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zwy01 · 9 months ago

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Blood Moon AU!! Part 1 - Nobles

Time for a second major AU yayy!! I’m still working on Millennium AU as usual, though I want to get started on another one that’s been on my mind since years ago but never really got the chance to put on paper.

So here we are. I’m calling this Blood Moon AU. The nobles and werewolves basically have a race swap in an almost brand new setting. Lukedonia and werewolf island still exist; it’s the characters that have changed.

All characters reference their canon counterparts to various degrees. Some are similar or even near identical to the original, while some are vastly different. This could apply to names, looks, personalities, heritage/family, moral alignment… etc. It’s gonna be fun! I’m going to let myself get crazy with this and change things up quite a bit, haha.

As for the story. To be completely honest, at this point I just want to start off this new AU as more of a simple artistic approach. Right now I’m much more interested in designing and drawing the characters rather than writing the story itself. Maybe I’ll come up with something much later but it won’t be nearly as complicated as Millennium AU, and it’ll be fairly straightforward. Even then, I don’t want to rush it so that’s for the future. If I end up liking this new AU more than I do right now, maybe I’ll give the story an honest shot and turn it into more of a long-term project, but time will tell.

(Fyi “Noblesse” does not exist in the world. Too early for details but they either never existed, are a now permanently extinct special type of noble, or they simply peaced out and ditched Earth and returned to their special heavenly realm… etc. Honestly doesn’t matter. In this AU’s setting, they are absent. “Raizel” and his brother do exist but they’re both human. Actual normal human beings, with a normal life, currently students at a normal high school, stuff like that. Just your average human. The trio are also unmodified normal human beings. They are scattered across the world and never meet each other. Basically, unlike their canon counterparts, their existence is minimal and contribute to almost nothing in this universe. It’s weird, I know! That’s just how this AU is set up)

I’m going to split the noble and werewolf characters into two parts. Doing the (originally werewolves) nobles first! Posting the werewolves in a future post aka. part 2.

The characters!

Lucretia Natalina “Lunark” Drosia: Leader of the Drosia Clan. Kendrick’s twin, and on-and-off lovers with Julius. A rather carefree woman who is primarily interested in having fun, and shows little to no concern for the future of Lukedonia as a whole. When it comes to her people, she is a decent Clan Leader and manages her family efficiently. Lucretia’s efforts only apply to her clan, and her interests in other noble affairs are almost nonexistent. She has a habit of ditching meetings and whatnots. Sometimes, she even tries to ignore the Lord’s summons but ends up going anyway because her lovely daughter makes her show up. The only thing that can get Lucretia’s blood pumping with true passion is an offer to spar. Lucretia is an excellent fighter. People have to be very careful to not interrupt her fights unless they want to unleash her wrath, because she hates it when people invite themselves into her business. She also likes to flirt with her opponents during spars. Lucretia has a bit of a weird relationship with Julius, who is the father of her daughter. They seem to have positive feelings for each other, but that’s only when both of them are very bored and have nothing better to do.

Kendrick Tian-Chen “Kentas” Ru: Leader of the Ru Clan. Lucretia’s twin. A prideful, stubborn man who believes that the stronger should rule the weak. Like his sister Lucretia, he likes to fight and enjoys a good spar. Sometimes, people can choose to settle a quarrel with Kendrick by offering to spar with him and he would gladly accept. You can trust him, because he’s a man of his word. No more grudges, no hurt feelings. Done. In a way, he’s quite simple. Unlike his sister, Kendrick does care about the future of Lukedonia. He has a strong moral code of his own, but that can be overridden by his belief of submitting to the strong. That is why Kendrick is extremely loyal to their Lord and never questions him even if the latter makes some controversial decisions. As of now, Kendrick has no children.

Marcus Duruvan “Maduke” Siriana: Leader of the Siriana Clan. Erica’s older brother, and the Lord’s advisor. The only person who truly has everyone’s best interests at heart. You can say he’s the most “good person” leaning guy in this entire AU. Marcus is quite worried about the future under their Lord’s reign. Life is pretty comfortable inside Lukedonia, which is by itself very isolated from the rest of the world. However, Marcus foresees the destruction of planet earth if no one stops the Lord, since the latter doesn’t care about other races and is only concerned with the prosperity of nobles. Though, he doesn’t want to overthrow the Lord and instead wants to convince him to step away from his current path of darkness. He believes there is still hope. Simultaneously, Marcus is secretly gathering followers and supporters who all share his beliefs and formed his own organization. Together they work to transport resources out of Lukedonia and deliver them to humans and werewolves in need because the Lord refuses the share.

Marcus is struggling to plan for the future of the Siriana Clan, in case the Lord gets tired of him and decides to kill him one day for “meddling” too much, because his younger sister Erica is insane and cruel which makes her the worst possible candidate for the next Clan Leader of Siriana. Marcus loves her, but also fears her. He doesn’t know what she is capable of. Marcus is trying to look for ways to bypass his sister and hopefully be able to hand over both his position and Soul Weapon to another pure-blooded Siriana who isn’t his sister.

Marcus had a son, but he was assassinated sometime after his coming-of-age ceremony and now Marcus is once again childless and without an heir. To this day no one can figure out who the culprit is.

Erica Siriana: Marcus’ younger sister, and next-in-line for the position of Siriana Clan Leader. Wife of Lord Maximilian, and mother of Ashlynn. Erica is a ruthless, bloodthirsty woman. She is actually the person who orchestrated her nephew’s assassination. She made sure he was killed, then got rid of his killers, whom she sent, with her own hands. No one is going to suspect a thing and they’ll never find out no matter how hard they try. Erica did this to eliminate brother Marcus’ heir so she can regain her position as first-in-line. She’s been after her nephew ever since he was born, but waited for two whole centuries before doing the deed. To Erica, she’s just getting back what she’s entitled to, which is the full power, control, and privileges of a Clan Leader. Marcus is trying to be discreet but if Erica ever finds out that her brother intends to bypass her and give his position and Soul Weapon to someone else, she might actually just kill him and take over the clan immediately. Erica is truly a terrifying, power-hungry woman who will do anything to reach her goals. She does not care for anyone aside from her daughter Ashlynn and husband Maximilian, whom she genuinely loves. As messed up as Erica is, she is capable of being very loving and committed to whom she treasures. She and her husband are absolutely addicted to each other and he would let her do anything her heart wishes for, even if she continuously breaks Lukedonian laws.

Vivienne Branwen Di Ashlynn: Name means “lively and blessed raven of dreams”. Daughter of Erica Siriana and Lord Maximilian, and the next Lord of Lukedonia. On the surface, Ashlynn isn’t as straightforward as her mother despite their similarities. Ashlynn is just as ruthless and bloodthirsty as Erica, but the former puts on a facade in front of her people and pretends to be a sweet, altruistic future Lord. The perfect angel princess. And she’s very successful at it. Ashlynn is energetic, talkative, and empathetic around her subjects. She always tells them about how she wants her father to teach her power so she can protect not only her subjects, but also people around the world so they don’t have to suffer from hunger and war. In reality, she doesn’t care about any of them and she honestly thinks of them as a burden. They’re nothing more than cockroaches to her, and she’s only doing this because she enjoys deceiving her people and pulling on their puppet strings. She welcomes the love and respect they give her, and at the same time pities them for not knowing better, for she’s had them fooled this entire time. The world is her stage, and she’s the center. Ashlynn only drops her act and returns to her true self around her parents, who not only tolerate, but also accept and even encourage their daughter’s behavior. Well, their entire family is insane. Erica and Maximilian are totally overindulging Ashlynn while being completely aware of the fact that she is just as insane as them with no attempt to correct her, because she’s their little princess and hey, if she wants the world, then they’ll give it to her. Like Erica, Ashlynn doesn’t care about anyone who isn’t her family. Ashlynn loves both of her parents to the moon and back, and she might as well kill anyone who dares to speak ill about either of them. No one is allowed to disrespect them in front of her. Not a single word.

Ashlynn has a crush on Dominic and wants him for herself one day.

Eutimio Friedrich Di Maximilian: Name means “good-spirited and peaceful ruler of the greatest”. The current Lord, husband of Erica Siriana, and father of Ashlynn. Maximilian firmly believes that nobles are the most supreme beings to exist on this planet, and that they have a right to rule over every other species. Humans, werewolves, whatever… well, for now he’ll let them be for as long as they’re still useful. He won’t hesitate to unleash his power on them if he loses his patience. From a world view, Maximilian would be categorized as “evil”, but he doesn’t think of himself as such. In fact, he believes that he is doing good for his people, who are his priority. Which is true from a certain perspective, especially to the nobles who share their Lord’s vision. To them, Lord Maximilian is the greatest Lord in all of noble history. To others who strongly disagree with him, he is the most terrifying and coldblooded Lord in existence. Maximilian is only concerned with the prosperity of Lukedonia and doesn’t quite welcome the idea of distributing resources with the rest of the world. He doesn’t want the nobles to simply exist alongside other species; he’ll make sure the nobles are on the very top of the food chain. Everyone else is irrelevant and they’re all at his mercy. Generally, opinions are very divided and you either side with him, or you don’t. Life is very, very comfortable inside Lukedonia, and indeed, to some nobles, that is all they care about. Those with more empathy see beyond the obvious and are concerned with what goes on outside Lukedonia. The thing with Maximilian is that despite showing neither mercy nor any sign of remorse for his deeds in the outside world, he is actually quite lenient and loving with his subjects. You can say he has two extreme sides to him. He’s very kind to his nobles, but only them. He doesn’t mind if Lucretia skips meetings; he’d let her be. Or when his servants make mistakes, when someone does something offensive, etc... it’s alright, no big deal. In a way, Maximilian’s Lukedonia is teeming with freedom like never before under the rule of his predecessors. This is where Marcus comes in. He is just nervous and overthinking about getting killed if he says the wrong thing, but in reality Maximilian doesn’t mind voices of objection. He’s not going to give anyone a treason sentence or kill them for saying what they really think of him. You can tell him you disagree with him, he’ll just shrug it off and laugh. Say all you want, he knows you’re trying to persuade him, he doesn’t care. He’ll just keep doing what he’s always been doing. Maximilian knows he’s the Lord, and ultimately it is his decision to make. Just don’t let Ashlynn know, because she’ll come after your head if she figures out that you had doubts about her precious Daddy.

Maximilian is a very loving husband and father to his family. He is obsessed with them just as much as they are obsessed with him. On a personal level, while Maximilian himself doesn’t crave for the blood of his own kind like his wife and daughter do, he doesn’t mind letting them do whatever they want for the funs and thrills. Erica and Ashlynn are free to break the law all they want. Though, they’re smart and strategic with it and don’t commit murder in broad daylight. Still, Maximilian is aware of his beloveds’ occasional killings, and he lets them be. He’s the type of person who would let them burn down the entirety of Lukedonia to nothing more than a pile of ash if that is what they wish to do. It’s no big deal, he’ll just rebuild Lukedonia to be even grander and more luxurious than before! To Maximilian, they are the only two existences in this world to come before Lukedonia. How sweet.

Zivon Tradio: Leader of the Tradio Clan. An elderly sorcerer who is quite the hard worker, and spends most of his time studying existing spells as well as coming up with new ones. He’s from the previous generation of nobles, and he stayed behind because he’s just too damn cool to die. Just kidding, his love for magic is why he’s still rocking it. It’s still too early! Zivon’s ultimate goal is to push the boundaries of noble magic and to create what has never been seen before. A true spectacle to behold. Zivon is one of Lord Maximilian’s favorite subjects and the latter even has an entire wifi system built and set up in Lukedonia as a gift just because the former has the hobby of streaming and likes being an “influencer”or whatever the humans call it. Zivon is quite an internet celebrity and Lord Maximilian is supportive of his work of “spreading superior noble influence over humans”. Zivon is also Princess Ashlynn’s tutor, who calls him “teacher”.

As of now, Zivon has no children.

