#and I think it's fundamentally cuz like. why are you expecting me to remember what the fucking heart indexes you're referencing are

[essektheylyss]

Would I be a calmer person if I was willing to dnf a book? Undoubtedly. But then I wouldn't get to deconstruct exactly what I don't like about the book for my own learning process, and I would lose out on some prime kvetching, so I think it levels out.

[fuutaprotectionsquad]

you guys ever think about how. how in the beginning of Milgram, Jackalope was like "you can vote however you want, you can vote someone innocent just because you think they're pretty. it doesn't matter." And despite how hard we (or atleast me, but i imagine most of us) try to vote objectively and not succumb to the bias he expects of us, we do. Our votes are all biased because fundamentally, law and sin itself is built off of emotion, which is the root of bias.

And thats what causes such a debate in the Milgram fandom over verdicts: bc even though we think we're thinking logically, we're not, we are biased. Our biases don't overlap, though, and thats why we can't agree with each other. And on top of that, we are rigid in our biases. We are stubborn, we refuse to see subjective things from other points of view, because we can't. Opinions are hard as fuck to change.

Hence why the Amane debate, despite infuriating me, is subsequently my favorite. Neither side is right or wrong, no matter how much I think I'm right or other ppl think they're right. Its subjective what age is too young to be held accountable for your crimes, its subjective whether or not you should be blamed for the abusive ideologies you were raised under. And I could rant all day about why I believe one thing or the other, and I can get really mad at people who disagree, but its subjective. Just as the sole fact that Amane's cult teaching are bad is also subjective. Murder being bad is subjective.

People trying to change the prisoners' opinions using their verdicts is biased just as voting them based on our own opinions is also biased. We are trying to force our own beliefs and opinions on prisoners who have different ideas of whats right and wrong.

Es cannot see any of this. Most of the prisoners do. We see it mostly with Yuno, Fuuta, Amane and Kotoko, who criticize/take advantage of Es' god complex. Meanwhile, Haruka and Mahiru invite Es to decide for them (i think haruka does??? i dont fully remember). Muu and Shidou are both initially opposed to it, but become more willing to follow Es' verdicts because it benefits them. Even though Shidou's a little hesitant to see himself as innocent, he starts to. Kazui attributes Es' verdicts to a lack of knowledge on his situation, with the ideology that only his opinion on it matters, because he's the only one who knows the full story. Mikoto's kinda just confused (understandably). And don't ask about John idr.

Anyway I could rant for hours about how the specific prisoners act towards Es in regards to their verdicts + milgram fans' voting ideology + the philosophical undertones of milgram. Technically i did cuz this took 2 hours to write. But. maybe another day.

[writing-hat]

Was rewatching Hands of Time because I wanna get Nya right for my fic (I know I won't but this is an attempt), and I am suddenly remembered of Karlof.

Why is there a metal master? Isn't Cole supposed to be the earth master?

So! Here's why Cole can't metal bend - at least not now, not in this universe, and/or not in my head

Everyone has their own opinions! And this is just me speculating I guess! You can skip if this bores you lmao

Okay for those that are reading my insane and ridiculous overthinking that makes sense for me but might not for everyone cuz I can't explain shit (also cuz yknow this is a lego show for kids all of this wasn't thought through lmao)

So Metal Bending from ATLA is something that always makes me go insane because it is super well brought up AND built up. Because, yknow, Toph is a fucking badass and she's the best actually no contest here I don't take criticism- BUT BUT it's something that somehow feels expected because of how well she handles her powers and how it works when it comes to earth benders

Now for Cole, and earth masters in general, this wouldn't work in my mind, because I feel like the ninjas powers work more in a- "magical" way?

NOW YOU KNOW ME, this does not mean magic doesn't work with physics of our world, yaddi yadda, yknow how crazy I am when it comes to powers being handled with a price, and actually thinking of physics (to an extend, I didn't major in that for a reason LMAO). But it does occur to me that the connections between powers work differently in Ninjago compared to ATLA

This is also why Nya wouldn't be able to blood bend in my mind (EVEN IF THAT'S FUCKING COOL and I want to see content of it always and forever (are there any content on it actually harrass me if there is I wanna see that)), because she's not that kind of close to water, but she is close to it in an other way?

How would I explain that. Hm.

So like imagine a path, and it bifurcates in two different kinds of fields, but it still started from the same branch. Here, one becomes the bender of the matter, reaching potential as badass as blood bending, while the other masters it, understanding how it works to its fundamental, going as far as fusing with the element itself ; it's what makes it so that fire benders can bend lightning, and why that can't be for the ninjas/masters. Because it was never meant to be that.

This comes with the idea that the "Illusion of Separation" is a thing in ATLA! Which, I think would also be the case in Ninjago IF the FSM hadn't seperated them (the powers)- but I still don't know how to explain my thoughts there, other then to say the FSM had all powers before and there's no way he didn't use them at the same time or make them fuse (yknow aside wind and water of course) but he stopped that when he decided to pass it on future masters? something?

And that's why Karlof is the Master of Metal. It got seperated.

(doesn't that mean it can be brought back together? Lloyd I'm looking at you)

ALSO! I think what's taken into account here is the differences between metal and dirt, rocks and such. The chemical/physical differences, how iron is but a mineral in most cases incrusted too deep into the rock before brought back and used to make pure iron (or something idk the exact names) or used to make steel (with carbon levels being too high but yeah this goes to deep I'll stop now) (also if I'm wrong please tell me I'm not a scientist and idk that much on the subject (I think that shows))

More so, Toph's powers and bending works with WAVES! Cole's doesn't (yet, because if he can actually cause earthquakes then O BOI)

Not only that, but they are all born with those powers, and it's hard to master. But for the ninjas, they're "on their own", in way that the generations before them didn't get to teach them shit before they poofed out, and those that are left behind are people that were as clueless as them- looking at the Smith Parents, or even Wu! Who prbably has to learn everything from his father's scrolls because the FSM is a piece of crap actually (not sure how he's handled in the books but rn in my mind he is a piece of crap with how Wu and Garmadon react to most things (that's another talk a bit more Encanto flavored (generational trauma yknow)))

Also, there's the fact that it took so long for the show to show us Cole control the earth from a distance! Usually, his powers are associated with strength- which is in my opinion a huge waste of talent, BUT AT THE SAME TIME IT'S REALLY COOL! You know what I mean?

BUT COLE, even if he doesn't bend metal, there are other things that come with earth powers, things I CAN'T WAIT TO write about, but won't speak for here since I'm still working on it (also they might actually suck but Idc I'm having fun lol)

I wouldn't be surprised if other people found about these abilities tho. Y'know it's the internet! Lots of people think of the same thing

But uh yeah! I guess that's it?

Thanks for reading, and see ya!

(Also if you think I'm wrong about some things, which I prbbly am, or if you wanna add things, correct some of my stuff and all, you're welcomed to do so! I'm always open to being told I'm wrong LMAO)

[bigskydreaming]

Making an additional post to respond to @fuyunoakegata’s response to @fiyaerrigan’s post here without derailing or going too far afield from the OP:

I think an additional thing to consider that the other kids had by benefit of Dick being the eldest is......every single one of them to varying degrees had Dick to look to as a precedent for like.....reassuring themselves that their presence in Bruce’s life wasn’t a temporary thing. Dick’s constant or recurring presence was an affirmation of permanence - that no matter how bad things got between Bruce and one of his kids, since things HAD been very dicey between Dick and Bruce for awhile - Dick still was there, at the end of the day.

Now, the obvious sorta exception to this is in Jason’s POV, with it being a sorta exception cuz there’s a couple different ways you can play this. By emphasizing how much Bruce and Dick were on the outs from Jason’s POV while he was living with Bruce, you CAN cast doubt on the idea that Dick was proof things would never get so bad with Bruce that he would just stop being part of their lives. And then this in turn can be used as a sort of explanation for why Jason was so convinced that there was no coming back from a lot of what he’d done by his return to Gotham, even without the events of UTRH....like, you can make the case that this is why Jason escalated things to that extent period. He thought reconciliation was never truly ever an option.

But by the same token, you can also use the fact that Dick IS reconciled with Bruce by the time of UTRH to seed doubts about this in Jason’s head, because he DOES remember just how bad things were between Bruce and Dick when he was younger....and if they could come back from that, maybe it WASN’T just wishful naivete to think that there could be a future for Bruce and Jason’s relationship as well, y’know?

To cycle back to the beginning though....it should be acknowledged imo that Dick never had the benefit of this proof of permanence, this security blanket of knowing that no matter how bad things got with Bruce, there wasn’t truly a point of no return. That WAS in doubt for him a lot of the time. Which gives him all the more motivation to see what we so often see evidence of in the comics - Dick going above and beyond to stress to his siblings that they aren’t temporary in his eyes, and their connection is not just limited to being via Bruce. They’re his siblings with or without Bruce in the picture.

Now to respond more directly to what @fuyunoakegata had to say in that last reblog addition, I think the fact that Dick is so good at translating what Bruce leaves unspoken is actually a key part of the conflict between Dick and Bruce at so many points. Because the thing is....Dick should never have HAD to become that good at it. He became good at it by necessity, because Bruce does leave a lot unspoken and taken for granted, and at a certain point Dick realized he’d just have to fill in the blanks himself.

But given that Dick was the traumatized kid that Bruce chose to take in as an adult - no matter how young of an adult he was - there’s an inherent disservice in not recognizing that it should never have been on that kid to feel HE had to be the one to bridge the communication divide between himself and his guardian when said communication felt lacking. That is the responsibility of the guardian or parent, its literally a key part of the sense of security its their job to offer the traumatized orphan in their care.

That’s not to say, however, that its not realistic for this to happen this way - and for reasons that actually have nothing whatsoever to do with Bruce, and everything to do with Dick. Because it is possible that Bruce just never quite clued into just how much Dick was assuming the burden of translating Bruce’s intentions into actual communication and filling in the gaps where Bruce was leaving stuff unsaid.....because as I’ve said before, for all their similarities and parallel tragedies, a key part of Dick’s tragedy that Bruce simply couldn’t relate to, was the abandonment fear of being sent away for not being good enough or being too much of a burden. Bruce has HUGE abandonment issues due to his own tragic loss of his parents - but his abandonment issues tend to be more geared around losing people to tragedy or death. 

Now from a parental standpoint, he does have fears of driving his kids away by not being good enough for them or by hurting them in various ways, true.....BUT the specific overlap he lacks is that he’s never really identified from the perspective of a child, with that fear of a parent or guardian not wanting to deal with him or be burdened by him anymore. When he was raised by Alfred, he feared losing Alfred in a variety of ways, but not really so much by driving Alfred away or making him sick of him....because there has always been at least an implicit awareness, even while acknowledging that Alfred basically raised him, that Alfred still technically worked for the Wayne family, and Bruce simply wasn’t ever in a position to feel quite as dependent on Alfred and say...his ‘whims’ or whatever, as other children might in regards to their own parents. Alfred’s loyalty is readily apparent and of a more....fundamental sort than most others can claim, y’know?

So I think one of the key divides between Dick and Bruce, a NATURAL area of oversight for Bruce, who tends to take for granted at times how much he and Dick are alike in certain ways.....is that it wouldn’t necessarily ever occur to Bruce just how much Dick feared being a burden who could and might be sent away at any time he became too difficult to be worth putting up with anymore. And by not realizing how big a role this played in Dick’s thoughts as he grew up, its natural that Bruce wouldn’t necessarily notice just how almost....eager Dick was to jump at filling in gaps in communication himself rather than risk having to insist Bruce clarify himself or his intentions in order to be understood instead. Dick didn’t want to give his guardian any reason to send him packing - so he voluntarily took up the role of Bruce-translator early on, before ever even alerting to Bruce that there was anything about his communication tendencies that might be lacking and left Dick occasionally grasping for assumptions to fill in the blanks.

But see, the problem that naturally arises from this sort of inherent miscommunication or oversight, no matter how understandable it is....is that it over time builds in an expectation or even reliance on Dick doing the majority of the work and emotional labor when it comes to understanding each other. And the precise problem this creates lies in when Dick for whatever reason - such as believing Bruce has already as good as cast him aside and no longer wants to be burdened with him - like, if for whatever reason Dick STOPS doing the majority share of their communication, if he no longer sees a reason to translate Bruce’s thoughts into actual words of affirmation and read approval into his actions or assume the best of Bruce’s intentions......if Dick basically just stops TRYING here, because he’s convinced there’s no longer any reason to try and the worst has already happened, the very thing he was going above and beyond in filling in Bruce’s gaps in communicating himself in order to avoid happening in the first place....

Then Bruce is going to flounder, naturally, because all of a sudden its going to seem like nothing he says or does in the ways he’s always been used to communicating himself like, seem to be getting through to Dick or leaving him with the same understanding or awareness of Bruce’s true feelings that he’s grown used to Dick having, based just on whatever Bruce DOES actually do or say.

So from Bruce’s perspective, its going to be like nothing he says seems to make any impact on Dick or convey to him that Bruce does in fact still love him and care....BECAUSE Bruce hasn’t quite realized yet just how much Dick has HAD to fill in those blanks for himself, because Bruce’s actual communicating of them has not actually involved ever FULLY expressing those sentiments.

Hence, their complete communication breakdown after Dick was fired and/or Jason was made Robin and adopted without consulting or even alerting Dick to the fact beforehand, or reassuring him that this didn’t actually say anything about Bruce’s feelings for his eldest. As well as Bruce’s seeming obliviousness as to why.

And another thing I want to add here is that I always tend to push back a lot against people bringing up how young Bruce was when he took Dick in, and how that explains his lapses in parenting....

Because the thing this fails to take into account IMO is that like.....by and large, and with obvious occasional exceptions like Robin: Year One.....its almost unanimously agreed that Bruce was at his BEST as a parent to Dick - whether thinking of himself as his father yet or not - in their early years together. So I don’t see how Bruce’s young age can excuse his later lapses in parenting Dick, when it was at his YOUNGEST, that Bruce was at his BEST in parenting Dick. To me, his age has nothing to do with it. The difference in Bruce’s effectiveness in being a parent to Dick at various stages in my mind lies entirely in the fact that in those early years, Bruce was most consistently putting in his most effort into being there for Dick, being the person Dick needed him to be, etc. 

Basically, those early years were so good between them, compared to other periods, because even with Dick assuming more responsibilities than he ever should have had to - but for completely understandable reasons ie Bruce simply not REALIZING Dick was so desperate to not be a burden he was making sure Bruce never realized there was a problem here at all -  the bottom line was it was in those earliest years that Bruce most consistently TRIED. He put his best foot forward. He did the WORK.

And thus the problem in the later years of Dick’s youth, IMO, had nothing to do with Bruce’s own relative youth - it was that I think Bruce had just gotten comfortable with their dynamic and lost sight of how much of that was due to his own EFFORT. He started to take Dick for granted, and thus defaulted more towards frustration when he didn’t understand why Dick did something or where he was coming from....where previously, he would have been more patient as he applied his intellect towards trying to figure out for himself WHY Dick was acting the way he was or what it might signify.

BUT. The point of all this digression is like.....me working my way around to how there’s not JUST an opportunity for Dick to buttress Bruce’s lapses in parenting for his younger siblings, and for them to benefit from him having gone first.....BUT, if people WANT there to be....there’s also every bit as much to fix or address a lot of the flaws in Bruce and Dick’s relationship via Bruce learning from things with his younger children like....an awareness of WHY he and Dick grew apart and how it can be addressed.

For an example.....with Jason. I’ve commented before on how a lot of authors doing revisitations of Bruce and Jason’s early years together in fic actually do a GREAT job of showcasing how patient Bruce is with him, and understanding of his history and why he behaves in various ways or reacts to things differently than Bruce would or expects.

And a lot of focus is put on how in the comics, when Bruce talks to Dick about why he took Jason in, he describes himself as having seen Jason as being a lot like him, and thus thought he could help him with his anger, etc.

See, I have always, ALWAYS, called bullshit on this point. (And that’s aimed at the comics canon btw, not fic writers).

Because uh, I just don’t see it at all. First off, Jason has always had even less in common with Bruce than Dick did, and second like, the only thing that Bruce has ever pointed to as feeling similar to Jason in....is Jason’s anger.

And like....early Jason, even after the post-Crisis origin retcon, like...wasn’t that angry! His supposed anger issues come from all of like, two different stories and that’s it. And I don’t buy that Jason was the first kid in all the time Bruce had been Batman by that point, that like, Bruce saw as a kindred spirit due to just being ANGRY. Umm, no. Sorry. That doesn’t track for me.

Especially because like....when Bruce first encountered Jason? When he first MADE the decision to take Jason in? First when meeting him stealing his tires, at which point he took him to Ma Gunn, and then after finding out that was a criminal front and deciding to take Jason in himself? Jason was like....literally not even angry in any of those encounters, lol. He just wasn’t.

Jason was scared. He was defiant. He was stubborn. He was proud. He was vulnerable. He was doing his damnedest not to show it. He was a lot of things.

What he wasn’t.....was...angry.

