#and also about fire (and all of its many connotations of course)

[incohorace]

10 + 19 + 25

10. do any of your ocs contain any symbolism in themselves/their story?

im gonna answer this just for symbolism within character design because symbolism is everywhere in my stories i cant get enough of it 🤷‍♀️ i feel like my designs are never very visual or complex and therefore i dont use a lot of motifs so the only thing i can think of is cyrus's white ministerial hat/scarf that he wears when in the royal court.........its partly about Order & how love disrupts that (the way his affair (can i call it an affair if hes unmarried? its definitely illicit) with aurelius acts almost as an oasis and a place where he can let go of his usual layers of facades and the way love acts in direct opposition to any sort of rigid or hierarchical system) and partly about hidden identity and intentions & artifice in political settings & hidden motives and backgrounds

19. who is your most recent oc?

gian ciceli and his family and environs!! the cicelis are the noble/leading family of mizzene, a remote town overlooking a huge valley from a hilltop, and gian is the current lord & lady's second child and oldest son. the other main characters are lucia (his sharp older sister), beatriz and orlando (his lordly (?) parents), timeo (his dashing, gossipy older cousin), marcel (a handsome, mysterious knight who stops in mizzene for a night before continuing on to the nearby monastery to become a monk), leandra (a beautiful minstrel), his troupe (more musicians & possibly accompanied by a wealthy old man who is rather enamoured with leandra. in the pederasty sense 😐) and nino (gian's jovial uncle). and probably a lot more characters, including gian's little siblings, other cousins, other more distant relatives, other travellers passing through mizzene, some monks and nuns, some peasants from the lower level of mizzene (its arranged with the castle of the cicelis at the very top and then with descending levels) who come into contact with the cicelis, etc etc. it doesnt exactly have a plot yet, although i have a few hundred words of the opening, but themes include voice/art/song/speech/silence, nothingness/emptiness/otherness and change/upheaval/modernity (in the loosest sense because this is a vaguely 13th century setting alkfhlfgh)

25. are there any two characters that are like a dynamic duo/group?

kit gordon & jasper gordon............butch girl and vaguely effeminate blond twin brother who are both a little obsessed with their mother, completely inseperable, have the exact same girl issues (<- their words not mine) and are both weirdly popular. arent they wonderful. special mention to cyrus & aurelius for (nearly) overthrowing a despotic monarchy with the power of elaborate schemes, queer love and strategic positions in the royal court 😍

[artiststarme]

The Long-Lost Wheeler

This fic is based on this post from @kcsplace! I'm sorry it was such a long wait but thanks for letting me use your idea! There was no way I could compress all of my ideas into a one-shot so this will be a series. I hope you like it!

~*~*~*~

Eddie had never known who his mom was. He didn’t know her name or what she looked like. All he knew was that she left him with his dad when he was barely two months old and never turned around to look back. He would dream of meeting her as a child. His childish mind would dream up faceless women hugging him, making him lunch, playing games with him, and anything else moms were supposed to do with their sons. He would imagine being part of a happy family when he saw the other kids at school getting picked up by their moms and dads. 

After so many disappointments though and so many years gone by, he gave up hope on ever meeting her. She didn’t want anything to do with her own kid? He didn’t want anything to do with her. The nameless, faceless woman that gave birth to him was nothing but a surrogate in his mind. Just a stranger that brought him into this hard world to abandon him when the going got rough. From then on, he viewed her with little more than mild disinterest. 

Whenever he had asked his dad about her, he never had anything good to say. Old Richie Munson said she was a manipulative bitch that was always too good for everyone around her, always looking to find something better. His old man would get upset whenever Eddie brought her up and on one fateful occasion, shaved his entire head because ‘he looked too much like her’. After that, Eddie never asked his dad about her again. 

A few months after he moved in with Uncle Wayne, he felt safe enough to ask him if he knew who his mother was. Wayne was a lot more tactful and nice with his description of her. He told Eddie that she was just a scared lady, unsure of what she wanted and too skittish to take care of little Eddie with his dad. He made her sound like leaving Eddie was a byproduct of escaping his dad and Eddie lost some of his anger towards her after that. He’d been trying to get away from his dad for eleven years, he couldn’t fault her for fleeing when she had the chance. 

He thought about her even less after the Upside Down once he had a group of friends close enough to call family. They filled the void that his dysfunctional and fractured family had left behind. He also found an unexpected best friend in Nancy Wheeler. They had a lot more in common than he thought they would and they got on like a house on fire. Things were finally going well for Eddie which was ironic since it was a near death experience and week in hell that led to it. 

Hellfire was back in action after being banned from the school due to its “Satanic connotations” and was now being hosted in the Wheeler’s basement. Eddie didn’t have his throne anymore or his chalice of Mountain Dew and it smelled a bit like a sweaty armpit. However, he was surrounded by his friends and the happiness he felt more than made up for the downsides. 

They were on their fourth day of the campaign when everything blew up. The entirety of Hellfire club was situated around the Wheeler’s kitchen on the singular snack break that Eddie allowed over the course of the day. All of the boys were talking amongst each other while Eddie relaxed against the counter happily watching his friends being happy and munching on baby carrots. Everything was fine until Karen Wheeler walked in carrying several grocery bags that Eddie immediately went to help her with. 

“Here, I can help you with that,” he said, leaning down to her height to take some of the heavier bags out of her arms. 

“Oh, thank you. Mike never helps with the groceries, you would think one would want to help their mother-” Karen abruptly stopped talking once she made eye contact with Eddie. He stalled a bit in response before setting the bags down on the counter next to where he was previously situated. 

She nodded at him jerkily before moving over to Mike and dragging him by the ear just out of sight, not out of hearing though. Eddie could hear what she said loud and clear. 

“Michael, what is he doing here? You didn’t tell me that you were going to have that… that boy over to my house!” She sounded pissed and Eddie narrowed his eyes as he listened. 

“Who, Eddie? He’s my friend, I told you he was coming over. You said it was okay for me to have my friends over to play Dungeons and Dragons today!”

“I want him out of my house, Michael. Don’t invite him over again, he’s not welcome here.”

“What the hell, mom? Why? He didn’t do anything wrong!”

“Now, Michael!”

Eddie didn’t know what the fuck was going on but he knew when he wasn’t wanted. Prior to the Spring Break from Hell, he would have rebelled and relished in the unease his presence caused. However, with the majority of the town still gunning for his arrest even after he was proven innocent, he knew not to make waves. 

When Mike turned the corner into the kitchen, still glowering and angry, Eddie clapped his hands to gather the rest of Hellfire’s attention. “Alright my fellow gremlins, let’s call it a day. We’ll resume our merciless quest next Friday. Expect a call with the updated Hellfire destination sometime next week. Godspeed.” 

Understandably this caused an uproar with the Hellfire members protesting and even Mike tried to convince Eddie to stay. “No, no, no, we’re all done for the day. We don’t want to overstay our welcome. We’ll wrap up the campaign next week. End of discussion!”

He gave everyone one last look and made this way back downstairs to pack up his things. He didn’t really blame her, he thought as he grabbed his things hastily. He wouldn’t want an alleged murderer in his house either. When he made his way past Karen on his way out of the house, he paused in front of her. 

“Thanks for letting us play here a few times. I’m sorry for making you uncomfortable, Mrs. Wheeler. I didn’t mean to. We’ll meet somewhere else next time,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

And with that he walked out of the Wheeler’s house with the dulcet sounds of Mike screaming at his mother following behind him. 

When he brought it up to Nancy just a few days later, she was perplexed. She had no idea on why her mother would be so vocally against having Eddie in the house. Karen Wheeler was known to be the perfect doting mother. To have her kick Eddie out of her home and to hate him so blatantly was almost unfathomable. She told Eddie that she would get to the bottom of it and she did. She didn’t expect to discover that Eddie was her long-lost brother that her mother abandoned. Now how was she supposed to tell Eddie?

Permanent tag list: @doubleb11 @nburkhardt @zerokrox-blog @newtstabber @i-less-than-three-you @carlyv @pyrohonk @straight4joekeery @trippypancakes @conversesweetheart @estrellami-1 @suddenlyinlove @yikes-a-bee @swimmingbirdrunningrock @perseus-notjackson @anaibis @merricatty @maya-custodios-dionach @grtwdsmwhr @manda-panda-monium @lumoschild @goodolefashionedloverboi @mentallyundone @awkwardgravity1 @kcsplace

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 30/03/2024

THANK YOU FOR RIPPING

Season 1 Featured on: beatmania IIDX 7 GRAND Also on: GilvaSunner's Highest Quality Video Game Rips: Volume 7: Part mm2wood

Ripped by beat_shobon

Requested by Bumsoldier! @bumsoldier (Request Form)

Its that time again - another Season 1 finale rip! But there's a good reason these keep showing up, as I reiterate with each one I cover - The Season 1 finale was when the team was truly firing on all cylinders to end the channel off with a bang. Planet Wisp Mashup Medley, The SiIvaGunner Smurfs Collab, File Select Fusion Collab, Stone Halation - tons of these incredibly ambitious, full-blast collaborations, that I've written plenty of words about already. In comparison, THANK YOU FOR RIPPING feels almost as if dwarfed in scope, not helped by being a rip of a comparatively niche series. Which is a damn shame - because what beat_shobon has done here is just as much of a loveletter to the entire channel yet expressed through his own individual style in a far more condensed runtime.

First of all though - wow, beat_shobon! It's been since Rolling Start that I wrote about one of his rips, and since then I've learned that he's become a bit of a superstar since his 2016 SiIvaGunner days - notably winning a Vocaloid songwriting contest with the ironically-named Can't Make A Song!! in 2018. The guy has a great grasp on this kind of music, is my point, and both Rolling Start and THANK YOU FOR RIPPING show that off well - but more importantly, I adore how THANK YOU FOR RIPPING still feels as much like a love letter to SiIvaGunner as a whole as it does a flexing of its rippers' muscles. The song used as the foundation for the mashup is GO MY WAY!! from the IDOLM@STER franchise, a song that was immensely notable in Season 1 as the song to supposedly "replace" Snow Halation during The Reboot storyline - see I Saw a Brainwasher Today for a bit more details on this. Its a song that I remember receiving a lot of pushback during that event as a result of those connotations, as a lot of people found it to be even *more* grating of an idol song than Snow Halation was - yet with The Reboot concluded, with those emotions settled, I find that the song has come to represent a sense of...unity, in the fanbase. It IS silly idol music, but we've come to accept it as part of SiIvaGunner, as a result of what The Reboot taught us.

That's far from all that THANK YOU FOR RIPPING contains, of course - the piano in the background continuously plays segments of The Flintstones theme throughout the entire song, as it jumps from joke to joke. Its a bit of a journey throughout the entire channel's life during Season 1: starting where it all began with Vinesauce Joel's reaction to 7 Grand Dad, to a quick clip of Snoop Dogg's "Smoke Weed Everyday!!", a sudden jumpscare from The Bean (I'll get to it someday), then moving into memes prominent in the season's last few months, in the infamous POKEMON GO SONG!!! and The Nutshack theme. All the while, again, those Flintstones-esque notes stay prominently audible in the background, as to keep reminding us of where this whole thing all began.

Perhaps most interesting of all, though, is near the rips end at around the 1:30 mark. Another Vinesauce Joel clip plays, a quite well known one - "WHO'S BEEN DRAWING DICKS?" - but its pitch shifted in a way that may ring as familiar to many of you. It is, indeed, directly referencing the rip "Creative Exercise - Mario Paint", known by its album name as Mario Paint exe 2. A sequel to a prior-made Soundcloud mashup from the same ripper in 2015, this is as of today the third-most-viewed rip on the entire SiIvaGunner channel - and was, to my surprise, also made by beat_shobon. Making that connection, then, drew my attention to another part of the rip just a few seconds earlier, where the instantly-recognizable bellow of "DAY-TO-NAAA!!!" from Daytona USA plays in the midst of the mix. I cannot help but think that this is a direct callback to Rolling Start, as another one of beat_shobon's most celebrated rips - one also made during The Reboot, tracing back to the rip's central joke.

I dunno - there are tons of these little connections to make within the surprisingly dense 2-minute runtime of THANK YOU FOR RIPPING, yet they all work toward the very same emotional goal. Gratitude - a thank you, from the entire SiIvaGunner channel yes, but also from beat_shobon himself, thanking us all for having enjoyed so much of the channel's life. Through thick and thin, through Reboots and Beans, though rips made by people all over the world - we loved SiIvaGunner more than ever before during the Season 1 finale. And its always such a treat to go back to that time and see just how much it meant to even the rippers behind it all.

[doodle-nerd]

Hey, buddy!

Have you seen the TOH finale?

What are your thoughts on it?

Hi!

Yes, I watched it yesterday and I totally love it. It was an emotional rollercoaster, I cried a few times and then smiled wide to the screen-

I totally LOVE all of the future designs DAMN LOOK AT RAINE THEY LOOK SO AWESOME (also can we talk about them and Eda switching earrings? I love that little thing). LOOK AT HUNTER AND WILLOW TOO, matching Flapjack tattoos!? I'm not crying you are-

I'll miss TOH a lot, I hope we will get some more content because it was AMAZING - story, characters and how they showed it - all of it 💜

And I could honestly go on and on for HOURS about it because there's so many little details that should be mentioned:

I loved the final fight with green and red fighting for place on the screen - these are opposing colours, which is already cool, plus, their meaning is different than usually! Green is life, peace, safety. Red is alarming, dangerous, unsafe. But here? Green is gooey evil and red is lively red grass and YOU FEEL IT INSTANTLY. Despite the usual connotations with these colours you see what's good and what's bad and I LOVE IT. Also, we have two types of light in here - glowing, cold, blue Belos' eyes and Luz's warm, yellowish light. THESE ARE OPPOSING COLOURS TOO. And forms - crystallized goo forms the sharp-edged web, triangle-based forms. Grass is soft, it doesn't have sharp edges. Same with eyes and lights - eyes have corners, somehow squeeze into the whole picture and lights just fly around freely so you can see their perfectly round shape everywhere. Awesome usage of colour theory and shapes <3 And of course I can't skip the thing that light was needed to release someone from the puppet form, right? Luz is the light. It's literally her name. Something that looked like an aesthetic thingy and the least useful spell in combat (after all, fire, ice, plants were used more often) turned out to be THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. I literally have a temptation to rewatch the whole show just to analyze the lighting in different scenes, damn.

I love how the Collector is designed, too. If it was any other villain in the world, their sudden change would feel weird and meh, but they are a KID. And they're created and presented like one. They do not understand things, they just want to play and do not get why others don't wanna. As a bullied child, who had no friends for a while, damn I understood them so well in that moment. They changed as soon as people started treating them like a child and not like an enemy. Isn't it lovely? Also, the change was SO WELL MOTIVATED. Collector didn't decide to help them because Luz died. Damn, for how long did they know each other? Probably not more than an hour, children get attached easier, but I doubt it'd be that easy. Collector just UNDERSTOOD WHAT DEATH IS IN THAT MOMENT and realized that their actions had, have and will have consequences. Again, I LOVE it.

Final scene with Belos is awesome, too. He is himself to the very end. Tries manipulating Luz after all of the stuff that already happened - showing himself in his "original" human form, pleading, making himself a victim... And then it starts raining. He is dissolved by the acid which made me literally gasp. I mean, damn, you could put it in a Disney series!? TOTALLY AWESOME. There was something sometime about witches dying from water, dissolving in it, so... This scene hit hard, had its meaning and was totally amazing and well planned.

And the final final scene in the future. I rewatched it SO. MANY. TIMES. There's so much to look at, so many actions going on in the background, daaaaamn <3 It makes me go "why couldn't we see more, stupid Disney" EVEN HARDER!!! World building is so well done and you can see it even in a little scenes like that,,, All of the characters grew and glow brightly. About glowing - THERE'S LIGHT EVERYWHERE. These scenes have lots of soft glows and lights around that are not only making the atmosphere, they have a meaning, because light, Luz, was what saved the demon realm.

I adore Hunter being a palisman maker. Literally no better job for this lovely boy. And I love that he has people that love him - Willow and Dadrius (I literally screamed when I saw Darius next to Hunter when everyone else had their reunion [and I also loved Amity-Alador reunion. With loser Odalia standing right next to them, all grumpy]). I love love loooooveeee working on a taking off sigils feat. Darius, Raine and Alador. Two ex-coven heads, who started rebellion, and amazing scientist, inventor, who learned how to choose his own way (isn't his history similar to the Amity's? Escaping Odalia's influence and getting to start new, better life...). And the best part - they finally succeeded, mixing healing magic with technology. SUPER COOL (Little Darius-Alador interaction was super cool, too, of course. Alador has NO CLUE so much- And Darius with this little chest touch and sliding away... Please we all know they're fruity don't we?). I'd love to hear more about all of the things that happened in between, when Luz was finishing school, because there's still so much possible content!

Also I cannot skip the masterpiece "they're almost gone! Say BYE!", obviously targeted to us, fans, not to Collector. But... It made me thinking. Aren't we like Collector, too? Taking the characters, placing them in the fanfics, fanarts, fancomics, aus, PLAYING WITH THEM? It probably wasn't supposed to be that deep but... In my head it became that deep LOL. So... Are we Collectors?

Okay, okay, I could analyze every single one of future designs, too, because I adore them, I could analyze Amity's designs change, gradually switching from Odalia-like to Alador-like, but I wanted to answer short and made quite an essay here already- So maybe, to summarize: I loved the finale. It was well planned and well done. It's amazing that they managed to fit it all in with limited time, without it feeling overly rushed and/or unsatisfying. I feel satisfied with the ending we got.

🍪 <- reward for reading all of this, enjoy 💜

[kafkaoftherubble]

破蛋日快乐！你的礼物是：为什么龙会戏珠？//

Happy Hatching Anniversary! Your present is: why do Longs hold pearls?

@secondhanddragon So, you wanna know why?

To be honest, while I was trawling for information, I realized that not even that many Chinese sites talk about the pearls. Such might be the nature of folklore—everyone gives their own interpretations, which are then spread orally. Tough to find "academic sources." And of course, wonky citations with broken links and poor reference points are always a hindrance.

"神龙戏珠" (The Divine Dragon Playing with Its Pearl) is a motif that has a few variations. It could be a single dragon (单龙戏珠), two dragons (二龙戏珠), three dragons (三龙戏珠), and even multiple dragons chasing one single pearl (多龙戏珠) [1].

In this figure, you can see five dragons chasing a single pearl. [1]

-------

#1: The Pearl... Really Is a Pearl!

Pearls are formed by living shell mollusks—which are members of the "aquatic tribes" [2]. They are hard to come by, lustrous, pretty as fuck, and very beloved in Chinese culture.

Chinese dragons, unlike the Western ones, are associated with water, right? That's because Long is "the king of the ocean" and it "rules over all aquatic tribes" [2]. If your dime-a-dozen clam could produce something as precious as a pearl, why can't the King itself produce the most beautiful and precious pearl that triumphs them all, huh?

This appears to be the genesis of the concept of the "Pearl." But naturally, as time goes on, more and more meanings are embedded in it!

----------

#2: The Pearl as an Egg

Long is a chimera of sorts. It's an amalgamation of, inter alia, a fish, a crocodile, a snake, a boar, a horse, an ox, a lizard, and a deer [1] [2]. Fishes and the reptilian reps in this group lay eggs. The crocodile's egg is even kinda big—way larger than a pearl.

Do you see? The egg is seen as a pearl and vice versa [1] [2]. Eggs are the source of life for crocodiles and snakes, and therefore, egg-pearl represents life in dragon arts [2]. When the dragon is "playing with its pearl," it's actually playing with "life." This motif embodies the dragon's status as a protector and caretaker of life [2].

Almost like a parent would...

---------

#3: The Pearl as a Symbol of Love for the Dragons' Children

Now, some might think that all Longs are male, as the mythical creature symbolizing women is often the Fenghuang (and so one might think that all Fenghuangs are females). That's not true. Dragons and Fenghuang both have two, uh, sexes.

This figure shows two dragons "playing" with a pearl. [1]

The "Two Dragons Chasing a Pearl" motif is popular in classical Chinese artwork. One of the dragons is male, and the other is female. The Pearl symbolizes egg/life, as stated in #2, which means the Pearl also comes to symbolize "a child" [1] [2].

In other words, Papa Dragon and Mama Dragon are playing with—and stealthily protecting—Anya Pearl.

An important note that isn't stated in any of my citations, but is nonetheless relevant: Chinese people may call themselves 龙的传人, "The Dragon's Heir." It means—as mythical origin goes—the Chinese people identify as "the children of the Long." Now connect this to what you learned in #3.

-------

#4: The Pearl as the Sun

Sometimes the Pearl is ON FIRE!!!

This is especially predominant in the aforementioned "Two Dragons Chasing a Pearl" motif. The Pearl looks more like a fireball than an actual pearl. Below the Pearl, then, one may find a depiction of the sea.

"The Pearl leaps out from the ocean." What does that connotate? The rising sun [2]!

Now, what does it have to do with the dragon? Well, have a little detour.

The Four Symbols (四象)

You might have already heard of this, but in case you didn't: each cardinal direction has a "guardian."

东方青龙 // Azure Dragon of the East

西方白虎 // White Tiger of the West

南方朱雀 // Vermillion Bird of the South

北方玄武 // Black Warrior (or Black Tortoise) of the North

They represent more than just directions—they have their own traits, backstories, virtues, etc.

Who's the Guardian of the East? The Azure Dragon!

Now, drawing our discussion back to the Pearl, you can see why the dragon chases after it now, right? The Pearl is the Sun; it rises from the East. The Guardian of the East plays/chases after it as an emblem of ancient Chinese worship of the Sun [1] [2].

-------

#5: The Pearl and the Dragons Representing Chinese Aesthetics [1]

Chinese art loves "wholeness" and "pair."

You often find a pair of things in Chinese culture: a pair of Door God, a pair of Chinese duilian (poetry of sorts; used for blessings and wishes), the likes. Chinese culture also really loves things like the full moon, because "roundness" symbolizes the whole, unity, and consummation.

Two dragons form a pair. In front of them, an orb—a round, whole object. Hence, the motif is well-beloved as it features two of the Chinese culture's favorite aesthetics [1].

Kinda hard to tell, but two dragons are playing with the pearl here.

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

And that concludes the answer to your hundred-year enigma, haha! To the best of my ability, anyway. I sure hope it's been a blast to read.

More importantly, happy birthday, @autistic-beanmonster2!

I have been saving this up for a ramble just for you, but I couldn't find the time to write it. I'm sorry; I really planned to show this to you the moment the time struck 12 am in your time zone through the power of "scheduled post," but... let's just say I've been hit by a hindrance. Oops!

Well, does it matter if I'm just a bit late?

Thank you for reading my ramble!

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

Citations:

神龙戏珠，所戏珠子为何？("The Divine Dragon Plays with Its Pearl; What is that Pearl?") by 徐崇良工作室, essay on Sohu.com [in Chinese]

龙的嘴里为什么要含着珠子 (Why does the dragon have a pearl in its mouth") answered by an anonymous user on wenwen.sogou.com [in Chinese]

The question that produced this ramble is originally found here.

[eremosjournal]

Revelation 3: 15-16

I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm-neither hot nor cold-I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

This scripture is basically “Baby Got Back” for Christians, and “lukewarm” is their “Becky”. Like, it’s not derogatory, but the connotation isn’t positive. “Lukewarm” is a term used internally by Christians to shame those who, through inconsistent practice, bring down the class average, so to speak. But I don’t think “lukewarm” carries the impact Christians think it does, and I certainly don’t think Christianity has made the impact Sir Mix-a-Lot has!

An anecdote: I was recently on a long drive with a friend, and we were listening to music from his Spotify. I was vibing, until (clutching pearls) an AD disrupted the music. Like, an advertisement. I was, of course, incredulous. My friend listens to music constantly, so the thought that all this time, all his music has involuntarily been on shuffle, interrupted by (loud gagging) ads literally made me sick. I offered to buy him a premium membership, or add him as another user on my premium account, but he declined. It was one of the most jarring moments of my adult life.

Thinking back, my confusion at my friend reminds me a lot of how I feel when I see Christians calling other Christians “lukewarm”. I immediately judged my friend for not sharing in my music streaming practices, for being a lukewarm Spotify-haver (if that sounds ridiculous to you, you’re already getting my point). In a way, Christianity is a membership. It’s meant to give access to joy and comfort that others don’t get to enjoy, in exchange for adherence to its tenets and a few bucks here and there.

