#and how much does that impact the entire lives of ur children?

[kellykadesperate]

just watched The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) and like "you should have named it danny" actually destroyed me !

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

HI i just wanted to say that i really enjoy your twilight metas (as those are the only ones ive read so far) and you're a genius. it's awesome to me how realistically you think about characters and the plot, which i have never been able to do because i always get confused. thank you especially for your post about jacob and how the fandom treats him bc ive always had mixed feelings! i love him (the fanon/new moon him ofc) but i also felt rly weird about the whole SA thing, especially as a brown boy thats been villainized (i didnt SA anyone i just realized how that sounds) i understood that it had racist roots but it still...happened, yk? anyways u put it beautifully and its alot easier to understand how i feel about him now. also like everything else u post about!! i despise the cullens w my every being but its so entertaining to see their dynamic and actions laid out. mostly bc it solidifies my hatred but anyways. they also kind of change my views on other characters, like i always kinda liked bella (i dont like alot of things she does but alot of the fan content i see on her made her feel rly relatable) and its rly interesting to see that she would be a kind of absent parent, bc id never considered it like that and it makes so much sense and woah. u have so much evidence to back up ur theories and opinions too--i tend to get lost in fanon but i dont rly do that w ur posts! even ones where ur spitballing its just muah chefs kiss i love. i write alot of self fulfilling fanfiction and tbh it does not feel the same when the characters r too ooc and ur posts have helped a fuck ton! ur super cool and i love ur stuff keep going :)

i do have some questions tho u dont have to acknowledge it at all and ik you tend to focus more on the cullens, but what do you think the wolf pack is like now that jacob, leah, and seth have left, and now that they have so many new members? do you think any other girls would have shifted and how would they be treated? ik leah was kind of alienated in canon not only bc shes a girl but also bc of her feelings, and i cant tell if the pack would be wary of her/treat her the same as leah, or if they would have learned their lesson.

have a good day!

Well first, thank you, I'm very flattered. I'm going to go ahead and acknowledge @therealvinelle here as well as she's I believe the one who originally posted the post about the very complicated topic of Jacob Black and his terrible choices throughout the series.

As for your questions there are a few pack questions in my inbox but it's mostly a matter that people keep asking questions about Bella and she keeps getting eaten.

Also, I'm not sure you want me answering these questions. Like all of Twilight, it's a bleak pit of despair.

But here we go

What About the Pack/Tribe After Breaking Dawn

There's a lot of shit going on in the tribe right now. Jacob leaving is just part of it.

They have an unprecedented number of shifters in the community and that's going to spell... a lot of issues in the years to come.

Namely, per Sam and Emily, domestic violence will be through the roof and kept very hushed up for the understandable reason of these people look like they were mauled by bears. This will also likely increase the number of deaths in the tribe, especially among those who are young. Accidents happen, it's not good, this is going to have a devastating impact on the people.

You also have a lot of angry, disaffected, young men who can no longer really be a part of society. They can't really attend school, can't even really leave the reservation for fear of turning into a wolf, they can't hold a job, at the age of nineteen or younger they each had their futures ripped away from them.

Some, Seth, handle this very well (possibly because he hasn't clued into what this means yet), others like Jake... do not. These people have had their lives turned upside down and in some cases utterly ruined: that's not good in any society.

Then you have the imprinting, lord, the imprinting.

To date, there's the Sam, Emily, and Leah disaster. The three of them handled it very well, but it still utterly destroyed Leah's life and emotional stability. Not helping, of course, is that Leah has had her very identity taken from her, has no privacy, and her only option of escape is to follow Jacob around which... we'll get to in a few paragraphs.

Added to that, you have the Claire/Quil disaster, in which the tribe is desperately trying to handle it by a) keeping it very quiet b) trying to make Quil just be the babysitter. That's unlikely to work out for them and is just angstfest all around and no one's fault.

And then, of course, Jacob/Renesmee. Jacob, having now imprinted, will follow Renesmee to the ends of the earth. He has no other purpose now. Which means that Leah and Seth, who are in his pack, get to follow along and uproot their lives. For the tribe this means they'll never be rid of the Cullens, not truly, and Billy has lost his son entirely. Not to mention it's guaranteed to go awful places.

Then you have the paternity questions this whole thing drudges up, the trauma of these children having to be sacred warriors and having slaughtered demons with human faces, many of whom were also once children and more.

The tribe and the pack are a goddamn mess.

Jacob imprinting on the Cullen hybrid daughter and leaving the tribe? Yeah, it's weird and no one likes it, but that isn't even the peak of the nonsense these people have to deal with.

Would the Other Girls Shift?

No.

Leah seems to have won the genetic shitty lottery. In 600 years of shifting, there has never been another woman, and Leah has all shifting bloodlines in her veins.

It seems Leah was just very unlucky.

Were other girls to shift I imagine they'd face much the same situation. Suddenly teenage boys are witnessing them naked, all the time, they have no choice to become sacred warriors (a role not typically meant for women and which will very much feel like 'the boy's club') and I don't get the idea that anyone learned anything from Leah.

Jake certainly didn't, he just thought she was Uber Bitch until she begged him to let her in his new pack and reminded him she was a human being with feelings.

The concept genuinely had not occurred to him.

TL;DR Remember kids, Twilight is despair

[wandaposting]

wandavision: the criticisms post

tl;dr: i liked the show, but there were aspects that were annoying and dumbfounding to me and here’s the post that covers That ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

this was gonna be my comprehensive wandavision review post that had both cons and pros, but the cons kind of ran away from me lsdfjs SO YOU’RE GETTING THIS FIRST. if you find my views diverging from yours in either direction, you’re valid, please don’t shiv me. this is just how i Feel in a somewhat shitposty (as per usual) format. 😔

the big con list:

the way wanda’s actual villainy gets brushed away by the narrative: or specifically the way wanda strolls past the people she mentally tortured and traumatized for a week to apologize to monica, who then goes “gg girl i would’ve done the same :)” and then wanda leaves that entire mess—that she caused—behind her and bails lol. that scene is a microcosm of my problems with this show’s attempt at portraying what the creators have described as her ““complexity””. they want us to feel sorry for her, but not in the way that we can sympathize with walter white while still acknowledging he’s broken bad. rather, this show seemed to want to paint her as more of a victim than the people she victimized. they still want her to come out looking heroic and triumphant and rewarded from her journey with new powers, a new superhero outfit, a new superhero moniker. and that falls flat when you realize she’s basically been a self-absorbed asshole throughout the course of this show. she was confronted no less than four times, and told point blank that a few thousand people were suffering under her control. that is not something we can excuse with depression and denial. that means that at multiple times she is making at least the subconscious choice that her happiness matters more than the wellbeing of her meat puppets, which includes children, across the span of a week. i don’t see monica rambeau “doing the same thing.” the fact that they made her say it while the townspeople glared on in miserable silence just rubbed me the wrong way. if they really wanted to make her responsible for westview, while also wanting her to come out looking remotely good, they needed to invest in a much more substantial redemption arc for her than “i didn’t mean to, gonna go self-exile now.” or even holding everything else constant, they could’ve delivered a more nuanced take where westview was in dire straits before her arrival. the westview she initially drove through already looked economically depressed, so i don’t know why they didn’t just follow through with this. but they could’ve made it so that by granting herself happiness and prosperity, she could’ve spread that genuinely throughout the citizens. instead of hex vision waking norm up in horror, you could’ve had him begging to be put back under. that way, her decision to accept and face reality head on could also be reflected by the people of westview. where everyone, perhaps aided through wanda’s mind link, decides they shouldn’t let fantasy consume themselves at the expense of improving their actual reality. there’s still moral ambiguity, there’s still mistakes being made, we can still side-eye wanda for doing the equivalent of drugging people, but at least these npc’s would've gained something from wanda blundering into their lives. but no she made 3 thousand people suffer through the literal plot of Get Out, giving them life-long ptsd and trauma with nothing good, and i think that’s bad. if she has more haters after this series, i can’t even blame them. but apparently she has a shit-ton more fans after this series, so... OH WELL, IT IS WHAT IT IS sdkfjkls