And so I truly don’t believe that Bruce took Jason in for reasons that had anything to do with identifying with him and seeing himself in Jason.

I think Bruce looked at that tiny young vulnerable but proud, spirited and defiant kid before him, utterly unrepentant about stealing Bruce’s tires and then hitting him with a tire iron and then with the Ma Gunn storyline....

And Bruce saw a young Dick Grayson reflected in the boy before him. 

Bruce missed Dick and took Jason in as a kind of do-over, a chance to fix the mistakes he barely understood making with Dick to lose him from his life or drive him away in the first place....and just resolved to do BETTER this time. To not make the same mistakes. To be patient, understanding, to try and get why Jason did and thought the things he did instead of just making his own assumptions.

And the painful irony is that despite Bruce’s best intentions in the comics, history DID repeat himself. He and Jason became estranged, even before Jason’s death - by Bruce projecting himself and his own issues and viewpoints onto Jason rather than see Jason as an entirely different person from him. He grew to take Jason and their dynamic for granted the same way he did with Dick. A significant element of the Garzonas story that never gets talked about is that after they captured Garzonas the second time, after Gloria’s suicide and before taking him into the police where Garzonas ended up just walking again....

Bruce stood back and literally encouraged Jason to take out his anger and frustration on the man. The same way Bruce sometimes did with criminals himself. He literally stood there and watched as Jason vented his anger by beating up Garzonas further.

And THIS is the heart of why Bruce reacted the way he did with Garzonas’ death, I think. Especially when you couple it with how much of Bruce’s reactions in UTRH are based around how HIS entire reason for being unwilling to kill the Joker is because he doesn’t think he could just stop there, couldn’t pull himself back from doing it again. I think Bruce just ASSUMED that Jason had pushed Felipe to his death, because he projected himself into Jason’s shoes, and saw that moment playing out from how he feared HE HIMSELF would have reacted in that moment, if he were say as young as Jason still was at the time, and frustrated by how futile everything felt. He assumed the worst of Jason, because he identified with Jason, and in that moment, was projecting his own worst assumptions of himself in a parallel moment of intense emotional frustration and anger.

Like I said.....he drove Jason away by making the same mistakes he’d made with Dick in essence - he projected too strongly on identifying with them and thus viewing their actions or choices through the lens of how he would behave in similar circumstances and WHY....and he stopped doing the WORK of keeping in mind that they were very different people from him with very different reasons for choosing the things they choose, different histories, different priorities, different contexts.

So the point is like.....instead of letting things play out like that, since fic IS an opportunity to improve upon canon, you can draw upon literally ANY of these ideas, and like.....examine what happens if not only Dick helps his siblings in their relationships with Bruce by drawing from his own experiences with him and the mistakes there.....

But you can also examine what happens if Bruce is helped in his relationship with Dick by drawing from his experiences with his younger children and using those to identify mistakes he made with Dick specifically, and address them even now....instead of just writing off his relationship with Dick as the best it’ll ever be now and damaged beyond further repair and so instead devoting himself to trying to just do better with his younger kids.

Because see what happens then, if you use Bruce’s patience and understanding while raising a young Jason, and awareness of just how different Jason is from him....to glean for HIMSELF, without having to be told by others....an awareness that no, maybe he took in Jason for reasons that had far more to do with regrets having to do with Dick than because of identifying with Jason just himself. And from there.....a simple examination of his relationships with Dick and Jason respectively, like, even just to wonder what’s so different about his differing dynamics with the two and why is so much better now than the other...that’s literally all that’s needed for Bruce to become AWARE of how patient he is with Jason and his seeming idiosyncracies, to acknowledge the work and EFFORT he puts into building and maintaining his relationship with a young Jason....and from there....the realization that....holy shit, he’d taken Dick for granted, and THAT’S why things broke down between them. He’d stopped TRYING to understand Dick the way he was working so hard now to understand Jason, and instead just started getting frustrated with the fact that he so often DIDN’T understand Dick, period.

And once you have Bruce HAVE that epiphany, GAIN that awareness....

Its the easiest thing in the world to just write him GOING to Dick and just like...acknowledging this. Owning his faults. Admitting that he took Dick for granted and put too much reliance on Dick doing most of their communicating, fell back on it being easier that way and stopped placing importance on being the one to take the LEAD in their relationship and addressing its flaws, as the PARENT.

And just saying.....its not too late to fix this. If I can do it with Jason, if I could do it with you in the first place, I can do it again. All I need is for you to give me the opportunity to try to do just that, to do better, and instead of demanding that or expecting it from you or even just hoping for it but never actually voicing it....here is me asking for it, but letting you know I understand if you don’t trust me with that or want to risk yourself like that again.

And whammo zammo, you’ve got yourself a road to a healthier, happier Batfam, and it doesn’t require actually vilifying anyone or expecting anyone but the patriarch of the family to like....take the actual wheel.

[inhonoredglory]

I thought this needed to be its own post, since it’s a huge meta and I really loved writing it.

The following is my attempt to analyze the symbolism and staging of @tenyai​ ‘s impeccable storyboards to Douxie and Merlin’s farewell, in the final episode of Wizards: Tales of Arcadia.

Teny, your boards and the thoughtfulness, heart, and passion you put into them have legit inspired me to take up boarding as a truly narrative, imaginative, and character-driven art. Thank you for these and for all the love. Your skill and craftsmanship and sincerity of emotion come shining through in these arts, and it warms my heart and fills me with absolute joy. I’ve been in awe of your handle of cinematographic symbolism ever since you teased so much meaning out of the final scene in Killahead Part 2, and I’ve changed my entire view on how to analyze scenes and characters on screen because of it. I cannot wait to see your analysis of this scene. It’s rich and powerful in ways I cannot even express.

People, please go check out her boards on her blog and at her professional portfolio on the website in her bio!!

______

Waking up in Merlin’s Study

First up, parallelisms… Merlin’s study is the symbol of everything Douxie is aspiring to in his life. It’s the heart of Merlin’s knowledge, his position as a master and a wizard. It’s full of things Douxie is off-limits to (like the safe or the time map), as we saw in the second episode. He’s always been a student and an inferior in this room; that’s why he considers it an ironic Hell. But unlike in “Dragon’s Den,” when he wakes up in this room on the floor, scared and confused––here instead, he wakes up on the table, surrounded by Merlin’s books, Merlin’s knowledge. And he’s much more comfortable and relaxed. Symbolically, he’s not scrubbing the floor anymore as an inferior.

I almost want to say that Merlin’s tables represent the places where Merlin crafts and makes things––like in “History in the Making” when he is shown making the amulet over one of the tables in his study. But in this case, the person Merlin had a hand in crafting was Douxie. And being a father to Douxie, by saving him from the streets, is Merlin’s greatest accomplishment. He may have saved Douxie, but Douxie took on a life of his own and surpassed Merlin’s wisdom, in a way much like the amulet took on a foresight far more wise than Merlin could have ever predicted (choosing a human to be the Trollhunter, despite Merlin’s belief that a human wasn’t enough).

Walking to the Light

After Douxie wakes up, we get the walk towards the Light, with Merlin starting out in the Light and by the end of this scene, falling into Shadow. Symbolizing Douxie’s growth and perception of Merlin, and symbolizing Merlin’s position as Master Wizard of this realm and his willful relinquishing of that role to Douxie. At first, Douxie wakes up, thinking about his past in this room and all the service he did for his master––who in this shot appears as a hazy halo-ed vision speaking down at him from the unattainable glow: “Hello there, boy,” said with the kind of judgmental snide Douxie’s used to from Merlin.

Then they start walking and then we hit the window at the far end of the room, a kind of apex in the parabolic staging of Douxie and Merlin’s movement through the scene––with the arc going from the back of the room and the table, to the window, and swinging again to the back, this time from the right side of the room. Merlin’s dialogue when we hit the window is important. He’s first talking about how he’s dead and vaporized into soot, etc, and then he opens the time map and asks, “The question really is, Why are you here?” A charged, thematically rich question placed right when we see the mingle of blue and green light from the time map’s lenses––the mingling of these two’s lives through the ages, the summation of all Douxie’s insecurities and all Merlin’s expectations, all Douxie’s greatest mistakes and his greatest triumphs.

Why Are You Here?

Why is he here? At this point, Douxie’s finally let go, he’s accepted Merlin’s death, accepted the title of successor, accepted his gifts and powers and heroism. And he’s accepted that death is part of the job of Master Wizard if it means saving those he’s sworn to protect. So why is he here? Because he’s done everything and more that a true Master Wizard is supposed to do. He’s equalled Merlin, nay––surpassed him in heroism, wisdom, and responsibility. The mingling of the time map’s lights symbolizes that Douxie has achieved everything Merlin represented to him, and more.

And then Douxie touches the Light, looking out into the glow of the hereafter, saying nothing (I love that and makes me crave for his thoughts).

There’s something so fundamentally and chillingly introspective and metaphysical here in this shot for me. It comes on the heels of not only “Why are you here” but also “I am most certainly dead. You saw me vaporize into soot.” Cuz that’s what happens when we all go, isn’t it? You might be the wisest person on this earth, mastered all there is to know about life, become the greatest wizard, lived a thousand years and more, and still in the end, you will die, and to the dust you will return. Maybe Douxie’s thinking, Am I here because I’m dead too? Because my body is gone, because somewhere out there beyond the stained glass is the explanation of the mystery of what happens when we die? Because even if you master life, there is no mastery over death, because none of us will ever feel what it truly is to be on the other side until we get there?

Separate and Equal

Symbolically, with the lighting, it also means Douxie’s touched Wisdom/Maturity in a way. If the hazy glow of Merlin at the start was from this Light, from this Unattainable Essence––then by the time of this staging’s apex, Douxie has achieved what Merlin has. He’s touched the thing that he has sought for so long. He too can be framed by the Light of the person he wanted to be. So now, we see Douxie talking back to Merlin, and not being silent anymore.

Merlin and Douxie are on the same plane now––as equals. We get the vitally important shot of them side by side, Douxie laughing off Merlin’s disapproval, both of them framed by the Light, both of them standing on their own, balanced by the pillars and the light, each of them solid and independent, separate and equal.

Douxie’s Need for Validation

And then we get to the other side of the parabola, the shift in Merlin’s dialogue from disapproval to one of admiration and pride. “I can see you no longer need my validation.”

This line kills me, because you can see in Douxie’s face that yes, he does. Oh how he desperately wants it. But he’s worked so hard to NOT need it, so that he can grow and flourish. And Douxie falls back into that quiet again, waiting on Merlin’s every word, because his rebellious veneer is stripped right now. Merlin’s hitting on the core of his needs, the source of his insecurity. In the film version, he’s even holding his hands together in front of him, and if that body language means anything to me, it’s Douxie feeling small and childlike again, needing and wanting something from his Dad but not having the courage to tell him.

Staging-wise, Douxie’s still very much following Merlin. He’s behind him, chasing after him, looking up to him. The “ancient Draconic” stand-off was the first and most important show of Douxie’s growth, born from Douxie’s own gumption and sass, when Merlin for the first time in this scene walked up to *Douxie* instead of the other way around, even if it was to judge him:

But like any good hero’s journey, after one win, our hero gets a setback, a reminder of his failures, before he wins again. And this time, it’s Douxie feeling like this latest monologue from Merlin is again some kind of judgement, some kind of backhanded lecture. Would his show of strength and independence fall on deaf ears?

“Remember when I told you that magic is mastery over life?” Merlin says, holding up an alchemy bottle and then a book––tools of the trade, spellcraft and tricks. All the things Merlin taught him. In a huge way, Merlin wasn’t there for the real lessons Douxie learned to become truly wise. Douxie became strong and selfless and kind because he had to, because those were the ways he knew in his heart would take him on the path to reaching that wisdom of life Merlin was talking about. I wonder if there’s something to the fact that once Merlin starts saying, “Nine hundred years you’ve guarded this realm…” he puts the book away––putting away his own knowledge and symbolically recognizing that Douxie’s wisdom has taken him far past Merlin’s own teachings, and that in the 900 years that went by, Douxie has guarded this realm with a mastery of life all his own.

In the final version, the moment Merlin says, “You’ve disrupted time, freed ancient beasts,” that’s when Douxie drops his hands, stops walking, and looks down––a brushstroke reminder of his guilt on doing these things, things that Merlin disapproved of, but things Merlin is now seeing as good and right things to do.

And then we get to the shot of the amulet blueprints, and the wonderful crowning statement of Douxie’s morality: “You’ve… fought to save one life at the risk of countless others.” Meaning Jim, meaning the very person who inspired Douxie to take his selflessness that one step further and set aside his own life so that he could save everyone. Because every life is precious. I find it fascinating that on this line in the boards, Douxie silently fist-slams the table, disappointment all over his face. While Merlin, now in Shadow, has a look of wistful regret.

This shot is so pack full of meaning, and I keep adding to this interpretation...

Douxie for so long has been stripped down for everything he’s done, been criticized by Merlin for being different from him. In some ways, he thinks this latest monologue is more of the same, more ways in which he’s disappointed his father. And clearly, despite his growth, it still hurts him.

And it hurts him that while Merlin is talking about saving Jim’s life, Douxie never really was able to save him. Douxie died while Jim was still corrupted. He died only seeing Jim lose himself to the Green Knight. He never saw Claire’s heroism in bringing Jim back. Personally, Douxie failed.

But even more than that, it hurts him that for all his love for Merlin, he could not save him. He might give his life to save the world, but he cannot bring Merlin back from the grave. Every life is precious and he would risk countless to save just one. But he couldn’t save the one that meant the most to him.

Merlin recognizing he’s wronged Douxie

In the end, Merlin here isn’t talking Douxie down, even as he’s pointing out their differences. He’s in awe at this idealism Douxie possesses. He’s not criticizing him, he’s not being wry or ironic. Merlin looks up at the portrait, knowing that it wasn’t him who gave Douxie this outlook on life. It wasn’t his harsh treatment that gave Douxie his beautiful soul. Douxie had it all along, and Merlin was too dense to see it and nourish it.

So what Merlin says next hits even deeper––

“And yet, despite such relentless hardships…” Merlin’s looking up at the portrait. He’s looking at himself. He’s looking at everything he’s done to Douxie that’s burdened his son with that guilt, that insecurity, that fear, that emotional abandonment. He’s acknowledging here his part in the trauma of Douxie’s life, and his regret is that all this time, it was Douxie who was the better man than he was.

And then we get the symbolic shot––“Despite such relentless hardships, you managed to protect those dearest to you”––with Merlin in Shadow and Douxie lit from behind with the Light. A reversal of the opening shot of this scene, when it was Merlin in the Light and Douxie, unsettled, in the Shadow. This is finally Merlin laying down his ego, seeing in Douxie the strength and force of love and protectiveness he never had. The very thing Merlin didn’t do, when he didn’t protect Douxie all those years, when he let his son down, when he left him and ignored him and took him for granted. When he didn’t give the person dearest to him the love he deserved.

Resolution

And finally, it’s Merlin walking *up* to Douxie, Merlin falling in Douxie’s shadow, and Douxie being once and finally again on an equal plane with his master and peer. “My Hisirdoux, what a life you’ve lived. What a wizard you’ve become.” This is the climax of Douxie’s parabolic hero’s journey in this room. Merlin has at long last given to him what he desperately needed to hear––pure, unadulterated pride in his father’s eyes, and an honest and sincere expression of love, kindness, and emotion.

It’s too much for Douxie’s desperate heart, and he collapses into his father’s arms, releasing 900 years of pent-up emotions and need.

(Is that symbolically why Merlin’s always in armor and Douxie never had any––cuz he’s fragile and bare in the face of Merlin’s cold, callous exterior?)

After that hug (waaaah TEARS, every. freaking. time), we once again are treated to the Light symbolism. First again to show how equal these two men are––Merlin importantly a step down from his son, with the light behind Douxie. And then to show the time map, glimmering with a calm, peaceful, happy equality.

Life and Death

And now we’re in scene denouement, as Merlin and Douxie walk to the end of the parabola (past the first table and eventually out the door). Fascinatingly, in the boards, Douxie glances around the room and then his eyes I believe land on the table he woke up in earlier, before the scene cuts and we get a shot of that same table, panning up to reveal Merlin and Douxie facing the doorway to the hereafter.

And in my brain, it’s like we’ve come full circle in Douxie’s life arc. If waking on your back is birth, snarking about your tough childhood, and now after all you’ve gone through, you look back on that time at the end of your days, ready to face what comes after death…. (well, that’s what it means to me anyway).

Douxie’s fully prepared to leave the mortal world. That’s how far he’s come in his maturity. He closes his eyes, accepting the unknown and resting in the confidence of who he is.

The Hero’s Journey

But like any good hero’s journey, the end isn’t to leave the ordinary world with the boon of your new knowledge and wisdom. It is to return to your home and share that knowledge with others, to use what you have gained and become a teacher and protector for your family and community.

Merlin gives him one last lesson, one last parting gift to tell him, Hey, you have more power than you even imagine you possess. Your rebellious spirit made you who you are today, and it’s what will keep you alive and fighting because it’s your gift and how you protect the world. Your way.