But that’s not the truth, Ellen. Joy and comfort are available to everyone through many different lifestyles, each as different from the last and each as valid as Christianity. My friend, for his own reasons, doesn’t want to upgrade to premium. Many Christians, for their own reasons, don’t practice diligently. What harm does that do to “on fire” Christians? What good does it do them to judge? Even if I had five Spotify Premium accounts playing five different albums out of five different devices all day long, that wouldn’t make me better at listening to music than my friend with free Spotify. That would just make me really unnecessarily into Spotify Premium and also super f*cking annoying.

I don’t think “on fire” Christians have a monopoly on life’s meaning. They are subscribed to a membership meant to help them find it. No one is closer to finding that meaning because of how they worship, and no one is getting closer by judging how others live. Self-worth shouldn’t be gleaned from your assumption that someone else is underperforming your chosen rituals. Maybe the lukewarms just let the minutiae of life momentarily eclipse their faith. Maybe their quest for meaning got shuffled with some meaninglessness. I think that’s normal.

We all have our “memberships”, regular habits and practices we subscribe to to make us feel good. That’s part of the sustaining attractiveness of religion: it makes people feel good about themselves and the world, offers a meter to the unrhythmic nature of life. But why should everyone have to have the same membership? How can there be a wrong one? Free Spotify, Spotify Premium, Apple Music, “lofi hip hop radio 📚 - beats to relax/study to” - who cares? It’s all music. And no matter your approach and what you’re on fire for, it’s all life. Everyone is just doing what feels good to get to tomorrow, assuming it comes.

By Elise Letrondo

[soul-dwelling]

Also I wouldn't be surprised if the bug thing originally had another or an additional meaning besides as a metaphor for "humans strive for death, like moths for flames" - like its too specific as a thing to only get reduced to be Giovanis gimmick. I think the literall alien plot would make sense, of them turning planets into suns for their sustenance - but this would also mean the Soul Eater connection came a lot later (except if you wanna accept aliens as the backstory for Soul Eater lol)

I can forgive coincidences, especially when it fits a theme to the story or a character’s motif. 

Giovanni is a bug man, and it has been bugs all along that turn people into Infernals? Sure, go for it, it’s literature, this doesn’t have to be realistic, it just has to fit the vibe and not take people out of the story. 

It didn’t take me out of the story, so that was fine. (Especially compared to how the meta stuff and prequel stuff really took me out of the story and made me stop caring about how the plot would end and what happened to the characters.) 

And for me anyway the Giovanni and bug stuff all just meshed well together and was one of the few parts of the series I enjoyed. The moth to a flame line? That line hits hard. The idea of bugs being aliens, something that has been a conspiracy theory or a part of supernatural lore long before Fire Force? Yes, as you said, it ties into the literal alien plot and makes sense. That all works and made Giovanni and the Hoods more engaging as villains: it tapped into something with history, something you could play around with visually and thematically, something like bugs that bring so many connotations, mostly negative (hiding in the shadows, feasting on decay and death) but some positive so that, when Shinra wins the day, these same icons can be reversed into something more uplifting (the garden motif with Iris, meaning that of course bugs still serve a purpose to this world, despite whatever negative connotations humans attach to them with their silly beliefs). 

Too bad, in my opinion, the bug motif got lost in the shuffle of all the other thematic approaches to designing the Hoods later: did we really need a snake and scorpion motif with the Purple Smoke, did we really need a zombie and stitched motif with Ritsu, did we really need a dragon motif and a metal motif? It felt like when DuckTales 2017 thought it was being clever with all the iterations of Beagle Boy trios when they all just came across as uninspired one-note gags--only with Fire Force, it felt either like Easter Eggs to Soul Eater (until suddenly, no, it’s no longer Easter Eggs, it’s probably that Orochi and Sasori are ancestors of the Gorgon siblings) or stuff that could be Easter Eggs but were still fun visually and thematically (Ritsu’s stitched design and zombie ability) or just underdeveloped (the metals) or forced setup and payoff for the finale (of course there is a Hood named Dragon to fight our knight Arthur--boring). 

And, to build on something else you said, Soul Eater didn’t seem to make it obvious that it had any aliens in it, aside from potentially the Clowns on the Moon. Fire Force worked better for me when it did stuff that Soul Eater didn’t: here is religious discussion, here are governmental conspiracies, here is taking death series, here are aliens. To reduce all of that to a prequel saps the differences between the two stories and their settings, and it just opens more boring questions as to why none of this stuff ever had an obvious presence in Soul Eater. 

[accursedkaleeshi]

Kaleeshi Spiritualism

The Kaleeshi pantheon is called the Hiilsay, which translates literally to “Soul/Value dais”. The Kaleesh often shorten this to just “The Say”. It has 8 main branches of Hiil (values of soul) that encompass all things.

A completely made-up lore dump from Accursed. 2.5k words until I find a better way to present this information. Sorry I made up so many words

Oyar (Wholeness)

        Oyar written in a specific character refers to the wholeness of the Mother & Spirit that, together, represent the All-Mother. Otherwise it is used to refer to spiritual completeness of oneself or community. It is something like enlightenment & it is very difficult to achieve.

Sidiir (Affiliates)

        The Say is split into 2 Sidiir which group affiliated values together. The Sidiir are Vivak & Ythral.

        Vivak is kind of like a light side. The more exciting side that everyone likes. The values in Vivak working together are attributed to life & vigor. War, Fire/Light, & Many: things the Kaleesh are all about. It is crowned by Mother, that gives all things.

        Ythral is kind of like a dark side. Things that are more intangible & complex. Although most Kaleesh know that Ythral is just as important as Vivak, its values have certain connotations. It is crowned by Spirit, which fills all but is often hard to understand. Water/Dark is synonymous with the void. The One is taboo & of course Death is not always pleasant.

Fyar (Balance)

        Fyar is a very specific concept. It refers to the bond between the hiil in opposing sidiir. One thing is dependent on the other in an inescapable bond that wants to be balanced. Light & Dark, The Many & the One. War & Death. Mother & Spirit are different than the rest as they are simultaneously created from & combine to form all things.

Oyama (The All-Mother)

        Also referred to as The Mother, Mother Kalee, or just Kalee herself, she is the center of Kaleeshi spirituality. Oyama is the start & end of all kaleesh & her creatures. The glyph is obviously the glyph for Mother within the Spirit. Oyama is always referred to with female pronouns. She is not usually visually represented but when she is it is as an ancient animal that the kaleesh believe they have descended from.

Masyr (Mother)

        Mother & Spirit are the root of all things. Mother is said to live in the hearts & souls of all kaleesh, since all kaleesh come from a mother. Mother also has domain & overlap with other hiil & lesser values but most notably fertility, green season, & protector of children.

        The glyph for Mother is the symbol for “person” cradled in two strokes, heavy in the center for support. The Hiilsay glyphs have gone largely unchanged since ancient times when kaleesh wrote exclusively with their claws. Temples to Mother are covered in clinging vines or light cloth banners where vines can’t grow. The temples range from enormous ziggurats to simple stelae on the side of paths with messages like “Call your mom :)”. Temple priests, Mother Minders, unlike other disciplines, are traditionally all female. Bonus lore: Taa’yn was a Mother Minder & was considered by the wives to have been blessed for her service.

        Kaleesh seeking consul or comfort from Mother will offer items that represent their own mothers or their motherhood.

Yth (Spirit)

        Yth (pronounced eeTH) is the flow of all energy on Kalee. Yth is just how kaleesh interpret the Force. Possibly the oldest glyph, it is just a scrawled circle as it encompasses everything. Most kaleesh have a healthy respect for the spirit since the only thing generally understood about it is that one’s soul is made of yth.

        Since Mother & Spirit are all things, there is a LOT of room for specialization. There are MANY different kinds of priests & shamans that have a wide range in their understanding & sensitivity of the Yth. There are not usually temples dedicated solely to the concept of Yth as they feel it is implied in any holy space. Temples dedicated to its attributes are often very potent.

        Spiritual kaleesh shed their strong emotions around as they accept becoming one with the All-Mother, on purpose or otherwise. Lingering energy lends to kaleesh continuing to believe their ancestors can still affect them. That & occasionally there are ghosts.

Sol (Light)

        Sol can mean light or fire in both a holy or literal sense. First of the more direct hiil, it covers the goods & the bads of the sun & of fire, Prometheus style. Kaleesh love being warm & goddamn do they love cooking food. Sol covers smaller values like hearth, metalwork, leatherwork & bone work. Sol & Water often have spots in each other’s temples to encourage balance to agriculture.

        Temples to Sol are always lit up & warm. Sol’s glyph is obviously sunrise on the horizon. A central fire pit is a common temple layout but in Sol temples it is a Feature™. Parishioners bring things to burn most often but will also offer flowers & fish that are the colors of the sun & fire. Sol sects range from journeying kaleesh bringing light to dark places with their ritual torches up to uh purification through fire inquisition type fuckers.

Der (Dark)

        Der refers to darkness, absence of light, & unknowable depths of dark water. Shadow is not something most kaleesh revere & they tend to be wary of the unknown dark. Hunters & trackers will invoke stealth & shade for successful stalking. Hunting nocturnal predators is usually a special occasion & requires experience. Kalee’s ecosystems are often wildly different at night. The glyph for Der is a horizon like its fyar Sol but is distinguished by a lone, dark ominous dot beneath it. What’s under there? Who knows!

        Der has the most disciples in its ocean faring kaleesh: the miirmanja (coastal hands of the sea) & the miirpinj (open ocean messengers). Like fire, water is both a giver & taker of life. But Der is considered with much more fear. There is no returning from the cold, dark abyss of deep water. It is a quiet & inescapable death, the opposite of a warrior’s frenetic death on the battlefield.

        But for its life sustaining merits temples to Der are dotted around Kalee’s many streams, rivers, & coasts. They are the most trafficked of Ythral temples by kaleesh trying to grow crops, sail well, & hoping for a safe monsoon season. Offerings include shells, reeds, blue beads & portions of fisherman’s catches. Temples range from small streamside shrines to some of the largest temples on the world given how much of the planet is water.

        Less seen are stelae to Der’s darkness bearing often just one word: “unseen”. These are shrines for the invisible ones. Some of them are seen as a spot to offer the homeless charity & some are seen as thieves’ guild markers, lowering the property value, so-to-speak. Rumor has it there are large hidden temples to Der Unseen, but no one has ever found one.

Klăn (The Many)

The Many is one of most revered of the eight, second only to Mother. Obviously, the Kaleesh are an extremely social species & feel great safety in numbers. Klăn represents family, community, & relationships. Its most notable sub-divines are health, love, & ceremony (i.e. song & dance).

These temples are very popular & always filled with people who will more readily help each other than if they just met on the roads. Klăn also has the most temples. Each community has one in the center, usually started as a central homestead family’s temple. This is what happened with the Sheelal family’s temple.

The glyph for Klăn is, of course, just 2 symbols for ‘person’. Kaleesh who regularly visit their temples often add another symbol to the hearth to represent themselves. Old temples have walls covered in glyphs. Kaleesh will stop by a Klăn temple seeking health & good fortune for their families, community projects, & fruitful marriages. Offerings include bread, berries or flowers that grow in clusters, feathers of colony seabirds, & buflor totems. Little carved frogs for household protection.

On (The One)

        Given that the kaleesh are all about the greater good, the One is kind of taboo. Although it garners a general respect since “there is not Many without first the One”, people are usually judgmental of the On until they need it. The Kaleesh are cautious about the slope between self-care & personal well-being to selfish & pompous. The On doesn’t really have sub categories; it is more about maintaining one’s self. It represents & is represented by balance.

        The only widely known cult of On is all about finding the balance between worthless & selfish. This isn’t even a sneaky mental health allegory. They don’t want to talk about it but will make assumptions if they see you struggling, like a shame your family couldn’t get that under control.

Although quite somber & stigmatized, the On is ultimately responsible for the hardest party an individual can get (besides dying). The Zrandalim is the Rite of Reconnecting. When a kaleesh feels they are yzron they feel disconnected in one way or another. This is often the hardest thing a kaleesh can go through. When that kaleesh feels re-engaged (yzranda: reconnect) with their community through acceptance of self: holy fuck we GAT to throw a party. Because not all kaleesh make it through yzron. Also Zrandalim usually includes beniilim (rite of earned self) since they’ve usually had some title-worthy epiphany.

The glyph for On is ‘person’ with another dark, ominous dot at the end. What is inside someone? Who knows! There are not modern temples to On. There are ruins of ancient On temples built by ill-fated warlords. Every now & again through Kaleeshi history some big shot warrior thinks “You know what, fuck it: I AM the BEST.” & builds monuments to themselves. These ancient emperors serve as cautionary tales against seizing power for oneself.

In more modern practice kaleesh would reach out to their ancestors for help finding their way at private or quiet temples or shrines. This might mean going on a pilgrimage or trying different roles in a community. (Or talking to your mom about your feelings. 75% of the time mom has your back.)

Vang (War)

        Vang is a shortened combination of ingja (hunt) & vasor (battle). Both of these concepts are much older than modern kaleesh. Kaleesh, being predatory creatures, find the hunt instinctual. Battle is closely related, since it utilizes the same concepts. There is usually an important distinction between what you hunt & what you battle. Early kaleesh would be much quicker to fight other groups of unknown kaleesh if they posed a threat to their group. They laid out territories before territory was ever a spoken concept.

        With hunting & combat being the 2nd & 3rd most common activities that kaleesh pour all their energy into, Vang is on par with the popularity of Klăn. The day to day uses of Vang temples is to come thank the animals of the hunts & wishing all involved good health. Hunting parties will often bring a large kill to the temple to process for the community so it was common that the temple floors be covered in blood. Kaleesh will also offer up some of their hunts & goods to hope for peaceful borders (or “I hope da fuck they do” borders). Vang & Sol temples are popular places to take your weapons (or yourself) to be anointed for battle. Vang will grant you honor & glory if you play your cards right.

        The glyph for War is the sigil for person & a vertical stroke downward. Most assume this to mean “go out with intent to end a life” but scholars aren’t really sure. Vang temples are decorated in blood colored tapestries (Kaleeshi blood is red orange). Some of the hardcore ones are actually dyed in the blood of enemies & always contain trophies & bones.

        Also! Since the only times the Kaleesh have been off-world were for the purposes of waging actual war obviously the first of their colony temples were to Vang. Which was a lot for outsiders to take in.

Urv (Death)

        The kaleesh have a complex relationship with Death. If a large part of your culture is oh boy, here I go killing again there is a high chance that you too will be killed. Upon death, a kaleesh is supposed to be humbled as all of the deeds in their life are added up &/or distributed to the community. They are then celebrated for their efforts & encouraged to join the All-Mother.

Even though they are taught to live with death at a young age it can still be pretty scary. Urvuyn is a unique type of kaleeshi anxiety. It translates to “death hate or jealousy”. Some kaleesh get anxiously preoccupied feeling like they have to have some good shit to be presented at their Ythyariilim (rite of death). Some kaleesh will get jaded thinking they will only be celebrated at death.

Death doesn’t have smaller values under it rather, like On, it represents an underlying value: Respect. The kaleesh respect their dead. If you disrespect their dead they will kill you. Granted it can be hard to tell what constitutes as disrespect to outsiders, since kaleesh go around wearing each other’s bones. But that is legitimately (usually) done out of respect. The Huk on Oben started fucking with the kaleeshi alters & were met with the wrath of Bentilais.

There are not many temples solely dedicated to Death. Most Kaleeshi temples contain the bones of their communities or families where you can honor them. Custom differs from place to place whether most of your bones are buried, in an urn, or in the central community pile of everybody’s bones. The glyph for Death is one stroke down & one stroke up. Down to the earth & back up to the All-Mother. When there is recently dead the candles have lanterns or directional covers so that the spirit doesn’t get confused by the light while looking for Oyama.

        Northern kaleesh feel very strongly that the dead deserve rest so priests that commune with the spirits are on thin fuckin’ ice, pal. Western kaleesh have the opposite opinion & feel like grandpa would LOVE the opportunity to go to battle once again. This is just the general geographical vibe but that does mean there is less of a market for undead in the North & a bit of the East in the northern hemisphere.

[ob-directory]

Machines

of

Loving Grace1

How AI Could Transform the World for the Better

October 2024

I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I’m the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or “doomer” who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don’t think that at all. In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they’re the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future. I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.

In this essay I try to sketch out what that upside might look like—what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right. Of course no one can know the future with any certainty or precision, and the effects of powerful AI are likely to be even more unpredictable than past technological changes, so all of this is unavoidably going to consist of guesses. But I am aiming for at least educated and useful guesses, which capture the flavor of what will happen even if most details end up being wrong. I’m including lots of details mainly because I think a concrete vision does more to advance discussion than a highly hedged and abstract one.

First, however, I wanted to briefly explain why I and Anthropic haven’t talked that much about powerful AI’s upsides, and why we’ll probably continue, overall, to talk a lot about risks. In particular, I’ve made this choice out of a desire to:

Maximize leverage. The basic development of AI technology and many (not all) of its benefits seems inevitable (unless the risks derail everything) and is fundamentally driven by powerful market forces. On the other hand, the risks are not predetermined and our actions can greatly change their likelihood.

Avoid perception of propaganda. AI companies talking about all the amazing benefits of AI can come off like propagandists, or as if they’re attempting to distract from downsides. I also think that as a matter of principle it’s bad for your soul to spend too much of your time “talking your book”.

Avoid grandiosity. I am often turned off by the way many AI risk public figures (not to mention AI company leaders) talk about the post-AGI world, as if it’s their mission to single-handedly bring it about like a prophet leading their people to salvation. I think it’s dangerous to view companies as unilaterally shaping the world, and dangerous to view practical technological goals in essentially religious terms.

Avoid “sci-fi” baggage. Although I think most people underestimate the upside of powerful AI, the small community of people who do discuss radical AI futures often does so in an excessively “sci-fi” tone (featuring e.g. uploaded minds, space exploration, or general cyberpunk vibes). I think this causes people to take the claims less seriously, and to imbue them with a sort of unreality. To be clear, the issue isn’t whether the technologies described are possible or likely (the main essay discusses this in granular detail)—it’s more that the “vibe” connotatively smuggles in a bunch of cultural baggage and unstated assumptions about what kind of future is desirable, how various societal issues will play out, etc. The result often ends up reading like a fantasy for a narrow subculture, while being off-putting to most people.

Yet despite all of the concerns above, I really do think it’s important to discuss what a good world with powerful AI could look like, while doing our best to avoid the above pitfalls. In fact I think it is critical to have a genuinely inspiring vision of the future, and not just a plan to fight fires. Many of the implications of powerful AI are adversarial or dangerous, but at the end of it all, there has to be something we’re fighting for, some positive-sum outcome where everyone is better off, something to rally people to rise above their squabbles and confront the challenges ahead. Fear is one kind of motivator, but it’s not enough: we need hope as well.

The list of positive applications of powerful AI is extremely long (and includes robotics, manufacturing, energy, and much more), but I’m going to focus on a small number of areas that seem to me to have the greatest potential to directly improve the quality of human life. The five categories I am most excited about are:

Biology and physical health

Neuroscience and mental health

Economic development and poverty

Peace and governance

Work and meaning

My predictions are going to be radical as judged by most standards (other than sci-fi “singularity” visions2), but I mean them earnestly and sincerely. Everything I’m saying could very easily be wrong (to repeat my point from above), but I’ve at least attempted to ground my views in a semi-analytical assessment of how much progress in various fields might speed up and what that might mean in practice. I am fortunate to have professional experience in both biology and neuroscience, and I am an informed amateur in the field of economic development, but I am sure I will get plenty of things wrong. One thing writing this essay has made me realize is that it would be valuable to bring together a group of domain experts (in biology, economics, international relations, and other areas) to write a much better and more informed version of what I’ve produced here. It’s probably best to view my efforts here as a starting prompt for that group.

Basic assumptions and framework

To make this whole essay more precise and grounded, it’s helpful to specify clearly what we mean by powerful AI (i.e. the threshold at which the 5-10 year clock starts counting), as well as laying out a framework for thinking about the effects of such AI once it’s present.

What powerful AI (I dislike the term AGI)3 will look like, and when (or if) it will arrive, is a huge topic in itself. It’s one I’ve discussed publicly and could write a completely separate essay on (I probably will at some point). Obviously, many people are skeptical that powerful AI will be built soon and some are skeptical that it will ever be built at all. I think it could come as early as 2026, though there are also ways it could take much longer. But for the purposes of this essay, I’d like to put these issues aside, assume it will come reasonably soon, and focus on what happens in the 5-10 years after that. I also want to assume a definition of what such a system will look like, what its capabilities are and how it interacts, even though there is room for disagreement on this.

By powerful AI, I have in mind an AI model—likely similar to today’s LLM’s in form, though it might be based on a different architecture, might involve several interacting models, and might be trained differently—with the following properties:

In terms of pure intelligence4, it is smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields – biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc. This means it can prove unsolved mathematical theorems, write extremely good novels, write difficult codebases from scratch, etc.

In addition to just being a “smart thing you talk to”, it has all the “interfaces” available to a human working virtually, including text, audio, video, mouse and keyboard control, and internet access. It can engage in any actions, communications, or remote operations enabled by this interface, including taking actions on the internet, taking or giving directions to humans, ordering materials, directing experiments, watching videos, making videos, and so on. It does all of these tasks with, again, a skill exceeding that of the most capable humans in the world.

It does not just passively answer questions; instead, it can be given tasks that take hours, days, or weeks to complete, and then goes off and does those tasks autonomously, in the way a smart employee would, asking for clarification as necessary.

It does not have a physical embodiment (other than living on a computer screen), but it can control existing physical tools, robots, or laboratory equipment through a computer; in theory it could even design robots or equipment for itself to use.

The resources used to train the model can be repurposed to run millions of instances of it (this matches projected cluster sizes by ~2027), and the model can absorb information and generate actions at roughly 10x-100x human speed5. It may however be limited by the response time of the physical world or of software it interacts with.

Each of these million copies can act independently on unrelated tasks, or if needed can all work together in the same way humans would collaborate, perhaps with different subpopulations fine-tuned to be especially good at particular tasks.

We could summarize this as a “country of geniuses in a datacenter”.

Clearly such an entity would be capable of solving very difficult problems, very fast, but it is not trivial to figure out how fast. Two “extreme” positions both seem false to me. First, you might think that the world would be instantly transformed on the scale of seconds or days (“the Singularity”), as superior intelligence builds on itself and solves every possible scientific, engineering, and operational task almost immediately. The problem with this is that there are real physical and practical limits, for example around building hardware or conducting biological experiments. Even a new country of geniuses would hit up against these limits. Intelligence may be very powerful, but it isn’t magic fairy dust.

Second, and conversely, you might believe that technological progress is saturated or rate-limited by real world data or by social factors, and that better-than-human intelligence will add very little6. This seems equally implausible to me—I can think of hundreds of scientific or even social problems where a large group of really smart people would drastically speed up progress, especially if they aren’t limited to analysis and can make things happen in the real world (which our postulated country of geniuses can, including by directing or assisting teams of humans).

I think the truth is likely to be some messy admixture of these two extreme pictures, something that varies by task and field and is very subtle in its details. I believe we need new frameworks to think about these details in a productive way.

Economists often talk about “factors of production”: things like labor, land, and capital. The phrase “marginal returns to labor/land/capital” captures the idea that in a given situation, a given factor may or may not be the limiting one – for example, an air force needs both planes and pilots, and hiring more pilots doesn’t help much if you’re out of planes. I believe that in the AI age, we should be talking about the marginal returns to intelligence7, and trying to figure out what the other factors are that are complementary to intelligence and that become limiting factors when intelligence is very high. We are not used to thinking in this way—to asking “how much does being smarter help with this task, and on what timescale?”—but it seems like the right way to conceptualize a world with very powerful AI.

My guess at a list of factors that limit or are complementary to intelligence includes:

Speed of the outside world. Intelligent agents need to operate interactively in the world in order to accomplish things and also to learn8. But the world only moves so fast. Cells and animals run at a fixed speed so experiments on them take a certain amount of time which may be irreducible. The same is true of hardware, materials science, anything involving communicating with people, and even our existing software infrastructure. Furthermore, in science many experiments are often needed in sequence, each learning from or building on the last. All of this means that the speed at which a major project—for example developing a cancer cure—can be completed may have an irreducible minimum that cannot be decreased further even as intelligence continues to increase.

Need for data. Sometimes raw data is lacking and in its absence more intelligence does not help. Today’s particle physicists are very ingenious and have developed a wide range of theories, but lack the data to choose between them because particle accelerator data is so limited. It is not clear that they would do drastically better if they were superintelligent—other than perhaps by speeding up the construction of a bigger accelerator.

