#IT DOES NOT GET MORE GASLIGHTY THAN THAT

[beaniebaneenie]

This has nothing to do with you, and how dare you emotionally blackmail Loki like that?

Trying to force him to accept you as his mother, so you feel better and less guilty (and completely dismissing his emotional pain and distress over the last millennium) and you can Play Pretend like you're a happy family, when you know that he is desperate for a scrap of comfort? When that also means forcing him to accept Odin, his kidnapper, as his father?

Maybe it's an unpopular opinion, but I'm actually glad Loki denied her.

He didn't give in to the emotional blackmail.

THOR: THE DARK WORLD (2013) dir. Alan Taylor

[short-honey-badger]

Peppermint Tea 12

Hey guys! Sorry it's been a bit since the last post! I ended up with a bad case of strept throat and I'm just now feeling up to do my stuff. Anyway. I hope you enjoy!

Warnings! None I don't think? Some drinking. Mihawk gets a little dark. A little gaslighty. It's all for your own good tho! Next part? It's finally Smut time!

I forgot to say! The song that they dance to HERE

Begin Again is HERE

Masterlist

Breakfast is already done by the time Dracule finally decides that he is done, not hiding per se, but procrastinating. You greet him with a blinding smile, and his thoughts flash back to the portrait of a younger you. He shoves the image away and brings you in for a quick kiss before he sidesteps you and an excited Hank for the stove. He plies his plate and joins you at the table. 

“I brought you another gift, dear one,” Dracule begins and you roll your eyes at him. He huffs and sips his tea before continuing, “Don’t pout. I think you’ll enjoy this one.” 

“I enjoy all of your gifts, Mihawk,” You point out gently and toss Hank a piece of grilled fish, “But I’ll need to start getting rid of some stuff if you keep bringing me such nice things.” 

Dracule casts his eyes around your humble home. While there wasn’t anything wrong with the things you have drug up from the shore from shipwrecks, It was far less than what you deserved. Especially since he knew about your past.

“Not everything is meant to be kept forever, Darling,” Dracule says right back, and you sigh but nod. The older man does have a point. Out with the old and in with the new, and all that. You catch the smug twist of his lips at your concession and roll your eyes. He was such a priss. 

“Finish your breakfast, and then I’ll bring it in,” Mihawk orders gently after a moment and stands to place a kiss on your brow. He leaves with a lingering look your way that has your cheeks pinking up. 

Down at his ship, Mihawk hefts two large crates with ease and carries them back up the beach and to the cottage. One is filled with a variety of fruit and vegetables that you did not have, and Dracule hoped that the more exotic ones would take to the soil of your island. The other crate held the real gift to you, one that he was far more excited to share. 

The dishes have been cleared by the time he makes it back to your home. Mihawk leaves the crate of seeds and sprouts outside for you to investigate later. Hank is lounging in the sun, and Mihawk rolls his eyes at the big lug as he trudges back inside. You have made them fresh cups of tea, and Dracule gladly takes his with a quiet thanks after setting the crate aside. 

“You'll need a clear space for this one, Darling.” Mihawk points out, and you escape to the living room to clear off part of one of your many bookshelves that line the walls. He follows after you and sets the crate on the floor, then kneels to flip open the lid of the box. You peer inside, brow furrowing at whatever was inside. 

“This is a gramophone. It's an older model, so you'll have to crank it here for it to power itself.” Dracule lifts the record player and sets it on the spot you've cleared for him. He dusts it off and then dives back down to retrieve a large metal horn that he attaches to the back of the box. While he is screwing the horn in, you crouch and look through the crate, carefully pulling out several very thin square objects with art on the front. 

“What are these for?” You ask and hand them over to Mihawk when he reaches for them. He opens the square and pulls out a shiny black disk that he sits in the middle of the gramophone. You watch in growing fascination as the vinyl begins to spin and jump out of your skin when noise blurts out from the horn. 

The static mellows out, and soon your cottage is filled with the delicate notes of classic music and the sound of a man and a woman singing in beautiful harmony. It's in a language that you don't know, but it isn't any less beautiful. You step closer to the machine, awe on your face. You've never heard something so beautiful before, and you close your eyes to better lose yourself in the changing notes. 

Mihawk watches you, eyes softening as he takes you in. You sway side to side, your long hair dancing around your waist, completely entranced in the classical tune. He steps behind you, hands settling on your waist as he gently leads you away from the bookshelf and to the middle of the living room. He sways with you, keeping to the slow beat of the song. 

One of Dracule's hands finds your own, and he twines your fingers together with a hum, bringing it up and around to wrap around his neck. His other arm wraps around your waist, pulling you flush against his front, “This is one of my favorite pieces. It's a recount of a young man and his affection for his first love.” 

You shiver when he speaks, his tone sinful and dripping with intent. You wonder if he is trying to tell you something in his usual, difficult, roundabout way. Did he love you? You were pretty sure that you loved him. 

Mihawk holds you close, and as you close your eyes, it is him you hear, humming quietly in your ear. You cock your head up and bring his head down, kissing him as best you can in the odd angle. He twists you around not a second later, untangling his hand from yours so that Dracule can slip it into your hair and hold you just the way he wants as he kisses you senseless. The song comes to an end just as he is pulling you away, leaving you staring up at Mihawk like he was your everything. 

Dracule gently untangled his hand from your hair to smooth his knuckles across your cheek, then shifted down to rub his thumb along your bottom lip.

“Would you like to listen to more?” Mihawk asks softly and breaks whatever tension that had built around the two of you. 

You nod, an eager smile breaking across your lips, “Yes, please. I didn't understand what they said, but it was beautiful.” 

“Not many would, Latin is a dead language to many,” Dracule informs you helpfully and then crouches to investigate the rest of the records inside the crate, “I made sure to bring you a variety of genres.” 

You thank his kindness with a kiss on his cheek and giggle when the stoic man looks inordinately proud of himself. He flicks your forehead when you go in for another, “You've made your point.” 

You pout at him briefly before you become distracted by the records again. You choose one at random and hand it to Mihawk, and then rise so that you can watch how he changes the disks. 

For the next two days, the two of you went through the music that Dracule had brought for you. While you enjoyed the classical music that the warlord favored, you found that the more upbeat jazz genre was more your style. Dracule would smile to himself whenever he caught you humming one of your favorites and pat himself on the back for doing such a good job on his gift. 

On the third day, the weather turned for the worse, casting your usual tropical and nice weather under dark clouds and raging winds. Rain pelted the island while you and Mihawk took shelter inside, Hank lay in front of the fireplace, drying his wet fur from his run inside. You sat curled up in the corner of the couch, a small glass of wine held in your hand. Mihawk had assured you that just a small bit would not hurt and would help to warm you up. 

Dracule sat in the armchair across from you, feet kicked up as he sipped from his own glass and paged through one of your waterlogged books. Vera Keys crooned in the back, a song about starting all over to begin again. You hum along to the sad song, frowning a bit at the words.

 Could you ever do that? Let go of your life here? Begin again somewhere else? The thought sent fear shooting down your spine, a voice echoing in the back of your mind that you could never leave this island. 

Dracule glances over to see you frowning and can tell that you have delved into your thoughts. He wonders how much of your past that you recall, but he doesn't dare ask, would hate himself for bringing you any unnecessary pain. There was no need for you to know right now, not when it kept you safe. 