Merlin’s parting sign of the horns is the cherry on top of this whole thing, a perfectly subtle way of Merlin acknowledging who Douxie is, accepting it, and celebrating it. Saying goodbye to his son in a language meant for him. Douxie’s tears at the end (wish they got into the final oof!) speaks volumes to his beautifully mingled emotions––amusement at Merlin’s gesture and a poignant love that he did it for him. I tear up just thinking about the look on Douxie’s face and what it all means in his heart.

Anyway, that’s a wrap, folks. I love Douxie with my entire soul. Thank you for sharing these boards, Teny, and for putting your heart and tears into this masterwork of a scene. (I listened to “Moving On” to write this for the Mood and guhh, it’s a tear-jerker gosh.) This fandom is incredibly lucky to be the recipients of your favorite sequence in your career to date. It’s been an absolute pleasure to see your work and feel the heart you poured into them.

[extraordinarilyextreme]

finally watched Guardian (2018) and i need to talk

Warning: contains MASSIVE SPOILERS, probably too much music/song analysis, my poor translations from Chinese to English, and some references to the original novel (disclaimer: my novel-reading was mostly jumping around because i have a problem where I’m not fluent enough to read the original Chinese novel and I don’t usually like English translations)

1. the freakin opening theme: We Won’t Be Falling by Chen Xueran... (also I see you Tina Guo on the cello thank you queen)

the amount of chills i get every time an episode starts,,, fantastic! marvelous! the lyrics are very VERY apt to the story of Guardian, esp this drama adaptation

(“We are the one/We will be holding on/For the promise we held for life/For the people we love are leaving” ... “And the story will keep on going”)

1.1. the promise? may i direct you to novel chapter 75? 

Shen Wei: “Sometimes I think if one day you can remember everything, then I will be able to say to you: look, I did it, I did all that I had promised you; not one bit did I miss, not one word did I go back on.”

they promise to keep the peace, to protect both Haixing and Dixing; and in the show, it’s a promise they keep with their lives

2. Zhu Yilong plays THREE characters and is able to differentiate them perfectly with particular microexpressions

-Ye Zun (literally, “Respect the Night”; “Lord/Master of the Night” would be a better title) sets off my fight-or-flight instincts even though i think his name tries a little too hard to be edgy; the way he sneers, the smiles that don’t reach his eyes, also that infamous tongue flick when Zhao Yunlan sees through the act... i think it’s both great and sad that Yunlan could differentiate the twins because, why, Shen Wei would never be so openly flirtatious (and wear a deep-cut shirt like that lol)... the delivery of “Xiao Yunlan” disturbed me so much—wonderful, stellar acting

-Black Cloaked Envoy: does his best to bend the rules where he can for the Dixingren because he’s just so fundamentally GOOD; he’s empathetic despite how stern and strict he seems to be, and how much he claims to enforce the clearly-cut laws... he’s an absolute babie ten thousand years ago (Yunlan, doesn’t it hurt your conscience to flirt with such a babie?)

-Shen Wei: in the novel, his name (both surname and first name) are given to him by Kun Lun’s incarnations—there’s a lot of power in naming something, in naming someone; he’s good-natured and gentle, always polite... he pushes up the glasses [that he doesn’t need] a lot, perhaps because he’s used to pushing up his mask as the Envoy

2.1. i find it very striking that Shen Wei dies without his glasses; he doesn’t die as the Envoy, he doesn’t die as the Professor; he dies as a person, as the person who loves Yunlan the most and has loved Yunlan for ten thousand years

2.2. the other notable moments we see Shen Wei without his glasses are where he apologizes to Yunlan [and Yunlan apologizes at the same time because they’re pining idiots] for not noticing the camera in his office, where he sets aside all his pride as Envoy and Professor and kneels in the rain for the man he loves (lwj kneeling after visiting the Burial Mounds, yea?), and of course after he slices up an orange [cuz food = love] only to find Yunlan asleep and drapes his jacket over the silly silly man... anyway, Yunlan is indeed the only person Shen Wei is comfortable enough to reveal everything to, all defenses and masks (literal and figurative) lowered

2.3. that last instance (ep 26) is when Shen Wei pulls out his necklace and reminisces as he gazes fondly at Yunlan; the song that plays during this is 《乱心曲》or “Chaotic Heart Song”... may I direct you to novel chapter 65 where Yunlan finds all the paintings and pictures his Xiao Wei has kept from the centuries?

“邓林之阴初见昆仑君，惊鸿一瞥，乱我心曲。” which translates to “In the shade of the woods I first saw Kunlun-jun; a glimpse of his grace wrought chaos in my heart’s song”

2.4. but also let’s not forget the [in]famous cut wrist scene of ep 23, where our dear Shen Wei, without glasses, as a person who loves Yunlan—not the aloof Envoy or the well-spoken Professor—is reduced to two words: “Worth it.” Yunlan is worth everything to him; this goes without question, without a second thought. Kun Lun (Yunlan) told him not to regret whatever decisions he’ll make, and Ye Zun scolds and laughs at his brother for giving up his life for a human/Haixingren, but of course Shen Wei doesn’t regret dying to protect Yunlan, dying to protect Haixing. (also, peep the behind-the-scenes where Shen Wei grabs Yunlan’s hand for a moment as he blocks the attack from Ye Zun)

2.5. on this same train of thought, Da Qing brings up a line from ten thousand years ago where Shen Wei claimed he would never kill unless it was for the world... and, well, he kills for Yunlan doesn’t he?

3. Bai Yu plays our charismatic Chief Zhao Yunlan/Kun Lun and hoo boy does he do an excellent job; the found family vibes of the SIU are spectacular and the way he flirts with tries to recruit Professor Shen is endearing and touching

3.1. there’s another piece from the OST called 《一点真心》, translated to “A Little Sincerity” though I would use “A Bit of a Sincere Heart” because it too references the novel

Kun Lun’s confession to Xiao Wei: “我富有天下名山大川，想起来也没什么稀奇的，不过就是一堆烂石头野河水，浑身上下，大概也��只有这几分真心能上秤卖上两斤，你要？拿去。” [I’m rich with famed mountains and endless rivers under heaven, but none of it feels rare when I think about it. It’s all just a pile of broken stones and uncultivated streams. From head to toe, there is probably only this bit of my sincere heart that is worth anything weighed on a scale. You want it? Take it.]

Zhao Yunlan’s confession to Shen Wei: “我别的东西也有，只是你可能大多都看不上，只有这一点真心……你要是不接着，那就算了吧。” [I have other things, only you probably would not think much of them. There’s only this bit of my sincere heart... If you don’t want to catch it, then forget it.)

And Shen Wei’s reply to Yunlan’s confession is of course “我接住了。” [I’ve caught it.]

3.2. the novel is a happy ending because Xiao Guo’s important role actually plays a part (i literally don’t understand why the show couldn’t do that after they built up so many expectations about his good character/merit/inability to be corrupted but ANYWAY)... Shen Wei, Xiao Wei, the little Ghost King has a soul and wow isn’t that just beautiful after everything he did to become worthy/deserving of Kun Lun’s attention and love

4. the Zhang Ruonnan and Wang Yike (death-touch Dixingren) case in ep 3 is an obvious parallel to the “brotherly” relationship of WeiLan... Shen Wei’s line of “Many tragedies were destined from the start” references the show of course but also the paradoxical precognition that marks the drama version of WeiLan; in both of their “first meetings”, one of them was always already in love with the other—Yunlan, as Kun Lun, knew he would have to return to his own time at some point and thus doom this impressionable young Envoy to ten thousand years of waiting and Shen Wei (honestly in a Code Geass Lelouch kinda style) knew he would have to die to defeat his brother

4.1. the importance of “touch” in this case alludes to novel WeiLan, where of course Shen Wei watched over all of Kun Lun’s incarnations but wasn’t allowed to get close to him because hungry ghosts would inevitably devour the essence of the people around them; similarly Yike was terrified of touching Ruonnan all this time... but Ruonnan accepted her (just like how novel Kun Lun lets this intriguing little Ghost King trail after him)

4.2. speaking of Shen Wei’s grand plans and the idea of “knowing”, Yunlan reminds him that “You are not a weapon/blade, you are a person.” and wow once again, only Yunlan can pull the humanity from Shen Wei, who has carefully crafted his disguise and personality to fit what people expect of the Envoy and the Professor... but alas, Shen Wei fulfills his promise by in fact making himself a weapon; he poisons himself to become a bomb that will take down his brother

4.3. as many qualms and complaints as I have with Chinese censorship, much in the case of WangXian, i think i prefer the drama version of WeiLan to the novel version; the plot of the Guardian novel is a lot better in my opinion (with references to mythology and legends, as opposed to, what, aliens?? mutants from X-Men? quirks in My Hero Academia??) and yea the relationship of Kun Lun with Xiao Wei is built up a lot better and makes more sense than the time-travel of Yunlan masquerading as Kun Lun with Shen Wei... but there’s an unadulterated, unconditional kind of love that runs through the drama, whereas the novel had some darker (though probably more realistic) vibes of near-possessiveness and ulterior motives... Kun Lun/Yunlan in the novel can be, well, cruel, which is not necessarily out of character; it’s just seems a little wrong to me that you could threaten your partner in a relationship (if you keep things from me again, i really will turn against you + had i known xyz would happen, i really should have killed you)... plus i’m always a sucker for love without an “i love you”, a love that’s conveyed entirely through actions and gazes

5. Yunlan asks Zhou Weiwei (the mirror case) where her jacket was bought because he “wants to get one for [his] girlfriend” and lo and behold, what similarly-styled and colored coat does our Shen Wei show up in a few episodes later? (also the fact that Shen Wei dies wearing this jade-ish-blue-ish coat)

6. boyfriend jacket during the Moutain-River Awl case... boyfriend jacket!!!! Shen Wei claims he doesn’t need it and well he still wears it anyway because Yunlan’s love is unstoppable

6.1. the way Shen Wei grabs Yunlan’s elbow before running down the hill

6.2. Shen Wei being so freaking fine-tuned to Yunlan’s discomfort/pain as always that he drinks wine for him (and passes out immediately—heroics/bde of yllz! wwx and the alcohol tolerance of our dear lwj)

6.2.1. when Minister Gao brings up Yunlan’s dad and the Chief’s hands tighten... and of course nothing can go by Shen Wei, so he changes the topic of the conversation; also the way he leans forward as if to shield Yunlan

6.2.2. Yunlan is similarly Aware of his boyfriend’s boundaries; cue him politely excusing themselves from the dinner with Vice-Minister Guo when Shen Wei (of all people!) fumbles with his chopsticks

6.2.3. Yunlan also blocks Shen Wei from Minister Gao’s sight (subconsciously?) after that wedding showdown... even though he’s unhappy that Shen Wei has kept the identity of the Envoy from him, he trusts the other man enough to recognize there must be a reason; thus he doesn’t want other people to pry into the possibility that Shen Wei is a Dixingren

6.3. also, also that Shen Wei lets Yunlan have his way and use him as a pillow in the car once again (he also adjusts the actual pillow beneath Yunlan’s head to make it more comfortable)

6.3.1 the other Shen-Wei-is-Yunlan’s-pillow scene is when the professor picks up the poor hurting Chief off the road and in the taxi ride home... apparently this was an improvised scene from Bai Yu who just wanted to mess with Long-ge and our great Zhu Yilong just stayed in character and ran with it

6.3.2. the other notable improvised scene is the cute “Black Cloaked gege~ please be careful~ there’s someone is waiting for you at home~” [sorry that i don’t remember the exact line] but once again our great leading actors just stay perfectly in character

6.4. after Shen Wei wakes up from a night of being drunk (lol) Yunlan has left a note for him “I’ve gone back first, stay in touch. -Zhao” and what’s that on the corner of the note? why it’s a winky face

7. when Yunlan grabs the fake Zhang Danni’s wrist to confirm his suspicions, Shen Wei narrows his eyes... (lol is our Black Cloaked gege jealous)

8. when Yunlan claims he can swallow the painkillers dry, Shen Wei clenches his jaw in his anger at this idiot of a man for not taking better care of himself... you’ll find that a lot of Shen Wei’s anger is directed toward his husband being a self-sacrificial fool

8.1. after Yunlan uses the Hallows again and his nose begins to bleed, Zhu Yilong in all his acting glory has Shen Wei furious to the point that his lips tremble (cue Shen Wei angrily shoving a handkerchief into his husband’s face) [i really want to know if they ever broke character during this scene due to their proximity lol]

8.1.1. Shen Wei all but invades Yunlan’s personal space (he really does stand there between Yunlan’s legs guys) and he’s so careful even though he’s angry as he tries to stop the nosebleed; he’s aware the force might tip Yunlan backwards, so he immediately rests his hands on Yunlan’s thighs/knees to steady him

9. Yunlan has claimed that he doesn’t do things for the sake of gaining anything in return and yet every time he’s wanted things from dear Shen Wei... “take off your mask and smile for me”, “join the SID”... the sexual tension is Unreal during these scenes lol, you can see Shen Wei swallow visibly in anticipation + babie Shen Wei of ten thousand years prior all but chokes on his words when he promises to do ANYTHING Kun Lun wants him to do (honey where is your mind GOING???)

9.1. Bai Yu does have a bruise on his knee after the scene where Yunlan asks Shen Wei for something... dunno if it’s the actor’s bruise or the character’s bruise, but if it’s the character’s bruise—how did he get it? what exactly did WeiLan do that evening lol

9.2. also peep the fact that Yunlan almost always has a lollipop in his mouth when talking to Shen Wei... oral fixation much? (also the whole sequence where he tries to explain how to eat a lollipop to babie Shen Wei, wow the amount of homoerotic tension)

9.3. babie Shen Wei’s ears and cheeks are SO RED when Yunlan snatches the mask off his face

10. Yunlan’s hairstyle changes after Shen Wei joins the SIU (joins his family), much like how a bride would change her hairstyle after marriage in China ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (random note but CQL WangXian does this too when lwj puts his hair down/styled over the front of his shoulders when wwx wakes up 16 years later)

11. the first time we see Shen Wei spit up blood, there’s an echo of “Xiao Wei” faintly and Shen Wei mutters to himself “Xiao Lan” before looking up and saying louder “Zhao Yunlan” (nicknames/pet names/names only your family or lover can call you... this trope is good)

11.1. i also think a lot about how in the novel Kun Lun muses before he dies that it’s a shame he won’t see this Little Beauty [Xiao Wei] grow up to be a Great Beauty 

12. Shen Wei’s funny little eyebrow raise when Yunlan accidentally reveals he broke into the professor’s apartment once ( “riiiiiiiiight i definitely believe you”)

12.1. though the ep 23 scene is angsty, the fact Yunlan says “It’s the middle of the night, were you hungry?” seems to imply their relationship is a lot closer than just neighbors... they’re probably used to sharing an apartment/room at this point :)

13. when Yunlan is hurt, Zhu Hong looks to him but he only has eyes for Shen Wei

13.1. after Yunlan is blinded, Zhu Hong is the one cradling him but he calls for Shen Wei first and reaches for his hand; Shen Wei of course responds immediately “it’s me”

13.1.1. both times after Yunlan gets his eyesight back, the first thing he sees is the person who loves him the most

14. Shen Wei warms up the congee in the morning with his magic after he watches over Yunlan when his stomach pain acts up (domestic use of magic? yes please)

15. the bomb defusing scene in the hospital (video game -> reality case) really is framed like a wedding proposal... also the way that Shen Wei smirks lol he’s so proud of his husband

16. after his Envoy identity is revealed, Shen Wei all but abuses his Black Cloaked Envoy voice to stop his stupid husband from doing stupid things that will hurt himself and every time Yunlan is properly sh00k by it

16.1. we really go from Chief Zhao remarking in the Mountain-River Awl case that he’s used to ordering people around, not receiving orders to married bickering with Shen Wei to then agreeing to everything Shen Wei tells him to do

17. the fact that “Shen Wei, ah, Shen Wei... You are such a good person, how could I bear to let you go?” is an actual line from the censored DRAMA astounds me, nevermind that Shen Wei just made breakfast for his man and Yunlan is basically pouting up at him from the bed

17.1. the way Yunlan’s dad warns him to stay away from Shen Wei and Yunlan responds with something like “he’s sincerely good to me, I want to be with him”... “be with him”???? [inhales deeply] yea this is definitely a “brotherly relationship”

18. Yunlan’s “WOW” after the Envoy kills the monsters in the cave of the Mountain-River Awl case is hilarious and i dont understand how such a noise is physically possible,,, it sounds like a growl?????