TYLER: which brings me to the thought that, if this show had hayward acting like a three dimensional human person with the bare minimum intellect required to run SWORD ... instead of an incompetent jackass scooby doo villain ... a lot of us would be spamming #HaywardWasRight. tyler hayward might legitimately be the worst villain mcu has ever produced, like edging past malekith. is he supposed to be an analogue to real world tr*mp appointed deputies? unlike agatha, he’s not even entertaining to watch. he’s the ted cruz of the mcu, which is bizarre when he was introduced as the strict but not particularly vexing or unreasonable successor to maria rambeau in episode 4. it ended up feeling extremely contrived how the show attempted to aggressively signal us with “hayward bad” and “wanda good, actually” through the lens of monica, darcy, and jimmy. it’s like they had to make hayward come across as Extremely Dumb in order to make wanda come across as the more sympathetic party, when she was the one doing [gestures vaguely at wall of text above].

and SPEAKING of agatha: she also ended up being the exact kind of simplified reductive cackling “gimme ur powers wanda” evil super witch that i didn’t want her to be. that’s all.

the theorybaiting: i didn’t care about the lack of mutants/doctor strange cameo (lol what happened, charles murphy)/multiverse/blue marvel/reed richards/mephisto/nightmare/chthon (altho we did get the darkhold wink wonk) so much that it ruined my experience. ralph bohner was disappointing, but i got over it. my issue here is more that they deliberately baited a more interesting story than they delivered, and i think they shot themselves in the foot with that. the first 7, even 8 episodes had set up this atmosphere of mystery and intrigue, only for them to wrap up all these questions with the most boring, uninspired answers possible. question: what does hayward want and what is he up to? answer: hayward is simply a stupid dingus. question: who is agatha harkness and what is she up to? answer: an evil witch who just wants to steal yo powers. question: who is fietro? answer: lol boner. question: was it wanda all along? answer: yes, but no it was actually agatha, but actually yes, but she didn’t mean to and is kind of sorry and now she’s gonna fly away so have fun with your ptsd, westview. ????????? yeah they could have ... done some of that better.

the pacing in the end: i remember when they said it was gonna be “around 6 hours,” and we got 4 and a half hours of actual content instead... they should have given us that extra 1 and a half hour to flesh out the finale. the sitcom portion was fun, it feels like the sitcom portion was prioritized in the writing room, and that the overarching narrative beyond the sitcom suffered to accommodate it. when it came time to break away from the format, they stumbled. so in the beginning, there were segments that felt authentic to the era but were fairly critiqued as “dragging on” ... and in the final episode, we had... the final episode. monica and wanda’s ending conversation felt unsatisfying, both wanda’s apology and monica’s acceptance of it rang particularly hollow [also gestures vaguely to wall of text above]. the appearance of white vision should have had much more of an impact on ... everyone, especially wanda. except the dude just dips and no one mentions him ever again. i feel like hex vision being revealed as the the vision that had always been ~part of her should have also had more ... fleshing out. darcy and jimmy basically ended up having no arcs in this show. they served as stand-ins for the audience, and because they were written to feel sorry for wanda (in a situation where she was absolutely deserving of more scrutiny), the audience too gets manipulated toward doing so.

there’s probably more to add but i’m running out of brain juice BUT THOSE WERE THE BIG ONES STORY-WISE

[oumakokichi]

What's your opinion on Kaito and Maki! I don't know if anyone's ever asked this before (sorry if yes) Ur blog is epic btw!

This question is pretty recent, so I feel like this is a great one to kick off with getting back into writing full meta! I know in the past I’ve answered a few brief questions on how I feel about Momota and Maki respectively, as well as their relationship in-game, but I don’t know if I’ve ever written at length about the two of them.

I also don’t know whether you want my opinions on them both as individual characters or their relationship together, so I’ll probably touch on both aspects! This ask will obviously include spoilers for the whole game, so I’ll talk more under the cut!

Momota and Maki are definitely two of the most important characters in the game. Both their dynamic with each other, as well as their eventual friendship with Saihara, are pivotal plot points that come up again and again. Momota’s good intentions and attempts to help Maki come out of her shell and self-imposed isolation from everyone else are initially met by her with skepticism, distrust, and a feeling that he’s being incredibly overbearing and putting his nose where it doesn’t belong—but in the end, she does find herself pulled in by his unrelenting optimism and offers of friendship.

As Momota helps Saihara begin to overcome his anxiety and self-doubt by pushing him forward and reaffirming that he believes in him, Maki also begins to face some of her own demons. Like Saihara, her issues are rooted in deep-seated trauma from a young age, though hers is considerably more severe as it concerns both physical and mental child abuse, as well as a life filled with violence and murder.

It’s interesting, because both Saihara and Maki struggle with what I would call self-loathing, but go about showing it in completely different ways. They both doubt their own ability to do anything right and feel that they’ll only hurt people in the end, but where Saihara overcompensates for this by trying to please everyone and being afraid of saying no, Maki’s approach is much firmer: she tries to shut everyone out completely, keeping everyone at arm’s bay in order to prevent any attachments from forming in the first place. As someone who lost pretty much everything at such a young age, she’s clearly afraid of the same thing happening all over again, as well as wary of anyone who might try to get close to her, only to attempt to “take her out” in the same fashion that she’s had to kill people her entire life.

Momota’s persistence in striking up a friendship with her is therefore really, really interesting. It’s the first time in Maki’s life that anyone has ever been so adamant about wanting to get to know her. Considering how harsh and unfriendly she initially is, as well as the fact that her talent is revealed to everyone by the end of chapter 2, it would make complete sense if Momota wanted nothing to do with her, in her opinion. She’s used to being alone, and she’s already convinced herself by that point that it’s preferable to the alternative.

But Momota is a character who fundamentally refuses to take no for an answer. This is simultaneously both his best and worst trait, in my opinion: it’s literally right in his catch phrase, whenever he claims that he’s going to reach the stars someday. He runs purely on the idea of faith and belief. There’s no middle ground with him: either you trust someone implicitly, regardless of everything stacked against them, or you don’t. Shades of grey, especially at the beginning of the game, are virtually nil. It’s a very “shounen protagonist” sentiment that winds up being somewhat challenged for him as the game goes on.

He’s interested in Maki, and wants to know why she closes herself off in her research lab. When the finger is pointed at her in chapter 2 and she falls under suspicion of murdering Hoshi, he defends her even at the expense of making himself look worse, and even to the point of claiming that he would “bet everyone else’s lives” that she’s innocent (a line which was completely omitted in the localization and dub, but which you can still hear him say in the jp dialogue of the chapter 2 trial).

There’s absolutely no evidence to back Maki up or support her; Momota’s defense on her behalf stems more from the fact that he hates Ouma’s equally black-or-white “guilty until proven innocent” approach, and resents the attempts at mutual suspicion and paranoia that Ouma tries to force between them. Momota is, in a word, stubborn. He figures things out by “feel” or “intuition” and is extremely slow to change his opinions even when facts and evidence are presented before him.

Again, this can be a good trait: his loyalty means he’s the last person who would ever throw someone else under the bus, and it’s the main reason he succeeds in getting closer to someone as emotionally closed-off as Maki at all. It’s less of a good thing, however, in later chapters like chapter 4, where his stubborn refusal to look at the facts genuinely endangers everyone’s lives in the trial and results in a huge blow-out that threatens his friend group with Saihara especially, but really with the whole training trio.