“Something wrong, Angel?” Dracule rumbles and sets his book away to focus on you. He stands and steps over Hank to sit beside you on the couch. 

Your lips screw up even more, and you debate on telling Dracule your thoughts. You'd already spilled enough on him the other morning about your dreams. 

“I just…wish that I could leave sometimes,” you admit quietly and sit your glass aside. Your hands pick at themselves, a nervous habit over the years, “But everything I think about it, there is this voice telling me how I shouldn't. How it isn't safe.” 

Dracule is silent beside you. Panic had shot through him for half a second when you mentioned wanting to leave. He could understand why. You've been trapped here all your life, but the thought of Big Mom somehow finding out about you? That was unacceptable. You needed to be kept safe, and Dracule would be the one to take up that role. 

“While I understand your desire to leave, to explore the world,” Mihawk begins softly and draws you close to him, manhandling you a little so that you sit on his lap, legs on either side of his own, “I would listen to that voice. The world is vast, and there are people out there that would destroy everything that makes you, you.” 

You find yourself nodding along. Dracule sounds so serious, and you wish he would tell you what had wronged him in the world for him to feel this way. For him to want you to stay here. 

“What kind of people?” You ask, and Dracule frowns harshly, looming far more frightening than you have seen him since the first time he stepped foot on your island. You aren't sure if his answer brings you comfort or not. 

“People like me, Darling. Pirates who take what they want when they want. I'm where I am for a reason, and I want to keep you away from anyone else who might wish you harm.” 

@writingmysanity @kenkenmaaa @foggyturtleknightangel @browneyedhufflepuff @djbumblebee @goth-mami-writer @myradiaz

[hoboblaidd]

Extremely rambling Mythal thoughts below. Spoiler alert: it’s not pretty.

Major endgame Veilguard spoilers below the cut.

@weptlore broke me with that one post and I’m basically riffing off of it because I’m emo. Tl;dr fuck Mythal.

First though, you will never catch me saying that Solas isn’t culpable, because he absolutely is. His ‘best’ ending is properly atonement, not redemption. He was faced with choice after choice whether or not to do terrible things and he folded every time she asked - save one - despite his better judgment. His choices in the Dragon Age are his, even as they’re motivated by his desire to make the world he thinks Mythal wanted. He needs to be held accountable for the things he messed up instead of running from them to do a full system reboot on the world. He says that thousands will die from the Veil coming down, but then ‘flowers would grow.’ That self-serving justification does not excuse the colossal loss of innocent life he’s prepared to take. Yes, I believe Varric and the Inquisitor that he doesn’t really want to do it and is looking for someone to sell him a better option. But he was still gonna do it, right up to the end.

But to ignore how royally Mythal fucked him up and manipulated him at every step does him a disservice. She strong-armed him into a parallel of a binding. She chipped away at who he was so thoroughly that it twisted him into the thing he is now. She even admits that what she did to him broke him. All new and faded for her indeed, in the worst way imaginable.

She cared about his usefulness. Her disingenuous ‘I need your wisdom’ morphs into the more honest ‘I used your wisdom as a weapon.’ Yeah she calls Solas ‘love’ and says ‘I always come when my friends need me,’ but it’s gaslighty as shit. No wonder she jived with Flemeth. They’re singing the same song. And when he finally didn’t toe her terrible line she turned on him and called it a betrayal. Elgar’nan said she considered Solas insubordinate and unmanageable, and we don’t even know whether that estimation was before or after he rebelled (I recognize Elgar’nan’s not a great source and was trying to get under Solas’ skin, but the truth hurts more than a lie. Given what we know of her, I buy it).

And now where are we? Back at square one and somehow she’s the one to sell him that better story and convince him to do the same damn thing again. ‘I release you from your service’ as long as you immediately bind yourself again.

To ignore the tragedy of his ultimate fate isn’t fair. He needs to atone but my god is it a tragic end for him. The one thing in the world Solas wants is freedom, and it’s the one thing he’ll never get. What was it Elgar’nan said? ‘As much as freedom is beyond your grasp.’ He was more right than he intended.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk. I would take questions but I need to go backstage and scream.

[fierceawakening]

My activity is acting up. @ante--meridiem I was able to see something from you earlier and read it but now I’m not seeing it and hope I during somehow nuke it. Since I’m responding from memory I’m likely missing some bits.

First: I think people can have rights to things even if they have undeniably terrible character. I do not like that Harris conceded to Trump, as I think it gives him rein to exercise power in accordance with his character, which is craven, corrupt, and greedy. But the rule is there for a reason, recognizing and enforcing the will of the people, and that’s more important.

I do not think it should matters one whit whether someone has good character or bad in matters of:

Access to housing

Access to health care

Access to sufficient, nutritious food

Safety in your home

Freedom from intimate abuse

A fair trial if accused of crime

Probably some others. These get (or should get, ideally) a designation we call “rights” which mean they are universal and inviolable no matter how horrible someone is or how consistently.

Because I think people have rights, I don’t think it’s a contradiction to say “Susan is a white supremacist. I despise her. But I gave her the keys to apartment 5B yesterday and will bring her food tomorrow. Now if you’ll excuse me I have water to blast in my ear canals to clean out the memory of those words she uses.”

(I don’t think everyone else of my political persuasion sees it this way, but I personally see that as my commitment when I chose the left over the right. To me being a leftist just MEANS society owes support to its members and that duty does not go away no matter what. It’s difficult to live with sometimes but it’s what I strongly believe is required to make a fair world and I’ve chosen to invest in doing that.)

Because of that commitment, I feel very leery when people say what sounds to me like “you’re not supposed to judge someone’s character, only their individual actions.” Because to me, someone’s character just IS the sum of their past actions plus their likely future actions.

Can I be wrong about this math? Given that it involves predicting the future and I am not clairvoyant, yes. I would not have guessed ten years ago that I would think Liz Cheney has admirable character (despite still thinking she holds many alarming and terribly wrong views), because I would neither have predicted Trump nor that so many others would cower before him rather than risk their jobs to defy him, highlighting her bravery in comparison.

But I do think most of us do math like this, and pretty often, so it feels weird and gaslighty to me (whether it’s meant to or not, and I find your arguments that it’s not meant to and is mostly just a response to resurgent Calvinism convincing) to hear “if you conclude someone is more bad than good, you’re not only wrong but behaving badly yourself.”

[gwemmieee]

current vibe

My ask inbox is not my DMs. If you want to have a big discussion with me outside of reblogs, use my DMs. I will not engage with anonymous negativity anymore.

This blog is a pretty mature space and sometimes horny, so if you're a minor, I promise you won't get anything out of staying here.

I'm a cute alien puppygirl. Also can be a wolfgirl sometimes. I'm a trans femby, she/her. Sapphic, lesbian, demiromantic, demisexual, hypersexual (but still learning to fully accept myself), neurodivergent, and a fused plural system (kind of like how it's depicted psychologically in Steven Universe, if you know you know). I'm polyamorous and currently in an open marriage w/ @kateinacrate1

I'm new to living in the city, but I love it so much. Lately, I've been building my first real family and discovering a lot about myself. At the moment all I want to do is build community, make friends, get fucked (in a good way), and explore all my old and new hobby interests. I also have a burning desire for certain things I can't afford anytime soon, like gender affirming surgeries, traveling, wine and dining, singing voice training, fancier clothes/makeup, and having a balcony at home.

