it is by pushing the narrative that our indigenous cultures are “dead cultures” that they try to erase our heritage.

Because we are not dead. We are still here, we are alive, we have survived and we’ll keep on surviving, and our gods and goddesses are not yours to take.

¡Chao! 🐈

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: Do the intellectual elites basically set the direction of how society thinks? Over the centuries, the general public has followed philosophical trends in the academic world so how do these beliefs and academic theories filter down into the mainstream? Is there anything we can do to stop it?

It may seem like in our current turbulent times that the elites do the thinking for the masses. And if one stands back to look at the flash points of intellectual history that indeed feels true. But equally one can stand back and ask critically if this is really so? 

Who are you actually talking about? Who are these intellectual elites? I dislike these generalisations because they are unhelpful. How does one define elite? Is it intellect? Is it cachet of social position? I think our so-called university elites - professors etc - are in their own existential crisis because of how commodified a university education is becoming. They are beholden to students as consumers. It’s a worrying trend.

Of course it didn’t use to be like that because then our intellectual elites had both recognised intellectual prowess and a social cachet. In other words they had power. I think the modern day academic is many ways a powerless and even pitiful figure at the mercy of university managers and money men.

Nor do I think one thinker dominates over others as they might have done in the past.

A case van be made that ideas today are democratised. Power resides wherever their is a vacuum. It doesn’t reside in the class room but on social media.

In our more recent times intellectual trends like post-modernism and now social critical theory have been seeping into the mainstream. Even Donald Trump has brought up critical race theory to the wider watching populace as a beating stick over the left.

But many ordinary people would be hard pressed to name the actual thinkers (outside of just lumping people together as an amorphous mass e.g. cultural marxists or far right conservatives). It’s more true to say that all ideas now fight in the market place of ideas as a product for people to consume blindly.

But why one idea takes off and another doesn’t is something I don’t have answer for. Or where is the point where ideas from top down meet reality from bottom up and create some kind of intellectual and social momentum? I don’t have time to get into that here.

Another thing is that like an MP4 download the compression size of the complexity gets eroded the more it is downloaded and passed around. In other words people start arguing over labels and top line arguments than actually grapple with the deeper and more complex ideas contained.

This isn’t to say there are no problems with such theories - e.g. critical race theory - because there are. For the record, I am hostile to such philosophies as a Tory as I am towards many lefty isms plaguing the modern university campus that find their way into the public square.

Rather than attack the messenger (ie people) one should critically examine the arguments from every side. This is true for any theory and wherever it comes from. We engage ideas not people.

I don’t want to sound like a broken record so let me play devil’s advocate and suggest an alternative if only to muse upon on it.

I was having a stimulating series of conversations with a professor of intellectual history and other academic historians and political scientists from prestigious French institutions at a friend’s dinner party not so long ago. Like any French dinner good conversation is expected along with good food and wine. Arguments are meant to be robust and even heated but never personal. Arguments are won as much by charm and wit as it is by intellect. It’s all very convival and civilised.

Anyway, we touched on many things from the sorry state French politics, Brexit, Trump, and Covid of course. The usual stuff I imagine. But because of who was around the table the discussion enjoyably explored much wider issues.

For me it’s always interesting to hear the premise from where people build their arguments. For the left secularist the Enlightenment becomes the cornerstone from which the lens of history is viewed and interpreted. For the conservative it’s anything before the 1789 Revolution. Both actually looked at change and the ideas therein as from top down. The ground up (or the view from below) was given short thrift.

I suggested an alternative premise more from a playful motivation than absolute empirical evidence - if only to liven things up a little as the conversation was becoming stale and even predictable.

Perhaps the direction of influence could also be seen the other way round? That is to say that philosophical theories formalise and develop ideas that are already in circulation in society and culture.

Did you get that? Let me explain.

Remember Hegel's beautiful and profound observation that 'the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. In the words what Hegel was saying was that philosophical theory comes afterwards, reflectively, when a development of ideas or institutions is complete and (he would add) in decline.

Plato's 'Republic', at least its political portion, was as the late Michael Oakeshott once put it, 'animated by the errors of Athenian democracy'. Any citizen could participate in politics and help determine policies and legislation without any knowledge of the relevant matters. Plato saw democracy as the politics of ignorance. If every other human inquiry or activity recognised expert knowledge - in his famous example, you wouldn't let just anyone, regardless of their lack of specialist skills, navigate a ship - why not politics, too ? Why should politics be special in not requiring knowledge of the proper ends and means of political action as a condition of participation. Think of this what you will, but the 'Republic' was rooted in its contemporary context and was a response to it.

Aristotle's 'Politics' is a theorisation of the Greek polis, which was already passing out of independent existence under the impact of Alexander the Great's conquests. Athens was a city-state, and a democracy (albeit a limited one). Even though Aristotle was not born in Athens his views were accepted until he was shunned after the death of Alexander.

Aquinas' 'Summa' was a response to the recovery of Aristotle's writings and to the ongoing beliefs and practice of the Catholic Church - as well, of course, to movements which he opposed in theology.

Hobbes' 'Leviathan' is clearly a recipe for avoiding the kind of political and social chaos caused by the French Wars of Religion and the English Civil Wars. They were in his rear-view mirror when he wrote his tome.

Hume's 'atomistic' view of the nature of experience as composed of distinct impressions and ideas drew on the model of Newtonian 'corpuscular' physics.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason asks how knowledge is possible, with the glories of Newtonian physics in the background. His emphasis on the place of reason in ethics is fully in the spirit of the Enlightenment's celebration of reason.

John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty' was a counter-blast to the pressure toward conformity which he thought he saw in the England of his day.

Logical Positivism was a response to the huge, brilliant developments in science - relativity and quantum theory - and took the form of scientism, the view that scientific knowledge is the only form of deep and accurate knowledge (of all real knowledge).

Marxism was a response to the embryonic birth of the modern capitalist system after the industrial revolution in Britain. Both Hegel and Marx formulated their theories by what they observed was happening with the birthing pains of modern industrial capital society. Cultural Marxism is a different beast entirely.

I could go on.

I am not suggesting, of course, that there was anything crude or mechanical in the way these philosophies emerged from their contexts. They all added independent thought of great subtlety. But their problems and the terms of their solutions were set by their times, at least as they understood them. It’s plausible but may not be completely true. But that’s part of the enjoyment of musing upon whimsical thoughts without the conceit of being certain.

Anyway something to think about.

Thanks for your question.

[heraldofzaun]

Hi. We’re doing this again. I’ve already spoken a little bit (well, a great bit) about how old lore Viktor wasn’t a stereotypical evil villain, but I keep seeing this interesting trend crop up - especially in the comments of analyses on Viktor’s character - and so I’m going to write about it. That trend is the fact that people seem completely and utterly convinced that only old Viktor “augmented without consent” or “didn’t respect free will” or similar mad-scientist-adjacent claims. This isn't true. The inverse is true, actually.

What follows is the entirety of Viktor’s old lore (I’m using the first - the second variant is the one that snips out his going to the Institute of War, I’m not trying to pull a trick on you or anything), his lines upon release (which are still technically canonical, even if many people believe them to be outdated - whether that is due to Riot still believing that they’re accurate to his character or, more likely, Riot not caring to replace them, I don’t know), and the accompanying blurb to his release comic. I am also including Jayce’s second lore, the one which Riot wrote after Viktor fans pointed out that Jayce’s original lore was contradictory to Viktor’s character. (Which is mentioned in the post I linked above. TL;DR: Viktor fans made such a fuss that Jayce’s lore got changed to paint Viktor as less of a villain, which again points to the fact that old Viktor wasn’t necessarily perceived as villainous by his fans. Of course, fan perceptions can be wrong - but canon was changed, so...)

This screenshot is missing his pick/ban quotes (“Join the Glorious Evolution.”/”Inferior constructs.” - ban quotes were added after his release, so they recycled one of his attack lines) and the quotes for Chaos Storm (“Obliterate!”/”Consume!”/”True power!”/”Behold!”). This is because it didn’t fit on my computer screen nicely.

This was written alongside Viktor’s teaser comic. (I personally really like the teaser comic, even though I’m concerned about Viktor cutting a hole in his laboratory wall.) It is, technically, non-canon material as it was posted on the now-defunct forums rather than anywhere on the client, but as we’ve seen a recent trend of Rioters Word-of-God’ing facts about canon, I may as well include it. There may be more Word-of-God confirmations on those forums as well, but the backup site that they’re currently hosted on doesn’t allow for searches as the original site didn’t either. You can find this on the “Development” tab of Viktor’s wiki page, if you’re curious.

Is there anything in here, besides “Submit to my designs.” and a few other of his voice lines, which should be taken with the context that they were a) written in 2011 and are thus not the highest examples of character-focused writing and b) written under the context of these being things he is saying to opponents on a battlefield, that says “Viktor augments people who are unwilling”? I don’t see it. He isn’t an angel, sure, because he wrecks Jayce’s lab after the man doesn’t want to work with him, but… He’s mostly alright, at least when it comes to the claims I’m investigating. (Also, note that his acolytes are not specified as being under his control or anything like that - they very well may just be people he’s helped, who don’t want a strange man smashing up the lab they were helped in.)

An interesting side-note: Jayce’s first lore does seem to imply that Viktor murdered people, as he “staged a deadly raid on Jayce’s laboratory”. This is concerning. There’s still somewhat of that implication in the second lore, considering the whole “incinerating the lab’s meager security force” line, but I’ve never seen anyone in fandom over the years use that as evidence for Viktor being a murderer, which is interesting. There’s actual textual evidence you can point to to say that Viktor’s a morally awful dude, and yet no one pointed to it when it was canon...I’ve never seen it cited in any character analyses for Viktor, nor have I ever seen anyone make the point that it’s people that Viktor’s incinerating. Food for thought, I guess. Anyways, my personal take is this: it’s security systems, not people. It doesn’t quite make sense, in-universe, for Viktor to murder a bunch of redshirt security guards but only blast Jayce aside - and leave him with no lasting injuries, obviously. Out-of-universe, you can say that it’s because Jayce is a champion, but still… It really doesn’t fit. Of course, I’m an old lore Viktor fan and this is entirely me trying to justify that he’s not a bad guy, so you can definitely take my words as biased. As we’ll see later, even if you take this as proof that old Viktor’s a killer, it doesn’t mean new Viktor is morally spotless.

Also, if you speak a language other than English and want to kill time, feel free to write in with what Jayce’s old lore says he did if you can find a translation of it. (If you go to the League wiki you can find other language versions of it, and from there you can poke around on Jayce’s page to see if it even has his older lore at all.) The Polish version apparently doesn’t imply people, but the Russian version uses “guards”... or so I think, my knowledge of Russian is pretty small so it was me and Wiktionary against the world. I think that League lore translations, especially from 2011, aren’t exactly the best material for textual evidence, but it’s an interesting curiosity. (I’m genuinely fascinated on how this was never a point of argument, and also to the fact that it was made much more ambiguous in Jayce’s post-outcry lore… but not removed.)

Anyways. Of course, you can take his lines and general character to a logical endpoint and say that it is implied that he doesn’t care much about whether or not people consent to the Glorious Evolution, but at that point you’re arguing interpretation and need to say as such. The cases I’ve seen in which people say that old lore Viktor was lopping people’s limbs off without consent or what-have-you just say that, without citing any textual evidence or saying that it is possibly implied by his character and lines. It’s pretty hard to take those claims seriously when there’s much more textual evidence that current-canon Viktor doesn’t seem too keen on respecting autonomy. Let’s begin with his own lore, which is written to favor his perspective.

Please keep in mind that this Viktor got his start selling automative technology to businesses in Zaun. The Zaun that is full of corrupt chem-barons. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he only sold to good businesses. (Also, fascinating that a common complaint about old Viktor is that his status as a pioneer of his field is that he’s “unrealistically accomplished”, and that other people would have figured out the same technology - just as it seems to be the case in current lore, with the Church of the Glorious Evolved existing pre-Viktor (except that it probably didn’t at the time of this lore’s release, as there’s a paragraph later on in his lore that talks about a “quasi-religious cult” that is unnamed but… Who else would it be?) and augmentations being common on the NPCs on the Universe page. Yet someone who’s 19 having their inventions be commonly used in Zaun long enough for the term eventually to be used in reference to the next stage of their life is perfectly acceptable. Anyways…)

What we see from this is clear: even if there is a “good” reason to control the divers, there is no mention of them consenting to the procedure. Considering the previous quotation, Viktor seems to deal more with the bosses than the workers and doesn’t seem to consider the potential job-removing impacts of his work (how many people lost jobs due to being rendered obsolete?), which doesn’t bode well for him caring much about what the workers think. But of course, this aside about dealing with bosses is all interpretation, so you can ignore it if you’d like. There still is, however, actual, textual evidence that new Viktor does not care about consent if he believes his idea is what’s best for you.

Ignoring the writer misusing the term “psychotics” - par for the course in fiction unfortunately - here’s Viktor kidnapping people “for their own good”. Nothing is said in his lore if he’s contracted to do this, or if he’s just Zaun’s version of a Good Samaritan out and about chloroforming people. While I’m not saying that the moral choice is to not intervene, he is drugging people here and performing brain surgery on them. Please note the “in a manner of speaking”. What does that mean? Is it in reference to them having permanent brain damage? Or is it in reference to him being all well-and-ready to transfer their bodies into robots that presumably weren’t designed for them? (Speaking of, if Viktor can transfer the consciousnesses - or at least brains - of people… why is he still in a fleshy mortal body? Yes, it would require a VU to update him to be fully robotic, but none of his written media seems to imply that he’s on his way. His color story has him integrating technology directly into his arm, for example. Why aren’t you getting into the robot, Viktor?)

Anyways, two options here: either the automatons had enough of their former programming to react to Viktor giving a kill command, or the consciousnesses of the people Viktor is “saving” are in these robots and are under his sway enough to commit murder. Either is bad (and negates any moral superiority over old Viktor’s maybe-implied-canonical-murder), but the second is horrifying. And, obviously, non-consensual. (Because the damage is reversing, I don’t believe there’s room for a justification of the second option in which these people are still violent and dangerous.)

Anyways, last bit. It’s pretty bad when your ethics are panned in Zaun, the nation host to rampart corruption and also people like Singed. Let’s now move on to his color story, which is what a lot of fans point to as evidence for new Viktor having a heart or a moral compass.

Yay! Moral win: your cyborg isn’t cutting off the head of a child without his consent. (Also, again, is this proof that Viktor can put brains or consciousnesses in robot bodies? Admittedly, he might be joking since this Viktor is a little softer than he is in his biography.)

Moral… win… your cyborg is augmenting a child… Anyways, joking aside, this is unethical. How’s Naph supposed to consent to something like this? I know that we can’t expect fictional characters in a fantasy setting to abide by modern ethical standards, but I think we can critique them from an out-of-universe context. This is bad. Viktor gives very little context, could very well be lying (he isn’t, hopefully), and sends the kid off with his version of a pat on the back and tells him to come back if he wants more. (The “Oh yes” is also… creepy.) A kid’s decision-making abilities aren’t developed to the extent that they can be reasonably expected to understand or consent to a procedure that removes a pretty crucial emotion. If Naph comes back and wants his fear gone permanently, will Viktor oblige?

Also, fear is something that is very important to survival and judgment calls. Without fear, a kid in Zaun might take dangerous risks that could end up with them dead. I can’t really see how people interpret this as a morally sound decision - Viktor’s pretty much giving mood-altering drugs to a child and telling him to come back if he wants another hit. Just because he got Naph’s okay doesn’t mean that he got informed consent.

Let’s now turn to the black sheep of Viktor content: his Legends of Runeterra lines. There’s two of interest.

Armed Gearhead’s card art is of a man whose only augmentation is his arm, which he says he broke in another line. (I suppose he didn’t want to wait for it to heal?)

Viktor is talking about messing with his head, here, because Armed Gearhead is… too emotive, I’d guess. He is “not yet complete”. A statement which Armed Gearhead seems rather apprehensive about, if you listen to his response.

I know that LoR Viktor is one of the more “comically villainous” depictions of Viktor we’ve seen, so if new Viktor fans would like to ignore his lines I have no issue with that. But these lines certainly seem to imply that what Viktor sees as Armed Gearhead’s end state isn’t necessarily what he sees as his, and should be considered if people want to take them as canonical.

Not necessarily needed, but here’s Jayce’s present lore. One of them is definitely lying - Jayce’s lore says that he doesn’t strike until after Viktor gives the kill order, and Viktor’s says that he gave the kill order in response to Jayce smashing up the lab. Either way, Viktor is ordering automatons (that, in this version, are outright stated to be housing the brains of the people Viktor is trying to keep alive) to kill Jayce. Not a good look.

Viktor’s new lore gives significant textual evidence that he doesn’t care for whether others willingly consent to his ideas, so long as he believes that his ideas are for the greater good. This is in contrast to the vagueness of his original lore, meaning that any individual who speaks about how current Viktor is someone who cares for consent in contrast to the “unethical mad scientist”ness of old Viktor is unfortunately mistaken. I have to imagine that general fandom interpretation, combined with the fact that his bio and color story are very tonally different, have made it so people believe that this version of Viktor is much more ethical than he canonically is.

Interpreting Viktor as sympathetic and actually morally grey is fine, of course! Riot wrote his narrative very poorly when he was updated, which is why I’m still finding bones to pick with it in comparison to his original and more open-to-interpretation lore. The issue is stating that this is canonically the case, which it isn’t, and/or stating that the current iteration of Viktor has the moral high ground over his previous incarnation, which he doesn’t. I think that much more interesting character conversations can happen if people acknowledge that Viktor as he’s currently written is roundly unethical - how can that be improved upon for a more complex character, does that mean that Jayce’s behavior was right, etc. For all my dislike of new Viktor, I’d be genuinely curious to read a take that actively acknowledges his pre-college work in automation and how that affects his standing in Piltover and Zaun. (Is he well-known in industry? What do workers think about him? And so on…) And, well, on a personal note: I think that acknowledging current Viktor’s moral failings would be nice, because it would mean that people would stop using old Viktor as a strawman.

Anyways, I suppose that’s the post. Thank you for reading!

[geekgemsspooksandtoons]

Why Bioshock Rebirth Part 3 won’t be a thing for a while

Guessing that title will work. I think considering now and on this day. There isn’t much else to do. I’m finally gonna talk about this. This is gonna be a long one. I’ll think about adding a keep reading thing as I make this. 

If any of you are a Bioshock fan or follow me. Or whatever else. I have this reimagining AU named Bioshock Rebirth. It has people who like it. There are mainly three parts on my mind. 

Part 1 and 2 basically deal with Rapture. Which are basically a reimagining of the main stories of Bioshock 1 and 2. With the events of Minerva’s Den being the epilogue. Part 3 from my mindset would deal with something outside Rapture. But I’ll talk about that later.

Yet I feel like to me. The reason I am not wanting to make a part 3 as soon as possible. Because it’s really tricky for me. I think I’ll just make the points and what my plans possibly were. Including I am gonna publicly reveal what my version of Zachary Hale Comstock would of been. Which is may be the most craziest decision. Whether people like it or not.

Now I just finished this post. I’ll put the tag after I write this. I will reveal I have a Bendy reimagining AU on my mind. But I want Dark Revival to come out soon. Which is why I don’t wanna focus more time on part 3. Along with other things. I feel proud or so with my work on Rebirth. I’m glad people love this AU/reimagining of Bioshock I made. :) So I will add the keep reading option. Now here is my detailed development of part 3. Not everything about it is there. But it’s a lot.

1. Part 3 would of taken 5 years after Bioshock Rebirth parts 1 and 2. Parts 1 and 2 took place in 2002. While part 3 takes place in 2007. Meaning the character ages have changed.