It’s this stubbornness of his that really baffles Maki. Initially, she doesn’t know what to make of Momota’s attempts to befriend her. She assumes he must be reckless, or stupid, or both, to want to get close to someone as dangerous as she is. But as she gradually begins to let her walls down and starts opening up despite herself, it’s such a nice change to see her eventually starting to believe in herself and view herself more positively as a result of Momota’s own belief in her.

I think momoharu as a ship works really well and has potential specifically because of these themes of “self-love” and “believing in yourself” that come up in the main game’s narrative again and again. And unlike the dynamics between Momota and other characters, such as Saihara, I feel like Momota and Maki are on much more of an even footing, where the two of them can view each other as equals and aren’t afraid to challenge each other whenever one of them is in the wrong about something.

For example, Saihara and Momota have much more of an imbalanced, sometimes one-sided friendship. That’s not to say that they aren’t both extremely important friends to one another—but between Saihara’s inability to say no to people and Momota’s tendency to take charge and view himself as “the hero” while everyone else is his “sidekick,” their relationship becomes incredibly uneven very quickly.

Add to this Momota’s unspoken jealousy of Saihara’s talent and his pivotal importance to the rest of the group in trials, and it gets even messier. I’m reminded of the chapter 4 trial, when Saihara really goes against Momota’s opinion on something for the first time by proving that Gonta is the culprit, and Momota is livid. Even when all the proof is laid out before him, and even when he knows, logically, he feels so betrayed by Saihara’s lack of “belief” in him that his underlying jealousy bubbles up and he lashes out. The localization considerably dulled the impact of this, but in the original Japanese dialogue, Momota even stops referring to Saihara by his first name for a long time, referring to him much more coldly by his surname from the end of chapter 4 until the latter half of chapter 5.

Momota and Saihara never feel as though they’ve really escaped that “hero and sidekick” dynamic until the very end of chapter 5 when they say their farewells, and even then there’s a real hesitance with Saihara to call Momota out when he’s wrong or ask for an apology even when Momota owes him one. If the game had explored more of Momota’s jealousy and feelings of inadequacy compared to Saihara, I would have really loved that, and I feel like there would be real potential to explore how they could eventually be on even footing… but as it stands, in canon we don’t really get that, and most of Momota’s shortcomings and flaws are somewhat brushed aside after his death in favor of Saihara remembering him more fondly.

This isn’t to say that Momota doesn’t have any flaws when it comes to how he interacts with Maki, of course. His character has a lot of “toxic masculinity” baggage, including unironically believing really outdated things like “women shouldn’t be fighting, they should be raising children,” or thinking that women are inherently weaker physically and more fragile emotionally than men. Luckily though, Maki often consistently proves him wrong on all of these points: her ability to wipe the floor with him during their training sessions is of course part of it, but it’s worth noting that she’s also considerably more level-headed than Momota is in many ways.

Where Momota is superstitious and afraid of the occult to a comedic degree, Maki remains the rational, down-to-earth one who doesn’t believe in such things. Where Momota is prone to letting his pride and temper get the better of him and refuses to speak to Saihara or apologize for the things he said during their fight in chapter 4, Maki is the one who attempts to push them into interacting with each other again, and believes that Momota is being much too childish about the whole ordeal. Again and again, Maki proves Momota’s outdated and harmful stereotypes about women wrong, and isn’t afraid to poke fun at him or get exasperated with his bullshit whenever he’s being kind of a dick.

Her relationship with Momota works specifically because of how much it feels like the two of them are on a more even footing. Where Saihara somewhat meekly accepts the “sidekick” role, even when he thinks it’s unfair, Maki doesn’t really accept it or go along with it in the first place, beyond showing up for training sessions. And when she gradually begins to develop romantic feelings for him, it feels authentic—particularly because it ties back into the idea of Maki learning to believe in herself the same way that Momota has believed in her from the start.

Deep down, Maki is someone who fundamentally believes herself not only undeserving of, but borderline incapable of love. She feels as though any human emotions she might have once had were stomped out of her from a young age and that absolutely nothing remains, to the point where she says “even Kiibo is more human than she is.” This self-loathing and dehumanization are the main reasons she keeps people at arm’s length: she simply thinks she doesn’t deserve any kindness, and that even if it’s given to her, she doesn’t know how to reciprocate in turn.

Her entire character arc is about unlearning this, and gradually coming to accept that she does have the capacity to love, including love for herself and for others. I’ve seen some people who believe Tsumugi when she claims in the chapter 6 trial that she “gave Maki those feelings for Momota” for the sake of the show, but I feel that believing that at face value really doesn’t do justice to Maki’s autonomy as a character.

Even if Tsumugi somehow did insert those feelings there (which I highly doubt, especially considering how she blatantly lies about giving Momota his illness too despite pretty obviously not knowing he was sick prior to chapter 5), the whole point of Maki’s confession to Momota in chapter 5 and reaffirmation of those feelings in chapter 6 is that she eventually comes to believe that they’re her feelings, and no one else’s. As someone who was denied any free will or choice for her entire life, her coming to view Momota as someone precious to her, as well as herself as an individual capable of making decisions and loving other people, is an incredibly powerful arc of character growth. I honestly really love to see it.

And it’s clear that Maki coming to love and value herself as an individual is exactly what Momota wanted to see from her. We don’t really know if he reciprocated her romantic feelings or not since he dies without really giving her an answer. I personally think he spared her an answer because even if he had said he reciprocated, it only would’ve hurt her worse to see him die immediately afterward.

But what he does make really clear is that he fully believes that because she could come to love him, she could also eventually come to love herself. Whether it’s romantic or not, he clearly cherishes her a lot as a person and wants her to be happy. He wants her to live on as herself, and not any of the roles she’s had to take thus far in order to survive. She eventually does do this, and I think he would’ve been absolutely thrilled to see it happen.

All in all, I feel like momoharu has a lot of potential for character growth (both for Maki and Momota), as well as for cute moments, comic relief, and all around as a feel-good ship. Momota definitely has some issues to work out with misogyny and toxic masculinity, and while it’s certainly not Maki’s job to hold his hand and walk him through those things, she’s the type of person who doesn’t mind putting her foot down and telling him no when she feels like he’s crossed a line, which is exactly the type of dynamic I like to see in relationships.

Anyway, I’ll wind this up here. This was a really fun question to go into, thank you again anon! I had a lot of fun getting back into the swing of writing meta, and I’m glad I got a chance to write a little more about my thoughts on momoharu, and Momota and Maki as characters.