I believe in community and mad pride. I am a lifelong victim of abuse and severely sensitive to many unusual things due to continuous trauma, especially around group interactions, but I tirelessly seek real connection. Dogpiling instantly renders me unable to maintain my composure or mental health. For this reason, I do not participate in dogpiling, and I minimize engagement with anyone who is mean, dismissive, or gaslighty. Sharing one's traumatic experience is not the same as one-upping anyone else. If I disappear from a discussion in which multiple people are questioning me and nobody is defending me, it is probably because I felt dogpiled.

I always make a full effort to humanize everyone. I frequently wind up being the kindest person most people have ever met, and I'm better than most at keeping my composure and understanding everybody's perspective in any tough discussion. I've had slip-ups in the past that I'm leaving behind. It usually does much more harm than good to express targeted anger or hate in public spaces, online or offline, so I won't. Most good people are ignorant about something or other. It is better to give the benefit of the doubt where possible. It is better to practice harm reduction and restorative justice than to fully embrace hardline tribalism. Callout culture is a genuine problem these days; I believe callouts should only be performed as part of a harm reduction approach with a known bad actor.

I believe in growing, healing, and deradicalization. I did not choose to be so traumatized that humanization of strangers takes me as much emotional labor as it does. I've always been climbing out of the deep pit I was born in. I am mad and I am feminine and I am a whore (non-derogatory) and I am a leader.

[golvio]

I don’t think any one route of Slay the Princess is more “valid” than the others. In fact, I think that’s a silly question to ask, because the whole point of The Princess seems to be that her entire being changes to accommodate her audience’s perception of her. Both her skill with a knife in the Prisoner route and her total lack of skill in the Damsel route are equally ��true,” because that’s the level of competence the player character assigns to her based on how they perceive her.

Even her demeanor changes depending on whether you pick up the knife at the entrance or not reflect this—she’s only threatening in the knife routes because you go in expecting her to be a threat when you decide to believe the Narrator and arm yourself before entering the basement as a precaution.

And, to be honest, the fact that she literally is what anyone who sees her believes her to be is why she’s so volatile and dangerous, and why the Narrator is so desperate to keep her quarantined and observed by as few people as possible, even if she genuinely doesn’t mean us or the world any harm (unless we assume she does).

(I’m willing to bet this ends up being part of the catch in the Damsel route. If she doesn’t hate us for imagining her to be so cute and harmless and tries to kill us for doing that to her so we start imagining her as something competent that has agency again, then her very nature as a being who reflects perceptions will make the simplistic love interest box we shoved her into violently combust the second she comes into contact with another “real” person and the chivalric romance fantasy falls apart.)

It’s why the Narrator is so adamant that His version of the truth is true, and why He gets so agitated and gaslighty when the player character very obviously starts having their own interpretation of events that diverge from the story He wants to tell, where the Princess is safely subdued and the player can’t end the story and start a new loop.

But I also think each of these routes has a greater purpose. If the Princess is a creature of narrative, then it stands to reason we’d learn more about her by looking at the bigger picture instead of squabbling over which individual interpretation of her is Most True. Each narrative is true within its own context, but also gives us glimpses of greater truths about the Princess, the Narrator, ourself, and the general rules of this metanarratively quarantined little world we find ourselves in that apply to all routes. Because there are consistencies across each route, from the presence of the Narrator, to the knife and the rules He lays down, the Princess’ existence in each loop, and the mirror extremely ordinary and boring spot on the wall that we are worryingly obsessed with touching.

There’s also the way the characters react in each route that show us new facets of their personalities and different rules that aren’t immediately apparent in every route. For example, you’d never find out the Narrator could override the player character’s will and force your body to do things if you only played the routes where you agreed with him, or if you played the Stranger route instead of the Damsel or Prisoner routes. The whole game is a puzzle, and each route is a piece that we must put together to see the greater whole.

[shiplessoceans]

To all the Buddie shippers, I'm so sorry fam.

I watched up to season 4 and posted here last year sometime that I was sure buddie wasn't gonna happen (though I had my fingers crossed for you all anyway) and I am sorry that 911 has turned out like all the other queerbait shows. I've been there, we've all been queerbaited and ignored and made to feel like we're stupid and it sucks ass.

I promise you, you are not being silly or frivolous or deluded for seeing what was right in front of you. Your feelings are 100% valid. The creators used romantic tropes and applied them to two straight characters with no intention of addressing it to either confirm it OR deny it.

That lack of denial is very telling.

TV show creators, producers & showrunners will always say that the fans or the audience are "getting the wrong idea" about a queer pairing. It's incredibly reductive and feels like an attempt to 'shame' fans.

Yet they never try to put an end to the romantic tension they have created. A few lines of dialogue. That's all it would take. A quick denial. Tension resolved, on with the story. Get Maddie to say to Buck:

"You and Eddie have gotten close, hope I'm not overstepping but are you...more than friends?"

That's it. A question. Simple one. Would be in character, make sense and be judgement free.

Hell, they could have any character mistake them for a couple and have them clarify that they are just friends who enjoy hanging out but are straight.

But the writers will never do that. Because they want it both ways. They want fans to watch the show for some representation, without having to provide any.

Denying Buddie is a thing would mean losing the audience that watch the show hoping for it. It means they lose you. And you make them money. It's gaslighty. They treat their fans like idiots and I will never watch a show that does that ever again. (Supernatural was the wake up call).

So while you come to terms with all this buddie fam, do yourselves a favour and use this energy to create! Write fix-it fanfic, draw art, make playlists, crochet...steal the characters you love and just write or read or imagine your own stories....

You can close the door on canon and have fun with the characters on their own.

It is also totally valid to move on to other ships, shows and characters. There's a heap of newer media that consciously avoids queerbaiting and those are the shows that deserve your dedication.

Love and hugs to you all!

[afarcry5fromstraight]

☀️😚🍁🐇💤

☀️  - Did they both want children/How many children did they want? 

I'd like to think they both want kids, but have the exact same crippling fear of that much responsibility, even genetically.

Jacob never considered giving himself the option, thankfully Joseph was a better 'mom' to John than he could be when they were kids. Jacob is weary of kids for a lot of the same reasons dogs are.. They're loud and unpredictable, cause complications frequently and in general are difficult to predict. Mistakes are a given and the general automatic acceptance of that is a large pill to swallow, mentally.

Chloe remembers the earlier years with her mom, she was ethereal. Meredith Felix had a seemingly endless well of patience, both for mistakes and questions alike. Her brother was constantly breaking things, Chloe taking blame in an attempt to cover it up. Mere just took it as an opportunity to learn something new, and somehow was incredibly good at whatever it was she was trying for the very first time... That was before Luca died. That same woman never breathed another breath of life, a ragged shell void of anything familiar at all left in her shadow. Chloe's worst fear is emotionally neglecting her theoretical children.

😚 - When one gets sick, what does the other do? 

Chloe is 1 of 2 ways when Jacob is sick and it's entirely dependent on his attitude at the very moment. She will either take care of him tenderly, or yeet the costco sized Tylenol at his head. Can't hurt that bad if he thought it was a good idea to talk to her like that.

Jacob does the slightly gaslighty 'what are you, a pussy?' ploy up to a certain degree. Over a certain line of sick it becomes his absolute upmost priority to make sure Chloe takes her meds exactly the minute she should. He weighed her 4oz of soup at a time when she had the Flu- Theo almost lost his life making a joke over it- thankfully her fever came down shortly after and Theo was given the privilege of greeting another morning.