Intrinsic complexity. Some things are inherently unpredictable or chaotic and even the most powerful AI cannot predict or untangle them substantially better than a human or a computer today. For example, even incredibly powerful AI could predict only marginally further ahead in a chaotic system (such as the three-body problem) in the general case,9 as compared to today’s humans and computers.

Constraints from humans. Many things cannot be done without breaking laws, harming humans, or messing up society. An aligned AI would not want to do these things (and if we have an unaligned AI, we’re back to talking about risks). Many human societal structures are inefficient or even actively harmful, but are hard to change while respecting constraints like legal requirements on clinical trials, people’s willingness to change their habits, or the behavior of governments. Examples of advances that work well in a technical sense, but whose impact has been substantially reduced by regulations or misplaced fears, include nuclear power, supersonic flight, and even elevators.

Physical laws. This is a starker version of the first point. There are certain physical laws that appear to be unbreakable. It’s not possible to travel faster than light. Pudding does not unstir. Chips can only have so many transistors per square centimeter before they become unreliable. Computation requires a certain minimum energy per bit erased, limiting the density of computation in the world.

There is a further distinction based on timescales. Things that are hard constraints in the short run may become more malleable to intelligence in the long run. For example, intelligence might be used to develop a new experimental paradigm that allows us to learn in vitro what used to require live animal experiments, or to build the tools needed to collect new data (e.g. the bigger particle accelerator), or to (within ethical limits) find ways around human-based constraints (e.g. helping to improve the clinical trial system, helping to create new jurisdictions where clinical trials have less bureaucracy, or improving the science itself to make human clinical trials less necessary or cheaper).

Thus, we should imagine a picture where intelligence is initially heavily bottlenecked by the other factors of production, but over time intelligence itself increasingly routes around the other factors, even if they never fully dissolve (and some things like physical laws are absolute)10. The key question is how fast it all happens and in what order.

With the above framework in mind, I’ll try to answer that question for the five areas mentioned in the introduction.

1. Biology and health

Biology is probably the area where scientific progress has the greatest potential to directly and unambiguously improve the quality of human life. In the last century some of the most ancient human afflictions (such as smallpox) have finally been vanquished, but many more still remain, and defeating them would be an enormous humanitarian accomplishment. Beyond even curing disease, biological science can in principle improve the baseline quality of human health, by extending the healthy human lifespan, increasing control and freedom over our own biological processes, and addressing everyday problems that we currently think of as immutable parts of the human condition.

In the “limiting factors” language of the previous section, the main challenges with directly applying intelligence to biology are data, the speed of the physical world, and intrinsic complexity (in fact, all three are related to each other). Human constraints also play a role at a later stage, when clinical trials are involved. Let’s take these one by one.

Experiments on cells, animals, and even chemical processes are limited by the speed of the physical world: many biological protocols involve culturing bacteria or other cells, or simply waiting for chemical reactions to occur, and this can sometimes take days or even weeks, with no obvious way to speed it up. Animal experiments can take months (or more) and human experiments often take years (or even decades for long-term outcome studies). Somewhat related to this, data is often lacking—not so much in quantity, but quality: there is always a dearth of clear, unambiguous data that isolates a biological effect of interest from the other 10,000 confounding things that are going on, or that intervenes causally in a given process, or that directly measures some effect (as opposed to inferring its consequences in some indirect or noisy way). Even massive, quantitative molecular data, like the proteomics data that I collected while working on mass spectrometry techniques, is noisy and misses a lot (which types of cells were these proteins in? Which part of the cell? At what phase in the cell cycle?).

In part responsible for these problems with data is intrinsic complexity: if you’ve ever seen a diagram showing the biochemistry of human metabolism, you’ll know that it’s very hard to isolate the effect of any part of this complex system, and even harder to intervene on the system in a precise or predictable way. And finally, beyond just the intrinsic time that it takes to run an experiment on humans, actual clinical trials involve a lot of bureaucracy and regulatory requirements that (in the opinion of many people, including me) add unnecessary additional time and delay progress.

Given all this, many biologists have long been skeptical of the value of AI and “big data” more generally in biology. Historically, mathematicians, computer scientists, and physicists who have applied their skills to biology over the last 30 years have been quite successful, but have not had the truly transformative impact initially hoped for. Some of the skepticism has been reduced by major and revolutionary breakthroughs like AlphaFold (which has just deservedly won its creators the Nobel Prize in Chemistry) and AlphaProteo11, but there’s still a perception that AI is (and will continue to be) useful in only a limited set of circumstances. A common formulation is “AI can do a better job analyzing your data, but it can’t produce more data or improve the quality of the data. Garbage in, garbage out”.

But I think that pessimistic perspective is thinking about AI in the wrong way. If our core hypothesis about AI progress is correct, then the right way to think of AI is not as a method of data analysis, but as a virtual biologist who performs all the tasks biologists do, including designing and running experiments in the real world (by controlling lab robots or simply telling humans which experiments to run – as a Principal Investigator would to their graduate students), inventing new biological methods or measurement techniques, and so on. It is by speeding up the whole research process that AI can truly accelerate biology. I want to repeat this because it’s the most common misconception that comes up when I talk about AI’s ability to transform biology: I am not talking about AI as merely a tool to analyze data. In line with the definition of powerful AI at the beginning of this essay, I’m talking about using AI to perform, direct, and improve upon nearly everything biologists do.

To get more specific on where I think acceleration is likely to come from, a surprisingly large fraction of the progress in biology has come from a truly tiny number of discoveries, often related to broad measurement tools or techniques12 that allow precise but generalized or programmable intervention in biological systems. There’s perhaps ~1 of these major discoveries per year and collectively they arguably drive >50% of progress in biology. These discoveries are so powerful precisely because they cut through intrinsic complexity and data limitations, directly increasing our understanding and control over biological processes. A few discoveries per decade have enabled both the bulk of our basic scientific understanding of biology, and have driven many of the most powerful medical treatments.

Some examples include:

CRISPR: a technique that allows live editing of any gene in living organisms (replacement of any arbitrary gene sequence with any other arbitrary sequence). Since the original technique was developed, there have been constant improvements to target specific cell types, increasing accuracy, and reducing edits of the wrong gene—all of which are needed for safe use in humans.

Various kinds of microscopy for watching what is going on at a precise level: advanced light microscopes (with various kinds of fluorescent techniques, special optics, etc), electron microscopes, atomic force microscopes, etc.

Genome sequencing and synthesis, which has dropped in cost by several orders of magnitude in the last couple decades.

Optogenetic techniques that allow you to get a neuron to fire by shining a light on it.

mRNA vaccines that, in principle, allow us to design a vaccine against anything and then quickly adapt it (mRNA vaccines of course became famous during COVID).

Cell therapies such as CAR-T that allow immune cells to be taken out of the body and “reprogrammed” to attack, in principle, anything.

Conceptual insights like the germ theory of disease or the realization of a link between the immune system and cancer13.

I’m going to the trouble of listing all these technologies because I want to make a crucial claim about them: I think their rate of discovery could be increased by 10x or more if there were a lot more talented, creative researchers. Or, put another way, I think the returns to intelligence are high for these discoveries, and that everything else in biology and medicine mostly follows from them.

Why do I think this? Because of the answers to some questions that we should get in the habit of asking when we’re trying to determine “returns to intelligence”. First, these discoveries are generally made by a tiny number of researchers, often the same people repeatedly, suggesting skill and not random search (the latter might suggest lengthy experiments are the limiting factor). Second, they often “could have been made” years earlier than they were: for example, CRISPR was a naturally occurring component of the immune system in bacteria that’s been known since the 80’s, but it took another 25 years for people to realize it could be repurposed for general gene editing. They also are often delayed many years by lack of support from the scientific community for promising directions (see this profile on the inventor of mRNA vaccines; similar stories abound). Third, successful projects are often scrappy or were afterthoughts that people didn’t initially think were promising, rather than massively funded efforts. This suggests that it’s not just massive resource concentration that drives discoveries, but ingenuity.

Finally, although some of these discoveries have “serial dependence” (you need to make discovery A first in order to have the tools or knowledge to make discovery B)—which again might create experimental delays—many, perhaps most, are independent, meaning many at once can be worked on in parallel. Both these facts, and my general experience as a biologist, strongly suggest to me that there are hundreds of these discoveries waiting to be made if scientists were smarter and better at making connections between the vast amount of biological knowledge humanity possesses (again consider the CRISPR example). The success of AlphaFold/AlphaProteo at solving important problems much more effectively than humans, despite decades of carefully designed physics modeling, provides a proof of principle (albeit with a narrow tool in a narrow domain) that should point the way forward.

Thus, it’s my guess that powerful AI could at least 10x the rate of these discoveries, giving us the next 50-100 years of biological progress in 5-10 years.14 Why not 100x? Perhaps it is possible, but here both serial dependence and experiment times become important: getting 100 years of progress in 1 year requires a lot of things to go right the first time, including animal experiments and things like designing microscopes or expensive lab facilities. I’m actually open to the (perhaps absurd-sounding) idea that we could get 1000 years of progress in 5-10 years, but very skeptical that we can get 100 years in 1 year. Another way to put it is I think there’s an unavoidable constant delay: experiments and hardware design have a certain “latency” and need to be iterated upon a certain “irreducible” number of times in order to learn things that can’t be deduced logically. But massive parallelism may be possible on top of that15.

What about clinical trials? Although there is a lot of bureaucracy and slowdown associated with them, the truth is that a lot (though by no means all!) of their slowness ultimately derives from the need to rigorously evaluate drugs that barely work or ambiguously work. This is sadly true of most therapies today: the average cancer drug increases survival by a few months while having significant side effects that need to be carefully measured (there’s a similar story for Alzheimer’s drugs). This leads to huge studies (in order to achieve statistical power) and difficult tradeoffs which regulatory agencies generally aren’t great at making, again because of bureaucracy and the complexity of competing interests.

When something works really well, it goes much faster: there’s an accelerated approval track and the ease of approval is much greater when effect sizes are larger. mRNA vaccines for COVID were approved in 9 months—much faster than the usual pace. That said, even under these conditions clinical trials are still too slow—mRNA vaccines arguably should have been approved in ~2 months. But these kinds of delays (~1 year end-to-end for a drug) combined with massive parallelization and the need for some but not too much iteration (“a few tries”) are very compatible with radical transformation in 5-10 years. Even more optimistically, it is possible that AI-enabled biological science will reduce the need for iteration in clinical trials by developing better animal and cell experimental models (or even simulations) that are more accurate in predicting what will happen in humans. This will be particularly important in developing drugs against the aging process, which plays out over decades and where we need a faster iteration loop.

Finally, on the topic of clinical trials and societal barriers, it is worth pointing out explicitly that in some ways biomedical innovations have an unusually strong track record of being successfully deployed, in contrast to some other technologies16. As mentioned in the introduction, many technologies are hampered by societal factors despite working well technically. This might suggest a pessimistic perspective on what AI can accomplish. But biomedicine is unique in that although the process of developing drugs is overly cumbersome, once developed they generally are successfully deployed and used.

To summarize the above, my basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years. I’ll refer to this as the “compressed 21st century”: the idea that after powerful AI is developed, we will in a few years make all the progress in biology and medicine that we would have made in the whole 21st century.

Although predicting what powerful AI can do in a few years remains inherently difficult and speculative, there is some concreteness to asking “what could humans do unaided in the next 100 years?”. Simply looking at what we’ve accomplished in the 20th century, or extrapolating from the first 2 decades of the 21st, or asking what “10 CRISPR’s and 50 CAR-T’s” would get us, all offer practical, grounded ways to estimate the general level of progress we might expect from powerful AI.

Below I try to make a list of what we might expect. This is not based on any rigorous methodology, and will almost certainly prove wrong in the details, but it’s trying to get across the general level of radicalism we should expect:

Reliable prevention and treatment of nearly all17 natural infectious disease. Given the enormous advances against infectious disease in the 20th century, it is not radical to imagine that we could more or less “finish the job” in a compressed 21st. mRNA vaccines and similar technology already point the way towards “vaccines for anything”. Whether infectious disease is fully eradicated from the world (as opposed to just in some places) depends on questions about poverty and inequality, which are discussed in Section 3.

Elimination of most cancer. Death rates from cancer have been dropping ~2% per year for the last few decades; thus we are on track to eliminate most cancer in the 21st century at the current pace of human science. Some subtypes have already been largely cured (for example some types of leukemia with CAR-T therapy), and I’m perhaps even more excited for very selective drugs that target cancer in its infancy and prevent it from ever growing. AI will also make possible treatment regimens very finely adapted to the individualized genome of the cancer—these are possible today, but hugely expensive in time and human expertise, which AI should allow us to scale. Reductions of 95% or more in both mortality and incidence seem possible. That said, cancer is extremely varied and adaptive, and is likely the hardest of these diseases to fully destroy. It would not be surprising if an assortment of rare, difficult malignancies persists.

Very effective prevention and effective cures for genetic disease. Greatly improved embryo screening will likely make it possible to prevent most genetic disease, and some safer, more reliable descendant of CRISPR may cure most genetic disease in existing people. Whole-body afflictions that affect a large fraction of cells may be the last holdouts, however.

Prevention of Alzheimer’s. We’ve had a very hard time figuring out what causes Alzheimer’s (it is somehow related to beta-amyloid protein, but the actual details seem to be very complex). It seems like exactly the type of problem that can be solved with better measurement tools that isolate biological effects; thus I am bullish about AI’s ability to solve it. There is a good chance it can eventually be prevented with relatively simple interventions, once we actually understand what is going on. That said, damage from already-existing Alzheimer’s may be very difficult to reverse.

Improved treatment of most other ailments. This is a catch-all category for other ailments including diabetes, obesity, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, and more. Most of these seem “easier” to solve than cancer and Alzheimer’s and in many cases are already in steep decline. For example, deaths from heart disease have already declined over 50%, and simple interventions like GLP-1 agonists have already made huge progress against obesity and diabetes.

Biological freedom. The last 70 years featured advances in birth control, fertility, management of weight, and much more. But I suspect AI-accelerated biology will greatly expand what is possible: weight, physical appearance, reproduction, and other biological processes will be fully under people’s control. We’ll refer to these under the heading of biological freedom: the idea that everyone should be empowered to choose what they want to become and live their lives in the way that most appeals to them. There will of course be important questions about global equality of access; see Section 3 for these.

Doubling of the human lifespan18. This might seem radical, but life expectancy increased almost 2x in the 20th century (from ~40 years to ~75), so it’s “on trend” that the “compressed 21st” would double it again to 150. Obviously the interventions involved in slowing the actual aging process will be different from those that were needed in the last century to prevent (mostly childhood) premature deaths from disease, but the magnitude of change is not unprecedented19. Concretely, there already exist drugs that increase maximum lifespan in rats by 25-50% with limited ill-effects. And some animals (e.g. some types of turtle) already live 200 years, so humans are manifestly not at some theoretical upper limit. At a guess, the most important thing that is needed might be reliable, non-Goodhart-able biomarkers of human aging, as that will allow fast iteration on experiments and clinical trials. Once human lifespan is 150, we may be able to reach “escape velocity”, buying enough time that most of those currently alive today will be able to live as long as they want, although there’s certainly no guarantee this is biologically possible.

It is worth looking at this list and reflecting on how different the world will be if all of it is achieved 7-12 years from now (which would be in line with an aggressive AI timeline). It goes without saying that it would be an unimaginable humanitarian triumph, the elimination all at once of most of the scourges that have haunted humanity for millennia. Many of my friends and colleagues are raising children, and when those children grow up, I hope that any mention of disease will sound to them the way scurvy, smallpox, or bubonic plague sounds to us. That generation will also benefit from increased biological freedom and self-expression, and with luck may also be able to live as long as they want.

It’s hard to overestimate how surprising these changes will be to everyone except the small community of people who expected powerful AI. For example, thousands of economists and policy experts in the US currently debate how to keep Social Security and Medicare solvent, and more broadly how to keep down the cost of healthcare (which is mostly consumed by those over 70 and especially those with terminal illnesses such as cancer). The situation for these programs is likely to be radically improved if all this comes to pass20, as the ratio of working age to retired population will change drastically. No doubt these challenges will be replaced with others, such as how to ensure widespread access to the new technologies, but it is worth reflecting on how much the world will change even if biology is the only area to be successfully accelerated by AI.

2. Neuroscience and mind

In the previous section I focused on physical diseases and biology in general, and didn’t cover neuroscience or mental health. But neuroscience is a subdiscipline of biology and mental health is just as important as physical health. In fact, if anything, mental health affects human well-being even more directly than physical health. Hundreds of millions of people have very low quality of life due to problems like addiction, depression, schizophrenia, low-functioning autism, PTSD, psychopathy21, or intellectual disabilities. Billions more struggle with everyday problems that can often be interpreted as much milder versions of one of these severe clinical disorders. And as with general biology, it may be possible to go beyond addressing problems to improving the baseline quality of human experience.

The basic framework that I laid out for biology applies equally to neuroscience. The field is propelled forward by a small number of discoveries often related to tools for measurement or precise intervention – in the list of those above, optogenetics was a neuroscience discovery, and more recently CLARITY and expansion microscopy are advances in the same vein, in addition to many of the general cell biology methods directly carrying over to neuroscience. I think the rate of these advances will be similarly accelerated by AI and therefore that the framework of “100 years of progress in 5-10 years” applies to neuroscience in the same way it does to biology and for the same reasons. As in biology, the progress in 20th century neuroscience was enormous – for example we didn’t even understand how or why neurons fired until the 1950’s. Thus, it seems reasonable to expect AI-accelerated neuroscience to produce rapid progress over a few years.

There is one thing we should add to this basic picture, which is that some of the things we’ve learned (or are learning) about AI itself in the last few years are likely to help advance neuroscience, even if it continues to be done only by humans. Interpretability is an obvious example: although biological neurons superficially operate in a completely different manner from artificial neurons (they communicate via spikes and often spike rates, so there is a time element not present in artificial neurons, and a bunch of details relating to cell physiology and neurotransmitters modifies their operation substantially), the basic question of “how do distributed, trained networks of simple units that perform combined linear/non-linear operations work together to perform important computations” is the same, and I strongly suspect the details of individual neuron communication will be abstracted away in most of the interesting questions about computation and circuits22. As just one example of this, a computational mechanism discovered by interpretability researchers in AI systems was recently rediscovered in the brains of mice.

It is much easier to do experiments on artificial neural networks than on real ones (the latter often requires cutting into animal brains), so interpretability may well become a tool for improving our understanding of neuroscience. Furthermore, powerful AI’s will themselves probably be able to develop and apply this tool better than humans can.

Beyond just interpretability though, what we have learned from AI about how intelligent systems are trained should (though I am not sure it has yet) cause a revolution in neuroscience. When I was working in neuroscience, a lot of people focused on what I would now consider the wrong questions about learning, because the concept of the scaling hypothesis / bitter lesson didn’t exist yet. The idea that a simple objective function plus a lot of data can drive incredibly complex behaviors makes it more interesting to understand the objective functions and architectural biases and less interesting to understand the details of the emergent computations. I have not followed the field closely in recent years, but I have a vague sense that computational neuroscientists have still not fully absorbed the lesson. My attitude to the scaling hypothesis has always been “aha – this is an explanation, at a high level, of how intelligence works and how it so easily evolved”, but I don’t think that’s the average neuroscientist’s view, in part because the scaling hypothesis as “the secret to intelligence” isn’t fully accepted even within AI.

I think that neuroscientists should be trying to combine this basic insight with the particularities of the human brain (biophysical limitations, evolutionary history, topology, details of motor and sensory inputs/outputs) to try to figure out some of neuroscience’s key puzzles. Some likely are, but I suspect it’s not enough yet, and that AI neuroscientists will be able to more effectively leverage this angle to accelerate progress.

I expect AI to accelerate neuroscientific progress along four distinct routes, all of which can hopefully work together to cure mental illness and improve function:

Traditional molecular biology, chemistry, and genetics. This is essentially the same story as general biology in section 1, and AI can likely speed it up via the same mechanisms. There are many drugs that modulate neurotransmitters in order to alter brain function, affect alertness or perception, change mood, etc., and AI can help us invent many more. AI can probably also accelerate research on the genetic basis of mental illness.

Fine-grained neural measurement and intervention. This is the ability to measure what a lot of individual neurons or neuronal circuits are doing, and intervene to change their behavior. Optogenetics and neural probes are technologies capable of both measurement and intervention in live organisms, and a number of very advanced methods (such as molecular ticker tapes to read out the firing patterns of large numbers of individual neurons) have also been proposed and seem possible in principle.

Advanced computational neuroscience. As noted above, both the specific insights and the gestalt of modern AI can probably be applied fruitfully to questions in systems neuroscience, including perhaps uncovering the real causes and dynamics of complex diseases like psychosis or mood disorders.

Behavioral interventions. I haven’t much mentioned it given the focus on the biological side of neuroscience, but psychiatry and psychology have of course developed a wide repertoire of behavioral interventions over the 20th century; it stands to reason that AI could accelerate these as well, both the development of new methods and helping patients to adhere to existing methods. More broadly, the idea of an “AI coach” who always helps you to be the best version of yourself, who studies your interactions and helps you learn to be more effective, seems very promising.

It’s my guess that these four routes of progress working together would, as with physical disease, be on track to lead to the cure or prevention of most mental illness in the next 100 years even if AI was not involved – and thus might reasonably be completed in 5-10 AI-accelerated years. Concretely my guess at what will happen is something like:

Most mental illness can probably be cured. I’m not an expert in psychiatric disease (my time in neuroscience was spent building probes to study small groups of neurons) but it’s my guess that diseases like PTSD, depression, schizophrenia, addiction, etc. can be figured out and very effectively treated via some combination of the four directions above. The answer is likely to be some combination of “something went wrong biochemically” (although it could be very complex) and “something went wrong with the neural network, at a high level”. That is, it’s a systems neuroscience question—though that doesn’t gainsay the impact of the behavioral interventions discussed above. Tools for measurement and intervention, especially in live humans, seem likely to lead to rapid iteration and progress.

Conditions that are very “structural” may be more difficult, but not impossible. There’s some evidence that psychopathy is associated with obvious neuroanatomical differences – that some brain regions are simply smaller or less developed in psychopaths. Psychopaths are also believed to lack empathy from a young age; whatever is different about their brain, it was probably always that way. The same may be true of some intellectual disabilities, and perhaps other conditions. Restructuring the brain sounds hard, but it also seems like a task with high returns to intelligence. Perhaps there is some way to coax the adult brain into an earlier or more plastic state where it can be reshaped. I’m very uncertain how possible this is, but my instinct is to be optimistic about what AI can invent here.

Effective genetic prevention of mental illness seems possible. Most mental illness is partially heritable, and genome-wide association studies are starting to gain traction on identifying the relevant factors, which are often many in number. It will probably be possible to prevent most of these diseases via embryo screening, similar to the story with physical disease. One difference is that psychiatric disease is more likely to be polygenic (many genes contribute), so due to complexity there’s an increased risk of unknowingly selecting against positive traits that are correlated with disease. Oddly however, in recent years GWAS studies seem to suggest that these correlations might have been overstated. In any case, AI-accelerated neuroscience may help us to figure these things out. Of course, embryo screening for complex traits raises a number of societal issues and will be controversial, though I would guess that most people would support screening for severe or debilitating mental illness.

Everyday problems that we don’t think of as clinical disease will also be solved. Most of us have everyday psychological problems that are not ordinarily thought of as rising to the level of clinical disease. Some people are quick to anger, others have trouble focusing or are often drowsy, some are fearful or anxious, or react badly to change. Today, drugs already exist to help with e.g. alertness or focus (caffeine, modafinil, ritalin) but as with many other previous areas, much more is likely to be possible. Probably many more such drugs exist and have not been discovered, and there may also be totally new modalities of intervention, such as targeted light stimulation (see optogenetics above) or magnetic fields. Given how many drugs we’ve developed in the 20th century that tune cognitive function and emotional state, I’m very optimistic about the “compressed 21st” where everyone can get their brain to behave a bit better and have a more fulfilling day-to-day experience.

Human baseline experience can be much better. Taking one step further, many people have experienced extraordinary moments of revelation, creative inspiration, compassion, fulfillment, transcendence, love, beauty, or meditative peace. The character and frequency of these experiences differs greatly from person to person and within the same person at different times, and can also sometimes be triggered by various drugs (though often with side effects). All of this suggests that the “space of what is possible to experience” is very broad and that a larger fraction of people’s lives could consist of these extraordinary moments. It is probably also possible to improve various cognitive functions across the board. This is perhaps the neuroscience version of “biological freedom” or “extended lifespans”.