[seoafin]

BYE I WAS IMMERSED WITH GENSHIN’s STORY PLOT (AND THE FANARTS ON MY TL) WHICH WAS ALSO DROPPED EARLIER THIS MORNING AND FORGOT ABT JJK FOR A SPLIT SEVONDSJJSJEJ

but anyways ,, jjk 145// the more i write abt it, the more i’ll sound incoherent, this is ur last warning to ignore this 🧍‍♂️(1)

the one who is based on avalokitesvara (i’ll start calling it them as kannon from now) that i mentioned was actually brain (out of ppl) 😭😭

kenjaku (羂索) is shorten from "不空羂索観音 (fukukenjakukannon)" ,, they existed b4 the heian period... older then sukuna ?? suggested that brain is at least 1k years old... hsjsjjsjs

fukukenjakukannon, a manifestation of the buddhist god of mercy and compassion,, perhaps of some interest is that the fukukenjaku shares some kanji with gojou's infinite void followed by kanjis for trap & rope, with kannon directly referring to an all-knowing/overseeing divine existence. it rly does seem that kenjaku, tengen, and gojou's fates have all been strongly interwined throughout history,, kannon has been perceived as both male and female depending on the portrayal and the region, not unlike jjk's kenjaku switching bodies and genders over the course of time (kamo vs kaori vs getou)

some associations with kannon may be relevant to jjk. namely, as yuki mentions, salvation ,, kannon is a deity to serve his subjects, and resolve their suffering by eliminating its source,,, in which case, i think kenjaku's goal may possibly not be too far off from geto’s ,,,,, he may think that he is saving a group that is enduring greater suffering than any other. whether that is shamans, cursed spirits, or sth else entirely is up for debate. given his persistence over the millenia, and the likelihood of spreading suffering worldwide through a universal tengen merger, it's more than likely that he has a very personal motive. note that under his plan it is specifically the evil of a human that would spread and destroy all of humankind connected through tengen

this is an interesting contrast to sukuna, who is much more whimsical and far less calculated. i think the clash between these 2 in the past will have strong relevance for the future,,, on the other hand, since kannon has historically manifested in response to the suffering of various beings, it may be that the feelings of cursed spirits as a whole have led to kenjaku's existence. he could very well be a curse born from curses, instead of from humans.

okay now what i'm really excited abt: the relationship between kenjaku and the 6 eyes. 1 of the functions of kannon is to protect the 6 realms of rebirth/the 6 paths. u may already be familiar with this buddhist concept as it has been referenced in a variety of animanga (notably it is a major plot point of naruto, it's mukuro's ability in KHR, etc.). there's strong reason to believe this concept also has connections to the gojou 6 eyes ability. i think if we get to learn more abt the 6 eyes, i may be able to speak more on this point.

(as a side note here, i’ll mention that there’s an association between kannon and the protection of aborted children, perhaps relating to og kamo and the death paintings)

at the very least, we know that kenjaku and the 6 eyes are in opposition, and i'm speculating that the gojou bloodline is the true manifestation of a protective deity, at least for the humans, and kenjaku's goals are antithetical to that,,, perhaps, as yuki kind of suggested, taking the name kenjaku is a joke of sorts. if sukuna is malevolence incarnate, kenjaku is mercilesness,,

i think some of the core concepts being explored by the tengen storyline are that of form and existence. gojou satoru, tengen, kenjaku, and eventually the star plasma vessels are existences that transcend the norm,,, toji on the other hand, is the only example of the opposite. an existence that shouldn't have ever existed, in a sense. kenjaku seemed to have used that to his advantage in his manipulation of the events in hidden inventory,,, but it also leads me to believe that only a similar anomaly could undo the new destiny he's setting up for himself.

geto was the perfect piece to set kenjaku up for success in conducting a merger and putting this culling game into motion. geto's path has led to this outcome,,, in which case, an apt parallel as we have known all along is that gojou's path should lead to the counter-outcome: megumi, yuuta, and especially yuuji— these 3 will be the key to unravelling kenjaku's plan.

also tengen said that kenjaku’s objective is to send all the ppl in jpn to higan or turning all non shamans into one but he doesnt have enough cursed energy to do that,,, i did say that yuuji’s birthday took place in the 4th solar term where a part of a week long celebration haru no higan (higan 彼岸→other shore, buddhist pārāmitā), when ppl would honour the dead and sweep ancestral tombs took place,,,

so theres this buddhist mantra, called the “heart sutra” and the last verse of the sutra is,,

there are many sutras in buddhism, but the most well-known among them is probably the Heart Sutra,, altho it depends on the sect (of buddhism), the heart sutra is often read at funerals and memorial services, so even if,, and for some reason the sutra is often associated to kannon even in the utube thumbnail 👁👁 if u search up prajnaparamita sutra,,

heart sutra has the meaning of "an important teaching to reach the state of enlightenment by the power to see through the truth and essence." which is based on the idea of ​​"void" as this important teaching,, the sutra tells us what we shld do to be free from the suffering of this world and live in peace,, in the heart sutra, the idea of ​​"void" is especially important.

buddhism can be broadly divided into theravada and mahayana buddhism,,,,

theravada is a teaching that only some ppl (those who practice buddhism with strict lifestyle like the monks) reach the state of enlightenment, while mahayana is a teaching that all ppl (some who practice Buddhism) can reach enlightment even if u dont practice anything related to the religion,,, the idea of ​​the void has the idea of ​​not being caught up in individual things and not being obsessed with it, and the idea of ​​heart sutra belongs to the category of mahayana buddhism

"void" does not mean "empty" but "no substance (no fixed shape)". the sutra also states that "everything keeps changing" and "although it keeps changing, the essence (core) of things remains the same."

for eg, the idea is, "i am me, no matter how old i am,, my appearance and various abilities deteriorate, how I am evaluated by others, whether i feel good or bad."

in other words,,, it’s a teaching to be aware of the essence without being caught up in the phenomenon of change.

"void" means "no substance (no fixed shape)", which means that u don't have to be obsessed with things or get caught up in one value.

eg, the reason why diamonds are beautiful is that diamonds arent beautiful from the beginning, but that humans decide that they’re beautiful,,, and that each person has a fixed evaluation of the movement of their hearts that they feel is beautiful. but thats not always the case right?

the last verse goes like this :

“Therefore, Prajna Paramita is known as the most divine mantra,

the great enlightening mantra,

the utmost mantra,

the incomparable mantra,

destroyer of all suffering!

Since what is true is not in vain, listen to the mantra of the Prajna Paramita– it goes like this:

GATE GATE PARA GATE PARASAM GATE BODHI SVAHA!”

the translation of the last line is: “going, going, going on beyond, always going on beyond, always becoming buddha.”

quoted from a web here : “it suggests movement toward awakening. It expresses the enlightenment of a buddha as an unfolding process, rather than a steady state. It puts us in the hopeful position of one who may not have arrived, but who may be on the way. The destination may not be an end, but the journey itself.

As appealing as this translation is, it is by no means the only one. When you do an Internet search for the terms “Heart Sutra” or “Prajna Paramita” you get numerous references. At these various pages you will find several different translations of the mantra. These include:

* Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond. Oh what an awakening! All hail!

* Gone, gone, gone beyond altogether beyond, Awakening, fulfilled!

* Gone, gone, gone to the Other Shore, attained the Other Shore having never left.

* Gone, gone, totally gone, totally completely gone, enlightened, so be it.

* “Oh, you have done! You have done! You have completely crossed the margin. This is Enlightenment! Congratulations!” “

the irony though of toji dying thinking that he should've stuck his principles but actually having ridiculous impact on the world,, this also puts a new spin on the "look upon the flesh of one who is free" (afaik it was left untranslated on his cover page when he invade dagon’s domain) and the implication is imo,,, the more cursed energy, the more restrictions and so in a way humanity goes into a devolution the more cursed energy there is because they will be bound even more tightly to the cycle than before,, which is the irony of the kenjaku & bodhisattva linkage

toji had a heavenly restriction and has zero cursed energy, which is an anomaly that is his own, which makes me wonder what he would've been like if he had an expressed technique,,, but it's the zero cursed energy part, that uniqueness, that makes him powerful in canon

im rly curious how having cursed power automatically seems to lock u into a binding,,, which is seemingly fate. the shaman world rly operates entirely on rules,, where this is because of tengen's barriers or the origin of techniques being more commonplace im not sure

i used to think CTs came abt when individual sorcerers made pacts with supernatural beings etc but now im not sure,, despite leaning hard on shinto and buddhist frameworks there isnt much overt indication over what is and is not a real power in canon,,, like we have mahoraga but are bodhisattvas assumed to be real and exist? or as figures of belief, are they and other figures of shinto mythology, all just cursed spirits in the end?