🍁  - How was their first kiss? 

I'd love to tell you there was this super hot scene but the moment was rather human and awkward. Chloe knelt down to the ground, Jacob kneeling down in front of her to try and see her tear stained face better. She was coming out of a close overdose of bliss, and still incurably out of sorts over her failure to even follow these plans through. Leaning forward she lost her balance, the dirt softer than she realized making her topple forwards into him. Jacob didn't have the most secure foot stance on this hill either, arm bracing the weight of them both as she fumbled into his chest. They miss, before Jacob rights both of them by pulling her into his lap. No mistaking what she just attempted, so.. fuck it. She'd blame it on the bliss later.

🐇  - Who wants to cuddle the other longer in the morning? 

Chloe. Jacob wants to lay in bed, but the longer he lays still the more ache his body dons for the day. Worse for wear is worth it, but only to a degree. Chloe thinks Jacob sleeps through his first alarm and bitches about it constantly to Theo, but Theo knows damn well Jacob wakes the first time. Those are Jacob's 5 minutes of solace, committing Chloe in her most peaceful state.

💤   - Who falls asleep first? 

Chloe falls asleep first. In the beginning she would try her best to outlast the Seed, particularly when she started in the trials. It took Chloe a very, very long time to comfortably fall asleep in the same room as Jacob. Between her distrust of his brothers and own instinct, she was slowly killing herself by refusing to rest until after Jacob.

This is why Jacob started pretending to fall asleep first. He'd always been good at faking a true sleep, between his childhood and the Army. At her best Chloe would be able to tell the difference, but sleep deprived and living out of spite it was easier to fool her. The more she got into the habit of sleeping though, the more natural the cycle was. Jacob doesn't really even pretend anymore, just waits a few minutes until he hears her breathing change to the rhythm his conscious recognizes as his own cue for rest.

[kyrodo]

There's one clear difference between Choskey and Shine. As far as crushes go I mean. Shine is always mindful for Snowy whenever he's visiting us. Always tries to make him feel included, always tries to ensure he doesn't feel isolated when he's being affectionate with me. At the same time, it's still somewhat obvious that he likes me a lot in particular. He'll be mindful of Choskey, he'll be mindful of Red, Lupy, Icy, BalloonToes, whoever is visiting us and ensure he's interacted with them all at least once. He's always making this effort to make everyone feel included, even though he kinda magnets to me for most of it. Which fits with his theme. Helping people, making people feel comfortable, making people not feel lonely, always being mindful of people's emotions perhaps to an extreme. The opposite of Choskey.

Choskey back in the day when I was jealous of him and CarboorCat, or Lightfostpaw, or even WolfangCerberus to a degree, I used to get hyper jealous. He'd always be inching closer to someone other than me, leaving me with the choices to either inch closer to remain included or in most cases sulk alone by myself or even hop worlds to see other people. He used to be completely oblivious of my feelings and always make me feel excluded. Which he does have difficulty with empathy or being mindful of what other think or feel and even admits it.

Shine is an overthinker like me, but an affectionate type. I'm more spiteful, sulky, jealous, selfish, just very good at hiding it at least in the moment. I'm always hoping for some degree of mind reading, hoping people will always be mindful of how I feel, or eventually notice enough to start wondering how I feel. Which is partly why it's beneficial for me to have a semi-private space to spill all that. Since other wise it would strain my friendships with the people I feel for or care about the most. But yeah... it's very clear Shine missed me a lot and was very happy to see me last night. I was getting nightly messages from him on the days we couldn't see each other on vrchat, to kind of make up for the fact we didn't see each other that night. Which I doubt Choskey or others have had that same kind of treatment.

The comfortable voice. The willing to share personal things. The warm paws for phantom sense. The highly compatible by his own words. Always purring and meowing to no end regardless of who's around or what they think of us. That is still me.

And not to toot my own horn but, the soothing voice, by multiple sources, multiple separate people have told me that, the warm paws for phantom sense also multiple separate people even someone I had just met day of at a khnfucat meetup told me the same exact thing Shine did the night before. And it is... I love having that identity. I love representing that. I love how consistent that is. I love how people feel that way about me without even pushing for it, that is objectively what people think of me. Lupyraster's said that too and even confirmed that with IcyCoyote who agreed. And that is the opposite of what people thought of me when I was all text on twitter.

People say all these positive things about me. Always positive. Unless it's some rando in a public lobby going "ew furries" people are generally accepting of me and enjoy my presence. And yet not some years ago some people I was hoping to be trusting with was doing the exact opposite.

And analyzing the past, analyzing the reaction I was observing when I was first being spied upon, that air I had in the irls was always there. It was just very much hidden by how negative I can be when I am spilling thoughts online. In vrchat, I can show my full potential without having to prove myself or fight for it. I literally just have to be my natural self.

That's the thing about manipulative or gaslighty people like Ronnie or his friends. No matter who you are or how good you can be, they will always make you out to be the worst person on the internet if you don't put an excessive amount of effort to quell every lie they make or imply about you because of the way they communicate, or the sheer level of injustice they put to what you're trying to communicate or who you actually are. You will always feel violated around people like that. Because the reality stops mattering, all that matters is who you could be which they'll maximize all the negative stuff as much as possible until just defending yourself is proof that whatever preassumptions have been made still feel likely to them. You will never feel comfortable. You will always feel hated.

Everything they say about you or whatever you have to say is so offputting that even the "positive" stuff they have to say about you feels like carefully veiled insults. This is the world I came from. And nobody sees it. Nobody sees the environment I survived. Nobody sees all the heartbreak, frustration, embarassment, sadness, pain or anger it took to make it here. Shine is one of the few people who truly understands the full extent of what I've experienced.

And once again I appreciate how socially and emotionally rich my life is in the present compared to back then. Both near and far. I still remember when Shine was shyly asking about discordant discourse wishing to be a part of it. Nearly everyone I've added to it has been active in it except Beastner. Though Choskey monopolized me enough that he stopped being interested in interacting with me much. That and he's overly self conscious about the french thing. He made a little too much noise in the voice calls when he was at work though so it's for the best but I wish I had a bit more time to include him more in our gaming at least. But he still got some value out of RGB up until he made his own server.

But other than him everyone I've added since vrchat became this little family I have, even carboorcat and lightfostpaw, who used to be my competition became friends to hang out with. We have this little hang out home, we're always seeing each other on vrchat when we can and that is the type of cohesion I wanted. I didn't get much value out of Omi's group chat and I didn't have anywhere else to go up until vrc. But when it's our own server it's a lot easier to be a part of things, it's a lot easier to be involved. And as long as I remain selective and slow about who I add to the server and how well personalities will fit with it, it will continue to be this lively tight nit community.

Vrchat added so much value to my life, identity wise, social wise, romantic wise, even got a job out of it, like I can't overstate how much vrchat turned my life around. Or how directly it eases my trauma wounds. So yeah, maybe I'm not for everyone, but most people seem to like me. You're just not most people. And that's okay.

It's clear that back when I was wondering if I would be a good fit for your group, I should have actually been thinking about if you would be good fit for mine. And a shitty manipulative personality like yours is never finding it's way inside my home. All this time and shit never seems to go in your favor does it? Not when it comes to me, not even when you're feeding me to the mob. The funny thing on my end of things is even though I would spout all these out into public places, which was and still is perhaps not okay, I didn't build a fucking army against you. I wasn't talking about you behind your back except to select people like my therapy friend or my bff. The only person who does that kinda shit is you. I don't mind if you spy on me now, kiss my fucking ass. Show all your friends how good I actually am, it sure fucking worked the first time around.