One topic that often comes up in sci-fi depictions of AI, but that I intentionally haven’t discussed here, is “mind uploading”, the idea of capturing the pattern and dynamics of a human brain and instantiating them in software. This topic could be the subject of an essay all by itself, but suffice it to say that while I think uploading is almost certainly possible in principle, in practice it faces significant technological and societal challenges, even with powerful AI, that likely put it outside the 5-10 year window we are discussing.

In summary, AI-accelerated neuroscience is likely to vastly improve treatments for, or even cure, most mental illness as well as greatly expand “cognitive and mental freedom” and human cognitive and emotional abilities. It will be every bit as radical as the improvements in physical health described in the previous section. Perhaps the world will not be visibly different on the outside, but the world as experienced by humans will be a much better and more humane place, as well as a place that offers greater opportunities for self-actualization. I also suspect that improved mental health will ameliorate a lot of other societal problems, including ones that seem political or economic.

3. Economic development and poverty

The previous two sections are about developing new technologies that cure disease and improve the quality of human life. However an obvious question, from a humanitarian perspective, is: “will everyone have access to these technologies?”

It is one thing to develop a cure for a disease, it is another thing to eradicate the disease from the world. More broadly, many existing health interventions have not yet been applied everywhere in the world, and for that matter the same is true of (non-health) technological improvements in general. Another way to say this is that living standards in many parts of the world are still desperately poor: GDP per capita is ~$2,000 in Sub-Saharan Africa as compared to ~$75,000 in the United States. If AI further increases economic growth and quality of life in the developed world, while doing little to help the developing world, we should view that as a terrible moral failure and a blemish on the genuine humanitarian victories in the previous two sections. Ideally, powerful AI should help the developing world catch up to the developed world, even as it revolutionizes the latter.

I am not as confident that AI can address inequality and economic growth as I am that it can invent fundamental technologies, because technology has such obvious high returns to intelligence (including the ability to route around complexities and lack of data) whereas the economy involves a lot of constraints from humans, as well as a large dose of intrinsic complexity. I am somewhat skeptical that an AI could solve the famous “socialist calculation problem”23 and I don’t think governments will (or should) turn over their economic policy to such an entity, even if it could do so. There are also problems like how to convince people to take treatments that are effective but that they may be suspicious of.

The challenges facing the developing world are made even more complicated by pervasive corruption in both private and public sectors. Corruption creates a vicious cycle: it exacerbates poverty, and poverty in turn breeds more corruption. AI-driven plans for economic development need to reckon with corruption, weak institutions, and other very human challenges.

Nevertheless, I do see significant reasons for optimism. Diseases have been eradicated and many countries have gone from poor to rich, and it is clear that the decisions involved in these tasks exhibit high returns to intelligence (despite human constraints and complexity). Therefore, AI can likely do them better than they are currently being done. There may also be targeted interventions that get around the human constraints and that AI could focus on. More importantly though, we have to try. Both AI companies and developed world policymakers will need to do their part to ensure that the developing world is not left out; the moral imperative is too great. So in this section, I’ll continue to make the optimistic case, but keep in mind everywhere that success is not guaranteed and depends on our collective efforts.

Below I make some guesses about how I think things may go in the developing world over the 5-10 years after powerful AI is developed:

Distribution of health interventions. The area where I am perhaps most optimistic is distributing health interventions throughout the world. Diseases have actually been eradicated by top-down campaigns: smallpox was fully eliminated in the 1970’s, and polio and guinea worm are nearly eradicated with less than 100 cases per year. Mathematically sophisticated epidemiological modeling plays an active role in disease eradication campaigns, and it seems very likely that there is room for smarter-than-human AI systems to do a better job of it than humans are. The logistics of distribution can probably also be greatly optimized. One thing I learned as an early donor to GiveWell is that some health charities are way more effective than others; the hope is that AI-accelerated efforts would be more effective still. Additionally, some biological advances actually make the logistics of distribution much easier: for example, malaria has been difficult to eradicate because it requires treatment each time the disease is contracted; a vaccine that only needs to be administered once makes the logistics much simpler (and such vaccines for malaria are in fact currently being developed). Even simpler distribution mechanisms are possible: some diseases could in principle be eradicated by targeting their animal carriers, for example releasing mosquitoes infected with a bacterium that blocks their ability to carry a disease (who then infect all the other mosquitos) or simply using gene drives to wipe out the mosquitos. This requires one or a few centralized actions, rather than a coordinated campaign that must individually treat millions. Overall, I think 5-10 years is a reasonable timeline for a good fraction (maybe 50%) of AI-driven health benefits to propagate to even the poorest countries in the world. A good goal might be for the developing world 5-10 years after powerful AI to at least be substantially healthier than the developed world is today, even if it continues to lag behind the developed world. Accomplishing this will of course require a huge effort in global health, philanthropy, political advocacy, and many other efforts, which both AI developers and policymakers should help with.

Economic growth. Can the developing world quickly catch up to the developed world, not just in health, but across the board economically? There is some precedent for this: in the final decades of the 20th century, several East Asian economies achieved sustained ~10% annual real GDP growth rates, allowing them to catch up with the developed world. Human economic planners made the decisions that led to this success, not by directly controlling entire economies but by pulling a few key levers (such as an industrial policy of export-led growth, and resisting the temptation to rely on natural resource wealth); it’s plausible that “AI finance ministers and central bankers” could replicate or exceed this 10% accomplishment. An important question is how to get developing world governments to adopt them while respecting the principle of self-determination—some may be enthusiastic about it, but others are likely to be skeptical. On the optimistic side, many of the health interventions in the previous bullet point are likely to organically increase economic growth: eradicating AIDS/malaria/parasitic worms would have a transformative effect on productivity, not to mention the economic benefits that some of the neuroscience interventions (such as improved mood and focus) would have in developed and developing world alike. Finally, non-health AI-accelerated technology (such as energy technology, transport drones, improved building materials, better logistics and distribution, and so on) may simply permeate the world naturally; for example, even cell phones quickly permeated sub-Saharan Africa via market mechanisms, without needing philanthropic efforts. On the more negative side, while AI and automation have many potential benefits, they also pose challenges for economic development, particularly for countries that haven't yet industrialized. Finding ways to ensure these countries can still develop and improve their economies in an age of increasing automation is an important challenge for economists and policymakers to address. Overall, a dream scenario—perhaps a goal to aim for—would be 20% annual GDP growth rate in the developing world, with 10% each coming from AI-enabled economic decisions and the natural spread of AI-accelerated technologies, including but not limited to health. If achieved, this would bring sub-Saharan Africa to the current per-capita GDP of China in 5-10 years, while raising much of the rest of the developing world to levels higher than the current US GDP. Again, this is a dream scenario, not what happens by default: it’s something all of us must work together to make more likely.

Food security 24. Advances in crop technology like better fertilizers and pesticides, more automation, and more efficient land use drastically increased crop yields across the 20th Century, saving millions of people from hunger. Genetic engineering is currently improving many crops even further. Finding even more ways to do this—as well as to make agricultural supply chains even more efficient—could give us an AI-driven second Green Revolution, helping close the gap between the developing and developed world.

Mitigating climate change. Climate change will be felt much more strongly in the developing world, hampering its development. We can expect that AI will lead to improvements in technologies that slow or prevent climate change, from atmospheric carbon-removal and clean energy technology to lab-grown meat that reduces our reliance on carbon-intensive factory farming. Of course, as discussed above, technology isn’t the only thing restricting progress on climate change—as with all of the other issues discussed in this essay, human societal factors are important. But there’s good reason to think that AI-enhanced research will give us the means to make mitigating climate change far less costly and disruptive, rendering many of the objections moot and freeing up developing countries to make more economic progress.

Inequality within countries. I’ve mostly talked about inequality as a global phenomenon (which I do think is its most important manifestation), but of course inequality also exists within countries. With advanced health interventions and especially radical increases in lifespan or cognitive enhancement drugs, there will certainly be valid worries that these technologies are “only for the rich”. I am more optimistic about within-country inequality especially in the developed world, for two reasons. First, markets function better in the developed world, and markets are typically good at bringing down the cost of high-value technologies over time25. Second, developed world political institutions are more responsive to their citizens and have greater state capacity to execute universal access programs—and I expect citizens to demand access to technologies that so radically improve quality of life. Of course it’s not predetermined that such demands succeed—and here is another place where we collectively have to do all we can to ensure a fair society. There is a separate problem in inequality of wealth (as opposed to inequality of access to life-saving and life-enhancing technologies), which seems harder and which I discuss in Section 5.

The opt-out problem. One concern in both developed and developing world alike is people opting out of AI-enabled benefits (similar to the anti-vaccine movement, or Luddite movements more generally). There could end up being bad feedback cycles where, for example, the people who are least able to make good decisions opt out of the very technologies that improve their decision-making abilities, leading to an ever-increasing gap and even creating a dystopian underclass (some researchers have argued that this will undermine democracy, a topic I discuss further in the next section). This would, once again, place a moral blemish on AI’s positive advances. This is a difficult problem to solve as I don’t think it is ethically okay to coerce people, but we can at least try to increase people’s scientific understanding—and perhaps AI itself can help us with this. One hopeful sign is that historically anti-technology movements have been more bark than bite: railing against modern technology is popular, but most people adopt it in the end, at least when it’s a matter of individual choice. Individuals tend to adopt most health and consumer technologies, while technologies that are truly hampered, like nuclear power, tend to be collective political decisions.

Overall, I am optimistic about quickly bringing AI’s biological advances to people in the developing world. I am hopeful, though not confident, that AI can also enable unprecedented economic growth rates and allow the developing world to at least surpass where the developed world is now. I am concerned about the “opt out” problem in both the developed and developing world, but suspect that it will peter out over time and that AI can help accelerate this process. It won’t be a perfect world, and those who are behind won’t fully catch up, at least not in the first few years. But with strong efforts on our part, we may be able to get things moving in the right direction—and fast. If we do, we can make at least a downpayment on the promises of dignity and equality that we owe to every human being on earth.

4. Peace and governance

Suppose that everything in the first three sections goes well: disease, poverty, and inequality are significantly reduced and the baseline of human experience is raised substantially. It does not follow that all major causes of human suffering are solved. Humans are still a threat to each other. Although there is a trend of technological improvement and economic development leading to democracy and peace, it is a very loose trend, with frequent (and recent) backsliding. At the dawn of the 20th Century, people thought they had put war behind them; then came the two world wars. Thirty years ago Francis Fukuyama wrote about “the End of History” and a final triumph of liberal democracy; that hasn’t happened yet. Twenty years ago US policymakers believed that free trade with China would cause it to liberalize as it became richer; that very much didn’t happen, and we now seem headed for a second cold war with a resurgent authoritarian bloc. And plausible theories suggest that internet technology may actually advantage authoritarianism, not democracy as initially believed (e.g. in the “Arab Spring” period). It seems important to try to understand how powerful AI will intersect with these issues of peace, democracy, and freedom.

Unfortunately, I see no strong reason to believe AI will preferentially or structurally advance democracy and peace, in the same way that I think it will structurally advance human health and alleviate poverty. Human conflict is adversarial and AI can in principle help both the “good guys” and the “bad guys”. If anything, some structural factors seem worrying: AI seems likely to enable much better propaganda and surveillance, both major tools in the autocrat’s toolkit. It’s therefore up to us as individual actors to tilt things in the right direction: if we want AI to favor democracy and individual rights, we are going to have to fight for that outcome. I feel even more strongly about this than I do about international inequality: the triumph of liberal democracy and political stability is not guaranteed, perhaps not even likely, and will require great sacrifice and commitment on all of our parts, as it often has in the past.

I think of the issue as having two parts: international conflict, and the internal structure of nations. On the international side, it seems very important that democracies have the upper hand on the world stage when powerful AI is created. AI-powered authoritarianism seems too terrible to contemplate, so democracies need to be able to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world, both to avoid being overpowered by authoritarians and to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian countries.

My current guess at the best way to do this is via an “entente strategy”26, in which a coalition of democracies seeks to gain a clear advantage (even just a temporary one) on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or delaying adversaries’ access to key resources like chips and semiconductor equipment. This coalition would on one hand use AI to achieve robust military superiority (the stick) while at the same time offering to distribute the benefits of powerful AI (the carrot) to a wider and wider group of countries in exchange for supporting the coalition’s strategy to promote democracy (this would be a bit analogous to “Atoms for Peace”). The coalition would aim to gain the support of more and more of the world, isolating our worst adversaries and eventually putting them in a position where they are better off taking the same bargain as the rest of the world: give up competing with democracies in order to receive all the benefits and not fight a superior foe.

If we can do all this, we will have a world in which democracies lead on the world stage and have the economic and military strength to avoid being undermined, conquered, or sabotaged by autocracies, and may be able to parlay their AI superiority into a durable advantage. This could optimistically lead to an “eternal 1991”—a world where democracies have the upper hand and Fukuyama’s dreams are realized. Again, this will be very difficult to achieve, and will in particular require close cooperation between private AI companies and democratic governments, as well as extraordinarily wise decisions about the balance between carrot and stick.

Even if all that goes well, it leaves the question of the fight between democracy and autocracy within each country. It is obviously hard to predict what will happen here, but I do have some optimism that given a global environment in which democracies control the most powerful AI, then AI may actually structurally favor democracy everywhere. In particular, in this environment democratic governments can use their superior AI to win the information war: they can counter influence and propaganda operations by autocracies and may even be able to create a globally free information environment by providing channels of information and AI services in a way that autocracies lack the technical ability to block or monitor. It probably isn’t necessary to deliver propaganda, only to counter malicious attacks and unblock the free flow of information. Although not immediate, a level playing field like this stands a good chance of gradually tilting global governance towards democracy, for several reasons.

First, the increases in quality of life in Sections 1-3 should, all things equal, promote democracy: historically they have, to at least some extent. In particular I expect improvements in mental health, well-being, and education to increase democracy, as all three are negatively correlated with support for authoritarian leaders. In general people want more self-expression when their other needs are met, and democracy is among other things a form of self-expression. Conversely, authoritarianism thrives on fear and resentment.

Second, there is a good chance free information really does undermine authoritarianism, as long as the authoritarians can’t censor it. And uncensored AI can also bring individuals powerful tools for undermining repressive governments. Repressive governments survive by denying people a certain kind of common knowledge, keeping them from realizing that “the emperor has no clothes”. For example Srđa Popović, who helped to topple the Milošević government in Serbia, has written extensively about techniques for psychologically robbing authoritarians of their power, for breaking the spell and rallying support against a dictator. A superhumanly effective AI version of Popović (whose skills seem like they have high returns to intelligence) in everyone’s pocket, one that dictators are powerless to block or censor, could create a wind at the backs of dissidents and reformers across the world. To say it again, this will be a long and protracted fight, one where victory is not assured, but if we design and build AI in the right way, it may at least be a fight where the advocates of freedom everywhere have an advantage.

As with neuroscience and biology, we can also ask how things could be “better than normal”—not just how to avoid autocracy, but how to make democracies better than they are today. Even within democracies, injustices happen all the time. Rule-of-law societies make a promise to their citizens that everyone will be equal under the law and everyone is entitled to basic human rights, but obviously people do not always receive those rights in practice. That this promise is even partially fulfilled makes it something to be proud of, but can AI help us do better?

For example, could AI improve our legal and judicial system by making decisions and processes more impartial? Today people mostly worry in legal or judicial contexts that AI systems will be a cause of discrimination, and these worries are important and need to be defended against. At the same time, the vitality of democracy depends on harnessing new technologies to improve democratic institutions, not just responding to risks. A truly mature and successful implementation of AI has the potential to reduce bias and be fairer for everyone.

For centuries, legal systems have faced the dilemma that the law aims to be impartial, but is inherently subjective and thus must be interpreted by biased humans. Trying to make the law fully mechanical hasn’t worked because the real world is messy and can’t always be captured in mathematical formulas. Instead legal systems rely on notoriously imprecise criteria like “cruel and unusual punishment” or “utterly without redeeming social importance”, which humans then interpret—and often do so in a manner that displays bias, favoritism, or arbitrariness. “Smart contracts” in cryptocurrencies haven’t revolutionized law because ordinary code isn’t smart enough to adjudicate all that much of interest. But AI might be smart enough for this: it is the first technology capable of making broad, fuzzy judgements in a repeatable and mechanical way.

I am not suggesting that we literally replace judges with AI systems, but the combination of impartiality with the ability to understand and process messy, real world situations feels like it should have some serious positive applications to law and justice. At the very least, such systems could work alongside humans as an aid to decision-making. Transparency would be important in any such system, and a mature science of AI could conceivably provide it: the training process for such systems could be extensively studied, and advanced interpretability techniques could be used to see inside the final model and assess it for hidden biases, in a way that is simply not possible with humans. Such AI tools could also be used to monitor for violations of fundamental rights in a judicial or police context, making constitutions more self-enforcing.

In a similar vein, AI could be used to both aggregate opinions and drive consensus among citizens, resolving conflict, finding common ground, and seeking compromise. Some early ideas in this direction have been undertaken by the computational democracy project, including collaborations with Anthropic. A more informed and thoughtful citizenry would obviously strengthen democratic institutions.

There is also a clear opportunity for AI to be used to help provision government services—such as health benefits or social services—that are in principle available to everyone but in practice often severely lacking, and worse in some places than others. This includes health services, the DMV, taxes, social security, building code enforcement, and so on. Having a very thoughtful and informed AI whose job is to give you everything you’re legally entitled to by the government in a way you can understand—and who also helps you comply with often confusing government rules—would be a big deal. Increasing state capacity both helps to deliver on the promise of equality under the law, and strengthens respect for democratic governance. Poorly implemented services are currently a major driver of cynicism about government27.

All of these are somewhat vague ideas, and as I said at the beginning of this section, I am not nearly as confident in their feasibility as I am in the advances in biology, neuroscience, and poverty alleviation. They may be unrealistically utopian. But the important thing is to have an ambitious vision, to be willing to dream big and try things out. The vision of AI as a guarantor of liberty, individual rights, and equality under the law is too powerful a vision not to fight for. A 21st century, AI-enabled polity could be both a stronger protector of individual freedom, and a beacon of hope that helps make liberal democracy the form of government that the whole world wants to adopt.

5. Work and meaning

Even if everything in the preceding four sections goes well—not only do we alleviate disease, poverty, and inequality, but liberal democracy becomes the dominant form of government, and existing liberal democracies become better versions of themselves—at least one important question still remains. “It’s great we live in such a technologically advanced world as well as a fair and decent one”, someone might object, “but with AI’s doing everything, how will humans have meaning? For that matter, how will they survive economically?”.

I think this question is more difficult than the others. I don’t mean that I am necessarily more pessimistic about it than I am about the other questions (although I do see challenges). I mean that it is fuzzier and harder to predict in advance, because it relates to macroscopic questions about how society is organized that tend to resolve themselves only over time and in a decentralized manner. For example, historical hunter-gatherer societies might have imagined that life is meaningless without hunting and various kinds of hunting-related religious rituals, and would have imagined that our well-fed technological society is devoid of purpose. They might also have not understood how our economy can provide for everyone, or what function people can usefully service in a mechanized society.

Nevertheless, it’s worth saying at least a few words, while keeping in mind that the brevity of this section is not at all to be taken as a sign that I don’t take these issues seriously—on the contrary, it is a sign of a lack of clear answers.

On the question of meaning, I think it is very likely a mistake to believe that tasks you undertake are meaningless simply because an AI could do them better. Most people are not the best in the world at anything, and it doesn’t seem to bother them particularly much. Of course today they can still contribute through comparative advantage, and may derive meaning from the economic value they produce, but people also greatly enjoy activities that produce no economic value. I spend plenty of time playing video games, swimming, walking around outside, and talking to friends, all of which generates zero economic value. I might spend a day trying to get better at a video game, or faster at biking up a mountain, and it doesn’t really matter to me that someone somewhere is much better at those things. In any case I think meaning comes mostly from human relationships and connection, not from economic labor. People do want a sense of accomplishment, even a sense of competition, and in a post-AI world it will be perfectly possible to spend years attempting some very difficult task with a complex strategy, similar to what people do today when they embark on research projects, try to become Hollywood actors, or found companies28. The facts that (a) an AI somewhere could in principle do this task better, and (b) this task is no longer an economically rewarded element of a global economy, don’t seem to me to matter very much.

The economic piece actually seems more difficult to me than the meaning piece. By “economic” in this section I mean the possible problem that most or all humans may not be able to contribute meaningfully to a sufficiently advanced AI-driven economy. This is a more macro problem than the separate problem of inequality, especially inequality in access to the new technologies, which I discussed in Section 3.

First of all, in the short term I agree with arguments that comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the “10%” expands to continue to employ almost everyone. In fact, even if AI can do 100% of things better than humans, but it remains inefficient or expensive at some tasks, or if the resource inputs to humans and AI’s are meaningfully different, then the logic of comparative advantage continues to apply. One area humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time is the physical world. Thus, I think that the human economy may continue to make sense even a little past the point where we reach “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”.

However, I do think in the long run AI will become so broadly effective and so cheap that this will no longer apply. At that point our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized.

While that might sound crazy, the fact is that civilization has successfully navigated major economic shifts in the past: from hunter-gathering to farming, farming to feudalism, and feudalism to industrialism. I suspect that some new and stranger thing will be needed, and that it’s something no one today has done a good job of envisioning. It could be as simple as a large universal basic income for everyone, although I suspect that will only be a small part of a solution. It could be a capitalist economy of AI systems, which then give out resources (huge amounts of them, since the overall economic pie will be gigantic) to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans (based on some judgment ultimately derived from human values). Perhaps the economy runs on Whuffie points. Or perhaps humans will continue to be economically valuable after all, in some way not anticipated by the usual economic models. All of these solutions have tons of possible problems, and it’s not possible to know whether they will make sense without lots of iteration and experimentation. And as with some of the other challenges, we will likely have to fight to get a good outcome here: exploitative or dystopian directions are clearly also possible and have to be prevented. Much more could be written about these questions and I hope to do so at some later time.

Taking stock

Through the varied topics above, I’ve tried to lay out a vision of a world that is both plausible if everything goes right with AI, and much better than the world today. I don’t know if this world is realistic, and even if it is, it will not be achieved without a huge amount of effort and struggle by many brave and dedicated people. Everyone (including AI companies!) will need to do their part both to prevent risks and to fully realize the benefits.

But it is a world worth fighting for. If all of this really does happen over 5 to 10 years—the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty to share in the new technologies, a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights—I suspect everyone watching it will be surprised by the effect it has on them. I don’t mean the experience of personally benefiting from all the new technologies, although that will certainly be amazing. I mean the experience of watching a long-held set of ideals materialize in front of us all at once. I think many will be literally moved to tears by it.

Throughout writing this essay I noticed an interesting tension. In one sense the vision laid out here is extremely radical: it is not what almost anyone expects to happen in the next decade, and will likely strike many as an absurd fantasy. Some may not even consider it desirable; it embodies values and political choices that not everyone will agree with. But at the same time there is something blindingly obvious—something overdetermined—about it, as if many different attempts to envision a good world inevitably lead roughly here.

In Iain M. Banks’ The Player of Games29, the protagonist—a member of a society called the Culture, which is based on principles not unlike those I’ve laid out here—travels to a repressive, militaristic empire in which leadership is determined by competition in an intricate battle game. The game, however, is complex enough that a player’s strategy within it tends to reflect their own political and philosophical outlook. The protagonist manages to defeat the emperor in the game, showing that his values (the Culture’s values) represent a winning strategy even in a game designed by a society based on ruthless competition and survival of the fittest. A well-known post by Scott Alexander has the same thesis—that competition is self-defeating and tends to lead to a society based on compassion and cooperation. The “arc of the moral universe” is another similar concept.

I think the Culture’s values are a winning strategy because they’re the sum of a million small decisions that have clear moral force and that tend to pull everyone together onto the same side. Basic human intuitions of fairness, cooperation, curiosity, and autonomy are hard to argue with, and are cumulative in a way that our more destructive impulses often aren’t. It is easy to argue that children shouldn’t die of disease if we can prevent it, and easy from there to argue that everyone’s children deserve that right equally. From there it is not hard to argue that we should all band together and apply our intellects to achieve this outcome. Few disagree that people should be punished for attacking or hurting others unnecessarily, and from there it’s not much of a leap to the idea that punishments should be consistent and systematic across people. It is similarly intuitive that people should have autonomy and responsibility over their own lives and choices. These simple intuitions, if taken to their logical conclusion, lead eventually to rule of law, democracy, and Enlightenment values. If not inevitably, then at least as a statistical tendency, this is where humanity was already headed. AI simply offers an opportunity to get us there more quickly—to make the logic starker and the destination clearer.