Julius Loyard: Leader of the Loyard Clan. On-and-off lovers with Lucretia. An elegant man who is well-received by his fellow nobles. Julius is a man of few words and usually doesn’t express himself beyond the bare minimum required to be polite. While Julius does admit to enjoying the lavish lifestyle that was a gift from the Lord to all nobles, he is beginning to see why this is a problem for beings outside Lukedonia and starts to sympathize with them. It isn’t easy for him immediately to give up what he’s been used to all these years, but he’s starting to steer away from that lifestyle in support of the less fortunate. Julius was one of the first members to join Marcus’ secret organization of smuggling resources out of Lukedonia to help those in need. Currently, he’s responsible as the leader of the food distribution sector. In his free time, Julius is a jewelry designer and Lord Maximilian is a fan of his work.

Julius’ heir is his son whom he had with Lucretia. He is fond of her but doesn’t entirely agree with her rather carefree personality. They seem to have positive feelings for each other, but that’s only when both of them are very bored and have nothing better to do.

Giada Agvain: Leader of the Agvain Clan. Like Kendrick, she is extremely loyal to their Lord. She’s been by his side since the beginning, and they are childhood friends. Everyone knows that Giada used to feel one-sided love for the then-Maximilian and now Lord Maximilian, but what they don’t know is that she is still in love with him. Well, maybe it’s better for them to continue to believe that she has gotten over him. It’s not like he’ll ever like her back anyway, and you’ll never know what Princess Ashlynn will do if she finds out that anyone other than her precious Mommy is “coveting” her beloved Daddy. Giada is one of the few people who knows about Ashlynn’s true nature despite the latter’s angelic facade. While Giada does love Max on a personal level and is loyal to him, she doesn’t agree with his actions. She is also one of the first members of Marcus’ organization. Currently, Giada is responsible as the leader of the money distribution sector. In her free time, Giada tends to a small spider lily garden.

Giada’s heir is her daughter whom she had with an unnamed noble woman.

Dominic Raffaello “Dorant” Blerster: Leader of the Blerster Clan. A calm and rational man who remains unfazed in extreme situations. He is also the youngest to become Clan Leader, because his mother and predecessor saw so much potential in him, she passed over her title and Soul Weapon to him as soon as he came of age. Dominic pretends to be fairly neutral, and most people think he isn’t dedicated to anything or anyone, but he’s actually Lord Maximilian’s right hand man in the shadows. On the surface, he is simply Clan Leader of the Blersters and does a good job of managing his clan. When he no longer needs to act as Clan Leader, Dominic goes to the castle and reports everyone’s moves to his Lord. Dominic is actually a member of Marcus’ secret organization and oversees the medical distribution sector… as a double agent. His allegiance is with the Lord and he’s only there to watch what everyone else is doing to report back to his master. That includes a long list of who is working with Marcus, what resources they have been smuggling out of Lukedonia, who is on the receiving end… etc. Every. Single. One. So Lord Maximilian is very much aware of Marcus’ “betrayal” thanks to Dominic. Curiously, Lord Maximilian tells Dominic to just let them be. Perhaps he finds this to be amusing. Nobody knows what he’s thinking. Dominic, on the other hand, is in total awe of his Lord for his immense generosity for the “traitors” even though they clearly don’t deserve it.

Dominic doesn’t know that Ashlynn has a crush on him.

As of now, Dominic has no children.

Undine Mergas: Daughter of the leader of the Mergas Clan. A woman with a short temper who is also easily provoked. Undine’s father, the current Mergas Clan Leader, believes that she is unfit to become Clan Leader due to her personality and tendencies to boss the knights around instead of being a responsible and respectful leader like she is supposed to, but he is hopeful that she will change one day. Undine is best friends with Mimi and the two of them are almost always seen together. On one of her travels to the outside world, Undine met a human named Michael Travis Osborn by chance and she has had a crush on him ever since. He’s pretty cute. Maybe the Lord will let her capture him and bring him back to Lukedonia, she thinks.

Mimi Elenor: Daughter of the leader of the Elenor Clan. A woman with a similar personality to her best friend Undine, but less impulsive and more calm. That’s why they get along and are best friends because they have much in common. Mimi has an older brother so she likely won’t become the next Elenor Clan Leader, but she’s fine with that. In fact, she’s glad she won’t become Clan Leader because all those responsibilities, hassles, sitting in meetings all day, blah blah blah… ew, just too much work. She just wants to have fun, so her brother better be competent so she won’t have to bother with her clan at all. Mimi, like Undine, also has a crush on Michael Travis Osborn. They chat about how cute he is. Both of them want to capture him and bring him into Lukedonia. They’re thinking about discussing this with the Lord. If Lord Maximilian hears about this, he’d approve of the capture and tell them to go ahead and enjoy themselves because of course he wants all of his nobles to get their hands on everything they wish for. Plus, these two remind him of his daughter Ashlynn so he’d be even more generous towards them.

Kushaal Kertia: Leader of the Kertia Clan. Cousin of Galileo. A respected fighter known for his immense speed and agility even amongst the Kertia. Kushaal is also honorable. He dislikes dirty fighting and is fairly open to acknowledging his own weaknesses and strives to become even stronger and faster. He has heard about a certain blonde werewolf warrior who is the fastest of his pack, and wishes to fight him one day. While Kushaal enjoys and supports the luxurious lifestyle given to him by their Lord, he believes that humans and werewolves could use some help from Lukedonia. After all, if they’re all gone, he’s not going to have anyone interesting to fight with anymore. Kushaal would love to spar with the werewolves, so he hopes that they’re doing well. In his free time, Kushaal likes to collect rare werewolf artifacts to display in his home because they feel familiar to him, for some odd reason.

As of now, Kushaal has no children.

Galileo Kravei: Son of the leader of the Kravei Clan. Cousin of Kushaal. A man who has a bit of an inferiority complex because his abilities seem to have hit a wall, and he can’t get stronger with his own strength. Galileo is probably going to get by just fine, even though he himself is more impatient than anyone in terms of wanting to gain strength. Other than that, no one really knows much about him since he tends to keep to himself. In his free time, he plays with his three supernatural pet aquatic snakes: Ramen, Ramyeon, and Lamien. Galileo has a huge love-hate crush on Kendrick, and people will tell you he’s both extra mean and extra nice to him. He sends him cheesy “let’s fight” love letters written on rose scented paper. Yeah. He’s totally in love.

And that’s it for now!

Again, very open to questions and discussion. Quite happy about my second major AU! While this post only touches the surface of what I have in mind, I have a feeling that I will grow to like this AU even more. Maybe I’ll even create brand new OCs specific to this AU lol.

Thank you for reading and stay tuned for future posts!

#noblesse #manhwa #myart #fanart #kori’s blood moon au #alternate universe #lunark #kentas #maduke #erin #muzaka #zaiga #ashleen #juraki #garda #dorant #gayare #kuharu #urne #mirai

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cryptidcodex · 4 months ago

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Boundaries:

Obviously we know we can’t actually force anyone to follow any of these things, nor will we try to play enforcement. We will speak up if something makes us uncomfortable. If that is ignored, we will block and/or take space. If you are blocked and don’t know why, refer to this list. We reserve the right to build whatever space makes us comfortable and happy, and will not be taking notes or arguments on these matters. I have a team of advisors, and you are not on it.

Fronting matters. We struggle very heavily with amnesia, and will not tolerate being talked down to or having our struggles ignored. Please take fronting into consideration when addressing us.

We will not give attention to reactivity. It is ok to ask a good faith question, but accusations or leading questions and bad faith interactions will result in a block.

If you’re going to troll, make it funny. If you do want our attention for your bad takes, at least make it meme worthy.

I am not obligated to respond immediately. If I am being spammed with the same comment, question, criticism etc multiple times I will ban freely. Check the comments before blowing up my notifications.

Do not quietly block then unblock without reaching out. We will give some grace for time needed to process or distance, and we understand we can’t actually force people to follow this. But we are sensitive, and do not have the energy to constantly be guessing. My dms have always been open, and I am willing to give out discord without question or reason. Failure to follow this will result in a block.

Do not argue in the comments. We do not have the patience or desire to make a difference of opinion or interpersonal conflict a public performance. Again, our dms are always and have always been open.

Do not vague post about us, especially if you know we’re following you and can see it. I will just block without question. It’s hurtful and petty.

Do not speak over our experiences. Being a system does not mean you know what’s best for us. Being older does not mean you know what’s best for us. Being more well read does not mean you know what’s best for us. Good faith questions and intellectual conversations should not be condescending or patronizing.

No unsolicited advice. Unsolicited advice is criticism, and unless you are feeding me, financing me, or fucking me, your opinion should only be shared with consent.

No unsolicited trauma dumping. If it is relevant to the post I make an exception because I make my spaces a safe space. But if it is only marginally related or in dms, ask first.

No unsolicited lewds or nudes of the personal, artistic, or meme variety. You may ask.

No unsolicited friend requests. You may ask.

I will respect the safety of the collective before the safety or comfort of the individual. You are not welcome in my space if you give any part of my intersectional communities reason to be uncomfortable or afraid.

MA requests: we accept all mutual aid without bias. This is the only exception to circumventing blocks, and all requests will remain anonymous unless otherwise specified.

Littles can not consent. Our littles have caretakers actively looking out for them and advocating for them, and their boundaries are negotiated in collaboration with our bigs. Unless you have spoken directly to a big, you do not have consent from a little.

We have a zero tolerance policy for lying. We believe lying to be intentional telling of mistruths or omission of details to mislead. Amnesia and false memories do not count as lying, but we do still expect an acknowledgement of harm.

No is a complete sentence

Do not tell us who to associate with. Informing of behavior patterns is welcome, but we take thorough communication and privacy very seriously, and will not tolerate being told what to do.

If you feel unsure about my presence in your feed, don’t follow me. I don’t have patience for wishy washy and indecisive, and this relates back to the random blocking and unblocking. This also means that if we find you have expressed opinions of us to people that do not match our interactions, we will block you. It’s fine if you don’t like us. Just don’t lead us to believe you do.

Do not announce your departure from our spaces. It is petty and hurtful, as well as extremely self centered.

You are welcome to reach out to request reasons for blocking or understanding and compromise. As long as you don’t come looking for an argument or validation, and the conversation can remain respectful and open, we are ok with talking things out.

We will deactivate/log out at anytime to take care of our mental health, Jacksepticeye style, but will always return.

#anti endo dni #bpd safe #pro endo #sysmeds dni #aspd safe #endo safe #npd safe #actually plural #pluralgang #system #boundaries post

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parentingtheoryandpractice · 5 months ago

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Reply to Kelsey re: unschooling

Kelsey Piper wrote this critique of unschooling a little while ago, and I've been meaning to respond to it. It's been a while (travel, family visits, etc.), but I finally found some focused time to do some writing. This also ended up being much longer than I anticipated, so consider yourself warned on that front.

Here's a link to Kelsey's post in full, though I will quote some parts more specifically inline as well: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/cVsxtWVqEEjnFKke/

Points of Agreement

Before getting into the parts where afaict Kesley and I don’t see eye to eye, I wanted to acknowledge a few points of major agreement, including where it might not be obvious.

A bunch of the online unschooling community is a trash fire

My experience, like Kelsey’s, has been that there’s a lot of terrible unschooling advice online. IME the epistemology is kind of terrible, including sometimes in a kind of culty way, and I’ve also come across a bunch of people who are being mean, invalidating, and seemingly completely unempathetic and incurious when people write vulnerably about their concerns. I’ve found some groups to be substantially better than others, and I’ll say a little more about that below, but I think this is a point on which we basically agree. I find the state of most (not all ) of the unschooling groups I’ve found to be quite unfortunate.

That Sudbury example you cited strikes me as bad behavior

Kelsey’s post includes this reference to a passage from a Sudbury educator:

An essay about Sudbury Valley School that I read while thinking about how to educate our kids had the following anecdote in it: "A few years ago a teenage girl who had been a student at SVS since she was five told me quite angrily that she had wasted two years and learned nothing. I did not agree with her assessment of herself, but I did not feel like arguing with her, so I just said, "If you learned how bad it is to waste time, why then you could not have learned a better lesson so early in life, a lesson that will be of value for the rest of your days." That reply calmed her, and I believe it is a good illustration of the value of allowing young people to make mistakes and learn from them, rather than directing their lives in an effort to avoid mistakes."

I think I may object to this passage even more than Kelsey does!

I find what the educator said to be patronizing, invalidating, and missing the point. I think educators and people in positions of authority should especially try their best to engage substantively when their students tell them they are doing a bad job, and to try to mollify someone by offering an insincere framing in order to calm them down is pretty bad behavior.

