#also newt would not be defeated by the precursor

[borealiszero]

Watching pacrim2 and seein they made newt evil i was like nah this is way ooc for him. My man would never

[teeforhee]

I’ll never forgive uprising for just... forgetting that Newt existed mid-way through. Like if they were gonna take the possession route then they could have at least fleshed it out more. I think one of the main problems uprising has is that the themes of the movie are so incomplete, there’s no constructive plot. If you’d ask me what happened in the movie I wouln’t be able to describe anything lmao. It’s a shame because Pacific rim could have had such an interesting sequel (continuing the theme of climate change etc). I was wondering what would you have liked to see in a sequel?

so sorry for answering this so late, I started writing this, got distracted, put it in my drafts and then completely forgot.

ohhhhhhh boy oh boy oh boy I have like. so many thoughts about what I wish we'd gotten from a pacrim sequel. mostly the thing that bothered me about uprising (other than it just being a Bad Movie Made Badly) was the way it disregarded pacrim's themes and yeah the way it mistreated the characters. they did not explore the possession route nearly as well as they should've and in general it seemed like it needed another couple of drafts. but here's a disorganised list of thoughts:

consistency in the characters and themes and worldbuilding. give me Raleigh and Mako and Herc and Newt and Hermann and make them consistent characters across the films. keep the themes as being about hope and cooperation in the face of immense grief.

no more slur jaegers please

okay either explore the allegory of Newt's possession by precursors or don't do it at all. either explore the trauma and the implications of the intimacy of a drift bond with the fact of a drift bond being abused by the precursors or don't have him be possesed. you cannot film a drift scene between a man who cannot consent and the aliens who have taken away his ability to consent like a sex scene and then not unpack that. either unpack it or don't do it but honestly I would've loved it they did it because it would've meant a lot to me personally to see a metaphorical abuse/s*xual *ssault survivor save the world by defeating his abusers and forever kicking them off of the planet with support and help from his loved ones.

explore herc's life after the film! that man lost his son and closest friend! have him and Mako and Raleigh interact! gd just more character interactions between everyone would've been so good. I wanna see what happens to them after! they're been through so much! Pacific Rim is about hope and love despite grief!! show me what happens to these characters after all they've lost!!

more female characters please. just. I know mako was the heart of the first film and I'm not bashing it just if you're going to bring in new characters can we have some more women please.

also like. just explore the fallout of the war. make it hopeful and continue the "this was a big enough shock to make the world band together" thing and continue the climate change metaphor by having like explicitly environmentally friendly and still technologically advanced cities and stuff.

oh my gd don't make it military or police propaganda what the fuck????? what the fuck!?!??!?!!? uprising what the fuck. anyway yeah don't have police jaegers. either decommission them entirely or like. bro bro bro. we're humans we're dumb as fuck make it like a sport. Jaeger sports that are like car racing now. maybe the plot is about how that's really shitty for the environment and we need to stop people doing it and find alternatives and u know. continue the climate change metaphor that way

okay these are specific little gripes but can we make either Hermann or newt (OR BOTH) explicitly neurodivergent. like this is just what I want from everything everywhere, no more coding, I want canon neurodivergent people. also don't demonise newt for being bipolar I'm pretty sure that's his canon diagnosis and I know this is what I WANT but also idk I just feel the need to specify. I don't want a sequel to demonise him please. let him exist.

Oh MY GD also teach burn gorman how to walk with a cane my boy you're going to hurt yourself like that.

explore the lasting effects of the drift with the precursors. just. explore that. let Hermann and Newt support eachother and let them hurt but give them a happy ending. I'd like for them to be explicitly together especially since all of the interview stuff Charlie Day has said, it'd be nice.

please keep the "minimum civilian casualties" thing. if we're going to have big monster Jaeger battles then please keep the civilians safe and in shelters. I'm so tired of millions of dead civilians in movies because they decided city fights were cool

I honestly don't know how to keep the optimism of the first movie while bringing the kaiju back but also I want the kaiju back and the Jaeger kaiju battles are just so important to Pacific Rim as a thing. so hmmmmmmm idk what to do about that.

I would also be super happy if we got an exploration of the possibility of Good Kaiju! like once they get separated from the hivemind they can think for themselves and do things, like How To Train Your Dragon style. also Newt and Hermann having a kaiju who they adopt as their child would make me very happy so long as it was done right.

Frankenstein And The Newt style plot/worldbuilding would be hella cool. k-virus and freeing the kaiju from the hivemind and befriending them would be cool.

aaaa this was just a dump of miscellaneous sequel thoughts. I'm more than a little bit sleep deprived rn so I'm probably not explaining things well. head full many incommunicable thoughts.

[ghostgirlvii]

Ok first time doing this, but I need to take all of this out my system. I never did such thing before, but I really want to make some sort of review.

So, I was excited to know that we would have more Pacific Rim content after Uprising and I was really looking forward to it. I did not do much research about anything because I love to keep everything a surprise and of course when Netflix dropped the trailer, I didn’t watch it. Today I binged watch the first season of Pacific Rim The Black with only 7 episodes. It was… interesting. I’m kind of glad I didn’t hype myself too much for it. Don’t get me wrong it was good, but not exactly the best. The only + points I would give now are the animation/design and story. Music vibe with the Pacific Rim universe but not that much. Uprising did a better job at catching the ‘main theme’ vibe. This series have good soundtrack but doesn’t have the catchy theme that make you feel like every thing you do is in a jaeger and you can fight anything. Also, the story take place in Australia. The first movie was a bit a let down with actor not having a real Australian accent, but hey the Hansen are still my favorite! The Black has only 2 (two) characters with Australian accent and it’s two bad guys. Not even the main characters. I’m very disappointed by it.

I guess that was the less spoilers-y part of all that’s coming, so heads up spoilers coming next. I don’t want to describe each episode fully, mostly just talking about general stuff and spoilers come from moment that made me went ‘WTF’, so I won’t spoil everything but probably some major moments.

First episode opens with a jaeger that looks very much like Striker Eureka, which turn out to be Striker Berserker (because we all know what happened to the beautiful piece of metal was Eureka!) Thing happened and the PPDC initiates something big (later reveal to be some sort of protocol that everyone call The Black) We also get introduced to our main character, Taylor and Hayley. Isn’t very clear at the beginning when this take place, however a few episodes later it said that it takes place years after the Uprising war. For now, it is safe to assume 5 years has the story is 5 years after the event of the blackout. Kaiju seems very easy to kill also, then again some are only Cat. 3 so maybe? Even then, I’m not super comfortable with this when we saw how all other pilots always struggled to kill their kaiju. Breaches also seems to appear on land now!

After some events, episode two force Taylor and Hayley to wander off the safe place their parents told them to stay 5 years ago while they went looking for help with their jaeger (Yup Mom and Dad are pilots!) Taylor and Hayley end up in a weird city with dog like kaiju after them and found out an old PPDC lab/place. They found a boy (named ‘Boy’ all season long) in an experiment lab. Oh no is the PPDC the bad guys now?! Well, answer later. We also see a kaiju/jaeger hybrid kind of fully transformed/evolve. That is just so weird at first.

Remark on episode three are small, mostly the usual people selling kaiju part or jaeger part and that feels very normal, honestly that just normal stuff. Also imply some worshippers which is then again nothing new. What’s knew is interrogating someone via drift and store everything on ‘mermory drive’ ? Cool, I guess? I don’t know, drifting always feels more ‘intimate’ it’s weird to force yourself in someone mind to find the intel you want...

Episode four is the moment where I had to check back on info about Uprising, I only saw the movie once, so I had a lot of piece and bit missing. But at this point it sort of made sense that the world would be infested of kaiju because at the end of movie Newt says the Precursors will keep attacking over and over again. So okay at this point I made peace with the idea of the world, no excuse me, Australia being invaded by so many kaiju and left in a post-apocalyse place. Also, I forgot to mention that there’s one kaiju named Cooperhead who sort of is the main kaiju who always find Taylor, Hayley and their jaeger. Which come to the point that is seems like kaiju can hear from VERY far away. Maybe this was always a thing, but it never felt like it would be like 100 kilometers like the series make it feels like.

Fifth episode is by far my favorite for one reason only…. Herc Hansen baby! Yup he made a cameo, voiceless, struggling to fight a kaiju and very old. We learn this because Taylor need to learn solo drifting via ghost drifting (using the memory drive we talked earlier, how did they get his last memory??). Turn out he is the one, under the order of I don’t remember who of the PPDC to initiate the blackout protocol and it has to be in a dramatic way. He fought solo a kaiju while making sure he could succeed his mission. Oh they also included Raleigh and Stacker when they were looking for candidate. The one who survived, although technically Herc died? If this is really canon, yup no original pilots are alive anymore. We learn that trying to drift too much with failure can cause lose of memory and ghost drifting side effect is you gain memory of the pilot you drifted with. Yay, joy! Or not. Because this mean they can, with the help the ‘memory drive’ , change the memories of someone to the point they don’t remember who they are (guess what it happen to one of the side character!)