Basically Archie Wynand is 28. Elizabeth Comstock is 24. Brigid Tenenbaum is 40. Eleanor Lamb is 22. Even though Archie/Jack and Eleanor had her their ages sped up by people. With Archie being 10 and Eleanor being 12. But again there ages were sped up. Also the Little Sisters and Big Sisters that have been rescued have grown up too.

It depends on what characters would return. Like Delta/Johnny being 42. Daisy being 34. Booker being 43. Considering it’s not in Rapture. I don’t know if many characters would of returned. Yet that’s because I didn’t start writing possibly the main story for part 3. In case if anyone is worried. Many of the Vox Populi are fine. They must of moved on with their lives with Rapture sadly being a mess.

2. From what I get. The main story again was outside of Rapture. I seemed to be going with my old ideas I had for this AU. A public Rapture or the idea of Rebirth’s version of Columbia.

Considering Rebirth was born from the mistakes and retcons of Burial At Sea breaking the multiverse. Basically me disowning, shaming, yet acknowledging that DLC. So the idea I seem to be going with is that Columbia is the aftermath and America trying to make their own kind of Rapture. A public Rapture in a way for tourists. Something kind of like Jurassic Park.

Yet I don’t think it would be fully in the sky. It would be an island on water. With possibly Rapture under it. They built it over Rapture. 

Again Columbia is like America’s pale imitation of Rapture. With Rapture being discovered by America. Basically making profit off of it. Despite how tragic the results of Rapture of.

3. More on the main story. I think what it would be or as of now is Archie, Elizabeth, Brigid, and Eleanor going to Columbia or America’s public Rapture to stop Comstock. Considering this city has become a mess. The original idea is that it some how became worse than the tragedy of Rapture. 

With Big Daddies and Little Sisters being legalized. And Splicers or so possibly becoming more I guess crazy. With an old or possible dark idea of a Splicer eating out of a Little Sisters neck. Yet that’s really dark and just me showcasing some how this place became worse than the original Rapture.

4. Vigor’s in Rebirth would of been America’s knockoffs and pale imitation of Rapture’s Plasmid’s being reworked by Jeremiah Fink to make them more accessible so that you don’t have to inject them into your wrists. You could just simply drink them. 

Basically again they are strangely knockoffs and pale imitations in a way.

Shock Jockey is Electro Bolt. Devil’s Kiss is Incinerate. Bucking Bronco is Telekinesis. While some are again knockoffs. But some are original being the other Vigor’s.

But considering an idea from my anonymous friend who has helped me with this AU. With them mentioning well I’ll copy what they said instead. I’ll put the “ around it.

“Ironic considering the stereotype about most of the world's products being inferior knockoffs made in China. I can imagine that Fink's imitation of Rapture's products might be even more unscrupulous and dangerous compared to the original versions in Rapture, as the greater capitalist system intersects with the small-scale capitalism of that city.”

5. To be honest and I want to get this out of the way. The reason I am not making part 3 right away. Because I want to see if the leaks about Cloud Chamber’s Bioshock 4 are really true. Spoilers.

Basically the leaks being about that Rapture seemed to have been discovered. Now London is at war with ADAM being used. You play as a character named Lucas with other characters like Eleanor Lamb joining you. I want to see if this is all true. So I can see how Cloud Chamber interpreted of how the world would react to a city like Rapture. 

While there are folks who have made criticisms about people discovering Rapture being the end of the world. Basically being critical about the Bioshock series going in a Resident Evil like direction. Which I can totally understand.

But I’m gonna be honest. I want to see what Cloud Chamber are doing. Yet this horrible thing I’m gonna say next. As someone who’s.....opinions of their planet and maybe species is I guess low....I kind of don’t care. Because I want to see the chaos of the consequences if a place like America discovered Rapture. 

It’s maybe my darker side and my action junkie side having the best of me. I am strangely interested to see Hell on Earth all because governments got fucking greedy with ADAM. Again my opinion on my planet and whatever else is tricky.

Fuck it like we as a species deserve it. But I’m sounding pessimistic. I want to see war torn London destroyed by ADAM junkies.

5. My direction for part 3 I feel is weaker and not as powerful as parts 1 and 2. Because the general idea of part 3 seems to be, “America is fucking stupid. Because it empowers young rich pricks like Zachary Hale Comstock and makes shit like Columbia. Our country needs to be fucking better if really are the land of the free” It feels less original and been done before.

Compared to the first two part’s stories of humanity, found family, love, forgiveness, empathy, and compassion. Along with other stuff.

While I recall my inspiration for this idea long ago was this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXjJOmRkN6s If I recall it being like an example of....America’s thought process of it thinking it’s awesome or whatever the Hell. I wanna say stupid thinking. But that video is awesome. Amazing what that person did.

Also my version of Comstock I feel is less threating and less interesting than the likes of villains like Andrew Ryan, Atlas/Frank Fontaine, and Sofia Lamb. Unless I really tap and dig deep into his character.

There’s also the other thing part 3 I feel unless I decided. It doesn’t deal with dimension travelling and all that crap.

6. There’s another thing is that I used many of the major characters from Infinite and incorporated them in Rapture. Such as Elizabeth, Booker, Daisy, and the Lutece twins. I haven’t done much with Annabelle because she sadly died before the events of parts 1 and 2. Also Bluto is practically Rebirth’s version of Songbird when he was in Rapture. He was the Proto-Daddy.

Fink and Comstock are the only major Infinite characters I haven’t used.

7. Bluto’s robotic corpse would of been found by Fink and Comstock. He would of been rebuilt into Songbird as being the supposed mascot and guardian of Columbia.

It’s also a way of torturing Elizabeth mentally. Because two men practically took her protective older brother’s corpse and rebuilt him as something else. With the added angst that Songbird still have memories of Elizabeth.

8. Another reason why I don’t feel so highly of part 3. It’s because it just seems unrealistic. Which may sound stupid. My ideas of America’s own Rapture like place becoming somehow worse than the original Rapture seem crazy.

Along with things like legalized Big Daddies and Little Sisters seems crazy. Despite how stupid my country is. The idea of taking human beings and turning them into that under an American government seems like bullshit. Unless they didn’t know. 

Yet it seems to be dissing on America. Considering the direction of Comstock I’m going with is more like, “We’re America and we are great.” Yet everything goes to shit.

Along with the crazy idea of the place being built in 5 or maybe 4 to 3 years. Which is why I wanted to give it a timespan.

Also it’s a fun easter egg that it’s the time span of the original Bioshock’s development. Unless I make part 3 in 2013. But don’t think I should.

9. There’s been a recent idea of Lucas being an antagonist. Something similar to the Arkham Knight from Batman Arkham Knight. But I should wait and see if this Lucas character is seriously real. Yet what I have read about him, he reminds me a bit of Booker.

I’m guessing and even was thinking a bit more in detail. Lucas being a US Marine who was born in 1981. He’s 26 during part 3. Possibly being an anti-thesis to Archie’s character. Now I’m thinking he may of met Arch during possibly tours. Even though they weren’t really friends but knew each other.

With Archie being an earnest and kind man. Now this makes sense. Lucas being jealous of Archie’s position as, “The Demon Of Rapture” and, “The Killer Of Fontaine”. Lucas being a bit more angry and less honorable than Archie.

Man these ideas make more sense than Comstock being an anti-thesis to Arch. Yet we also have Frank Fontaine and Booker Dewitt being anti-thesis to his character too. But the idea of Lucas is strangely perfect.

The ideas I am having are he’s Columbia’s poster boy of a super soldier. But without the horrifying results of Archie’s origin possibly. Since Lucas I’m imagining is more equipped with stuff(Again thinking of Arkham Knight)....fuck this is strangely perfect. 

Man we haven’t gotten more info on this who I am calling Lucas Parkside....fuck I thought of more of him being a deeper character or so.

10. But again about Bioshock 4. Considering Rebirth is the result of Burial At Sea and also Infinite breaking the multiverse. It combined the worlds of the main universe(Bioshock 1, 2, and the Rapture novel if you want to include that) and Infinite. Which resulted in a timeline where Rapture was made later during the cold war. Along with characters like from Infinite being more connected to Rapture because of the events of Burial At Sea.

Yet Bioshock 4 or those Parkside leaks. I question if I should put them in here too. Because it’s unknown if well the events of 4 happened yet in the main universe. Unless we take into the good ending being canon. With 4 taking take in the 70′s what I read.

I’m rambling, I’m sorry about that. Basically the events of the novel and first two games happened. But the events of Infinite and Burial At Sea disturbed the main universe. And whatever I’m using some weird comic book logic. 

Again I hope sometime but soon I want more information considering Bioshock 4. 

11. I guess I’ll just reveal this now. Including I called him a young rich prick. I gave a hint early on. In fact this character was hinted at in memes. But him combing in Comstock was something I was surprised by long ago. Yet I felt I guess could be genius or whatever.

Only two friends of mine know. The anonymous friend. And also @feckinatlas

Zachary Hale Comstock in Bioshock Rebirth would of been the Mark Zuckerberg of Bioshock.

While there was the idea of making him the, “Radec” or something similar to make him more threating. But Booker is already that. Including the Mark Zuckerberg angle is something I’m interested in.

Yes Comstock is Rebirth is younger than his main universe counterpart. He’s also not Booker and possibly not related to him.

One of my original ideas was that he’s a year younger than Elizabeth. But I changed that and may make him possibly 30 or so. Or even Archie’s physical age or 29.

An old idea I even told Feckinatlas that him being Fontaine’s kid. But Frank never knew about him. Practically making even more of a terrible father. Yet I don’t know if I’ll go with that idea. Yet it seems better than Comstock being a kid of Booker. Which I don’t like. I was trying to keep the Booker and Comstock connection. I’m still wondering now.

Yes I think that’s all I’ll reveal now.

Edit I forgot this one other important thing. Oh crap two actually.

12. Considering Ava Tate survived and escaped Rapture. She would of been one of the villains in part 3. Basically she sided with Fink and Comstock. Ava is kind of like that character who might not care what side she’s on. Despite she has redeeming qualities in her.

13. Even though this wasn’t part of the main story. To be honest there are ideas that one of Elizabeth’s looks is like her Burial At Sea look. Yet she’s not a femme fatale. Basically it was the idea of her and Archie going undercover. With Elizabeth trying to pose as a femme fatale. Which in reality she isn’t. She’s still the same joyous girl that people love. It’s something a bit more strangely adorable.

Also Brigid tried to teach her some stuff of trying to act different. I remember talking about this with my anonymous friend. It’s mainly silly and adorable stuff before meeting her seeing Ava. Like Arch being pouty that he may have to put on a tux. When he’ll put on something like maybe Clark Kent would wear. He doesn’t wanna look like a rich prick and would rather have black ops gear on. While Brigid and Elizabeth find it adorable and funny he doesn’t wanna dress like Ryan and whoever else. Despite they would kick him out if he looks very normal.

But again Brigid teaching her some tricks. Along with Elizabeth trying to smoke to look cool. But she coughs and again it’s adorable. XD

This idea is like before the main story. But I should develop it more. It could still be before the main story. I wanted to share this because I forgot about it. 

[azwriting]

Binary Suns (Two Sides of the Same Coin, Din Djarin x Fem!Reader) - Chapter Two

A/N: This took forever to write and I’m so sorry! I had the worst writer’s block and I hope it doesn’t show in this chapter....

Summary: Mando and the Reaper find themselves in Mos Eisley where a shady young bounty hunter seeks the help of the Mandalorian. 

Warning(s): Canon typical violence, me having major writers block, posting this at 4 in morning unedited,

Word Count: 8431 (I’M SoRrY)

The Mandalorian had tried to do the right thing: he went against the Guild and rescued the small green asset, he had taken the child somewhere safe where he had hoped they could lay low for a few months, but trouble seemed to follow. Because of his years of rigorous training and the years he had dedicated to the Guild, he could have foreseen the inevitable bounty hunter tracking the kid to Sorgan, but taking on a new strange passenger? No training or amount of labor could have helped him predict that one.

It had been a few days since they had departed Sorgan, leaving Cara behind with “Until our paths cross” and “Not a scratch on my ship Dune!” It had been a few days and he still did not have a decent interpretation of the Reaper, (Y/N). Mando knew nothing about her, only the minor glimpses into her life that Cara had revealed and how oddly well the child and her connected. It was almost as if they spoke their own silent language.

There were a few things he did uncover though. They were small details but provided an insight into her guarded life. Without the white paint smeared around her eyes, the dark circles hidden underneath were revealed to him. He had mistaken the purple and bluish patches of skin for bruises until he realized they were not healing. She did not sleep much… that much he could gather. Late at night whether he was in the cockpit or the confines of his room, he could hear the faintest of movements, like the soft hum of a breeze. The Razor Crest was not quiet by any means, every step warranted creaking durasteel in response, yet barely any noise ever came from her. It was as if her feet never touched the floor…

(Y/N) was impossibly agile, quick reflexes, reacting to things before his mind had even processed them. Reaching for things before they had even fallen, catching the kid before he could get them all into trouble by pressing whatever button he could reach. Mando had seen it on Sorgan with the way she took out the raiders. All quick and precise movements, flipping up and into the air only to land before them and drive her spear straight through. It was unlike anything he had ever seen across the galaxy.

She constantly wore armor around her chest and abdomen. Whether it was sitting on the floor playing absentmindedly with the kid or sitting silently in the cockpit alongside him. It appeared as if she never took it off. Coming from the man who was covered in head to toe Beskar everyday, it seemed a little strange. An out of character trait for someone who was not devoted to any creed. He began to wonder what dangerous predicament the Reaper had experienced to make her so tense.

(Y/N) was jumpy, jumpier than him. Any great fighter had their senses heightened, always ready for the unpredictable, but (Y/N) was on a whole other plane of existence. Every little insignificant noise earned her gaze, earned her fingers grazing her blaster. Her reflexes making her ready to spring into action at any given second. Mando was positive that each and every time he entered the same area as her on this small ship that her breath hitched. She would be stiff for a moment until whatever irrational fear played out behind her eyes faded away. He tried not to take it personally, many beings feared him and it brought him a strange sense of joy sometimes, but strangely not with (Y/N).

The Mandalorian knew the weight of trauma, of secrets, the Beskar was not the only thing that weighed him down. He knew what it did to someone and he knew she harbored many secrets, a past that left a burden on the young Reaper.

Regardless of his own intense curiosity that was building beneath the helmet, (Y/N) never voiced any. She never pestered him about what was beneath the helmet, like so many did. In fact there were moments over the past couple of days that he felt that she looked straight through the helmet. It was one night in particular when she was just informing him that rations were running low, the child seemingly always hungry, that the visor that tinted his vision served as the only reminder that she could not see him. Her eyes always found his with ease despite the barrier. They were small gestures but he deeply appreciated them, not that he would ever voice that. Mando needed to remind himself that she was simply here to help with the kid, but he could not help but enjoy the new company. Although she could talk a little less…

(Y/N) had retired to her small cot for the night, leaving Mando and the child alone in the cockpit. The two were silent, except for the occasional chatter from the small green creature behind him. The Mandalorian kept his eyes trained on the vast stars before him, thoughts wandering to the woman below. He had never been curious, it was something that diminished in him as a boy during his training, yet this former Rebel had awoken it in him. She was as much as a walking mystery as he was.

A loud beeping derailed his train of thought, bring him back inside of the cockpit. His head looked around the control panel, searching for the indication of what was wrong, when he caught sight of the scanner. Behind the Razor Crest was another ship, its targets locked onto them. “Shi-” Mando could not even get a word out before a blast hit his ship, rattling the worn durasteel. 

“Hand over the child, Mando.” A demanding voice cut through the radio, almost drowning in the sound of other blaring alarms and the frightful whimpers of the kid. He quickly accelerated, dodging incoming blasts, although a shot hit one of the jets. The Razor Crest jolted forward at that, electricity crackling throughout the cockpit. With the chaos that was ensuing, Mando did not hear the footsteps climbing the ladder.

“I leave you alone for five minutes,” (Y/N)’s voice carried through the small cockpit as she entered. It had been longer than five minutes, he silently noted to himself. “And you somehow find trouble! Seriously you two!” (Y/N) pointed down accusatively at the child, a smile breaking through her teasing tone. The child babbled something in response followed shortly by a giggle. Perhaps if they were not in a state of peril than Mando would have found humor in the comment, maybe even allow a corner of his lips to twitch. Instead he was stone cold, focused on putting an end to the hunter behind him. “Hold on.”

(Y/N) hovered behind him, hands tightly gripping the molding of the cockpit’s viewpoint as Mando spun the Razor Crest around, the ship taking a few more hits. “I can bring you in warm or cold.” The hunter’s voice came from the radio and the child whimpered quietly, no doubtedly petrified. Mando suddenly braked and (Y/N)’s hands slipped from the ceiling and she stumbled forward, hands falling to clutch onto the Beskar pauldrons on his shoulders. He immediately stiffened, the cold from her hands seeping through his layers, the apology fumbling from her lips muted against the ringing in his ears. A shiver ran up his spine, but he was unsure if it was from her frigid hands or something else entirely. As his defense system locked onto the ship that was now before him, he banished his internal inquiry.

“That’s my line.” The Mandalorian declared firing at the other ship, it exploding into nothing more than speckles of dust. (Y/N)’s hands slipped from his shoulders as he moved to fiddle with multiple toggles and buttons, the Razor Crest whining in a state of distress. 

“Nice shot Mando, decent comeback.” A small noise escaped the helmet and she bit back a grin, turning to squat down before the baby. She could hear him mumbling about losing fuel as he tried to transfer energy elsewhere, the alarms only blaring in response, and the engine powering down. “Are we floating dead in the middle of space? Yes we are, yes we are!” (Y/N) cooed to the child, softly stroking one of his long green ears, earning her a soft giggle in return. His big brown eyes held onto hers, his small teeth poking out through his smile. She had never seen a creature so easily enthused, especially by her.

The cockpit abruptly was filled with red light, tinting everything in sight. A non-amused groan sounded from the chair to her side as Mando sat back down, continuously switching toggles. The engine sputtered back to life and the rusting gears of the pilot chair creaked. (Y/N) tore her eyes away from the baby, finding the man had swiveled his chair over to peer at them, the helmet tilted down. (Y/N) did not need to see his face to know the telling look of “Don’t underestimate me”.

It had been a few days since (Y/N) had joined the Mandalorian and the child on their desperate attempts to avoid the Guild. She did not know much about the man hidden behind the beskar and she had accepted that. She knew that the creed prevented him from showing his face, that the creed hid all remnants of whoever he was before. (Y/N) could understand that, could relate in her own way, the hood she adorned hid more than just a face. But during their few days in space together, in the small confines of his ship, she had uncovered a few things without ever having to ask.

Mando was quiet, never speaking more than necessary around her. He had been stiff at first, but she could feel him starting to loosen his resolve around her. She knew he hid behind a facade, but the child had started to break through that long before she even began accompanying them. The late nights where she could hear him talking to the child, who only offered incoherent answers, proved that. Waking up in the cockpit with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders proved that. Although that was something both of them never dared to address. He was not as heartless as he wanted others to believe.

He was protective. Perhaps it was his line of work that had brought it out or something he too buried beneath the mantle of a Mandalorian, but he was protective, overly so. Late at night when she could not sleep, a common occurrence, she could hear him up in the cockpit refusing to sleep afraid for the unknown. He constantly checked on the child, more so than her, even reluctant to let her leave the room with him. (Y/N) attempted not to take it personally, most of the beings he had encountered lately had been after the child, but she secretly hoped he did not think of her like so. She was here to help, not harm him.