And IMO of course it matters if a kid’s self-assessment is that they haven’t been using their time well.

Which isn’t to say I think it’s especially damning if someone said something like that once when they were impatient or frustrated, but if anyone is writing down that story in an unapologetic way, that person and I have a major disagreement.

It’s mostly good to let parents do their weird stuff

In her post, Kelsey says:

I don't feel like I can confidently opine on whether other people are doing a good job and I don't have any desire to do so. I think that the healthiest culture around parenting is one where we basically chill the fuck out about other parents making decisions we disagree with, and are grateful to live in a culture and company where we similarly have the freedom to make decisions that they disagree with. I feel defensive of parents doing weird things, because I'm doing weird things.

And once again, I’d say we agree! If you want to read more about the details of how I agree, here they are: https://parentingtheoryandpractice.tumblr.com/post/160828234181/respecting-other-peoples-parenting

Pedagogy is a real thing and I’ve also seen unschoolers act like it isn’t

I’m not sure that “pedagogy” is quite the word I’m looking for here, but it’s the closest I have. I think there there are a bunch of skills that I respect involved in:

explaining things well

providing good puzzles and exercises

modeling the specifics of what is going on in the learners head and being responsive to it

breaking things down into pieces that the learner will be able to interface with

sequencing material based on which foundational bits build on each other

sometimes back-chaining from material that you, having more context, strongly expect that the learner will want to know later

When there is something that I am trying to convey to someone, whether it’s my child or someone else, I try to pay attention to pedagogy, and I think it can be very helpful!

I have personally done a ton of tutoring over my lifetime, including professionally (not unusual for the unschoolers I know personally—a ton of them have also been professional educators), and when I have done it, a bunch of my focus has usually been on pedagogy.

Additionally IME, overall, the online unschooling communities, including the ones I like most, tend to be uninterested in leveraging pedagogy. I am sympathetic to some of the reasons I can guess for why this might be the case, but I agree with what I think Kelsey is saying about how the online unschooling communities often aren’t passing some sort of basic checksum about telegraphing awareness of pedagogy, presumably sometimes bc they in fact lack it.

Kids often don’t know what’s out there

I also wholeheartedly agree that kids don’t start out knowing what sort of cool things in the world, and that they will be much better served if adults who care about them inform them about, and sometimes try to sell them on, cool stuff that the kids don’t already know about.

I’m pretty sure all the unschoolers whose views on unschooling I respect agree with me on this point, and I think it’s too bad when unschooling advocates say otherwise.

Educational coercion is costly, and almost never worth doing

This is a point of agreement that Kelsey acknowledged as such, but it seems good to me to state it here again. We both agree that forcing kids to study material that they don’t want to learn is a bad idea, for reasons that include but are not limited to, that it often fails on its own merits; the kids often don’t even learn the material.

Some things where my experience has been different

I also wanted to note some points where my experience has diverged from Kelsey’s that don’t feel especially core to me, before attempting to get to the heart of where I think the two of us disagree.

Basically, my own experience of the unschooling community I have found has been vastly more positive than what Kelsey described, and my anecdata from grown unschoolers, while not universally positive, also seems to have a much more positive skew.

In the first case, my guess is that the main thing that accounts for it is that I’ve met a ton of unschoolers in person, and that has been vastly more positive for me than mailing lists and facebook groups were. And also, I think the main mailing list I used to read was a better environment than what Kelsey has mostly come across, though that that list hasn’t been especially active in years.

I posted some comments on Kelsey’s original post saying this, but, for example, I have quite often heard unschoolers recommend that families not unschool, all considered! I can think of a bunch of concrete instances, and I have done it myself in a substantive way at least once that I can recall.

(This is particularly non-central, but I actually disagree that a family couldn’t successfully unschool a 4 and 6 with both parents working full time. I’m not sure I personally could do it, but I knew one family where both parents worked full time, but they did shift work and arranged it so that one of them was basically always with their kids. Both parents had lots of energy, and their family seemed to me to be thriving as much as the families I knew with stay at home parents.)

And, to be clear, when I talk about positive anecdotes, I’m explicitly trying to exclude anyone where I only heard about their story because they were presented, on a podcast, in a book, or a conference, etc. as a success story, since I understand that of course I wouldn’t be hearing from them if it hadn’t gone well in their case, and that I wouldn’t be hearing about the parts that didn’t go well.

But even so, I don’t think unschooling is any guarantee of a happy, fulfilling childhood that the kids feel good about upon reflection. I don’t think I ever thought that, but I do remember when I was just starting out learning about unschooling having some hopes for certain outcomes that I now consider to have been unrealistically high. In particular, I think unschooling is far from a cure-all for the challenges faced by highly neurodivergent kids, or kids with mental illness, even though I think in most of the cases I’ve seen it has served them better than a public school would. And, perhaps notably, it was talking to the unschooling friends I met in person that gave me a more realistic picture.

It was pretty early in my unschooling journey that I remember having a substantive discussion with a good unschooling friend of mine about a kid in our extended unschooling community who had lamented that he didn’t know certain academic material when was around 18 or so, and how we wanted to relate to that sort of thing.

Ultimately, I don’t want to get into too many details about which exact experiences and anecdotes I have from different unschooling communities, for all the usual reasons I usually avoid posting details on the internet about people who aren’t me, but I did want to note that what I have seen seems to be somewhat different from what Kelsey has seen.

What I think unschooling is, with an emphasis on where I think Kelsey and I disagree

One thing I’m hoping to avoid, is the discussion of what unschooling ought to mean. I think that could be an interesting fight to pick, and maybe one day I’ll want to, but my hope is to instead try to clarify what I am trying to do as an unschooler, with particular emphasis on where, based on Kelsey’s critique, I think we don’t see eye to eye.

So here are some things that seem core to me about what I mean when I say unschooling. (With the caveat that I would expect many of my friends who unschool to agree with me a bunch, but I don’t expect else anyone I know who unschools to have quite the same take on it as I do.)

Actively challenging cultural defaults about what kids ought to be learning

I think almost everyone I know agrees that it’s in some sense ideal when people get to spend time learning things that they are actively curious about in a moment-to-moment way. Like how babies sometimes gleefully play with crinkly paper, perhaps because they want to know what’s up with it. Or when sometimes adults are like “my new hobby is that I will now learn as much as I can about abstract algebra”, perhaps because they recently realized that their mind seems to have an abstract algebra shaped hole in it. Or the way a lot of people I know go on “wiki benders”, where they follow one wikipedia link after another, opening a bunch of tabs, collecting novel information and hooking it up to other information.

And I think almost everyone I know agrees that sometimes, it’s valuable for people to do a more back chain-y thing where they form plans about learning things for instrumental reasons. Such as when,even though they don’t care in any intrinsic sense how tax law works, they want to comply with relevant laws. Or they’re not especially driven to understand how toilets (or plumbers?) work today, but they do want their toilet fixed.

And I think most people also agree that it’s also important for people to sometimes notice that their friends and loved ones might benefit a lot from learning about something. I personally tend to lean towards preferring explicit consent for discussions about what other people think I ought to learn, but I have often found them quite valuable.

All of that is roughly how I think it should work for kids too.

When a kid is curious about something, or a kid wants to learn something in order to accomplish one of their goals, I trust that motivation. And when a parent has a felt sense that it would be good for a kid to learn about something, either because it seems like the kid would be intrinsically into it, or a kid could better accomplish their goals if they knew it, I trust that motivation too.

(With the major caveat that IMO it’s usually good to treat that latter thing lightly, since there are almost always more varied ways that I have modeled for my kids to accomplish their goals.)

And a lot of what unschooling means to me is that in addition to trusting all those reasons for kids to be learning things, I also have an active interest in deconstructing, for myself, the orientation where I defer to something like a “cultural default” about what my kids ought to be learning. If there are arguments that make sense to me from first principles, great! But afaict lots of people either choose to adopt, or have and don’t especially question, a pretty deferential attitude towards standard curricula, what “most people” are doing, or what “most people” think “most people” should be doing, etc.

And I buy that that attitude of deference serves a lot of families better than any of the realistic alternatives. I could defend it if I wanted to!

But it’s not what I want for my family. I think it works better for my family to reject the cultural default.

I’m not sure, based on what Kelsey wrote, how Kelsey relates to what I am calling the cultural default. I would guess, given what I know about her, that she’s given it a lot of real thought. And given Kelsey’s choices to start a school, she is obviously up for doing weird stuff! My guess is that I’m more of a radical on this point though, and it may explain some of why we seem to see things differently.

Kelsey says:

It would have been a mistake, in my opinion, to make her learn geometry when it seemed pointless to her. But it would equally have been a mistake to go 'well, geometry isn't suited to her'. The thing to do was to come up with interesting material which would provide her with different points of entry into geometry until she saw the reason to study it and was excited to do so.

When Kelsey uses geometry as an example of something where she kept working to find an angle that clicked with her kid, on my end there’s a bit of a missing mood—a missing mood like “why geometry though?”

It’s not that I can’t think of all sorts of good reasons that Kelsey could want her kid to learn geometry, or that I don’t believe that she has them, or that I think Kelsey needs to justify this focus to anyone at all (or perhaps anyone outside her family).

I don’t personally find it especially compelling that geometry is a subject that kids often learn in school these days, or that I think math is great (which I do), or that geometry is a deep topic that connects up to a lot of other cool topics. But of course there are other topics that I do really want my kids to learn, so I can try to relate by substituting geometry for one of those.

(As it happens, I do feel somewhat differently about algebra. Kyle Aretae, a long-time uschooling friend of mine made the case to me that deeply “getting” algebra tends to be pretty cruxy for whether kids can be on the track where they can pretty straightforwardly get a technical math-y type job. And I was persuaded both of his model of the educational tracks, and of the practical upside of unlocking that set of jobs for my kids if it seems doable. I do have a felt sense that it’s important.)

But the thing that I think points most to a disagreement is that I can’t quite imagine writing up a similar story without including some sort of explicit nod to why this topic in particular is one where I want to keep searching for an angle where it clicks. Because at this point the water that I seem to be swimming in is one where it’s pretty unnatural to take it as a background assumption that kids should especially be learning almost any particular subject.

I’m not sure how close I’ve gotten to identifying any real specific disagreement with Kelsey, but I’m pretty sure there is a substantive crux somewhere near what I’m trying to gesture at?

Hayekian anti-coercion

Kelsey says:

The Sudbury, etc content I read mostly encouraged us to treat her refusal here as deep wisdom - that she in some sense correctly knew that geometry wasn't valuable to her. I read lots of anecdotes about a child refusing to learn something and then it turned out years later that that had been completely correct of them. Our philosophy was more that kids are almost certainly correct when they say that a lesson is not valuable to them - and it's not right to force them to do it - but that this doesn't mean they are perceiving something deep about the subject matter, it often just means you haven't found the right entry point and should keep trying.

I think I agree with the denotation of the words Kelsey says here, and yet I’m also pretty sure we have fairly straightforwardly different priors about how much deep wisdom tends to be involved in kids’ lack of interest in learning stuff.

Though even thinking of it in terms of deep wisdom or not isn’t really how the question looks in my native ontology.

Certainly it is also my experience that sometimes people’s lack of interest in certain topics can be addressed easily and quickly with a different framing or entry point. The example Kelsey gives about the Pythagorean theorem unlocking geometry for her kid makes sense to me. I remember one of my kids having trouble with the voiced “th” sound, and words that started with that sound not helping, but when we talked about the word “brother”, it clicked. I could probably think of dozens of similar examples without too much trouble. And I think I would have been meaningfully mistaken if I thought something like “well, I guess this kid just isn’t ready to learn about that sound”, and given up. I can also recall many instances of teaching young kids a slightly different body mechanic, or iterating some fine motor skill with them, and I have had many experiences of these things clicking very quickly!

However, after trying a bunch of different approaches, I have often gotten a clear sense that “okay, my kid wants me to stop trying to get this to click with them”. And of course, I can then also go meta about that, and try to figure out why, and see if there’s a crux to be addressed. And as they get older, more introspective, and more willing to talk to me about it, they can often verbally tell me what’s going on.