Episode 6 gave me a headache! It is the episode with the most inconsistency. Uprising was better. I mean this episode had inconsistency coming from both movies, hard to beat. But first may I point a breach open in the middle of ground and no kaiju come up? Ok… At some point, Taylor and Hayley found a cave with jaeger and kaiju remains. Oh, that looks interesting. Wrong. The graveyard it somewhere in Australia, on land, right? Well, here’s the three kaiju found; Leatherback, Slattern and Mutavore.

Mutavore was indeed killed on Australian ground by Striker Eureka, but that was in Sydney and this cave seems very far from any city. Leatherback attacked Hong Kong! How did he ended up always the way there? Slattern was killed near/in the breach by Gipsy Danger. Once again, how it finds the way in the cave?!

Unless we are talking about the ‘cloning’ theory of Newt and there are kaiju with the same DNA has those three but then maybe precise it?

Then our jaegers; Titan Redeemer, November Ajax and Omega Valor.

Omega Valor was damaged during the attack of the Moyulan Shatterdome, then the remaining part used to fix Bracer Phoenix. All of this also took place near Japan, very close to inland Australia. I suppose we could assume Bracer Phoenix had a fight in Australia at some point and when the AI scanned the part, she tought it was Omega Valor.

But then come Titan Redeemer. Taylor has now Herc’s memory because of ghost drifting and he is sure that he knew the pilot of Titan Redeemer and helped/took down Yamarachi. Wrong. Yamarashi was taken town by Gispy Danger aka the Beckett brother with another unknown jaeger. Herc was no part of this fight.

Also remember Boy and the kaiju/Jaeger? Well Boy and him sort of drifted and we learned that the K-J is actually a surviving drone from the uprising war who fully merged to become a actual biomecha. He also eats kaiju. But at this point, Boy feels very not normal for the kind of universe Pacific Rim is. Too ‘magical’ and ‘OP’.

And the final episode, where everything resolves, in away. The kaiju who have been following Taylor and Hayley since the beginning is finally defeated, they found clues about their parents whereabout and Boy turns into a kaiju that looks like a gremlin. Yay everyone happy. Hmmm hold on. Human found in PPDC lab who turn into a kaiju? Could it be that the Precursors found a way to introduce kaiju that look human in our world? That’s what implied at the end. The worshipper called ‘The Sisters’ are revealed too and they seems to have plan… for season 2!

 That’s it! Overall, it left very unfazed. I did not hook me up as much as I hope. A lot of elements feel too magical/fantasy for the world of Pacific Rim (that’s my opinion) and errors in episode 6 really threw me off. I know that there was already some inconsistency between some infos in the first movie and the (not canon) novelization. But there were small. Also, that whole thing of be able to change people memory, I didn’t knew I was in Total Recall. The characters are nice, the story is okay, just some classic tropes, but some stuff just don’t seems to fit. And then again, would it have been hard to find actor with Australian accent? Not everyone but at least for Taylor and Hayley and not just the big bad guy and his assistant, sort of not sure who he was but definitely not the big boss’s right arm. In the end, I would give this series a 6/10. It wasn’t bad but wasn’t not as good as it could have been. I’ll watch season 2, because of the story, I’m curious of those worshippers and their business.

[crimson-snowfall]

Someone’s Hungry

Word Count: 1237

Warning(s): None

Genre: Birthday fic

Click here to read this fic on AO3.

For the past few days Isaac had spent most of his time locked away in his room, working on his latest machine. His eyes were constantly glued on the technical book Comte de Saint-Germain brought for him from the future, claiming it was an advanced birthday present for him.

And Isaac couldn’t probably ask for more… other than for Arthur and Dazai to sod off somewhere they couldn’t interrupt him.

He almost dropped a wrench on a particularly fragile part of the machine when he heard a knock— not from the door— but from the blasted window.

“Aiiii-chaaan! Open uuuup!” Dazai waved enthusiastically at him. Isaac has been thinking for a while now how he would go on and ask Comte if he could have the room in the basement instead, being the most Dazai-proof room in the mansion due to the lack of windows. Sure, it’s not Arthur-proof, but that’s one less tease to deal with and more quiet time for him.

Isaac intended to ignore Dazai until he gave up, but snapped out of his thoughts when he heard another knock; this time from the door.

“Are you in there, Newt?” Isaac ran for the door in an attempt to lock it, but it was too late. Arthur chuckled as he watched the light die away from Isaac’s eyes.

“Oh, were you that excited to see me that you came running to open the door for me? My bad, shall we go over it again?”

“No thanks, I’d rather you keep your–” Isaac’s protest was cut short by a whine from the window.

“Not fair, Ai-chan! You can’t have fun without me!”

“By Jove! That’s not very nice of you now, is it Newt? We don’t want Dazai freezing to death outside now, do we?” Arthur said as he opened the window, letting his partner in crime in. Isaac slumped on the floor, precursors of an incoming headache already assaulting him.

The next time Comte travels to the future, Isaac would definitely build up the courage to ask him for one of those anti break-in technologies he read about on another book.

“Ai-chan, are you alright? You must be really hungry for you to be down on the floor like that.” Dazai is obviously holding something behind him, and if only Isaac could earn some timeout from the two men if he guessed correctly what it was every time, he would probably have a century’s worth of peaceful, Arthur-and-Dazai-free time all to himself.

“Mm-hmm. I agree. Newt has been doing nothing but tinker with that piece of metal over there.” His comment earned him a frown from Isaac.

“Is that so? Good thing I always come prepared.” Dazai then proceeded to dramatically present what he had been hiding behind. “Behold! The biggest apple I have seen in my life… next to Ai-chan, that is!” To be fair, the apple was indeed of remarkable size and the scientist himself had to wonder if it is one of those genetically modified fruits that also came from the future.

Isaac snarled. “Alas! What do you two have against me that you find the need to constantly pester me?”

The smile on Dazai’s face grew even wider. “Pester? Arthur, is that the physics equivalent of ‘look after’?”

“I don’t know. Newt here must be really hungry if he’s starting to mix up his words.”

Isaac sighed in defeat. He got up and went back to his machine and proceeded to ignore the two.

“No fun, Newt. Humor us a little more, will you?” Arthur pouted as he tried to steal the scientist’s attention, but to no avail.

“Hey Arthur, I have an idea…” Dazai whispered something to Arthur. After a few moments of whispering back and forth, the pair finally left the room.

“Ah, finally. Some peace and quiet.” Isaac found it suspicious that his pester-duo would leave just like that, but nonetheless he hurried to lock the door as soon as he had ascertained they were out of the hallway.

---------------

It was around past dinner time that Isaac heard another knock on his door, followed by Le Comte’s voice.

“Isaac, it’s me. Can I bother you with opening the door, I’m afraid my hands are full at the moment.”

Isaac found it strange the Le Comte would personally drop by so he immediately complied, and the scent that assaulted him as soon as he opened the door had him knitting his brows. It was at that moment that he realized that he had been too absorbed in his new machine that he ended up skipping his meals. His eyes darted to what Le Comte had on the food tray. It was a ridiculously large apple pie.

“Don’t tell me…”

“I’m afraid it is. Your brothers— no, I meant Arthur and Dazai made it for you.” Le Comte had an amused expression as he let himself in and set down the tray on Isaac’s nightstand.

Isaac couldn’t help the wry smile upon hearing Le Comte’s slip of tongue. “Not you too, Comte…”

“You’re doing great on this machine, Isaac.” Le Comte complimented him on his work. “Unfortunately, we can’t release any of these in public. This is something that comes from the future, after all.”

“I am well aware of that.”

Le Comte took a quick glance of everything in his room, a small smile on his face as he did so. “In any case, I am truly glad you are enjoying your stay here. On the other hand, while I would agree that losing yourself in the things you are passionate about truly is a great feeling, I would not recommend you skipping on your meals. You may not realize your hunger at the moment, but when you do, you know that it can be quite… inconvenient, especially in your case, Isaac.”

Isaac looked away in embarrassment. “…You may be right.”

Le Comte gave him a look that says 'Of course you know I am,’ before walking away. “I am glad we are clear on that. Enjoy your meal, Isaac. Sebastian will be here shortly to deliver you your rogue.”

After Le Comte had gone, Isaac looked over at the large apple pie on the tray. Upon closer inspection, he found the words 'Happy Birthday’ written in apple sauce.