She could feel a strange sense of comfort emitting from him, beneath all of the stress. (Y/N) was unsure as to why but he seemed to tense around her despite the deep, dare she say, relaxed breaths that escaped from the helmet. Whenever she looked to the visor, searching for eyes she would never see, he seemed to stutter in his movements, hands twitching at his sides. He was never just one emotion, that much she could tell.

Against her control, the sight of the helmet still brought forth unwelcomed thoughts. She would have to take a moment to calm her heart and he seemed to know to wait to speak when the flashes resurfaced. It was not Mando’s fault, he did not mean to stoke the inner fear she had from her youth, but it was just a foolish thing she could not control. With each passing day, (Y/N) hoped the sour taste in her mouth would disappear when her eyes first land on the Mandalorian.

Mando was a good person, she knew it. He tried to obscure it behind curt sentences, bloodied hands, and polished armor, but it was there. He too had the weight of trauma secured around his soul, tighter than the beskar, she knew that personally. Despite everything, she was beginning to enjoy his company. She enjoyed the silent looks, the hours spent playing with the child, the teasing remarks that only earned her a soft noise in acknowledgement. Spending so many years alone, having not one but two living and breathing beings around was an unexpected but welcomed change. And to think, she had almost fought him on Sorgan before a single word had been exchanged between them.

The crackling static of the radio pulled the hunter away, the visor returning to the vast expanse of space. “This is Mos Eisley Tower, we are tracking you. Head for bay three-five, over.” Mando confirmed that he was heading for the hangar, but (Y/N) groaned drowning it out. She stood back to her full height and eyed the sand covered planet rapidly consuming their view of space. “Mos Eisley?” Of all the places to land… 

“You’ve been here before?” The deep modified voice questioned. (Y/N) leaned over him, eyes narrowed and observing. She could feel the Mandalorian tense beneath her, the frigid chill of the beskar radiating through her clothes. She paid no mind to it as memories of the pale architecture of the former wretched hive of scum and villainy surfaced in her mind. It had been different then, just as it would be now. Back before embarking on a trip with a Mandalorian bounty hunter and a small green creature, back before the whispered tales of a hood black figure spread across the galaxy. 

“A long time ago.”

Climbing down from the cockpit, (Y/N) watched as Mando laid the kid down in a small compartment. He had seemingly fallen asleep during their descent, the thrill of a chase leaving his little body drained. “Will he be okay in there?” She was hesitant to leave him, not doing so since she had joined his side. The two of them bonded quicker than anyone would deem normal and (Y/N) did not have an answer, not a truthful one. She was scared to part from him, feeling the need to protect him. He was too important and yet too fragile. “He’ll be fine.” Mando assured closing the door. Sighing (Y/N) moved towards the ramp, waiting for the man to finish loading up his weapons. Her blasters never left her side, a habit that she would never shake. The horrors that had been seared into her mind, that bled from her soul with every step had made sure of that.

“No hood?” Mando suddenly spoke, moving to press the button that lowered the ramp. (Y/N) just shook her head, no she would not be needing it. The Reaper would not be present today. They both were silent as the ramp lowered, hands automatically flying up to shield her eyes from the blinding suns. The dry, hot, suffocating air of Tatooine infiltrated her lungs and the immediate uncomfortable prickling sensation of unbearable heat made itself known underneath her dark tunic. She could not imagine how agonizingly hot Mando was beneath all his armor and dark clothing, his skin no doubtedly producing the sticky gleam of sweat under it all.

A blaster went off pulling (Y/N) back to the hangar. Her one blaster was cradled between her hands, finger on the trigger, faster than she could process. “Hey! Hey! You damage one of my droids, you’ll pay for it!” A woman’s nagging broke through the tension. (Y/N)’s eyes fell over to Mando, finding his blaster pointed at a few pit droids. His face was turned towards her though and she could sense his eyes observing her and her blaster, as if he was taking a mental image.

A woman emerged from a small office in the bay, her unruly curls taller than her. “Just keep them away from my ship.” Mando huffed out holstering his blaster, (Y/N) following suit, only after assessing their surroundings. No trouble appeared to be near, especially from the tiny woman. 

“Yeah? You think that’s a good idea, do you? Let’s look at your ship.” The woman, a mechanic, chastised stepping closer to the ship with her datapad in hand.

The quiet chatter of the city streamed into bay three-five, gaining (Y/N)’s attention. She could not help the curiosity that came over. It had been years since she last stepped foot on this planet, the first planet she had ever come back to. She never stuck around long enough to see how change would progress. Looking back to an occupied Mando and Mechanic, she knew she would not be missed. (Y/N) walked down the rest of the ramp, stepping down onto the hard sandy ground, the exit just ahead. Her next step has not even touched the ground before rough leather clamped around her wrist. The heat from the leather burned almost as hot as the suns of Tatooine. If it weren’t for the steel, (Y/N) would assume that Mando would radiate pure heat, even in the coldest parts of space. Her hands were always cold, a striking difference between the man and her. She was certain Mando believed they were all differences, two things that could not coexist in the same atmosphere. But the similarities greatly outweighed that, two things that in fact orbited each other. Although he would never know that.

“Where are you going?” Frustration had twisted its way into his speech from the credit hungry Mechanic and confusion for her interrupted departure. The stone cold legendary bounty hunter was nothing like she expected, something she had been piecing together since Sorgan. His instinctual protectiveness over the child had proven there was more to him than what had been spoken of. 

“Relax, I’ll be back.” She attempted to rip her hand free, but his grip only tightened. Her eyes flashed up to his, narrowing with a challenge, an eyebrow quirking up as well. She could take him with ease, make it to the blast door before he could even stand.

 “Just wait a minute.” A hint of humor edged its way into the modulator and (Y/N) fought back a satisfied smirk. She was bound to break through that facade of his sometime. He turned back to the mechanic, never releasing her wrist, he was too smart to think she would stay. “I’ll get you your money. Just remember-” 

The curly haired woman cut him off, “Yeah, no droids, I heard you. You don’t have to say it twice.” Mando did not comment, instead he released (Y/N)’s wrist. His now free hand gestured for her to lead the way and she wasted no time jetting towards the bay exit, the hunter close behind.

The two stepped through the blast door, greeted by the quiet hangar alley. (Y/N) half heartedly expected to see the sickening white duraplast armor patrolling around, but with a heavy exhale she reminded herself that it had been taken care of. “Is there a cantina or something around here?” Mando asked reminding her that he was still in fact next to her. She rolled her eyes at his question, was there a cantina in Mos Eisley? He must have never been here, especially during the Empire’s reign.

 “Yeah, it’s just a few streets over.” (Y/N) answered, eyes scanning the area. Last time she was here it was bustling with smugglers, spice runners, and running fugitives. Now it was almost bare except for the occasional traveler and moisture farmer passing by. It was unlike Mos Eisley to be so… civilized. Pride attempted to rise in her, but she snuffed it out quickly. This was how it was supposed to be.

“When were you on Tatooine?” The words surprised her, the Mandalorian verbally seeking out information about her. She was astonished to know he was inquisitive, let alone about her. 

“It was one of the first places the “Reaper” went to.” It was the first real city she traveled to, bearing no identity as she removed any traces of the horrid Empire. It was wear the Reaper was born, her alter ego. (Y/N) did not associate herself with the stories that had spread across the galaxy. She was no guardian angel, no she was the person she had needed as a child. 

“That’s why you didn’t wear your hood.” Mando said more to himself than her. 

(Y/N) nodded in agreement, “They didn’t need to think it was some second coming and it’s nice to just observe, to see this prosperity that is attached to the name.” She could recall the weeks she had spent here, covered in grime that consisted of blood, sweat, and coarse sand. She had barely slept while freeing each and every small town or village of stormtroopers. If she had not struck them down, the few she did not, were left for the Tusken Raiders. 

They turned to their right where a pathway was lined with weathered Stormtrooper helmets, all pierced with stakes. He turned to her wordlessly, the tilt of the helmet indicating the question he did not ask. (Y/N) winked walking past him, “What? Didn’t know I was an artist?”

The cantina was quiet, only a few local patrons sitting around the old bar, the occasional droid rolling by. Mando approached the bar leaning against the worn countertop, “Hey droid, I’m a hunter. I’m looking for some work.” Out of the corner of his eye, he watched as (Y/N) rested against the counter beside him, eyes patrolling the small cantina and droid before them. She was paranoid so was he, but she always seemed to be on the lookout. Him shooting at the pit droids had her ready to attack in a split second. Just another telling reason as to why he determined she was jumpy. 

“Unfortunately, the Bounty Guild no longer operates from Tatooine.” The droid responded and Mando let out a sigh. 

“I could’ve told you that.” (Y/N) mumbled. He slowly glared over at her, eyebrows raised in annoyance. Her eyes widened in dramatics before she pursed her lips and turned to face the opposite wall. Expressive, he mentally noted, another thing to add to his list. She was extremely expressive in her movements and facial expressions. A part of him was relieved she had not worn the hood since Sorgan, he found her reactions to be… enjoyable.

“I’m not looking for Guild work.” 

The bartending droid was quick to retort, “I’m afraid that does not improve your situation, at least by my calculation.” Mando wanted to blast the damn droid, being of absolute no use.  How was he supposed to pay for repairs if he could not find a job? How would he buy rations for himself, the child, and now (Y/N)? He thought back to the simpler times where it was just him all by his lonesome, but had those times really been simpler? He enjoyed having the child now and he liked (Y/N)’s company, he had been alone for far too long.

“Think again, tin can!” A voice called. Mando twisted around to see a young man sitting in a booth with his legs propped up as if he was some high and mighty scoundrel. “If you’re looking for work, have a seat, my friend.” He added gesturing to the open seat across from him. The beskar helmet turned to face (Y/N), who already was focused on him. Wordlessly, (Y/N) lifted her shoulders into a shrug and Mando sighed. What other option did they have? He sauntered over to the small booth, (Y/N) staying at the bar. “Names Toro, Toro Calican.” The young man, Toro, boots dropped from the table as he placed down a bounty puck onto the table between them. “Picked up this Bounty Puck before I left the Mid Rim. Fennec Shand, an Assassin. Heard she's been on the run ever since the New Republic put all her employers in lockdown.” 

Mando narrowed his eyes at the boy, unsure how naive he could possibly be,“I know the name.” 

Toro pulled the tracking fob from his belt as he continued, “I followed this tracking fob here. Now the positional data suggests she's headed out beyond the Dune Sea. Should be an easy job.” Mando heard (Y/N) snicker from the bar, her head dropping in laughter. Toro was a newbie, that was for sure.

After Toro confessing that he was in fact, said newbie, he made the Mandalorian an offer he could not refuse. “You and your hot partner can keep the money, all of it. I just need this job to get into the Guild.” From his peripheral vision, Mando saw (Y/N) stiffen at his words. Through the security of his helmet, he allowed his eyes to rake over his new supposed partner. The thought had not yet crossed his mind, (Y/N) was now his partner, both protecting the child.

Her hair was secured in a braid once again, the same taupe colored piece of fabric woven into it, along with grains of sand that had fallen to embellish her hair during the walk here. She wore a dark blue tunic over a white long sleeve, the black armor as always wrapped around her torso. Mando took in her black belt and two holstered blasters, her brown pants that were tucked into her black boots, and something silver that gleamed inside her one boot. He swore it better not be anything of his.

His eyes found Toro’s to be regarding (Y/N) as well, although it was in less of an observant way as Mando had just done or at least that’s what he tried to tell himself. Mando was not pleased to find that Toro was eyeing his partner and so visibly, no discreteness to it. He leaned in the beskar plate pressing tightly into his chest, “She can see you.” Toro’s eyes snapped back up to (Y/N)’s face, who had not moved from her position at the bar. With her head staring straight ahead at the multitude of vials of different liquors one of her hands raised and gave the two men a short wave, indicating that she did in fact see them.

Toro’s mouth fell open as he searched for what to say, some pathetic excuse, but only straggled spurts of air fell from his lips. Mando did not grant him anymore time to find his words, “Meet me at Hangar three-five in half an hour. Bring two speeder bikes and give me the tracking fob.” They both stood and headed for the door, (Y/N) approaching them with a sly smirk on her face. Toro refused to meet her gaze instead holding Mando’s visor as his leather covered hand extended out for the tracking fob. Mando watched as Toro’s eyes widened as he glanced down at his hand and then back up to the helmet. Before anyone could react, Toro smashed the tracking fob into the stone wall.

(Y/N) let out a small noise and the Mandalorian bobbed his head in shock and annoyance. “Don’t worry, got it all memorized!” The young bounty hunter reassured tapping his temple. Mando mentally facepalmed himself, what had he gotten himself into? 

“Half an hour.” He repeated before nodding for the Reaper to follow him.

The minute the two were out of the cantina, (Y/N) grabbed his arm. “I don’t trust him Mando.” He looked down at her seeing the uncertainty embedded in her eyes, could feel it in the way her cold fingers clutched onto him. Even underneath the heat of the binary suns, her hands were still cold. He envisioned that even the heat of a thousand suns that they would still be cold, it was just another attribute that made up the mysterious Reaper, his new partner. The word still felt foreign in his mind, he could only imagine how bizarre it would feel tumbling from his lips. Mutely Mando nodded and her hand released him, leaving him to feel strange in its absence. He did not trust the kid either, but they needed the credits.

The two entered the hangar silently, the mechanic nowhere in sight. Surely she was gathering the parts she needed to patch up Mando’s sorely messed up ship. She would never say it, but the ship was older than them both and belonged in a ship graveyard somewhere on Jakku or Honoghr. Her ship the Weeping Sinner, a name her brother had bestowed on the old freighter, was newer than his. And yet, they had left that one behind on Sorgan in the hands of Cara. Her ship could have handled a shoot-out better than this.

(Y/N) followed the Mandalorian up the ramp still playing over what the wanna-be bounty hunter had said. “Partner.” She elected to ignore his words before that, but dwelled on the title he had given Mando and her. They were partners now, working together to protect the child, it was odd to think of. Their partnership was almost humorous considering the stories, the history she knew… but it was the three of them now. A drastic change to the solidarity she had grown accustomed to since the war ended.

Inside the Razor Crest, Mando moved to collect supplies for his trip with Toro and (Y/N) headed towards the small compartment to check on the kid. She was amazed he was still sleeping… except as her eyes fell onto the empty compartment, she realized he was not. Mando’s eyes seemed to have noticed the same gut wrenching sight at the same time because he quickly bolted over to investigate, confirming the child was not inside. His helmet whipped back to her widening eyes and they both took off running out of the ship.

“Hey!” Mando shouted down at one of the pit droids, who in terror collapsed down into itself. Durasteel filled (Y/N)’s stomach as she scoured her surroundings, searching for green ears and that oversized beige tunic. Where was he? Was he okay? Had someone taken him? The information Mando had told her when she first joined them, reiterated itself inside her head. “Imps had him hooked up to some machine, the client didn’t seem to be concerned about whether he lived or not.” If a hunter had found him there was no saying what could have happened to him, what was currently happening to him. The child was of grave importance, Mando had begun to put that together and (Y/N) had known it the minute she had seen him playing with the children of Sorgan, those little green ears perked up in joy. She felt dizzy, enough of them had suffered, the child did not deserve any harm.

“Where is he?” Mando demanded looking down at the quivering droid. Fear encompassing his voice even through the modulator. 

“Quiet!” The mechanic attempted to shout and keep her voice down at the same time. She emerged from her office, a small bundle secured in her arms. (Y/N) was quick to raise her blaster targeting the Tatooine native. She craved another weapon, one that fit in the palms of her hands better. A weapon that was quicker, cleaner, more precise in the hands of someone like (Y/N), someone who was as lithe as her. She desired the weapon the Reaper beared when taking down any outpost still flying the Imperial flag, still under control. But this was not the place, not without a hood, not with a Mandalorian she barely knew.

Muffled cries escaped the child as she walked closer, unaware of the blaster pointed at her and the tensed Mandalorian. “You woke it up! Do you have any idea how long it took me to get it to sleep?” The woman complained, eyes flickering between the two. She seemed unbothered by the two fighters standing before her as if she had stared down far more dangerous people. Living in Mos Eisley, it was possible.

“Give him to me.” Mando demanded, pointing at the incoming child. (Y/N) tightened her grip on her blaster, one foot stepping closer. 

“Not so fast!” The mechanic shifted to the side holding the child away from them. An animalistic sneer escaped (Y/N)’s lips as she took another intimidating step forward. Both the woman and Mando turned to look at her appalled, stunned by her fearless approach. (Y/N) was undeterred by their silence, only jerking her blaster up as a reminder to give them the child or else. Big brown eyes met hers and a soft murmur escaped the child, his claws reaching out for her.

A hand was gently placed on top of her blaster, urging her to lower it. (Y/N) swallowed slightly, not even looking at the man as she reluctantly holstered the weapon. Taking a deep breath, she tried to reign in the inner warrior that had escaped from its cage. “Please.” She whispered desperately, trembling hands reaching out. The woman seemed to hesitate for a moment, unsure of the sudden change in her, but against her better judgement she handed over the child.

A sigh of relief escaped (Y/N)’s throat once she felt the soft fabric graze her exposed skin and without a second thought she pressed his little body into hers. Content little sounds fell from the baby’s mouth and a claw raised to rest against her cheek. (Y/N) offered him a small smile, pleased to see he was in no danger and no harm had come to him. “Thank you.” Her voice was barely audible as she regarded the mechanic, who in shock just nodded. She could feel Mando’s eyes on her too but she kept her head down, basking in the joy of the child.

“You got a job, didn’t you?” The woman asked instead. Mando did not answer as he moved to collect his belongings from back inside the ship. She continued on anyways, “I figured you were good for the money since you have extra mouths to feed.” (Y/N)’s eyes drifted away from the child to glance up at the Mandalorian already staring back down at her. Her partner… Her (Y/E/C) eyes fell quickly, her cheeks flushing in the slightest. The awful sweltering Tatooine heat must have been getting to her. The child cooed up at her almost as if he was calling her lie. 

“It’s not like that…” She mumbled to him. She had been alone for so long, it was overwhelming to finally be near others again. Let alone have a partner.

Mando walked down the ramp and headed for the exit, (Y/N) and the child following close behind. Outside the hangar, Toro leaned against one of the speeder bikes, arms crossed, and a relaxed expression on his face. “Hey Mando, what do you think? Not too shabby, huh?” Mando was silent as he plopped his belongings down onto the one speeder bike. He moved to inspect the bike, clearly not impressed. “What'd you expect? This ain't Corellia.” Toro shrugged, looking over to (Y/N) and the baby. She did not meet his gaze, instead watching Mando strap his pack to bike. (Y/N) was uncertain about this hunt, Fennec Shand was a highly regarded mercenary with a big bounty over her head, there being only one other person as high as her.

“Hey kid, why didn’t you pick something easier to get yourself into the Guild?” (Y/N) prodded, jerking her chin towards him. 

Toro smirked slightly at her words, “Please as if any other bounty could get me in. The only other one worth such a high honor is the Reaper, but their just a myth.” 

(Y/N) faked a laugh, eyes flashing over to a quiet Mando. “You think the Reaper is just a story?” 

Toro nodded tossing in an unnecessary wink, “No one just helps others for free.” She shrugged innocently, knowing that perhaps there were people like that out in the galaxy. (Y/N) never allowed anyone to pay her for what she did, the most she would accept for her deeds was food and fuel. The work of the Reaper did not require payment, she found her reward in the relieved sighs, the gracious smiles, and the dissipation of fear and suffering. The Empire had oppressed too many and ridding the galaxy of such evil was enough reparation.