One such example is that I tried to teach one of my kids about letters and their sounds when they were a toddler. I got a lot of traction at first, but then I ran into what I now think of as a tell-tale dynamic, where it seemed like I kept running up against a particular type of resistance–not at first when I tried a new tact, but in a delayed way, seemingly to me as though it was kicking in when a high-order process noticed what was going on.

My current best guess is that given where my kid was at developmentally, it seemed like a higher priority for them to classify objects as the same regardless of their orientation, and my project about identifying letters conflicted with that. And that in and of itself doesn’t mean I couldn’t have kept trying stuff–maybe if I only worked with them on letters that didn’t have the rotation issue and built up from there, something cool could have happened. But the sense I got from my kid was more like “I’m trying my best to hold onto my developmental priorities here, and it’s kind of exhausting and bad for our relationship to have you poking around in this vicinity. Drop this for now; do not pass go; do not collect $200.”

An example from my own life that still has emotional charge for me, some 25 or so years later, was when Nancy Bidlack, who ran the chamber music summer camp I attended from ages 13-18, was my cello teacher for the summer. I had had a few cello teachers by then, including one of warmest and kindest people I’ve ever spent a lot of time with. But I think, until that point, all of my teachers had some sort of goal like “get me to be a better cellist”, that in retrospect I think I subtly wasn’t bought into. (Some context here is that playing the cello was an optional part of my life. My mother made it very clear that if I wanted to stop I could.) Nancy seemed to intuitively and deeply get that not only did I not want to be a professional cellist (lots of the kids at this summer camp did go on to become professional musicians), but that I was mostly there because I liked the vibe and wanted to hang out with my friends playing chamber music. Because of that, I think, she taught me in a very different way, that was more about satisficing learning pieces I was assigned. And not only did it work better in a narrow sense–my recollection is that did learn my pieces better than usual that summer–the difference in how it felt on my end was dramatic, and very positive, and I’m confident it helped me inhabit myself more fully.

These days I have a pretty high prior that my kids may want me to drop my educational agendas. If I let myself make up a number, I think maybe half the time I have had an agenda about one of my kids learning something in particular, I come up against something like this on their end, including when they were quite young and not able to confirm it verbally.

Which isn’t to say that I automatically give up just because my kid seems to want me to, since some things are quite important to me. And it doesn’t mean that even when I do drop my agenda for a while I might not revisit it later.

(In some cases, revisiting a thing later is more like my default plan. My 2yo is great at taking off his clothes, but pretty unskilled at putting his clothes on. I want him to be able to put his clothes on, which is why I have tried to show him how, but it doesn’t seem urgent. And I have a high prior that it will be much easier to show him in a year, and even easier in two years. I feel similarly about a bunch of academic subjects.)

And for me, part of respecting and supporting my kids’ developing personhood is trusting them when it seems like they are telling me, either in words or not, that if I keep trying to present the material in different ways, they will experience it as quite costly.

Which, on my end, ties into a philosophical position I hold pretty deeply about central planning importantly not working, especially at large scales. But if I speak from my gut, I want to say: “Not even within my family, and not even within my own mind.”

As I see it, the calculation problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem) is one angle on why it can work very well to be deferential to people (and even processes) about how they want to allocate their resources, very much including cognitive and attentional ones.

And then I see something a bit more abstract following from that, where it can be good and adaptive for people to build ego structures that often tend to reject a bunch of agendas other people might have about them, to maintain the sort of process-level separateness that makes them function well.

And so, not only do I have a higher prior that there’s deep wisdom in my kids’ choices about what to learn, but for me part and parcel of respecting their autonomy involves deferring to them quite a bit about when to keep trying to present material to them basically regardless of my prior about how deep their reasons are once they start to object. And empirically, they seem to object pretty often.

My kids seem to be unusually picky in this way, and that they probably get a lot of it from me, since I am also unusually picky this way.

On the other hand, a family is pretty small scale. (Cold take, but) I think central planning tends to work noticeably better for city states and small countries than it does for large countries. And families are obviously much, much smaller than even the smallest countries.

And, afaict, given people’s skills, context, and values, there’s a lot of variation in how it’s most functional to divide up their interpersonal and intrapersonal epistemology. (I don’t currently have great explicit models about which factors tend to have big effects here.)

Concretely I’ve encountered unschooling (and non-unschooling) families for whom it usually seemed to go smoothly when the parents had more of an agenda about the kids’ learning, and other families who seemed about as concerned about the potential downsides from that as I am. And I feel confident this is because our family dynamics around this sort of thing are meaningfully different. (Analyzing what seem to be the relevant differences interests me, but I consider it beyond the scope of this post, and I’m not sure I have a good handle on it anyway.)

So I’m not trying to say that I think everyone ought to be scrupulous about mostly holding educational agendas for their kids lightly, but I do think in some families there’s a lot of upside from relating to it that way.

Treating teaching as potentially costly

It’s usually quite costly for me whenever I’m in a “teaching” type context. Friends explaining stuff to me doesn’t really count, but when someone is occupying a role where they’re supposed to impart knowledge to me, it always seems to apply.

Kelsey says:

substituting the adult's judgment for the child's judgment and teaching the child to please the adult - which is a critique unschoolers often make of conventional education that seems to me to have some merit

And my guess from reading this is that Kelsey and I have a disagreement about how costly it usually is for certain kids to be taught things, even when the teaching is pretty good.

One cost associated with teaching people things in general, as I see it, is that afaict there’s a pretty real low-level tradeoff between being the sort of mind that can absorb the thousands of years worth of accumulated human knowledge, and the sort of mind that can figure out stuff more like from first principles.

I do care about that cost somewhat, and for whatever reason it felt wrong to me to leave it out, but ultimately that’s not the one I’m worried about it.

The cost I worry about ~isn’t present (or at least I expect it to be much lower) when I’m reading a book, or watching a video of a lecture, and isn’t there for me when I’m playing a video game, no matter how heavy-handedly educational. But, as I see it, it has basically always there when a person was teaching me something in realtime. And it’s particularly there when the person teaching the thing is an adult, and an authority figure, and it was higher when I was a kid than it is for me now.

Because, as I see it, the teacher role is super relationally fraught, and almost no one seems into doing it in a way that supports the type of personhood I’m aiming for, which I tried to explain above. My own experience has been that the vast majority, though of course not all, of people who are in official teaching type roles have a bunch of their intentionality, often unconsciously, pointed at something like actively trying to interfere with my ability to:

think for myself

maintain my own sense of taste about the subject matter

trust myself about when to keep thinking about something

perceive the material accurately when the teacher is wrong

etc. I’m trying to gesture at a cluster here, and my list isn’t meant to be exclusive or exhaustive

One example that has stuck with me was when I was in a zoom Q&A near the end of a virtual conference I was attending about a longtime hobby of mine. They were explaining a particular principle (that people in this domain often elide), and I asked under what circumstances it was especially important to pay attention to it (since many of their colleagues did often ignore it, and seemed to get good results anyway). One of them ~said “always”, and the other one backed him up right after. The tone of both of their responses struck me as contemptuous. I still think about this, because I think it left some barb in my mind that I have only mostly removed. There was a reason I asked the question! I also think it had a real answer, and I think they were using my genuine curiosity and intent to deeply understand the material as a springboard for emphasize something they wanted to emphasize for their own reasons. Which is, in many ways, fine. It was their event, and I think my expectations for the Q&A were naive. I have since developed some explicit heuristics for when the sorts of questions I like to ask subject-matter experts are likely to welcome. It’s an example of how teaching can affect me though.

According to my worldview, and because of the shape of the personhood I’m especially trying to support in the world, I believe that teaching at its best involves actively modeling and trying to mitigate the sort of vulnerability people, especially young people, are taking on in the student role. Especially when the students feel obligated to be polite to the teacher, if not to also treat them as an authority figure.

I will freely admit that I seem very sensitive to teaching dynamics. I have almost always complained about them after the fact when I am trying to learn from subject matter experts who aren’t already my friends. Lots of other people that I’ve talked to don’t seem to share my issues, due to, afaict, a combination of aiming for something different than I am aiming for, being robust in ways that I’m not, and having more adaptive strategies for interfacing.

Certainly it struck me when Kelsey said:

As an adult, I learn well when a person who is an enthusiastic expert about the topic walks me through the key ideas - so it makes sense to me that this is also true of children.

I rarely learn from being forced to attend mandatory training, so it makes sense to me that this doesn't work that well for children either.

Adults frequently do (and like!) classes, bootcamps, trainings, and other structured instructional settings, so it doesn't make sense to me to assert that children's love of learning is inherently destroyed by those things.

Adults don't pick up skills by magic intuition, and so it's not surprising that kids mostly don't either.

I do tend to like it when an enthusiastic expert walks me through something I’m interested in, when I ask them to, and when they treat me respectfully. I don’t like mandatory trainings! (Though fwiw I think I have often retained quite a bit of material from mandatory trainings—people seem to differ quite a bit on this point—but that’s not a crux for me about whether I like them.)

And I almost never like classes and bootcamps. I hate almost all trainings and structured instructional settings I have tried. Even conference talks with questions are often fraught for me.

And, as far as I can tell, my kids are a lot like me in this way.

I’m also pretty skeptical of the claim that adults frequently do and like those sorts of structured educational things? Some do, for sure. Afaict, compared to the population average, my friend group (and probably their kids, too) contains disproportionately many people who enjoy structured educational settings and also disproportionately many people who are deeply allergic to them.

And also my guess is that the number of minutes of their adult life that the median American voluntarily devotes to learning things in structured instructional settings, other than to obtain a credential they want, is pretty low.

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s important for me to know what most people are like, but as it stands I do have a pretty high prior that children I come into contact with will rightly and meaningfully object to a whole bunch of structured instructional settings, particularly academically focused ones, since I think the frame stuff that bugs me (and some others like me) out that I tried to point to above is more part of the standard cultural context for academic material than it is for stuff that’s more hobby-coded.

And to the point about magic intuition—I totally agree that it’s very possible to model learning in detail and pretty mechanistically. And at the same time, my sense is that I more like disagree than agree with the statement. I think most of the time adults learn things because they decide to learn it, and figure out something that works for them. And most of the time when I learn things it’s usually pretty opaque to the people around me unless they ask me about it or I decide to tell them about it.

Magic intuition, no, but I do think the vast majority of the learning that people of all ages do happens for reasons and in ways that approximately no one else is modeling. I taught myself to touch type on a Dvorak keyboard one summer when I was a kid in a very straightforward way–I read something on the internet that I found persuasive about how the layout was better, I found a typing program, installed it, and practiced a lot. But I imagine that the whole thing seemed pretty out-of-nowhere from my parents’ perspective, if they even knew I was doing it.

I also think my kids can learn substantially more and better with me involved and as a resource, a lot of the time, and I try to help them with their learning, so I’m not quite sure why I felt compelled to write the above paragraph disagreeing with the magic intuition point, but I did.

And to be clear, I do not claim that teaching is never good and worth it. I have taught people things, and often it has seemed good and worthwhile to me to have done it. Despite my relevant allergies, I continue to look for teachers who work for me, and I periodically attend events that I know I’ll have objections to, because they seem like the best way for me to learn the material. I have recommended that my kids take classes about things that interest them, sometimes they have done it, and sometimes it has been a great experience for them. And when one of my kids wants to opt into a teaching experience, I try my best to support it. Furthermore, if you read this and think “all that stuff you’re saying about teaching seems pretty neurotic and it doesn’t seem to apply to me or my family”, I think that’s great! I am very much not trying to sell anyone on relating to teaching the way I do.

Since Kelsey and I support kids opting out of their classes, I also think we are way more on the same page about a pretty fundamental point about how children’s education ought to look than most people are. And also, I think my concerns about teaching may explain some chunk of the differences I see in our stances.

Conclusion

I don’t think most people should unschool. I am not an unschooling evangelist. I might even say, as I have sometimes heard about whether people ought to become professional musicians, that people should only do it when they think they couldn’t live with themselves if they didn’t. And I think even most parents who deeply want to unschool will have a pretty rough time of it if they didn’t manage to find enough supportive community.

But I personally really like unschooling, and I can’t quite imagine doing anything else for my family. So, since there’s been a bunch of discourse about unschooling recently, from Kelsey and a bunch of stuff I’ve seen on my twitter timeline too, I wanted to at least weigh in on the conversation myself, and try to articulate some of what it means to me and what I find valuable about it.