but that tengen is linked with the proliferation of 6 eyes and star plasma vessel, makes me start wondering how and why tengen started this whole barrier thing,, like yes jpn has a ton of cursed spirits but was it before or after the barrier i can't remember now

maybe Kenjaku was messing around too much back then,, i like how sukuna also maybe had very lil to do with this and is possibly going to interfere as a wild card once more. is the idea to use him as a hail mary so u convey more ppl to the other side all at once? unless kenjaku thinks sukuna is the person who got closest to the next evolution of humankind and is actually a fan 🥴

but yeah if sukuna and megumi can remake the world together can they just hit the reset button so tengen isn't somehow this massive jungian collective unconscious? is sukuna going to accidentally save the world lol,,, i didn't care for fate themes before since it felt like akutami hadn't wholly committed to it as a theme,,, but fate and collective responsibility/influence on the individual just became a much bigger theme

also the mind/body/soul thing with tengen,,, when is that idea coming back

so tengen and sukuna are so far the only ppl who have said to have evolved into curses, whereas kenjaku still seems to be a shaman, as well as angel. what catalyzes that??

also how tf are the cursed weapons made i have questions,, just putting it out here but i actually thought that if toji, presumably, didnt rebel and defected from the clan,,, what are the chances of zenin thinking of turning him into a cursed weapon lol

,,, does being a cursed spirit mean u are bound even more tightly to fate? or do u escape because u are no longer a human bound by ur technique and u are instead just energy that keeps cycling over and over.....cursed energy rly just karma with strength mechanics???

why did gojou get rid of the black rope only for yuuta go to find more??? seems contradictory,, like...did he exorcise sth in that couple years gap?? or were there other reasons? or is HE the one scared since he also hid the inverted spear of heaven,,, makes me wonder how common knowledge all these mechanics actually are

trying to wrap my head around potential megumi learned helplessness or not being able to work through his own problems, or if it's this weird backward wishing that he didn't HAVE to deal with problems if he didn't HAVE to do these things and there were simple solutions,,, like i don't think he's exactly lazy bc he seems to do a lot of work behind the scenes, but there's a certain stasis to him, a wishing not to know. i wonder if he was ever given the "u are a child and I'm the adult" speech nanami gave yuuji

nanami, qifrey and maybe reigen are the adult/ mentor figures i wish was/ is in my life orz

i think it's kind of funny how 145 is like suddenly christianity! this manga is just abt the many ways people seek freedom and want to be delivered,,,

but im not going to talk abt it 😔 — i only have lil to no knowledge abt it other than the lil trivias my friends dropped time to time whenever we’re having a discourse abt religion suddenly lmao and im not a big fan of talking abt things idk abt bc i’ll just look stupid otherwise LMAO

its interesting to note that christian have this uh for a lack of better way to describe it, higher power which can grant u eternal salvation or damnation while buddhism is just fending for urself in pursuit of enlightment ,,, while buddhism also have beings like devas/ deities it just means that 1) if ur born as one, u must have done a good deed sometime in one of ur previous lives,, 2) u just have a ridiculous long life span but yes u’ll eventually die again and rebirth as sth depending on ur actions,,, that goes for living in gods, demi-gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts or hells realms

this is completely unrelated but,, my mother used to blast the heart sutra frequently in my house back then and the only thing i catch is the “gate gate parasamgate bodhi svaha” which i used ,, whenever i see sth..that is supposed to be unseen

theres this time i stayed behind in cram school for an exam,, i purposely took a another path from my usual one to clear my head (but im still familiar) and i saw this guy standing on the side road and the only thing that went thru my mind back them was “why is he not moving? is he waiting for someone? is he lost or sth,, the main road is just 6 foot away tho lol”

it was until i keep looking at each house that i finally notice that the spot he stood on is not even a ground lvl asphalt,, it’s a fucking sewer which means that he’s actually floating 😭😭 i just jogged and say sth along the line “wow today, ma is cooking hotpot for dinner (i actually have no idea what she plans to cook everyday) i dont want to eat it cold,, so i better hurry up” out loud while chanting the verse in my head

theres also this time me and a friend were sitting on my motorcycle after getting our late night food run until a particular smell and when we stay silent, a woman is singing on the branch right above us that we dipped right away and i almost catch a ticket for speeding all the while thinking abt that verse💀

i dont mind seeing one of “them” but i do have a problem with them following me back home and end up haunting my house for some period of time,, that one or sth ghost who slam things around and giggle in the middle of the night is enough for me to deal with 😀

now im off crying abt genshin (again) now and i’ll go back to sleep afterwards,,, ALSO I LOVE WITCH HATE ATALIERJSJEJEJ- 🐱 (2)

you literally brought up THE SAME EXACT QUESTIONS I HAVE!!! like why would gojo send yuuta to find more of the rope if he destroyed it in the first place?? unless he destroyed it in the heat of the battle with miguel during the prequel but it didn’t look like that. also i saw on twitter kenjaku might not even be a male?? apparently when referring to kenjaku, tengen didn’t use gendered pronouns. im also super curious as to how the six eyes, star plasma vessel (riko...), tengen, and kenjaku are all entwined because kenjaku’s plan was a long time coming, even though he was foiled two times already.

this reminds me of the heavenly restrictions because im still so confused about what exactly it is!! is it something a person is born with or is it something that is placed on a baby by another person??

you brought up fate too and i think that’s such an interesting concept like with akutami making more and more references to the heian era and the “golden age of sorcery” in the end I feel like everything led up to this moment. the existence of cursed energy too just feels like this “endless cycle of fate” which makes sense considering this theme also kinda aligns with yuuji’s birth which was pre planned. idk...this whole thing is suddenly feeling so much more insidious than we may have originally thought.

the sudden christianity mention is a pretty odd choice on akutami’s part but a lot of ppl (including me) are speculating that hana is going to be a harbinger of doom or something. once again is she even japanese?? the western concept of angels have never been particularly altruistic either.

unfortunately gojo has always been treating megumi like an adult so i don’t think he was ever given the “you are a child” talk from gojo. we can see it in their first meeting too. when their conversation takes a turn to serious, it becomes a conversation is from one adult to another. gojo also seems like the type to pile even more responsibility onto megumi because gojo isn’t responsible, so megumi had to pick up that slack.

i agree with you. i think sukuna is literally a wild card LMAO he does what he wants when he wants and that’s in. i don’t even think you can have a contingency plan for sukuna because he’s just that unpredictable!!!

nanami, qifrey and MAYBE reigen LSDNFKJFKN....reigen beats gojo by far though so i’ll give reigen that (that's not saying much tho tbh 😭) reigen's still sexy as hell tho 😁

also you mentioned khr!! khr is one of my favorite mangas of all time....although amano akira cannot write women despite being one khr still holds a very special place in my heart. i had no idea mukuro was influenced by kannon (to be fair i was like 14) but then again...mukuro’s eyes....i can’t believe our tastes in animanga are the same....bestie our taste>>>

HELLO???? YOU’RE RUNNING INTO SUPERNATURAL CREATURES LIKE THAT??? also motorcycles!! now im like 80% sure you're in SEA somewhere, bc as someone who lived in a SEA country for 3 years and went to school in a haunted building I feel you LMAO

[idk-my-aesthetic]

a concept

U know how in the comics Aang starts rebuilding the air nation with ppl who are basically converts to their religion? By like teaching them about the air nomad’s ways and stuff?

What if he gave some of them air bending using energy bending? And they could start re-building the air nation and it’s culture by teaching them everything!! They could even start moving back into the temples now that they could fly and rebuilding

They’d even have the bison!! According to the wiki aang found a living herd after the war !!