Mando sauntered back up to her side, a simple glove reaching out to stroke one of the child’s silky ears. “I’ll be back as soon as possible. Keep an eye on the kid.” (Y/N) agreed, eyes searching the visor for his. She knew she would never see them, but attempting to find them was enough. It was a game she played: if he’s tilting his head than his eyes must be there or he stiffened, I must have found them. (Y/N) wanted to remind him to be safe, to watch his back, but he was a Mandalorian, a skilled fighter… He would be fine.

(Y/N) watched as the two speeder bikes took off in a cloud of sand, the child babbling up at her softly. She smiled looking down at his sweet little face, “It’s just you and me, kid.” Another babble floated up to her ears, his head attempting to turn back. “Don’t worry he’ll be back soon.” Bouncing him lightly in her arms, (Y/N) turned to enter the hangar again. Before entering bay three-five, she cast one last glance out to the horizon, inwardly remind herself that everything would be fine.

The day flew by quickly and the binary suns rose the morning, greeting the two of them with the same insufferable heat. (Y/N) and the child made due on the Razor Crest, attempting to keep each other from the brink of boredom, while the mechanic worked around them. Peli, as she was called, was a nice lady (Y/N) could give her that. She had fed them both, dramatically professing how she would only add it to Mando’s other charges, but (Y/N) could tell she did not fully mean it. She could tell the lady enjoyed the change in company. Her and the child got along well too.

Although (Y/N) was going stir crazy. She had not sat around for so long, not since she had been in the Rebellion, but even then there had been something to do. She preferred to keep herself busy, it left less time to remember, less time to feel alone. But now she could only lean against the cold durasteel and watch the child play with a small shiny sphere. It was entertaining enough, watching as the sphere reflect back a distorted image of herself. (Y/N) pondered briefly if that was how she truly looked: altered, disguised, and nothing like her true self. She was always the Reaper or a Rebel or something that no longer existed, never just (Y/N). She was always a conscious blend of multiple things, never truly herself. Fear held her back, just as it had for all these years, since that horrific night. Although she supposed the chance for her to be just (Y/N) died long ago with so many others.

The mid-afternoon sun brought down an intense heat, everything practically radiating thick waves of the sweltering heat. (Y/N) had stripped down to just her blue tunic as she tried to keep the kid cool inside the shade of the Razor Crest. His little green self seemed unbothered by the heat, but she was still worried. She could not wait to leave, the coldness of space calling to her. She had not grown up anywhere near the desert heat, the planets she had lived on were always cool. The closest to heat she had gotten was Yavin 4 during her early years in the Rebellion.

The sound of the blast door opening had (Y/N) jumping to her feet. An alleviated groan passed through her lips, “Finally they’re back!” She jumped down out of the cockpit, eager to leave, but the smile on her face soon died. Toro was walking up the ramp of the ship, blaster raised in defense, no shining beskar in sight. “Where’s Mando?” (Y/N) questioned, slowly walking to the side, her hand reaching for her blaster. Mentally she cursed, during her changing she never clipped back on her belt. Now she was blasterless, but she was not weaponless. Concern tugged at her heart, concern for her Mandalorian partner. She hoped he was alright and not buried in a pauper’s grave somewhere in the desert.

 “Oh don’t worry, he’ll be joining us shortly. And until then, you’re going to do as I say because I don’t want to mess up that pretty little face of yours.”

(Y/N) quirked an eyebrow up at that, “Oh is that so?” Toro nodded as the two began to circle each other in a standoff. She wanted to laugh at his boldness and ill-placed confidence. This adolescent could not beat her, he had nothing to hold against her.

As if on cue, a quiet whimper filled the tense ship, heads turning to find the child watching them from a step on the ladder leading up the cockpit. (Y/N) gulped, of course he would follow… “You wouldn’t want anything to happen to this little guy would you?” Her eyes snapped back over to Toro who now pointed at the child. With a blaster pointed at her, she could handle it, but she could not risk the kid.

“You backstabbing bantha!” (Y/N) spit, the two of them now locked on opposite sides of the ship. She did not know why he had double-crossed Mando, but he had no less. And now he was threatening the kid, oh how badly she wanted to unleash the Reaper on him. 

“It’s just business, you know.” Toro grinned maliciously, eyes twinkling down at the child. 

“I wasn’t in the Guild, so no I don’t.” A thick eyebrow lifted at that, curiosity emitting from him.

 “Who are you then?” (Y/N) rolled her eyes, ignoring his question. A part of her told her to wait for Mando, that she could not risk endangering the child, that she could not risk exposing herself. Her actions would no doubtedly out her, but to who? The child? He already knew who she was and he would be the only one walking out of here besides her. Peli was nowhere to be found, meaning while she bore no hood, no could identify her.

Yes, she could stay here and play Toro’s little game and wait for Mando to arrive whenever or she could handle the situation herself. Just as she’s done all along. As she stared at the blaster pointed down at the baby, her decision was made. (Y/N) smirked, her head tilting down threateningly, fingers twitching at her sides in anticipation. 

“I’m the Reaper.”

Night devoured Mos Eisley as Mando slid off the dewback, eyeing the speeder bike resting outside of hangar three-five. His chest tightened with unfamiliar feelings, feelings that the child had awoken in. His jaw clenched as he pulled his blaster free from the holster, heading inside the bay. He did not know why Toro had killed Shand, but his gut told him it was not in defense. Slowly he stepped down the stairs, scanning for any threat. He swore if Toro had laid a hand on the kid or (Y/N)… he swallowed thickly not fond of the potential sights he could see. His grip tightened around the blaster in determination, anger seeping in.

“Took you long enough, Mando.” a voice called and in defense his blaster raised to point at the dark shadows of the Razor Crest. What he saw made his heart skip a beat. (Y/N) walked down the ramp, the child asleep in her arms. His eyes frantically raced over the two of them, finding no evident sign of harm. He could not fathom it, where was Toro? He was still tense, eyes searching the grounds of the bay, fully expecting the young bounty hunter to ambush him from the shadows. But his eyes found something else. Beside the ship, was something dark, a silhouette. Mando moved closer hesitantly, blaster still secured between his glove.

On the ground was Toro, eyes closed and a strange blaster hole going straight through his chest. He was dead… which meant (Y/N) had killed him. His eyes lifted back up the ramp where she peered down at him, the moonlight the only source of light. “A-Are you both okay?” Mando’s voice was stiff, the dread and anger he had felt still woven into it. 

She smiled lightly, “Yeah, nothing I couldn’t handle.” A deep sigh fled his lips and Mando rolled his shoulders trying to loosen some of the built up tension. Of course, the Reaper could handle herself, it was foolish of him to assume otherwise.

“Peli, the mechanic, is scared out of her mind though.” 

Mando’s lips twitched a little beneath the helmet, “From him or you?” (Y/N) laughed loudly, before clamping a hand around her mouth. Her eyes looked down checking to see if she had woken the kid, she had not. 

“Good question.” He walked around to the end of the ramp where (Y/N) met him. Looking down at the sleeping child banished all of his previous fears, he was safe, so was she. Through the veil of his lashes he looked up to the former Rebel, who smiled down at the creature too. “I will say though,” Her eyes flickered up to the visor, finding his eyes with such ease, Mando swore she could see right through. “I did warn you about him.” He groaned taking a step back, trying to fight the smile that broke across his face.

 “Go back inside, I’m going to figure out the payment with the mechanic, and then we are leaving this place.” Her eyes widened in thankfulness as she nodded, turning to head back up the ramp. With her back to him, Mando carefully eyed her and let an amused hum slip out. Shaking his head, he left to find the mechanic.

(Y/N) felt as the Razor Crest lifted from the bay, leaving Tatooine in the rear viewport. She was thankful to leave, the sweltering heat draining her and the minor scuffle she had with Toro. He had not put up much of a fight just as she expected, he seemed to shaken to function after her admission. The Reaper did after all strike fear into the hearts of the malevolent.

Carefully she placed the child down into the small compartment and wrapped the small blanket around him. At the end of the day, she was glad he was safe. She would not have been able to function if he had gotten hurt, he meant to much. Before she had even crumbled to her knees before him in Sorgan, he had awoken something in her. Something she had not felt for decades, a sense of belonging. The Mandalorian only began to heighten that feeling too.

(Y/N) leaned against the durasteel wall, eyes never faltering from the sleeping child as she heard the cockpit door open. Heavy boots thudded down the ladder before Mando turned to face her, both of them inhaling greatly. “Hey.” She mumbled, eyes heavy with sleep. She was exhausted but she knew laid down on her small cot that she would not sleep anyways. Sleep never came to her easily despite how depleted her body was. Mando nodded once and approached them, the helmet tipping towards the peacefully resting child. (Y/N) too went back to watching the child, the sole purpose they were on this journey, facing trouble at every corner. He was worth it.

A leather hand moved in the corner of her vision, reaching down for something. She was tired, but still fast. Her hand snatched hold of Mando’s wandering hand, eyes wide in confusion. “What are you doing?” 

His visor was looking down at the ground, “What’s in your boot?” (Y/N)’s blood turned colder than Hoth, the color draining from her face. She did not have to look to know what he saw peeking out from the black boot. 

“Nothing of yours if that’s what you’re insinuating.” Her answer was rushed, tumbling out messily, but Mando sighed and nodded. Her hand slowly released his and they both moved back to watching the kid. The air was tense between them but (Y/N) knew it was not because of her unwillingness to reveal a single item.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here to help.” Mando breathed out. 

Her (Y/E/C) eyes moved over to fixate on the beskar, “It’s okay, I’m used to taking care of myself.” They were silent once again and the comfort of her stiff cot called her name. (Y/N) spun to leave, but now the worn leather caught ahold of her hand. Their eyes found each other and she swore she could feel the ghost of Tatooine’s heat creep up the back of her neck.

 “I know you are and so am I, but we…” The man before her trailed off searching for the correct words. He did not talk much nor express his feelings, (Y/N) knew that. “We don’t have to fight alone anymore.”

She knew he meant more by his words, that they now had each other’s backs, that they were no longer alone. Guilt flooded (Y/N)’s thoughts. She was hiding so much from him, more than any single person could bear. She wanted to tell him, but fear enclosed around her so thickly. If the truth came out, he would never look at her the same and she would lose the first sense of belonging she’s had in a long time. It did not matter anyway, lying was encoded in her and the truth was buried so deep, it felt lost and out of touch.

(Y/N) smiled weakly, her hand falling back to her side free, “Goodnight partner.”

Taglist: @emma-frxst​ @silverlambcaptain​ @im-the-nerdiest-of-them-a11​ @capisalittleowlie​ @sailorflowermoon​ @ah-callie​ @fleurdemiel145​ @sporkedloser​ @mxicanvinlla​ @greendragonzz @retrobhaddie​

[calliecat93]

Top 5 Things I Liked About Red vs Blue: Season 2

(Top 5 Dislikes)

One post down, one more to go… and then twenty-six more to go for the rest of this series. Why did I decide to do this again? Meh, whatever. Let’s just get on with it as we resume looking over Season 2.

#5. Machinima

Okay, this might sound weird, but hear me out. The machinima last season was… basic. Not bad mind you, there is only so much that you can do without a lot of creativity and resources. Resources that RT didn’t have at this point in time. But mostly, they just went through the default motions. Nothing really stood out. It had some cool stuff, like them somehow managing to blow the Warthog on top of Red Base. I think they even said in the commentary that trying to replicate it for the remaster was a pain in the ass. Still, it just didn’t stand out, though the humor made you not notice.

Clearly, the RT guys wanted to push themselves a little more now that they knew how Halo operated and they could machinimate better. Which they did. I noticed a lot of little things when watching the season. Like having Caboose jumping up and down during the opening gunfight while behind a rock, or even Doc just pretending to fire his blaster. Or having Simmons more or less trembling in the finale when his… ugh… fax parts act up and you can tell what Grif is staring at when he questions it. Or adding in things like Lopez’ note in the finale, and even having it written in binary. Heck, we even have smoke come out of Grif’s helmet when Simmons catches him in the act.

These are small things, but it helps make the world and characters feel a little more alive. Clearly, machinima has its limitations, and we’re a long way away from them adding in animation. But creative people will find a way to work within their limitations, and even use those limitations to their advantage. Considering how long this show has been going, I’d say that they succeeded.

#4. Caboose’s Mind

One of the most memorable parts, and one with some actual effects on the characters, is when Church and Tex go into Caboose’s mind to kill O’Malley. It’s one of the weirdest, yet funniest parts of the season. We get to see how Caboose views everyone, with Tucker being stupid and Church being obsessed with being Caboose’s best friend. He gets them wrong, but it makes sense because it’s how /Caboose/ interprets these individuals. They aren’t supposed to be accurate. It’s especially funny when we see the Reds and only Simmons is close to right Grif is Yellow (which they outright did to prove that he was Orange to viewers), Donut is a girl since that’s what Caboose thought at the time, and Sarge has a pirate accent instead of a Southern one. 

It’s just funny to see Caboose, who at this point had been portrayed as the most dim-witted, and how he views these people. It kinda reflects what he wants with Church being his best friend and the Reds fearing him and his greatness. His ideal version of himself is pretty much a cool version of himself, though otherwise not too different. Church’s reaction and frustration at all fo this, especially Caboose!Church, only makes it funnier as is Tex being unfazed by all of it. It did kinda throw me off when I watched it the first time, but God it’s funnier on rewatch now that I know what’s going on. It’s a nice look into Caboose’s mind, and we got to see glimpses of the others int he S14 episode Head Cannon.

I think the biggest things though were for one, we got a location that wasn’t Blood Gulch finally. Sure it’s pretty much a standard video game map with a bunch of cubes, but after having the only setting be a canyon, it was refreshing. We also have some major impact with this since due to all the chaos, Caboose’s character becomes what it is now. We can debate all day how we should view Caboose and his intellectual level, but I do think that this helped endear the character to people and allowed him to stand out much, much more. Even now I know very few people, if anyone, who dislikes Caboose so while maybe they should acknowledge that he was more or less brain-damaged, the character himself has become better due to this. Which is nice~

#3. O’Malley Subplot

Speaking of Caboose’s mind, the O’Malley plot was by far the standout in this season. At first, it wasn’t too much since only Tucker cared about Caboose’s sudden murderous behavior. But once Tex came back, things picked up. While the backstory wasn’t totally accurate, it would certainly lead to more ahead. The fight in Caboose’s mind was fun. Tucker got to show some genuine competence when he came up with the plan to make the Reds turn their comms off and even using Lopez as a backup plan. With how much more competent Tucker grows later once circumstances pretty much force him to, this was an early sign showing that he is capable. He just needs to be pushed into doing it.

O’Malley himself didn’t stand out too much, just being kinda murderous. Then he escaped into Doc. I’ll go more into this next season, but this was the best decision ever. Doc is a whiny goody-two-shoes while O’Malley is gleefully, over-the-top evil. The contrast of the two personalities works super well and is just really funny to watch, though again it applies more for the next season. By the end, O’Malley makes his move and firmly sets himself up as the first proper Big Bad of the series, and he’s the perfect villain for the Blood Gulch Chronicles.

Overall, the whole subplot was really fun even though it did kind of have a slow start. It brought back Tex, had some really funny moments like the Reds' reactions to Lopez’s horrible love song. At least Donut liked it, haha~ It gave us our first proper villain, which led to one Hell of an insane finale. Even everything in between with Donut getting captured by the Blues and them trying to use this to make Sarge build them new bodies was fun to watch. The first half of S2 s super fun, but the second half is, without doubt, the best part for me. O’Malley was the catalyst, and to this day is one of my favorite villains. Love it~

#2. Improved Production Standards

Season 1 was good but flawed. It was clear that the RT guys weren’t really sure what they were doing. Audio quality was meh, jokes could drag, and the pacing was rather slow. It makes sense though when you read about what the original plans were. RvB was meant to be a miniseries, and nothing more. But pretty much a combination of them not getting to what they planned as soon as they thought (Donut was supposed to be in pink armor much sooner for example, and they realized how long it was taking to get there) as well as just coming up with more ideas extended things to a nineteen episode run. So there was no long term plan and things like writing and machinima were done in mere days in between releases. Plus there were only two main machinimators, Burnie and Geoff, and if you listen to the original S1 commentary they are both clearly exhausted. Burnie even said on a one-on-one podcast with Geoff on how they had pretty much had every conversation ever and they’d be like some old married couple just staring at each other. You can find it here if you’re interested, it’s a fun one~

So yeah… when you look back you can kinda tell that S1 was a bit of a rush job, and a tiring one at that. It’s still very good and like I said, they found ways to use so much you barely notice things were made up on the fly. But clearly, they needed a better system. Enter Matt Hullum. He had already been voicing Sarge, but he ended up stepping in to play a larger behind the scenes role. He joined Burnie on writing and directing, and thus they started planning things much farther ahead. As such, they knew the general plot and thus things could be tightened. The pacing is much better with episodes feeling faster, but having plenty of things happening. I already talked about the machinima improvements, which having Matt as well as Gus coming back from Puerto Rico also helped there. The voice acting, while still amateur, improved as well as the audio mixing. The filter is still a little distracting, but it and the general audio mixing is greatly improved. Pretty much every aspect of S1 was improved big time. It wasn’t perfect, but still, they clearly put a lot in creating a more quality product.

Season 2 had a hard job. Season One had to prove that this was a show worth watching. Season 2 had to prove that it could keep going and wasn’t just a one-hit-wonder. And ho boy did they. It’s funnier, it’s more ambitious, and even starts adding in some story. This season got the viewers from last time to come back, and probably brought in some new ones. It proved that this was a show that was sticking around and that RT had staying power. If this season failed, RvB would probably just be remembered as this funny Halo show. But it succeeded because they wanted the show to keep succeeding and be good, and that effort shows.

#1. Improved Characterizations

The thing that I enjoyed most about Season 1 was the character interactions. They just had natural chemistry and their interactions were funny. The characters themselves though were a little one-note. They had personality, but they didn’t really stand out when you compare them to other comedies like The Simpsons or South Park. I guess that RT realized this as well because this is where the characters really begin to become the same ones that we know now. Not all of them mind you like Simmons and Tucker are the least fleshed out here, but even then the signs of who they would become are there with things like Simmons clinginess to Sarge and the joke about Tucker’s rock, as well as the previously mentioned show of competence when pushed.

Donut and Grif show more of their personality, with Donut expressing his hobbies like home decor and growing to like his lightish-red armor. Grif shows his more lazy slacker attributes, like sleeping during meetings and forgetting the ammo, and his unhealthy habits like smoking and his constant eating. Which he’s pretty much doing intentionally to annoy Simmons and mess up the parts that he got from him. Lopez also got a lot of personalities now that he can talk. Namely, after the Reds nearly kill him and the Blues use him for their own means, he hates them all and his apathetic personality has stuck ever since. Poor guy has had such a hard time, haha. And I already went into Caboose, so there's no need to repeat myself. Even Shelia got sassier this season~

The one I think got the most improvement though is Sarge. In S1, he was just kind of a standard sergeant character you could find in just about any military movie, and the voice reflected it. Here? Matt just goes off the wall. He said in the S2 commentary that Sarge is pretty much the combination of various 50’s character tropes, like the grumpy old guy and the mad scientist. It shows. Sarge’s hatred of Blues and love of warfare are much more evident, especially in the finale. His hatred of Grif is also much more played up. We see that he is absolutely insane with his conspiracy theories about Lopez being brainwashed by the Blues instead of reprogrammed and turning Simmons into a cyborg instead of just getting a new robot. Sarge is the opposite of sensible, and having this guy be the leader and forcing everyone to follow his plans due to it is freakin’ hilarious. Matt exaggerating the accent from this point on only adds to this characterization and is much, much more fitting.