18.1. Zhu Yilong was asked to mimic it during an interview (which he did not do and only half-heartedly gave a “wow”) and then Bai Yu did it again

19. also i inevitably got attached to the side ship of Lao Chu and Xiao Guo... they have so much skinship for a censored “brotherly relationship” lmao

the amount of face-touching and hand-holding that they do is unreal... they’re more canon than WeiLan in the drama adaptation methinks 

20. 《时间飞行》or “Flying Across Time” sounds like Yunlan’s reply to Shen Wei’s《只是太在意》or “Just Cared Too Much”

20.1. the lyrics of both these songs really cements this idea that both of WeiLan believe the other to be too good... Kun Lun was a god in the novel, and Xiao Wei was just a soulless little Ghost King... and then we have the incorrigible Chief Zhao pining after the beautiful and kind Professor Shen... i just have a lot of feelings about them becoming better people for each other, that their love really does make each other stronger

21. my favorite two pieces from the OST are Shen Wei’s theme (arranged by Kun Luo) and Kun Lun’s theme (arranged by Chen Xueran)

head’s up: it’s been like four years since i last even glanced at music theory so a lot of this might just make no sense to an actual professional

-Shen Wei: written in 4/4 time, Ab Major, melody is primarily carried by piano + strings; the piano almost sticks exclusively to triplets whereas the strings are in steady whole, quarter, and eighth notes—which creates in interesting impressionistic effect, kind of like hazy smoke or the ripples across the surface of a lake; every single measure uses decrescendo, so the first triplet is always the loudest and the three that follow get progressively softer (mimicking an echo)... the piece ends on the seventh note of the scale, which is usually a pretty awkward place to end and yet it doesn’t feel wrong it all; the piece uses a ritardando in the last three measures, and we simply drift off with that last G... i think it’s a beautifully written piece that perfectly portrays such a complex character as Shen Wei, someone who loved with everything he had, and was just so overwhelmingly good... and then he simply disappears as if the dream has ended. it makes me think of how he guarded over Kun Lun/Zhao Yunlan for thousands of years in the novel, never ever ever daring to meet him... and yet the other man always felt like he was waiting for someone

-Kun Lun: written in 3/4 time, a minor, there’s no real complex shift in the melody although there’s brief modulation into E major (dominant/fifth note); it’s a fairly somber piece, especially when the strings join in... it’s a steady waltz, and it finishes with the scale (second to last major is g, last major is a), like a circle coming back around [like their love story perhaps?]... there’s a finality to it, a completeness, a wholeness, which makes sense in the drama-verse because the moment Yunlan takes up the name of Kun Lun is when his love story with Shen Wei all fits together. the piece feels a little lonely in its minor key and all, a little sad, indeed as if you were standing at the top of a mountain surrounded by clouds and mist... the constant meter also reminds me of like the steady drip of water, the perpetual and inevitable passage of the days and time

-i don’t really understand how because the keys of the two pieces don’t fit together easily, but somehow it doesn’t feel wrong to play the pieces back to back; the melodies of both seem to call upon each other despite the differences in key and time signature, so it actually feels right. a circle without a beginning or an ending, wouldn’t you want your love to be so infinite?

-when yunlan finds shen wei in their bubble outside of time, when shen wei is about to leave him, shen wei is wearing the outfit of their first meeting. and the lyrics go “Across time, I am in the same place”... surely, they will find each other again.

[cyanidesouffle]

Me nitpicking Imagine me

CW: Dub-con. If you read the book you know what I’m going to point out.

I didn't go into this book with high expectations. What I did want was more Anderson and Warner angst. Because I am a sucker for that stuff. And you do get that, so I can say I'm way happier with Imagine me than Ignite me.

That is not to say that Imagine me doesn't have it's issues. This is mainly going to be a long list of me nitpicking stuff.

Fundamental things I want to get out of the way:

So before I even begin talking about Imagine me I just want to say: I think it would have been way better if the last novella had been from James's POV. James being kidnapped, Adam giving himself up to protect him, being told he is Warner's brother. I think that would have made a great few chapters compared to Kenji sulking and pining after Nazeera. Reveal me just confirmed my headcanon that Adam and James were still in Sector 45. But it feels like nothing in Reveal me sticks. Kenji having bad side effects after being drugged? It doesn't last for longer than two chapters. Anderson being back in sector 45? Yeah, he goes back to Oceania after crashing the Sanctuary. Reveal me is (imo) better than Shadow me, but I think we all can agree than neither of them are as good as Destroy me. Adding James to the male POVs would have been a cool change. Get to know him better. Give Adam one last chance at being appreciated by the fandom.

Now to Imagine me. I think it's WAY too similar to Defy me, plotwise. Think about it: Juliette is stuck in Oceania, except she's now hanging out with Anderson instead of Evie. Kenji and Nazeera, and now Warner, have to go get her back. They do and kill some Supreme Commanders on the way. The end. It feels very… lazy for the final book in a series.

"Big" plot points I keep questioning:

I'm going to say it again: Anderson going to Sector 45 to Sanctuary and back to Oceania again. I guess he wanted to go pick up Adam and James, but it seemed like such a big deal at the end of Reveal me; it sounded like the final showdown was taking place in sector 45. But nope. He goes back to Oceania again. It just felt pointless to tease us like that.

Can't we be real? In every scene between Anderson and Juliette I was expecting him to tell her to take her clothes off. And then rape her. Robo Juliette probably wouldn't have seen it as rape; but it would be rape. Especially when she woke up IN HIS BEDROOM! (Am I a pervert for anticipating it? Probably. (And now there’s at least one fic about it so yeah, not just me))

On that note: Anderson's drawer containing either his whip, or a BDSM kit. Or both I guess. You can't change my mind :9

And I also thought it was funny when he wasn't into Juliette finding him attractive.

The supreme kids not being utilized, again. I thought it was weird how they were shoehorned into Restore me. Then I thought it was strange that only Nazeera showed up in Defy me. Stephan, Haider and Nazeera team up with the gang in Imagine me, which is an improvement. But the south American twins and Lena? They were just there. In tanks (which is never explained!). Let them distract the parents or something. Anything!

The supposed climax of the book. Robo Juliette is defeated/turned back to normal immediately. Warner talks to her. Then they hug. Done. Predictable. Boring.

How are we supposed to take Robo Juliette seriously when everything is undone like *snaps* that?

Hunger games spoiler I guess:

I can't help but compare it to Mockingjay, Peeta tried to kill Katniss, what was it?, three times? And he's not perfectly turned back to normal at the end. They continue to have issues. But they fight through it, because they love each other. You, as the reader, understand how much they love each other. The reader understands how much work they are putting in, and you appreciate it.

End of Hunger games spoiler

My suggestion is that there would have been a confrontation earlier, and they fail to bring her back. Maybe Juliette could have killed someone, I suggest Castle, and everyone would be way more freaked out. Here they would talk about maybe having to kill Juliette. Then we would have a larger confrontation at the end, where Warner actually managed to snap her out of it. I would have been able to appreciate the effort they put in more that way.

Medium things:

Mafi making Kenji influenced by stuff but not really. Kenji is said to be super drugged at the beginning of Imagine me. Then it goes away. Why did she make him unconscious because of drug side effects? To make him unable to talk to Juliette? Then he's tipsy. Half an hour later Anderson attacks. Kenji is supposedly STILL TIPSY when he's running around the battlefield. Can you tell he's tipsy during the battle? Not until it's already over. Why did Madi make Kenji drunk? So he would have an easier time to talk to Nazeera? But then he doesn't really? Why put these status effects on Kenji when they don't do anything?!

My friend suggested that: I think the tea was supposed to be played as a joke. My response to that is: Does Mafi think making your friends intoxicated with laced tea without their consent is funny? That's not funny. Ever.

Kenji not making a Tangle reference when Warner's asks Anderson to let him take Juliette's place. #WarnerIsBestRapunzel.

On that note: Can Anderson make up his mind about whether he wants to kill Aaron or not? In Defy me he was ready to let Warner know about operation synthesis, but Ibrahim stopped him. But he seems to have given that up completely by Imagine me.

My friend pointed out it might be to underline how erratic he is. But I'm like: Why spend the time making Anderson more human with his tattoo, childhood trauma and protecting Juliette, and NOT have him try to get Warner back one last time? "Juliette, hit him I'm the back of the head. Kill the other one."

((Maybe it's that I've written too many fics with Anderson acting like an actual father…))

Or he wanted Aaron to be killed by Juliette, the one he's in love with, because it would fulfill the whole "Feelings will kill you", lesson Anderson has going on. Yeah, that would make sense now that I think about it...

The scorpion girl didn't contribute to anything. It was pointless drama and killing. Kenji is the one to kill her, but again it doesn't last. Kenji doesn't walk around thinking about how awful he is for killing someone. He just brushed it off and continues with going to rescue Juliette.

I like how people don't know whether to call her Juliette or Ella.

I like how Nouria gets a lot of screen time.

Now to Things probably only I care about:

We never find out the name of Adam's mom.

Seeing no interactions between James and Anderson. Again, I would have loved a novella from James' POV.

Seeing no interactions between Anderson and Adam. I'm more upset about this one. I wasn't that surprised to be honest that Adam made a deal with Anderson. I was pleasantly surprised because I actually had a fic idea about it a while back. After the flashback with Adam in the aviary I had a tiny whimey hope that Adam would turn out to be a bad guy (because if Anderson can come back from the dead then anything is possible). I thought Adam was the reason they have all the blue thingie magingies, cuz Adam's blue and Adam turn off people's powers. He wasn't evil though. Instead he just laid on a table. I was right about his powers being used to kill Anderson though, so I guess that's nice.

And it's also nice that Mafi remembered to explain Adam's tattoo.

I wanted to know what Anderson's tattoo was. Wild guess is that it's just a shape reminiscent of a whip.

I like Warner's ring being back. I thought it would have been really sweet if he had used it as an engagement ring, but at least it's here.

No one cares about Delalieu. Kenji mentions him by name once. Once. Warner doesn't even mention him in the epilogue. DELALIEU WOULD HAVE LOVED TO BE ON THAT WEDDING! *cries*

[normal-thoughts-official]

That thing about assumptions on whose more openly affectionate of malec being opposite is so true lol! Like you expect Magnus to be the teasing in public/PDA type but Alecs the one who grabs his ass and kisses him on the cheek and wraps an arm around his waist or shoulders, the one who initiates hand holding and kisses in public, the one who whispers dirty things in his ear?? And magnus adores every minute he just doesnt trust himself to initiate in case it's Too Much or hes being "clingy" :'[

ABSOLUTELY and i think it’s mostly because people don’t realize that magnus and alec’s outer appearance, demeanor-wise, is not only fake, but effectively a defense/coping mechanism

i mean i’ve already talked a lot about magnus many times and it’s been basically canonically established that magnus’ devil-may-care, playboy, detached attitude is the result of him trying to close himself off after too many experiences with abuse

and closing yourself off doesn’t just mean not allowing himself to feel, it also means not letting anyone get too close to you. but magnus can’t really do the “completely isolating yourself in a tower” thing, like Raphael does, because he craves contact and touch and attention and being alone with his thoughts is one of the worst things he can do to himself. 

also, he’s too much of a softie, he’s still there, trying to represent warlocks politically, taking people under his wing. there’s just too much he needs to do, wants to do, so isolating himself physically won’t work. ergo, he needs a facade. a ruse. something between his feelings and others, something to keep him safely isolated and away from people who will- could hurt him and this way he also helps them too, because who needs to have such a broken, despicable, whiny murderer of a friend who brings nothing but emotional baggage to the table?

so he builds this uncaring, detached, but fun persona; someone whose company you can enjoy a lot, who will take you on adventures, who can do a lot of stuff for you, but who’s not deserving FITTING for a deeper relationship, even if just friendship-wise. he’s shallow, he only cares about the Exorbitant Amounts Of Money™ that he’ll get from his “favors” (which is hysterical because I don’t think I’ve seen him being paid a single fucking time in the entire show, not even when fucking lilith showed up at his house claiming to be some warlock he’s never met and asked for a potion, he literally gave it to her for free because she mentioned ragnor. he’s too kind for his own good, honestly. and god the amount of unpaid work he did for these goddamn shadowhunters. unbelievable. he deserved so much better. but anyway, i digress), he’s impulsive and stubborn and listens to no one, he’s all about partying and fashion and sex. so how could he possibly be like in a relationship, if not the teasing one who’s all over the other, showing them off to people, grabbing their ass, gushing over them or whatever. the most surprising part, honestly, would be to see magnus getting in a relationship at all, considering what an unfixable lothario he is and his general disdain for complicated matters - at least in most people’s eyes

as for Alec, well, for many, he’s probably the picture of the Perfect Shadowhunter. clear mind, cool head, cold heart. a soldier so perfect he’s almost a machine, and has never learnt empathy, much less love

it’s obvious that none of this is true, once you take a look. he’s clearly suffering and in a constant battle with himself, not only who he is and who he’s attracted to, but also what he actually believes in - and look, i’m not saying he’s perfect or some kind of woke white savior or anything, cuz he did and said some shitty stuff both in s1 and after it. but he’s also the one who told magnus “take what you need” when magnus needed his strength, and the one who refused to let magnus use his magic to clean the loft when he could do it himself and allow him to rest. and that says a lot. when everyone else, including clary, who supposedly wasn’t even raised in racist shadowhunter culture, treated magnus like a tool, the means to an end, alec remembered magnus’ humanity

so, upon closer inspection, most people would think that he’s just Repressed™. sure, there’s a lot going on in there, that man is conflicted af, and it’s actually a pity. were he raised in another culture, one that wasn’t so set on stripping you of your humanity, he could’ve been a great man. he could have been happy, too. goes to show you how cruel shadowhunters are, even to their own kind. 

so for those people, alec is almost a pity case. he’s stuck in his oppression, helpless, confined. shadowhunter values have been drilled into him so deep that he can’t face his feelings anymore. he lies to himself and smothers any semblance of a “rebellious” thought before it even comes to mind. he’s all but brainwashed, basically

but that’s not exactly true, either

and look, don’t get me wrong, because of course i know that alec struggled like crazy to come to terms with his identity and his attraction. but alec is not brainwashed. if anything, he’s shockingly self-aware 

when he’s in shock after he finds out about his parents and the arranged marriage, he says, “i’ve done everything that they’ve asked, i’ve dedicated all of me to the clave”. he knows exactly what he was sacrificing for them, he knows that there’s a line between what he believes in and what he does because it’s what’s he supposed to, and he knows where it is, too. when he goes on his first date with magnus, he says “i always knew i couldn’t get what i wanted, until you came along”. knew, not thought. it’s not that alec never considered it, always thought it was out of his realm of possibility, couldn’t face the idea; it’s that he thought it over, came to the conclusion that it couldn’t happen, and resigned himself to it. in alec’s eyes, he was making a choice

now, don’t misquote me, because obviously it’s not really a choice when you’re between losing everything you’ve ever had, including your family, or being who you are. i’m not saying that alec chose to be in the closet, i’m saying that he saw it that way. that he was perfectly aware of who he was, and what he wanted, and what he thought, but he knew he couldn’t act on it. there’s a fundamental difference between the way alec acts, and lying or hiding from yourself

so alec is not repressed in the freudian sense of the word, where his desires are all subconscious and whatnot, but in the sense that he won’t act on them

i think alec was never quite good at lying to himself (or anyone, really, but specially not himself. he’s painfully logical and introspective, and he over analyzes everything, including himself. i’m also like this and believe me when i say that it’s almost impossible for me to lie to myself, even when i want to. my therapist and psychiatrist both think it’s appalling lol. lying to yourself is a survivorship skill that i think neither alec nor i ever had)

and then we have the third group of people, the people who realize that, who know that alec knows and actively and consciously represses his desires anyway, but who think that alec is too powerless, too weak, to break out of it. basically another pity case, the poor lightwood boy, so hurt and powerless to do anything about it. 

all of these people are wrong

alec is not weak, he’s- incredibly strong, really. like the shit he did when he came out, that was incredible. and before that, just heading out of the institute to go to magnus’ and help him heal luke when that went straight against clave’s orders? holy shit. straight up ignoring his mom’s calls? id literally die of anxiety before ever being able to do that. and after s1 too, he continuously chose magnus, continuously faced all sorts of enemies, he threatened maryse, who was always the monster under his bed, without batting an eye

alec’s always been strong, and brave, and self-aware. and that’s why his relationship with magnus was way less about figuring out what he wanted or learning how to express his feelings and desires, and way more about allowing himself to do exactly what he wanted. most people would think that alec would need time to adjust to being in a relationship, to being happy, to not looking over his shoulder after every touch or word. that alec would need help to figure out what he was into, what he liked, how to do things, how to feel and to love. but he didn’t, because alec knows himself way too well. once he decided that he could get what he wanted, he just did it and never looked back 

(because he knows how strong he is, too, and there’s an advantage in being trained to be a soldier and diplomat - he’s very aware of his own strengths and how to use them) 

so yeah, there is the reason everyone is wrong and shocked: people assumed that magnus knew what he wanted and was comfortable in his own skin, while alec didn’t. but it’s actually the other way around

if you look at their relationship, the “insecure one” (obviously there’s no such thing as “the insecure one”, everyone has their insecurities, but you know what i mean) was magnus. alec was ready for sex before him, and it seemed that it never occured to alec that he could have fears surrounding that. magnus was the one who was always worried that something would be the Last Straw, make alec leave him. magnus was hesitant to make big gestures of love or just be sappy and romantic, and alec was like “we’ve been dating for 3 months, i think it’s appropriate to propose to magnus”. magnus was scared and insecure, and alec gave zero (0) shits