Idk just. As a Jewish person genocide stories are really really personal to me. And the thought of being the last of my people is terrifying

I just really want the air nation to have a chance to rebuild in a natural way. And I think that like letting ppl choose to convert and gifting them with air bending would probably be the best way

Ik aang’s kids and grandkids have air bending but trying to rebuild an entire nation from one bloodline is.... not the best idea

And I also know that in lok a bunch of ppl are given air bending, but that whole story really rubs me the wrong way (no hate to lok though!! There are parts I like!!)

Under the cut is basically an explanation as to why I take issue w/ it and find it mildly offensive/an essay about cultural appropriation in general lol. but i don’t wanna kill ppl’s dashes so if you wanna see the explanation check there 

but i really think that aang like.... allowing ppl to convert, and teaching them, and gifting them w/ airbending in the most natural/best way for that story to go and i wanted to share that!! :) 

anyway time for a whole essay because i.... apparently need to explain and justify every single one of my opinions. i’ma blame the adhd. 

I have 2 main issues w/ the new air bender plot. a) the air Nomad religion/culture is pretty explicitly seen as a closed one and b) it’s sort of a cop-out.....

so... first:

 Air bending is pretty explicitly a huge part of the air nomad culture and religion and is extremely spiritual. bc of how religious and spiritual it is the idea of ppl just.... randomly being given it really rubs me the wrong way.

It’s really really hard for me to explain this or come up with an irl example, bc these ppl didn’t ask for air bending, or try to gain it in anyway. So it’s not really their fault. But to me it feels almost like accidental cultural appropriation? If that makes sense

Which like. cultural appropriation is obviously bad. Even in the comic I originally referenced (the promise) Aang is initally really really offended by the people practicing the air Nomad religion when he first finds out!!! Which he should be!!!

There’s a difference between cultural appropriation, culture appreciation, and sharing culture. The first is bad, and the second 2 are good when done correctly.

Ima use an irl example w/ Judaism just bc using this personal experiences is apparently the only way my brain knows how to explain things

Scenario 1: Amanda (who is xtian) decides to research the Jewish holiday of Passover and the traditions behind it just bc she’s interested in it

This is cultural appreciation! She’s just learning about smthn she finds interesting. This is generally ok! although in some cultures there is knowledge that you are not supposed to know or discuss if you are not part of that culture and you should 100% respect that if it is the case 

Scenario 2: Amanda learns about the Passover seder and decides to throw one herself

Dont fucking do this omfg. This is cultural appropriation. Passover is a super important and religions holiday! It’s one of the high holy days and celebrating it on her own isn’t ok! 

Scenario 3: Amanda asks her Jewish freind Alex if she can come to his Passover seder

This is cultural appreciation and cultural sharing!! It’s totally valid!! She respectfully asks to join in and be included! 

it’s diffrent from cultural apropriation for one huge reason. she is joining in, rather than celebrating it on her own with no jewish ppl present 

Scenario 4: Amanda eats gefitlefish just bc she likes it 

this is appreciation! even though there are no jewish ppl involved! bc gefiltefish isn’t a holy/religious/spiritual thing. 

different aspects of different cultures have different levels of importance. as a general rule, if smthn is holy/religious, you should not do anything with it, unless invited by someone of that culture. if it’s not then you can generally do it on ur own (though there is some grey area there. ie, moccasins are smthn that aren’t religious to native americans, but if ur not native you shouldn’t be producing and selling them. if you want moccasins by them from actual natives) 

scenario 5: amanda contacts a rabbi and starts the conversion process 

this is...... just conversion lol. when she is finished with the process (which can take months/years) she’ll no longer be xtian and be jewish!! just as much as anyone who was born into judiasm. she’ll be able to host her own seders and any of her children will be jewish as well :) 

sorry for the really long thing!!  but i felt it was necessary to show the difference between some concepts that seem similar but are actually vastly different!! 

anyway, i hope y’all understand the difference between cultural appropriation/appreciation/sharing. if ur asking urself “ok why does it matter tho” friendly reminder that alot of irl ppl have been murdered for trying to peacefully observe their cultures/religions :) 

including the air nomads! (hey segway...) 

they are literally hunted to extension because they are part of one culture/religion. you could argue it’s a racism thing (which it is) but race, culture, ethnicity and religion are all inherently tied. see: almost every non-xtian religion worldwide 

SO. when you consider that a) the nomads were killed for their religion b) airbending was incredibly significant part of that religion, isn’t it weird that random people who have 0 connection or interest in that religion suddenly have airbending?? 

again it becomes like accidental cultural appropriation. which you can’t really blame the characters for in-world

but, these aren’t real ppl. they’re characters in a situation that was written by real ppl, real ppl who can and should be criticized 

not that i’m trying to call the creators bigoted in anyway! this dosn’t seem like anything that was meant to be offensive. and it’s not really that offensive unless you think about it. to me it just seems like a plot point that wasn’t fully thought through. i don’t bring it up to shame the creators, just as a way to show others why it’s smthn not to be repeated 

and, to show a better way to do a similar story 

the reason i went so in depth w/ the explanation of cultural appropriation vs appreciation vs conversion is bc i wanna show why a different way of approaching a similar story would have been better

the reason i think my whole idea (of ppl basically contacting aang or the air nomads, converting to the religion, and then being gifted air bending through energy bending) is better than ppl being randomly gifted it is bc conversion takes work 

to convert to any culture or religion you a) need a connection to someone in that culture (usually made by reaching out to a religious leader) and b) need to actually be accepted by that group in order to be considered one of them. it takes work and dedication. it’s a literal transfer of culture!! it’s just... ack i’m not good at explaining it 

but dosn’t it make so much more sense that ppl who actually worked to integrate themselves into the culture and become one of them are givin airbending? not because it’s a privilege but bc they need to first become part of the culture in order to have any right or claim to it 

but by just giving it to random non-benders it’s basically the reverse!! yes they later learn the culture and religon, but???? thats not how that works??? wtf??? 

i feel like i’ve been talking in circles and i’m sorry if i’ve bored everyone to death but i hope u understand my point. 

anyway! next thing! (i swear this part will be way shorter) 

by just making a bunch of random ppl airbenders it basically retcons one of the longlasting effects of the 100 yr war and almost just... erases the impact of the air nomad’s genocide 

which. is gross and uncomfortable. genocide stories are touchy subjects and smthn that need to be treated with respect 

just giving random ppl airbending it’s almost like the genocide didn’t matter at all. which i take a huge fucking issue w/ ok and i don’t feel like i need to explain why 

instead of a natural rebuilding of the air nomads it’s just fixed with spirit magic. it’s just... an insult to the really compelling and well written genocide story that was in atla and an insult to the irl ppl who related to that story 

so. yeah.... again i’m not trying to call out the creators, i again think this plotline was more accidentally insulting than purposefully 

i already propsed a better way to do it by allowing converts to gain the ability to airbend. (hell it dosn’t even need to come from energy bending or aang. the air nomads were incredibly spiritual, maybe a spirit gifted it to the ppl who earned it instead of random fucking ppl) 

but the other reason that converts instead of just.... random ppl gaining the ability is better is bc there aren’t gonna be that many ppl to convert!! there’s not gonna be some sudden boom in the airbending population!! theres would still be a story of the nation slowly healing and rebuilfing itself instead of the insulting sudden magic fix

oof. sorry for the long freaking thing. i literally went into this just wanting to share an idea and instead spent over an hour analyzing this stuff lol.... 

i hope this was coherent but if anyone’s got questions about anything i said feel free to @ me or shoot me an ask :) as long as ur polite and stuff i’ll answer to the best of my ability 

[fencesandfrogs]

an abridged history/explanation of warrior cats if you didn’t read them as a kid and have questions (a primer)

welcome. i’m going to keep things to the point, this is not a plot summary, just, well, its a pandemic and people are seeking items of childhood comfort and its come to my attention that a lot of people didn’t read these books as kids and then they come up in conversation and they act shocked so! i felt compelled to write this.