The characters, in my opinion, are the best part of Red vs Blue. This season demonstrates that very well. Unlike S1 where there were only shades of their later portrayal, this one uses broad strokes. I think some of the better voice acting can also be due to this since the cast now has more of a character to fool around with instead of just having to more or less act like their everyday selves. The characters were stronger, and as such the interaction and humor were even better. As such, it is my favorite part of Red vs Blue Season 2. Can they keep it up in Season 3? Well… we’ll find out soon~

[screwtheprinceimtakingthehorse]

Do you have any advice for someone wanting to get started in fanfiction? :')

Hello! Thank you for coming to my ask box, make yourself at home!

Uh I do have advice, if it’s any good is up to you, I s’pose! As it’s quite a broad question, I’ll try to be as concise as possible and talk about a couple different things.

Fandoms & Sharing

There’s no definitive answer to the question “which fandom/pairing should I start with??” other than: whatever the fuck makes you happy and you’re into at the moment. You got plot bunnies for Batman adopting a parakeet and taking the kids on trips to Gotham Zoo, you write those. You wanna drown Dunwall in a pit of High Chaos and Despair? Arse to chair and pen to paper, my pal.

Big fandoms and popular otps have the advantage of getting a lot of eyeballs on your work in a short amount of time and, hopefully, helpful feedback and encouraging responses; especially if you let people know it’s your first time posting.

Small fandoms or rarepairs, on the other hand, often have a very engaged core fan base that’s doubly willing to share ideas and talk about stuff, since any newcomer to their hovel is usually welcomed with tears of joy.

In both cases, it helps if you’ve already been chatting to people, either about your fave fandom, pairing, or their work, if you’ve been following authors on AO3 or tumblr. They’re often the first to read your work because they’re excited you’re doing the thing!!

Side note: as a fellow word idiot, I’m excited you wanna do the thing!!

Also: asking for feedback/advice is cool beans. So far I’ve not met anyone who didn’t wanna talk through an idea or look at a snippet when they have the time.

When you post, share far and wide — put it on tumblr, on twitter if you’ve got fandom folks there, throw it at your friends. (If you’re new to AO3, definitely familiarise yourself with the tag system a lil bit. Tags help your work get seen because people look for tropes as much as pairings.)

Ideas & Writing

If you’ve been writing your own stuff before starting on fanfic, then you know how to build a story already. Go do that :’D

If you’re new to writing in general, remember that characterisation is everything. Writing fic is both an excellent tool for writing practice and for checking your plotting and pacing because it gives you certain parameters to give you a base structure while also letting you completely off the leash.

Like, once you know what makes a character tick, you can throw them into any situation you want and get them out of it their way. (Or deeper into it.) When you’re writing fanfic, you’re — very broadly speaking — writing for people who are in love with that character, too. That never means that there is only one possible interpretation of a character or their actions (no matter what tumblr tries to tell you sometimes *cough*), but what is true is that readers appreciate consistency in characterisation; and they’re an absolute mess for you when you get a character’s voice right.

That’s why I’d always start with someone in whose head you’re comfortable, maybe someone with whom you easily identify or who you just find most interesting; maybe also a little challenging to figure out, to give yourself a bit of a puzzle to work through. (Especially rewarding for longer pieces and character development.)

If you wanna start small, say with a couple one shots, you could go for missing scenes that canon never got around to; there’s loads of prompt blogs you can check out just to jumpstart the writing process, or ask your followers for prompts. They’re good ways to find out what makes your character go.

If you’ve got an idea for a longer work right off the bat, sink your teeth into that, I say! Depending on what fandom you’re in, there’s loads of options in terms of format and plot structure. Not to mention genre! God, if I had the time (and nerve) to write a Dishonored noir detective story starring Daud as a hard-boiled egg private eye, you bet I would. Just don’t pressure yourself in getting it off the ground. As that one great post says, it takes a lot of braining to make the words go, and it’s a platitude gone wild, but slow and steady wins the race often enough. Don’t let yourself burn out because it takes a while to write that 500k epic.

(Short excursion to illustrate: I’ve been on assassins don’t take sides for over a year now, and I’m halfway through. I know there’s still a ways to go, and I’m keeping myself motivated by chipping away at it bit by bit. The Coup is coming and my brain is crying because it’s already panicking about plot planning and pacing in the background. Part 5 is gonna be a goddamn monster, and I’ll take it one day at a time.)

Right-o! This is my off the cuff, instant answer to your question, I hope this helps!! (pls let me know!!) And if you’ve got any more questions, hit me up if you want :)

[starsaboveyouadoption]

love comes in layers - 1 year, 4 lessons

Originally, I had intended this entry as a reflection on my first 100 days as an adoptive parent. At the time of writing, as a bank of entries ready to start Stars Above You with, it felt an apt starting place. With Covid and Lockdown and the haze of limbo in between, the months rolled on, and before I knew it, we made it to an even bigger milestone – one year together as an adoptive family, or as we call it, our first “Family Day”.

Post-adoption, it’s amazing how you enter a strange dual-edged time warp, where time simultaneously seems to be racing away from you and you can’t believe how far you’ve come as a family, whilst also being able to recall some of the really raw moments early on as if they were yesterday. With that in mind, I thought I’d revisit the half-finished draft of this post, and inject some “1 year on” lessons into it as I went along. So what follows are my reflections on adoption 1 year on, for whatever they may be worth to you as someone starting out (in which case I hope they serve as a heads up to what you may go on to feel/experience yourself, though every road is different), or as someone walking along the same path as me now, still a relatively newly formed family with a lot of miles still to travel, but at least some of the road behind.

________________________________________________________________

It was around the time of the juncture that I mentioned, as I was lying down on the floor of Little Star’s nursery waiting the obligatory 5 minutes after they’d nodded off for their morning nap to make my ninja-esque escape out of the small crack in the door left ajar, that a realisation struck. We’d survived our first 100 days of adoptive parenting. Somebody else looking at the scene may have read this as a parenting fail. At 16 months, Little Star still needed the reassurance of me lying on the floor next to their crib, playing the same lullaby tune on our white noise machine that we’d been dependent on since only a few weeks after they came home, while they fell asleep. They still needed (up until pretty recently) a dummy to soothe them, a specific comfort blanket made by my Mum given to them in introductions to snuggle up to, lots of quite prolonged winding down time ahead of going upstairs, and for me to wait at least 5 minutes, if not longer, before attempting my escape lest they wake up again, scream their head off and refuse to go back down, leaving a very grumpy toddler (and Mummy) for the rest of the day.

But to us (and especially to me), this was an absolute win. We were no longer having to rock endlessly to sleep, dependent on TV programmes for Little Star to understand it was sleep time. We were no longer spending the first 20 minutes of what would usually be a 45 minute nap anxiously hovering over the monitor to check if they were going to jolt awake any minute and hear that angry battle cry, or getting through umpteen bottles of Calpol in our guesses as to whether their restlessness was linked to toothache, tummy pain, reflux, or just general toddler stubbornness and FOMO. We were finally (finally) able to put Little Star to sleep through a short series of little rituals that worked for them, taking far less out of our down time than before – able to put them down in the cot to (semi) self soothe without too much fuss, and at last able to sleep most nights and enjoy most nap breaks without the constant feeling of anxiety and exhaustion from second guessing what might happen next. In short, we’d found a system that was working for us.

I thought back to the immediate fortnight after Little Star moved in, probably some of the toughest days of my life. The moments of joy and awe at having this little bundle sleeping upstairs on good nights felt like winning the lottery, but for those first weeks and months, more nights than not were spent feeling drained from a whole host of pressures – trying to “read” Little Star (but, if babies don’t come with a manual, trying to read your adoptive baby’s cues when you’ve known them for a matter of days or weeks feels like trying to interpret hieroglyphics). Trying to “keep up” with the Mummy world’s expectations of what Little Star “should” be doing at their age (you know exactly what I’m talking about I’m sure). Trying to build up some semblance of a routine amidst the chaos. Trying to mourn our old lives (even though Little Star was so wanted). Trying to be the parents we’d told ourselves (and others) we’d be. And everything in between. Trying to be perfect.

If someone asked me the overarching word I would use to describe our first month at home with Little Star, I would either say “mind-blowing” (in all the right ways), but also, without a doubt, “isolating”. The loneliness was palpable. We’ve talked about this in a previous blog but as a reminder, in adoption, the general wisdom is that when you bring your child home, you need a period of several weeks to establish yourselves as a family, and for your child to settle before meeting any visitors, even close family. This is referred to as “cocooning” and is a vital step of the moving in process (I can now see how important this was with hindsight). However, with all of the benefits this brings for bonding as a family unit, it does rob you of the opportunity that most new parents get of seeing a friendly face amongst the stress, being able to accept a helping hand in their care when days get rough, and maintaining perspective. You feel (and pretty much are) living in a bubble, and while usually this bubble actually only lasts a few weeks, at the time it feels so intense. And to top it all off, I put myself under so much pressure. Pressure that I can now see in retrospect I had no business putting myself under. So for those of you considering adoption, or maybe especially those of you who may be in the period leading up to meeting or bringing your child home, for what it’s worth, this is my learning from our first 100 days (or 1 year!)…

Let go of conventional parenting wisdom

We had this drilled into us repeatedly throughout our assessment, but somehow, it never really sticks. When you’re new to being a parent, and in our case going in “cold” to a toddler with an established personality, who wasn’t carried by you, hasn’t spent the first year of their life growing up in your home environment, doesn’t know how to read you nor you to read them, and hasn’t had the same stability, security or opportunities as other children to start them off in life (not to mention an added dollop of trauma, grief and loss) – I can tell you now that most of what you read in baby magazines and online articles, how your friends and relatives parent their babies, what the health visitor, GP, or especially bloody Mumsnet says about what your baby “should” be doing by now, categorically will not apply (at least for some time). Many adoptive parents come up against the myth (which we will explore soon!) that if they adopt a baby who is relatively young or from birth, that child will not be affected by their adoption and will largely be “normal” – and thus should you notice any differences these are all in your head as an over-protective earth Mum type. I’m here to tell you that any child development or adoption expert will confirm that the evidence suggests this is absolutely not the case and even babies adopted from birth will already have had experiences, traumas and risks associated with their early and in-utero development that mean conventional parenting wisdom will often not apply.

In those early months, and maybe for much longer than that, give yourself a break. Of course, it’s important to identify if your child is not meeting extremely crucial developmental milestones that may indicate additional needs or support requirements. But please do not get yourself wound up about any of the following as I did:

·        Whether your child can self-soothe to sleep. This is in my experience of the most dominant narratives within Western parenting advice. That at a mere 4 months old or so, your baby should be capable of settling themselves to sleep with no help from you, and that if you do need to help them, you are setting them up for a life of stunted development, and “making a rod for your own back”. Notwithstanding the rant I could go on about my feelings on this for any baby, for adoptive parents specifically I would really warn against absorbing too much of this messaging. As my intro alluded to, my partner and I were at our wits’ end at times trying to help our elder baby learn how to self-soothe better to sleep, and it was causing us some problems, but we got there in the  end, and crucially, the biggest problem of all that we stressed about was that we “shouldn’t” be doing this and that. A lot of the time we realised if we were honest that the things it took to get Little Star to settle to sleep weren’t usually a big deal for us but we were hyper aware of social expectations around it and started tying ourselves in knots to push them before they were ready to be capable of sleeping the way many Western birth children do. Because we were worried what people might think. Which actually as it happened, was largely unfounded as mostly people are too concerned about their own parenting neurosis to contribute to yours, and your loved ones won’t be taking anywhere near as much interest in it as you are. There was the odd comment here and there from certain quarters but nothing I couldn’t usually put down to well-meaning, if misplaced and slightly unsolicited, advice. My take on it is – it is far more important in those early days and weeks to provide your child with some continuity as they ease from their foster placement to your home, than to try to keep up with the Joneses on this one. However, a caveat to this is if it causing you and/or your partner problems, then of course your wellbeing is a priority and it absolutely makes sense to try what you can to make things easier on yourself. Sometimes easier means trying something new. For us, a lot of the time, easier meant keeping to what was familiar for Little Star, and only making very gradual incremental changes over a longer period of time. Something I’ll always remember is our social worker saying to us at one particularly neurotic check in, “you don’t see many 5-year olds needing to be rocked to sleep at night. So, rest assured, Little Star will get there in their own time”. This is a very common issue for adoptive babies, and every adoptive parent I’ve spoken to on this subject has agreed - throw the “rulebook” out the window, and do what works for your child and your family. Any extra soothing time is extra bonding opportunities as far as we are concerned.

·        What they’re eating and how they’re eating it. As it happens, we are fortunate that by and large, Little Star is not a fussy eater, with a good appetite, and mostly, will eat what’s put in front of them so we manage to maintain a relatively healthy diet. However, they, like many toddlers, have gone through times of fussiness, food refusal, screaming at the highchair, throwing their food at the cat, and spitting everything out. Many adoptive parents will say that they haven’t always been super on board with the food their little one was fed in foster care, and they would have chosen to do things differently if they’d had their baby from birth, but that by the time they’ve met their child, their eating habits are quite established, and it’s been hard to move them on to a rainbow of 10 a day when they’re refusing everything but chicken nuggets (especially older children!). The main message I’ve picked up from more seasoned adopters in this area is – don’t sweat the small stuff (at least for now). There will come a day you might want to step up those gradual changes I talked about earlier, but usually the more immediate and important emotional need is to offer your child comforting familiarity, a sense of security about food, and not inadvertently create any anxieties around meal times, especially when you are trying to establish meal times as a family bonding opportunity. For older adopted children who may have lived in their birth homes before being in foster care, food can be a very common area for anxiety. Some may have experienced not knowing where their next meal is coming from or food being removed as inappropriate punishment, and sometimes overfeeding is a factor in neglect/abuse (we hadn’t realised this until we did our prep training). Therefore, it is very common for adopted children to develop insecurities about food, hoard or steal food, or develop anxiety about there being enough to go round. This isn’t exclusive to those who have grown up in their birth family’s care – sometimes even the knowledge of poverty in their life history is enough for some children to develop unhealthy attachments. We don’t believe this to be an issue for our Little Star, but many adopters have shared their experiences with this, and the general consensus seems to be, not to make food a battleground, to do what gets you through and to not force major changes upon your child within the first 5 minutes.

 Now, what we did have is some commentary about Little Star having not been able to feed themself with a spoon at a slightly older age than the “norm”, having been still used to some “baby food” when they came home, and still taking quite a few bottles at an age where they would probably be expected to have dropped them. These sound like trivial things but when you are continually met with surprise that they are still on the bottle, or haven’t practiced some of their motor skills yet, it can be hard not to feel defensive or worried. The bottle thing really got to me for a while – quite a few well-meaning people questioned why we weren’t changing this, or why we still give Little Star a night time bottle, or why they had it in their crib to get to sleep. It’s taken a lot of blocking this stuff out and trying to stay true to our instincts but thankfully we’ve persevered with what worked for us. And lo and behold, Little Star started feeding themselves one day – with a little bit of practice and praise, they’re doing just fine!

·        Walking, talking and other milestones. Should you have reason to believe/know your child has formal development delay, then of course this is not applicable. However outside of this, do try not to worry if your child isn’t as early a blossomer as other children you know. Often adopted children, even those without specific additional needs, can be slightly delayed in starting these things, mostly because they’ve had a level of disruption in their first year(s) which other children usually don’t. Even with all the best encouragement and intentions of foster parents, if a child has had a number of moves, shared their home with other foster children, or even has been in the process of being prepared for their move to you at a crucial time in “typical” development, they may not have had the opportunity to practice key skills as often. Little Star was on the later side of walking – they’d been cruising for ages but our foster parents shared that they’d hung back on encouraging them as they were due to move in with us imminently and wanted us to experience this milestone which we thought was thoughtful of them. It’s worth remembering that for even the loveliest foster parents in the world, they are often balancing the needs of several children within the same home, and with the best will in the world, won’t always be able to provide the intensity of “coaching” around these things as a parent would focusing solely on their one child. Personally, we were bowled over by how conscientious our foster family were in nurturing Little Star’s abilities, but certainly there were things that they just took a little longer to do, because of the impact of transitions. If a child is trying to get used to a whole new life, their little brain may not be able to focus on everything all at once. It’s also quite possible that foster parents will parent differently to how you might choose to – may naturally encourage or not particularly focus on certain aspects of development that you might see as important, and vice versa. I wish I’d been kinder to myself about these things – trust me, it’ll happen in time.

Your child may not be the “same” child you meet in introductions.

Recently I was watching the movie Instant Family and laughing out loud, relating to the moment that the previously smug adoptive parents realise that their well-behaved brood are in their “honeymoon phase” and hell on earth is waiting to be unleashed! So…one consistent thing I have heard almost every adoptive parent I know speak about is that they have been surprised by how differently their child behaved, or presented, once home a little while. This is particularly poignant for older children, but certainly there are some truths with babies. In the adoption community we talk about the “honeymoon phase” and are warned to see this coming on our preparation course (though of course you never really do!)

Little Star came across as a very placid, easy-going baby during introductions with their foster family over the course of a week. They appeared to be a very good sleeper, very adaptable to changes in routine, and quite happy-go-lucky. We also sighed a huge breath of relief when they fell asleep perfectly on the first few nights – maybe we were so in tune with our baby that we had seamlessly transitioned them to their new life…? Fast forward 1 week, not quite so. Little Star was having episodes of waking up screaming for 2 hours at night, refusing naps and/or food, and acting cranky for what felt like endless hours. None of the sleep cues we were told about and actually tried successfully in introductions were working, we had no idea how to soothe Little Star when they became distressed, and it felt like an enigma to work out what they wanted. We had some really low moments in those first few weeks, and if you’re not prepared for that happening, it can hit you like a train. I will also add that a year on as Little Star has grown to an older toddler, we have had multiple sleep regressions where even when we have established key routines, these have then been undone, and to this day Little Star finds it very difficult to self soothe, and still reflects the description of them as a younger baby as a “fractious cryer”. The depressing truth, unfortunately, is that we have yet to find anything that “works”, if they do wake. If there was one aspect of their behaviour that I would see as affected by in-utero development, it would be this.

The first few days were something akin I suppose to those first few days with any new baby. You are so in awe of this new bundle of joy, and they perhaps excited about the novelty of their new surroundings, that you can get lulled into a false sense of security – and so when the inevitable hits you, you can feel like a failure. I’m here to tell you that this will happen at some point, but please try not to beat yourself up, or assume you are useless parents!

When you think about it, it’s actually entirely logical that your child would behave differently. If they’re older, perhaps they’re testing boundaries to see how far they can push you before you’ll give up on them like other adults in their life? Adopted children have left everything they’ve come to know behind. Familiar sights, smells, sounds, routines. The bond they’ve created with their foster family, all those little day to day things that make them feel safe and secure. This point really hit home to me when I tried to imagine, having had Little Star home for nearly 6 months, somebody else now coming along, taking them back to their house and “starting again” with everything. I couldn’t even imagine what they would go through.