(not with everything, obviously. i’m not trying to say magnus was the helpless uwu one who needed fixing. just that when it comes to their relationship, magnus was more hesitant than alec was)

because magnus was the one who had been repressing what he wanted. he was the one who couldn’t face the idea of falling in love, of allowing himself to be vulnerable, of being with someone else. after camille, after all the hurt and abuse, he wasn’t ready, and he needed time not only to allow himself to feel, but also to figure out how he feels - to get rid of this deep conviction that he’s worthless, that he should accept crumbs and not look back because it’s the best he’ll ever had. i’ve said that before, but that scene in s2 when magnus gets mad at alec for being a rude bitch, that’s so significant. the magnus from a few years before wouldn’t have said anything, would have just let alec treat him and make excuses for him. “oh he’s new to this,” “oh he was stressed,” “well there’s his brother”, “i was being annoying,” “it’s not his fault”. because that’s what you do when you’ve been through abuse. magnus got into their relationship unwilling to accept being only given crumbs, and unwilling to be anyone’s punchbag. not that alec would do him like that, but it’s important that magnus wouldn’t let him. especially because alec is kind of a dumb bitch who believes people when they say “it’s ok” way too often, so he might not have realized he was hurting magnus, had they met when magnus was in a different headspace

anyway, what i was talking about before i went on yet another big tangent about magnus and his abuse recovery? ah yes, repression

basically what i’m trying to say is: while both magnus and alec struggled with coming to terms with who they are, who they love, and loving and respecting themselves, by the time they got together magnus was the one who needed to be eased into things. he needed time and space to relearn how to be in a relationship, and to be happy in it. while alec needed to jump headfirst into what he wanted and not look back

and look, not to be a disgusting malec stan, but that’s one of the many reasons why they are literal soulmates work so well together. because magnus has been needing someone who loves him so deeply and expresses it so fearlessly, because he’s unused to it, because he’s way too insecure and convinced that he won’t get or doesn’t deserve it. and alec also needs to be able to express his love with abandon, he needs to be affectionate, to tell magnus that he’s beautiful and that every day they’re together is a dream and to give him gifts and to take him to the lock thing and make a romantic dinner with ten dozen red roses because for so long he didn’t allow himself. obviously they both love and are loved, and they both love each other equally and fiercely, and magnus also always expresses it, it’s not a one-way thing. but to alec, being able to express his love and affection for magnus is a wonder, it’s something that he’s still in awe of, realizing that he gets to have this, to be in love and let the whole world see. to say exactly what he feels. i think that’s one of the reasons why alec never beats around the bush, just goes straight into “it’s moments like this, when i’m staring into the eyes of the man that i love,” and his constant Wedding Vowing, because he’s basically bursting with everything he feels, and just how much, and he fucking wants to express it god damn. why the fuck would he be chill? HE GETS TO HAVE THIS, after denying himself for so long

and magnus, well. magnus really needs it. really needs to be convinced that he’s lovable, and that he deserves not only to be loved but to be loved in a fulfilling, caring way. to be happy in a relationship, not just part of it. that he doesn’t have to constantly sacrifice himself for others

and that’s just one of the many ways in which they suit each other so perfectly. because what they need to say is what the other needs to hear, and what they have is so strong it can calm the storm that’s been inside of them for so long. they have the kind of love where they’re sad together, happy together, silly together, angry together, where they get to be competitive dorks and say dumb shit, and also to have slow and calm mornings, and also to feel juts as intensely as they desire. they have it all they are soulmates they have a one in a million kind of connection they are so perfect for each other and in this essay i will

[unproduciblesmackdown]

frost!

sick tyvm

frost - if you could give some advice to your younger self, what would you say?

i think for a lot of lgbtqueues it’s like, you’d like to provide some insight on that knowledge which was already there but not really sorted out or given the right context, but you also know that it’s a process and you can’t just tell yourself “hey, @ my younger self, btw you’re ___” and all and just skip that process, but at the same time it’s like, giving that process a boost / kickstart is nice, and providing some reassurance and all.......but as for “let’s straightup skip ahead a little too” i think it would’ve been fun to just go ahead and let myself know my name b/c i would’ve hated my name forever even if i wasn’t trans and it just never like, felt like my name, so i don’t even consider it a Deadname cuz that implies it was ever alive lol.........and i’d tell myself not to bother / feel obligated to try to come out to my parents, and to not feel like it’s an inconvenience to come out to friends as trans / insist on your name and pronouns.

i’d also tell myself not to be so worried about trying to stay in line and not to feel like i’m only the person who other ppl see me as (i.e. i was like “oh this is what ppl expect of me / tell me i am, that’s what i’m really most fundamentally like i guess! these are my interests!”) and that i’m not overly self-inhibiting b/c that’s what i want, but b/c that’s what i feel like i have to do to be safe, like, no you’re actually social and wanna do more than just read all the time but you also feel like you have to keep your head down and not rock the very small boat you’re in, but in 2013 you’ll be sneaking out to a kesha concert and taking your brother to visit the gay agenda protestors in front of the supreme court (separate occasions lol) so get used to That as being who you actually are, you’re not just the quiet good-grades-getter okay, which makes sense considering that you hate school. idk i my identity a lot on what was like, hey you have cptsd your home life is awful your parents don’t really know you and the treatment there isn’t your own fault or deserved! like, that took a surprisingly long time to figure out and it would’ve been better to at least be told like, this actually isn’t how it is for everyone and it shouldn’t be like this, and it’s not on you or anything. like, a great way to sum it up would just be like, don’t worry as much about trying to Stay Out Of Trouble b/c it’s not going to happen and it’s going to be better for you to just actually do some of what you want and be who you are and not worry about staying on the straight and narrow b/c that shit is Arbitrary as hell. on a related note, your politics are radical left and even though you figure that out easily enough here’s some reading or smthing so you can know more basic shit than you do now. cut your hair as short as you want b/c yeah you want short hair i promise

oh and also that i never thought i was allowed to be mad or stand up for myself or anything. like, don’t worry about being nice all the time. be meaner. don’t bite your tongue all the time. still working on that unfortunately!! all my regrets are “i wish i had been meaner to this person!! i wish i had spoken my mind more rudely!!” lmao just earlier today i was remembering this time my brother was a real #ally b/c we were at an Amusement Park (i love that term lmfao like. so fucking quaint. this roller coaster is so diverting!) and i was texting furiously on my flip phone coz i just so happened to be real fed up with someone and was telling them off and he just stood behind me and steered me through people while we walked. and i STILL was not rude enough to that person!!! they even showed up again a year or two later, giving me another chance to tell them off, but then effed off again a couple months later and i was like fucking...whatever get out of here, but i wish i could’ve told you off a little more. regrets

also the fun fact of like “take the fact that you like sneaking in a way to Perform (and getting points!!) by being in the church choir and singing too loud, and the fact that you enjoy the other way of performing of ballet productions, and your shoulder-brushes with regular theatrical / stage performances being supremely fun for you, and know that you’re actually a theatre gay. btw....for one weekend in nyc in february 2011 there will be a student production of a musical called bat boy and you MUST GO” lol like i would’ve been uhhh ssss only almost 17 then? maaaybe i could’ve pulled it off but idk, nyc in the middle of the semester.....a definite maybe lol. nah but yknow. just a fun tip. i mean i never even tried theatre b/c a) i’m not even sure my middle school had a theatre dept and b) due to skipping high school i was at college like “why am i here, i’m sure i’ll flunk out asap” and not bold enough to try any extracurriculars anyhow and Def not bold enough to audition for stuff when i had No experience and c) my older sister did plays in her high school (and eventually my brother did too) and so middle sibling style i was like “well then i should be the one Not doing that”.......it’s not vital i’m sure but it’s A Thing About Me that shouldn’t’ve been so hard to figure out, and also which like, idk, maybe i Would’ve found some chance somewhere to try something out for myself. who kneauxes

tldr just stuff like be meaner, be more inconvenient, you’re queer you’re here and here’s some details on that, [definition of nonbinary], get whatever haircuts you want, fight your parents whenever And feel less like you’re in charge of someone else’s unreasonable whims of Being Terrible cuz that’s on them actually, explore more of what you actually like just cuz you want to, idk, Hang In There, believe it or not knock on would you make it out of the ‘10s alive! idk do your thing you gay bastard lol. try to have a little more fun along the way if you can?

[odditycollector]

[ @nightpool asked: Agatha and the gang (or some subset of the characters thereof) hijack a Justice]

I originally answered this ask properly but the readmore broke so maybe this will work.

The bodies were strewn over the corridor in a variety of entertainingly awkward poses. They still smelled alive – mostly – but the entire swarming army had collapsed the instant Agatha shut down the mind of the airship.

Yeah, yeah, okay. So it wasn’t an airship, what with there being no air on the outside of it. But acknowledging the idea of a Nothing-ship set his temples throbbing, and Dimo was NOT going to think about it until events inevitably set that up to be the only way to stop everyone from dying.

Agatha killed the ship several hours ago, and none of the bodies had moved since. So they were nothing but puppets, but if they worked like humans as much as they looked like humans they were going to have problems pretty quick, being all bent over with elbows under their asses or heads tangled up in their knees. The blood was going to get stopped up in there.

That was fine with him. Damn creepy empty-eyed puppet things. They were tough to kill, yes, but no fun to fight even so. There wasn’t enough personality in them.

But… as soon as Agatha got the ship in her control, they’d be HER creepy puppet soldiers. And Dimo could really use some properly functioning fighting guys as as backup. Not so many that he couldn’t tear them apart one-and-a-half handed – just in case something new was waiting to go wrong on him – but at least a few seconds’ worth of cannon fodder that wouldn’t just fall over first thing because their feet stopped working.

From the room to his side, there was a clang, a shuffle like dominoes falling, and the first few threads of soft humming that could still, at this early stage, have been mistaken for music. The sound folded, twisting over itself into a chorusing atonal braid: that low, familiar vibration that raised the fur under his collar and rattled in the space between his fingertips and claws.

An enemy army slept at his feet, and he yearned that it would awaken so he could put it down properly, not clean Spark magic but fangs in throat and the Horde around him and the blood-slimed spoils of battle dragged back for the Masters….

But there were no other Jaegers here, and the most memorable moment of today’s battle had been Agatha firing a death ray through the ship and getting herself blown out into – as it turned out – Nothing, and Dimo jumping after her because what else was he supposed to do about that.

No. Wanting more fighting was stupid, and he didn’t get to be stupid anymore.

But PLANNING for more fighting, whether he wanted it or not…

The closest of the ship’s puppet soldiers was resting mid-somersault a few feet from the doorway. Dimo gently kicked it over, so that its limbs were sprawling in more or less reasonable directions. There. One down.

He was working on number three when Agatha’s cat stalked into view. “Hoy dere, kitty cat,” Dimo said.

Instead of returning the greeting, Krosp frowned at where Dimo was untangling a boot and an elbow. But you couldn’t take that sort of thing personally with cats.

“What happened to your hand?” Krosp said.

“Ho, dis ting?” Dimo examined his mechanical prosthetic, as if only just now noticing he was down two fingers and a good portion of the wrist and palm. “Ah, vell, hyu know.” He swung the thumb of his good hand at the doorway behind him. “De Mistress, she vos needink some parts.”

Dimo didn’t elaborate, therefore leaving it ambiguous whether Agatha had politely asked him if he had any extra fingers that he wasn’t particularly using at the moment and that, perchance, she might borrow if Dimo found himself so inclined; or whether Dimo had taken his attention off of her for five damn seconds to deal with a flailing tube that was starting to catch on fire, and when he had glanced down half his hand had apparently detached from his arm and walked across the room and hopped up onto her workbench all by itself.

“Uh huh,” said Krosp, who had been around enough Sparks in his short feline life that he certainly did ‘know’. “That explains why you finally let her out of your sight, anyway.”

“Hrmph. She iz a big gurl, und hy iz schtill in screaming distance,” Dimo said reasonably, and resisted the urge to immediately spin around and check on her again. “But vhere iz Miz Zeetha? Hy vos expecting her to come back vit hyu.”

“Do you remember that one section Agatha said was probably still powered on, just isolated from the rest of the ship?”

“Yah, sure.”

“Yeah. We looked into it after talking to the prisoners. Most of it was a training room, with moving targets and armoured clank arms, but it was all going haywire without the main brain to control it. Zeetha stayed to,” Krosp rolled his eyes up, as if reading her words from the air above Dimo’s hat, “manually shut them off. For good.”

Dimo nodded at this. “So Miz Zeetha iz fighting clenks, und hyu iz running interrogations,” he mused, “und hy iz tucking dese guys verra nicely into sleepytime.” He kicked over the next soldier maybe a little less carefully than he could have.

“Right,” Krosp said. “About that. Shouldn’t you be finishing them off, not fixing them? They’re practically revenants.”

“Hy dunno,” Dimo said. “Dey’ve got a sheep for brainz, but it depends how it got in dere, yah? Besides,” he added with alarming cheerfulness, “dey’s Miz Agatha’s revenants now, so ve gots to ask her first bout shtuff like dot!”

Krosp’s his tail swished unhappily back and forth. There were implications in Dimo’s last statement that Krosp liked even less than Dimo did, but he was too smart to be baited into an argument.

And what the hell was Dimo doing, trying to start one?

Agatha’s humming was still growing in complexity, and Dimo could now hear the subtle way it changed with every noise he and the cat made. Reflecting their words or nullifying them. Dimo was growling slightly, under his breath, and he recognized the vibrations through Agatha’s voice before he noticed them in his own throat.

“Hokay.” Dimo scrubbed his flesh hand over his face, like that would scrape away all the stupid hiding under there. Maybe it was hard to wait here, alone, and do nothing. But he’d done harder things. “So did dey say anytink useful?”

“What?”

“De prisoners. Dot hyu interrogated?”

The cat’s tail swished again. “I have no idea. Maybe they were giving me the personal address of the Celestial Milkman, but they don’t speak any language I’ve ever heard of.”

“Or mebbe dey do, and dey iz pretendink?”

“No,” Krosp said. “They wanted to talk to me. I’m sure of it.”

“Hoy, hy know dis one. Iz it cuz hyu iz a cute kitty?”

“Yes, exactly! I’m adorable! And Zeetha is terrifying! But here’s what I did get. This place is called ‘Radch’.”

Dimo rolled that one around his memories. He’d been a lot of places but: “Neffer heard ov it.”

“Neither have I. Just like they’ve never heard of Europa. Or England. Or Africa. Or even America.”

“Dem,” Dimo said. “Ve IZ far away. Dis von’t be an easy one.”

Krosp said, “But there’s one more thing they managed to communicate. Apparently these people have an alliance of some kind with someone called the ‘Presger’.”

“Neffer heard ov dem eiffer.”

“I know,” said Krosp, “but they really, REALLY wanted us to know that. I don’t understand it, and I don’t like it.”

“Vell, tink ov de bright side, hey? Mebbe dese Presgers iz more fun to punch den de puppet guys.” For illustration, Dimo nudged another limp body until its head rolled out of its armpit.

“Sometimes,” Krosp said, “I honestly can’t tell if you’re serious or not.”

Dimo had a short bit of clowning he was tempted to launch into - Ho, ho, I iz not serious, I iz Dimo! - but Agatha spared him.

Her humming was interrupted by a loud banging and a short surprised “hah!”. Krosp’s ears flicked. “Aren’t you going to make sure she didn’t start another fire?”

“No, iz hokay,” Dimo said. He still heard Agatha’s movement and smelled only cold blood from some of the puppet soldiers.

There was another prolonged crashing, this one followed by maniacal laughter and a 'ZAAAPPP’.

Dimo sniffed again. “Dere hyu go,” he said to the cat. “NOW dere iz a fire.”

And then Agatha ran out of the doorway, with flushed cheeks and a full madgirl grin, and Dimo saw exactly WHAT she had set on fire.

Agatha’s gaze darted around the hallway, and seemed to land on him only by chance. “Dimo! Do you KNOW what electricity is?”

“YEZ!” Dimo grabbed the jacket from a puppet soldier and tore it free, sending the body flying. “It iz de bright blue ting wot goes ZAP and den hyu iz on fire!”

“WRONG!” Agatha roared in triumph. “Electricity is not a THING! It is merely movement, but of what? OF WHAT? Of NOTHING! Merely a mathematical analog of what we have so naively called probabilistic– WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! HOW **DARE** YOU ATTACK ME!!!!!”

“I iz not attacking hyu!” Dimo snarled plaintively. “I iz attacking DE FIRE.”

“FIRE? HAH! BUT THERE IS NO SUCH THING” - She grabbed Dimo by the collar and slammed him into the wall. - “AS FIRE!!”