Nevertheless, it is a thing of transcendent beauty. We have the opportunity to play some small role in making it real.

Thanks to Kevin Esvelt, Parag Mallick, Stuart Ritchie, Matt Yglesias, Erik Brynjolfsson, Jim McClave, Allan Dafoe, and many people at Anthropic for reviewing drafts of this essay.

To the winners of the 2024 Nobel prize in Chemistry, for showing us all the way.

Footnotes

1https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving-Grace ↩

2I do anticipate some minority of people’s reaction will be “this is pretty tame”. I think those people need to, in Twitter parlance, “touch grass”. But more importantly, tame is good from a societal perspective. I think there’s only so much change people can handle at once, and the pace I’m describing is probably close to the limits of what society can absorb without extreme turbulence. ↩

3I find AGI to be an imprecise term that has gathered a lot of sci-fi baggage and hype. I prefer "powerful AI" or "Expert-Level Science and Engineering" which get at what I mean without the hype. ↩

4In this essay, I use "intelligence" to refer to a general problem-solving capability that can be applied across diverse domains. This includes abilities like reasoning, learning, planning, and creativity. While I use "intelligence" as a shorthand throughout this essay, I acknowledge that the nature of intelligence is a complex and debated topic in cognitive science and AI research. Some researchers argue that intelligence isn't a single, unified concept but rather a collection of separate cognitive abilities. Others contend that there's a general factor of intelligence (g factor) underlying various cognitive skills. That’s a debate for another time. ↩

5This is roughly the current speed of AI systems – for example they can read a page of text in a couple seconds and write a page of text in maybe 20 seconds, which is 10-100x the speed at which humans can do these things. Over time larger models tend to make this slower but more powerful chips tend to make it faster; to date the two effects have roughly canceled out. ↩

6This might seem like a strawman position, but careful thinkers like Tyler Cowen and Matt Yglesias have raised it as a serious concern (though I don’t think they fully hold the view), and I don’t think it is crazy. ↩

7The closest economics work that I’m aware of to tackling this question is work on “general purpose technologies” and “intangible investments” that serve as complements to general purpose technologies. ↩

8This learning can include temporary, in-context learning, or traditional training; both will be rate-limited by the physical world. ↩

9In a chaotic system, small errors compound exponentially over time, so that even an enormous increase in computing power leads to only a small improvement in how far ahead it is possible to predict, and in practice measurement error may degrade this further. ↩

10Another factor is of course that powerful AI itself can potentially be used to create even more powerful AI. My assumption is that this might (in fact, probably will) occur, but that its effect will be smaller than you might imagine, precisely because of the “decreasing marginal returns to intelligence” discussed here. In other words, AI will continue to get smarter quickly, but its effect will eventually be limited by non-intelligence factors, and analyzing those is what matters most to the speed of scientific progress outside AI. ↩

11These achievements have been an inspiration to me and perhaps the most powerful existing example of AI being used to transform biology. ↩

12“Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.” - Sydney Brenner ↩

13Thanks to Parag Mallick for suggesting this point. ↩

14I didn't want to clog up the text with speculation about what specific future discoveries AI-enabled science could make, but here is a brainstorm of some possibilities:

— Design of better computational tools like AlphaFold and AlphaProteo — that is, a general AI system speeding up our ability to make specialized AI computational biology tools.

— More efficient and selective CRISPR.

— More advanced cell therapies.

— Materials science and miniaturization breakthroughs leading to better implanted devices.

— Better control over stem cells, cell differentiation, and de-differentiation, and a resulting ability to regrow or reshape tissue.

— Better control over the immune system: turning it on selectively to address cancer and infectious disease, and turning it off selectively to address autoimmune diseases. ↩

15AI may of course also help with being smarter about choosing what experiments to run: improving experimental design, learning more from a first round of experiments so that the second round can narrow in on key questions, and so on. ↩

16Thanks to Matthew Yglesias for suggesting this point. ↩

17Fast evolving diseases, like the multidrug resistant strains that essentially use hospitals as an evolutionary laboratory to continually improve their resistance to treatment, could be especially stubborn to deal with, and could be the kind of thing that prevents us from getting to 100%. ↩

18Note it may be hard to know that we have doubled the human lifespan within the 5-10 years. While we might have accomplished it, we may not know it yet within the study time-frame. ↩

19This is one place where I am willing, despite the obvious biological differences between curing diseases and slowing down the aging process itself, to instead look from a greater distance at the statistical trend and say “even though the details are different, I think human science would probably find a way to continue this trend; after all, smooth trends in anything complex are necessarily made by adding up very heterogeneous components. ↩

20As an example, I’m told that an increase in productivity growth per year of 1% or even 0.5% would be transformative in projections related to these programs. If the ideas contemplated in this essay come to pass, productivity gains could be much larger than this. ↩

21The media loves to portray high status psychopaths, but the average psychopath is probably a person with poor economic prospects and poor impulse control who ends up spending significant time in prison. ↩

22I think this is somewhat analogous to the fact that many, though likely not all, of the results we’re learning from interpretability would continue to be relevant even if some of the architectural details of our current artificial neural nets, such as the attention mechanism, were changed or replaced in some way. ↩

23I suspect it is a bit like a classical chaotic system – beset by irreducible complexity that has to be managed in a mostly decentralized manner. Though as I say later in this section, more modest interventions may be possible. A counterargument, made to me by economist Erik Brynjolfsson, is that large companies (such as Walmart or Uber) are starting to have enough centralized knowledge to understand consumers better than any decentralized process could, perhaps forcing us to revise Hayek’s insights about who has the best local knowledge. ↩

24Thanks to Kevin Esvelt for suggesting this point. ↩

25For example, cell phones were initially a technology for the rich, but quickly became very cheap with year-over-year improvements happening so fast as to obviate any advantage of buying a “luxury” cell phone, and today most people have phones of similar quality. ↩

26This is the title of a forthcoming paper from RAND, that lays out roughly the strategy I describe. ↩

27When the average person thinks of public institutions, they probably think of their experience with the DMV, IRS, medicare, or similar functions. Making these experiences more positive than they currently are seems like a powerful way to combat undue cynicism. ↩

28Indeed, in an AI-powered world, the range of such possible challenges and projects will be much vaster than it is today. ↩

29I am breaking my own rule not to make this about science fiction, but I’ve found it hard not to refer to it at least a bit. The truth is that science fiction is one of our only sources of expansive thought experiments about the future; I think it says something bad that it’s entangled so heavily with a particular narrow subculture. ↩

[dankusner]

Gaslighting Your Boss: Creative Experiments in Digital Sabotage

For its entire existence, “sabotage” has been a loaded word.

But with what is it loaded?

In her 1917 pamphlet titled “Sabotage,” labor leader, activist, and feminist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn defines the term as “the withdrawal of efficiency” with the aim of affecting the profits of the boss.

She goes on to enumerate the many ways workers have intentionally reduced the productive capacity of their workplace as a means of coordinated labor resistance.

The practices of a saboteur might center around the individual worker and could simply involve working more slowly or clumsily to impede their hourly or daily output.

In other scenarios, sabotage might take the form of truth telling or leaking, where workers reveal embarrassing or unsavory details about their workplace to the outside world.

And, in more extreme situations, it could involve actually breaking machines or equipment to more completely impede output.

Generally speaking, these practices could be described as “gaslighting your boss” by creating subtle (or not so subtle) workplace issues that are difficult to pin on any one specific antagonist.

As Flynn notes, specific modes of sabotage will always be unique to each workplace, and are contingent on the equipment, the divisions of labor, and the individual ingenuity of workers.

Beyond that, they are “as flexible as the imagination and passions of humanity.”

While the practice of intentionally withdrawing efficiency has existed for as long as people have worked for other people, the term “sabotage” is relatively new.

Originally referring to the act of working clumsily or noisily as if you were wearing clunky wooden shoes (or sabots, a kind of French clog), the phrase “sabotage” eventually took on a threatening or even violent connotation in reaction to the notion that workers could engage in deliberate practices of slowdown or profit tampering as a way to reclaim power.

With this in mind, perhaps the most useful framing for sabotage is that it is the practice of interfering with profit as political action.

Perhaps the most useful framing for sabotage is that it is the practice of interfering with profit as political action.

“Sabotage” is more than just one-off acts of mischief-making or destruction, though.

Individual acts of slowdown or profit tampering could, after all, just be taken into account as the cost of doing business.

At the scale of the individual, this kind of defiance doesn’t usually have the ability to catalyze structural change.

One just gets fired or reprimanded, and business continues as usual.

On the other hand, defiance on a collective scale is much harder to mitigate and therefore offers rich potential.

The danger to the boss comes not only from the threat of reduced profit, but also (and perhaps most importantly) from the ways that sabotage can lay bare the fundamental mechanics of capitalism and exploitation itself.

In order to fuck with profit, you have to understand your own role in the circulation of capital.

You have to confront how profit is produced. In this way, sabotage reveals where value comes from; it reveals that value comes from the worker.

As Flynn writes, “Sabotage is an unfair day’s work for an unfair day’s wage. It is an attempt on the part of the worker to limit his production in proportion to his remuneration.”

What might sabotage look like in 2021?

For many workers—like those employed in factories, farms, or restaurants—methods of sabotage likely look almost the same as they did a century ago.

However for others, the advent of personal computing and smartphones has radically transformed both their work and the corresponding tactics of resistance.

This of course applies to anyone working in an office, or working from a laptop at home—but also includes the many “gig workers” who rely on personal phones to manage their employment.

New practices of digital sabotage are therefore relevant not just to middle-class digital laborers, but to anyone whose work is mediated by computational devices.

The classic image of the saboteur throwing a wrench into a machine resonates within a dynamic where the means of production are emotionally and physically disconnected from the worker: a factory floor, a mill, an assembly line, and so on.

For many people today, thanks to always-on smartphones and the never-ending cascade of emails they enable, there is a well-documented emotional blurriness between work and life.

But there is also a blurriness between the actual material tools that produce work and the material tools that produce and reproduce life.

After all, many of us use the same machines to mediate our labor, recreational activities, and social and romantic lives—often all at once.

So, what does sabotage look like when the means of production are your laptop or your phone?

And what does it mean when you do your paid work on the same machines that mediate your home life;

the same machines you use to communicate with friends and family?

To produce labor inefficiencies on these machines might also mean producing social inefficiencies, familial inefficiencies, or romantic inefficiencies.

An act of digital sabotage might also be an act of self-sabotage, because in order to hamper your work you might have to voluntarily and willingly hamper yourself.

For the past few years, one area of my artistic research has been centered on the concept of sabotage within the emotionally and materially blurry context of digital technology.

As an artist, I examine how data-driven systems are transforming practices like labor, policing, shopping, or even dating.

My work often takes the form of software experiments that hijack technologies or methods from industry, re-deploying them for ends that were never intended by their creators.

In doing so, I attempt to reveal the politics and power structures inherent in the systems that mediate our lives.

To this end, I’ve made a few projects that allow the user to play with forms of digital sabotage, and its necessary side-effect: self-sabotage.

Play

Video

Slow Hot Computer User Test

Slow Hot Computer (2016) is a website that makes your computer run slow and hot, so that it almost stops working but doesn’t—thus allowing you the most minimal, slowest form of productivity.

Play

Video

enron emails on phone

The Good LIfe (2017, made with Tega Brain) is a subscription service that sends you 225,000 emails from the Enron email archive, clogging up your inbox with office drama and meeting reminders from decades ago, confusing your spam filter, and also allowing you to witness firsthand the collapse of a corporate empire.

And, more recently, the Zoom Deleter (2021) and the Zoom Escaper (2021) hamper your ability to work remotely by sabotaging your video calling software.

Zoom Deleter is a small application that runs in your menu bar.

It constantly checks for the presence of Zoom on your computer and immediately deletes it if found. (As of the time of writing, Zoom Deleter has been downloaded 2,289 times.)

Play

Video

Zoom Escaper Tutorial

Zoom Escaper is a website that allows you to sabotage your own audio stream on Zoom (or on any program that uses your mic).

It adds real-time effects to your voice, making it sound like you have a terrible connection, an echo, or that there are any number of loud distractions in your space like construction, or a man weeping in your apartment.

The goal is to make your presence in meetings unbearable to others.

All of these projects attempt to invert the commonplace narratives around new technology:

they add “friction” rather than remove it; they create problems rather than attempting to solve them.

At the same time, and from a technical/UX standpoint, I’ve done my best to make them as easy to use as possible.

And I do hope that people make use of them, in a coordinated fashion, when and if needed—but more so I hope that the experience of using these applications and services makes apparent the new labor and power relations that have come to dominate our lives thanks to the vast proliferation of personal computing.

Today, we must all come to the understanding that our cell phones are, in multiple senses, also someone else’s factory for wealth generation.

And, as means of production, they are also a choke point where pressures can be applied and resistance exercised.

Like all forms of workplace sabotage these tools can be used to hamper profit, and therefore clarify for their users how value is produced.

Most importantly, I hope this work fosters a new imagination and a sense of the wide-open possibilities that exist for new tactics to claim power.

Today, we must all come to the understanding that our cell phones are, in multiple senses, also someone else’s factory for wealth generation.

And, as means of production, they are also a choke point where pressures can be applied and resistance exercised.

Perhaps in the future we will all need to embrace self-sabotage as a tool for political action.

I think we shouldn’t hesitate to participate in this counterintuitive form of resistance—after all, what is the “self” that is being sabotaged?

That is, what is the self that the laptop or the phone constructs?

It’s a “self” made according to the rules and norms of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and the like—one emerging out of the dullest kind of extractive right-wing hippy fever dream.

To briefly rehearse the usual complaints, the “self” constructed by digital tech is one shaped by for-profit platforms on which every person exists as a series of data points to be bought and sold, and whose founding ideology states that individual expression trumps all else. It’s a self that I believe we should obstruct and foil at every opportunity.

Play

Video

Mark Zuckerberg Haircuts

[rrandomtthings]

Why Bkdk is NOT toxic:

A look through their relationship throughout the series

Cw// MAJOR bnha manga spoilers

As bakudekus, we experience that “bkdk is toxic!1!” argument on a daily. It’s something that we have all just.. let sit next to us knowing that it’s always going to be there. Of course, and understandably, it bothers most of us. What many see, especially non-manga readers, isn’t what we see.

Let’s start off with what they see. In the first episode/chapter, we start off with Bakugous infamous “Swan dive off the roof” line.

Of course, no matter how you look at it, this was a terrible thing that Bakugou said to Izuku. There is no excuse. Telling someones to kts, no matter how you may disagree and not see eye to eye, is always inexcusable (this applies to real life too!!)

Later in the chapter, Bakugou carries around a can that says “Lip Service,” which, pretty much means being all talk and not meaning actions behind the words that are being said (usually said with a negative connotation.)

Once again, does this excuse what he said to Izuku? Absolutely not. However, this does give us insight on the future and when we find out about how Bakugou feels for Deku.

Note: As for the bullying prior to this scene, there is no proof that Bakugou continuously bullied Deku as of when this has been written.

Then, the sludge incident happened. At first glance, Deku looked horrified at the attack. However, he didn’t make any moves as he assumed that the heroes will come in and save the person. Once it was revealed to him that it was Bakugou, Izuku had his “My body moved on its own” moment and did not even hesitate to save Kacchan.

After the sludge villain attack, it was explicitly stated that Bakugou had not bullied Deku since then.

Now, the two are in UA and it is revealed that Deku has a quirk to Bakugou. A quirk that he was told to keep its origins of a secret. However, Deku told Bkg about OFA, ignoring All Mights warnings because he felt like he could not lie to Kacchan. Despite them still having a very rocky relationship at this point in the series, Deku still felt the need to tell Kacchan about OFA. He could not lie to him. He could lie to his mom, all of UA, everyone in the world, but not to Kacchan.

Fast forward to DVK2 and they are fighting out their emotions. Here, Deku talks about how, although he hated those small parts of Bakugou that bullied him, he never let the bad outshine the good. He always looked up to Bakugou and wanted to be just like him.

Deku compares how he sees Kacchan to All Might. His literal hero. The man who he idolizes like crazy. He felt closer and more inspired by Kacchan than All Might. Because Kacchan was always there next to him. In Dekus eyes, despite the bullying and all, he saw Kacchan as more than All Might.

Izuku expresses how he is the only one who can accept Bakugous feelings. Not because it is explicitly about the two of them, rather it’s because he is the only one willing to listen and understand where he is coming from. And Bakugou knows this too. He could have easily asked anyone else, but instead he chose Izuku. He trusted Deku enough to be vulnerable around him.

During this fight, Bakugou expresses how he always thought that Deku continuously looked down on him. And it’s because he has never seen such genuine kindness from anyone. He was always expected to get up on his own. All because of his quirk and how he was praised for being gifted with such. He always thought that Izuku had an “attitude” that he was so unfamiliar with.

Deku, during their fight, although he does not say it out loud because he thinks that it “sounds stupid,” talks about how he sees Kacchan and his image of victory. To him, when he thinks of victory, Kacchan is who comes to mind.

After this fight, they are able to start to see eye to eye and start to understand each other’s perspectives. Now that Bakugou knows about OFA, they start to work and grow together. Win to save and Save to win.

In the JT arc there are very fun moments between the two as they start becoming more and more friendly with each other. They continue to try and one up each other, but it is much different than before. There is a lighter undertone to their words and actions. They start hanging out in the meeting room with All Might as there is also a lot of banter between the two—this is when their relationship has started to mend. Not to mention, during this arc Deku unlocks black whip all because Monoma insulted Kacchan.

Now, after the two spend so much time together with the JT and Endeavor agency arcs, the two has become much closer than they were at the beginning of the series. The two have started to mend their bond and continue to do so.

Then, the war arc.

After realizing that Shigaraki is after OFA, Deku makes the decision to follow after him. Throughout these panels, he looks absolutely terrified. Of course, why wouldn’t he be? He is about to run into a battle field all on his own, without any support and with no one knowing what he plans to do.

However, Kacchan does.

Kacchan follows Deku to Shigaraki. He claims that it’s because he has “unfinished business” with him, but, while that may be partly true, that’s not the full truth (I.e. he wants to protect Deku.)

Now, the two have reached Shigaraki and Deku is fighting against him. Bakugou tells Deku to get away from him and that he should be the last person near him. The response Bakugou gets is that no one else can defeat Shigaraki as Kacchan watches Deku in absolute fear that he will end up being terribly hurt.

Side note: look at the terror in his eyes.. I’m gonna sob

Within this specific fight with Shigaraki, there are many heroes with the two. Some of which are Endeavor, Shouto, Rock Lock, Aizawa (injured), etc. Despite knowing that this is a child up in the air fighting Shigaraki, some (not Rock Lock, he had the right idea with questioning why children are on the battle field) look in amazement as Deku continuously breaks himself so he can try and get Shigaraki down.

However, Kacchan sees past this as he yells at the other heroes about how this is not helping Deku in the slightest and that he is going to get himself killed at the rate that he was going.

Bakugou devises a plan to try and help Deku and to get Shigaraki down as the heroes look in awe at Deku. He uses Shouto and Endeavor as they try and get up to where the two were and have Endeavor use his Prominence Burn on Shigaraki in hopes that would bring him down.

While Bakugou is flying them up to Deku, he has a flashback to a conversation with All Might.

They were training Deku with black whip. They were playing a game called “Catch a Kacchan” (I will never get over how cute this name is 😭) and they called in others to help Deku practice with quirks similar to the ones that he will eventually or has either unlocked (Uraraka for Float, Tsu for black whip, etc.)

As All Might and Bakugou watch on as Deku trains, they have a conversation.

Bakugou asks All Might why he is hiding information about the fourth user from Deku. No, he doesn’t ask, he confronts him. He confronts his childhood hero for the sake of Deku. He straight up tells All Might to stop keeping information from, knowing that this could potentially harm him.

Bakugou is upset at that point. He wishes for All Might to stop keeping secrets from them, more specifically Deku.

Then, as the two continue to talk, All Might brings up the fact that he is worried for Izuku. And Bakugou is too, to which he does not deny in any sort of way.

Note: once again, even when they’re not on the battle field, Bakugou looks so worried for Deku. Many have speculated that him looking tired throughout this chapter (ch. 284) has to do with him continuously worrying about Izuku and thinking about their past together.

Bakugou continues the conversation as he talks about how Deku does not understand how special he is. All Might brings up the idea of atonement and questions Bakugou as to whether that is what he is doing with Deku as a way to make up for their past, to which Bakugou does not disagree upon. The conversation then ends with All Might talking about how the two will eventually get to talk this out together and allow for Bakugou to express his worries for Deku to him.

Then, the scene changes back to the battle field as Endeavor uses his Prominence Burn onto Shigaraki, only for it to fail as he got right back up due to his regeneration.

The battle continues between Deku and Shigaraki (who at this point is AFO) as he releases Quirk Activation spikes in Izukus direction.

Kacchan, seeing as Deku is about to get hurt, rushes to him in an instant.

Throughout this scene, we see Bakugous inner monologue. Here, we are shown all his regrets with his and Dekus relationship. How he completely regrets bullying him in the past. Deku are his final thoughts in a moment where he thinks he is about to die.

Kacchan had his “my body moved on its own” moment as he rushed in to save Deku.

After Bakugou was hit, his first words to Deku were to try and calm him down and to tell him to not win this on his own.

Upon seeing Kacchan hurt, to even say that Deku went bat shit crazy would be an understatement. He was absolutely livid as we see him fight like never before.

As Deku continues to fight against Shigaraki, Shouto flies up with his fire quirk to catch Bakugou as he is falling, to which he eventually grabs Deku after him and Shigaraki separate and Izuku starts to fall.

After putting them on the ground, Shouto goes back and fight with Nejire.

As Iida had arrived at the battle field by this point, he tries to help an injured Bakugou get out of the battle field. However, Bakugou refuses as he continues to fight.

Here, it is revealed that Bakugou, just by seeing Deku almost die, has never felt so close to death in his lifetime. Not when Bakugou got kidnapped. Not when class 1A was attack at the USJ, not after he was stabbed. It was the thought of Deku dying that made him feel like he was about to die.

The need to get to Deku caused for a quirk evolution as he had to advance his quirk in that moment to be able to reach Deku.

After the battle is done, Bakugou falls into a 2 day coma. When he wakes up, the first thing he asks is how Deku, Todoroki, Aizawa, etc. are doing.

Upon hearing that Deku is still asleep, Kacchan rushes out of bed to get to his room despite still being heavily injured. At this moment, Bakugou knew that he would not be able to talk to Deku. He just wanted to know if he was okay. He just wanted to see him.

After having to tie him up with Tsuyus tongue, knowing that that if they tie him up with anything else he would explode it, Bakugou yells “Why am I awake while you’re still asleep?” towards Dekus room as he is being dragged away by the class.

Many have taken that line as a way of showing that Bakugou fully expected to die for Deku at that moment. And he was willing to. Seeing that his effort to protect him failed and led to Deku being in a coma only greatly upset Kacchan.

At the moment that this has been written, Deku still hasn’t woken up and Kacchan was forced back to his room.

If after reading this post you still think that bkdk is toxic because of their past, I do want you to understand that people change. We all have a past, a present, and a future. You are not who you were in your past. You are who you are in the present, and you will be someone different in the future.

Bakugou clearly regrets how he treated Deku. This is not an opinion, this is a fact. He is trying to change and mend their relationship. They are living in the present right now, not the past.

Izuku does not hold any grudge against him and even admits that he feels blessed to be able to have conversations with Kacchan.

When it comes to Bakudeku, so many only look at the first episode. Even if you’re just an anime-only, the anime has DVK2. The episode where a lot of their progression comes from.

At this point, if you still think that their relationship is toxic, then im really not sure what to tell you. If your argument is still “in the first episode...” The no. Stop. We are 300+ chapters in. These two are the main protagonists and the show literally revolves around them. They are obviously going to grow. You can’t completely ignore this growth because of what happened in the first episode. You can’t only look at the things you want to and ignore the big picture.

[theartofdreaming1]

Katniss, bravely stepping inbetween Gale and Thread (and his whip) - she’s so courageous and protective, she deserves the world 😭

As usual, my thoughts regarding this week’s prompts and (many) random thoughts on chapters 7-9 are below the cut. (Is it just me, or are my notes getting longer and longer with each and every post? I swear, this book is so meaty, we’ll soon reach the point where I have to type out the entire chapter, with my thoughts in the margins)

heart

“Gale is mine. I am his. Anything else in unthinkable.” 