This ended up being way longer than I expected or hoped it would be, so thanks for reading this far if you did!

Many thanks to everyone who helped me clarify my ideas by talking about them and gave me feedback on drafts, including Steph and James Payor, Pete Michaud, Kyle Aretae, Cristy Henry, and Anna Salamon.

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maramiri · 1 year ago

Text

OA C1 author's notes

welcome to the new home for these stinky notes. man i can tell i was just so excited to share things with ppl smh.

anyway on with the show

Officially AU from 184, and of course, some events have been shuffled around so I could shoehorn them in (detailed notes at the bottom).

Mostly Tanjirō-centric with some Muzan sprinkled in every so often. Occasional Demon Slayer(s) POV; I’mma be real with you, they can probably be skipped if you don’t give a shit about the DS goons.

First arc’s song: Valky — Any Time

Astral projection: I am a very literal/gullible reader and I accept everything I read at face value, so there might be other people like me, heh. When Muzan talks about tethers, paths, lines, astral projection, etc, he is not literally doing any of that. It’s just visuals to help him (and readers) logic his way around as he uses his telepathy to bad-touch Tanjirō’s brain.

Notes regarding going AU from CH. 184:

Deaths: Nearly everyone should have survived, albeit with varying amounts of serious and non-serious injuries. I just can’t handle the death(s) of major characters ;w; Shinobu does NOT live (I wish I could have her live, ‘cos I hecking love her, but her death was a little too hard to come back from haha. I could think of a few scenarios where she manages to scrape by, but she ultimately doesn’t add anything to the plot so I have chosen to let her death have meaning). Oh, yeah, and Tamayo is officially dead but I mean… she died this chapter.

Sequence of events (in canon): I believe Yushirō’s cat delivering the remaining Tamayo drugs, her explanation of them, and Muzan searching through her cells to find the answer, all happen around CH. 191-ish. Since I couldn’t quite clearly tell if Muzan had drugs 1-3 inside of him already and needed 4, or if he only had 1-2 inside of him and needed 3-4 from the demon cat, I decided to have him be afflicted by all four when he was first initially poisoned, and then he learns everything about them from searching Tamayo’s cells while in the forest. While some side effects do remain from a plot standpoint, I don’t think the nuances of this particular scenario will affect my plot overall. Muzan will still definitely suffer side effects as a result of these poisons, but not to their full extent. [FUTURE HILDA HERE: pretty sure I misremembered and the cat actually injected healy-boopies into the good kids, but it still doesn't matter XD]

[Humanification] Well, he obviously doesn’t become human, and he canonically neutralizes it on his own so that’s out. Added bonus: he now knows how to reverse-reverse engineer what Tamayo did, meaning he could probably humanify anyone he wants? Because that’s something Muzan would do?

[Rapid Ageing] Yep, Muzan is now a 10,000 year old vampire loli daddy. The explanation takes place later after CH184, so therefore he wouldn’t have been 10,000 until that point, but that nuance is too much for my poor brain to figure out. Sure, I could use cues from the time announcements to figure out his proper age but…

[Cannot split apart] Well, he better not get caught like that ever again in the future kek

[Cell destruction at weak points inflicted by Yoriichi] This should still affect Muzan as well, but there isn’t really anyone available with the knowledge to take advantage of this weakness. Yushirō would know and would have told the other Slayers, but Tanjirō wouldn’t know, as this knowledge becomes known in like CH194-ish. Since Muzan knows about the drugs’ effects and/or is more careful, he will likely synthesize a ‘cure’ for the drugs in due time. As of now, his body is simply regenerating the damage. So I suppose he would treat them as permanent handicaps to his ‘energy reservoirs.’ In essence, his battle power has decreased (as he has stated in the manga). For the purpose of the fic, I would say his body has ‘naturally’ fought off the second stage of the drug and is attempting to autonomously decompose the third and then fourth stage. Muzan even considered dedicating his mental capacities to dealing with it, but obviously didn’t because he judged it to not be worth his effort and is fully confident his superior god-like body will take care of it—and if it doesn’t, I mean, he has all the time in the world (again) to deal with it later. Plus, like, he needs a lab and he’s currently shacking up with Tanjirō in a hole he dug up.

THE FOREST AND CAVE: I had to flip back and forth through so many chapters to make sure I wasn’t having a fever dream. (In the manga). There is a scene where Nezuko runs through a field of rice paddies towards the city, and in the distance are some spare forests and mountains. So… [roughly applies artistic license juice into your eyes] for my nefarious purposes, it is now a dense forest with a lot of random caves.

#once awake #chapter 1 #author's notes

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jjackrabbitt · 2 years ago

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hi!! this is rlly random but i wanted to know ur thoughts on the various loop sentences mentioned in mpmow! such as the tree kid being put on an island without trees, or the crazy ship loop that one peculiar was sent to (i think bc she pretended to be a ymbryne and killed some kids?). ik the book mentions that, since peculiars live for so long, the long sentences arent rlly much but i think the conditions they're put in r terrible and i cant help but go "wow this sounds like a pretty terrifying society to live in, when u ignore the already glaring issue hollows and wights".. but maybe im applying too much of a real-world lense to this silly little ya series. from ur posts, u seem to be someone who is willing to make a critique on how the lore is handled in a sociopolitical (am i using that word correctly???) sense, so i would love to hear ur thoughts!

Anon I am kissing you passionately. I am sorry it took me like three days to answer this but it was because I was too busy making out with you. I fucking love questions like these so much you can not imagine

Okay first of all I don’t believe that bull crap about “oh well we live so long that it doesn’t really matter” because that’s not how humans work. Even if you live to be really really old and dusty you are still a human person and will react to things in a human way. If you put a person, like the tree guy, in a situation where they are not getting some sort of need met they will suffer for it and it will follow a similar timeline to the same situation outside of a time loop. Actually it might even be worse for the person because we had it established in the first book that people stay mentally/physically/etc. pretty much the same as they were when they enter a loop so like who knows, maybe if you stick a person in there with any kind of psychological state then that’s just average now. So if you go in there feeling super terrible (because you murdered a guy, got convicted, and are in a new place without something you care about deeply) then idk, fuck you i guess??Be sad for 100 years. Intentionally putting people under psychological distress, especially for extended periods of time, is torture by the way. And as a horticulture student, that tree guy was right. Beyond that, i don’t agree with the current way prisons are used and don’t think that they should exist the way they do now. So I really don’t agree with how the ymbrynnic justice system seems to work.

I don’t think you’re applying too much of a real world lens to this book, it takes place in our world. Just because all the information ain’t there don’t mean you’re taking this too seriously. That’s one of my favourite ways to approach this book! I love looking at this stuff and thinking about how this would actually work! I could go into more detail but I don’t have the books in front of me at the moment. If anyone wants to talk about this more I’ll be glad to!!

#mphfpc #asks #unpopular mphfpc opinion hours

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xxspringmelodyxx · 1 year ago

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FAQ:

Are requests open?

Yes they are open! And if you feel like just talking, that’s totally cool! I’d love to hear from you :)

What are your restrictions for writing?

I don’t have many restrictions actually, so feel free to ask! Don’t be discouraged, my dear! I write sfw/nsfw, AU’s, angst, and fluff stories and am happy to do so, though if there are any requests that make me uncomfortable or I decide not to write about them, I will either reply privately or just delete the request :) However, that being said, I do only write for female readers x male characters because it's the only thing I’m good at. It’s in my comfort zone and the last thing I would want to do is attempt something I am not qualified for, only for it to hurt/disrespect someone else.

How to Request?

Please send your requests in through my ask section. This will be easier for me to see rather than requesting through my comments section. Please be as detailed as you want so I can make sure the story is to your expectations. Again, I will only do requests from people who are above 18 <3

How to be added to/removed from a Tag List?

To be added, you have to be above the age of 18 (Sorry for repeating myself on this, I just want to make it clear that I will only interact with adults, not minors) You can be added to a tag list by sending an ask! Just let me know what taglist(s) you would like to be added to and I’ll get that done ASAP! I’ll then respond to those requests to let you know when you have been added. Please also let me know what @username you would like for me to use so I can make sure to use the correct one. If you want to change the account associated with the taglist(s), just let me know and I’ll update the tag list so you can get notifications on any account you want :) Please also explicitly state if you would like to be added to the tag list. The same goes for if you’d like to be removed from taglists!

Who am I? (Not really an FAQ, but just thought I’d add this for anybody who cares, Lmao)

I am currently a college student and planning to work in the medical field. I will be very busy with all my classes and hopefully a new job in the hospital…this means that once school starts, I might be a little slower in writing, but I will still write. I also promise not to delete this account this time, haha. Writing helps keep me inspired and creative, which is something I never want to lose, especially with how life is sometimes. Once this starts, I just kindly ask to be patient with me as it might take me a while to get writing.

What fandoms have you written for?

I have written for Genshin, HSR, Spyxfamily, Black Clover, Fairy Tail, MK11, Diabolik Lovers, Black Butler, Marvel, BNHA, Howl's Moving Castle, Harry Potter, etc. If none of these are to your interest, please still ask me and I will do research if I don’t know the fandom. That’s how I used to do all my writing when I was younger for characters I didn’t know about. It was actually fun too! I also have watched many different anime/games that I just haven’t written about. <3

Any other rules?

I do write nsfw so please, if you are under the age of 18, DO NOT read those. I put those warnings in the stories and any other story that might have some suggestive/adult content, so please respect my boundaries. If you read my sfw, that’s alright, but please don’t interact with me nor my nsfw stories if you are underage. Nothing against you, I just feel uncomfortable interacting with people younger than 18. Please also be kind to one another. I believe that no matter what, we should all respect each other!

If you still have questions after this, please let me know and I will get back to you ASAP! Love you!!

#faq #rules

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hacked-by-jake · 2 years ago

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What do you think about who can play Jake,or the most important thing:Could we see him in the new game?Some people say it's Ivan,the videos taken for Jake's video call are said to be him,videos uploaded to the internet :D I don't know where or what the source of the videos is but do you think lvan will appear as Jake in the new game or will he be played by a different actor? Or do you think we may never see him? (My english is a little bad,excuse me if the sentences are a bit meaningless or inaccurate :'D)

Hey, dear Anon. :D Don’t worry about your english. I can understand you very well. My native language is also not English, so I probably make mistakes myself. :)💚

First of all, the pictures of Jake are stock photos by shutterstock. That's the name of the page. There you can buy the rights to photos to use them. Ivan was the actor of the images that Everbyte used in the game for Jake. We have already discussed this issue a few times, so I have a clear opinion on it. :)

And no, I don’t think Ivan is gonna be the real Jake, only photos of him were used, nothing more, he has nothing to do with duskwood. Otherwise Everbyte could have used pictures with his face. Fans have found out who the actor is and more has not happened, exactly the same as with the actor of Phil. Only his pictures are interesting for Duskwood, he himself is not. Everbyte just needed matching and cliché hacker photos for Jake, they found good ones and used them. Everything else has nothing to do with duskwood, it’s all about the aesthetic. Of course, it could be that Everbyte has now found out that Fandom has found Ivan. But I do not believe that this will lead to cooperation. 🤔

I mean, after the 'I love you' from Jake to Fem! MC, another logical step would also be to see him. But I have to say, I don’t think we’ll ever see Jake. Maybe we’ll get a performer, but maybe we’ll never see his face. I think everyone has a very personal idea of Jake and I can imagine that Everbyte prefers to just leave us the idea. After all, everyone is satisfied with their own Jake.

And I mean, actually, his face doesn’t matter for the story itself, at least until now. It’s about him as a hacker and not about his appearance etc. Even if we have a close relationship with him, it doesn’t really matter.

I personally have an approximate idea of how my Jake looks, but also not detailed. And I’m also not a fan of comparing or portraying Jake with any actors or models or whatever. Of course everyone is allowed to do this as they want, I don’t take anyone’s opinion or anything like that, but I personally prefer not to do it.

Whether we get an actor or not I really can’t answer. But I rather think we’re not gonna get an actor for Jake. I think it works very well even without actor, we have our ideas, we have fanarts and pictures from the internet. We can imagine Jake the way we want. Of course we can still imagine Jake differently with an actor, but I think then we will always have to think a little about the real actor.