[2.5k words, 10min read. section headers, no pictures. not a ton of helpful formatting. i don’t want to say don’t read this because obviously i wrote it and think it’s worth reading, but i’ll be honest, this is a lot.]

section one: about me

i was an avid reader as a child, most of which fits solidly into “stories for another time,” and some of which would necessitate me adding tags onto this post that are, well, not necessary. so i will skip over that backstory but for those aware of lexile scores, i had one that was too high for literally any book that was appropriate to give me. so reading in school was torture and reading for fun was excellent.

now because i was a first-ish grader and my mom was trying to keep the fifth harry potter out of my hands, she looked desperately for something else to pass to me. her friend, who had a daughter a year or two older than me, was into these cat books, and my mom was like “here honey you like cats” without thinking too much about it.

which is good, because as i’ll get into, it was a really good fit for me. but like a dozen books later she asked me about the plot and well. i think at that moment she realized that it might have been better to just let me read harry potter.

but yeah i continued to read them long past the recommended reading ages and still as a Young Adult will return to them for nostalgia, and also as i will get into, some really good books. (see a list of books for “morbidly curious but i don’t want to spend 56 to 168 hours reading this”)

i’m not fully caught up on the series but this is not a plot summary so that should not impact my ability to discuss this

section two: content warnings

these books (not this post) includes the following:

discussion of castration (1.1 series 1, book 1, i’m not including this on every item/discussion because this is a complicated series but i want to demo how up front some of this is)

teenage romance/sex/pregnancy (1.1ish-1.3 or 4, continues throughout the series quite a lot, comes up again in 3.4/5, 4.4-5, and a bit in 5)

death from childbirth (1.can’t remember which book, many others)

unwanted pregnancy (se super edition, or a longer one off novel, discussed in 4&5)

sex/implied, discussed, and very very very heavily hinted but never directly said/shown (1.1-3ish, se, other)

murder (constantly, 1.1, 1.4, literally every book, 3.5, i’m just listing the ones i remember off the top of my head that were particularly graphic)

disability/illness, esp. the debilitating and/or deadly nature of it (1.3-5ish, 3.1, but all of 3, 3.4ish)

dementia (1.3-5, i’ve heard in some of the later series?)

abuse (7/8 this is reported i haven’t read these books but based on what i know it’s def there)

child abandonment (1.4-5, 3.4/5, it’s also all over the place but i think those are the only major character incidents of it)

treason (1.3-5, all over the place)

the horror/tragedy of war (background, but pretty constant)

disagreeing with an integral religion/tradition (3, based on the series title, 8, and generally scattered)

the corrupting influence of power (1.4/5, possibly 7/8, others)

racism (1, 3-5, possibly others)

sexism (se, background)

patriarchal societies (se, seems to be somewhat softened based on what i’ve heard but i’m not entirely sure about this)

and more! but it starts to get stranger and this is enough to prove my point

basically everything that could go wrong does

oh yeah! child abuse also child abuse that’s a very major theme in the first series as well as during other points. and elder abuse in the first series.

okay i’ve made my point.

section three: the appeal

look. so. i think we’re kind of pastel-ify children’s literature based on movies. see, parents have to watch children’s movies with their kids, so they can’t be gritty and intense because a lot of parents will say “not for my nine year old! they can’t deal with treason!” and that seems to be bleeding into children’s literature.

but warriors is not that. it’s intense, it borders on “too gruesome for children,” and it’s from a time where kids books got to be serious and heavy and dark because they were about animals. which was great because i couldn’t find books at my reading level that weren’t too thematically difficult, so i got to read something below my reading level, but thematically too hard, so it kind of balanced out.

and then well. so. the series grows with the audience, but the books don’t grow in terms of like difficulty so new readers start deep into it and it’s a complicated thing, the fandom history is complex, but.

the appeal is that parents don’t usually read the books their kids read and so they see a book about cats and assume it’s fluff, and kids who are starved of complex content get to read hamlet-for-kids.

section four: worldbuilding/lore

oh yeah also there’s some really deep lore to explore. so there’s two bits of appeal.

i’m not doing a full world/plot summary, but i’ll explain some common elements here.

thunder/shadow/wind/riverclan: harry potter houses for cats (gryffindor, slytherin, hufflepuff, ravenclaw, except this doesn’t work for the last two but that’s fine because no one cares about them despite riverclan being pretty important in most of the books)

-kit/-paw/-star: naming conventions. everyone has a two part name. (we’ll use cinder as an example because i like the two cinders we know, even tho neither of them get to be cinderstar.) babies are -kit (cinderkit), then when they’re apprentices, which is like being a student, you know, elementary through high school, you’re paw, so cinderpaw. then you get an Official Name from ur clan leader (cinderheart). if you become clan leader, you get to be -star (cinderstar). i know i haven’t explained clan leaders bear with me. this is kind of important because i have the names burned into my memory so i cannot simply always call firestar firestar if he was firepaw at the time of the events i’m describing. it won’t be ambiguous, cinderheart/cinderpelt are a special case. if this is tricky for you it’s fine just only read the first part of the name.

clan (leader, deputy, medicine cat, elder): roles with in the clan. leaders literally have nine lives. deputies are next in line and chosen by the leader. leaders usually go through several deputies, because deputies don’t have nine lives. medicine cats are doctors. they also have an apprentice. those are all one per clan. elders are just retired cats. they’re not a special category per say, but i wanted to mention them.

warrior: adult.

warrior code: laws.

star clan: dead cats. this ties into the religion which is pretty important to the books but for the most part if you understand that dead cats get to give guidance and send their approval, you have the gist of it.

section five: so um, what the fuck

so we start with a cat named rusty who runs into the woods to join thunderclan and then his name is firepaw and we all forget that he’s named rusty except for like that one time it comes up again. bluestar is a great leader with some corrupt deputies but fireheart eventually takes care of it and becomes clan leader which is a big deal.

then a bunch of other shit happens and suddenly ashfur is possessing brackenstar and being (more) abusive to squirrelflight (who is on the outs with brackenstar anyway for lying about their kits jayfeather, hollyleaf, and lionheart because they’re actually the children of firestar’s other daughter leafpool who had them with crowfeather after she fell in love with him but he’s from windclan and she’s a medicine cat so that’s double illegal and apparently hollyleaf is alive even though she yeeted herself into a pit and died because she killed ashfur when he threatened to reveal this but couldn’t live with being the product of an illegal meeting and then it was all pointless because leafpool stopped being a medicine cat out of guilt anyway and jayfeather is just an ornery bitch about everything but especially all of this)

i’m not explaining any of that.

section six: i repeat: so um, what the fuck

so the thing about these books is they’re soap operas and dramas about cats and that means they get just as strange and chaotic as anything else in the genre. i think a lot of people like me, who read them as children, regard the series we knew as a child (usually either the first three or the first five, plus super editions) as something good and warm and comforting (despite being dark and gruesome) because they made us feel good.

they were also a breeding ground for young fandom because of all the the drama that exists and the nature of the books providing that.

section seven: super editions

the simple answer to what a super edition is has already been given (it’s a novel length one-off about a single character, and its usually either a side character - bluestar, crowfeather - or a event/perspective we don’t get to see - firestar, skyclan, greystripe - and they’re generally more mature)

my favorite super edition is bluestar’s prophecy. i read it at like 16, slinking into the children’s library with a stack of other ya fiction and a “children’s book” which dealt with unwanted pregnancy, grief, forbidden love, and more. still not sure why that’s in the children’s section.