“It’s nice of them to remember what I myself have forgotten… but, am I… really supposed to finish this all by myself?” Isaac thought to himself as he took a slice, and soon he found himself digging in to the pie that was surprisingly good. He surprised even himself with how fast he finished the entire plate, given how bigger than an average apple pie it is.

---------------

Later, when Sebastian came to fetch him his rogue, the butler was looking a little crestfallen.

“Are you alright?” Isaac asked as he put back the now empty bottle of rogue.

Sebastian helped prepare the apple pie and had been secretly looking forward to helping himself to a slice, but he never thought that Isaac could actually finish the whole thing in one sitting.

“It’s nothing, just a little tired perhaps.” Sebastian lied, but nonetheless he was glad that Isaac liked it. After all, he has never seen Arthur and Dazai that passionate about preparing food before. He was about to leave the room when Isaac called out to him.

“Sebastian.”

“Yes?”

Isaac looked away as he mumbled. “Send... them... my regards.”

Hi so this is my first time writing a fic for Ikemen Vampire, and this is the fic I had been referencing on my tags on this post I made earlier. Anyway I got into this game around three weeks ago, and as such I don’t have an in-depth knowledge about the characters, and have read only one route so far so I would like to apologize for any OOC-ness here, but hey it’s a fanfic lol.  

[majingojira]

Super Robot Wars: Pacific Rim

A While Ago (over a month ago), I asked people what they thought Pacific Rim would connect to in a Super Robot Wars game.   Now, I’m going to share my thoughts based in part on those thoughts, and some of my own after scouring every entry in the whole series. 

Which means, this is gonna get weird. 

This will go stage by stage, because Pacific Rim, even including Uprising, can only really bring in a few stages.  

Stage 1: The Kaiju War

In this prologue stage, we’d have Gypsy Danger battle Knifehead, but with one piece of added help:  Getter Robo!  

Even then, it goes about as well as you expect.  Not only does Raleigh’s brother die, but so does Musashi! Both mecha are taken down in the battle, but not before Knifehead is destroyed. 

Stage 2: The Wall

This one occurs in Australia, and has Striker Eureka appear to help against the Kaiju.  The Player’s character and current crew/battleship (probably the Nadesico-C) appear to aid against it, or against another foe before the Kaiju/Jaeger show up.  Pretty straight forward, but a MYSTERIOUS PERSON is watching and says that they are glad they have allies even after all this time. 

Stage 3: The Drift

This is where Raleigh is recruited into the Pan-Pacific Defense Force. Which is currently on its last legs because the World Government's Autonomous Peacekeeping Organization, the A-Laws, funded the wall instead.  

So far, Stacer Pentecost has recruited the usual crew from the film (Probably only Eureka and Gypsy are playable), but he has a few more.  Getter Robo G (Ryou and Hayato help Raleigh a little emotionally because they are bros and this is OLD SCHOOl Getter), Great Mazinger (from Mazinger Z Infinity), and ... 

Kiryu.

Stacker Pentacost also leaves to talk with “The Ambassadors” before letting Mako take over the rest of the tour.  

When Mako and Raleigh drift, and the RABBIT occurs, we get a level of Coyote Tango battling Onibaba.  

Stage 4: Double Event

Shortly afterward, we have a double event, and this is where things get ABSOLUTELY NUTS. 

The event occurs, and by the time the level ‘starts’, all the mechs are injured and Crimson Typhoon/Cherno Alpha are already destroyed. 

Battle for a bit, then EMP fries the mechs. 

And things get worse.  Remember, Kiryu is in play, so it goes nuts -- but not in the way people fear. It still attacks the Kaiju, just not under the player’s control.  They have to beat on it a bit to allow Akane to get in the cockpit and ‘talk it down’.

It roars one last time and goes into alignment.  

But how can you beat it down?  Well, Great Mazinger and Getter Robo G manage to survive the takedown, but because Great is Size M, and G is Size L, and the Kaiju/KIryu are Size LL, this is tough stuff. 

Which is where the Ambassadors come in.  The Fairies of Infant Island call Mothra (Imago) (Size LL) to aid.  

That helps, and when Kiryu regains control, it calls Godzilla himself to aid.  

Which is also when Gypsy Danger arrives.  

So now the player has Great Mazinger, Getter Robo G, Kiryu, Mothra, and Godzilla to fight 2 Kaiju.  

To which the Mysterious Person from before says “No, no, no.  That won’t do!”

Suddenly! The city tears itself apart and a strange castle descends from the clouds.  From the castle, riding a bicycle through the air comes the witch Bandora. 

Yes, we’re going there! 

Bandora proclaims that she is glad to see her allies from 65 Million years ago are back. Now they can get back to slaying out all life on earth!  And she’s also particularly miffed to see a Dinosaur still around.  She summons several Dora Titans (her mook monster), Griffozar, and Dora Minotaur to aid the rift Kaiju.  

At which points the player's battleship arrives. 

As soon as one of the Kaiju or Dora Minotaur is defeated (Griffozar retreats), the restore to full health with the others.  After some doom proclamations, Raleigh and Mako rally with a few others, and we get the last bit of aid.  

At which point, the last bit of help for this overly-complex level arrives.  

Daizayujin and the Zyurangers.  

Heroic speeches and butt-kicking apply aplenty.  

When this is done, Bandora retreats, Godzilla slinks off (for now), and things are hashed out. 

Remember in Pacific Rim when Newt said that they tried before back with the Dinosaurs?  Guess who also has a beef with the Dinosaurs?   Getter Robo, yeah, but also Bandora.  

Which is why they have a villain team up for the game. 

So many of the big Ranger moments (IE: The Green Ranger arc) have Pacific Rim moments scattered throughout. 

But after that, the next big level is ...

Stage 5: The Breach

The assault on the breach, Bandora beefs things up, Godzilla helps out once again, and if you do things, Striker Eureka is kept around. 

At the close of the level, the player still need a Big Boom to close it.  So, it ends up a mix of big attacks (IE: Shine Spark) to seal it for good.  

After this is a Time Skip where we set off to fix Pacific Rim: Uprising. 

Stage 6: The Rogue Jaeger

This is all about setting up the new recruits, and fending off some other faction that is attacking.  Doesn’t matter who, but the rest of it plays out as normal. The A-Laws are gone, but many threats such as Doctor Hell and Bandora are still active.  

Stage 7: The Black Jaeger

This is the Obsidian Fury attack on the UN, though obvious Mako doesn’t die.  She gets to come back with Raleigh for Gypsy Danger’s return.  But she’s still hurt and there’s damage to the UN and all that.

Stage 8: Arctic Battleground

Gypsy Avenger vs Obdidian Fury 1v1 until Bandor gets involved, revealing she now has “Dokita-Clay” to make her monsters even stronger! 

This big battle against Dora Frank also sees the appearance of Bandora’s master, Dai-Satan (Yes, really), making this a rough battle. 

And it’s all a distraction. 

Stage 9: Shatterdome Attacked! 

The Mass-Produced Jaegers are revealed to be pawns of the Precursors.  Newt was put under a spell by Bandora to corrupt the program from within, and now they and more Super-Monsters are on the attack. 

The base is aided by the return of Earth’s Kaiju: Godzilla and Mothra.  Godzilla gains his ‘ultimate’ attack in this battle “King of the Monsters” --where he summons all the other earth monsters (Rodan, Anguirus, King Caesar, and Mothra) to beat down on a foe.  So the base is saved, especially when your reinforcements arrive, but 3 rift kaiju have been released. 

Stage 10: TOKYO S.O.S.

3 Kaiju from the rift.  Backed up by Heterodyne, Bandora’s monsters (ALL of them, serving as minions here, probably maybe 3 or 4 from a list of: Dora Minotauros, Dora Sphinx, Dora Raiger, Dora Knight, Dora Tortoise, Dora Frank, Satan Frank, Dora Unicorn), Mass-produced Jaegers, Obsidian Furies (as elite mooks), Griffozar, Dai-Satan, and Dora Talos.    When one of the Rift Kaiju is destroyed, the Mega-Kaiju is formed.  

And when Dora Talos or Dai Satan is brought to 0, it fully heals and Dora Talos turns into Satan Talos. 

But this is the last battle for Pacific Rim and Zyuranger.  And as you can see, it’s one hell of a big blow-out. 

And it’s still not the final kaiju enemy, that comes from Godzilla’s end, as King Ghidorah.   But that’s his own journey.  

[avelera]

Do you think the story would've been hugely different if Hermann had been possessed, not Newton?

I assume by “the story” we mean Uprising? Yes and no. Side note, I had a film critic friend who was actually surprised it wasn’t Hermann because he thought that would have been more of a twist, and on some level I agree with him (though in other ways I don’t). But getting to the film. 