Trauma and loss are so integral to the adoption journey, and your child will exhibit signs of this at some stage in those early days. For Little Star, they went from being a champion sleeper at the drop of a hat, to am anxious, screaming baby who was inconsolable at times, and who didn’t appear to like us very much at others. This was so different to our experience with them in our first week that I think we went into shock, and this can be the time when relationships are really tested. I remember endlessly questioning if I’d made a huge mistake, genuinely believing I couldn’t do it, planning my days hour to hour to get myself through, and sitting sobbing in front of Little Star’s highchair on those dark days with this knot of anxiety in my belly that I didn’t think would ever go away. For me, looking back, knowing what I know now, I would have sought help and talked to people about how I was feeling a lot sooner. I did reach out to a few close family members, but I was so worried about what people would think and say if I admitted I was struggling that I didn’t ask for as much help as I needed at the time. I imagined that I would be met with “what did you expect?” and feel shamed, so I largely said nothing. This is where it doesn’t always help that adoption can be quite romanticised. A lot of well-meaning people comment on how beautiful it all is, how “lucky” your little one is (more of that another time!!), and try to make you feel better with basically saying how “normal” certain behaviours are for babies/children of their age. But there’s nothing normal about being plonked into those behaviours cold, at an age where you child has already developed a personality of their own, and when you have no experience of how babies work, or more importantly much sense of how this baby works! On top of which you are being expected to practically isolate in your home for 2 weeks which is not natural when most people have new babies. You can feel like there’s some invisible parenting manual out there that everyone else is reading and you’ve missed in the post.

Needless to say, these times fade away as your child grows to build attachments with you, and your confidence will increase, I promise you, to the point where you’ll struggle to remember in the future how you ever felt that way. But even though it all seems like a foggy dream now, I know that I did feel that way, and it was really awful at the time. Please know you are not alone. Reach out for support, talk to your support network that you’ll have spent so much time articulating during your assessment (they focus on support networks for a reason!), and don’t be afraid to talk to your social worker for help – everyone is willing you to succeed. And one last thing, don’t try to be “perfect”. You don’t have to pretend every day with your child has been bliss because of a feeling of debt to the universe for this finally happening for you. You can admit you’re struggling, and still be an awesome parent.

Skip the parenting Olympics

I think this point applies equally to biological parents, but perhaps feels more poignant to adoptive parents who may, as I did, be struggling with other layers of complication which can make feelings of guilt more pointed.

When I first became a Mum, I felt really lonely. Although most of my friends actually do have children, many of them don’t live in immediate proximity, many of their children were quite a bit younger or older than Little Star at the time, and on top of that, I was cocooning with Little Star for the first month or so, so couldn’t really have seen people in person. I then had a couple of good months of meet ups where I was gradually introducing Little Star to friends and family, before Covid struck, and lockdown put a halt on any plans to start integrating them into my wider circle and get into any sense of normality with babysitting, play dates, etc. I have one friend who is also an adoptive parent with roughly the same timeline as me who has been an absolute Godsend throughout and who I was texting regularly (as I was with some other friends) but I really felt like a fish out of water in the parenting world.

On the suggestion of a colleague of my partner’s, I joined a few apps for meeting Mum friends in the local area, and I started to make a few online connections with local /online peer groups of other adoptive and biological parents. I also follow a few accounts and hashtags on Instagram I thought might help me feel I was in some company. While in many ways, this has been a positive experience and provided me with much needed peer support for times when I really needed reassurance, positivity and a forum to ask all the questions I had about raising a baby, there have also been times it’s left me feeling woefully inadequate. I always knew that there was pressure on new parents, but it wasn’t until I entered the world of #mumsofinstagram, that I realised how much frankly, bullshit, there is out there in the stratosphere. I now roll my eyes at carefully curated and filtered photos of perfection, but it’s taken (and still takes) work to recognise that my parenting is, as is another saying in the adoption world, “good enough”. So, I now consider it my civic duty to inform you if no-one else has, that to be a good enough parent, your child does not need:

·        To be a yoga maestro/baby Mozart/be fluent in baby sign/to have mastered phonics by 12 months

·        To have had a cake smash photoshoot, custom-made balloon arch or 100-person party for their first birthday

·        To be kitted out in matching pyjamas in a whole-family photoshoot for Christmas

·        To be on a daily rota of classes, groups, and Mum and baby Zoom sessions to be making the most of their potential  

·        The latest in the most recent trend for baby toys and accessories, especially Sophie the bloody giraffe, or £1000 10-part baby travel system from John Lewis

·        To join you in an 18-photo montage on Instagram with matching Mum/Dad-and-me outfit in a carefully choreographed palette of neutral pastels

And you do not need to:

·        Be eating breakfasts of runny yolked #eggporn washed down with an oat-matcha latte in a Scandinavian mug next to a roaring fire to be a #wintermummy or be making the most of your #metime

·        Be wearing a fresh face of makeup and working off the cocooning weight with buggy runs to not have “lost yourself”

·        Sacrifice your every waking moment to filling every second of your child’s free time with active play

·        Set yourself up to be the sole foundation of your child’s happiness for them to grow up as secure, well-rounded individuals

One thing I’m grateful for (if that’s the right term) from lockdown is that just when I was starting to feel this pressure, the ability to take part in some of these presumed rights of passage was taken away, and in turn, I managed to recognise these things for largely what they are – passing trends and fads that will be replaced with new ones over and over, as part of the persistent narrative of the time about what it means to “give all” to your child. I did grieve and still feel slightly sad about, the loss of being able to socialise Little Star in the same way I may have chosen to without these circumstances but I’ve noticed that there was an unexpected opportunity for plenty of low-key bonding, attachment and gelling as a family unit that we may not have made room for in a parallel world.

Love comes in layers

And finally, I just want to end on a note that I’ll expand on far more in a future post. One of the most counter-intuitive and mind-bending things about adoption is that the typical narrative about how you are “supposed” to feel about your child may well not apply, and for good reasons. And then if you’re not careful, you can end up in an unhelpful spiral of guilt at the time you least need to be bogged down by that.

Think about meeting your partner, or when you first formed one of your close friendships. Did you fall in love with that person instantly, or did you take time to get to know them, grow affection, build intimacy and share life experiences together which became your glue? With exceptions, I would guess that the latter is far more likely. I think this is a flaw in how we as a society talk about our relationships with babies and children, not least even for biological parents, but my feeling is this is a last taboo as a society we are not yet ready to break openly.

I would wager that a huge chunk of parents don’t necessarily feel the immediate rush of unconditional love on meeting their baby or child that we are programmed to believe they do. Because to admit otherwise is a bit of a taboo in our society, and depends upon a whole host of other social issues such as post-natal depression and new parent pressures being discussed in a more open and emotionally vulnerable way, this white lie becomes a self-perpetuating social expectation. With adoption, this pressure can manifest itself particularly pointedly sometimes, because of the added layers of feelings of “less than” that can arise (and sometimes be exacerbated by) the process, and the shame attached to admitting things aren’t rosy from the get-go when outwardly you have wanted this for so long. We can feel we “owe” our child, who may have already been through traumatising experiences and loss, that immediate depth of feeling.

This is where it’s important to remember that it’s not a dichotomy – you don’t either love your child to the depths of the ocean or feel nothing for them. And struggling with new parenthood doesn’t always even equate to post-natal depression. I suspect that there is a whole spectrum of feeling as a new Mum or Dad that allows for all sorts of scenarios. Many new adopters will tell you that they felt a strong affection, and a fierce protective instinct on first bringing their child home, and a deep caring, but not necessarily true “love” for some while afterwards. And just in case nobody else tells you this, I’m here to tell you, that is normal, and that is okay. I would say my “love” for Little Star kicked in after about a month, but some will tell you it took significantly longer than that, and it doesn’t bear any reflection on how well you are caring for your child. Love just takes time.

If I did it all again, there are some things even within the adoption community I would take with a pinch of salt. Some people who I had come across via online forums or WhatsApp groups were painting a very rosy picture of life as ab adoptive parent that I felt to be inauthentic, but it didn’t help me to feel less affected by it when I was in my early days, worrying I wasn’t feeling what I “should” be. If you come across this, my advice would be to turn your focus inward to your family, your child, and your wellbeing. Adoptive parents are not immune to the Instagram filter of parenthood, and like any other human, they make mistakes and can be as guilty of misrepresentation as anyone else.  

Some adoptive parents are able to identify something that kick started that feeling for them. Times like the first time their child was ill, or really needed them, or when they had to advocate for their rights, or were frightened of losing them in the ensuing legal processes, were moments of clarity for them where they realised how far their feelings had come. It’s all individual and it’s all okay. There is a saying with adoptive parenting that sometimes you have to “act as if”. For me, this meant acting “as if” in ways such as how I displayed physical affection, eye contact, care and advocacy despite not always feeling totally “there yet” and that at times, these things could feel a little unnatural or even, dare I say it, forced. The outcome being that despite some internal wobbles, what your child receives and knows is still warmth, attention and affection in the bucketloads. You will get there, and sooner than you know, you won’t need to be acting “as if” at all.

And so, I hope this blog is of some assurance to a few people out there. I certainly don’t know it all, and would be lying if I said I embody all of these principles, or remember all of these things every day, but they’ve held me in good stead for the past year, and I pass them on to you, with every hope they’ll help you on your journey.

[probablylostrightnow]

Chaos and Adventure (ME Fic)

I was @qbert0​‘s Holiday Harbinger gifter, and wanted to write something to go with the dice bag. You mentioned that you liked fShep/Liara and Garrus/Tali as a secondary pairing, that you enjoyed the whole gang’s adventures in the Citadel DLC, and requested no heavy emotional angst, so I tried to write a bit of fluff that captured some of those themes. It was a fun piece to write and I hope you enjoy it!

Post-game, ambiguous as to ending but Shepard is alive, pretty much pure fluff.

Judging from the length of the line outside, the rebuilt Ryuusei’s Sushi Bar was even popular than the old one. Even in civvies, Shepard was quickly recognized and waved to the front of the line. Liara had wondered if she would prove to be on some sort of restaurant blacklist, but if the maître d’ was aware of Shepard’s role in the demise of the sushi bar’s previous incarnation, she gave no sign. “Welcome, ma’am, Ryuusei’s is honored to have you,” she said smoothly. “This way, please, the rest of your party is waiting for you.”

Liara took a moment to look over the place. The renovation had been extensive (and doubtless expensive). Fish swam contentedly below her feet, unaware of the tragic fate of their predecessors. The wood paneling was carefully aged as if to suggest that the restaurant had been in continuous operation for decades, and certainly had not been invaded by mercenaries or swarming with Reapers at any point.

The maître d’s brow was furrowed in a look Liara had learned to interpret as impatience. She fell in beside Shepard as they made their way across the restaurant. Garrus Vakarian gave a quick wave from across the way – of course, he had spotted them first. Tali’Zorah’s attention appeared to be completely absorbed by the “NEW Dextro Menu!” in her hands, but she quickly glanced up as the maître d’ pulled out Shepard and Liara’s chairs.

“Shepard! Liara!” she said. “It’s so good to see you!” Liara didn’t need to be able to see Tali’s face to know that she was smiling. “It’s been too long.”

“Well, if some people could tear themselves away from their homeworlds more often…” Shepard said teasingly.

Garrus spread his hands. “You know how it is, Shepard,” he said ruefully. “One meeting after another, datapad after datapad filled with decisions to be made… It’s enough to make a turian think about resuming his vigilante career. I’d have thought the Reaper advisor would be, eh, off the hook with the Reapers gone…”

“Ah, ah!” Tali waved a finger in mock indignation. “No Reaper talk.”

Liara thought back to the vidcall she’d received from Tali. “We’re coming to the Citadel!” Tali had blurted excitedly as soon as Liara took the call. They’d brainstormed about plans, and Tali had proposed a double date. “Some casual time together,” she’d suggested. “No fate-of-the-galaxy stuff, no Reapers, no bringing each other up to date on every aspect of rebuilding this and that. Just friends spending time together. Do you think you can get Shepard to sign up for this?”

When Liara had mentioned the location Tali had in mind, Shepard had countered with a “no discussing past sushi-restaurant shenanigans” condition, which Tali had accepted. Joker would be so disappointed when he heard they’d passed up the chance to rib her.

“I wasn’t talking about the Reapers,” Garrus complained mildly. “I was talking about my job, the one I still have for some reason. The position seems more escape-proof than Purgatory. Do you think the Admiralty Board would accept my application for asylum?”

“I’d have to ask the Admirals,” Tali said primly.

Liara brought to mind the reports of the Shadow Broker’s agents in the no-longer-Migrant Fleet. “I hear a certain young Admiral is the deciding vote more often than not, these days.”

“Time to upgrade our security systems again,” Tali said. She sounded rather as if she was looking forward to it.

The waiter arrived to take their order, and the conversation paused. Liara ordered something called the “Asari Delight,” which the waiter assured her was carefully selected to please to asari palates. He seemed unamused when Shepard asked if it contained any actual asari.

“Really, Shepard?” Liara asked after the waiter stalked off.

“Just looking out for you,” Shepard said unapologetically. “For all you know, Javik could be the head chef.”

“I can’t imagine that he could find the time,” Liara said. She turned to Tali and Garrus. “He sends me a new book chapter every week or so. Usually with instructions to throw the previous draft of the chapter out of an airlock.”

“How are they to read?” Tali asked skeptically.

“Arrogant, but interesting,” Liara said, smiling. She definitely found Javik easier to deal with at a distance.

“I guess you must be keeping busy, between editing and your Super Secret Other Job.” The capital letters were audible, and Tali went so far as to make air quotes. “What have you been doing, Shepard?”

Shepard waved a hand in the air. “Oh, you know. Lots of rehab, consulting on that thing we’re not supposed to be talking about, following the research on those other things that are banned from this conversation…”

The table was silent for a bit. Liara wondered if she should bring up their news, or if Shepard would. She felt oddly nervous at the prospect.

“So, ah, biotiball?” Shepard ventured. Apparently it wasn’t just Liara. “How about those Seattle Sorcerers?”

Garrus shook his head. “I don’t really follow the sport, Shepard.” Tali and Liara shrugged their agreement. “Has Cortez made a fan out of you?”

“I’ve really just watched a game or two,” she admitted.

Silence fell again. Maybe now she should…

“The, eh, weather has been nice,” Garrus offered.

Tali elbowed him. “We’re on a space station.”

“That’s a fair point,” Garrus granted. If he’d been a stranger, Liara might have thought the comment a cranky grumble, but she knew his subharmonics well enough to hear the underlying affection. So did Tali, clearly, as she inclined her head toward him. Liara glanced at Shepard and found her smiling fondly at her friends.

“I’m so glad you two are doing well,” Shepard said.

Tali said a warm, “Thank you.”

The waiter returned with their drinks. Shepard raised a glass. “To friends who fell in love.”

Tali and Liara clinked their glasses against Shepard’s, but Garrus’s attention seemed to be drawn by something to his right.

“Ah, don’t all look at once, but that turian tending bar – isn’t that Rolan Quarn?”

Liara, Shepard, and Tali glanced toward the bartender, more or less surreptitiously. The bartender did look rather like the turian she remembered from the casino. Quarn appeared to be engaged in animated conversation with a few of the patrons, but Liara couldn’t catch any words.

“Sure looks like him,” Shepard confirmed.

“Hmm. Think that he’s gone straight and is now earning an honest living serving drinks in a sushi bar?” Garrus asked.

Shepard snorted. “Want to make that a bet, Garrus?”

“I should go check in with him. Let him know I’ve got an eye on him.”

“Or,” Tali countered, “you could enjoy our date, and not plunge us into chaos and adventure.”

“It’s not as if you’re in C-Sec anymore,” Liara said.

Shepard added innocently, “I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for his being here.”

“Perfectly reasonable and highly illegal, at a guess,” Garrus said. He stirred restlessly in his chair.

Tali put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sure he would never break the law. If it weren’t for a good cause, I mean.”

“How long are you two on the Citadel?” Shepard asked.

“Nice change of subject, very subtle,” Liara teased.

“Not very long, I’m afraid,” Tali said, keeping a firm hand on Garrus’s shoulder. “Just making some diplomatic contacts, attending some meetings, then heading back to the homeworld.” She sighed. “I think I preferred it when you were in charge and I could spend all my time in engineering.”

“Daniels and Donnelly got married last month, did you hear?” Shepard asked.

“I did,” Tali said. “I sent Gabby a card saying, ‘Good luck.’” Shepard barked a surprised laugh.

“What about you two?” Garrus asked, finally looking away from Quarn. “Are you here for long? I thought you were going to be on Earth a while longer.”

“We were,” Shepard said. “But the Extranet connections are still pretty unreliable, and that was making it too hard for Liara to get work done. And, uh” – she paused, smiled a bit nervously, and went for it – “there are much better asari physicians here.”

“Asari doctors? You aren’t ill, Liara?” Garrus asked. His visible eye narrowed. “Your vitals look all right…”

Liara shook her head quickly. Trust Garrus to wear his visor to a casual date. “No, no! Nothing like that, I’m fine.”

“Then why…” he trailed off.

Tali got it first. Liara could have sworn to the Goddess that she saw Tali’s smile radiating from under her helmet. “Oh, I’m so happy for you two!” She looked Liara up and down. “Is this something you’re planning, or are you already…”

Garrus looked back and forth between the women, still wearing a puzzled expression.

Liara nodded. “Yes.” She patted her belly. “Early days yet, but I can sense her in there.”

The light dawned for Garrus. “Oh!” He raised a glass. “Congratulations, you two.”

This time Shepard was the one who didn’t clink. Liara turned to see why and found her staring at the waiter taking a nearby table’s order, brow furrowed.

“I think he’s packing a sidearm,” she said with a frown. “At least, there’s a suspicious-looking bulge in his pocket. Liara, can you…”

“No,” Tali said, quietly but emphatically. “No chaos and adventure, remember? If he pulls a gun out, Garrus can overload it and Liara can dangle him from a singularity until he spills whatever he’s up to. Let’s talk about the important things. Do you have a name picked out? Have you told your father?”

“Not yet, and not yet,” Liara said. “It’s traditional to wait until there’s enough of an empathic connection to get her reaction to the name.” And as for Aethyta, or any asari for that matter, Liara was dreading the potential for aren’t-you-too-young-for-your-matron-phase conversations.

Garrus looked fascinated by that. “Your children get to vote on their names?” In the background, the suspicious waiter was conferring with a member of the kitchen staff.

“Mmm, it’s more of a vague empathic feeling, as I understand it…” Liara trailed off as she realized who the waiter was talking to. “Wait, what is Maya Brooks doing here?”

The words came out louder than she intended, and Brooks turned their way. As soon as she saw their table, she frowned and reached for something in her pocket, and the muffled thump of an explosion came from the direction of the kitchen.

“Chaos and adventure it is, then,” Tali said ruefully, as all four diners pushed back from the table and sprang to her feet.

“Someday I will actually get to eat here,” Shepard grumbled as they ran for the kitchen.

[ntrending]

Driverless car proponents love this stat. Too bad it's a wreck.

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/driverless-car-proponents-love-this-stat-too-bad-its-a-wreck/

Driverless car proponents love this stat. Too bad it's a wreck.

In “<a href=”https://amzn.to/2XFqxZz”>Are We There Yet</a>?” Dan Albert looks at the past, present, and autonomous future of the automobile. (Deposit Photos/)

The driverless car stars daily in the news, in opinion columns, and the business pages. It is on the tip of everyone’s tongue. The robot car will disrupt the car culture, reinvent mobility, and unleash trillions of dollars of economic activity. Best of all though, it will save 36,000 lives a year and eliminate 2.9 million injuries. Or so we are told. Those lives are lost, we hear, because we drivers are responsible for 94 percent of crashes. Eliminate the driver, eliminate most crashes, save lives. In truth, we don’t really know as much as we think we do about what causes crashes.