So; I personally don’t care if we get one or not. I’m absolutely happy with both and I don’t really care about how the character who would be chosen by Everbyte would look like. I think it’s absolutely beautiful the way it is now, even if Everbyte should choose an actor, I would still be very happy. As long as Everbyte acts as they want, I support everything. :D

Of course, this is just my opinion and what I think, I have as little knowledge about it as anyone else. Many hope that we will get an actor for Jake, so I’m sorry that my answer is rather negative. I hope you don’t hate me for it. 💚

Thank you a lot for asking, dear anon. I really appreciate it. And I hope my answers was a bit interesting for you. I hope you will have a wonderful day/evening/night! Take care of yourself and stay healthy! 💚💚

#dw sequel anon ask #duskwood sequel thoughts #duskwood sequel theories #hbj dw sequel answers #duskwood jake #dw s jake #<3

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 1 year ago

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Update on this: I’m now nearly 25 hours in, and I was right 15 minutes in, it’s fucking awesome. Most hacks that create a whole new region and storyline, instead of improving upon existing ones, look a bit amateur-ish in some way. Which I don’t complain about! People are doing for free, out of the goodness of their hearts, what professional game developers get paid lots of money to do. I don’t become less grateful for that if it looks a little rough around the edges.

However, that does make me appreciate how smooth Pokemon Unbound is. You could tell me this was an official Pokemon game made by Game Freak, and the only reason I’d struggle to believe it is that Game Freak wouldn’t just drop everything that’s annoying about the real Pokemon games all at the same time like that.

The storyline is at least as detailed as what you get in the actual game. All the quality of life improvements from other hacks are there, plus a few I hadn’t seen before. The map is huge and varied. Lots of Pokemon are available early so you can build the team how you like.

That reminds me, I’d been meaning to write down the rules I play with for my final team in each game. Hard and fast rules:

- My six Pokemon have to be 12 types. So I only use dual-type Pokemon (in my final main party, that is), and no repeating types.

- For each of the 18 types that exist in total, at least one of my 12 types has to be super effective against it. This automatically adds some other rules, like there has to be one part-fighting type because that’s the only thing that’s super effective against normal. There has to be at least one of poison and/or steel because otherwise I’ll have nothing good against fairy. There has to be a part-ground type so I have something to use against electrics. Etc.

- Each Pokemon must know at least one damage-dealing move of each of its two types. The other two moves can be more damage-dealing moves, or other stuff, it doesn’t matter. However, the Pokemon cannot know any damage-dealing moves from outside their own two types. Non-damage-dealing moves can be from any type.

- No messing with the game besides the fact that it's a hack in the first place. No cheats, no modifications to the file. No trading or playing online for any other perks (I only play hacks where one of the modifications is you can fill up the Pokedex without needing to trade). No participating in events. It's a self-contained game and I do it all on my own.

Slightly negotiable rules:

- All damage-dealing moves must also match with that Pokemon’s strength in terms of physical/special. Pokemon with a physical attack stat that’s higher than their special attack stat cannot know special damage-dealing moves, and vice-versa. This rule can be negotiable if it’s only a small difference in their stats. A Pokemon with a physical attack stat that’s only ten points higher than their special attack stat can learn one damage-dealing special move, maybe. If I have one that I really want them to know.

- All Pokemon must have a base stat combined total of at least 500. I used to follow this rule more strictly, but there were too many other Pokemon I wanted to use. Now I have a general rule that most should be over 500, I try for over 500, but I can use ones in the high 400s if I want to.

- No legendaries. A rule that I did stick to strictly until I decided a couple of years ago that I really like a lot of the legendary Pokemon (I’m using “legendary” and “mythical” interchangeably here, this applies to mythicals too), so now the rule is “no stacking the team with legendaries”. I can use. Maybe even two, at a push, if I really want to.

- All Pokemon that I have so far for my main party have to be at the same level as each other before I go into each gym leader battle. This level can be higher than, but must not be lower than, the number of the gym times ten (ie. I can’t take on the sixth gym leader until they’re all at least at level 60, but it’s fine if they’re all level 62 or something). Obviously for most gyms I won’t have my full party of six yet, so it only applies to whatever Pokemon that I intend to use in my final six that I’ve caught so far. For this rule, the Elite Four counts as the ninth gym. This rule is modified to be able to go up by increments of 5 instead of 10 in games with a very significant postgame, like Crystal (pretty much just for Crystal, actually).

...Sometimes I forget that these are just some things I made up years ago, and not actual rules of Pokemon. Last year I used to watch my then-girlfriend play Pokemon, and I'd see her enter gym battles with her Pokemon at a mish-mash of levels, and I accused her of barbarism. Doesn't everyone play Pokemon with multiple spreadsheets being used to keep track of all the types and stats to make sure they're following the rules?

Anyway, I'm having a good time. So far I've got Alolan Ninetales, Gabite, Gengar, and Lucario. Fairy/ice, dragon/ground, ghost/poison, fighting/steel. Not sure what my last two slots will be. I'm actually playing an unusually relaxed version of the game now, just picking up Pokemon I like as I go, when normally I map out the final team using Serebii and spreadsheets beforehand to make sure it works out according to the rules. We'll see if this works out. I'm sorely lacking the "basic" types - fire, water, grass - and I know I might have to swap one of them out at some point.

Post that is not about the usual subject of this blog: If anyone here happens to be into Pokemon ROM hacks, I’ve just started Pokemon Unbound and it’s awesome. I guess I can’t really recommend something I’ve played for 15 minutes, but in 15 minutes I’ve been immediately struck by how good the graphics are, how smooth the gameplay is, how much attention to detail there is, how intricate a story they’re setting up right from the beginning, how the quality of life upgrades are immediately obvious. It’s like what I’d make if I could magically design my dream Pokemon game, and by “magically”, I mean if I had any of the very non-magic necessary skills, which I do not.

In Pokemon, ROM hacks mainly seem to be there to fix one thing: it’s technically a game for children, but enough fun to appeal to adults, so lots of adults play it, but it kind of sucks that they’re still playing something aimed at children. So a lot of the hacks fix things related to that, increasing the difficulty and aging up some of the characters and dialogue. And they’re non-commercial, so they get rid of all the annoying things that exist for commercialism reasons, like requiring you to trade with other games to get all the Pokemon.

This one does all that but also more than most other hacked games I’ve played, which is a few (Gaia, Blazed Glazed, and all the Drayano ones I think are the only ones I’ve played right through, plus dabbled in a bunch of others). It did way more than just fix the annoying parts of old games, seems to have gone above and beyond to make it more creative and interesting and clean up some rough edges. And does an excellent balance of managing all this while still making it feel like the old games, so you get the nostalgia and the fun of feeling like you’re in Pokemon, the way I find you sometimes don’t when playing versions that change things too much.

Like I said, this is based on the first 15 minutes. Maybe it crashes two cities in. But I downloaded it based off good reviews that suggest the quality keeps up. No one is reading my blog for recs about Pokemon hacks, but I just thought I’d put it out there in case. I think I'm going to try for a full Pokedex completing run on this one.

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coinandcandle · 3 years ago

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Witchy Red Flags

In this post you will find a few types of red flags and why they are red flags in reference to witchcraft or the witch community.

This is more of an opinion post, but I will also mention why I think you should steer clear of these flags and you can decide on your own what you will do, it is always your choice. C:

Stay away from people who:

believes that magic or witchcraft alone can cure mental or physical illness

Magic or witchcraft should never replace your medications or treatments. There are many ways in which magic can help us feel better, and maybe some folks have been lucky; but do not trust anyone who tells you to stop getting treatment or to stop taking your medication.

are bigots

Sadly even in witchcraft/magic communities there are bigots. Racists, homophobes, sexists, transphobes, and the like.

Sometimes we’re lucky enough that we can see their true colors right off the bat, so it’s easier to stay away from those ones. Generally if your gut tells you to stay away, then it’s best that you listen.

try to use witchcraft/magic as a means to control others

This could mean love potions, non-consensual hypnosis, or any type of spell that involves controlling another person. (Even if it never works it’s messed up that they’re even trying)

This can also mean trying to threaten you with a hex or curse if you don’t do what they want. Abusers find their slimy little ways into all sorts of communities, so if you see this flag run far away.

judge your magic/craft based on how long you’ve been practicing/ learning.

I have practiced or learned witchcraft since I was 14, but I have learned more in the last two years than I had in any of the previous years. Why? Because what matters is research and learning from others, looking at different styles of witchcraft and finding out how to ethically practice witchcraft.

Just because someone has been practicing for years doesn’t mean they know everything. The best teachers will still consider themselves students, always ready and willing to learn more.

try to make you do sexual things

I won’t go into too much detail here but please, if someone says the only way to do XYZ is for you to sleep with them…they’re lying. Sex magic is a real thing and it’s wonderful if everyone involved wants to do it, but if you have to be pressured by magic to do it then you need to run from whoever is telling you those lies.

disrespect closed practices or religions.

Self explanatory. If they don’t respect closed practices they are ignorant at best, malevolent at the worst.

thinks only women can be witches

No, any one of any gender can be a witch, steer clear of anyone who talks down on other genders. It’s not only harmful in general, but the witchcraft community should strive for peace and communication, not hatred and bigotry.

uses a spiritually or culturally important title (i.e. Shaman, Witch Doctor, Priest, Priestess, etc.) but shows no evidence or credentials to back this claim.

Of course there are the people who jokingly or ironically use these titles in usernames or as nicknames, but that’s not who I am referring to. I mean the people who try to sell you things using their title as evidence of it working, but have nothing to back the title they claim to have.

say they can talk to a deity for you when you can’t talk to that deity yourself.

I’m not going to say that other people can’t talk to a deity that you talk to, or that they can’t bring you messages from a deity. (I mean, I had an entire experience recently where my friend’s deity had to reach out to me as a last ditch effort since they weren't listening. So it does happen!)

Always be wary, especially if you’ve never talked to the deity yourself, you don’t personally know whoever is saying they can, or if they are trying to sell it to you.

If a deity wanted to speak with you, they probably wouldn’t make you pay a stranger just to get through to you.

doesn’t believe in history or scientific fact.

I know that it seems like magic and science are opposites, but they aren’t. Arguably, magic is just science we don’t fully understand yet/can’t explain!

So if someone is trying to discredit what we know to be true from science or history, and they have no evidence backing them up, it’s probably a good idea to stay away from them.

Stay away from shops that:

sell endangered or unethically sourced herbs like white sage and palo santo.

if you’re not from the cultures who use these and a native person from that culture does not give it to you saying that it’s ok for you to use it, do not buy from them.

sell you potions, tinctures, etc. as "medicine" without any peer reviewed studies.

You want to make sure if you’re buying some sort of herbal supplement that you’re going to ingest in some way, that there is solid research backing the product and that it is safe to use. (Is it FDA approved?)

won’t tell you what’s in their products.

It’s not only bad business practice, but it’s also possibly dangerous to sell a product without disclosing what is in it.

try to gouge you of your money.

This one is more of an intuitive thing, if you think it’s too good to be true (whatever it is) and they’re selling it at an extremely high price, it probably is too good to be true.

try to sell some sort of certification into or involving a closed practice

Generally, or the closed practices I am aware of at least, you can’t buy your way into. If someone is telling you that they can sell a membership or certification into one of these closed practices, they’re probably lying so they can get your money.

Stay away from resources that:

say there is only one way to practice magic, and that it is the way written in the book

say that Wicca is an ancient religion (it was created in the 1940’s, I have a whole post about wicca)

don’t link their sources when stating “facts”

teach anything from a closed religion when they are not part of the closed religion

DO NOT DO ANYTHING involving closed religions without making sure it is ok. If you are not born or initiated into the religion, it’s best to not try any of their practices as it is disrespectful and, in some cases, could even be dangerous.

teaches myth/lore as fact

In my experience, most folks who work with deities agree that myths are not fact when it comes to the deities involved. You could almost liken it to gossip; you may get a whisper of truth here and there, but until you speak to them yourself you have no clue who they are as a person (or god!).