Maybe next time consider more finding out than fucking around. Maybe then you'll start looking less like a fucking asshole. Only you could take careful obvious diplomatic planning and turn it into a total disaster. You're just a beacon of amazing decision making skills. You ever change, or are you just the same old you?

Happy Halloween and all. I hate to admit that my sona kinda fits the part. But I clearly didn't have the right person to bring me into the horror scene. I don't care how well my sona goes with someone if they're a shitty person. Nothing makes up for having a trainwreck as a personality. So what am I supposed to say. Didn't have the right environment to be a great person? Yeah well you sure didn't give me the right environment either. When I'm emotionally fucked, I'm not looking for someone to be emotionally fucked with, I'm looking for a fucking cure. Distrust and gaslighting doesn't make for great treatment.

Who are you? What do you represent? If choices make you who you are than who are you? My point of reference is very limited I admit but I don't hold much hope for you at all. You don't exactly seem the learning type. You're the blame everyone for your mistakes type. You're the wounded ego type that doesn't give a shit if they're doing something wrong or not. That's the only side of you you've ever shown me. The Ghost in the Shell. You like doing everything the hard way especially when it comes to basic communication so who am I to fucking stop you.

In heavy contrast when I can be myself, when I get the soft and forthcoming environment I want, I fucking thrive. You're only great when you're the only choice.

[mayhemmies]

this!! this sucks to see because. yes the really strong want and need to help people knowing that "oh my god that could be a real person in trouble" is 100% understandable but . people are waayyyyy too trusting on the internet nowadays. it's so easy to just fake an identity and say "hey i'm from here my family is dying look at this sick child give me money" in a time like this and YES it's sickening but it HAPPENS. and it's VERY COMMON. and acknowledging this doesn't mean you think all like. gazans and whoever else requests for your help and money are evil scammers. it doesn't make you a zionist. you can support gaza in other, safer ways than that.

and i hear a lot of people making dedicated blogs to these. working hours and hours and risking their own health for this sort of stuff and. while that is admirable, people forget that YOUR HEALTH matters more above anyone else. it doesn't matter how selfish it sounds, you shouldn't be borderline killing yourself for people. let alone asks that are most likely scams on tumblr. like i said. not all are. and hey, desperate times call for desperate methods sometimes. but this is bordering dangerous. please just put your money towards like. other fundraisers and not on random GFM pages. i know you want to help and it's really distressing to see people coming to you with like. photos of dying families and horrific conditions begging for your assistance but you don't know who you're giving your money to. please just play it safe.

(also the whole "DONATE NOW OR WE WILL HAUNT YOU!! DONATE NOW OR YOU'RE A SICK PERSON!!" is also. concerning because imo it's really gaslighty and while it does work at times, it's definitely not a good way to raise awareness and it makes me feel worse about donating to these things.) tldr:

just because people come to you in your asks or posts and even if they're "vetted" (which usually doesn't help much. the vetting a lot of people are doing are NOT very useful /lh) doesn't mean it's real and you should give like. 1k dollars immediately

pointing out that scams DO exist should not get you flamed. it's a genuine thing to be worried about

still support Palestine!!! just do it in a safer manner than trusting every blog and repost you see. while it CAN be a real person it's also likely someone trying to profit off a literal genocide, as bad as it sounds.

not sure that getting mad at people for wanting to verify that something isn’t a scam on this hellsite which is full of scams is really the righteous take that some people are acting like it is

[astralazuli]

If you get Covid, honestly, the best thing you can do is REST REST REST.

Even if you feel okay, prioritize rest.

Even if you're thinking, "oh I should be able to do this by now," rest instead of pushing yourself.

Even if your doctor says you should be able to do this by now & just need to work through the fatigue/dizziness/tachycardia/whathaveyou, ignore their uninformed opinion & rest.

There is a lot of overlap between long covid & ME/CFS (as mentioned in the article linked above). In fact, many cases of long covid are just ME/CFS with a fancy hat because you know where it came from (unlike very many pre-Covid ME/CFS patients).

& the best thing you can do early in ME/CFS is learn to pace & to rest before you think you need to.

Pacing means learning to live within your energy envelope rather than trying to escape it.

Think Spoon Theory. You've only got so many exertion Spoons each day & with pacing for ME/CFS, you always want to end up with at least one Spoon left at the end of the day. You never want zero or negative Spoons, because that's when PEM hits you like a ton of bricks & all your symptoms flare & you feel like actual death.

Worse yet, this can lead to permanent lowering of your energy baseline. Which, as it turns out, can get pretty dang low if you keep overexerting yourself. I am talking "can't get out of bed" low, "can't listen to music or have a conversation because you're too fatigued" low, "can barely breathe" low.

I don't say this to scare you or to convince you this is where long covid will always end up. But I do want folks who aren't ME/CFS informed to understand the stakes.

It's also important to understand that, most likely, your doctors don't know this. ME/CFS is chronically under researched & generally dismissed as a psychological problem or malingering because it doesn't yet have a definitive biological marker for diagnosis. (Jeeze, wonder if that has anything to do with the absolute dearth of funding for research, hm? Anyway.) This means a lot of doctors don't bother keeping up on what little research is getting done & still have very archaic opinions about it, including the idea that it is best treated by Graded Exercise Therapy (or GET) (basically incrementally increasing activity at a set pace, regardless of energy envelope) & CBT. Yep. A lot of doctors will think the best route is to just send you to psychotherapy to "learn to not be afraid of exertion."

There's a whole other post about why doctors think these things (I've literally written & deleted like three lengthy rants about the PACE Trial in an attempt to write this post & that's just the tip of the medical nonsense iceberg), but they do & we're stuck dealing with it, despite current research showing GET is contraindicated in ME/CFS & the CDC recommending pacing above all else in symptom management.

All this to say, please be gentle with your body when & after you have covid if you do end up getting it, & rest as much as possible & take re-entering life as slowly as you can. (I know that, especially in the US but also in many other countries, it is pretty much impossible to rest as much as you should in such situations due to the capitalistic hellscape we live in.)

& like. Be gentle with your brain as well. Having lowered capacity for exertion sucks, especially if you're used to being go go go. But take this time to reflect on how you're still a being with inherent value, no matter your productivity, just like everyone else, & unpack the ableism in the glorification of the grind, & give yourself grace in dealing with your feelings around these things. It'll be good for you & good for society at large.

(Also, while CBT does jack shit for ME/CFS, if you are struggling with decreased abilities/learning to relax & rest when needed, it might be worth looking into a chronic illness informed therapist. Chronic illness informed therapists are more likely to be helpful in a) not giving you shit medical advice & b) not (inadvertently or not) gaslighting you into thinking it's all psychological. I have tragically had waaaaaay too many psychotherapists in my time as a disabled person do both of those things & it really only hurt me in the immediate & the long run. Pretending you don't have a physical illness doesn't really help you not have that physical illness.)

The United States has always been a terrible place to be sick and disabled. Ableism is baked into our myths of bootstrapping and self-reliance, in which health is virtue and illness is degeneracy. It is long past time for a bedrock shift, for all of us.

Long covid has derailed my life. Make no mistake: It could yours, too.