I think these words are a result of Katniss being so afraid of losing Gale that she’s kinda overcompensating; their relationship has been strained these past few months and they’d just had a row, separating from each other on bad terms - and the next time she sees him, he’s been whipped so bad that he’s lost consciousness and could be potentially dying from his wounds. Of course she’s so terrified of losing him, that she’s holding on as tightly as she can to him. It’s important to keep in mind how important their relationship is to her and we see that in her preceding thoughts: What a pair we were - fatherless, frightened, but fiercely commited, too, to keeping our families alive. Desperate, yet no longer alone after that day, because we’d found each other. I think of a hundred moments in the woods, lazy afternoons fishing, the day I taught him to swim, that time I twisted my knee and he carried me home. Mutually counting each other, watching each other’s backs, forcing each other to be brave. - Gale was the first person who was her equal, a kindred spirit, her partner. After Katniss had lost both of her parents when her father died and her mother succumbed to her depression - the people who were supposed to care for her and guide her through growing up - she was stuck with the role of sole provider and protector of her family at age eleven. She must have been so lonely all this time until she met this boy who understood what she was going through and they learned from each other and shouldered their burdens together, to take off some of the overwhelming pressure. Of course that relationship, of course Gale is important to her. But also now their relationship has become more fragile, after the Games they are in danger of growing apart - it’s got to be so terrifying to feel like the one proper, mutual relationship you’ve had seems to be slipping through your fingers. With everything that’s going on, her entire life as it is teetering on the razor’s edge (heck, the president himself has been threatening her and her family!), it’s no wonder that Katniss is craving that familiarity and safety that her relationship with Gale used to provide her with. And seeing Gale in this state just has her holding on to him more tightly than ever.

mind

Hmm, no big moment is coming to my mind right now; I think I’m always most impressed by the tiny moments that show how tenacious, resilient and fiercely kind humans can be - like Darius stepping forward to stop Gale’s cruel punishment, Leevy volunteering to tell Hazelle about Gale and promising to stay with the Hawthorne children, Madge bringing the morphling, Katniss pressing Darius’s hand in the Training Center, Twill taking Bonnie with her to flee to D13 and so on.

soul

I believe that Katniss was honestly surprised to learn that Gale had feelings for her; she had categorically shut down the idea of entering a romantic relationship for herself, so I don’t think she’d seriously consider anyone being romantically interested in her in return (that’s not how that works, of course, but I think that’s how she perceived the whole shtick). Their kiss threw her completely for a loop and if anything, she mostly saw it as something that contributed to the deterioration of their previous, easy and comfortable relationship.

Chapter 7

A mockingjay is a creature the Capitol never intended to exist. [...] They hadn’t anticipated its will to live. - In a way, the Capitol continues to make this mistake with the people living in the districts, too - underestimating their will to live (opposed to just surviving)

I look in his [Gale’s] eyes. His temper can’t quite mask the hurt, the sense of betrayal he feels at my engagement to Peeta. This will be my last chance, this meeting today, to not lose Gale forever. - Okay, we don’t know how much Katniss might be (incorrectly) presuming here, but the idea that Gale might feel betrayal because his best friend is being forced into an engagement pisses me off. It’s fine if he’s feeling jealous because she’s being paired off with Peeta when he wishes he could have a shot with her, but how in the world does this even rate as a betrayal?! A) It’s done against her will and B) Just because they’re friends doesn’t mean Katniss owes him anything when we’re talking about romantic feelings... Ugh 😒 Also, it’s quite noteworthy how insecure Katniss feels about their relationship - she’s constantly worried Gale will drop her and their friendship (waiting for Gale after the camera teams left after winning the Games: I’d begun to think that he’d given up on me in the weeks that had passed.- Ch. 2) and it doesn’t help that she’s been through that extreme, traumatic experience without him and they haven’t had much opportunity to spend a lot of time with each other (with the Victory Tour and Gale having to work so much) and when they do hang out, they don’t seem to really talk much, which doesn’t exactly help...

He [Gale] tosses the gloves on my lap. “Here. I don’t want your fiancé’s old gloves.” “He’s not my fiancé. That’s just part of the act. And these aren’t his gloves. They were Cinna’s,” I say. “Give them back, then, he says. - Gale can be so petty sometimes 🙄

While I talk, [...] [Gale] occupies himself with turning the food in the leather bag into a meal for us. Toasting bread and cheese, coring apples, placing chestnuts in the fire to roast. I watch his hands, his beautiful, capable fingers. Scarred, as mine were before the Captiol erased all marks from my skin, but strong and deft. [...] Hands I trust. - Oh boy, this moment really shows how these two are at cross purposes right now - Gale’s prepping the food as you would for a toasting (romantic connotation), while Katniss is oberserving his hands, thinking how their hands used to match (not anymore!) and basically wishing herself back into the time before the Games, when things were ‘simpler’/more clearly defined (and also platonic!); there is nothing romantic from her P.O.V. - it’s all about the friendship and trust

[Gale] steps in and I feel myself lifted off the ground. The room spins, and I have to lock my arms around Gale’s neck to brace myself. He’s laughing, happy. “Hey!” I protest, but I’m laughing, too. Gale sets me down but doesn’t release his hold on me. “Okay, let’s run away.” [...] “You’re sure?” I say. [...] “I’m sure. I’m completely, entirely, one hundred percent sure.” - Yeah, and I’m sure you’re not going to change your opinion in the next five minutes, Gale... In his defense, Gale didn’t know all the details, so in that regard it’s totally valid that he might decide to change his mind after having more input... It’s just that Katniss specifically asks him whether he’s sure and his reply is so full of conviction (100% sure!), only for him to do a complete 180 just a couple of minutes later; Gale’s very hot and cold, which makes for such a harsh contrast when compared to Peeta’s more measured reaction later in the chapter

He tilts his forehead down to rest against mine and pulls me closer. [...] I don’t try to move away. Why should I, anyway? His voice drops to a whisper. “I love you.” That’s why. - Oh man, Katniss just can’t catch a break 😞 Really not wise of Gale to drop the L-bomb here (after, what? a kiss they never talked about and little else... their communication is truly abysmal and it’s really damaging to their relationship, hurting the both of them)

“Gale, I can’t think about anyone that way now. All I can think about, every day, is how afraid I am. And there doesn’t seem to be room for anything else. If we could get somewhere safe, maybe I could be different. I don’t know.” I can see him swallowing his disappointment. “So, we’ll go. We’ll find out.” - I mean, honestly, I totally understand where Katniss is coming from - she doesn’t need a romantic interest, she needs a partner, which is why she’s been so eager to talk to her hunting partner, someone she’s used to rely on for survival and now he’s also confounding their relationship by introducing that romance-angle (as if it wasn’t bad enough that her relationship with Peeta got kind of messed up when that same angle was forced upon them prematurely)... Also, telling how Katniss thinks she’d have to be different to maybe even consider a romantic relationship with Gale - Katniss as she is right now just can’t see herself wanting to be with Gale romantically; it would require a change... I’ve got to give Gale credit for still going along with it, and trying to push past his disappointment, though

“My [Gale’s] mother is going to take some convincing.” [...] “Mine, too. I’ll just have to make her see reason. Take her for a long walk. Make sure she understands we won’t survive the alternative.” “She’ll understand. I watched a lot of the Games with her and Prim. She won’t say no to you,” says Gale. - That’s interesting, I wonder what exactly Gale means by that? That Mrs. Everdeen won’t say no to Katniss because she feels guilty that Katniss had to go through the Games or because watching her daughter compete in the Games really made her realize how messed up Panem is? Or that she’s more inclined to trust Katniss’s judgement after everything that has happened?

“Haymitch will be the real challenge.” “Haymitch?” Gale abandons the chestnuts. “You’re asking him to come with us?” “I have to, Gale. I can’t leave him and Peeta because they’d-” His scowl cuts me off. “What?” “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize how large our party was,” he snaps at me. - Gale doesn’t seem to have realized how close and important Peeta and Haymitch have become to Katniss... maybe because they never properly talked about this aspect of Katniss’s life (I swear, their shoddy communication must account for at least half of the damage their relationship has taken in these past few months alone)

“What if he [Peeta] decides to stay?” he [Gale] asks. I try to sound indifferent, but my voice cracks. “Then he stays.” “You’d leave him behind?” Gale asks. “To save Prim and my mother, yes,” I answer. “I mean, no! I’ll get him to come.” “And me, would you leave me?” Gale’s expression is rock hard now. - Boy, oh boy! I think Gale knows (like Peeta) that Katniss could never leave behind the people she cares about; then, he’s kind of gauging whether Peeta has already received the Katniss Everdeen Stamp of ‘Caring’ - and, as it turns out, he has! And then Gale ends up making it into a bit of  competition by asking her whether she would leave him behind (or, alternately, her turning him down has him confused about the depth of their relationship, I dunno); not fun

“There’s an uprising in Eight?” he [Gale] says in a hushed voice. I try to backpedal. To defuse him, as I tried to defuse the districts. - Katniss is going to be about as successful as she’d been at defusing the districts, too - But here we have another example of Katniss trying to rein in Gale’s temper because she’s afraid he’s going to get himself in trouble (like when she decided not to tell him about Snow’s visit to her house because she was worried what he’d do with that information)... It’s really not great that she feels the need to censor herself so he won’t do something dangerous... Katniss knows first-hand how badly impulsive actions and decisions can be received in the Capitol - and she never even meant for a rebellion to happen!

“And it’s my fault, Gale. Because of what I did in the arena. If I had just killed myself with those berries, none of this would’ve happened. Peeta could have come home and lived, and everyone else would have been safe. too.” “Safe to do what?” he says in a gentler tone. “Starve? Work like slaves? Send their kids to the reaping? You haven’t hurt people - you’ve given them an opportunity. They just have to be brave enough to take it. - Katniss is taking all the responsibility upon herself again... Gale is right to point out that she was merely a catalyst, not the cause for the rebellion - the cause are the awful living conditions of the people in the districts

“Stop it! You don’t know what you’re saying. The Peacekeepers outside of Twelve, they’re not like Darius, or even Cray! The lives of district people - they mean less than nothing to them!” I say. “That’s why we have to join the fight!” he answers harshly. “No! we have to leave here before they kill us and a lot of other people, too!” [...] “You leave, then, I’d never go in a million years.” [...] “What about your family?” “What about the other families, Katniss? The ones who can’t run away?” - This discourse is so painful because they are both right - Katniss has seen more of the districts and how things are handled beyond the (relatively tame) confines of D12 and it’s fair that she wants to know that the people she cares about are safe from harm; Gale, of course, has a point commenting that not everyone has that opportunity and the only way to have a long-lasting, wide-spread improvement of their conditions is through rebelling against their oppressor - but that will inevitably come along with sacrifices and collateral damage and it’s easy to say that it will be worth it in the long run, but when those who are hurt/dead could end up being your loved ones, it’s definitely easier said than done

He throws Cinna’s gloves at my feet. “I changed my mind. I don’t want anything they made in the Capitol.” And he’s gone. I look down at the gloves. Anything they made in the Capitol? Was that directed at me? Does he think I am now just another product of the Capitol and therefore something untouchable? The unfairness of it all fills me with rage. But it’s mixed up with fear over what kind of crazy thing he might do next. - Gale getting rid of Cinna’s gloves just because they are from the Capitol is a prime example of this “us vs. them” mindset that he will be (worringly) fast to adopt - of course, perceiving the opposite side as “other” will make it easier to fight against them; however, it’s all too easy to lose sight of your opponent’s humanity when you think like that (think of how Gale has a hard time understanding Katniss’s distress upon seeing her prep team being treated so terribly/inhumanely in D13); Katniss feeling upset that Gale might perceive her as a product of the Capitol instead of its victim is understandable (and isn’t that exactly what the inhabitants of D13 are going to think of Peeta in MJ?) - and yet, she is still worried Gale could get himself into trouble with his impulsivity; she’s a good bean

”Going to town?” I ask. “Yes. I’m supposed to eat dinner with my family,” he [Peeta] says. - I’m tripping over the word ‘supposed’ here - it doesn’t sound like Peeta’s looking forward to hanging out with his fam, although it can’t be that often, since they’ve been away on Victory Tour and he is living alone (maybe the end of the chapter will give us another hint why that is 😒😒)... I can’t help but wonder whether these family dinners are mainly for public perception (in that case... it really is no wonder Peeta is so good at playing the cameras - poor guy had to fool the outside world his entire life) or because they are the only chance for Peeta to hang out with any of the members of his family he might actually want to spend some time with

“Peeta, if I asked you to run away from the district with me, would you?” Peeta takes my arm, bringing me to a stop. He doesn’t need to check my face to see if I’m serious. “Depends on why you’re asking.” President Snow wasn’t convinced by me. There’s an uprising in District Eight. We have to get out,” I say. “By ‘we’ do you mean just you and me? No. Who else would be going?” he asks. - Peeta doesn’t just blindly agree to Katniss’s proposal; he needs to know what’s going on first (he has been burnt before - no more secrets!) - and it’s a testament to how well he knows her that as soon as he’s asking whether she meant just the two of them, he corrects himself because knows that Katniss would never leave the ones she cares about behind

“What about Gale?” he says. “I don’t know. He might have other plans,” I say. Peeta shakes his head and gives me rueful smile. “I bet he does. Sure, Katniss, I’ll go.” I feel a slight twinge of hope. “You will?” “Yeah. But I don’t think for a minute you will,” he says. [...] “Then you don’t know me. Be ready. It could be any time.” - Telling how Peeta immediately agrees to the plan once he gathers that Gale won’t come - he knows that Katniss cares about Gale and could never leave him behind, ergo she’d never actually leave under these circumstances - he knows her so well. Also, Katniss’s reaction is like that of a petulant child, it’s kind of funny 😄

“Katniss, hold up.” [...] “I really will go, if you want me to. I just think we better talk it through with Haymitch. Make sure we won’t be making things worse for everyone.” - Ultimately, Peeta would follow Katniss to the ends of the earth - doesn’t mean that he can’t throw in a sensible suggestion in there as well 😉 (Also, in the next chapter we will see how Katniss, Gale, and Peeta might be a little too inexperienced/naive to be able to form accurate expectations of what is to come - Haymitch and his generation have a little more experience in that regard)

He raises his head. “What’s that?” [...] I haven’t noticed the strange noise coming from the square. A whistling, the sound of an impact, the intake of breath from a crowd. “Come on,” Peeta says, his face suddenly hard. I don’t know why. I can’t place the sound, even guess at the situation. But it means something bad to him. - Why does my sweet boy know what a whipping sounds like, Suzanne, huh?! Care to explain that? 😭

Peeta steps up on a crate against the wall of the sweetshop and offers me a hand while he scans the square. I’m halfway up when he suddenly blocks my way. “Get down. Get out of here!” He’s whispering, but his voice is harsh with insistence. - Peeta was offering his hand to help Katniss up the crate because they are a team (and he’s a gentleman)! It’s only when he recognizes who is receiving those lashes and realizes that Katniss will lose her shit once she knows, which could make the current situation even worse, that he urges her to leave, and he is not the only one to think that: - Voices hiss. “Get out of here, girl.” “Only make it worse.” What do you want to do? Get him killed?”

Chapter 8

It’s too late to stop the arm from descending, and I instinctively know I won’t have the power to block it. Instead I throw myself directly between the whip and Gale. I’ve flung out my arms to protext as much of his broken body as possible, so there’s nothing to deflect the lash. I take the full force of it across the left side of my face. - Katniss is so selfless; she knows that it’s either Gale getting hit again or a lash to her own face and she chooses the latter

“Hold it!” a voice barks. Haymitch appears and trips over a Peacekeeper lying on the ground. It’s Darius. [...] He’s knocked out but still breathing. What happened? Did he try to come to Gale’s aid before I got here? - Haymitch sure appeared quickly - I can easily imagine Peeta taking off immediately to get him (or send someone to bring him to the square) once he knew Katniss couldn’t be stopped; but if Haymitch had been at his house in Victor’s Village, there is no way he’d have made that quickly to the square... maybe he was already at the Hob and had gotten wind of the whole situation? Also, poor Darius! Wearing a uniform/being in some sort of position of power is no guarantee you won’t get punished as soon as you show the tiniest glimpse of compassion - in a place like Panem, nobody is safe from the caprice of the people in charge

I see a flicker of recognition in the eyes of the man with the whip. [...] it wouldn’t be easy to identify me as the victor of the last Hunger Games. Especially with half my face swelling up. But Haymitch has been showing up on television for years, and he’d be difficult to forget. - Getting Haymitch truly was the smartest move to make (which is why I’m pretty sure it was a move on Peeta’s part - he’d know how to use reminders of ‘appearances’ to ensure a punishment wouldn’t go ‘too far’, y’know 😢). But also - Thread must have lived under a flipping rock, to not being able to recognizes Katniss (her face must have been plastered all over the place during the Victory Tour, which just had concluded recently) - or he was just too in the heat of the moment, with someone opposing him, bleugh 😒

“He [Gale] was poaching. What business is it of hers, anyway?” says the man. “He’s her cousin.” Peeta’s got my other arm now, but gently. “And she’s my fiancée. So if you want to get to him, expect to go through both of us.” - I love how Peeta’s just laying it down as it is; his phrasing just sounds so factual, rather than provocative (although it is, of course); he really has a way with words - Maybe we’re it. The only three people in the district who could make a stand like this. Although it’s sure to be temporary. There will be repercussions. - Haymitch, Peeta, and Katniss working together as a team again! Also, a good example of the effect people with public influence can have 

One [Peacekeeper], a woman named Purnia who eats regularly at Greasy Sae’s, steps forward stiffly. “I believe, for a first offense, the required number of lashes has been dispensed, sir. Unless your sentence is death, which we would carry out by firing squad.” “Is that the standard protocol here?” asks the Head Peacekeeper. “Yes, sir,” Purnia says, and several others nod in agreement. I’m sure none of them actually know because, in the Hob, the standard protocol for someone showing up with a wild turkey is for everybody to bid on the drumsticks. - It’s kinda nice to see the local Peacekeepers supporting Purnia’s claim to get this display to stop - this is the only way out of this situation where Thread’s authority is not openly challenged (and we know Thread doesn’t take well to having his authority challenged - see Darius)

There’s no stretcher, but the old woman at the clothing stall sells us the board that serves as her countertop. “Just don’t tell where you got it,” she says, packing up the rest of her goods quickly. Most of the square has emptied, fear getting the better of compassion. But after what happened, I can’t blame anyone. - It’s sad how that air of intimidation makes people want to mask their acts of compassion (and also says a lot about the precariousness of the existing living situations if that old lady is still selling that board - I’d never even consider exchanging money for that, but that’s probably my privileged situation showing here; Katniss brings up the theme of fear vs compassion - very fitting, since it seems to be her driving force (although, generally, her compassion wins out over her fear) and despite her assertion that fear appears to be getting the better of compassion we see a good amount of people reaching out to help, such as the following example:

Leevy, a girl who lives a few houses down from mine in the Seam, takes my arm. My mother kept her little brother alive last year when he caught the measles. “Need help getting back?” Her gray eyes are scared but determined. - The subtle suggestion here that Leevy might be further motivated to help out because Katniss’s mom helped her little brother is also an excellent example of how kindness breeds kindness

“Get some snow on that,” Haymitch orders over his shoulder. I scoop up a handful of snow and press it against my cheek, numbing a bit of the pain. - This moment reminded me of Peeta immediately reaching for some ice from that fruit tureen after Haymitch hit him on their way to the Games in THG (Ch. 4) - their different immediate reactions to getting hit in the face could simply be due to the fact that Katniss is a little too preoccupied worrying about Gale to think about her injury, of course, but I feel like you could also interpret them as examples for how much experience Katniss and Peeta have with being hit in the face, respectively...

Gale must have gone to Cray’s house, as he’s done a hundred times, knowing Cray pays well for a wild turkey. Instead he found the new Head Peacekeeper, a man they heard someone call Romulus Thread. No one knows what happened to Cray. He was buying white liquor in the Hob just this morning [...] but now he’s nowhere to be found. - As I’ve already mentioned regarding Darius, inhabiting some position of power does not guarantee you any safety in Panem (there is always someone more powerful who will treat their inferiors like garbage, if they feel like it)

By the time I showed up, he [Gale]’d been lashed at least forty times. He passed out around thirty. - Jesus 😨 poor Gale!

“What about Darius?” Peeta asks.“ After about twenty lashes, he stepped in, saying that was enough. Only he didn’t do it smart and official, like Purnia did. He grabbed Thread’s arm and Thread hit him in the head with the butt of the whip. Nothing good waiting for him,” says Bristel. - It’s so messed up how it is not enough to have someone who’d stand up and do something about a horrible situation - they have to do it the right way, or else they’re toast; there really shouldn’t have to be a smart way of doing the right thing

Snow begins, thick and wet, making visibility even more difficult. - (President) Snow is coming down hard on them, making it hard to see what’s up ahead

Ever so gently, she [Mrs. Everdeen] begins to clean the mutilated flesh on Gale’s back. I feel sick to the stomach, useless, the remaining snow dripping from my glove into a puddle on the floor. Peeta puts me in a chair and holds a cloth filled with fresh snow to my cheek. - Although she’s quite squeamish, Katniss stays as Gale gets treated (the force that holds the loved ones of the hurt/dying, just like when Peeta was being treated after their Games); meanwhile, Peeta is taking care of Katniss - there is so much care + love to be found in this moment

My mother has to save the strongest [painkillers] for the worst pain, but what is the worst pain? To me, it’s always the pain that is present. If I were in charge, those painkillers would be gone in a day because I have so little ability to watch suffering. - Honestly, same; I can’t stomach seeing other people suffer without feeling overwhelmed and feeling like crying... I don’t know how professionals do it

“Just give him the medicine!” I scream at her. [...] “Take her out,” says my mother. Haymitch and Peeta literally carry me from the room while I shout obscenities at her. They pin me down on a bed in one of the extra bedrooms until I stop fighting. - Oof. Poor Katniss! But yeah, it was the best call to remove her from the situation, Mrs. E. had to focus on what she was doing... Also, Haymitch and Peeta are the ones to get Katniss out of there and stay with her - these three take care of each other!

After a while, my mother comes in and treats my face. Then she holds my hand, stroking my arm, while Haymitch fills her in on what happened with Gale. “So it’s starting again?” she says. “Like before?” - Katniss’s mom has become a much more active and soothing presence in this book, I like it... Also, what does “again” mean? Does this imply there has been an attempted uprising in D12 that needed to be squashed before?

Cray would have been disliked, anyway, because of the uniform he wore, but it was his habit of luring starving young women into his bed for money that made him an object of loathing in the district. In really bad times, the hungriest would gather at his door at nightfall, vying for the chance to earn a few coins to feed their families by selling their bodies. Had I been older when my father died, I might have been among them. - Horrifying and absolutely disgusting 🤢 Those poor women! How desperate they must have been! 