Dimo was out of the practice of cringing, at least in any sort of satisfying manner, but he probably did a fair approximation as he tried to simultaneously angle his hat away from the flames crawling down Agatha’s jacket arm, and his face from the device she was clutching in her other hand. It had recently been his pinkie finger, but Dimo assumed it had been turned into a death ray by now.

“Fire is only a word for the sufficiently rapid chemical oxidative process, but there are layers of reality beneath the chemical, beneath the energetic – AHAHAHAHA! As if those were in truth different things! – and I have seen once more what I have seen and forgotten. There are layers and levels and layers of fundamental forces we have scarcely dared to imagine and FIRE is merely a REORDERING OF INFORMATION!”

A terrible, but belatedly obvious possibility was blooming in Dimo’s brain like one of the Red Heterodyne’s flesh eating fungus bombs.

“Ah, Mistress,” he started carefully. “Does hyu VANT to be on fire?”

Agatha blinked. The question had thrown off the rhythm of her ranting. “I– What?”

“Vot?”

Her eyes drifted away from his face. She had broken from the madness place enough to notice the flames reaching up her jacket, and was staring at them like they were distantly reminding her of something or other.

Then her eyes went suddenly wide. “Ahh!” She dropped Dimo and swung her flaming arm away from him. “Ow! Ow!”

“Hokay!” Now THIS was a problem he was set up to solve. Dimo grabbed the jacket’s burning sleeve and ripped it off at the shoulder.

Not too many moments later, Zeetha jogged into view. She had a bar of jointed metal swung over her back as an impromptu souvenir.

“Hello then, what are we up to?” she offered in happy greeting. “I smell barbeque!”

Krosp swept his arm across the hallway. Dimo was jumping up and down on a smoldering piece of once-white cloth while Agatha, wearing the other half of the labcoat, frowned at a suspiciously familiar metal finger sticking out of a shifting pyramidal block.

“Good news,” Krosp intoned. “Agatha disproved fire.”

[siliconvalleysuccesses]

A Real Startup Founder Pt 4 of 4

0:00

How was that switch with your co founders from going from a colleagues at the university to now kind of being their boss.

0:07

So my co founders, I think that's that. And everybody says that co founders are key. And getting along with your co founders is life or death. Okay? Is everything and I love my co founders. We were doing the advice and some point that we're doing a yc videos. Yeah. And we found ourselves having somewhere so much fun doing it that we almost put in bloopers. So this there is nothing more important than just fundamentally getting along with them. Okay. And is there any problems, any disagreements treated like, like a marriage, solve the problems talk it out, cuz you want to get back to smooth as quickly as you possibly can? Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's Central. The fact that my co founders and are such a great team. We're great as a as a three people. And we're also great in Paris. Okay,

0:54

that really helps what happens when you want to add people to your team? How have you gone about doing that? Because I'm a three person teams not going to make a billion dollar business, I may come close. But I mean, how have you gone about adding new people was thought process been to add new people to the team. So hiring is is very, very complicated.

1:14

It definitely, definitely much easier when you have more resources, been noticing, it's no surprise for anybody. But you really can get some good people before you have resources to work for equity, happily, what does that look like when you talk to them. So it's not it's a process. So for example, we're very, very fortunate to have a producer sound designer Dustin Morag there who joined very early and what I did what I felt comfortable doing, and it's actually something that I learned as a professor trial periods. Yeah. So even though we had hardly any money, okay, we gave him a little bit of money to do a one month contract to see how we get along before giving equity. Yeah,

1:51

and that was a very, very smart way to go. Yeah, that is trial period. Money than equity.

1:56

Yeah. Because if you can afford money, or thrive, by all means, why don't you know, until then, he's been fantastic. He's just there, you know, really there with us, really, one of us really wanting to see the company succeed in any way, help in any way possible. And those are the kind of people you want, people are gonna be like, I'm doing x, y, z, period, because that's because it's a startup. And if you guys are, you know, we stay up to three o'clock in the morning regularly. This is just this just a regular life. Somebody asked us recently, actually a really good friend. So what are your soft hours? Like, we plan time off? We don't plan time on Yeah, look like, okay, we're getting burnt out. We need an hour off. Okay. How does that look for, for the team to come together and say, guys, we need to just rest a little bit or does that not even happen? People always go, go, go. I mean, when do you see that burnout? Well, if we are, you know, getting very tired with a lot of time, all three of us were starting to get migraines. Oh, we were right.

2:50

I get migraines all the time. And my co founders don't say it was very kind of, I thought, Okay, guys, let's, I think, you know, next weekend, let's take it easier, not working as much. Okay, just so we can reset. You know, we need ourselves to be healthy. So that kind of moderation, but also we really care about each other. So we don't want to push each other to, you know, too far either. We know that we care so much. We're going to do whatever we can anyway. So would you say once you do a startup, like truly do a start, there's really no work life balance or

3:21

work life balance? That's hilarious.

3:23

I think that says it all.

3:26

What type of time commitment is a startup? I mean, for people that think it's all glory,

3:30

glory, somebody thinks it's all glory. I think a lot of people do. Awesome. Yeah,

3:34

I should have a nice, yeah, I live on a boat. There you go

3:37

live on a boat. I think if your goal is to live on a boat, they're much better ways to get

3:44

easier ways to make money, Silicon Valley much easier ways. But it's not. It's not about it's not about the money because money is part of it. It's a package deal. Because you can't succeed with a startup. You don't care about money, fundamentally, right? But if you just care about the money, there are better ways.

4:02

Okay, let's go back. So right now, finding investors where the next steps for you, what are you working on your finishing up our round? Okay, that's, that's really, really exciting. Did you go I know, you can't go into too much detail. But can you talk about that, that that process of presented pitch decks, getting that together meet investors that a little bit more detail.

4:23

Honestly, I've never given the same talk so many times in my life. What's really amazing is that when I look at you, and I'm about to tell you about my company, I forget everything ever said about it. And I just want to explain to Sean what I've done. Oh, gotta keep it fresh. Otherwise, you're gonna die from board. But Ok. Ok. More seriously. Um, we had a lot to learn pitching is I mean, I've done academic talks for such a long time, you know, I've been in the media talking as part of what I do, you know, I'm also a singer. So, like, I live on stage, but it's a is very, very specific. You want to effectively communicate, and that's really important, your business, not your product. Okay. That was a big learning curve for me. Okay. So your product, wasn't it? So your business, right? It's about the team. It's about how are you going to make money, it's about your competitive landscape. And I'm the founder, you know, I know that this is unique, there's nothing like it. It's amazing. It's the best thing since sliced bread, in fact, quite a bit better.

5:24

But other people don't know that. And you have to be patient and careful and explain to them why your business is the most amazing thing in a way that they can understand. So are you adjusting this pitch based on the investor you're talking to them

5:38

a little bit about a lot of it has come off from feedback, tell me about the feedback.

5:43

So at first,

5:46

at first, it was difficult at first, it was your professor now someone's telling them professor, they could be wrong or change

5:53

as professors, you get used to accepting criticism. In fact, the professor is our one of the few people who readily say, okay, you're right, if you give them a good argument, but what I wasn't used to it was more the culture of it, I supposed to go. There's a lot to the culture of startups a lot of how you're supposed to behave when you talk to investors, just so that it fits what they're expecting,

6:15

will say one or two things of how very a beer because we're running a little bit at a time, what information do you wish someone had given you at the beginning of your journey that you know now, but you wish you had known at the beginning? Um,

6:27

yeah, there's a lot,

6:30

I'm going to even start. So we're pivoting for example. Okay. So that was something you know, I mean, I suppose everybody would have liked to know, their final pivot all the way in the beginning. But that came out of a long list of meetings with investors were finally we had an outstanding meeting or felt like somebody somebody was able to explain to us why our market was too small. Finally, they could explain it. Well, we were going to make plugins and somebody explained to us that the most success successful plugin of all time was very far from a billion dollar company. And we felt from the beginning the different products because it could work for everybody. And so we made a massive pivots remade our whole product from scratch. Wow. And created something so that anybody can write a song and five minutes so you don't have to, you have to have like, really zero expertise. Maya, can you tell everyone how they can reach you and your beta test one more time? Absolutely. So you can reach me at what actually all the information is on our website at with elisa.com A li si K. That's the spelling of Elisa, the with elisa.com. You can sign up for the beta, my contact information is there happy to hear from you. Oh,

7:37

so Maya, I really want to thank you for coming on Silicon Valley successes. And for anyone at home that wants more information on the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem. get in contact with any of our guests writing, please visit our website. Silicon Valley successes, calm our next interview is fascinating. We have two people that are going to talk about startups, leases, office space do's and don'ts and things to be careful of. So it's a very important meeting and I look to see you there. All right. Take care.

8:07

Thank you. From all of us at Silicon Valley successes. We hope you found the information presented today useful in your path to success. For further information on accessing the resources in Silicon Valley. You may visit us on the web at Silicon Valley successes. com on Facebook and YouTube. Thank you. And remember, we want to help you in your journey to become the next success.

[brokendownbrown]

Regret the day I discovered alcohol as self-liberation, cuz really it was a prison.

there's so much to be said about the nature of the beast that shuts down your brain in  sequential order, that  renders consent impossible and  makes so many bad things happen to your body. there's  so much to be said for the pressures we face growing up that are unrealistic to meet. the internalized stigma around our bodies and the weird pressure that creates within as we internalize the violence that caused us the  harm in our childhood and we  continue to injure ourselves in  adolescence. 

to think that sex wasn't for me, that I was an alien, to think that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. for me not to be able to understand what that fundamental thing was, to not be able to get what was happening with me. its a cruel thing to have a child immigrate and then encourage them not to take advantage of resources that are available in the community. to be raised in a world where America wasn't form me and to be given friends who at least on surface cared about me, and showed me an incredible 17th birthday, at least I thought, but I'm so conflicted because it was so chock full of substances, the same substances that took vivek's life at 24. in college where I was constantly feeling like a monster. a layover from high school where I never went to parties and even if I was invited would always feel left out. I think people didn't want to challenge my visible orthodoxy even if it was begging for it. I was screaming for saving and no-one felt obliged. and so I kinda waifed out of school, just amid w weed smoke and beer cans, and loop pedals, and isolation. there I wrote the beginnings of what would become the discography of my life of which most seems lost. but still you start over, and over. eventually you get to a point where you've collected enough that you don't necessarily find yourself going through old archives that you made because the life you lived at the time was just too harmful to recollect. [pause] I understand that when my brain was off and I was trying to battle my demons I was in the company of people who were chasing the dragon but not necessarily for the reasons that I was. its a difficult matter to try to navigate and I really just need to continue to be honest, like my friends suggest. I think there's nooks and crannies in my mind that need to be explored yet and my friends demand better from me. so that's what I'll do. [pause] I guess I'm left with the harm that this person experienced, and I have to give them space to express that. if I don't then I'm not like doing my part, or following my friends advice, and really thats all I have in this stage. why would my friends offer advice if I wasn't going to follow it. [pause] This is a part of my being that is hard to access. I guess tears are coming out and I don't want people who've experienced harm to be lying in my wake. its a difficult matter to navigate but I'm getting good advice and I'd do well to follow it. [pause] I wish I didn't have this sense of romance when it came to drinking, like this james Bond-esque super-hero in a suit in the 70's with guns and explosions and girls. why is this like fueling my romance of what it is to drink. well dressed chavs with smarmy charismatic sneers pasted on their faces with wild eyes and hair blowing in the wind, and a cold glow about them. a sense of danger and freedom. a stubbly chin and immaculate fingernails and dapper dress interpreted through chav aesthetic. [pause] all of this and more seems to run through mind, like the whimsical joy of carrying a beer on the train in the UK and being OK. the freedom and sexiness of it all. but in reality I think about how unsexy being too drunk is. how terrible it can feel to be weighed down by whisky, to have the shades drawn mentally and medically have parts of your brain literally de-activting as per the want of alcohol to manifest. [pause] this grandiose life that wasn't for me, as an immigrant, and a kid with a super religious family, who'd never approve of partying. the knowledge of doing exactly what you weren't supposed to be doing was its own reward, a stab back at the family that would constantly torture you all day with all sorts of clothing potions that you'd never wear, all kinds of smarmy remarks about your body, asking you to weigh yourself on the scales, asking you to change your posture, asking you to change your diet. this always would fuck with me and contribute to a sense of two terrible things. [pause] me and my pal vivek would pain the town red and it was grand, like all the visions of radness that had plagued my pre-teen visions of awesome were manifesting at the age of 19. I was the badass id always dreamed to be, and it nearly killed me. I literally woke up in the ER. vivek, he went out in a body bag. so destructive was our dream. now I talk about liberation and its just weird to think that libation is more of a prison and this is almost a slogan but the truth is damning. damn it. I just wish that I wasn't sold this golden vision of substance abuse as a fast track to badassery. I never smoked a cigarette outside of a few chance parties, and hated it every time. weed never stuck. neither did any other drug. it was always alcohol for me. this weird like, sexification of a substance that was in all likelihood a turnoff the whole time. [pause] and now I guess I have a conversation pending with a person whose experienced harm due to drinking and thats going to be a day of reckoning for sure. I'm being given the harsh truth of things and id expect nothing less from my friends and partners. it is what it is, its nothing to sneeze at and I need to step my game here. I need to center their concerns. they need to know that I hear them. [pause] I grew up around bro's. like I was a chav growing up, also a grammar school kid, over in the UK. a northerner, a manc, a blackburnian, a Lancastrian. we'd wear our uniforms and say our prayers. and thats part of a tradition of schools of that nature going back hundreds of years. it was an old world thing. we were raised to love soccer. that was just the way of it. there were no bones about it, you were there, you were playing the game, you loved the game. it was also a city phenomenon, the blackburn rovers, a team that used to be badass when I was a kid but now don't even qualify for the main league. [pause] soccer was a way for me to continue a part of my culture as an immigrant who otherwise had no place to practice my accent, or any other trapping of my britishness. and then white adult comedians have the audacity to come to me and mock the state of my ability to express my internalized and still remembered Britishness as a sign of my ... [pause] its a lot to delve into. its super painful for me to talk about the way I was harmed by midwest public space to the degree that I had to self censure my own accent in order to find any escape from the harm that was being visited upon me daily by taking up space as a british, identifiably british person with religious garb of a faith they misidentified daily, another thing that I ended up leaving behind to step away from the harm coming my way. [pause] sometimes I wonder where does it end, like this weird tapestry of harm that I've internalized, the pain and the trauma, I go through my narrative and my head spins, and its hard for me to ground myself. but still, here I am all the same. [pause] what can anyone do anyway, given the world. I think about my gender and how thats buried in there somewhere, how I'm an immigrant and how thats kinda elusive for me to understand, how like... so many things. like the difficulty I have with mascara, and the few times I've worn a dress, how they've turned into jokes amongst friends. [pause] my body is a problem for me as I... like... you know, am not necessarily drawn to the standard male stuff with regards to fashion despite my swarthy appearance, and in saying that I feel like its racist to use those words. but I've spoken so few times about all this I have a lot of blunderousness in vocab to overcome. my family used to shame my body, my clothing choice, my posture, my body shape, despite being for many years the sole source of all nutrition for me. straight from my mothers kitchen to my stomach, to my body, to their eyes, their lips, and to my shame, the pain, the harm, the trauma. [pause] and I think about the boy from daycare, when I was a pre-teen, I think about the contact we made, their hand on my cheek, the electricity I felt. I think about my old neighbor, how we were close, very close, and how I missed that, and maybe they never felt the same, and maybe thats why they avoided me in years since. there have always been boys, although I'm not running after every boy I see. I have a type, and when it strikes me, it does. [pause] I'm about to do something really difficult and crazy, and I think it might work, but I am not going to pretend like I have everything figured out, I dont. I'll suck before I do better. [pause] but before all that I need to have this conversation with this person whose experienced harm. it was a surprise, a horrible one, but I have reached out and let them know I'm down to speak, and they seem down too. who knows what the right move is from there. but its important to recognize the harm that went down. and I don't know whats going to happen but it needs to and thats the main thing. on the phone he [their friend] told me to center their trauma over my ego. I'm already there trust me. but sure, feel free to say so. [pause] callouts and callins are triggering to me especially when they occur in this city because they've in my experience been used to fuel racist agendas that never get addressed, because of the power dynamics at play. but in this case I feel like maybe I can go through this process without being too worried about that.

[bigskydreaming]

Everybody believes and supports survivors until the second a survivor accuses someone they’re close to. Without fail. Every single goddamn time.

That last reblog...fuck. I’m so mad for that OP I’m shaking. There’s nothing new about their post and that’s what hurts the most. That convo they posted was the same song and dance every single survivor who knows one of their abusers or rapists knows by heart and has heard so many times before they can say the words along with the person they try and confide in.

Doesn’t matter how loud someone is in saying all the right things about believing and supporting survivors, how vehement they are about hating rapists and abusers, how much they present themselves as someone SAFE to be around. The second you accuse someone THEY’VE always felt safe and comfortable around, they will always, always, ALWAYS find a way to tell you you’re wrong and don’t know what you’re talking about, you misremembered or read too much into things or got confused or mistook them for someone else or it wasn’t REALLY rape or abuse or a million fucking things that aren’t actually I SUPPORT YOU. I BELIEVE YOU. THE WAY I’VE CLAIMED TO ALL THIS TIME, MAKING YOU THINK YOU COULD ACTUALLY TELL ME THIS.