[lepertamar]

hey so i was wondering if you were gonna like... rec someone the stars that rise at dawn / the overall sehhinah series... what would u uh. say

SHOULD i...recommend it thoughf. idk i selfishly want very much for other people to read it to discuss it with me but i’m not sure how to rec it cuz it’s sort of a mess/partial failure. expels fascinating ideas in the process of its partial failure, succeede at some!. but it’s very much not a ‘successful’ story or serie. it’s the sort of thing that’s only good if a fan is ‘forced’, due to their deep attraction to some aspect of it, to deal with it and struggle with it and try to make it work, but i’m not sure it has any exploitative shallow ‘there’s Slash Potential’ type of hook to keep most people on tumblr trapped long enough to struggle with it.

i’d say for the first book, rec it as.....subversion of a number of tropes/premises, on different types such as 1) ‘how do i get the member of our childhood friendgroup who ran away when bewitched by fucked-up powers back’ (subversion is: i can’t and shouldn’t, but more deep subversion is that i wasn’t even having the trope-typical assumptions in the first place — i wasn’t assuming it was bad, i was assuming it was unimportant/normal/didn’t imply the things about the depth inherent in soul and life it does in fact imply); 2) ‘obviously any magic introduced into the worldbuilding is there so the characters can use it for other plot relevant stuff’ (subversion is, ‘what can you do with it’ is ‘completely irrelevant’ and also ‘not much’ the focus is all on exploring what the existence and mechanics of the magic implies about how the world or its people exist, so, expansion pack worldbuilding?). 3) all possible moral/(un)desirable/useful/punitive connotations the reader brings with them and projects on the thinges that occur in abrahamic mythology OR ‘subversive’ fantasy are completely incorrect in this world, even when the actual things that occur are the same as in the mythology. its world/characters have a set of assumptions and connotations that are wildly different from irl ones, and which everyone in this fictional world pretty much assumes so matter-of-factly that its almost gaslighty to the heavily-projecting reader (in a good way) and takes a long time for the reality of the fictional world to percolate through the reader’s projecting of IRL connotations, or conversely, for the sheer importance/coolness of the fictional worldbuilding to occur to the characters (the next book starts capitalizing on New Unheard Of (to the fictional world) Premises that are.....concepts that are extremely naturally and casually familiar to the point of ‘not even bothering to think about or define it’ to irl readers, and the defamiliarization there is very VERY effective imo even though most of the book isn’t). (it really should have gone even harder on this imo but well, sff readers ARE incredibly stupid and project much more than they ever ever take in so......)

oh but there’s a third book coming out! idk when, but hopefully it will be good or at least full of thinking :3 the title is ‘the lives that argue for us’ which referes to a really good arc words

[waywardvictorianconfessions]

Calling out problematic behavior and active anti-racist allyship didn’t stop with the end of the summer of 2020. Alternative and gothic circles have never been welcoming to BIPOC. What EA did was fucked up. And she hid from the accountability until enough people in her fanbase moved on. We called that this was gonna happen—that the further away we got from the initial incident, the easier it was going to be for the fandom to wave a hand and say ‘that doesn’t matter anymore’. Or ‘it wasn’t all that, you’re being too sensitive’ gaslighty shit. Yes it does. No we’re not. She marketed herself a champion of the voiceless, and protector of the vulnerable weirdos and outcasts. BIPOC goths and alternatives are that 20 fold. And this was just another alt artist refusing to look at the problematic behaviors in their own community AND their own bullshit, and breaking our hearts. It’s a drop in the bucket of disappointing platform holders, but her music held my hand through so much pain and violence of my youth, like so many. It hurt more than most. You don’t get to trivialize the BIPOC fans that are still burning over this. Now today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.

[randombubblegum]

Sydney, what is your opinion about self sabotage lyrics?

LOL wellllll on one hand, i think they are indeed indicative of how awsten treats the girls he dates???? like he really just, uh, explains exactly the cruel manipulative gaslighty shit he pulls on romantic partners right there in the song huh. i guess my opinion is also colored by the fact that his last gf legit confirmed in response to self-sabotages lyrics that yeah he acted exactly the way hes describing (and more, like making her delete pics of her in crop tops and shit) which is like. that….. sucks?

i think it kind of boils down to (and his ex also said this but this is my take) that he thinks hes like the main character of every relationship hes in, friend or partner or whatever. so when he acts badly or does jerk shit just because he feels bad/to get a reaction/whatever, hes not thinking of how that affects the actual living breathing person hes doing it to. he only thinks about “what the fuck is wrong with me :( im sad” like IN THE LYRICS EVEN…….

i think that is…. kind of an insane thing to cop to in a song? like obviously not all lyrics in songs are 1 to 1 “this is how i really feel and act” but awstens lyrics ARE by his own admission (and again we have the tweets from his ex to corroborate it) which makes this feel….. uhhhh. uhhh kinda bad?

but also, on the other hand, i cant even say i hate this song LOL i like it better than fg or brainwashed (extremely low bar to clear but whatever) because i LIKE songs about self destruction. i LIKE songs where its like, im the monster and theres something wrong with me and i keep lashing out just to see what happens, or because it hurts, because i want to see what youll forgive me for, or whatever. that can make really good lyrics. but i think SS misses the mark??? like it just isnt…. quite…. good…… even in the context of a song like that yknow???

i guess im kinda thinking of old fall out boy songs where pete writes about being like, a self-destructive kind of fuckup and those are GREAT songs that i love……… and this is kinda like a shittier version of that. idk. its also all over the place like okay you want this to work so bad but them you launch back into all this sociopath shit youre doing to some girl and then back to “but i want what i cant have” but also you want to get away from her so bad WHERE does it connect….. you are not pete wentz. and you never will be

i guess in summary: lyrics are pretty shitty with the added context of how he treats girls, i still kinda like the song tho????? its not rly like “HERES A SMOKING GUN OF HOW AWSTEN ABUSES WOMEN” like some people are trying to paint it but its also not a really poignant self-destructive anthem like he was trying for (and like i frankly wish it were). its like……. fine. its just whatever. the instrumentals are good lol

[rainebasillovesbyler]

Why are anti-byler’s so convinced we want El to be unhappy??? That’s why Elmax exists ofc 😊 But in all seriousness after season 2 El has seemed happier with friends than with Mike, for example in season 3 she and him were arguing and stuff than she went of with Max and had the time of her life and learned she has control over what she does NOT Mike. Also I want will to be happy but that’s not the only reason I ship byler, I look at Mike’s side of Byler a lot. The flirting, the way he did anything to save Will. Getting into more proof Mike likes will, he only smiles in photos with Will and only allowed one person to record him during the show, Will. Whenever Mike is arguing or apologizing to El he’s very exaggerated and gaslighty when speaking (poor el she deserves better) but when he speaks to will he stays serious with micro expressions and admits he’s wrong and goes out of his way to apologize. In the season 3 and 4 fight Mike reached out to Will to apologize El had to essentially beg for it. I think El deserves a better partner, bc I love her a lot. I do not want El, Will, or Mike to be unhappy I them all.

just a not so friendly reminder.

Suddenly mike liking will and getting together with him in season 5 would seem really cheap. Like you guys want byler so bad that you want mike to leave el for will? If the duffers were to listen to the backlash and complaints and suddenly make it seem that mike is in love with will after declaring his love for El in the previous season. Like wouldn't that seem cheap and reek of fan service? Like it's pretty pathetic. You guys don't even want mike with will, you either just want will to be happy by any means necessary (even if it means the poor innocent girl who has suffered the whole season but is also ironically the main character suffers for it) or you just want el to suffer because you suck.