First, why, no, it wouldn’t have changed things:

- Newt and Hermann’s skill sets had gotten so mixed in with one another that, for the purpose of the film, Herman was basically a blend of both Newt and Hermann, a one-man K-Sci lab, and in the personality divorce of their 3-way Drift, all Newt got was the Precursors ;P If it had been the other way around, I think Newt would have picked up some of Hermann’s skills and the only difference would be it’s Newt being the PPDC’s somewhat eccentric tag-along nerd trope and Hermann being the corporate guy who doesn’t really want Newt touching him, I’m not sure much would have changed except we’d be wondering why Newt’s trying so hard to get this guy to like him back?

Basically, for their actual roles in the film’s plot, interchanging them wouldn’t have changed much because they were blended by their Drift. I totally believe Newt could have just as easily fulfilled the Kaiju Blood Rocket plotline, and would have picked up enough of Hermann’s skills to figure out Hermann’s version of the plan.

Yes it would have been different for a few reasons:

- Hermann is just, personality-wise, a far more stereotypical villain personality in the first film (and Burn’s bon structure lends itself to villains, Charlie is just more friend-shaped in general). He’s stern, forbidding, and seems to hate fun. Also Hollywood has a big ol’ anti-intellectualism thing going on so smart = bad. Him becoming a corporate guy working for Liwen Shao wouldn’t have seemed odd at all. A difference would be that he’s difficult for Liwen in other ways, perhaps just saying no to her a lot or being a perfectionist about the Jaegers, saying she can’t have the demonstration when she wants it. (Overall though, I think Liwen would have preferred Hermann even if it meant the destruction of her company and the world itself, because Newt is just a personality that annoys the shit out of her and she got stuck with him for ten years, lol.) 

The tragedy of Hermann being possessed would be there’s even less chance of someone noticing something is up. His brief flash of happiness after they Drifted would appear to be just that: a flash before his standoffish personality resumed. 

It also would have been much harder to convince the audience and everyone in the story that, “It wasn’t him!” that this was something against Hermann’s will I think, because he’s so reserved about his emotions. The only strong argument is that he’d never turn against the cause he fought for, but even Newt would have to admit that most of the time Hermann was a jerk to him and didn’t seem to like people very much. Would it be that hard to see him leap from there to destroying people?

- For “yes it would change things”, I don’t think his ploy would have been the same. I truly do believe the Precursors went into their host’s brain and said, “Ok, if YOU wanted to destroy the world, how would you do it?” and Newt’s answer was, “Duh, take over some evil weapons manufacturer and turn their weapons against humanity. I’d do it with cloned Kaiju brains because that’s my skill set.”

For Hermann, I think it would be opening breaches to let Kaiju back in sooner. Or he’d find a way to make the Jaegers go bad without Kaiju brains, just with rogue programming. Hell, it it was me with his skill set, I’d just have the Jaegers of the world turn on each other and launch World War Three by making it look like nations were turning on one another, then let a bunch of Kaiju come pouring in after the dust settles.

Basically, I’m also not convinced humanity would do as well against Hermann going evil, or even win at all. I sort of have a suspicion that like… Newt’s plan took 10 years because it was silly levels of elaborate on purpose because he was also stalling them as much as possible because he really, fundamentally doesn’t want to destroy the world. I also think his plan is like… kinda dumb and easy to defeat. His specialty as a biologist is just DUMB for destroying the world? 

But Hermann… Hermann’s the robot guy. Hermann’s the math guy. Hermann’s the “learning to understand holes ripped in the fabric of time and space”. I’m not sure the good guys would have even had time��to react when his plan went into motion. To quote Newt in TOWOID, “No whimper. Just a really loud bang.”

Basically, the Precursors dun fucked up by taking Newt instead of Hermann, and we’re all lucky they did.

[idonotbitemythumbatyou]

H! I! K! M!

Style, guilty pleasures, angst, back burner ideas! You picked some thought provoking ones! Let’s do this!

H: How would you describe your style?

Playwright attempts prose.

I love conversations because I love complex and interesting relationships, and I’m best at writing that because theatre is where my training lies. I think I’m pretty good at writing a conversation that moves emotionally, where both characters need something strong (to distract. to seduce. to infuriate. to appease.) and at having them end up in a different place in their relationship by the end.

I actually write most of my stories dialogue first, and then fill in everything else after. Not even on purpose. I’m just acting it out in my head and I know the endpoint and can see the shape of the scene really clearly like arcs on a graph, and I just have to write the lines as quickly as they enter my head lest I lose track of them.

At best I get nice zippy dialogue. At worst I get people statically moving occasionally in only vaguely sketched out rooms. I’m getting better though. I think if you compare the first few chapters of Effort with the last few chapters there’s a pretty marked difference. I’m getting better at incorporating the characters’ senses, allowing them to make observations, and form unstated opinions. And BOY do I love a juicy descriptive metaphor.

Do you have a guilty pleasure in fic (reading or writing)?

um. ok. So I haven’t actually read a ton of fic. Especially post uprising fic because at first I was so paranoid about stealing ideas by accident. So I don’t really have guilty pleasure as such.

Also if you follow me, you know I’m uncomfortable writing smut, well that extends to reading it! So I don’t really have any sexy guilty pleasures either. Actually, really well written sex with beautiful character development makes me really sad and makes me cry so I avoid it! Which is like the opposite of a guilty pleasure! More like an embarrasing discomfort! Like a rash, But on my psyche!

K: What’s the angstiest idea you’ve ever come up with?

Hard to say. The things that I tend to find funny, others tend to find depressing (like the text messages one!!) and I don’t know why my brain is like this! But I think, any time I extrapolate the inevitable horror show that canon dictates of the last 10 years, it gets pretty angsty pretty fast. 

The Mako Mori we see in uprising is a hardened woman that has rebuilt the wall that started to come down in PR1, and she’s rebuilt it out of ice and made it higher and stronger than it was before.

Raleigh Beckett is nowhere to be seen so he’s either dead or has abandoned the PPDC, and no matter how or why that is, it sucks and is sad as hell.

Tendo Choi see above

Hermann Gottlieb has spent the last 10 years (or at least a sizable portion of that time) thinking that the man he loves has moved on to bigger and better things.

Newt. 

The PPDC has been militarized and the tech is being used to police civillians. And that’s about as horrifying as it comes.

Like. I don’t have to come up with any angsty ideas. The fridge logic is already at peak angst.

Got any premises on the back burner that you’d care to share?

GUY WHO LIKES MUSIC. I need to write the early days possession where the precursors finally have enough control to push Newt down all the way but are SO BAD at being human that they have to let him back in and find the balance. It’s a comedy.

Obviously, Evil Together is a big one. I haven’t written a word for it, and I’m kind of intimidated by how many directions it could go. I’m actually thinking of making it a series of one-shots within the Effort multiverse (as indeed all PacRim fancfiction is): all the universes where they’re evil together and how they’re defeated every time. Or maybe the win a couple times. idk yet. I think it’s the gay imperative to always love the villains, but I really really want to tell a story about deliciously evil people in love.

I am haunted by Precursor Steve and Kaiju coder Bill and will not be able to rest until I can post it. You, Maggie, are the one person who has ever seen it.

Otherwise I don’t really have backburner projects. If something grabs me, and I can knock it out in 2-3k words, I’ll just write it. I think it’s really helped me avoid burnout on Effort.

[ramrodd]

Are Marxists the unsung heroes of our time? Why were Marx's ideas so gravely betrayed?

COMMENTARY

Jason M. Becker: No, they are not unsung heros, they are totalitarians. Everything they say is about acquiring power, and nothing they do reflects what they say.

Tom Wilson: As the short version, Jason M. Becker is exactly correct. I went to Vietnam on this basis and I haven't changed my mind.

The longer version is more interesting and will defeat the Joe McCarthy Conservatives on 3 November 2020 by aiming at Mars.

First of all, it is useful to understand that the American Revolution, which spawned the French Revolution, is the inspiration for Marxism as an inverse expression of the Clausewitz Paradox as an essential economic engine, that is, Newt Gingrich’s and Steve Bannon’s formulation that Politics is a continuation of Warfare and the Military-Industrial Complex. This is where Marx and Newt Gingrich, as a pointy-headed college professor engaged in political insurgecy agree.

Politics as as a continuation of warfare is a formula for violent revolution. It is a core technology of Marxism. It is not a necessary core technology of Marxism: it can be swapped out for Democratic Socialism and get something like the Free Enterprise Marxism of Vietnam. It’s a little clunky, but it seems to be working pretty well. I have a friend, another Viet vet, who has moved to Hanoi and married a young single mother and is happy as a clam.