And then non-survivors all wonder why so few of us disclose, why so few of us come to you, confide in you, do the exact fucking thing we know will always end the exact fucking way BECAUSE THATS THE WAY IT ALWAYS FUCKING GOES, NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU SWEAR ‘I’M NOT LIKE THAT.’

And people wonder why I’m so goddamn VITRIOLIC about abuse and rape apologism in fandoms, and so goddamn adamant about not encouraging people to forgive and move on, and so fucking insistent on holding ppl accountable, whether fictional characters or celebrities or random fucking posters, for shit they’ve done even years before, not giving them the benefit of the doubt that they’ve changed and grown and learn from their lesson, like why am I so sure they’re still like that, ‘you don’t know’.

Except yeah. I do. Because its all so fucking predictable. The sheer number of times I’ve heard variations of that same exact combo since the first time I tried to confide in someone growing up about the shit my mom did to me....I honestly can not count. I can name less than five people I’ve confided in over the twenty five years or so since then who ACTUALLY made me feel safe in doing so, who just sat there and shut up and didn’t try to do or say anything other than “I’m sorry you had to live that, I’m sorry that happened to you.” But I couldn’t even BEGIN to tell you the number of times I’ve tried to open up with people about the shit that hurt me, that terrified me, that traumatized me, only to have them turn around and with ‘good intentions’ awkwardly try and mitigate it and dilute it and water it down or reframe it or give her the benefit of the doubt AS THOUGH ITS THEIR PLACE TO DO SO because she’s my mom and you all just can’t fucking HANDLE living in a world where moms do that shit to their kids. But you still expect ME to, without any of that much vaunted ‘belief and support’ you’re always going on and on and ON about, while you keep living in fantasy land where actually, what actually happened was she was just trying her best and it wasn’t her fault and it was all just bad dreams and remembering shit wrong because who really remembers stuff from when they were kids anyway? LOLOLOL. Fun fact. Once you know what a wire hanger feels like after its been heated on a stove, THATS NOT SOMETHING YOU EVER FUCKING FORGET.

And its exhausting. So. FUCKING. Exhausting.

Like the true, honest to god reason I don’t have any fucking chill when it comes to judging people for characters they stan for or the arguments they make in defense of abusive characters or how people will go to fucking hell and back to defend their right to enjoy their precious noncon rape fantasy smut in peace?

I’ll be totally fucking honest with you, on some fucked up level that I acknowledge is unfair but I just honestly don’t give a fuck - its a test. I admit it. It is. Because at this point in my life, this far into it, this many times listening to the same shit play out any and every single time it comes up, I fundamentally do not trust, do not feel safe, or secure, or capable of fully relaxing, around anyone unless and until I’ve seen them willing to sacrifice something. Give up something or someone, a character or celeb or friend or relative who they formerly were close to or took comfort in or spoke highly of, because that character or celeb or whomever did something that was a dealbreaker, hurt someone or said or did something that made them go you know what, enough, that’s too far, no amount of joy or comfort or security I formerly felt because of this character or person can justify this thing they did, I can see that and this is me actually DOING something with that acknowledgment.

It doesn’t have to be for my benefit, doesn’t have to be for a reason I personally agree with, whatever, it just needs to be SOMETHING. Something visible, something real. Not just hating certain characters or celebs or people, but ones who once meant something to you, something that says.....I used to think this person or this character or this celeb was good and I could like them or even love them and be comfortable and safe around them.....but then someone told me otherwise and I BELIEVED THEM. I SUPPORTED THEM. I. PICKED. THEM.

Because without that, it just is what it is. I don’t care if its not rational, or fair, I just don’t. Twenty five years of the same broken record, I’m tired. I’ve heard “I believe, I support” to the accompanying tune of actions that say the exact opposite so many fucking times it does honestly take a shock to the system, the goddamn JOLT of actually SEEING the proof that at least once, you DID believe someone, you DID do something with that belief, for me to actually think oh fuck, they actually mean it this time instead of oh look, a person who gets off to rape fic is reblogging a ‘look how much I support survivors, Im such a good person’ ego-stroke again.

You can say all you want oh its just fiction, it doesn’t mean anything that I stan this abusive character or this celeb I don’t know, if a person in my REAL LIFE came to me and said this other person I know hurt them, I’d believe THEM, that’d be totally different....but its NOT. Its not remotely and I dont know how so many ppl actually buy this shit coming out of their own mouths cuz if it doesnt really matter cuz its a fictional character or a celeb you dont even know and you STILL cant bear to give up whatever enjoyment you get out of them once its pointed out hey that person or character you enjoy is a fucking rapist....then how the FUCK do you delude yourself you’d be able to give up a person you’ve spent any length of time trusting and being comfortable around in your real, personal life, if someone else disclosed to you that they fucking abused or raped them??? YOU WOULDN’T. AND I KNOW YOU WOULDN’T, BECAUSE EVERY SINGLE THING YOU GUYS SAY IN DEFENSE OF THESE CELEBS OR THESE PEOPLE ARE THE EXACT WORDS I’VE HEARD SAID OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

So many of you act like you think there’s this magical fucking SIGN you expect to get from on high, if shit like this ever happened in real life, that would magically distinguish it as an OH SHIT THIS TIME ITS FOR REAL moment, like okay NOW its make it or break it time, NOW it matters. And survivors keep telling you over and over again it ALWAYS matters. EVERY TIME you say this shit it ALWAYS matters, because what you’re always saying is what EVERYONE says.....”if I try hard enough, I can find SOME WAY to excuse this shit, so I don’t have to lose anything here, so I can keep going through life exactly as I have been.”

Somehow, some way, it always plays out the same....the SECOND we do or say something that puts someone on the spot, makes them CHOOSE, who will I believe, who will I support.....they always, always, ALWAYS find a way to support the other person, to make you the easy one to discard and toss away, like you’re the problem, you’re the enemy for making them choose in the first place.

Ugh. Fuck it. Whatever. I’m tired and gotta get back to work anyway. Not to be bitter or resentful, but that’s what happens when you’ve got no family as a support system cuz you ‘alienated’ them all by spending most of your life hating them for making you spend every Tuesday night alone with the woman they’ll still never admit abused you every week like clockwork til you finally fucking put your foot down and fucking revolted when you were ten, lmao.

[viralhottopics]

16 Couples Who Waited To Have Sex Until Marriage Talk About How Things Turned Out

1. Sucked at first, but got better

Probably not a typical experience, but I never had PIV until the night of of my wedding with my wife (now of 8 years). Sex sucked at first, especially for her. But it’s amazing now, albeit a bit less frequent. Still getting better with time.

2. It was a big mistake

My wife and I weren’t 100% abstinent before marriage, but close. When we first started dating we fooled around some, but then she felt like waiting was the right thing to do so we didn’t do anything else until we got married.

Right when we first got married sex was alright. We did it pretty frequently, I guess. Not so much now though.

It was a mistake. Fuck abstinence. It’s the worst.

3. Awful relationship

Not my experience but my parents. They did not partake in premarital sex for religious reasons but they are pretty compatible in bed. Awkward for me to know but I still know.

However, their marriage itself wasn’t that great. They only moved in with each other after marriage before realizing that they weren’t compatible as a couple. After 20 years of fighting and divorce threats…they are still amazingly together.

4. Their sex drives are 100% different

A very good male friend of mine didn’t have sex with his current wife until after they got married (her idea), turns out that she basically hates sex and he LOVES it…they have been married 12 years bf he can count how many times they have had sex (less than 10 times).

Suffice it to say, he wouldn’t recommend waiting…

5. It didn’t hurt us

My husband and I were semi-abstinent (no PIV) for religious reasons, and didn’t live together before we got married (dated 5 years). Have now been married 2.5 years. We have a very healthy marriage and active sex life, in my opinion.

To be fair, we are more part of the Christian left and have always been sex-positive. I’m not sure if I still believe it’s essential to abstain until marriage, but it was very important to my partner, and it didn’t hurt us.

6. It ended up going great

IT’S GOING AWESOME. We didn’t have genital contact (or sight haha). He didn’t even pat my butt. We decided that would be too hard not to push the boundary if that was allowed. Ya gotta draw the line somewhere, I guess. We also didn’t talk about sex explicitly because it turned us on too much. We were pretty horny.

I think it helped us to learn how to work well together and know each other without adding in an element that can cloud the clarity in a relationship. It was also a major trust builder in each other. We accomplished something huge together, and stayed strong for each other.

We love having sex. We do it at least 2-3 times a week, and we’ve been together for over 4 years. It’s cool that neither of us can compare each other to anyone else. Special, sacred, intimate, exciting.

7. Sex has never been a problem

Great after 14 years. While we have had our own challenges, sex has never been one. We were both open about our absolute lack of sexual experience and have had a good time exploring it together exclusively

8. Glad we waited!

My husband and I waited. We don’t have any issues with our relationship because of it. We talked a lot about what our expectations would be and how we would approach it in our marriage. I’m glad we waited. It has been a learning curve sure, but we’ve been married for almost three years now and have a descent sex life. There’s been some short dry spells sure to health issues but we love each other very much and try to make the other person happy.

9. Regret not sleeping with other people

We were both pretty religious when we got married 12 years ago. We dry humped before then but that’s as far as it went. Sex was difficult for her physically at first. This was pretty discouraging for me because it was a turn off to think I was hurting her. Also a lot of lubes tended to irritate her. Also oral would make her jaw lock. So yeah, it was not that great at first.

It got better over the years. We found lubes that worked. However I stopped being religious 5 years ago. She still is. My beliefs about sex have totally changed. I have regrets about the fact that I will probably never be able to experience someone else physically. This is not to say I an dissatisfied with my wife, just that I kick myself for never exploring.

10. Brought us closer together

Still happily married 17 years later. I think it was very good because it forced us to spend time really getting to know each other while we were dating.

11. Sex was awkward at first, but it worked out

We’ve on been married less than a year as of now, but it’s going great. Of course sex was awkward at first but we had it pretty well figured out by the end of our honeymoon trip, and it’s only been getting better!

Being married is awesome, especially to such an amazing woman. I’m convinced that waiting until marriage was the correct course of action, because it allowed us to get married based on our real-world, day-to-day compatibility rather than being distracted by the bliss of intimacy. Certainly not a popular point of view, but it definitely worked for us

12. Destroyed my friend’s marriage

Not me but a lady friend. She married right after college because her SO was in the military and going to be deployed. They abstained until marriage. The sex was bad. Painful for her and I’m guessing because of that not all that enjoyable for him either. Her doctor diagnosed her with Vaginismus (a condition wherein your vaginal wall involuntarily spasms during intercourse I guess?) so she just thought it was her fault and she would never enjoy sex.

When they got back to the states and her husband went back to school they broke up for other reasons. She started dating other people and realized that sex could actually be good.

I don’t know particularly why it didn’t work with her first husband but it’s true that some people just aren’t compatible.

13. Got better over time

For religious reasons we were not only abstinent, we didn’t touch at all before marriage. The most contact we had in advance of tying the knot was we were once both sitting in the back seat of a car with a carefully delineated line of space between us and the car swerved and his leg briefly brushed against mine.

It was stressful because I was worried about all this sexual incompatibility other people talk about. But I did whatever due diligence I could manage under those constraints – we had several frank discussions about kink and experimentation and sex toys and comfort levels and at what point we’d get help if things weren’t working etc etc. I also made him buy me a vibrator- it seemed like a good symbolic gesture of “we will both work to have orgasms yes we will”. (and lube. We both bought lube. We didn’t really end up needing it but we had it available.)

The first time was mediocre but not painful, I don’t think it’s fair to expect more than that, given that we hadn’t yet worked out the positions, rhythms, etc that really worked for us. It got progressively better from there, I’m very satisfied.

I guess the surprise is that I was expecting my libido to be… Lower. But I admitted this to a friend and she laughed at me so maybe I was in denial I don’t know.

Other than that? Well, I really respect and admire and like him. I only got really infatuated after we were already married, so it’s nice knowing my non-hormone-addled mind also thinks he’s fantastic…

14. We waited, and have great sex

The most we did while dating/engaged was one heavy make out session. No groping, even. We’ve been married 5 years and have sex or he gets a bj nearly every single night, unless he’s tired or sick. I love the d, and have declined sex only once I can think of in the last several months. It worked out for us.

15. It almost destroyed our lives

Wife wanted to stay a virgin until marriage—too late for me by the time I met her, but I respected her wishes even when I was deeply depressed about it—turns out her libido is significantly lower than mine… After eighteen years of concealing my mental anguish, instead of cheating, I risked everything in asking for an ‘open marriage’ (she agreed!), and our (revised ‘polyamorous’) relationship is so much better, now.

It is fundamentally stupid/irrational to commit to monogamous marriage before you even know if you’re sexually compatible! Save yourself decades of heartache, ladies and gentlemen, and “try before you buy”!

16. “Waiting was the most dumbass thing I ever did.”

I am so late to this party but I have to chime in. Been married 26 years. We abstained from sex because of religion. Before marriage he went up my shirt once. I remember one time we sort of grinded a bit. He came but I didn’t know at the time.

Then marriage and 2 people who didn’t know what a clit was or where it was located. I cried a lot. I thought I was dysfunctional. We bought a vibrator in desperation. We both had no idea what to do with it. One night he went to work and I was determined to figure it out. Had my first orgasm at 21. Told him about it and we went from there.

Years passed and sex seemed pretty good. Had several children. I was still a bit frigid I think. I eventually left our oppressive religion. A few years later he followed.

We finally worked thru the religious sexual bullshit. Started having really mind blowing sex. I was blown away. I never knew it could be that good.

Eventually we opened up the marriage. However it didn’t work out. I was with men that sucked in bed. They were mostly selfish. He dipped his dick in crazy a few times. Idk how single guys deal with a lot of women cuz mostly we experienced cray cray.

We closed the marriage back up, at least for now and it’s been amazing. Excellent sex 4-5 times a week. More in the summer because of less work stress for both of us.

Have sex before you make a legal contract. Waiting is the most dumbass thing I ever did.

bella0520

Read more: http://tcat.tc/2jFM4hq

from 16 Couples Who Waited To Have Sex Until Marriage Talk About How Things Turned Out

[chrismaverickdotcom]

All Facts are Alternative (some are more alternative than others)

(This is going to be a long one… I’ve put off writing about this for a while.) So about two and a half months ago, America seemingly got really bored and decided to end itself… you know… cuz why not? At least that’s one view. Another view is that a small sect of megalomaniacal billionaires, the Illuminati, if you will, decided to to take over the world or the pure joy of spreading hatred and evil or maybe because they saw it as a quick and easy way to make a buck. It also looks like we’re witnessing the rise of a fascist dictator determined to will himself to power and take his seat amongst the amongst the great conquerors of history. And it’s possible that we have a great and benevolent billionaire, determined to raise his people out of their tragic circumstances and make the world a better place even if a significant portion of those people think that he’s a nincompoop. All of these things are arguably true. I both believe and don’t believe them all.

So way back on November 9th, the day after election day, my friend and coworker Carol was the first person to ask me when I’d be blogging about it. She wasn’t the last. Several people wrote me saying they were curious as to what my thoughts on the whole thing would be. I told Carol (and all the others) that it would probably be a while. Sure I had thoughts. I had lots of thoughts. But I felt like I didn’t have anything to say that wouldn’t come across as an “I told you so!” and that didn’t seem healthy or useful to anyone. Even if I did. And that’s wasn’t the point that I wanted to make 12 hours after the election. And it’s not the point that I want to make now, even if it’s going to sound like it for a lot of this post… but really stick with me.

I was never 100% positive that Donald Trump would win… at least not until election day. Even though he was polling below her, I’d been figuring it was a coin flip. 50-50 shot either way… I actually thought that pretty early on, long before he won the GOP nomination. I thought Hillary Clinton maybe had a shot if she could beat Bernie Sanders, because voting for the historic first woman president might be enough to turn people in her favor. But given the rhetoric of their campaigns I more and more started seeing Trump as kind of an inevitability. Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment was the thing that really sealed the deal for me.

For those who don’t know, I work on the election board for my district in Pittsburgh, PA. I’m literally the guy who sets up the machines and counts the votes at the end of the day. You know how people are always talking about how election officials are on the take and we’re fixing the election? Well, if you wanted to fix the election, I guess I’m the guy you’d call. I’ve been doing it for 8 years and I haven’t gotten that call yet. Anyway, I don’t actually KNOW how people are voting until the end of the day. It’s completely secret, just like it’s supposed to be. And I (and the rest of my elections board) am pretty good about keeping people from electioneering in the polling place. But the thing is, it doesn’t matter if people get to vote in secret or not. They’re pretty good about telling you who they voted for (or are about to vote for) anyway, so long as you listen. Since I’m sitting there all day on election day, I hear everything people are complaining about to their neighbors as they walk through the doors. Talk about muslims or women’s reproductive rights or healthcare or walls. It doesn’t matter if you say the names you wrote down. On election day, people are pretty upfront about what they BELIEVE (true or not). I can pretty much guess the way they’re leaning by their attitude.