So which one is it? You want will to be happy or you want el to suffer, dont bother answering because both of these include hurting el and taking away her happiness. Don't tell me that you guys actually believe that will likes mike. Because there is nothing that could convince me that byler is real or that mike likes will.

[random-thought-depository]

Tangent from my last post: reading over this and thinking about it, I’ve pinpointed a disagreement that I think reveals a fundamental disagreement I have with the ideas I was responding to there.

Seph’s essay talks about liberal sexual consent practices as requiring a shift toward a more Culture A style of social interaction; requiring a willingness to actively assert your own interests instead of engaging in Culture B accommodationism. And that’s true, but I immediately recognized that it’s incomplete in a way that I think fundamentally distorts what’s happening, though it took me a while to think out exactly how. Saying “no” involves a degree of Culture A type assertiveness, but respecting that “no” and pro-actively making sure your partner is enjoying things involves an attentiveness to feelings, an accommodationism, and an attentiveness to maintaining harmony that’s more Culture B.

Like, if you drew up two columns, one labeled “Macho Republican Dad Boomerpost Stuff” and one labeled “Softy SJW Stuff,” and started sorting things into those columns by which group they’re more stereotypically associated with (bacon, guns, capitalism, Christianity, complaining about “cancel culture,” and calling people sissies as an insult into the Republican Dad column, tofu, queerness, feminism, socialism, veganism, accusing people of microaggressions, and being a Wiccan into the SJW column, etc.), I think liberal sexual norms placing a high premium on explicit consent would definitely stereotypically belong in the “SJW” column. And in this context I think that’s revealing.

I think what’s happening here is fundamentally orthogonal to Culture A vs. Culture B. I think, like a lot of left vs. right divides, it fundamentally comes down to hierarchy vs. egalitarianism. Liberal sexual norms emphasizing consent are a rejection of the pecking order method of simply resolving sexual conflicts of interests in favor of the person with more power, whether that power is social status, physical strength, emotional intelligence, or just being more willing to press for their interests. Culture A vs. Culture B is fundamentally orthogonal to what’s really going on here; trying to understanding this issue through that lens is at best like trying to understand the US Civil War through the lens of doctrinal disputes between different types of Christianity (you may get some genuine insights, but you’ve mistaken the fringes of the conflict for its core), and at worst like trying to understand the US Civil War through the lens of doctrinal disputes between Sunni and Shia Islam.

Actually I think the “trying to understand the US Civil War through the lens of Christian doctrine disputes” may be a good analogy, because I think this does tie back to the “the left/liberal side of the culture war is waging a war against Culture A” hypothesis in a way that reveals how that idea is not exactly wrong but misses an important dimension of what’s happening. I think what’s happening is that hierarchy is more explicit and explicitly enforced in Culture A, and therefore as society becomes less like a pecking order hierarchy tends to assume Culture B characteristics.

Culture A is where you find the human hierarchies that look the most like actual pecking orders, which are maintained by literal physical pecking. It’s where you find the openly brutal world of bosses screaming “the leads aren’t weak, you are!” into a cringing subordinate’s face, cops quietly taking an uncooperative suspect into a convenient alley and roughing him up a little to “teach him to respect our authority,” gangsters beating somebody up for being insufficiently deferential to them, some 6′3 250 pound guy in the grips of road rage punching some 5′7 150 pound guy in the face over a smashed bumper, teachers disciplining students by giving them hard blows on the palm with a ruler, a swaggering thug threatening a woman with physical violence because she had the effrontery to object to him groping her, and jocks having some fun inflicting casual physical abuse on the nerds in the locker room and on the playground. Hierarchies in Culture A are often maintained by physical violence and the threat thereof and put-downs and other explicit verbal bullying. When somebody in Culture A thinks you’ve gotten a bit above your station and wants to put your in your place, they’re likely to either actually use physical violence against you, explicitly threaten you with it, or explicitly insult you. Abuse in Culture A tends to look like our stereotypical picture of some swaggering thug openly terrorizing somebody who has some sort of vulnerability.

By contrast, hierarchies in Culture B tend to operate under more polite fictions of relative egalitarianism, cooperativeness, and non-violence. Enforcement of Culture B hierarchies tends to be less overtly violent. Culture B hierarchies are more likely to be covert and legible only to somebody with inside knowledge (e.g. you’ve ostensibly got a group of equals, but some are more equal than others because of advantages that mostly aren’t explicitly acknowledged). Culture B tends to have more of an ideal that coercive power can only be legitimately exercised for moral reasons, while Culture A tends to have more of a “master morality” culture where power is seen as worthy of respect in itself (Culture A is what gave us “Chad” and “alpha” as aspirational ideals), which is why bullying in Culture B tends to have a moralistic and fearmongering nature (see: Tumblr call-out posts) while bullying in Culture A tends to follow a more “master morality” logic of “our victim is weak and aesthetically displeasing to us, and that in itself makes them deserve punishment” - though much like “Culture A rewards strength and technical skills, Culture B rewards social skills and popularity” that’s a dichotomy that can easily be overplayed; most human hierarchies come with a hefty dose of community-minded moralism (even if the community is a pirate ship or criminal gang or something like that), and social skills and popularity are hugely important in almost any culture. Culture B is for people who wouldn’t dream of doing anything so barbaric as yelling at you or punching you because they’re mad at you; they’d complain to the human resources department who’d force you to spend a Friday evening listening to somebody lecture you about the need to “make our store a welcoming environment for our valued customers.”

An archetypal abusive Culture A authority figure is the macho thuggish “respect mah authoritay!” cop. An archetypal abusive Culture B authority figure is the gaslighty Nice Lady Therapist. The former is more-or-less open about the fact that he sees himself as above you in the pecking order and if you dispute that he’ll be delighted to enforce the pecking order in approximately the way chickens do it. The latter pretends to be your friend (and perhaps believes themselves to be that), and expends a great deal of effort tailoring their pecking order enforcement to not look like pecking order enforcement - significantly, they might like to be as openly brutal as the “respect mah authoritay!” cop is, but in strong Culture B that social strategy just doesn’t work; their social strategy represents a compromise with socially influential ideals of egalitarianism and non-violence, a tribute that vice pays to virtue (less charitably, it may simply reflect playing to different strengths and trying to minimize different weaknesses, e.g. the thuggish cop may have chosen that social strategy because he’s a physically powerful but not particularly socially intelligent Biff Tannen type, while the Nice Lady Therapist may have chosen that social strategy because she’s a socially intelligent and Machiavellian but physically feeble 4′10 woman).

In short, Culture B tends to both meaningfully soften the blows of pecking order enforcement and obfuscate them. It follows that as equalizing movements gain ground and explicit pecking order logic becomes more taboo, hierarchy will increasingly take on Culture B characteristics. In 1700, if you angered your boss in some petty interpersonal way he might have whipped you, which was his right as your master. Today, if you anger your boss in some petty interpersonal way she might think a little about how to get revenge on you in a way that doesn’t risk blowback if you take it up with the union, and then find some excuse to arrange for you to have to attend some mandatory HR remedial training that isn’t officially a punishment but let’s be real, totally is. Maybe in 2200 you won’t have a boss because you’ll work in an officially egalitarian syndicalist union, but there will be some union members who are “more equal than others” because of personal connections or charisma or some combination of both, and if you anger one of them in a petty interpersonal way they might through whisper networks arrange a quiet campaign to make sure the union votes against your requests for your favorite foods on the workplace lunch menu.