Marxism is sort of the Jewish version of the Protestant Reformation, when the economics of Western Civilization separated into two forms of capitalism: the verticle structures of the Vatican, where wealth is consolidated and trickle-down economics is the essential economic engine of feudalism and the mix of verticle and horizontal structures of modern, market-driven processes. The Protestant Reformation more or less dupilcated the destruction of the 2nd Temple economis of Judanism, a precrusor to the Vatical as a vertical structure established to consolidate the wealth of the kingdom for the arbitrary distribution of the powers-that-be, King Solomon around 1000 BCE and the Sadducces in 70 CE, when the emerging horizontal structures of the synagogue/kibbutz economics that persists to this day, which is characterized by an organic capital cascade of the grass roots capital organism.

Marx recognized that the verticle structures of the Oligarch capitalism emerging from the Industrial Revolution repeated the same mistake Constantine made when he disbanded the horizontal features of the Praetorian Guard and shifted entirely to the verticle stuctures of the several centers of the Roman Empire. His solution was, and remains, to return society to the economic status of the Children of Moses wandering in the Wilderness where Marxist Socialism would provide all the manna from heaven each according to his needs. while the State rumbled around the world, following a pillar of fire by night and a plume of smoke by day, implementing Politics as a continuation of Warfare.

I read Capital in the summer of 1962 in preparation for a career with the Green Berets. At that time, CO-IN (Counter-Insurgency) was the sexy career path for recent West Point graduates, what with Camelot and the swagger of the beret, itself. I didn’t read Marx to understand how it works, but, like the mongoose, to seek the moment to strike and to kill. The Communist Threat was a real thing and it was a potent agenda, especially the political insurgency element of the practical implementation Lenin and Trotsky worked out from the example of Jefferson and the French Revolution.

Jefferson spent most of his life as a self-absorbed and irresponsible dilettante who was excluded from the Constitutional Convention as redundant to the process and under a cloud for his dilatory behavior as C-in-C of the Virginia Militia. He was still widely admired in post-Enlightenment France and useful as a representative of the democrative values of the adolescent nation. While Ambassodor, he did what he could to foment what became the French Revolution in addition to the financial shock to the French bourgeoise and petty aristocrats when the America refused to honor the war bonds sold by Robert Morris. Jefferson was always far more of a lover than a fighter, and was always care that the roots of the Tree of Liberty that the blood of patriots must, from time to time, water, wasn’t his. He should have been appalled by what he helped ignite, but my impression is, he didn’t really notice.

Lenin and Trotsky did. And, in 1962, we were going head-to-head with the Trotsky Insurgency Process every where in the world, including Cuba, Vietnam and every place south of Juarez, thanks to Trotsky’s addition to the all ready volitile mix of Mexican politics. And the core technology of the Trotsky Insurgency Process is Politics as the continuation of warfare, which, like Marx standing Hegel on his head, is Marx standing Clausewitz on the head with the inversion of his maxim: Warfare is the continuation of political intercourse by the intermixing of means.

Marxists really love Marx: it’s a true love affair and it breaks their hearts when history bludgeons them into the realization that it is an unrequited love affair. My only test of an intellectual is to understand why intellectuals love Marx, a test I completely fail at. I have a similar response to Paul’s legal constructs in his Epistle to the Romans. But one of the characteristics of Marxism that drives the relentless, and ultimately impotent, abuse of power is the intellectual perfection of his arguments. Which I don’t share but a similar fanaticism is displayed by the Republicans who voted to ignore the treason Donald John Trump committed to get elected: an appeal to a greater outcome.

As I say, if the Communist Manifest was made into a movie, John Lennon’s “Imagine” would be it’s theme song, the Kumbaya of Dialectic Materialism.

Marxism is also very Puritan and prudish in it’s general aesthetic. There isn’t much room for humor or joy in Marxism: while the economics of Adam Smith is dismissed as “The Dismal Science”, Maxism embraces the “dismal” part of the equation as an organizing principle and essentially posits a future for the proletariat as the Second Coming of the Children of Moses in the Wilderness subsisting on a dreary diet of manna and without the celebraton of Passover or Chinesee take-out on Christmas. Doctor Spock and your basic Marxist are kindred spirits in at least the attempt at the rational as an exercise in following your bliss in a Bernie Sanders kind of way.

Which is to say that Vietnam’s Marxism, which has replaced violent revolution with Free Enterprise and the entrepreuneurial impulse as the core technology of their economic modeling, turns out to be a potent incubator for the Free Entrprise because much of the structural corruption of French Colonialism has been stripped away but the entrepreneurial spirit of Paris persists. The Pillar of Fire and Column of Smoke is being replaced by the consumer revolution of the electronic cash-transfer proletariat.

But, Marxism is still bullshit. Marx’s Transaction Theory is more derivative of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter than Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, The problem being that so is the Harvard Business model of Capitalism, as illustrated by Ray Dalio’s Transaction Theory: both Marxism and Harvard Capitalism are different sides of the same coin of economic theology. They are a corruption of Adam Smith’s Economics, which is an explication of the economics of Jesus as moral science.

Basis Tranaction Theory posits that Person A with Value B meets Person B with Value B to form a free, open and unbuffered market, exchange Values and leave, Person A with Value B and Person B with Value A.

Marx corrupts this basic process to prove that the Profit Motive is evil and Property is Theft, while Dalio corrupts this basic process to prove that economic policy based on white supremanist social constructs are divine truth

Here’s an interesting thing: I will provisionally stipulate to Dalio’s version of capitalism because it reflects the actual operation of the Free Entreprise economic ecology of American-British constitutional capitalism as a function of Democratic Socialism in contrast to the Marx or Harvard model, which reflects the Tory Socialism of 19th Century Oligarch capitalism. More to the point, both Marx and Harvard are mechanical operations based on the steam engine while Dalio is a mechanical operation based on the T Model Ford and the spark plug is the Free Enterprise dynamic missing from the Marx/Harvard assumptions.

The thing is, there is a newer, better model than Dalio’s capitalism and the Krugman-AOC Green New Deal intuits the possibilities.

And, just for the record, Bernie Sanders “socialism” is Marxism without the Pillar of Fire and Column of Smoke, nor the Keynsian cascade structures of the pre-Reagan Affirmative Action precursor to the Green New Deal. Bernie is also an example of the love affair Marxists have with Marxism.

And the Nixon-Moynihan-Carter “Affirmative Action” Reagan inherited was designed to complete the transformation of the Military Industrial Complex with the 100 year trajectory of the Aerospace-Entrepreneurial Matrix by catching the global synergies wave set into motion by Apollo 11 that create Silicon Valley and is aimed at putting man on Mars by way of a NASA-Soyuz lab on the moon in 2001.

The cost of Reaganomics (i.e. Ray Dalio’s Transaction Theory) hs missed making the first step to Mars by 19 years and counting. I mean, if you are a Joe McCarthy Conservative, the future looks like Puerto Rico.

Both Maxism and Reaganomic are bullshit.

[nicholemhearn]

Climate Change Denial as the Historical Consciousness of Trumpism: Lessons from Carl Schmitt

Of all the errors made today by liberals—I use the term broadly—our most fundamental has been our underestimation of Trumpism as a philosophical movement.

We have no trouble loathing Donald Trump the man. His temperament and political impulses are self-evidently those of an authoritarian, straight from the pages of Adorno or Hayek. Likewise, our criticism of his administration’s misguided policies has been ever at the ready.

Yet to say of President Trump and his followers that they hold or are even capable of holding philosophical convictions is generally to invite ridicule, as if the term were an undeserved appellation of grace. Trump doesn’t philosophize, he tweets.

Understandable though this tendency is, it is mistaken and self-defeating. Indeed, it is a signal of our own intellectual weakness. And if we continue, it will redound to our detriment by hindering our ability to reinvigorate liberal principles for our own time.

Trumpism is well on the road to becoming a systematic program of ideas that will carefully refine its views through praxis and—allied with anti-liberal movements elsewhere in the world, especially in Russia—articulate a new, fundamental challenge to liberal thought for the twenty-first century.

As this transformation takes place, liberals should be ready. We need to understand Trumpism as a philosophical movement even better than its own adherents do, and with full interpretive sympathy, and we need to be prepared to confront it along all its philosophical axes.

The most central of these axes is Trumpism’s approach to history, because the identity of a political movement, like that of a nation, becomes fully apparent only once it possesses a self-conscious understanding of the past.

That was the case for Marxism. And for liberalism (or here). And it will be the case for Trumpism.

True to politics in the digital age, however, Trumpian historical consciousness will appear in new guises and unexpected forms.

***

There are many types of historical consciousness under Trumpism, variously supporting each other and competing for dominance.