Not surprisingly, the true believers preach the driverless car gospel louder than anyone. Anthony Levandowski, the brilliant engineer who headed up driverless car projects for both Google and Uber told Burkhard Bilger of the New Yorker, “Once you make the car better than the driver, it’s almost irresponsible to have him there.” Those who might oppose his righteous crusade are either irresponsible or irrationally afraid of a robot uprising. “Every year that we delay this, more people die.” Elon Musk, who seems to have inherited Henry Ford’s genius for grabbing headlines, put it more combatively when he chastised the media for writing negative stories about Tesla’s “Autopilot.” “If, in writing some article that’s negative,” he told reporters, “you effectively dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you’re killing people.” The context was negative publicity surrounding what was widely reported as the first Autopilot death. Musk grew more pugnacious when a financial journalist suggested that Tesla should have alerted investors to the “material fact that a man had died while using an auto- pilot technology that Tesla had marketed vigorously as safe and important to its customers.” Musk responded: “Indeed, if anyone bothered to do the math (obviously, you did not) they would realize that of the over 1M auto deaths per year worldwide, approximately half a million people would have been saved if the Tesla autopilot was universally available. Please, take 5 mins and do the bloody math before you write an article that misleads the public.”

Karl Vogt, whose driverless car startup GM bought for about $1 billion, told Forbes that driverless cars were his “true calling.” Like Levandowski and Musk, Vogt emphasizes safety. “Part of what’s driving him is the fact that some 33,000 Americans are killed by highway accidents each year, 90% of the time because of human error,” Forbes reported.

Dan Albert’s new book “<a href=”https://amzn.to/2XFqxZz”>Are We There Yet? The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless</a>” is on sale now. (Courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company/)

Vogt may be rounding down: most sources reference human error as causing 94 percent of crashes, injuries, and deaths. “Today, 94 percent of traffic accidents involve driver error,” said Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, introducing federal regulations designed to encourage further development of driverless cars. She went further in NHTSA’s “Automated Driving Systems 2.0: A Vision for Safety.” “The major factor in 94 percent of all fatal crashes is human error,” she wrote. Chao pulls that figure from NHTSA itself. The National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey conducted between 2005 and 2007 found that in 94 percent of crashes, the “critical reason for the critical pre- crash event” should be attributed to the driver. I haven’t done the bloody math, but I have read the bloody footnotes. A huge distance separates that carefully crafted phrase “critical reason for the critical pre- crash event” and the shorthand, “drivers cause 94 percent of all crashes.” The study’s authors took pains to highlight this fact:

Although the critical reason is an important part of the description of events leading up to the crash, it is not intended to be interpreted as the cause of the crash nor as the assignment of the fault to the driver, vehicle, or environment.

The emphasis is decidedly in the original. Yet even NHTSA officials have trouble communicating the difference. I exchanged several emails and spent a half hour on the phone with a representative of the NHTSA press office who could not explain the difference between the footnote and the shorthand and must have hung up the phone and headed off to lunch thinking I was dense. I myself began to wonder. I felt headed for a lifetime of scratching “94%, 94%, 94%” in tiny letters on the worn pages of a composition book. Was I making too much of an italicized footnote? Then Daniel Blower, associate research scientist emeritus of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, talked me back to sanity.

I had tracked down Dr. Blower’s “Large Truck Crash Causation Study Methodological Note.” The LTCC study involved intensive work by NHTSA field teams and served as the model for the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey, whence the 94 percent. “Note that the critical event is not the ‘cause’ of the crash,” Blower told me via email. “When considered carefully, the statement that drivers cause 94 percent of crashes is not very helpful,” he wrote. “The fact is that in the vehicle- driver- environment system, the driver is the last thing that can do anything to avoid the crash.” In other words, no matter how poorly designed the intersection, or how inadequate it is for the increase in traffic since the day it was built, drivers navigate it every day without incident. The “did not crash” figure dwarfs the number of crashes, which implies that drivers routinely compensate for the hazard.

Traffic engineers are the ones who design those intersections. Traffic engineering trades safety for mobility. More than one in three road deaths occur at intersections where “turning moments” and crossing traffic result in deadly “T- bone” crashes. When considering how to make an intersection safe, the engineers begin with a bias toward flow. “Does this intersection warrant any control at all?” they ask. If it rarely sees traffic, no control of any kind is warranted. If it has enough traffic, it gets a stop sign. More cars, and sometimes pedestrians warrant a stoplight. Drivers hate stoplights. Driverless car promoters employ the same balance, putting mobility first and then adding safety as conditions warrant.

New York is one of ten US cities trying to create a world in which not one life is lost to automobility. “No level of fatality on city streets is inevitable or acceptable,” states the city’s Vision Zero Action Plan. The approach is holistic. New York’s radical privileging of life over automobility will require changes in political accountability, the culture of mobility, and road designs, proponents argue. Road speed limits will have to be lower. Actually, we already have the technology to do all of these things while we wait for the driverless car to be perfected and commercialized. Planners and engineers call it “traffic calming.” It amounts to reengineering streets so that vehicles slow down to a speed where they no longer present a hazard.

Notice that Vision Zero is about changing the culture of mobility by framing all road users as citizens with equal rights to safety and security. It means refighting the battle over street space won by the automobile at the turn of the last century. The ultimate measure of Vision Zero’s success will be whether American culture changes from one that privileges driving to one that accepts the equal rights of all road users.

Its potential for saving lives aside, Vision Zero lacks the gee-whiz appeal of the driverless car. It arose not from wondrous, world-shifting algorithms but from the tedious reality of public meetings where everyone gets to say their piece. Although New York City’s mayor Bill de Blasio endorsed Vision Zero, New York State’s governor served up the city’s pedestrians and cyclists as algorithmic guinea pigs. According to a statement by Cruise Automation, GM’s autonomous car startup that will operate with Governor Andrew Cuomo’s blessing, “New York City . . .  provides new opportunities to expose our software to unusual situations.” New York’s pedestrians may object to being called unusual situations.

We can have safer, more hospitable streets as well as the active safety features of autonomous cars. Cars should be able to stop themselves and avoid running off the road whether or not the person inside is paying attention. They should be able to maintain a speed safe and appropriate to conditions. They should be able to see things a human driver cannot easily see such as blind spots and the area directly behind the bumper. In fact, with varying degrees of success, many of the newest cars can. The rhetoric around autonomous vehicles has gotten so heated, however, that some people think that means we have robot cars.

Excerpt from Are We There Yet?: The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless by Dan Albert. Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Marc Albert. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Written By Dan Albert

[maxksx]

Free will is dead, let’s bury it.

According to our best present understanding of the fundamental laws of nature, everything that happens in our universe is due to only four different forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear force. 

These forces have been extremely well studied, and they don’t leave any room for free will. 

There are only two types of fundamental laws that appear in contemporary theories. One type is deterministic, which means that the past entirely predicts the future. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no freedom. The other type of law we know appears in quantum mechanics and has an indeterministic component which is random. This randomness cannot be influenced by anything, and in particular it cannot be influenced by you, whatever you think “you” are. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no “will” – there is just some randomness sprinkled over the determinism. 

In neither case do you have free will in any meaningful way. These are the only two options, and all other elaborations on the matter are just verbose distractions. It doesn’t matter if you start talking about chaos (which is deterministic), top-down causation (which doesn’t exist), or insist that we don’t know how consciousness really works (true but irrelevant). It doesn’t change a thing about this very basic observation: there isn’t any known law of nature that lets you meaningfully speak of “free will”. If you don’t want to believe that, I challenge you to write down any equation for any system that allows for something one could reasonably call free will. You will almost certainly fail. The only thing really you can do to hold on to free will is to wave hands, yell “magic”, and insist that there are systems which are exempt from the laws of nature. And these systems somehow have something to do with human brains. The only known example for a law that is neither deterministic nor random comes from myself. But it’s a baroque construct meant as proof in principle, not a realistic model that I would know how to combine with the four fundamental interactions. As an aside: The paper was rejected by several journals. Not because anyone found anything wrong with it. No, the philosophy journals complained that it was too much physics, and the physics journals complained that it was too much philosophy. And you wonder why there isn’t much interaction between the two fields. After plain denial, the somewhat more enlightened way to insist on free will is to redefine what it means. You might settle for example on speaking of free will as long as your actions cannot be predicted by anybody, possibly not even by yourself. Clearly, it is presently impossible to make such a prediction. It remains to be seen whether it will remain impossible, but right now it’s a reasonable hope. If that’s what you want to call free will, go ahead, but better not ask yourself what determined your actions. A popular justification for this type of free will is insisting that on comparably large scales, like those between molecules responsible for chemical interactions in your brain, there are smaller components which may have a remaining influence. If you don’t keep track of these smaller components, the behavior of the larger components might not be predictable. You can then say “free will is emergent” because of “higher level indeterminism”. It’s like saying if I give you a robot and I don’t tell you what’s in the robot, then you can’t predict what the robot will do, consequently it must have free will. I haven’t managed to bring up sufficient amounts of intellectual dishonesty to buy this argument. But really you don’t have to bother with the details of these arguments, you just have to keep in mind that “indeterminism” doesn’t mean “free will”. Indeterminism just means there’s some element of randomness, either because that’s fundamental or because you have willfully ignored information on short distances. But there is still either no “freedom” or no “will”. Just try it. Try to write down one equation that does it. Just try it. I have written about this a few times before and according to the statistics these are some of the most-read pieces on my blog. Following these posts, I have also received a lot of emails by readers who seem seriously troubled by the claim that our best present knowledge about the laws of nature doesn’t allow for the existence of free will. To ease your existential worries, let me therefore spell out clearly what this means and doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that you are not making decisions or are not making choices. Free will or not, you have to do the thinking to arrive at a conclusion, the answer to which you previously didn’t know. Absence of free will doesn’t mean either that you are somehow forced to do something you didn’t want to do. There isn’t anything external imposing on you. You are whatever makes the decisions. Besides this, if you don’t have free will you’ve never had it, and if this hasn’t bothered you before, why start worrying now? This conclusion that free will doesn’t exist is so obvious that I can’t help but wonder why it isn’t widely accepted. The reason, I am afraid, is not scientific but political. Denying free will is considered politically incorrect because of a wide-spread myth that free will skepticism erodes the foundation of human civilization. For example, a 2014 article in Scientific American addressed the question “What Happens To A Society That Does not Believe in Free Will?” The piece is written by Azim F. Shariff, a Professor for Psychology, and Kathleen D. Vohs, a Professor of Excellence in Marketing (whatever that might mean). In their essay, the authors argue that free will skepticism is dangerous: “[W]e see signs that a lack of belief in free will may end up tearing social organization apart,” they write. “[S]kepticism about free will erodes ethical behavior,” and “diminished belief in free will also seems to release urges to harm others.” And if that wasn’t scary enough already, they conclude that only the “belief in free will restrains people from engaging in the kind of wrongdoing that could unravel an ordered society.” To begin with I find it highly problematic to suggest that the answers to some scientific questions should be taboo because they might be upsetting. They don’t explicitly say this, but the message the article send is pretty clear: If you do as much as suggest that free will doesn’t exist you are encouraging people to harm others. So please read on before you grab the axe. The conclusion that the authors draw is highly flawed. These psychology studies always work the same. The study participants are engaged in some activity in which they receive information, either verbally or in writing, that free will doesn’t exist or is at least limited. After this, their likeliness to conduct “wrongdoing” is tested and compared to a control group. But the information the participants receive is highly misleading. It does not prime them to think they don’t have free will, it instead primes them to think that they are not responsible for their actions. Which is an entirely different thing. Even if you don’t have free will, you are of course responsible for your actions because “you” – that mass of neurons – are making, possibly bad, decisions. If the outcome of your thinking is socially undesirable because it puts other people at risk, those other people will try to prevent you from more wrongdoing. They will either try to fix you or lock you up. In other words, you will be held responsible. Nothing of this has anything to do with free will. It’s merely a matter of finding a solution to a problem. The only thing I conclude from these studies is that neither the scientists who conducted the research nor the study participants spent much time thinking about what the absence of free will really means. Yes, I’ve spent far too much time thinking about this. The reason I am hitting on the free will issue is not that I want to collapse civilization, but that I am afraid the politically correct belief in free will hinders progress on the foundations of physics. Free will of the experimentalist is a relevant ingredient in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Without free will, Bell’s theorem doesn’t hold, and all we have learned from it goes out the window. This option of giving up free will in quantum mechanics goes under the name “superdeterminism” and is exceedingly unpopular. There seem to be but three people on the planet who work on this, ‘t Hooft, me, and a third person of whom I only learned from George Musser’s recent book (and whose name I’ve since forgotten). Chances are the three of us wouldn’t even agree on what we mean. It is highly probable we are missing something really important here, something that could very well be the basis of future technologies. Who cares, you might think, buying into the collapse of the wave-function seems a small price to pay compared to the collapse of civilization. On that matter though, I side with Socrates “The unexamined life is not worth living.” 

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/01/free-will-is-dead-lets-bury-it.html 

[encephalonfatigue]

whence camest thou? and whither wilt thou go?

i was invited to give a short talk at a Lenten gathering at Guelph today about what i felt God was doing in my life and how i thought it related to a passage from the lectionary. it was my first time doing anything like this, and i enjoyed the opportunity tremendously. i chose the gospel passage, and mostly focused on John 3:8, which is a verse i’ve come to really love. the material for the talk was mostly recycled from the last post i made, just reformatted more concisely into the closest thing to a homily i’ve ever tried to write.

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

So I’m in a moment of transition right now, having recently graduated, and still looking for work. The process of finding work, for me is at times one ridden with anxiety, and so I wanted to briefly talk about both the uncertainty and the insignificance I’ve struggled with as both a student and now a graduate seeking employment.

In 2014, I started studying environmental engineering and international development here at Guelph. I had hopes of maybe working for an NGO one day, and grad school seemed like another step I could take towards that goal. 

But I soon felt very uncertain and doubtful about what I was doing. Around the time I was reading a book by Peter Singer called The Most Good You Can Do. He briefly argued, in utilitarian terms, that while working at an NGO for a low salary might be noble, it might not be the best way to do the ‘most good’ possible. Singer reasoned that you might do “more good” by landing the highest paying job possible (within certain ethical parameters) and donating most of your income to what he considered the most highly ‘effective charities’ (i.e. donating any income in excess of a typical NGO salary).

Resources are scarce in global development, hence engineering jobs are too. There’s often only enough money to hire the most competent (i.e. not myself), and often the most experienced from the private sector. Many global development projects are contracted out to boutique firms within large engineering corporations. Some maybe like Pharaoh’s, you read about in Genesis, a massive civil engineering project concerned with storing and controlling surplus food, under the supervision of Joseph the dream interpreter. In Genesis 47, the people seeking solace from a severe famine, sell themselves into slavery, and cry out to Joseph: “You have saved our lives; may it please my lord, we will be slaves to Pharaoh.”

Peter Singer’s book in some ways shattered my confidence with respect to what I was doing in grad school, which was an attempt to combine engineering and international development. I was also struggling with the fact that I’d maybe never be a competent enough engineer to directly do anything significant about poverty and inequality. I felt like I no longer had a clear way forward, no clear exodus from the type of career trajectory I had grown disillusioned with as an undergraduate student – one preoccupied with the problems of the world’s richest 10% (i.e. Pharaoh and his administrative and professional class, of which I am of course implicated as a belonging beneficiary).

In Genesis 16, there’s a story of a young Egyptian slave girl who runs away from her affliction under Abram and Sarai, and God finds her by a well and asks, “Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” She said, “I am running away from my mistress Sarai.” (Genesis 16:8)

As we continually wonder where the Spirit comes from and to where the Spirit goes in our messy realities, God maybe also wonders, and asks: Where have you come from and where are you going?

The theologian Sarah Coakley wrote that:

“It is easy, from a privileged position, to be morally righteous about justice for the oppressed, while actually drowning out their voices with the din of one’s own high-sounding plans for reform… contemplation… its practised self-emptying inculcates an attentiveness that is beyond merely good political intentions. Its practice is more discomforting, more destabilizing to settled presumptions, than a simple intentional design on empathy.”

There is something seductive about a deterministic certainty. The idea that you can neatly add up things and predictably reach the summation you want.

We may often think of uncertainty, unknowing, and chaos as something to be at best tolerated, to come to terms with – but I think maybe chaos is also a type of miracle, a wide expansive canvas, where the Holy Spirit has creative agency to paint colourfully unexpected brushstrokes in a world of remarkably consistent regularities, that seem to confine us to deterministic equations and predictable outcomes.

Quoting Sarah Coakley again:

“For the very act of contemplation… is an act that, by grace, and over time, inculcates mental patterns of ‘un-mastery’, welcomes the dark realm of the unconscious, opens up a radical attention to the ‘other’”

She goes on to say:

“The desire not to ‘master’ cannot be summoned by mere good intention or fiat. It is a matter, I submit, of waiting on divine aid and transformation, a transcendent undoing of manipulative human control or aggression.”

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.

The Holy Spirit is not something we control. A difficult concept for an engineering student schooled daily in the practice of learning how to control things.

Engineers interested, e.g., in wind energy, make it their business to figure out where the wind comes from and goes to. Wind turbines after all are expensive; they take energy and mined resources to manufacture, transport, construct. We want to make them worthwhile in our imagined world of scarcity.

While the principles behind wind can be thought of in quite simple terms, largely resulting from the Sun’s uneven heating of the earth’s surface, predicting the wind and the weather can be notoriously difficult.

Edward Lorenz, a pioneering mathematician in ‘chaos theory’, coined the term the ‘butterfly effect’, provocatively suggesting how a butterfly flapping its wings in one continent could create a hurricane in another.

While working on a computational weather model at MIT in the winter of 1961, Lorenz wanted to rerun a simulation, and just copied in the needed values to restart it from the middle, before stepping out for a coffee break. But when he got back, instead of finding what should have been a duplicate of the last simulation output, puzzlingly the plot looked completely different.

He soon figured out he had typed in the initial values to an accuracy of three decimal places rather than six. The difference shouldn’t have mattered. Weather data collected to the third decimal place was often considered more than adequate. But this small difference led to a very different outcome. Even in a system of deterministic equations the smallest change could lead to an entirely different result. 

Maybe analogously, in a world governed by stable and consistent physical laws of nature, the Holy Spirit emerges in the midst of what we choose to call ‘miracles’, planted by the smallest of actions from the help of the most unqualified of people.

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

This verse you might recognize is from the famous encounter between Christ and Nicodemus at night, it’s where my Pentecostal and Evangelical friends get the term ‘born again’. For an evangelical like my mom, someone’s a ‘real Christian’ for her if they are ‘born again’. It surprises me every time how explicitly maternal the imagery of God is here. Born of the Spirit.

A God, who mysteriously births us into new life, as new creatures, claimed explicitly as children of God. No child earns the love of their Mother who births them, or must work to become significant in her eyes. We are deemed from the beginning immeasurably valuable to God. After all, Christ famously tells Nicodemous, “God so loved the world.”

[liberallifeblog]

How To Get Out Of The Cycle Of Outrage In A Trump World

Have you heard about the latest outrage? Can you believe what the administration just did? I’m not actually talking about anything specific, but between the time I’m writing this and the time you’re reading it, there will no doubt have been plenty of examples. Your inbox and notifications are likely full of them. Your friends are probably texting you about them. You may well be talking about them at dinner tonight, before settling in to watch outraged pundits rehash them. Then there’s one last check for late-breaking outrages before a night of restless, fitful sleep. In the morning, with a check on the accumulation of whatever new outrages rained down overnight, the cycle starts all over again.

Trump has brought many new things to our lives. And one of them is this state of perpetual outrage (Trumprage? Trumpdignation?) provoked in reaction to the state of perpetual chaos his administration seems to generate on a daily, even hourly basis.

This is no way to live. Literally. We’re only 17 days in, and people are already exhausted by it. Trump hasn’t invaded any countries (yet), but he’s certainly invaded our minds and hearts. As Kevin Baker wrote in Politico, “thanks to social media, and to the nature of our new president and his administration, politics is suddenly with us always, in every aspect of our lives, including wherever we may look for diversion.”