... when the doorbell rings, I shoot straight out of bed. [...] “They [the peacekeepers] can’t have him,” I say. “Might be you they’re after,” Haymitch reminds me. “Or you,” I say. “Not my house,” Haymitch points out. “But I’ll get the door.” “No, I’ll get it,” says my mother quietly. - Again, Mrs. Everdeen is taking the initiative! She was so watered down in the movies

[Madge] holds out a small, damp cardboard box to me. “Use these for your friend,” she says. I take off the lid of the box, revealing half a dozen vials of clear liquid. [...] “What is that stuff?” asks Peeta. “It’s from the Capitol. It’s called morphling,” my mother answers. “I didn’t even know Madge knew Gale,” says Peeta. “We used to sell her strawberries,” I say almost angrily. What am I angry about, though? Not that she has brought the medicine, surely. “She must have quite a taste for them,” says Haymitch. That’s what nettles me. It’s the implication that there’s something going on between Gale and Madge. And I don’t like it. “She’s my friend” is all I say. - I mean, Katniss could be mad because A) Gale had literally just told her he loved her a few hours ago and if there was something (reciprocated) going on between Gale and Madge, that would have been pretty shitty for both girls involved and also B) she is friends with both of them and it would be hurtful to learn that two of your closest friends had been seeing each other without telling you anything about it... also, she’s super upset over Gale getting so seriously hurt just after they’d had an argument, her feelings are all over the place

... I’m selfish. I’m a coward. I’m the kind of girl, who, when she might actually be of use, would run to stay alive and leave those who couldn’t follow to suffer and die. This is the girl Gale met in the woods today. No wonder I won the Games. No decent person ever does. You saved Peeta, I think weakly. But now I question even that. I knew good and well that my life back in District 12 would be unlivable if I let that boy die. - Yes, Katniss, you knew that your life back in D12 would have been unlivable if he died - but not because you feared that people would shun you; it was because you “couldn’t lose the boy with the bread” and because “if he dies, I’ll never go home, not really”... This is an excellent example of how distorted your memories can get when you are in a bad headspace at present

The berries. I realize the answer to who I am lies in that handful poisonous fruit. If I held them out to save Peeta because I knew I would be shunned if I came back without him, then I am despicable. If I held them out because I loved him, I am still self-centered, although forgivable. But if I held them out to defy the Capitol, I am someone of worth. - Katniss, you don’t have to be planning to overthrow a corrupt and cruel government to be someone of worth! You’re someone of worth just by being yourself! - The trouble is, I don’t know exactly what was going on inside me at that moment. - Frankly, very rarely are our motivations clearly defined by a single factor - or my professor would not have been able to teach an entire semester-long course on motivation psychology😉)

Chapter 9

Gale’s dead to the world, but his fingers are locked around mine. I smell fresh bread and turn my stiff neck to find Peeta looking down at me with such a sad expression. I get the sense that he’s been watching us awhile. “Go on up to bed, Katniss. I’ll look after him now,” he says. - Peeta! Must have been hard for him to see Katniss like this (and the underlying strength of Katniss and Gale’s relationship, when his relationship with Katniss is still not all that solidified), and yet he’s being such a good bean about it 😭

I give a strangled cry and wake with a start, sweating and shivering at once. Cradling my damaged cheek in my hand, I remind myself that it was not Clove but Thread who gave me this wound. I wish that Peeta were here to hold me, until I remember I’m not supposed to wish that anymore. I have chosen Gale and the rebellion, and a future with Peeta is the Capitol’s design, not mine. - Katniss, gurl... Maybe your instinctive desire to receive comfort from Peeta is trying to tell you something??!? Also, Katniss is forcing this strange dichotomous association of Gale = rebellion and Peeta = Capitol, when in just a bit, she’s clearly connecting Peeta to the rebellion as well (aside from the fact that Peeta was basically the first person to suggest to her that maybe a rebellion was necessary... just saying)

Fighting the Capitol assures their swift retaliation. I must accept that at any moment I can be arrested. [...] There might be torture. Mutliation. A bullet through the skull in the town square [...] I imagine these things and I’m terrified, but let’s face it: They’ve been lurking in the back of my brain, anyway. [...] I’m already a target. - Oh geez! Despite admitting that she’s terrified of what the Capitol is capable fo doing to her, Katniss is still pretty composed naming the possible horrors in store for her, which is just a heartbreaking reminder of how many terrible things she has already had to endure.🙁

Now comes the harder part. I have to face the fact that my family and friends might share this fate. Prim. I need only to think of Prim and all my resolve disintegrates. It’s my job to protect her. [...] I can’t let the Capitol hurt Prim. - 😭😭😭 Katniss has reached a point where she can put her own need for survival/physical intactness aside, but the thought of something awful happening to Prim stops her short (it’s so strange to think that, in a twisted way, it wasn’t the Capitol who’d ended up inflicting the final harm upon Prim...)

And then it hit’s me. They already have. They have killed her father in those wretched mines. They have sat by as she almost starved to death. [...] She has been hurt far worse than I had at the age of twelve. And even that pales in comparison with Rue’s life. [...] Prim... Rue... aren’t they the very reason I have to try to fight? Because what has been done to them is so wrong, so beyond justification, so evil that there is no choice? Because no one has the right to treat them as they have been treated? Yes. This is the thing to remember when fear threatens to swallow me up. What I am about to do, whatever any of us are forced to endure, it is for them. - All these things are very true and it’s also very fitting that the main motivation for Katniss would be to ensure a better future for the children of Panem (and to avenge the evils done to the people close to her heart... while Katniss of course can see the abstract bigger picture/reason for the rebellion, she always operates best when it comes to specific people/circumstances she has a deep, personal connection with)... But also: all these things apply to you, too, Katniss! Despite your tendency to feel responsible for everything and everyone, you’re still a child that had to grow up way too fast and had to endure way too much!

We need someone to direct us and reassure us this is possible. And I don’t think I’m that person. I may have been a catalyst for rebellion, but a leader should be someone with conviction, and I’m barely a convert myself. Someone with unflinching courage, and I’m still working hard at finding mine. Someone with clear and persuasive words, and I’m so easily tongue-tied. Words. I think of words and I think of Peeta. - Katniss’s idea of a great leader for the rebellion is Peeta - interesting, isn’t it (she could have considered Gale, but no)? She makes a good point, though: it helps when a leader has plenty of charisma, and our boy has that in spades; he’s got a good set of morals, is not above joining in on the action/risking his own neck when the need arises and is very genuine and purposeful with his words and actions, which is inspiring... I think Katniss is severely underselling how courageous she is, though

He could move a crowd to action, I bet, if he chose to. Would find the things to say. But I’m sure the idea has never crossed his mind. - Why would you assume that, Katniss? Peeta’s literally the one to suggest to you that trying to placate the district might not be the right thing to do... Peeta’s not someone who’d stir up trouble just for the sake of stirring up trouble, sure; he’s much more deliberate about doing things the ‘right’ way, but he’s not generally opposed to challenging authorities (he’s literally the one to openly gift some of your winnings to another district!)

She knows what she’s doing, my mother. I feel a pang of remorse about yesterday, the awful things I yelled at her as Peeta and Haymitch dragged me from the kitchen. “I’m sorry. About screaming at you yesterday.” - It’s so sweet how Katniss feels sorry for yelling at her mom and apologizes to her; their relationship really has improved so much in this book - “I’ve heard worse,” she says. “You’ve seen how people are, when someone they love is in pain.” Someone they love. [...] Of course, I love Gale. But what kind of love does she mean? What do I mean when I say I love Gale? I don’t know. I did kiss him last night, in a moment when my emotions were running so high. But i’m sure he doesn’t remember it. Does he? I hope not. - Katniss is struggling to figure out in what way she loves Gale... She definitely doesn’t want him to remember their kiss because she knows it wouldn’t be fair to give him the hope that she might be able to return his romantic feelings when she is still in the dark about her own

... and I can’t really think about kissing when I’ve got a rebellion to incite. I give my head a little shake to clear it. “Where’s Peeta?” I say. - Lol, goes on to immediately mention the guy she’s been kissing these past few weeks (see, with Peeta you could actually have both: kissing and rebellion, Katniss - he’s the perfect man, isn’t he? 😉😋)

“He went home when he heard you stirring. Didn’t want to leave his house unattended during the storm,” says my mother. - Yeah, I don’t think Peeta left because of his house; I’m pretty sure he needed some time to himself after seeing Katniss and Gale this morning - he is the type of person who needs to be alone to work through his feelings when he’s feeling upset - “Did he get back all right?” [...] “Why don’t you give him a call and check?” she says. I go into the study, a room I’ve pretty much avoided since my meeting with President Snow, and dial Peeta’s number. After a few rings he answers. “Hey. I just wanted to make sure you got home,” I say. “Katniss. I live three houses away from you,” he says. “I know, but with the weather and all,” I say. “Well, I’m fine. Thank you for checking.” There’s a long pause. “How’s Gale?” - Aww, Katniss is worried about Peeta and gives him a call, although she hates being in the study 😊 Also, her calling him must have been at least of some reassurance to Peeta that she genuinely cares about him, in some way (though, he’s still clearly busy processing her relationship with Gale, since he’s asking about him as if he hadn’t seen that dude just a couple of minutes prior)

“Have you seen Haymitch today?” “I checked in on him. Dead drunk. But I built up his fire and left him some bread,” he says. “I wanted to talk to - to both of you.” I don’t dare add more, here on my phone, which is surely tapped. -  Despite everything, Peeta still made sure to look after Haymitch! And I know, there is also the issue of their houses themselves potentially being bugged, but I couldn’t help imagining how they could easily avoid the whole phone-tapping thing simply by using a tin can telephone (they do live pretty close to each other, after all) 😂

“You don’t even have a phone,” I say. “Effie had that fixed,” he [Haymitch] says. “Do you know she asked me if I’d like to give you away? I told her the sooner the better.” “Haymitch.” I can hear the pleading creeping into my voice. “Katniss.” He mimics my tone. “It won’t work.” - Okay, but Haymitch mimicking Katniss’s tone reminds me so much of when Peeta mimicked her tone towards the end of their Games, when she was trying to persuade him to climb into a tree as a lookout while he was insistent she’d show him some plants to gather; these three, I swear! 😂 On a sad note, Haymitch is talking from experience here when he’s advising Katniss not to challenge the Capitol 🥺😢

Some streets away from the square, I see a blaze flare up. None of us has to say it. That can only be the Hob going up in smoke. I think of Greasy Sae, Ripper, all my friends who make their livings there. - Katniss considers the people from the Hob her friends - honestly, even if the Hawthornes, Everdeens, Peeta and Haymitch all had agreed to leave D12, I don’t think Katniss would have been able to go through with it - she cares too much about the people in D12 to have been able to leave them to their fate

“Well, I better go see how much rubbing alcohol the apothecary can spare.” He [Haymitch] trudges off across the square and I look at Peeta. “What’s he want that for?” Then I realize the answer. “We can’t let him drink it. He’ll kill himself, or at the very least go blind. I’ve got some white liquor put away at home.” “Me, too. Maybe that will hold him until Ripper finds a way to be back in business,” says Peeta. - Another instance of Katniss and Peeta being on the same wavelength, having taken precautions to help out Haymitch so he doesn’t have to go cold turkey again

We find Hazelle in her house, nursing a very sick Posy. I recognize the measles spots. “I couldn’t leave her,” she says. “I knew Gale’d be in the best possible hands.” - The second mention of someone having contracted the measles in D12 - Why the heck does the Capitol withhold measles vaccination from the people in the districts?! They’re inflicting unnecessary damage onto the very people they want to exploit... But I guess cruelty isn’t always about playing it smart and logical...

When we’re outside, I turn to Peeta. “You go on back. I want to walk by the Hob.” “I’ll go with you,” he says. “No. I’ve dragged you into enough trouble,” I tell him. “And avoiding a stroll by the Hob... that’s going to fix things for me?” He smiles and takes my hand. - They are a team, they stick together (and they are constantly holding hands, always physically linked to each other)😩💕 Also, Peeta pointing out the irrationality of Katniss’s train of thought to calm her down and stay with her reminds me of how he’s going to use logical reasoning to calm her down after the jabberjays in the Quarter Quell arena

We go back to the square. I buy some cakes from Peeta’s father while they exchange small talk about the weather. No one mentions the ugly tools of torture just yards from the front door. The last thing I notice as we leave the square is that I do not recognize even one of the Peacekeepers’ faces. - How weird is it that Peeta and his dad just talk about the weather?! Is this supposed to illustrate how in the Mellark family they just ignored the ugliness going on in their lives *cough cough* the abuse *cough cough* and just pretended that everything was fine, on a very superficial level? Also, it makes perfect sense that the Peacekeepers have been exchanged; the more time we spend with people, the more likely we are to like them - that won’t do if you want to have a ruthless authoritarian police force in the districts

As the days pass, things go from bad to worse. The mines stay shut for two weeks, and by that time half of District 12 is starving. The number of kids signing up for tesserae soars, but they often don’t receive their grain. Food shortages begin, and even those with money come away from stores empty-handed. [...] The eagerly awaited food promised for Parcel Day arrives spoiled and defiled by rodents. - This is just so awful and despicable 😞 Life in the districts was already horrible but now the government does not even honor the extortionary rules they themselves have set up! I can’t help but wonder if the lack of food could be traced back to rebellions in the food supplying districts and, to keep this from the inhabitants of the Capitol, the reduced amount of good food was (obviously) kept for the Capitolites, so that the bad food had to be sent to the districts, anyway... It just seems like such a breach of ‘honor’/etiquette on the Capitol’s part, I dunno... Or maybe Snow was just desperate to use any means necessary to stamp out any potential rebellions in the districts that he still had some control over...

Gale goes home with no more talk of rebellion between us. But I can’t help thinking that everything he sees will only strengthen his resolve to fight back. [...] Rory has signed up for tesserae, something Gale can’t even speak about - Poor, Gale! Poor Hawthornes :(

My fingers have all but decided to release the arrow when I see the object in the glove. It’s a small white circle of flat bread. More of a cracker, really. Gray and soggy around the edges. But an image is clearly stamped in the center of it. It’s my mockingjay. - It is so very telling that the true symbol of the rebellion combines something symbolic of Katniss (which also contains a nod to Rue) and something symbolic of Peeta (the bread/cracker!) The people in the districts have rightfully recognized the both of them as symbol of the rebellion; they have a truer vision of the matter than the more artifically/forcefully constructed symbol of rebellion that D13 /Coin will push - we will also see that when the people in D13 will view Peeta as a traitor, while the rebels Katniss will visit in D8 instead ask her about Peeta and assure her that they know he was speaking under duress

[ratcandy]

Subcon Forest Analysis

Hi everyone I'm here to spill my aggressive overflowing thoughts on Subcon Forest and what it represents because it's been driving me insane since I finished the Sleepy Subcon time rift. Okay let's go. Obvious spoilers for AHIT ahead so proceed with caution.

This is also very, very long.

Disclaimer/warning: I will be discussing abusive/unhealthy relationships in this analysis. I mean. Vanessa. Come on. Also, there is a section on the nooses, and that delves, of course, into mentions of suicide. It will be sectioned off and easily skipped, but if you'd rather be safe and skip the entire post, that's completely understandable! Please stay safe. <3

Alright. Main point to be had here:

Subcon Forest is a giant extended metaphor for Snatcher's mind and character.

You all get to now listen to me spout nonsense about metaphors and symbolism because I'm a sucker for analysis and I'm given an opportunity to go ham. So perish.

The Ice

Let's start with the most obvious and most glaring thing in Subcon. The ice. It's everywhere. Not just outside Vanessa's manor, either; no, it's throughout the village, too. Shows up in the well and in random locations sprinkled about. When it comes to literal plot, we know that ice is just what lingers after Vanessa's wintery curse on Subcon. But going deeper and analyzing the meaning behind it?

Well, let's look at this from the perspective I've suggested. Subcon Forest being an extended metaphor for Snatcher's mind and character. A symbol for Vanessa then litters his mind, enough where it's certainly noticeable at first but blends in more easily once more of Subcon is unlocked to Hat Kid. This is clearly meant to be his lingering trauma, whether or not he wants to acknowledge it. Which he doesn't, as he never mentions it directly in his forest (that I can recall). Her influence plagues him, as to be expected with the traumatic experiences he went through with her. Breaking the ice is something Hat Kid must do in order to fulfill the wishes of the Fire Spirits (another subject I'll get into shortly), which, if self-indulgently playing with the found family idea, could mean that Hat Kid is helping him heal; if indirectly. Even if fulfilling the Fire Spirits' wish to die is... counterproductive, in that measure, which I'm now getting ahead of myself so hold on a sec!!

Vanessa. Ice. Everywhere. Traces of it all over his forest. That's the effects of an abusive relationship! Especially in a worst-case scenario where... yknow! One party in the relationship dies! So of course ice would be everywhere.

In and of itself, ice is a common symbol in literature and other forms of media. In this case, it's presented as an antagonistic force; emphasis is placed upon freezing and the harm that comes with it. The cold is unwelcoming, threatening, merciless. Snow can act as an insulating force, at least, but ice cannot. It can only make things colder.

A slight stretch: Seeing as this game deals a lot with time shenaniganry, I'm not sure if it'd be too out of left field to connect "freezing" with the theme of time. Yknow. Frozen in time. Both parties here, Snatcher and Vanessa, would be in this frozen state. One largely repressing it and never fully moving on, and the other doomed to her isolation ever since the event in question. They never moved past that moment after the Prince and florist's interaction.

The Fire Spirits (& the Portraits)

I'll put a slight warning here for suicidal ideation, if only because... it's the Fire Spirits we're talking about. It's not as grossly in-detail as the noose discussion will be, though, so make of that what you will.

To me, the Fire Spirits are a very interesting case. After all, they're fire. They're a direct contrast to the ice, thus being the only thing we're shown that could potentially melt it. The Fire Spirits, in my opinion, represent hope or a strength to continue. A strength to move on after troubles of the past.

...And that hope wants to die.

The Fire Spirits wish to burn out, to leave this mortal coil and abandon the forest to the cold. They make no effort to melt the ice, they simply dance, blissfully ignorant towards their surroundings. This being a metaphor for Snatcher's own hope for moving on is made all the more obvious by the fact he wants them gone. The first contract is to kill the Fire Spirits, to kill the hope. Perhaps he believes that sort of thing to be fruitless or naïve, so it only clutters his mind or has him foolishly optimistic at points. So, get rid of it. And the hope is happy to oblige.

(That, or their willingness to leave the forest to its own suffering and not aid in the ice's thaw angers him. Besides the whole "bark bark growl I can't get to parts of my forest because of them!!" which... also could represent a naïve hope clouding his judgement, not allowing him to see a bigger picture. But hope can't all be lost if one wants to move forward...)

A little side-tangent now on the portraits! And it's another slight stretch but the idea is in my head and I can't let it go. Portraits are another common symbol, usually being a physical representation of a memory or idea. For our purposes, let's say they're memories. I know in canon they appear to just hold souls captive or something but for now we're just Ignoring That(tm). The Fire Spirits have to burn the portraits to disappear. See where I'm going with this, maybe?

Instead of handling bad memories (or perhaps memories of the past in general) in any healthy manner, Snatcher chooses to forget/repress them, which just allows his hope to progressively die out.

I'm really hoping this is making sense because it makes a lot of sense to me but I might be insane rn

The Fact that this is a Forest

Forest symbolism breakdown! What's a forest usually mean in literature? "Traditionally, the forest has come to represent being lost, exploration and potential danger as well as mystery and 'other worldliness'." Okay. Yeah. Fair enough. That certainly works with the whole aesthetic we've got going on. Wood usually is life, growth and strength. But the trees of subcon are all dead. So what about that? It stands for death, big whoop, very spooky, we know Snatcher's dead and so are the children, yadda yadda wowie wowie. But. :) The trees in Subcon look a lot like trees that were scorched in a forest fire. Don't believe me?

(You could also argue they're just regular marsh/swamp trees bUT SSHHSUUHSH HANG ON HEAR ME OUT LOOK LOOK,)

What I believe to have happened was a controlled fire to rid the forest of the majority of its ice and snow. Likely done by Snatcher. It leaves behind a very desolate, depressing, barren scene... but. What else do dead/burnt trees symbolize? Rebirth. After all, controlled fires happen to make way for new trees to take the place of old ones. Some trees only drop seeds in fires/hot temperatures, so new ones take root and begin anew. Weird. It's almost like... I dunno. Snatcher was given some sorta second chance, given he's not just a corpse in Vanessa's cellar. So were the subconites. Another life given then by Snatcher. All connected I tell ya!!

Generally, aside from that, forests have many connotations. Mystery, isolation, claustrophobia; a place to dwell on regrets, or the past; to worry over one's future; to seek escape from or escape inside of... hmgmrnmm!

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- T / W -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The Nooses

The t/w is given at the top and another cut-off point will follow the bottom of this, for those that would like to skip. This will delve into talk of suicide and abusive tactics used by abusers. Please don't read if it will upset you or make you feel unsafe!!!

Personally, I cannot stand the nooses, but that's just due to my own triggers. Were there a way to hide those from the game or replace the damned talking ones with anything else. I would take it. In a heartbeat. But I can still appreciate the potential analysis to be had with them. So now i'm gonna talk about it despite how uncomfortable it will make me to do so. yEa

So, what about 'em? There are three types of nooses seen in Subcon. At least that I remember but I didn't really go looking for them. Empty ones, ones containing empty subconites, and the talking ones.

Nooses in general obviously can hint towards suicidal thoughts or behaviors of the characters that interact with them. If saying Subcon is Snatcher's mind, it could suggest that he suffered from some sort of suicidal thoughts in life (or currently, if second death is possible... or if he never truly died... or maybe he's trying to figure that out...which has given me... a separate idea...uh oh). But. And hear me out. Different perspective.

A talking noose. I hate them with a fiery passion that is unmatched. But think of the packed symbolism of a noose that talks. And think more about what it says. "I wouldn't mind being strapped around a cute neck like yours." "Be careful now, I don't want to see you meet a miserable end anywhere, but with me." Oddly, a lot of what the noose says seems almost... endearing? One could argue it's a way of luring someone to put it around their necks, which in and of itself is a whole lot to unpack when it comes to suicidal thoughts beckoning one forward; painting itself as something romantic, almost. But. Here's a wild idea, now. What if the nooses, at least the talking ones, are another symbol for Vanessa?

They're tinted blue, after all. While Vanessa's scheme is more red, one could argue two things: One, ice. Blue. Ice. yeah. Or two, the fact that Snatcher's scheme is more purple. Blue and red... make... purple. So, for all we know, Snatcher's current state was a compound effort between suicidal thoughts and Vanessa's treatment of him. Perhaps he even found a way to put himself out of his misery before freezing/starving to death. (I know he has dialogue that argues against that, but... are we certain Snatcher would be the kind to admit suicide over freezing to death?... I don't think so.)

At any rate, a common threat by those in "control" of an abusive relationship is that of killing themselves should the other person not do as they desire. It's a cruel form of emotional manipulation to get their way, worse off if the other party is an empathetic individual. As a person who has been the empathetic individual in relationships like this... I would know. I've been here, unfortunately So, it's not completely out of the question to say Vanessa could've used some tactic like that, even before the whole... cellar ordeal. Did she? I dunno. I'm tossing ideas around. But if she did, the threats of such would sit around in the Prince's mind easily. Even if she has a reputation of not going through with it. It doesn't matter. That shit sticks with you forever, that scare, the potential of it ever being true, is horrifying and it ruins you. I'm projecting, Squirtle.

Still. A noose cannot hang itself. It has to have a victim.

...yea.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- T / W PASSED -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Misc. Ideas

- The spiders: Aside from the usual things spiders can be chalked up to symbolizing - toxicity, alluring danger, just... general pain - I like the potential wordplay that can happen here. Yknow. A black widow. Say the Prince and Vanessa were married when one died. What would that leave Vanessa? A widow. ...She's red and black, too. Yknow. Like a black widow. HA wordplay is fun isn't it?

- Snatcher's tree: Love this place, love sitting in here. But not the point! The inside of Snatcher's tree is such a harsh juxtaposition to the rest of Subcon that it kinda throws ya off guard. After all, the dark, purples and blues then contrasted with the bright warm colors of the inside. Even the music switches over. The thorns outside aren't present indoors. Ohh yeah this is gonna be on the nose as hell but the Tree(tm) is 100% representing Snatcher's appearance/put-on personality vs. his truer nature. Spooky outside with thorns, foreboding, unwelcoming. Then the more comfortable interior. VULnerable. Have I even mentioned that the tree is HOLLOW I mean COME ON. The sturdiness of that tree? Nonexistent. He's not a sturdy guy at all no matter how he fronts

- Intrusions are unwelcome: Snatcher does not like the fact that Hat Kid sticks around in his forest. His personal space. His mind. In fact he tries desperately to get rid of her after their fight, not wanting her presence in his forest at all. He has no problem providing more contracts later on with the Death Wish thing, and he finds great entertainment in messing around with Hat Kid, so it's not just a weird sudden hatred he has for her; it's the fact that. After she's finished being useful, he no longer wants her around, lest she find some things she shouldn't find. Now he's just uncomfortable with her in his personal boundaries. Could just be a denial that she's helped him heal (breaking ice, stealing from Vanessa, being something interesting for his kids to interact with) or just not really wanting a child to get wrapped up in. All that. Most likely the former. Considering the amount of joke-hints he drops regarding his background during his Death Wish dialogue. I see you funny man, making jokes out of your trauma as a coping mechanism. Punts him

Annnd I think that's all I got, for now! I'll make an update post if I get any more sporadic ideas. If you read this whole thing, thank you!! and also!! Wow that was a lot!! Hell world. Please feel free to elaborate on any of my points or debate with me on em!! I'm always open to other ideas, just be aware that if I disagree I am not shy when it comes to debate hehehe, tho I won't be aggressive to any extent I prommy!!

Alrighty. goes to sleep goodnight

[kob131]

https://www.reddit.com/r/RWBYcritics/comments/qzr4tn/rwby_discussion_some_of_you_guys_gotta_get_over/hlo8r57/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I was reading some comments on Twiins Iink’s video on Adam and found this on the subreddit.

... I have words.