I guess I’m staking out a position as a hedging kind-of partisan of Culture B here. There’s a lot of talk about how Culture B gets an undeserved good reputation and can be just as unfair and cruel as Culture A but in a more insidious way, and I’m sympathetic to that and I think there’s a lot of truth to that, but, y’know, if I had to choose between pecking order enforcement that has to maintain a plausible veneer of being something else and just open undiluted sadistic pecking order enforcement, I think I’d prefer the former. I think even just adding in a requirement of hypocrisy improves things, because it forces pecking order enforcement to optimize for plausible deniability instead of sadism and effective tyranny. Admittedly, as somebody who finds this very relatable I have a strong personal bias here.

An illustrative personal anecdote: the usual stereotype of high school is that bullied kids (or at least bullied boys) suffer a lot of casual physical abuse, but I noticed that in my school there was a lot of verbal bullying but mercifully little physical abuse; the worst that was likely to happen in terms of physical violence was somebody tripping you up or throwing a box of kleenix at you or spitting their drink at you or something like that. I suspect the reason was that blatant physical violence was pretty much the only form of bullying the school administration would reliably punish (though they’d likely punish the victim right along with the perpetrator), and that’s why it usually wasn’t done. I suspect what happened is that stereotype of chronic casual physical abuse reflects what schools were like when the baby boomers were growing up (and boomers then wrote fiction etc. that reflected that experience that shaped the pop culture stereotype), but then anti-bullying reforms came along and by the late ‘90s and early ‘00s they’d achieved one great success: mostly eliminating that schoolyard culture of casual physical violence. And that was a very incomplete fix, just addressing the tip of the iceberg of the problem and probably often redirecting bullying into psychological abuse rather than actually reducing it... but, y’know, I’m really glad my middle and high school experience didn’t conform to that pop culture stereotype of the school dweeb getting regularly beaten up by four or six bigger kids. I had an awful time in middle and high school, but judging from pop culture stereotypes it could have been so much worse, and if suspensions for kids who punched other kids is what created that difference, then I’m profoundly grateful for that reform.

I think the left is kinda-sorta waging war on Culture A as a side-effect of its war on pecking order culture, in which high-status people enjoy the advantages of Culture A while low-status people labor under the disadvantages of Culture B. It’s not an accident that Culture A is associated with men and Culture B is associated with women. Accommodation (sometimes to the point of self-harm) is a survival strategy for low-status people in a social structure that resembles a pecking order; if you’re going to lose the fight, it often makes sense to pre-emptively accept a settlement that favors the interests of the stronger person (often to the extent of trying to anticipate the stronger person’s wants, performing even the brain work of figuring out their preferences for them). Competitiveness is a social strategy for upward mobility in a pecking order society or defense of a place near the top of the pecking order (it also has more pro-social functions so we probably want to keep it around in some form, but social competition is very much part of its function). Women tend to be reluctant to openly advocate for their personal interests because for much of history a woman openly advocating for her personal interests was likely to provoke status-guarding retaliation from men. Men tend to be reluctant to show vulnerability and see doing so as feminine because for much of history other men were likely to perceive a vulnerable man as an opportunity to increase their own social status by lowering the vulnerable man’s social status, and as a rule of thumb to lower a man’s social status was to give him a social status more like a woman’s. In the context of a pecking order society, a lot of Culture B makes sense as social strategies for people at the bottom of the pecking order with little realistic shot of escaping its lower levels, and a lot of Culture A makes sense as social strategies for people at the top of the pecking order and people at the bottom or middle of the pecking order who have a realistic shot at using high-risk high-reward social strategies to move up in the hierarchy. I think there’s some complicating factors around reproductive dynamics that explain why this is a gendered thing instead of just a class thing, but I won’t get into that here. So it makes sense that as society becomes less like a pecking order that process will involve shifts toward Culture A in some areas and shifts toward Culture B in other areas, because those cultures are probably both somewhat maladaptive in a more egalitarian social context.

A relevant example is that for much of history vigorously advocating their own sexual interests was often very risky for women, so Culture B primes women to pre-emptively accept a settlement that favors the man’s sexual interests, so liberal consent norms work better if women develop more assertiveness about their own interests, which looks kind of Culture A-ish. At the same time, women now have more leverage to effectively demand that men perform pro-social Culture B behaviors of accommodation, empathy, and consideration for the feelings and interests of others in the context of heterosexual sex.

----------

Tangential aside: I think thinking of hierarchy as the fundamental tension point of the left vs. right conflict illustrates a way that post I was responding to might be kind of too meta and you might get an illuminating perspective by stepping back from all that meta-level theorizing about fundamental epistemological differences and looking at the object level.

If you analyze left-wing “cancel culture” at the object level, what does it look like it’s trying to do? It seems to me that it’s trying to lower the social acceptability of what leftists perceive as defenses of hierarchy. Who are the stereotypical targets of campus “cancel culture”? They might be a “race realist” who’s very eager to tell you about how he thinks certain human groups have lower IQs or other congenital traits maladaptive to modern society and darkly hint about political implications. They might be a business libertarian economist who wants to stump for the gospel of the free market. They might be somebody who has a habit of delivering the academic equivalent of boomerposts about kids these days with their coddling and their trigger warnings and their genders. They might be some principled “free speech” type who seems to spend a lot of their energy white knighting for neo-Nazis and other far-right types. They might be somebody who you’d think would be relatively unobjectionable to leftists but who’s said something that can be uncharitably interpreted as bigoted at some point. Besides raw factionalism, the obvious common point is something that can be reasonably interpreted as a defense of hierarchy. The “race realist” at least implicitly says “some groups are smarter or otherwise better than others and may therefore be rightfully deserving of privilege.” The business libertarian economist at least implicitly says “if you’re poor because you can’t get a job or can’t get a job that pays well, that’s basically your problem and the system working as intended; a society with great inequalities of wealth and status may not be ideal but it’s at least better than all the realistic alternatives.” The academic boomerposter at least implicitly says “some people struggle in our education system because of personal emotional sensitivities; their weakness is their own problem and us more functional people have no obligation to accommodate it, if that harms them it may be regrettable but it’s basically the system working as it should to weed out those unfit for it.” The principled free speech proponent at least implicitly says “wanting to kill the Jews and re-enslave the blacks and have white Sharia should be a tolerated opinion in our society, at least insofar as it should not be legally persecuted, and I am willing to devote considerable efforts to defending that principle.” The basically unobjectionable liberal who happens to have a dodgy comment or three in their social media record at least implicitly says “I don’t think I should get too much blowback for once implying that [insert group of concern here] maybe deserves the jackboot to the face.”

And sure, you can dispute the fairness of such judgements, but the over-arching project outlined by these targets seems fairly obvious: to raise the social costs of what leftists perceive as defending pecking orders.

And, like, yeah, there’s some meta-level differences about the role of tolerance and debate too, but I suspect a lot of the disagreement is really more object-level, over how objectionable certain opinions actually are, e.g. a lot of the dispute over “cancelling” the business libertarian guy is probably going to be over 1) how objectionable defense of hierarchy actually is, 2) whether libertarian beliefs are actually defenses of hierarchy.