I knew Trump had won Pennsylvania (and therefore in all likelihood the Presidency) by about noon or so.

Pennsylvania is technically a swing state, but generally goes blue in a presidential election. The reason is MOST of the state (by area) is pretty solidly republican, but there are two population centers that are pretty solidly democrat: Pittsburgh (where I live) and Philadelphia. The state gets awarded to the democrats in presidential elections because the people in those two cities come out and vastly outnumber the people in the more rural areas. My district is even more heavily democratic than Pittsburgh as a whole. I typically expect the democratic candidate to outscore the republican by at least a factor of 10x. In the 8 years I’ve been doing this, most elections see a republican candidate (for any office) get about 10-15 votes. The highest I’ve ever seen before was Mitt Romney in 2012 with something like 37, if I remember correctly (and Barack Obama getting like 200, so still soundly crushing him). But I could tell that Trump was going to do much better than that. When polls closed and we ran the final vote tally, I found out we had 169 for Hillary Clinton and 116 for the Donald. It wasn’t enough for him to win MY district, but if he did well enough here, I knew for sure that would be good enough to overcome her lead since the rural parts of the state were almost certainly going to hold.

Obviously it did. Donald Trump, super villain, would be Lex Luthor, and pussy grabbing enthusiast is President of the United States.

And now that it has, I’m starting to see people make the same mistakes that they made before the election. The mistakes that if they didn’t lead to Trump winning, they led to a lot of people being massively surprised when he did win. It’s particularly been highlighted this week what with the Trump and Sean Spicer arguing that Inauguration was “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.” and Kellyanne Conway introducing the phrase “alternative facts” into the lexicon (seriously, I may kinda love her for this). This has of course been a perfectly laid trap because now all of Trump’s opponents are arguing that facts are facts and trying to convince Trump’s supporters that he’s a big fat liar because look! Photographic evidence! Then the left gets infuriated because this doesn’t seem to change any of the Trump supporters minds and they just rally back around to the “liberals are sore losers” talking points. Because two years of of contentious primary and presidential campaigns haven’t taught the left the most important lesson. In fact the (traditional) right doesn’t really understand the lesson either. The reason Trump is smart is that he (and Conway and Spicer and their entire administration) DO understand the most important lesson.

Trump supporters don’t give a fuck about facts!!!

And honestly, neither does anyone else. Not really. Allow me to explain.

Way back when I first started saying Trump could win because he’s was organizing the DudeBro vote, I pointed to an example of a then student of mine that I referred to by the codename “Chip.” I argued that the Planned Parenthood debate was a non-starter because Chip doesn’t honestly give a fuck about Planned Parenthood one way or the other. What he likes about Trump is that he is unfiltered. He “tells it like it is.” Trump’s non-politically correct attitude translated to honesty to Chip. And honesty translated to truth. And truth means facts… more or less. Really, Chip doesn’t care what facts are. What he wants is rhetoric that backs up what he wanted to believe already anyway. Sometime after that, I gave my students an assignment to write a paper making an evaluative argument. Chip chose to write his paper on gun control and why it needed to be LESS strict. The foundation of his argument was that having more citizens with guns would keep the United States as a nation less vulnerable to foreign or terrorist attack. His evidence was based on some random guy’s blog that he found that pointed out if you considered the people in Wisconsin with an active hunting license (600,000 people) an army they would be the third largest army in the world.

Of course, this is patently false. Ignoring the fact that there’s more to being an army than just owning a gun, the United States currently has the 7th largest armed force in the world with 2.3million. 600,000 wouldn’t even be in the top twenty. But the actual facts weren’t really important to Chip. He wanted to argue that everyone should have a gun. So he found some information that seemed to back up what he already believed and based his argument on that. When I rejected his first draft on that and similar faulty points, he was initially pretty upset. However, we went on to write a much better paper where he argued that we needed lax gun control where we had no background checks except to maintain that the gun purchaser had no criminal record and that all gun owners pass a mandatory gun safety class (one he had taken with his father as a child). In effect, what he actually was proposing was something pretty similar to “common sense gun control” only he didn’t really realize that. In fact, he argued that what he was asking for what much better.

Some people would probably consider that a victory. They would think that I “convinced” Chip that his argument was faulty and he needed to reexamine it. I don’t really think I did. See, there’s a power dynamic between teacher and students based on grades. What I actually did was convince Chip that he had to make the “right kind of argument” in order to pass the class. What he fundamentally wants or would be willing to vote for never changed. In fact, he would absolutely positively be against calling his proposal “gun control” at all. And if a liberal agreed with his proposal he would consider that a victory for the gun lobby… convincing someone that they DIDN’T need gun control. And honestly, he probably still feels that hunters are a good army. He just knows that trying to convince his teacher of that wasn’t a great way to get a good grade.

Although Chip is kind of a silly example (at least probably to most people who would probably read stuff that I write here), most people actually think like him. People don’t vote based on logic. They don’t formulate opinions based on facts. They do this based on feelings and they retrofit the facts to back up the feelings they are having. Sure there is some drift. Facts may move the needle of your opinions a little in one direction or another. But on STRONG opinions — that is on fundamental beliefs that are important to us — we as people use facts to back us up and we mostly dismiss everything that doesn’t match up. Really, what we do is base our ideology and beliefs on morality. MOST of us are actually trying to do what we feel like is right. And yes, this includes both Democrats and Republicans. Honestly, I expect it even includes Donald Trump (even though a lot of liberals can’t see that) and it certainly includes the majority of his followers. This is the disconnect that liberals miss. They assume Trump’s followers are evil because they appear to be behaving illogically.

I’m reading a great book right now (for research for my dissertation unrelated to this). It’s called Against Empathy, by psychologist Paul Bloom. Bloom argues that we often make decision based on our ability to empathize with others. And this is actually illogical and ultimately leads to sometimes immoral decisions because empathy actually isn’t logical. Bloom actually argues that the world would be better off if people were LESS empathetic. If we based our moral decisions on logic and reason, we would come closer to what Bloom calls “compassionate distance” and in doing so increase the net moral good. The problem is of course that Bloom sort of ignores that morality isn’t absolute. Or rather, since he knows it isn’t he sticks a stake in the sand to point out the absolute morality that his argument depends on, “that it’s better (all else being equal) to save a thousand people than just one, that it’s wrong to harm someone without cause and wrong to devalue people just because of the color of their skin.” (Kindle Locations 864-865). That’s a pretty reasonable standpoint to have. But even that is based on empathy. If you were really to be for the good of the many over the good of the one, then you can’t absolutely adhere to point two or three… and who says the good of the many outweighs the one anyway? And Bloom knows this, as he points out that “if you think numbers don’t matter or suffering is good or racism is moral, then many of the arguments that follow will be, at most, of intellectual interest to you.”(Kindle Locations 865-866).

In any case, Bloom then goes on to point out many of the ways in which empathy, which liberals tend to claim is their domain over the uncaring conservatives, is fundamentally utilized by both parties. As liberals we tend to base our decisions on who we care about and doing the right thing. We are for reproductive rights because we care about women. We support marriage equality because we care about gays. We back #BlackLivesMatter because we care about African Americans. But it’s very easy to miss that the conservative ideals are also fundamentally based on empathy as well. Pro-lifers fundamentally believe that they are standing up for the rights of a defenseless child. Traditional marriage defenders believe that they are protecting Christians. #BlueLivesMatter people are trying to save the men and women of law enforcement who have sworn to protect them. It makes complete sense to want to protect the rights of transgender people to pee in peace. BUT if you fundamentally believe that allowing transgenders to use the bathroom of their choice puts your children at risk of being raped, then stopping them is the empathic and honestly the only logical choice of action.

The fact that you’re wrong if you believe that really doesn’t have much to do with it.

For liberals… progressives… modern day Democrats… this is a little harder to see. If we take in all the facts and compare them to what we believe, it feels like they’re pretty consistent. It’s really easy to say “FoxNews is lies. Real news shows that Trump is an idiot.” This works because a lot of the time the facts really do back up what we already believe. That’s not really a function of liberalism though. It’s more of a happy accident. Here’s a key point. I’m against Stop and Frisk. The new president has made it pretty clear that he is for it. He says he believes it makes the world a safer place. The defense against this is that statistics show that there’s really no effect whatsoever, and in fact, there’s some evidence that it does more harm than good. But honestly, that’s not why I’m against it. Not really. I’m against it because I’m a black man who happens to enjoy wearing ripped jeans and hoodies pretty regularly as causal wear and a lifetime of being harassed by the police is a major pain in the ass. Similarly it turns out that transgender people are at much greater risk in bathrooms than children of any age or gender. Like it’s not even close. But that’s not really why I’m for allowing a transwoman to pee in the lady’s restroom. I’m for it because in *MY* ideology, that just feels like basic human decency. I don’t want people bothering me when I want to go pee, so I don’t want anyone bothering anyone else. THAT is empathy!

But it’s not logic. And it’s not really facts. Or rather, the facts are incidental. They happen to back me up and it’s really nice that they do. But let’s say the evidence was that Stop and Frisk did work. Let’s say that statistics showed that cities implementing Stop and Frisk showed a crime decrease of 10%. I’d still be against it. Hell, let’s say they saw a crime decrease of 99%. I’d STILL be against it. Why? Because I’m a black man, who happens to enjoy wearing ripped jeans and hoodies pretty regularly as causal wear and a lifetime of being harassed by the police is a major pain in the ass. Where is the cut-off? If we somehow discovered that it turned out that 10% of child molesters were transgender individuals would liberals still be for bathroom equality? What about 25%? 50%?

In fact, let’s assume that absolute worse case scenario for liberal voters under the current Trump administration. Let’s assume that he brings back stop and frisk. He reverses marriage equality. He ends the ACA. He overturns Roe v. Wade. He builds a wall, bullies Mexico into paying for it, and deports every undocumented worker in the country. We bring back water boarding of suspected terrorists. We grant the government free reign to tap any electronic communication. There’s a gun in every home, conversion therapy becomes standard medical practice and grabbing pussies at will is completely decriminalized. Every horrible thing Trump (or Pence) has ever said comes to pass. BUT, lets also assume that it turns out that he’s right. Unemployment drops below 1%, the Dow hits 40,000 in two years time, crime rates drop to 1% of what they were, all of the recently converted queers are in lovingly Christian relationships where they happily engage in missionary sex purely for procreation. And the 75% of us who survive have great healthcare. The country is fundamentally a better place, at least according to Bloom’s metric. The needs of the many have outweighed the needs of few. Would liberals really support him?

I sure as hell wouldn’t. Because that’s not the America I want to live in. I wouldn’t be happy because the values I care about have been stripped away in the name of logic. At the end of the day it apparently turns out I care about racial and gender equality more than I care about the Dow or the crime rate or even healthcare. No matter how many facts you throw at me, that’s never going to change. And if I were in that situation, ANY facts that seemed to back me up would be something I’d cling to for dear life.

And this is the fundamental reason that this matters. I do a lot of arguing with people. And given that these are the issues I care about, a lot of my arguments include references to systemic racism or sexism. One that I have noticed is that there are certain people who will never be convinced that I am right. No matter how right I am. I generally don’t call out people individually here, but for the sake of making this argument, I’m going to use Vic Carter, because I know he won’t mind. He’s not shy about sharing his opinions in my comments and it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if he were to comment on this post anyway. Anyway, Vic often disputes that there is “no such thing as systemic racism” because he believes that racism must be active. This often puts me (and others) in the position of arguing that he is wrong. Honestly, I never expect him to change his mind. And he sure as hell isn’t going to change mine. What I’m doing is creating a dialogue for others who DON’T have strong opinions. I’m using him as a convenient strawman to present ideas for me to counter. Even though I pretty much disagree with Vic ALWAYS, I will grant him the compliment that his dissenting point of view makes these posts better. He’s still wrong. But what the many people who have asked why I don’t block him don’t understand is that his dissent is important. It’s integral. And credit where credit is due, Vic is a lot smarter than most of the people who come here to argue against me or who argue against me on Trump’s behalf. (Fair disclosure for Vic. He is NOT a Trump supporter). He’s still wrong. But he’s smarter.

But not everyone can be Vic.

And here’s where it starts to get really complicated. Here’s the reason I knew that Trump would win. Culture progresses, but it cycles. Everything that I’ve ever learned in every historical cultural studies class that I’ve taken in my entire academic career backs this up. For every two steps forward a society takes, eventually they have to take one back. And in the last eight years, the United States of America has taken a SHIT TON of liberal steps forward, despite a concerted effort to stop it. In eight years, the affordable care act got passed, marriage equality has become the law of the land, weed has become all but legal, the Confederate flag has become all but illegal. Atheism, transgenderism, premarital sex and sexual education regarding it have become essentially normalized. Visibility for polyamory, kink, total drug decrimialization, are all on the rise. Climate change, gender and sexual identity, evolution and the Big Bang are about as commonly accepted as the world being round. Trigger warnings became common in classrooms as well as internet posts. #BlackLivesMatter became a mainstream political topic that is essential to at least address if you want to seriously run for office. Feminism became such a dominant political ideology that it is acceptable to wear t-shrits with things that used to be considered swear words to political gatherings. Social Justice Warrior became such a normalized thing that rather than being an insult that it’s almost an insult to say that someone isn’t one. “People of Color” became the cool in crowd. The LGBT community got so many extra letters tacked onto it that not even gay people are sure how to spell it anymore. All of these topics are commonly addressed in the most popular television shows, both fictional and news. And Barack Obama has been the face of that (even for the things on this list that he really had nothing to do with). And anyone who opposes any of these things can expect to see some level of backlash from those of us who support it.

A lot of backlash.

There’s a meme, by someone named Brendan O’Neill, that I’ve seen posted by quite a few Trump supporters on social media in the last week… and I’ve seen the sentiment a lot of forms even outside of the meme. It addresses “how Trump happened.” Essentially it is a manifesto of sorts. The author argues that Trump happened because liberals treat conservatives badly. It complains about being called homophobic for having a religious opposition to gay marriage. It complains about being called xenophobic for wanting closed borders to Mexicans and Muslims. It complains about being called sexist for opposing Hillary. It complains about being called racist for opposing pretty much anything Obama has ever done. It complains that people don’t like being treated “like shit” and that Trump is there response.

They’re not wrong!

They really aren’t. Intentional or not much of the rhetoric we use “systemic RACISM and SEXISM” is insulting to the people who might practice it. And sometimes… in fact often… we directly tell them that they are racists or sexists. When people denounce evolution because their magic book they believe in told them that the world is only 6000 years old, we tell them that they are ignorant. When they oppose any group that we like we accuse them of not being “woke.”

Of course all of these things are true. They are in point of fact very often ignorant racists and sexists and xenophobes. Aware or not… by intention or upbringing… that is ignorant racist, sexist, xenophobic behavior. That’s a fact.

But facts don’t matter. Feelings do. And their feelings got hurt. And they revolted. And they won because cultural studies, history, sociology and psychology says… sooner or later… they’ll have to. Also a fact.

But facts don’t matter. Feelings do. And every time I’ve seen the O’Neill meme posted in the last few days, I’ve seen liberals come to dispute it. “No,” they say, “that’s not why Trump won. It’s because of the sexism, racism, interference by Russia, collusion by the FBI. It’s because he lied to you and you were too stupid to understand it. It’s because you’re too stupid to understand that Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing. It’s because of the electoral college. Hillary won the popular vote. Hillary should be president. Trump is evil! How are you too stupid to realize it’s not because we hurt your feelings?” And they say that because their feelings are hurt. And rightly so. And a lot of those things are true as well. But there’s one big fact that they’re ignoring. One incontrovertible fact… a fact that is not alternative and is indisputable: Brendan O’Neill voted for Trump because his feelings were hurt, and by sharing this, the person you are arguing with is telling you that they feel that way too.

Does that mean that liberals are wrong? Does that mean that our facts aren’t facts after all? Not really. And frankly, I believe my ideology is right. I believe that there is a shit ton of systemic racism, sexism and Otherisms out there and I’m going to call them out everytime I see them. I also don’t mind making fun of people and hurting their feelings from time to time. See, I’m an asshole and that kind of comes with the territory.

But it also means that I understand that just because I may be right, both morally and logically… that doesn’t mean that I can expect things to just work out. It doesn’t mean that I can expect people who have opposing ideologies to change their minds. It doesn’t mean that anything is ever going to be easy. It’s not. Change is hard. It’s slow. It takes work. And there’s a lot of moving backwards. And sometimes… after a long string of wins you end up with a supervillain in the Whitehouse. And all the facts in the world can’t change that. And won’t make the people who see him as a savior see it any differently.

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All Facts are Alternative (some are more alternative than others) was originally published on ChrisMaverick dotcom