History as heritage and nostalgia—#MAGA. History as reverence and fidelity—Straussianism and constitutional originalism. History as a philosophy of action—embodied in the novels of Trump’s intellectual precursor, Newt Gingrich. History as racial melancholy—Charlottesville. History as a resource of trans-historical Germanic mythology—the masculinist branches of the alt-right. History as conspiracy—Infowars, #fakenews, and the “rigged” political system. History as providence and decay—the implicit revival of Jacksonian-era romantic nationalism, with its narrative scaffolding of dwindling popular sovereignty.

And then there’s Stephen Bannon’s philosophy of generational change, about which I’ve written elsewhere, a toxic blend of Toynbee and Jung—history as a cycle of apocalypse and renewal.

Here I’d like to offer some thoughts about an especially significant type of Trumpian historical consciousness: climate change denial.

We naturally tend to understand climate change denial as part of a larger struggle over the respect accorded to scientific data in the making of public policy—and it is that. But stripped of its meteorological content and considered formally, climate change denial also is a view about the meaning of events as they unfold over time.

It’s a view about the history of the environment.

This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2014

  I’m not concerned with the anti-scientific character of climate change denial, at least not primarily. Instead, I’d like to suggest that it plays a significant role in the architecture of Trumpism as a developing philosophical system.

As a framework for interpreting the past, climate change denial grows logically from the core metaphysical commitments of contemporary populist nationalism in its confrontation with trans-Atlantic, cosmopolitan, individualist liberalism.

In this respect one might thus regard it as the distinctive form of anti-liberal historical thinking of our era.

This means that it also offers the greatest opportunity for liberals to address some of our own philosophical failings.

***

To understand the philosophical significance of climate change denial for Trumpism, it’s helpful to turn to the work of a thinker whose writings, it’s been suggested (and here), underwrite the movement’s “intellectual source code”: the German constitutional theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985).

For readers acquainted with Schmitt, the outlines of the emerging political philosophy of Trumpism seem eerily familiar. Over the course of his campaign and presidency, Trump has consistently expressed in action principles that Schmitt developed at the level of theory.

On Schmitt’s view, liberal states are weak and vulnerable, subject to corrosion from within—through capture by private interest groups—and conquest from abroad. In the American case, as Trump would have it, the United States has been “crippled” and reduced to “carnage” by self-interested financial and cultural elites, radical Islamic terrorists, cunning foreign trade negotiators, and illegal immigrants from Mexico.

The source of this vulnerability, Schmitt argues, is modern liberalism’s thin conception of political community and the state. Because liberals misunderstand the very nature of political life, they create conditions under which their nations implode.

According to Schmitt, a political community arises when its members coalesce around some aspect of their common existence. On this basis, they distinguish between their “friends” and “enemies,” the latter of whom they are ultimately prepared to fight and kill to defend their way of life.

A political community, that is, is created through an animating sense of common identity and existential threat—indeed, that’s how “the political” as a fundamental sphere of human value comes into being, and how it provides the cultural foundation of sovereignty and the state for a community of equals.

Schmitt believes that this pugilistic view of politics rings true as a conceptual matter, but he also regards drawing the friend-enemy distinction as a quasi-theological duty and part of what it means to be fully human.

Without the friend-enemy distinction, he argues, political life would vanish, and without it something essential to humanity would vanish, too—human existence would be reduced to mere private hedonism. This gives Schmittianism, like the Bannon-affiliated elements of Trumpism, a family affinity to traditionalism in Russia—a link highlighted by Bannon’s discussion of the traditionalist underpinnings of Eurasianism in his 2014 remarks to a gathering of the Human Dignity Institute.

One could equally express the Schmittian worldview in more theologically positive terms, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, as a politics based on love. For Schmitt, the political is founded on the essential mutual regard of community members for what they share beneath their surface-level differences. That recognition justifies the state’s demand that citizens be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice in its name, and for Schmitt it forms the philosophical precondition of law itself.

***

Two principles of Schmitt’s writing are especially relevant to understanding the place of climate change denial in Trumpism’s historical consciousness, and they’re worth discussing at some length. Each principle links Trumpian domestic and international politics as two sides of the same philosophical coin.

The political is inviolable

First, for Schmitt a community’s ability to draw the friend-enemy distinction can—by definition—brook no conceptual or institutional restraint.

Most notably, the distinction can’t be predicated on other domains of human value, such as morals, aesthetics, or economics. Ideals from these fields may be used to enhance public feelings of opposition. Enemies are regularly portrayed as ugly, for instance—a practice at which Trump personally excels.

But the object of a community’s political dissociation is made on the basis of criteria independent from judgments about good and evil, beauty and ugliness, or profit and loss.

Liberals today regularly violate this principle. They seek to circumscribe national sovereignty within generally-applicable legal norms such as individual human dignity—consider Article I of the German Basic Law—and to restrict it through institutions like the United Nations.

Schmitt views such liberal projects not simply as naïve, but also as a recipe for social chaos at home and unrestrained, imperialistic violence abroad.

On the domestic level, according to Schmitt, when liberals predicate the friend-enemy distinction on ideals drawn from other value domains, they undermine the state by confusing their community’s own self-understanding. Who are we if our state holds basic responsibilities to everyone?

Such uncertainty chips away at what President Trump, warning specifically about the fate of the West, described as a community’s “will to survive.” It also leaves the state vulnerable to capture and abuse by self-interested private groups, because its essential duties and commitments become unclear.

Trump’s repeated insistence that “I will never, ever let you down” expresses the underlying Trumpian belief that, in Schmittian terms, liberal representatives from both parties have lost sight of the friend-enemy distinction that lies at the core of the nation’s existence.

According to Schmitt, a parallel problem exists on the international stage. In his view, the liberal effort to circumscribe national sovereignty within universalist legal and moral criteria increases the possibility of total war.

By moralizing conflict, liberals become disinclined to make deals with their opponents to limit war’s scope. They transform “conventional” enemies into “absolute” enemies, against whom fighting can never truly cease.

They also seek to reconstruct other societies in their own image—after all, they base their own political identity on universalistic criteria.

Trump acts in full accord with Schmitt in this respect by praising Vladimir Putin and embracing autocratic Russia as a potential friend while snubbing liberal nations of the trans-Atlantic alliance. In fact, one would expect such a realignment from a sovereign unshackling itself from decades of liberal universalism.

On the Schmittian view, a people in no way acts inconsistently or improperly if it determines that another political entity is its existential “friend” although it engages in practices that violate the people’s basic views of right and wrong.

Great move on delay (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2016

  Trump is likewise consistent with Schmitt in insisting that the American goal in Afghanistan should be “killing terrorists”—”not nation building.”

Both Schmittianism and Trumpism possess a striking normative pluralism.

The political requires territorialization

The relation between politics and geography is the second aspect of Schmitt’s philosophy that’s relevant to thinking about climate change.

In Schmitt’s view the state, as the bearer of a people’s sovereignty, must create clear territorial boundaries that correspond to its friend-enemy distinction. If the territory of a state doesn’t track the distinction between friend and enemy, then the identity of its underlying political community becomes muddled. This process mirrors spatially the confusion that results when liberals seek to circumscribe sovereignty conceptually.

For Schmitt, that’s why states also should seek to homogenize the political community within their borders, and why the “sovereign dictator”—a leader exercising power in a period of constitutional transition—should quash internal dissent.

Accordingly, at the heart of Trump’s campaign was the promise to territorialize the friend-enemy distinction, namely to build a “great wall” along the border between the United States and Mexico—a promise that became his movement’s most fervent rallying cry: “Build the wall!”

The cry is Schmittian in two respects, one obvious, the other less so.

Most obviously, it expresses the Schmittian position that a community’s political obligations should be physically legible. A border wall is a fitting architectural symbol of a Schmittian conception of the state—indeed, Schmitt himself once explained that the normative order of a people “can be described as a wall.”

Jeb Bush just talked about my border proposal to build a “fence.” It’s not a fence, Jeb, it’s a WALL, and there’s a BIG difference!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2015

  In addition, the Schmittian quality of the slogan is implicit in the spirit with which it typically has been chanted at rallies

[avelera]

Hey i love the prisoners dilemma and i was just wondering what your writing process is ( as someone who stuggles to get words on the page)

*falls in a heap* right now anon I’m so behind on TPD that I don’t even know what my process is but first of all, thank you for your kind words. 

OK! But I actually love questions like this so I’m gonna give it a shot (I’m actually very excited, thank you for sending this!)