It is that among RWBY's many problematic storylines and characters, Adam is one of the worst examples of the revolutionary murderhobo. Due to Adam's lack of character prior to V3, this technically applies more so to the WF in its entirety than just Adam, but Adam is usually the face of the issue since he is arguably the face (not leader) of the White Fang.

You know, I have a rule whenever someone uses the word ‘problematic’ like this.

I replace it with ‘disagreed with me’. And if it makes more sense- I throw it out.

... Guess what happened this time?

You have this rebellion organization who as we have seen in the show, are the only people who seem to be willing to fight back against prejudice, brutality, and corruption while other people like the Belladonnas do jack-shit.

Lisa: Thank you, Cyril. In other news, this Saturday's Faunus Civil Rights protest turned dark when members of the White Fang disrupted the ceremony. The once peaceful organization has now disrupted...

Right because the effective group always goes around disrupting other forms of rebellion. That’s not a sign of insecurity and tribalism.

Also gee, since you’re so obsessed with the early Volumes and taking what Blake said at face value as gospel, what did she say about the results?

Blake: (off-screen) "Suddenly, our peaceful protests were being replaced with organized attacks. We were setting fire to shops that refused to serve us, hijacking cargo from companies that used Faunus labor. And the worst part was, it was working. We were being treated like equals. But not out of respect... out of fear."

Right. Thing is about fear- it is unsustainable. Fear is an extreme emotion and like all extreme emotions, it cannot be sustained for long periods of time. People eventually return to normal and when that happens, when the people intimidated into treating the Fanaus as equals without actually being convinced and a growing number of people who associate the Fanaus with fear and threat- what do you think is gonna happen? Hint: take a look at how any dictatorship ends.

But of course much like Killmonger (MCU), Sylas and Xerath (League of Legends), if you're a revolutionary character who threatens the status quo too much and dare suggest that violent resistance may be necessary instead of begging your murderous oppressors and militant officers to be nice, they have to be slapped with the Murder Hobo stick.

Doesn't matter how arguably heroic their goals are, if they fight against the grain or suggest the need of actual rebellion, then they get slapped with the murder hobo stick.

Dunno about the other two but funny you should mention MCU Killmonger. Because that guy never cared about who he said he cared about. If he did care about other black people, he wouldn’t have destroyed the scared site of a Wakanda’s own religion just to make sure he couldn’t be challenged. No, he cared about revenge. On getting back the people who wronged him, whoever he kills in the process be damned. Just like Adam.

And just like Adam, the fact that Killmonger has a goal means he is NOT a murderhobo. A murderhobo is usually someone who just kills whoever is around them for the sake of short term personal gain, like a homeless person who kills to get people’s stuff. It is used explicitly to depict them as reductionist and without grander goals. The word you’re looking for is ‘terrorist’. But that doesn’t have the connotation you need huh?

Aside from that side of things, I think another thing that contributes to why people felt Adam was going to be more nuanced or at least not a Psycho-Ex, is honestly his character design.

Character design is THE most important thing about conveying "who" a character is to the audience, and since Adam had literally nearly no character for three volumes, all we had to go on was his character design and how that acts as a lens for his actions prior to the "darling" moment. And yeah, Adam seems cold and calculated by his slick suit, ornate decals on his outfit (including a Rose which usually exudes either romance or class), and uses straight up Iaijutsu which further accentuates that kind of "Vergil-esque" personality (even though Vergil has been confirmed to not have been an inspiration for Adam, but the vibes are still there).

A. ‘Vibes’ are just your bias. I’ve gotten over my ‘vibes’ you get over yours.

B. No, character design is about setting EXPECTATIONS.

Look at this design. Look at the pristine silver and gold aesthetic, colors used to signify holiness and divinity. Look at his metallic appearence, almost like an immortal guardian of mankind.

Look at this design. Red and dark blue, almost black. Signifying danger and blood. The emancipated look of his body, almost unnatural and sick. The leathery bat like wings, an animal associated with malevolence. 

Who do you think has the history of trying to help mankind the most?

If you answered the first: you’re dead wrong.

Character design sets EXPECTATIONS, not DEFINTION.

C. As I said above, red and black are defintively MALOVELENT colors when used together. While both have netural and positive connotations, together they paint a picture of darkness and blood, the danger of the unknown and the sign of life ending, in your head.

D. And a wilted rose, which Adam has, would signify a DYING romance or FADING class.

E. Yeah, what was Vergil obsessed with again? ... Power? He was a definitive bad guy due to his selfish actions before being forced to reform? Yeah I thought so.

And then we learn that the White Fang are a rebel group who have had enough of oppression, and to any decent person, fighting against oppression and corruption = not completely evil, in fact it usually makes people inclined to believe that certain measures might be fine with the right justification... which the WF probably could have had if they weren't slapped with the Murder Hobo stick.

Hilariously- you kind of proved you didn’t pay attention.

Who is the common man among the White Fang? Illa, a sympathetic and ultimately good person portrayed as having a point.

Who is the worst among the White Fang? Adam, a broken man invoking pity and sorrow.

Who is the best among the White Fang? Blake, whose worst flaw with them is defending them too much.

Cool...now the humans.

Common man? Cardin, petty racist bully with a cowardly disposition and no redeeming features.

Worst? Jacques Schnee, selfish, self-centered and amoral business man who abuses his loved one AND children with no reason given other than ‘he’s malicious’.

Best? Weiss, a VERY flawed character in the beginning who is basically forced to side with Blake at the end.

As bad as you tried to make the White Fang look- the humans are FAR WORSE.

There just isn't really much in Adam's design that communicates him as immediately a creepy loud and un-organized psychotic slimeball. Had he been designed more like say, Tyrian or used daggers and explosives instead literally "THE" quintessential power-fantasy certified badass fighting style that is Iaijutsu.

Except for one thing-

Adam is also portrayed as DANGEROUS. As in, he is a threat on screen with a history of unstable behavior and maiming/killing other characters. Whenever he appears, there was a constant threat of death if anyone fucked up. All that badassery you tried to say contradicted his character? Communicated the danger he represented.

And if his design was meant to be ironic, their isn't anything immediately occurring that can establish that irony. Like you said, we have three years of nothing but a badass character design, so unfortunately badass character design + rebel against oppression will = morally grey badass.

But red and black color scheme + man in a position of power and authority + a weapon built kill people as quickly as possible + bull horns with the animal signaling anger, rage and dangerous wrath + no morals to restrict him = oh shit.

Once again I think the actual problematic aspect of Adam's character (the villainized revolutionary) is more important to talk about than whatever Vergil power fantasy he could have been, but the topic of his character design and how it may have affected many people's perception of the character had always fascinated me, and makes me wonder how Adam would be like if he just had a less-badass, and more character-appropriate character design.

He fucking severed the arm of the strongest fighter in the main team. An action that can never be forgotten, as it is now a part of Yang’s design.

Missing the point to the end.

All-in-all, all I have left to say is, PLEASE STOP MAKING REVOLUTIONARIES MURDER HOBOS! JUST MAKE THEM THE HEROES OF THE STORY!

Look up the French Revolution or the Chinese Communist Revolution and their aftermaths. Then come back and try saying that.

The Revolutionary War only worked because, unlike Adam and the White Fang, the leaders had morals and principles they stuck to.

[lunarblazes]

i made a desertduo playlist and then decided to be a nerd and write explanations for all the songs! like a nerd!

playlist link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5ZGylutQpyTbgX7MY7Lrzz?si=t8_kBwBHSYG5kxTvZoIrTQ&dl_branch=1

QUICK DISCLAIMER: i am aware that a lot of these songs may have or imply romantic connotation! i would really really like it if these were not read as though those romantic connotations carry over to scar and grian. even if we’re just talking about the third life characters, i would prefer not to ship them or imply romance between them on this post. thank you so much and keep reading if you’d like to see the playlist analysis!

and now that that’s out of the way, PLAYLIST TIME!

•

passerine- the oh hellos

“you were the song that i’d always sing/you were the light that the fire would bring/but i can’t shake this feeling that i/was only pushing the spear into your side again”

this song really just... firstly, it’s one of my favorite songs, and the line i chose there pushes home the sort of terrified devotion i think the desert has. plus there’s a fun line about the cold wind blowing in from the north in the ending bits that i think very much fits their conflict with the red army, and a lot of legally obligated flight imagery that i need to have in every possible song because i’m a fuckin nerd.

•

no children- the mountain goats

“i hope that our few remaining friends/give up on trying to save us/i hope we come up with a failsafe plot to piss off the dumb few that forgave us”

i will admit that no children isn’t a perfect fit, but the general vibe of sort of defiant pessimism and betrayal fits very well with them! it’s very triumphant in its death, and i think that is very desertcore, because what’s more triumphantly dead than being the last duo left alive?

•

skulls- bastille

“when all of our friends are dead and just a memory/it’s always been just you and me/for all to see”

okay like this entire song is SO MUCH DESERT VIBES? LIKE SO MUCH. if i were to ever make an animatic for them i’d do it with this song. “a match is our only light, it’s day of the dead i’m indiana jones, yeah,” “i hope you can make me laugh six feet under when we’re bored of each other,” “i don’t want to rest in peace, i’d rather be the ghost that annoys you,” IT JUST KEEPS GOING. i think this song would work well with any third life duo, honestly, but these two in PARTICULAR just because of how it ended with them literally ‘buried’ next to each other, and again, the chaotic death vibes.

•

freaking out- mystery skulls

“i just keep out of my tongue/til all you want is done/and you just wanna leave me, oh yeah”

this song is a very third life grian song to me in particular! it could be my bias because of my little headcanon of grian burning on his red life, but seriously, this song is very reminiscent of the back and forth of loyalty that grian has with scar. the above line is sort of representative of the betrayal on red, and of course grian’s life debt.

•

night running- shin sakiura

(this song is in japanese! these lyrics are the rough english translation i found on google.) “someday we will stand at this place once again/for sure we will stand up again and again/we will watch it will the end/i want you to live freely”

this song is actually the ending theme for the anime bna, which i adore, and i just added it on a whim before looking at the translated lyrics. but um. holy hell the lyrics hurt me because they’re about running in search of someone, running for no reason, looking for something, and it just really hit, because the desert never really had a goal! they didn’t expect to survive, they were trying to survive, but what was their longterm goals? nothing. so that sort of endless search felt fitting for this. plus the song is a parallel for the two estranged best friends of the show so! perfect.

•

summer nights- siames

“it’s summertime/singing al green in your car/heading to a party/and the night air feels alive”

okay again, i will admit this song is mainly on here because i absolutely love it, but i also do think it fits well. it’s also about healing/estranged friendships, with a very distinct feeling of nostalgia for a happier time. maybe for a time when this was all a game, when there was no blood or betrayals on their hands. little canon divergent, but it’s fun for me, so into the playlist it goes!

allies or enemies- the crane wives

“are we allies or enemies/this will be the death of me, this will be the death of me/all’s fair in love and war but i can’t fight with you anymore”

. i just. points to that lyric. it literally led to both of their deaths. are they allies or enemies? it also fits with scar still wanting grian to be his friend even after he’s no longer indebted with the line “what happens now? do we have another go, do we bow out?” another very good animatic song that i’ve considered heavily. i listen to this playlist a lot

•

burn him down- kitsch club

“you must destroy, oh you must destroy, beyond all recognition/you gotta burn him down, you gotta burn him down, beyond all recognition”

this song just has a lot of fire and arson and high energy vibes. my little war criminals look at them go

•

rose- the oh hellos

“what's true is like a sickle/it'll cut you to the middle/your rose is without a thorn/but no, my mouth don't taste of metal/from the pot here to the kettle/i think we got a lot we gotta learn”

this one is like the exact opposite vibe of burn him down. the oh hellos are so poetic and this song just... feels like the healing potions after a battle. many of the metaphors here fit, i think

•

lone digger- caravan palace

“hey, brother, what you thinking/that good ol' sound is ringing/they don't know what they're missing/(they call it lonely diggin')”

okay this song is straight up just a dance song. i added it because i like it and also for some reason it feels ominous to me? i’ve got no idea why, it’s seriously just a club song, but it’s a banger and it’s in this playlist because i said so

•

feed the machine- poor man’s poison (suggested by my friend argonaughtkeene!)

“somethin’s goin” on, just look around/fear is on the rise, and there’s blood all over the ground/let’s all just blindfold the poor, we all know what’s in store/ we got ‘em now, just break ‘em down a little bit more”

this song is a VIBE for both desertduo members. there’s parts for both of them. it’s ruthless, gritty, very maniacal, perfect. listen to it and you’ll immediately understand why i added it.

•

sweet tooth- scott helman

“i hold hands with cosmic entities/i’ll take this two-ride if i please/i got this sweet tooth baby, yeah i got this sweet tooth baby/i exploit my opportunities/some broken hearts, some cavities”

sweet tooth is super upbeat and bright with these strangely dark lyrics? like i’m pretty sure it’s about addiction. in any case, i thought the “i hold hands with cosmic entities” very funnily fitting for both of the desert boys. it’s a banger!

•

necromancin’ dancin’- bear ghost

“when i’m necromancin’, everyone’s dancin’/nobody can stop me, i dare you to try/the dead are infused with insatiable groove and they’re coming for you, there’s nowhere to hide”

necromancin’ dancin’ just. bastard vibes. there’s not much more to say it’s just huge villain song vibes. i adore it.

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crazy = genius- panic! at the disco

“if crazy equals genius/then i’m a fucking arsonist/i’m a rocket scientist/if crazy equals genius/you can set yourself on fire/but you’re never gonna burn, burn, burn”

i. yeah. y. yeah. more bastard vibes. also shoutout to an artist i saw (i think it was strifesolution?) who made a desertduo piece to this song because i have not stopped thinking about it ever

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sweet bod- lemon demon

“i’m diggin’ up your coffin/and pouring out the contents/your sexy, sweet solution/is ripe for distribution”

you know how i said freaking out was a grian song? this one is a scar song. it’s my favorite lemon demon song and also it has the total macabre capitalism vibe that third life scar NAILED. more bastard vibes good for him <3

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drunk- the living tombstone

“feel so much better than usual/i feel indisputable, oh/but now i’m feeling so beautiful/don’t wake me up from this spell i’m under, if i’m still breathing/i know that i will be ugly when i feel like myself again, oh/but right now i’m feelin’ so beautiful”

the descent of this song, starting off with a polite gathering and ending with a gasping drunk in the parking lot gazing at the stars that he can barely see? yes. yeah. mhm. i used a line from this song for a fic, actually, it fit so well.

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oh no!- marina

“one track mind, one track heart/if i fail, i’ll fall apart/maybe it is all a test/cos i feel like i’m the worst so i always act like i’m the best”

bubbly pop track about false confidence, the ruthlessness of the pop industry, and the influence of the media? you know why this is here. it vibes. it rocks.

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do it all the time- i don’t know how but they found me

“we’re taking over the world/a little victimless crime/and when i’m taking your innocence/i’ll be corrupting your mind/no need to cry i’m only doing everything i want to do because i do it all the time”

EVEN MORE BASTARD VIBES! SOMEHOW THERE IS MORE! this playlist is half villain songs and half heart-wrenching ballads and that’s the real desert experience i think.

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the phoenix- fall out boy

“i’m gonna change you/like a remix/then i’ll raise you/like the phoenix”

BATTLE SONG BATTLE SONG! i’ll be honest i partially chose this song because i am a huge sucker for phoenix grian imagery in particular, but it’s also just a very good war song for them. villain song no 18372948 except this one originally had a hero vibe and now it’s changed specifically for them?? wild. their power

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the other side- the greatest showman

“right here, right now/i’ll put the offer out/i don’t wanna chase you down, i know you see it/you run with me/and i can cut you free/out of the treachery/and all you keep in”

scar and grian’s desert monopoly conversation went exactly like this canonically because i said so fuck you <3

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icicles- the scary jokes (suggested by my friend demizorua!)

“icicles don’t soften when they die/so why should i, why should i?/oh, icicles don’t soften when they die/they sharpen into sabers and they stab you in the eye”

this song actually has specific parts for both grian and scar! my cool epic friend mx demizorua pointed both of them out to me and i adored it so much. it’s a very spiteful song, just like the desert boys. also it feels vaguely murderous. perfect

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problems- mother mother (suggested by my friend demizorua!)

“i’m a loser, a disgrace/you’re a beauty, a luminary, in my face”

literally this entire song fits them. particularly their relationship with the flower husbands, to me, honestly— the whole “when we meet at the pearly gates/you’ll get the green light/and i’ll get the boot in the face” reminds me a lot of them hdksjdks

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tongues and teeth- the crane wives

“i know that you mean so well/but i am not a vessel for your good intent/i will only break your pretty things/i will only wring you dry of everything”

h. yeah. this song is literally gaslight gatekeep girlboss and i attribute it to the desert for that reason alone. songs to commit murder to!

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you’re nobody til somebody wants you dead- saint motel

“you’re nobody til somebody wants you dead/and the list, it grows, and grows, and grows/it grows, and grows, and grows/and grows, and grows, and grows/until it’s everyone you’ve ever known”

this one is very self-explanatory. enemies pogchamp

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curses- the crane wives

“there’s a fire in my brain and i’m burning, love/oh my, oh my/keep running to the sink, but the well is dry/oh my, oh my/every word i say is kindling/but the smoke clears when you’re around”

okay again! this one has two very specific parts for both of them. grian’s the first verse, which is above, and scar’s the second verse!! i really do like my fire imagery for these two don’t i? well, i blame them for having a fuck ton of tnt on them at all times and literally burning their enemy’s banners as a final act of defiance.

[thinkingisadangerouspastime]

I find it really intriguing how the ATLA writers could have gone a “brotherly love” route with Zuko and Aang, but they never did. Even in LOK, the only thing that I remember Iroh saying about their relationship was that they canonically became the best of friends and that Zuko knew Aang better than anyone, even more than Katara and their children. I find the direction of their relationship a contrast to how often the bond between the male protagonist and the male antagonist that are spiritually linked in other media is reduced to “they were like brothers” and put aside for the respective heterosexual romances of the leads, even though the relationships between the leads often have homoerotic subtext and can be interpreted through a queer lens. I guess what I’m wondering is: would you classify Zuko and Aang’s relationship as brotherly? Do you support interpretations where their relationship is viewed as brotherly? And finally (I’m sorry for all of the questions): why do you think the ATLA writers - who seem to mostly be composed of cishet men - never took the “brotherly love” route and left the nature of their relationship ambiguous?

This ask has been in my inbox for a Hot Minute 💀 my apologies, my friend. And since I haven’t seen LOK, I won’t try to speak on the front. Before I continue, though, @likealittleheartbeat has an AMAZING analysis here about the interpretation of Aang and Zuko’s relationship through a queer-platonic lens that I found to be an incredible read and arguably could answer this ask on its own, lol!

I guess the general “issue” that must be addressed to answer these questions is simply how we define brotherly. That “we” can be divided into the viewers and the writers, only adding another layer of complexity. Because the reality is that we can’t jump into the creators minds and see exactly how they intended Zuko and Aang’s relationship to be interpreted. We can make deductions, e.g. the existence of Kataang and Maiko suggests Zuko and Aang were not intended to have a romantic relationship within canon (duh, lol). In fact, you could even add another division to the “we” - the writers, the viewers, and the characters themselves (i.e. interpretation through the cultural lenses that inspired the show).

All of this is to say that there is not going to be one agreed-upon definition of “brotherly,” lol! Since you seem to be asking for my personal opinions, I’ll go with my personal definition. If anyone has differing thoughts in response to these questions, please feel free to add them in a comment or rb! I think there’s a lot to explore here and my sole opinion is Not the be-all and end-all, lmao.

So, what is my personal definition of “brotherly”? I’m not going to try to make a formal definition, lol, but the gist of my interpretation is a platonic relationship akin to that of siblings. To me, there is a difference between having a “brotherly relationship” with someone versus a “friendship” (I almost used “friendly relationship” but that didn’t feel right jskdfhakdls). I think these two can overlap and/or be the same, but - for example - I have friends who I would say without hesitation that I am incredibly close with, but I also would not classify that friendship as “sisterly.” (Again, these are strictly my personal thoughts, and I encourage further discussion in comments/rbs!)

I’ll take your questions one at a time:

Would you classify Zuko and Aang’s relationship as brotherly?

Personally? Probably not. To me, there is a sense of superficiality associated with the term “brotherly” that in my eyes can be reductive to platonic relationships between men (can be, not always lol). I think with Zuko and Aang, the relationship just runs much deeper than “brotherly” can connote. For one, they are the primary narrative foils of the show! The only relationship that comes close to theirs in terms of narrative significance is Kataang (which is a very different dichotomy, btw, I’m not trying to compare them lol). We have numerous episodes dedicated to the parallels between Aang and Zuko, including but not limited to “The Storm” and “The Avatar and the Fire Lord.” I mean, this is an actual quote from the latter episode:

Do you really think friendships can last more than one lifetime?

We see variants of this line and the notion of friendship itself associated throughout that episode explicitly with Roku and Sozin, Roku and Gyatso, and of course the Gaang at the end, but implicitly we also know it’s about Aang and Zuko, too. Aang says, “Everyone, even the Fire Lord and the Fire Nation, have to be treated like they’re worth giving a chance.” One common take with this line that I’ve seen is interpreting it as foreshadowing for Aang’s decision to spare Ozai - which obviously is a fair assessment - but we cannot also ignore how much it applies to Zuko joining the Gaang. Specifically, Zuko reconciling with Aang.

We all know Aang was the first person to extend friendship to Zuko back in “The Blue Spirit” and tbh, after he saw Appa licking Zuko, you can tell Aang was nearly willing to extend a second chance to Zuko then and there lol. Aang and Zuko’s friendship, them being drawn together, is a relationship that transcends lifetimes, transcends social norms/expectations, transcends a loss greater than anyone can imagine (for Aang) and offers a new opportunity arguably far more than deserved (for Zuko). I think ascribing a qualifier of “brotherly” to their relationship therefore limits this transcendence because of how much their dynamic encompasses.

Do you support interpretations where their relationship is viewed as brotherly?

Of course! One of the reasons I love A:TLA - especially my small corner of the fandom - is how many interpretations that every relationship presents, be it a small “difference” (such as calling Zuko and Aang’s relationship “brotherly”) or a more drastic one (exploring fanon possibilities with rarepairs, let’s go #AangRarepairWeek 😎). So even if this interpretation isn’t one I’m inclined to in the literal sense (i.e. it’s the “brotherly” qualifier I feel I dislike, because I do love platonic Zukaang as much as romantic Zukaang), I absolutely encourage others to make the most of their fandom experience and product/support content that they enjoy!

Why do you think the ATLA writers - who seem to mostly be composed of cishet men - never took the “brotherly love” route and left the nature of their relationship ambiguous?

I will say that we don’t really have any way of knowing the sexualities and gender identities of every single A:TLA writer, lol. I’m not saying they were all queer in some way, of course, but I just want to establish that we don’t and can’t know unless told. If that makes sense 😂

As I mentioned earlier, I have no way of getting inside the writers’ minds to determine their intentions when they were writing Zuko and Aang’s relationship, so all you’re gonna get here are my best guesses lmao! For one, there wasn’t really a need to outright label Zuko and Aang as having a “brotherly” relationship. The existence of Kataang and Maiko again speak for themselves. Most viewers - especially casual watchers - don’t need the show to state “these two only love each other in a brotherly way” to conclude that the relationship was platonic (or rather, was not romantic), especially considering that the show was made in the mid-2000s (i.e. sad but true, most people weren’t watching A:TLA with a queer lens 😔). So I wouldn’t say they left the relationship “ambiguous” so much as there wasn’t need to qualify it further than simply being platonic.

Of course, I do think there is an ambiguity that comes with Aang and Zuko’s relationship, which I love to exploit in my Zukaang fics 😌. Was that ambiguity intentional? Again, I’m inclined to say no. But I can’t speak with certainty and - as I discussed earlier - I truly think Aang and Zuko’s relationship would be limited by being called “brotherly” when their connection runs so deeply and is intertwined so heavily with the spiritual themes of the show. Thus, it’s possible the writers were purposefully emphasizing that spirituality by not labelling them as “brotherly”! But as I said, there’s really no way to be sure.

At the end of the day, I don’t think it matters how someone chooses to label Aang and Zuko’s relationship. I mean, I’m always a little horrified when a person completely overlooks their narrative significance as foils (because I personally can’t imagine dismissing either of their importance to the other), but hey, to each their own. Brotherly, queerplatonic, romantic, and hell, anything in-between - these interpretations are anyone’s for the taking. Have fun with it! 💛

(I hope this at least kind of resembles the answer you were looking for, anon 😂)