And that’s not healthy. There is — as our president might say — a tremendous mountain that shows that when we live in an ongoing state of outrage, anxiety, fear and stress, it wreaks an awful toll on our physical and mental health. It’s not sustainable. And there is another way.

It’s not that the outrage is unwarranted. Trump’s executive order on refugees, his endless petty feuds — with allies, with judges, with Arnold Schwarzenegger — his constant stream of up-is-down and down-is-up fabrications is outrageous. Any president’s actions have real consequences in real people’s lives. This is high stakes and it really matters. But that’s precisely why it’s so important to take back control of how we react. Because only then will we be able to mitigate the effects of those presidential actions on the lives of people most vulnerable to them.

So we need to go back to the truth that helped the country recover after 9/11: if we are consumed by fear, the terrorists win. If we live in a perpetual state of outrage, Trump wins. Because when we become depleted and exhausted, and sapped of our energy, we’re not as resourceful, creative, or effective. The goal of any true resistance is to affect outcomes, not just to vent. And the only way to affect outcomes and thrive in our lives, is to find the eye in the hurricane, and act from that place of inner strength.

It’s the centered place Archimedes described when he said “give me a place to stand and I shall move the world.” It’s the place from which I imagine Judge James Robart issued his historic order to reverse Trump’s executive order on refugees. And it’s the place from which Viktor Frankl, who lost his pregnant wife, parents and brother in the Holocaust and spent 3 years in concentration camps, could write, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way…every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom.”

When we are robbed of our inner freedom, we feel like victims — victims of our circumstances, of Trump’s outrages, policies and chaos. If we want one more reason not to live in a state of victimhood and perpetual outrage, think of this: that’s the world Trump lives in. He wakes up feeling victimized by the media, he goes to sleep outraged at Alec Baldwin’s portrayal on SNL, and then he wakes up outraged at Judge Robart’s decision. And it’s from that place that he reacts and lashes out with language his administration has to spend news cycles explaining — like the “so-called” judge.

So whatever you do, don’t just let yourself get stuck in the outrage storm — that particular weather pattern is likely to be here for a long time. Remember, you have the power to step out of the storm, think carefully about how best to channel your valuable energy, and then take action. And there are so many ways to do that.

Laura Moser is a freelance writer and mother in Washington, D.C. After the election, she found she couldn’t disengage. So to channel her energy, and that of others as well, she created Daily Action, a daily text people can sign up for that gives them one concrete and specific action to take. In just a matter of weeks, she’s amassed over 100,000 subscribers. One is Aaron Becker, an author from Massachusetts. “People are feeling fatigue,” he told the Washington Post . “We are not really designed as human beings to take on the responsibility of everything at once.” But since channeling his energy in a specific way, he’s gotten a measure of control back in his life. “Now I feel like I can turn off my browser window and do some work,” he said.

And there are plenty of other groups doing a similar thing — making it easy to channel that outrage in productive ways that can change outcomes.

• 5 Calls gives you five calls that you can make in five minutes.

• The Resistance Manual is an open source guide to taking action on a range of issues, from incarceration to immigration.

• Run For Something is dedicated to helping young people get off the sidelines and into the leadership pipeline.

• No One Left Behind is dedicated to helping obtain special immigration visas for those — like translators and interpreters — who have helped U.S. soldiers abroad.

• The March for Science will be held on Earth Day, April 22nd. Showing up will be a way of demonstrating that we care about facts, data, science and what they tell us about climate change.

•The Indivisible guide bills itself as a “practical guide to resisting the Trump agenda,” and also shows you how to get involved with one of the over 4,500 local indivisible groups that have already been started.

When you fight a disease — and the Trump presidency is a disease, an assault on the health of our entire system — the most important thing is to give yourself the resources to allow your immune system to prevail over the disease. And that includes taking care of ourselves to strengthen our resilience — making sure we sleep, exercise, enjoy nature, eat healthily, take breaks from technology, and don’t start and end our day by going straight to the latest news before we’ve found that eye in the hurricane. As Marcus Aurelius, who spent nineteen years as the Emperor of Rome facing nearly constant war, a horrific plague, an attempt at the throne by one of his closest allies and an incompetent and greedy step-brother as co-emperor, wrote, “People look for retreats for themselves in the country, by the coast, or in the hills. There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind. ... So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself.”

So how do you put this into action in your everyday life? How can we renew ourselves and thrive in the Age of Trump? Here are a few of our ideas. I hope you’ll add your own by telling me on social media at @ariannahuff on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook:

1) As they say on airplanes, put your own oxygen mask on first. Take care of yourself so you can take care of others.

2) Take action. Once you’ve taken care of step one, you’ll be ready to put your outrage to work, and the list above is a great place to start.

3) Remember that humor has always been a great way to find light in dark times. So seek out ways to laugh. There are, of course, the usual sources: Bill Maher, SNL (and Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer!). But you can also lead the way, as did whoever thought of the fake vigils to honor the victims of the “Bowling Green Massacre” made up by Kellyanne Conway.

4) Get creative — as did those who started the viral hashtag #dresslikeawoman in response to Trump’s narrow (and antiquated) ideas of how women should dress in the White House.

5) Find your own Thrive Tribe — reach out to people, seek out encouragement and inspiration from friends and be there for those who need the same, including those most vulnerable to Trump’s decisions.

6) Don’t limit your reading to social media — read the Greats and surround yourself with their wisdom. Here are two of my favorite quotes that I’m keeping by my bed right now: “Our actions may be impeded, but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. The impediment to action advances actions, what stands in the way becomes the way.” That’s from Marcus Aurelius. The other is from Albert Schweitzer: “One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity.”

8) Unplug. Calendar time in your day when you choose to separate yourself from your devices, from the news, from social media.

9) Breathe. Seriously. It’s good for your brain.

10) Trust: As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Remember: truth and justice ultimately always win.

This post was originally published on Thrive Global.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

How To Get Out Of The Cycle Of Outrage In A Trump World posted first on http://ift.tt/2kDxLY4

[prohealths]

How To Get Out Of The Cycle Of Outrage In A Trump World

Have you heard about the latest outrage? Can you believe what the administration just did? I’m not actually talking about anything specific, but between the time I’m writing this and the time you’re reading it, there will no doubt have been plenty of examples. Your inbox and notifications are likely full of them. Your friends are probably texting you about them. You may well be talking about them at dinner tonight, before settling in to watch outraged pundits rehash them. Then there’s one last check for late-breaking outrages before a night of restless, fitful sleep. In the morning, with a check on the accumulation of whatever new outrages rained down overnight, the cycle starts all over again.

Trump has brought many new things to our lives. And one of them is this state of perpetual outrage (Trumprage? Trumpdignation?) provoked in reaction to the state of perpetual chaos his administration seems to generate on a daily, even hourly basis.

This is no way to live. Literally. We’re only 17 days in, and people are already exhausted by it. Trump hasn’t invaded any countries (yet), but he’s certainly invaded our minds and hearts. As Kevin Baker wrote in Politico, “thanks to social media, and to the nature of our new president and his administration, politics is suddenly with us always, in every aspect of our lives, including wherever we may look for diversion.”

And that’s not healthy. There is — as our president might say — a tremendous mountain that shows that when we live in an ongoing state of outrage, anxiety, fear and stress, it wreaks an awful toll on our physical and mental health. It’s not sustainable. And there is another way.

It’s not that the outrage is unwarranted. Trump’s executive order on refugees, his endless petty feuds — with allies, with judges, with Arnold Schwarzenegger — his constant stream of up-is-down and down-is-up fabrications is outrageous. Any president’s actions have real consequences in real people’s lives. This is high stakes and it really matters. But that’s precisely why it’s so important to take back control of how we react. Because only then will we be able to mitigate the effects of those presidential actions on the lives of people most vulnerable to them.

So we need to go back to the truth that helped the country recover after 9/11: if we are consumed by fear, the terrorists win. If we live in a perpetual state of outrage, Trump wins. Because when we become depleted and exhausted, and sapped of our energy, we’re not as resourceful, creative, or effective. The goal of any true resistance is to affect outcomes, not just to vent. And the only way to affect outcomes and thrive in our lives, is to find the eye in the hurricane, and act from that place of inner strength.

It’s the centered place Archimedes described when he said “give me a place to stand and I shall move the world.” It’s the place from which I imagine Judge James Robart issued his historic order to reverse Trump’s executive order on refugees. And it’s the place from which Viktor Frankl, who lost his pregnant wife, parents and brother in the Holocaust and spent 3 years in concentration camps, could write, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way…every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom.”

When we are robbed of our inner freedom, we feel like victims — victims of our circumstances, of Trump’s outrages, policies and chaos. If we want one more reason not to live in a state of victimhood and perpetual outrage, think of this: that’s the world Trump lives in. He wakes up feeling victimized by the media, he goes to sleep outraged at Alec Baldwin’s portrayal on SNL, and then he wakes up outraged at Judge Robart’s decision. And it’s from that place that he reacts and lashes out with language his administration has to spend news cycles explaining — like the “so-called” judge.

So whatever you do, don’t just let yourself get stuck in the outrage storm — that particular weather pattern is likely to be here for a long time. Remember, you have the power to step out of the storm, think carefully about how best to channel your valuable energy, and then take action. And there are so many ways to do that.

Laura Moser is a freelance writer and mother in Washington, D.C. After the election, she found she couldn’t disengage. So to channel her energy, and that of others as well, she created Daily Action, a daily text people can sign up for that gives them one concrete and specific action to take. In just a matter of weeks, she’s amassed over 100,000 subscribers. One is Aaron Becker, an author from Massachusetts. “People are feeling fatigue,” he told the Washington Post . “We are not really designed as human beings to take on the responsibility of everything at once.” But since channeling his energy in a specific way, he’s gotten a measure of control back in his life. “Now I feel like I can turn off my browser window and do some work,” he said.

And there are plenty of other groups doing a similar thing — making it easy to channel that outrage in productive ways that can change outcomes.

• 5 Calls gives you five calls that you can make in five minutes.

• The Resistance Manual is an open source guide to taking action on a range of issues, from incarceration to immigration.

• Run For Something is dedicated to helping young people get off the sidelines and into the leadership pipeline.

• No One Left Behind is dedicated to helping obtain special immigration visas for those — like translators and interpreters — who have helped U.S. soldiers abroad.

• The March for Science will be held on Earth Day, April 22nd. Showing up will be a way of demonstrating that we care about facts, data, science and what they tell us about climate change.

•The Indivisible guide bills itself as a “practical guide to resisting the Trump agenda,” and also shows you how to get involved with one of the over 4,500 local indivisible groups that have already been started.

When you fight a disease — and the Trump presidency is a disease, an assault on the health of our entire system — the most important thing is to give yourself the resources to allow your immune system to prevail over the disease. And that includes taking care of ourselves to strengthen our resilience — making sure we sleep, exercise, enjoy nature, eat healthily, take breaks from technology, and don’t start and end our day by going straight to the latest news before we’ve found that eye in the hurricane. As Marcus Aurelius, who spent nineteen years as the Emperor of Rome facing nearly constant war, a horrific plague, an attempt at the throne by one of his closest allies and an incompetent and greedy step-brother as co-emperor, wrote, “People look for retreats for themselves in the country, by the coast, or in the hills. There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind. … So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself.”

So how do you put this into action in your everyday life? How can we renew ourselves and thrive in the Age of Trump? Here are a few of our ideas. I hope you’ll add your own by telling me on social media at @ariannahuff on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook:

1) As they say on airplanes, put your own oxygen mask on first. Take care of yourself so you can take care of others.

2) Take action. Once you’ve taken care of step one, you’ll be ready to put your outrage to work, and the list above is a great place to start.

3) Remember that humor has always been a great way to find light in dark times. So seek out ways to laugh. There are, of course, the usual sources: Bill Maher, SNL (and Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer!). But you can also lead the way, as did whoever thought of the fake vigils to honor the victims of the “Bowling Green Massacre” made up by Kellyanne Conway.

4) Get creative — as did those who started the viral hashtag #dresslikeawoman in response to Trump’s narrow (and antiquated) ideas of how women should dress in the White House.

5) Find your own Thrive Tribe — reach out to people, seek out encouragement and inspiration from friends and be there for those who need the same, including those most vulnerable to Trump’s decisions.

6) Don’t limit your reading to social media — read the Greats and surround yourself with their wisdom. Here are two of my favorite quotes that I’m keeping by my bed right now: “Our actions may be impeded, but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. The impediment to action advances actions, what stands in the way becomes the way.” That’s from Marcus Aurelius. The other is from Albert Schweitzer: “One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity.”

8) Unplug. Calendar time in your day when you choose to separate yourself from your devices, from the news, from social media.

9) Breathe. Seriously. It’s good for your brain.

10) Trust: As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Remember: truth and justice ultimately always win.

This post was originally published on Thrive Global.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

How To Get Out Of The Cycle Of Outrage In A Trump World syndicated from http://ift.tt/2llz9hF

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How To Get Out Of The Cycle Of Outrage In A Trump World

Have you heard about the latest outrage? Can you believe what the administration just did? I’m not actually talking about anything specific, but between the time I’m writing this and the time you’re reading it, there will no doubt have been plenty of examples. Your inbox and notifications are likely full of them. Your friends are probably texting you about them. You may well be talking about them at dinner tonight, before settling in to watch outraged pundits rehash them. Then there’s one last check for late-breaking outrages before a night of restless, fitful sleep. In the morning, with a check on the accumulation of whatever new outrages rained down overnight, the cycle starts all over again.

Trump has brought many new things to our lives. And one of them is this state of perpetual outrage (Trumprage? Trumpdignation?) provoked in reaction to the state of perpetual chaos his administration seems to generate on a daily, even hourly basis.

This is no way to live. Literally. We’re only 17 days in, and people are already exhausted by it. Trump hasn’t invaded any countries (yet), but he’s certainly invaded our minds and hearts. As Kevin Baker wrote in Politico, “thanks to social media, and to the nature of our new president and his administration, politics is suddenly with us always, in every aspect of our lives, including wherever we may look for diversion.”

And that’s not healthy. There is — as our president might say — a tremendous mountain that shows that when we live in an ongoing state of outrage, anxiety, fear and stress, it wreaks an awful toll on our physical and mental health. It’s not sustainable. And there is another way.

It’s not that the outrage is unwarranted. Trump’s executive order on refugees, his endless petty feuds — with allies, with judges, with Arnold Schwarzenegger — his constant stream of up-is-down and down-is-up fabrications is outrageous. Any president’s actions have real consequences in real people’s lives. This is high stakes and it really matters. But that’s precisely why it’s so important to take back control of how we react. Because only then will we be able to mitigate the effects of those presidential actions on the lives of people most vulnerable to them.

So we need to go back to the truth that helped the country recover after 9/11: if we are consumed by fear, the terrorists win. If we live in a perpetual state of outrage, Trump wins. Because when we become depleted and exhausted, and sapped of our energy, we’re not as resourceful, creative, or effective. The goal of any true resistance is to affect outcomes, not just to vent. And the only way to affect outcomes and thrive in our lives, is to find the eye in the hurricane, and act from that place of inner strength.

It’s the centered place Archimedes described when he said “give me a place to stand and I shall move the world.” It’s the place from which I imagine Judge James Robart issued his historic order to reverse Trump’s executive order on refugees. And it’s the place from which Viktor Frankl, who lost his pregnant wife, parents and brother in the Holocaust and spent 3 years in concentration camps, could write, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way…every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom.”

When we are robbed of our inner freedom, we feel like victims — victims of our circumstances, of Trump’s outrages, policies and chaos. If we want one more reason not to live in a state of victimhood and perpetual outrage, think of this: that’s the world Trump lives in. He wakes up feeling victimized by the media, he goes to sleep outraged at Alec Baldwin’s portrayal on SNL, and then he wakes up outraged at Judge Robart’s decision. And it’s from that place that he reacts and lashes out with language his administration has to spend news cycles explaining — like the “so-called” judge.

So whatever you do, don’t just let yourself get stuck in the outrage storm — that particular weather pattern is likely to be here for a long time. Remember, you have the power to step out of the storm, think carefully about how best to channel your valuable energy, and then take action. And there are so many ways to do that.

Laura Moser is a freelance writer and mother in Washington, D.C. After the election, she found she couldn’t disengage. So to channel her energy, and that of others as well, she created Daily Action, a daily text people can sign up for that gives them one concrete and specific action to take. In just a matter of weeks, she’s amassed over 100,000 subscribers. One is Aaron Becker, an author from Massachusetts. “People are feeling fatigue,” he told the Washington Post . “We are not really designed as human beings to take on the responsibility of everything at once.” But since channeling his energy in a specific way, he’s gotten a measure of control back in his life. “Now I feel like I can turn off my browser window and do some work,” he said.

And there are plenty of other groups doing a similar thing — making it easy to channel that outrage in productive ways that can change outcomes.

• 5 Calls gives you five calls that you can make in five minutes.

• The Resistance Manual is an open source guide to taking action on a range of issues, from incarceration to immigration.

• Run For Something is dedicated to helping young people get off the sidelines and into the leadership pipeline.

• No One Left Behind is dedicated to helping obtain special immigration visas for those — like translators and interpreters — who have helped U.S. soldiers abroad.

• The March for Science will be held on Earth Day, April 22nd. Showing up will be a way of demonstrating that we care about facts, data, science and what they tell us about climate change.

•The Indivisible guide bills itself as a “practical guide to resisting the Trump agenda,” and also shows you how to get involved with one of the over 4,500 local indivisible groups that have already been started.

When you fight a disease — and the Trump presidency is a disease, an assault on the health of our entire system — the most important thing is to give yourself the resources to allow your immune system to prevail over the disease. And that includes taking care of ourselves to strengthen our resilience — making sure we sleep, exercise, enjoy nature, eat healthily, take breaks from technology, and don’t start and end our day by going straight to the latest news before we’ve found that eye in the hurricane. As Marcus Aurelius, who spent nineteen years as the Emperor of Rome facing nearly constant war, a horrific plague, an attempt at the throne by one of his closest allies and an incompetent and greedy step-brother as co-emperor, wrote, “People look for retreats for themselves in the country, by the coast, or in the hills. There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind. ... So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself.”

So how do you put this into action in your everyday life? How can we renew ourselves and thrive in the Age of Trump? Here are a few of our ideas. I hope you’ll add your own by telling me on social media at @ariannahuff on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook:

1) As they say on airplanes, put your own oxygen mask on first. Take care of yourself so you can take care of others.

2) Take action. Once you’ve taken care of step one, you’ll be ready to put your outrage to work, and the list above is a great place to start.

3) Remember that humor has always been a great way to find light in dark times. So seek out ways to laugh. There are, of course, the usual sources: Bill Maher, SNL (and Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer!). But you can also lead the way, as did whoever thought of the fake vigils to honor the victims of the “Bowling Green Massacre” made up by Kellyanne Conway.

4) Get creative — as did those who started the viral hashtag #dresslikeawoman in response to Trump’s narrow (and antiquated) ideas of how women should dress in the White House.

5) Find your own Thrive Tribe — reach out to people, seek out encouragement and inspiration from friends and be there for those who need the same, including those most vulnerable to Trump’s decisions.

6) Don’t limit your reading to social media — read the Greats and surround yourself with their wisdom. Here are two of my favorite quotes that I’m keeping by my bed right now: “Our actions may be impeded, but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. The impediment to action advances actions, what stands in the way becomes the way.” That’s from Marcus Aurelius. The other is from Albert Schweitzer: “One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity.”

8) Unplug. Calendar time in your day when you choose to separate yourself from your devices, from the news, from social media.

9) Breathe. Seriously. It’s good for your brain.

10) Trust: As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Remember: truth and justice ultimately always win.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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