Also, here is a source of authors to stay away from (they even give you reasons as to why)

Alright, I think I hit most of the important and the most common ones. If you have more suggestions, please add them in the replies or reblog this post with them!

#witchy red flags #witchcraft #learning witchcraft #magic #red flags #witch community #beginner witch #baby witch

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accio-victuuri · 2 years ago

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CPN : the argument of XZ being “single” + my reflections

Let me start this post with one Candy that stood out to me today before we get to a more serious is it really lol topic. You may find a few other ones floating around but this one got me:

The BGM of GG’s Douyin video is from the Soundtrack of Suicide Squad. The same movie features the character of Joker, which they both love. Tho for things like this, I feel like the team just uses what’s popular on Douyin. What got me with the BGM is how it seemed like something you would use for a hiphop theme. They are literally showing how gorgeous XZ is, a pop song will be more appropriate.

Now that I gave a little sweetness, Let’s go to the main topic of this post.

If you haven’t seen this talk going around then that’s fine, in the grand scheme of things— it should not matter. With all the content going on from both sides and Bobo going back to being active on screen, this is not an important topic. However, it made me reflect on this issue and how fans operate. Also how as BXGs we should take this things and I AM SURE some really toxic people will use this as leverage to bully turtles. the whole talk of his relationship status has been gaining some traction lately because of a recent incident that @rainbowsky already detailed here.

Today, this account which is called Opinion Book mainly for 🍤 posted.

What is this accout you ask? It’s basically one that posts fan etiquette especially in times of discord. It has good intentions and I have found it to be a pretty level headed account that aims to pacify fans when things are chaotic. They allegedly also are able to directly communicate with XZS. They published what was “communicated” to them and a lot of it are no brainers tbh. Do not believe in melons and just wait for announcements of XZ’s new work. Do not follow him and his family during his private itinerary. Don’t start fan wars and be instigated by antis. However the cause of the buzz is this particular statement:

In addition, We have recently seen many rumors about the romance of the artist circulating on the Internet. False rumors have even risen to attack the artist himself. Although it has been a question and had been refuted many times, but we have made clarification again, all rumors are false. The artist is single. please don't be maliciously led by unknown people.

and well you guessed what happened. this has been taken as truth and an absolute confirmation that XZ is single and that all CPF should cease to exist. There is a lot to unpack here so I want to start with how credible is this account. What the hell are the “refuted many times” they are talking about?

1. I mentioned that I found this account as a good one. Is it necessary? I don’t think so. However I feel like it had to be made so as not to have a repeat of the 2020 fiasco and just in general to guide fans because XZ has a lot. Other celebrities may have way more followers than him like 80-100M on weibo but the difference is, his are very active. I still maintain my stance that the only official source of news is XZ STUDIO and Xiao Zhan himself, especially if it’s something personal. for dramas/endorsements/etc then the projects involved are definitely the true source. If a statement is not sealed, stamped and posted by XZS then it’s not be taken as coming for Xiao Zhan’s mouth.

2. The only “fan account” followed by XZS is the one with Patrick’s profile pic on it. It’s job is to clarify.

I’ve said it in the past that I don’t really have much love for Clarification accounts especially for personal matters. I understand some fans may want to clarify but I think it should be for career reasons, like if someone claims that GG is taking unnecessary leave on set because he is lazy or something.

3. The next question here is did XZS ever say that GG is single? Did the Patrick Account every say that he is single? The short answer is No.

Patrick Account refuted the following ( most recent and relevant ) :

• That GG is secretly married and has a child all because of a photo of him holding a baby was leaked. FYI, it was his friend’s kid.

• Li Qin dating rumors, the most recent one is because she was seen in the same restaurant as him. having dinner.

• The rumor that Antis love to spread : That he is dating his Manager 😂

All of these rumors were specifically marked as false. They did not say single. Just false and do not believe it.

As for XZ Studio, they do not mention the name of the other party. It’s what these studio accounts do. However people know who they are referring to because of what rumor is going on HS and is being talked about on that day. There are times they will just mention the User ID, and you just gotta look at what person is posting to get the gist that XZS is refuting it too. For example a specific account was mentioned and it had a lot of posts about XZ dating MZY. If they think it’s getting too much talk— they release some statement. But never that XZ is single. The message is always more on do not participate in talks like that and concentrate more on his works and your personal life.

The credibility of that account and it’s confirmation all boils down ( I think ) to the person reading it. As with all things in this day and age, you will believe what benefits you. Confirmation bias is very strong. The people who are screaming this from their accounts are the very same people who already had this idea in mind to begin with. For me the most interesting thing that even got me into making this post is what can we learn from this? I will try and make my thoughts/reflections as coherent as possible lol but here you go:

1. As a CPF and someone who believes in SZD, I always leave a percentage that I could be wrong. No matter how the evidence says otherwise. Am I mad and screaming right now? Obviously not. This incident comes at the right time because I’ve been talking recently about the fact that not all things should be made into a candy. That in order to be in this fandom, supporting them both, we should be fans of them as individuals and their work. If you are here solely for the candy, then sure, I will still welcome you but you probably won’t be here for much longer. This is why I get personally triggered when I see so/os say that all CPF do is candy and obsess about their relationship. Which is well, if you look at my blog as an example — it’s clearly not. We have to multitask like hell to keep up.

2. There is a bad side to being a CPF and that is when fans start getting too loud. CPNs and whatever are for BXG circles only. This is why I stopped participating in the whole “i wonder what solos would think” practice because I realized that I don’t need their validation. Candies are not for them. The reason why this talk has gained attention in the first place was because a certain CPF group started asking a third party about it. If that person knows who XZ is dating. Is it really that important? Should we really invite other people into this? Same goes with their friends, don’t ask them. Don’t DM them. It should remain in CPF circle of your own as a form of respect too. Especially if the type of CPF is more on a real couple and not a fictional pairing in a drama they starred in. The latter is encouraged and considered normal to be talked about.

3. Whether he is single or not, CPF should be allowed to exist. It’s always been a part of the fandom ecosystem. There are other pairings of XZ/WYB that i’m not fond of but it’s their life— they can do what makes them happy. I find it particularly harmful when certain fans invalidate CPFs just because of the possibility of the relationship we support not being real. I could ask them the same thing. Xiao Zhan will not marry you, so why the hell are you still acting like you’re his wife or that you own him? LOL. But I don’t cause i’m not an entitled asshole.

I’m pretty sure that on a professional level, if I’m an agency, it would be fine with me. As long as they are fan of my artist — we’re good. If you watch the shows, buy all the things. engage and just support the artist then it’s fine. All these animosity between solos and cpfs are made by fans. In the outside world, if you tell someone about this— I bet they won’t understand what the problem is.

4. The idea of a celebrity being single for an “idol” like XZ has layers to it. It’s not unique to XZ. Being single will appease a lot of the fans who still cling to the boyfriend fantasy. There is also the possibility of his contract having a clause that says he cannot publicize any relationship and must maintain the image of being an idol which is a story for another day. Also if a relationship is publicized, I am pretty sure it will eclipse all the professional work. It will also invite more shady individuals to get insider info and follow him around.

It’s ironic cause the same people were “happy” when XZ had dating rumors last year because and i quote— “he now has normal rumors about him.” LOL. Okay.

5. Going off the point above, I absolutely hate labeling XZ as an idol. It is not good for him and his brand to be on Hot Search because of personal matters and his relationship status. He is not some starlet who is only good for tabloid-esque news. He is an Actor. I don’t know if fans realize the hunger that XZ has to succeed in this profession. His name should be out there because of his career or if it’s related to personal content ( i.e photos ) that XZS shares. I personally get frustrated when things like this get traction — just in case people failed to get the hint— XZS posts when stuff like this is being talked about. It seems like their way of diverting the fan’s / people’s attention. Like “Hey, look, have something so you won’t be idle and start doing unnecessary shit.”

I am a BXG. I support XZ/WYB. I believe in SZD. I love their love. I am fond of candies and everything the community has to offer. My mindset at this point is really more of what are they gonna do next career wise. It’s what excites me and engages me the most at this point in my journey. I won’t order anyone to be in the same place because we go on our own pace and maybe one day you will get there. 💕

#bjyx #yizhan #my thoughts

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samwisethewitch · 5 years ago

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Cults? In my life? It’s more likely than you think.

In my last post, I talked about how the Law of Attraction and Christian prosperity gospel both use the same thought control techniques as cults. I’ve received several public and private replies to that post: some expressing contempt for “sheeple” who can be lead astray by cults, and others who say my post made them scared that they might be part of a cult without knowing it.

I want to address both of those types of replies in this post. I want to talk about what a cult really looks like, and how you can know if you’re dealing with one.

If you type the word “cult” into Google Images, it will bring up lots of photos of people with long hair, wearing all white, with their hands raised in an expression of ecstasy.

Most modern cults do not look anything like this.

Modern cultists look a lot like everyone else. One of the primary goals of most cults is recruitment, and it’s hard to get people to join your cause if they think you and your group are all Kool-Aid-drinking weirdos. The cults that last are the ones that manage to convince people that they’re just like everyone else — a little weird maybe, but certainly not dangerous.

In the book The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, author Jeff Guinn says, “In years to come, Jim Jones would frequently be compared to murderous demagogues such as Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson. These comparisons completely misinterpret, and historically misrepresent, the initial appeal of Jim Jones to members of Peoples Temple. Jones attracted followers by appealing to their better instincts.”

You might not know Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple by name, but you’ve probably heard their story. They’re the Kool-Aid drinkers I mentioned earlier. Jones and over 900 of his followers, including children, committed mass suicide by drinking Flavor Aid mixed with cyanide.

In a way, the cartoonish image of cults in popular media has helped real-life cults to stay under the radar and slip through people’s defenses.

In her book Recovering Agency: Lifting the Veil of Mormon Mind Control, Luna Lindsey says: “These groups use a legion of persuasive techniques in unison, techniques that strip away the personality to build up a new group pseudopersonality. New members know very little about the group’s purpose, and most expectations remain unrevealed. People become deeply involved, sacrificing vast amounts of time and money, and investing emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, and socially.”

Let’s address some more common myths about cults:

Myth #1: All cults are Satanic or occult in nature. This mostly comes from conservative Christians, who may believe that all non-Christian religions are inherently cultish in nature and are in league with the Devil. This is not the case — most non-Christians don’t even believe in the Devil, much less want to sign away their souls to him. Many cults use Christian theology to recruit members, and some of these groups (Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.) have become popular enough to be recognized as legitimate religions. Most cults have nothing to do with magic or the occult.

Myth #2: All cults are religious. This is also false. While some cults do use religion to recruit members or push an agenda, many cults have no religious or spiritual element. Political cults are those founded around a specific political ideology. Author and cult researcher Janja Lalich is a former member of an American political cult founded on the principles of Marxism. There are also “cults of personality” built around political figures and celebrities, such as Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Donald Trump. In these cases, the cult is built around hero worship of the leader — it doesn’t really matter what the leader believes or does.

Myth #3: All cults are small fringe groups. Cults can be any size. Some cults have only a handful of members — it’s even possible for parents to use thought control techniques on their children, essentially creating a cult that consists of a single family. There are some cults that have millions of members (see previous note about Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses).

Myth #4: All cults live on isolated compounds away from mainstream society. While it is true that all cults isolate their members from the outside world, very few modern cults use physical isolation. Many cults employ social isolation, which makes members feel separate from mainstream society. Some cults do this by encouraging their followers to be “In the world but not of the world,” or encouraging them to keep themselves “pure.”

Myth #5: Only stupid, gullible, and/or mentally ill people join cults. Actually, according to Luna Lindsey, the average cult member is of above-average intelligence. As cult expert Steven Hassan points out, “Cults intentionally recruit ‘valuable’ people—they go after those who are intelligent, caring, and motivated. Most cults do not want to be burdened by unintelligent people with serious emotional or physical problems.” The idea that only stupid or gullible people fall for thought control is very dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that “it could never happen to me.” This actually prevents intelligent people from thinking critically about the information they’re consuming and the groups they’re associating with, which makes them easier targets for cult recruitment.

So, now that we have a better idea of what a cult actually looks like, how do you know if you or someone you know is in one?