1) Get an idea. Think the idea is going to be short. It’s not short. I am roundly mocked for my hubris. 

ex 1. the seed idea for “The Only Way Out is Down” was that I wanted to combine Newt’s recovery with Dante’s Inferno (got it literally in the parking lot after seeing Uprising and to this day I don’t know what was up with my brain that day). I figured that would be done in 20k. I wasn’t even through the third circle of Hell (out of 9) in 20k.

ex 2.the seed idea for “How to Accidentally Become a Jaeger Pilot in 10 Easy Steps” was a thought I had while jogging of how funny it would be if Newt and Hermann actually had to do the stick sparring and accidentally became an incredibly effective Jaeger pilot duo, to Hermann’s euphoria and Newt’s everlasting shame.

ex 3. the idea for “Prisoners’ Dilemma” was basically “what if Newt wasn’t alone for the 10 years of his possession? What if Hermann was there, both as our audience surrogate to observe the situation but also as a potential source of salvation? what if it was really messed up but also really cute and domestic?” 

2) Each fic has a different process but generally, ideally, I write the first draft as quickly as I can all the way to the end, occasionally having alpha readers to offer encouragement if it’s a very long piece to get me through the slog and self doubt (I had SO MUCH self doubt about towoid, damn, I was convinced the story was self indulgent garbage pretty much the whole time). TPD that kinda broke down so it’s been slower going overall as I release chapters as they come. One reason I like to finish a story to the end before posting though is a) it gives more time to let the early chapters sit so I can edit them with fresh eyes and b) it allows me to “seed” things and set up foreshadowing for stuff I don’t get an idea for until I’ve written to the end. For example, the circle “Wrath” in TOWOID was re-written after I finished the first draft because I realized it needed tweaking to be brought in line with the overarching mystery of the story so the reader could actually *solve* it. 

3) I get beta readers. I also read the chapters about 100 more times myself, before and after it’s posted. I’m still editing months even years later. I basically re-read a section every time someone comments on it, because their comment allows me to see the story with new eyes. 

When it comes to defeating writers block, generally what I find is it’s a product of being too hard on oneself. Another reason to write the whole draft before posting is it allows me to not worry about the audience or let them in on the process until I’m certain myself about what I have to say, without fear of judgement or alteration for “fanservice”. Trying to change things to please fans is one of my biggest sources of writer’s block. There’s generally a reason I don’t do things a certain way. I also really need there to be conflict in a story or I get stalled out. If it’s just two people having a cup of tea agreeing on everything the other says, I don’t know how to direct the scene forward. Even just now while working on the next TPD chapter I realized I had stalled out because the characters agreed on something too early in the conversation and they needed to be in conflict for the conversation to progress to where it needed to go. 

Tip: One thing that’s helpful for breaking writers block is doing 15 minute short prompt fics. Just having something rough but DONE is a good way to remember that one is a writer and one CAN complete things. It also helps make writing feel less momentous, like every word needs to be perfect, which is in my experience the source of almost all writers block.

I also try to incorporate lessons from the writing workshops I’ve begun attending. Lately I’ve been working on:

- Make sure everything has a cause and effect. Even just thoughts the characters are having need to be prompted by something external, they can’t just realize things out of the blue, something needs to prompt the thought, otherwise the audience can’t follow or predict the action and it makes them frustrated. I still agonize over what are probably invisible plot holes in TOWOID where I feel like I didn’t adequately set up certain aspects of the story. For example, I still feel as if I never properly came up with the cause of the dive into Newt’s memories taking the form of Dante’s Inferno, at least not to my satisfaction, because the true Doylist answer was, “Because the author felt like it.”

- For TPD I’ve been throwing myself into making sure information isn’t known to different characters before they actually share it. An astute reader may notice that by ch. 6 of TPD, Hermann *still* doesn’t know that Alice is the brain in the jar. Why would he know that? It’s a bonkers thought that would never occur to Hermann, Newt is too embarrassed to tell him and the Precursors never would. So at this point, though the audience has outside knowledge of who “Alice” is, Hermann still believes she’s a human accomplice, perhaps someone at Shao. Similarly, the Precursors and Newt have a copy of Hermann in their minds, but it’s a copy from the day of the Drift, so they don’t know Hermann’s thoughts for the past year or two, they don’t have an echo of the Hermann who has been in love with and cohabited with Newt for that time. So, their map of Hermann is incomplete thus they can’t always predict his actions and that drives them nuts. I could go on but that would be spoilers. Suffice to say, I’m doing my damndest to give each character distinct knowledge and a distinct mental map of how they operate, which can be a bit migraine inducing for the author at times lol. 

- Describing facial expressions with specifics. This is a critique I got at my last workshop, that I was falling into the fanfic trap of describing things like, “Something indescribable happened to his face.” It’s not indescribable, damnit, describe it! You’re the author! We can only see the world as you show it because it’s all squiggles on a page! When you use that turn of phrase, you’re making the reader do your job of showing how things look AND you’re missing an opportunity to give your characters strong, unique visual details. 

Anyway, I hoped this answered your questions somewhere in this mess!

[avelera]

⭐star⭐ The Only Way Out Is Down :D

The original meme was: Reblog this if you want readers to come into your ask box and ask for the “director’s commentary” on a particular story, section of a story, or set of lines. Or, send in a ⭐star⭐  to have the author select a section they’ve been dying to talk about!

Sorry it took a second to get to this! I kept mulling over what I wanted to talk about that I haven’t gone into detail on already. Usually I sorta default to the Drift section in the chapter “The Handwriting of God” because it was a late addition to the story that I’m very proud of, but I’ve talked about that before.

Soooo, I think instead I’ll go into detail about how the “twist” in the chapter “Treachery” was constructed, because I feel like I learned a lot as an author by doing it and it’s probably the single thing in the story I put the most effort into. Warning, this is very self-indulgent ;P

This is gonna by default have a lot of spoilers for The Only Way Out is Down so please don’t read below the cut unless you’ve finished the story unless you want to be spoiled!

The “twist” in question is the revelation that Hermann’s own traumas with regards to Newt’s possession are writing the “sins” that they’re visiting in each Circle, and that they’re Hermann’s sins in particular, not Newt’s. Furthermore, he’s been identifying himself as the guide, Virgil in the original “Inferno” by default, having convinced himself he’s the hero of the tale here to rescue Newt and not require any saving of his own, when in fact the role he fulfills is that of Dante, the man in need of rescuing from sin. This comes to light in ch. 12, Treachery, after Newt and Hermann have consistently failed to figure out the central logic for why the Circles are styled as they are, or why they break when they do in order to free them to move on to the next and hopefully to free Newt once all 9 are completed. 

This twist may not have been planned since ch. 1, as such, because I started the fic as an Inferno-based character study of Newt with the question of, “How do I do a Newt Recovery Arc story where Newt is actually present from the very first chapter?” I’d been reading quite a few Newt Recovery stories at that point, and noticed that somewhat by necessity they all began where Uprising left off: with Newt bound to the chair and the Precursors speaking through him. Then the inciting incident would begin that would allow Newt to finally break through, but usually that was several chapters in.

So I realized 2 things from the outset: 1) I didn’t want the Precursors still around. They just create too much plot to solve and questions to cloud the narrative like “When is this Newt? How good are they at faking him?” and what to do with them after Newt’s freed. Are they all killed? Does the war happen? It sets up a whole huge conflict that also asks the question of how Newt is involved with a theoretical Pacific Rim 3. So I decided this was going to be a Pacific Rim 4, the Precursors are already dead but for some reason Newt STILL won’t wake up, allowing the narrative to stay focused on his recovery with no dangling questions after. 2) Obviously, in order for Newt to be there from the beginning, we need to start inside his head. This made it even more a mindscape journey. His POV gives us reasonable assurance that this is really him and he’s not corrupted. He remained psychologically separate from the Precursors, which is the story’s world state that I deliberately set up so I also didn’t have to answer questions of “how guilty is Newt for what the Precursors did?” He’s not guilty and he actually knows it, because that separation remained distinct in this particular interpretation. 

Originally, Newt was absolutely supposed to be Dante, the man at the center of his life who is lost with no way forward and must go on a spiritual journey to regain himself, which may be a bit unfair and confusing for readers to solve the twist because he sees himself as Dante in his opening monologue. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to set up that expectation and then flip it for one simple reason.

 I didn’t want this to be a “Hermann saves the day” story.

The narrative structure of a lot of Newt Recovery Arcs by default place a lot of pressure on Hermann’s character to be the rescuer and the Knight in Shining Armor. That can lend itself too to a character who has all the strength while the other has all–or most of–the weakness besides maybe the occasional moment of doubt. I didn’t want to do that. In fact, I wanted to deliberately subvert that. I’d already done a story with Prayers to Broken Stone where one half of the ship is in crisis and the other half rescues them, and I always thought that story was a bit flawed because it made one side out to be this angel who never tires of their constant rescuing of the other, and the other out to be desperate and broken and crying all the time. I wanted to do a more balanced rescue story,  with mutual rescue, which is one of my favorite tropes for romance.

I started realizing even from ch. 2 in Hermann’s POV that Hermann was Not OK. That the years separated and the revelation of Newt’s possession had shattered him, but he had duct taped himself back together and fiercely refused to acknowledge he was anything but the hero designated to rescue Newt from his coma. Even the fact he’s spent a year Drifting with Newt to try to revive him was meant to be the reader’s first warning sign. Hermann isn’t just being a good partner, he’s not just a hero doggedly refusing to give up. He’s broken. He’s repeating the same attempt every day, shattering his own physical and mental health in order to dash himself to pieces against the problem of Newt’s recovery. This should be the first warning bell for the reader, and for Newt once he’s regained enough of himself to start paying attention to Hermann’s mental health.

I conceived of a crossover style narrative, where Newt would begin the story outwardly broken and in need of healing and begins to transition as he healed into the stronger party of the two. He starts breaking Circles all by himself as early as Circle 5, the midway point, technically he did so with help all the way back in Circle 2 but was too in his own head and convinced of his own weakness to notice. The point of Newt’s arc would be that with each Circle, he gets a bit of himself back. He faces his old traumas and re-writes them to become victories. The reality remains unchanged, sure, but new memories help to ease the old ones. 

By the end, Newt’s only remaining trial is to face the memory of the Precursors and realize he was a hero the whole time, that he was targeted because of his strength, that they attacked his self confidence deliberately because they knew he was strong enough to defeat them, and that he doesn’t need to be prey to their manipulation anymore. Then, he’s able to step free of his own traumas in order to save Hermann. That was the big subversion I had built in from Ch. 2 onward. I wanted Newt to be the hero of his own recovery, not without help, but the help was to pull him out of the depths of despair so he could be his own hero. 

Hermann’s assurance that he’s the hero of Newt’s story is in fact hubris, and that hubris is why it takes him so long to figure out what is in fact the embarrassingly simple reality that they are in the Drift, so these Circles are constructed from both their memories and the traumas being addressed belong to both of them. His blindspot is himself, as it is with many people. Newt doesn’t recognize this in part because Hermann is so tight-lipped and secretive about the trauma of those 10+ years. So Newt is buying that Hermann is fine because Hermann says he’s fine. That is, until the evidence becomes overwhelming that he isn’t. Each Circle has in fact, brought Hermann face to face with his failures, and it’s reopening the wound until the point where he shatters from the self-imposed guilt.

Hermann’s arc in the story is also a recovery arc, but he needs to actually finish falling before he can pick himself up again. “The only way out is down” is the title and the theme of the story. In order for recovery to begin, they have to push deeper into the things that hurt them, rather than running away, before they can come out on the other side. Newt had to regain his strength because he’d already hit rock bottom and was honest with himself about this fact. Hermann’s journey is first and foremost to stop lying to himself. He can’t begin to recover until he’s acknowledged that losing Newt, learning Newt was possessed and he did nothing to prevent it, the vengeance he took on the Precursors by destroying their planet, and the devastation of that not being enough to wake up Newt immediately actually broke him and he is not ok as a result. It may seem outwardly that the narrative is therefore punishing Hermann, saying he needs to be pushed down while Newt is raised up, but I always envisioned it more that the wound has festered. It needs to be reopened and cleaned so it can heal properly, even if on the surface that looks like he’s being wounded all over again, it’s actually a step in the healing process.

So knowing this was going to be the parallel arcs of the characters back in Ch. 2 I actually went ahead and said it in the dialogue:

“…The journey into Hell was instructive, not punitive.” Hermann frowned. “But you are not Dante, and I am not Virgil who can keep whatever is down there from harming us….”

In addition, many times Hermann notes Newt’s parallels to Virgil without connecting the dots, for example when he notes in the same chapter that Newt’s catchphrase, “Fortune favors the brave,” is actually a Virgil quote. Hermann assigns himself the role of Virgil/Savior, and Newt goes along with it because he doesn’t know Hermann needs saving too, but it’s Hermann hubris and part of that too is that Hermann did not do a close enough read of the text until it’s too late. 

Hermann is the one going on a journey into a strange place, which is Newt’s mind, where he is in fact an outsider. Newt is a native of this Hell, just like Virgil. Newt has seen all these memories before. While Hermann has a surface level knowledge of Inferno and the order of the Circles of Hell, that doesn’t mean he’s an expert on what’s actually in them the way Newt is. In fact, as early as Limbo, it’s Hermann asking Newt to explain what’s happening in the Circles/memories, in dialogue that is deliberately cribbed in its formatting from The Inferno. 

“"Tell me, my master, tell me, lord,“ [Dante] thenbegan because [he] wanted to be certainof that belief which vanquishes all errors,"did any ever go – by his own meritor others’ – from this place toward blessedness?”

Parallels with:

“Newton, stay with me, what are we looking at here?”

“I’m trying, Herms, but.. ugh, I think I’m feeling kind of seasick? I’m here but I’m also…also there? I don’t…”

“Why would it be showing you this? This level corresponds to Limbo. Think!”

Even the opening quote from Inferno in the chapter summary is taken from when Dante and Virgil go into Limbo and is meant to be one of the first clues of what’s really going on:

The poet, white of face, began: ‘Now, let us descend into the blind world below: I will go first, and you go second.’ And I, who saw his altered color, said: ‘How can I go on, if you are afraid, who are my comfort when I hesitate?’ And he to me: ‘The anguish of the people, here below, brings that look of pity to my face, that you mistake for fear. Let us go, for the length of our journey demands it.’

The poet is Virgil, who is in distress when he thinks about the horrors encapsulated in the Circles, which mirrors Newt’s fear of going into them. Similarly, the next chapter’s quote is: 

I learnt that the carnal sinners are condemned to these torments, they who subject their reason to their lust.

But Newt didn’t choose, in TOWOID at least, to be subjected to Drifting with Alice. Newt is not the one who subjected his reason to his lust. Hermann did, by his own admission, when he admits he was too jealous of Alice taking Newt to visit Newt in his new home when he was invited, where he might have begun to learn that something was wrong. 

There’s a thread of anti victim-blaming in this story that actually gives away the answer to the riddle very early on, when you realize none of the sins could apply to Newt because Newt was under duress in every memory, while Hermann had free will, which is the only way one can properly have guilt, which is what the Circles are actually addressing: Hermann’s sins, Hermann’s guilt, what Hermann believes he should have done differently to save Newt sooner, meanwhile these memories are constructed too so that Newt can gain strength from seeing himself freed over and over, from that demonstration that someone did are about him. 

This goes back to ch. 1 when Newt gives his furious rant at Hermann for never noticing or caring. It’s not that Newt is actually mad at Hermann, by his own admission, he just wanted to see that someone cared enough to try to rescue him, and that’s what the Circles are accomplishing for him. Thus, the Circles are constructed from both of their needs, but Hermann’s is opening his eyes to how terribly he’s been beating himself up for not doing something sooner, to the point where he finally cracks and admits it to himself as well as Newt.

This is why I needed to do two drafts. Because like the characters, I actually went into the Circles not really knowing myself what made them break or not. I resolved to write out all the best thematic “memories” to match the 9 Circles and then find the internal link between them after. That required me to re-write Wrath, actually, in order to make sure it was clearer that Hermann was th eone who got angry, not Newt, and to throw up enough smoke around Newt’s body killing Hannibal Chau to make it seem like he was the one who acted with the traditional definition of “Wrath”. 

Actually, each Circle is very carefully constructed so that Newt’s actions are the surface level definition of the sin discussed, but Hermann is the one who actually committed the sin. Newt is physically suspended in Limbo, but it’s by the Precursors. He’s trying to reach out, but he can’t. Hermann is the one with full autonomy who refuses to reach out once he perceives himself as rejected. Lust has Newt in the throes of physical pleasure, but it’s not a pleasure he chose and Lust itself is not a sin. It’s the act of Lust being used to harm others, Hermann’s sexual jealousy of Alice leads him to the sin of abandoning (unknowingly, he’s actually pretty hard on himself) Newt to these torments. And so on. 

A lot of effort was put with the second draft to make a casual reader see the sins as Newt’s and the careful reader to see the sins as Hermann’s. By knowing this from ch. 2 on I was able to interweave into the story these two layers so that a careful reader could sense something subtly off about the characters’ interpretation of events, e.g they’re Newt’s sins, until the final revelation in the chapter Treachery, which I hoped would be a gut punch when everything fell into place, which in a way is the “passage” I’m responding to with this ehehehehe….