A good rule of thumb is to compare the group’s actions and teachings to Steven Hassan’s BITE Model. Steven Hassan is an expert on cult psychology, and most cult researchers stand by this model. From Hassan’s website, freedomofmind.com: “Based on research and theory by Robert Jay Lifton, Margaret Singer, Edgar Schein, Louis Jolyon West, and others who studied brainwashing in Maoist China as well as cognitive dissonance theory by Leon Festinger, Steven Hassan developed the BITE Model to describe the specific methods that cults use to recruit and maintain control over people. ‘BITE’ stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control.”

Behavior Control may include…

Telling you how to behave, and enforcing behavior with rewards and punishments. (Rewards may be nonphysical concepts like “salvation” or “enlightenment,” or social rewards like group acceptance or an elevated status within the group. Punishments may also be nonphysical, like “damnation,” or may be social punishments like judgement from peers or removal from the group.)

Dictating where and with whom you live. (This includes pressure to move closer to other group members, even if you will be living separately.)

Controlling or restricting your sexuality. (Includes enforcing chastity or abstinence and/or coercion into non-consensual sex acts.)

Controlling your clothing or hairstyle. (Even if no one explicitly tells you, you may feel subtle pressure to look like the rest of the group.)

Restricting leisure time and activities. (This includes both demanding participation in frequent group activities and telling you how you should spend your free time.)

Requiring you to seek permission for major decisions. (Again, even if you don’t “need” permission, you may feel pressure to make decisions that will be accepted by the group.)

And more.

Information Control may include…

Withholding or distorting information. (This may manifest as levels of initiation, with only the “inner circle” or upper initiates being taught certain information.)

Forbidding members from speaking with ex-members or other critics.

Discouraging members from trusting any source of information that isn’t approved by the group’s leadership.

Forbidding members from sharing certain details of the group’s beliefs or practice with outsiders.

Using propaganda. (This includes “feel good” media that exists only to enforce the group’s message.)

Using information gained in confession or private conversation against you.

Gaslighting to make members doubt their own memory. (“I never said that,” “You’re remembering that wrong,” “You’re confused,” etc.)

Requiring you to report your thoughts, feelings, and activities to group leaders or superiors.

Encouraging you to spy on other group members and report their “misconduct.”

And more.

Thought Control may include…

Black and White, Us vs. Them, or Good vs. Evil thinking.

Requiring you to change part of your identity or take on a new name. (This includes only using last names, as well as titles like “Brother,” “Sister,” and “Elder.”)

Using loaded languages and cliches to stop complex thought. (This is the difference between calling someone a “former member” and calling the same person an “apostate” or “covenant breaker.”)

Inducing hypnotic or trance states including prayer, meditation, singing hymns, etc.

Using thought-stopping techniques to prevent critical thinking. (“If you ever find yourself doubting, say a prayer to distract yourself!”)

Allowing only positive thoughts or speech.

Rejecting rational analysis and criticism both from members and from those outside the group.

And more.

Emotional Control may include…

Inducing irrational fears and phobias, especially in connection with leaving the group. (This includes fear of damnation, fear of losing personal value, fear of persecution, etc.)

Labeling some emotions as evil, worldly, sinful, low-vibrational, or wrong.

Teaching techniques to keep yourself from feeling certain emotions like anger or sadness.

Promoting feelings of guilt, shame, and unworthiness. (This is often done by holding group members to impossible standards, such as being spiritually “pure” or being 100% happy all the time.)

Showering members and new recruits with positive attention — this is called “love bombing.” (This can be anything from expensive gifts to sexual favors to simply being really nice to newcomers.)

Shunning members who disobey orders or disbelieve the group’s teachings.

Teaching members that there is no happiness, peace, comfort, etc. outside of the group.

And more.

If a group ticks most or all of the boxes in any one of these categories, you need to do some serious thinking about whether or not that group is good for your mental health. If a group is doing all four of these, you’re definitely dealing with a cult and need to get out as soon as possible.

These techniques can also be used by individual people in one-on-one relationships. A relationship or friendship where someone tries to control your behavior, thoughts, or emotions is not healthy and, again, you need to get out as soon as possible.

Obviously, not all of these things are inherently bad. Meditation and prayer can be helpful on their own, and being nice to new people is common courtesy. The problem is when these acts become part of a bigger pattern, which enforces someone else’s control over your life.

A group that tries to tell you how to think or who to be is bad for your mental health, your personal relationships, and your sense of self. When in doubt, do what you think is best for you — and always be suspicious of people or groups who refuse to be criticized.

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thehiddenmemoryuniverse · 3 years ago

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Lucifer Ending: Tragedy and Contradiction

Okay, so I tried really hard to resist the urge to post anything about it, and I even held out for over a week trying to process/calm my feelings about the ending to Lucifer. I’ve tried, I really have, but the more I try, the more I CANNOT rationalize that ending. As you may have guessed, I absolutely hated the ending, and I just really, really, have to get my feelings out about it. If you liked the ending (I really wish I could be you!!), you may want to skip reading any further (I recommend you do, in fact).

Ultimately, regardless of the details, that ending for Chloe/Lucifer is just way too heartbreakingly tragic and sad, however, this is made all the more unbearable because none of it makes ANY damn sense.

I’m just going to start by pasting a bunch of quotes first:

2x05

Lucifer: I refuse to believe that. There is always another way.

Mum: If anyone can find it, it's you.

2x02 Chloe: “Doing what's best for your child, it doesn't always make them happy.”

3x16

Cain: But you're the Devil, you always keep your word.

Lucifer: I do. So I hope you understand how difficult a decision this was. And yet, oddly, the easiest I've ever made.

6x01

Lucifer: I love you, Chloe Decker. I'd do anything for you. Except give you up. Give us up.

6x09

Lucifer: I need you to know that if there is any choice to be had at all, I will always... choose us.

6x07

Rory: You make choices, Mom. If I told you what they are, you wouldn't really be making them any more.

Yeah. Not going to comment further on these right now.

Nor am I going to even get into the whole fate vs free will. Regardless of your views on that debate, why on earth a show about free will spends its final season spotlighting the widespread, controversial debate of fate vs free will by introducing a time loop plot, I’ll never understand.

But even if we forget the numerous issues/contradictions with that (and the ridiculous irony of Rory’s quote shown above), and accept that Lucifer and Chloe chose this, I honestly feel like screaming because WHY??? Why on earth would they EVER want to chose this?

I know the 2 reasons given, the reasons everyone is speaking up with, the reasons expanded on at length in fanfiction, and I’ve tried really, REALLY hard to rationalize them in my head, tried to enjoy the sweet moments fanfic writers are trying to make of it, but I cannot. Because it doesn’t make any damn sense whatsoever to me.

Reason # 1: Lucifer never would’ve realized his ‘calling’ to help tortured souls in Hell.

Right. First of all, if it really is his ‘calling’ he would figure it out eventually because that’s what a bloody calling is. I mean really. Not to mention there was plenty of evidence that he was figuring it out already, and him figuring it out after actually helping people in hell (Jimmy, Dan, Mr. Said out bitch), makes way more sense than stopping someone from making the mistake of killing someone else.

And second, even if we accept the argument that he wouldn’t find his calling, we are then saying that he chose his ‘calling’ over his own family, the people he loves most of all? That’s beyond awful to me. And pretty much destroys all of the growth and beauty and love and development across the series. A complete contradiction to even earlier in series 6. See above quotes. Lucifer tells Chloe he’d do anything for her, except give her up, give them up. He tells her if there’s ever any choice to be had he would chose them (his family). So, what the heck? Which leads me to reason 2, and beware with continuing because this is UNBEARABLY frustrating to me so I may get a bit heated. I just can’t. I can’t understand this. Reason #2: They did it for their daughter, because she asked them to, because she didn’t want them to change her, because she’s happy with who she is, etc, etc..

This is the most widely accepted reason, the most referenced in fanfic, that it’s so beautiful because Lucifer and Chloe sacrificed everything for their daughter because they loved her so much.

I’m sorry, I really am, I tried so hard to make sense of this but it makes the least sense to me of all.

Why on EARTH is Rory growing up without her father better for her? Why on earth would Lucifer, of all people, knowing the pain it causes, ever chose that for his daughter?

This is not sacrificing for their daughter, this is sacrificing for NOTHING at all. This is doing the ABSOLUTE worst for their daughter, all because she asked them to?

And her asking them to in the first place makes no sense either. Why on earth would Rory ASK for it after all the pain it caused her? Earlier she told Lucifer and Chloe that him leaving ‘ruined her life’, and now all of a sudden she’s happy with it? After seeing and reading how much Lucifer and Chloe loved each other she wants to separate them? After saying she now loves Lucifer too she wants to do that to him? And you can’t tell me it’s her being selfless because she thinks he won’t find his ‘calling’ otherwise, because even if he doesn’t (which he would for reasons above), then again we are saying they are choosing a ‘calling’ over family, over those they love most. Or, even worse, Rory, is choosing FOR HIM and ROBBING him of his choice to chose his family over his ‘calling’.

No matter what way you spin it, it is just all kinds of wrong and messed up, and does not showcase the love the characters have for each other, nor the freedom of choice.

There’s nothing beautiful about any of this to me. It’s just plain awful and cruel for NO REASON.

Yes, I know I’m missing one popular theme with all of this, and I might just hate this one most of all: That even though Rory suffered it made her stronger, she’s proud of who she is, and they don’t want to change her, don’t want to ‘kill’ this version of Rory who grew up without her dad.

No. Just no. This pains me immensely. So we’re saying that she’s a better person having grown up without a Dad than she would’ve been growing up with a complete, loving family? That people who grow up with loving families can’t be as strong and proud of who they are? WTF?

Sure, we as people are only strong in life when we need to be but that doesn’t mean that someone who grew up more fortunate doesn’t still have the capacity for that strength (or that they don’t suffer in other ways).

Yeah, it��s beautiful when you grew up abandoned and were able to eventually overcome it, but in reality you’ll always be scarred to some degree, and you certainly would have been less messed up, happier if you hadn’t.

Changing the time loop so that Rory could grow up with her father in her life wouldn’t ‘kill’ her. Fundamentally she’d still be the same, still would have grown up with her ‘kickass’ mom. All the good parts would still be there. There would just be even more good and much less of the bad.

How on earth would Chloe and Lucifer not want to chose that?

There is no way anyone can ever convince me that you come out better growing up abandoned by your father than you would have if he hadn’t. Just no.

We are strong and proud to overcome something only when WE HAVE NO CHOICE. CHOOSING to suffer just to show how great you are afterward for overcoming it when you could have chosen NOT to suffer at all, is just the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.

It reminds me of a quote from one of my childhood movies, the original “Lion King.’ Little Simba tells his dad he went looking for danger to show that he’s brave, and his dad answers, “I’m only brave when I have to be.”

So. Circling back. Ignoring the debate on whether or not there was even a choice given (fate vs free will and ridiculous time loops). Ignoring that Lucifer likely (and should have) been able to find his ‘calling’ anyway.

Then, in summary, we are left with Lucifer (and Chloe) ‘choosing’ for Lucifer to leave them for Hell, abandoning them both (and Trixie) because either

1) Lucifer’s calling is more important than being with his family

2) Rory wants to suffer, to let her parents suffer an unimaginable amount of pain, just to show that she comes out better for it, even when she can choose not to suffer at all. And Chloe and Lucifer are both in agreement that this is best for them and their daughter.

What. The. Hell???!!

I’m sorry, but there’s no rationale for this. None. At. All.

I’ll be the first to admit that I would never be happy with such a devastatingly heartbreaking ending no matter what the reasons, but, HOLY HELL, can they at least have had it make even the smallest amount of SENSE?!

It’s just angst for the sake of angst, and I especially did not expect this from this show. It was always a show not to be taken too seriously, not to overthink and just have fun with, and that’s what made it work for me. But then they decide it’s a good idea to 1) throw in a time loop plot when time loops in fiction is pretty much the definition of serious complexity and making viewers overthink. And 2) have it end with such a tragic and sad ending that makes no sense. I am so sick and tired of the trend now days that shows can’t have happy endings.

(Edit: Now look what happened. I’ve gone and made another rant: https://thehiddenmemoryuniverse.tumblr.com/post/663357629901438976/lucifer-morningstars-broken-journey)

#Lucifer #lucifer spoilers #lucifer season 6 #deckerstar #discussion #Lucifer discussion

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