section eight: about the drama

so there’s been a lot of fandom drama about these books. i can’t tell you about the nuances, because i am an old fan, so i watched but didn’t partake. the highlights reel that i can recall goes as follows (please note i will refer to characters by name without explanation. it’s fine. the point of this section is to convey the pettiness of this drama):

tigerstar: did he do anything wrong? (the answer is holy shit yes, this isn’t discourse, it’s okay to like a villain)

scourge: did he do anything wrong, also what color is his collar? (also yes, doesn’t matter)

was the new prophecy (2)/omen of the stars (3)/etc good? (yes, eh, no, yes, no comment, no comment)

should jaypaw or hollypaw be medicine cat apprentice (neither of them, but jaypaw’s employment opportunities are limited because he’s blind, so its gotta b him)

uhh a massive tangle around this parentage drama between squirrelflight, leafpool, brackenfur, and crowfeather, which i used as the crux of humor for how batshit the plots can get, so i’m not even going to pretend i can make it funny, but just know that it’s batshit and the correct opinion is as follows: no one is right, but squirrelflight has done the least wrong, brackenfur is an asshole to her where it’s unwarrented, and hollyleaf is an idiot

and the current drama centers around brackenstar and ashfur and is tied directly to the point above, which is why i’ve kind of given up trying to make jokes about this because this is the culmination of like 35 novels.

section nine: i feel like i need to have some conclusive point to justify writing all of this

but i don’t have one, because this was really an excuse to ramble about an old passion for like half an hour. i mean i guess i can say, like, i think younger fans are sort of embroiled in this drama they don’t really have context for, because i’m not kidding, the current drama centers around the grandchildren of our original cast.

it’s kind of hard to know why, say, mistystar matters if you don’t know that she’s the child of bluefur and oakheart and if you don’t remember the drama that surrounded that when bluestar was dying and tigerstar and leopardstar were ruling a combined shadow/riverclan.

(i really hope that’s intelligible i tried to lay the groundwork for it. basically, there’s a biracial kid in a very segregated society who becomes the leader of one of the clans. which is obviously drama, especially considering that that clan was part of a weird supremacy movement a while back.)

& you know? i really hope one of the new series gets to be like, a soft reboot. just. end the current drama and pick up again with the latest generation. a) we’re starting to run out of names, and b) i think that it’s kind of tipped over the edge of sane.

the series also used to be very low fantasy. the cat societies are reasonably close to feral cat colonies (the biggest detail is that toms don’t all have their own territory, but there’s honestly in-universe discussion of this and it’s basically a culture thing), and while star clan/religion is a real and legitimate thing, there’s also a discussion of its abuse and most of the early books don’t really use star clan/related ideas as a physical force so much as a plot device, barring, like, when a new leader gets their nine lives.

honestly, i’ll always adore these books for serving the role they did, and a lot of the series is fantastically well written. but the fandom surrounding it can be, uh, not great because 9-14 year olds don’t really have good brains to understand this.

also, i’m very sad that i can’t find the flash game that was for the great prophecy. it was not very fun, but i enjoyed playing it, so if anyone knows the url so i can search the internet archive for it, please let me know.

section ten: i’m morbidly curious but there are 56 hours of books to read, assuming a very fast reading pace, so is there something i can start with to experience this without dedicating 4 days to it?

yes, there is.

it’s called bluestar’s prophecy. it’s standalone, and i should have given you enough of a background on the lore that you don’t need to know anything else. i’ve already given away the twist in series 1 that it would spoil, so you’re all good on that front.

if you want more, or want the original experience, the first series is self contained and quite good. i’ve given the broad outlines of the plot, but trust me, there’s a lot of surprises and all sorts of things i skipped over because while i like it, it’s not exactly fandom primer material

i also enjoy firestar’s quest and skyclan’s destiny for super editions, but you’ll need to read the first series to understand FQ and FQ to understand SD, so it’s not exactly a starting point. also, SD especially deals with a very different set of themes as the other books.

also, if you were to, say, search “readwarriorcats” (no spaces) on duckduckgo, and then click on one of the first links, you know, not the official site, the one hosted on one of those free website things, you know, not wix, not wordpress, the other one, you would only find lists of the books with hyperlinks.

;3

[sacredfire44]

Watch Yugioh GX part 15

So ummm,,,, haha,,,, I’m,,,, back?

I”M SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG I SWEAR I DIDN’T THINK IT WOULD!!!!

But it’s here now, so please enjoy part 15 of Sacred watches gx!

Here we go, with episode 37!

XXXX

We start this episode with Misawa looking Really Fucking High.

This episode title mentions a Hand-to-Hand duel so I will be extremely disappointed if Juudai doesn't straight up punch someone’s lights out.

Aww, Misawa was heartbroken... I'm not entirely sure he's not actually under some spell, considering the stupid nicknames, but that's still gotta hurt.

Holy crap, dude, Misawa is GONE! That's not even censored sake, it's just straight up tabasco sauce! And he's not even reacting!

Oh look, another very cute Juudai face as the angel worries for his friend.

Misawa... you like her. It's not just about dueling, my dude... You like her.

I'm pretty sure everyone else in this group knew that Misawa like-likes Tania, but then there's Juudai, who thinks Misawa just enjoys facing a strong duelist.

Also, the shocked faces of those around Juudai as they realize just how oblivious he can be are what I live for.

The sound Tania's fist makes impacting with her boob is. Interesting. Do the animators of this show realize boobs aren't made of muscle? Do they think boobs are just, like, protruding pecs? Jesus. Wait, Tania is duel spirit, not a human. Theoretically, they COULD just be pectoral muscles...

Please take my thoughts away from me, I'm traumatizing myself.

Oh my god they're still teasing Misawa about the Misawa-chii thing.

So... are they ever going to explain that? No? Okay then...

Juudai told them to call him Yuki-chii... First, I think that's the first time he's ever asked anyone to call him by his last name. Second, this marks the third time Juudai has shown interest in a girl who is a duel spirit, while he has shown NO interest in human women. Does Juudai have a type? I think so.

"Why increase their attack points" Do you not remember that one of her monsters can switch their ATK points? At least Misawa should remember that!

Did she just start a dark duel? I think she did...

Oh my god please tell me what I think is gonna happen is actually gonna happen. I'm begging you, please, please, please-

YES! YES! YES! YEEEEEEESSSSSSS!

Misawa, you should not be attracted to the fact she enjoyed being punched...

The animation and sound effects for polymerization were different. I'm... not sure I like them much.

Oh hey, I wasn't sure that attack was gonna land.

Daitokuji, I don't think she's mad...

Juudai looks way to happy to be punching someone in the face.

So... she's a masochist?

I think Juudai's plan involves having lots of HEROs in his graveyard... I don't think he'd recklessly through them into battle otherwise...

Juudai can yoU STOP THIS! YOU'RE RISKING UR LIFE BECAUSE YOU ENJOY PUNCHING THE SHIT OUT OF EACH OTHER!!!!

And yet they're technically fighting mostly with a children's card game... I do love this card, tho. I hope they use it more often!

A tie? I think that was a tie.

And if you look to your left, you will see the exact moment Misawa realizes he is, in fact, a furry.

XXXX

So that’s all I got for episode 37. I’m pretty sure the next episode I’ll be doing is episode 40, so look forward to it!

See you all next time!

[futabayoshioka]

just saw ur post w/ that print from twt and yeah, i totally feel u. i also been thinking a lot lately abt how all the shit i went thru in my childhood fucked me up. just like that post says "buried feelings, inability to express emotions, wanting to please everyone, etc" it kinda hurts to read those kinda stuff bc it's so true. like, u want to change and really wish u weren't like that, but it's just SO fucking hard. and hey, it's totally ok if u want to vent it out! if anything, i'm all ears!

I’ve seen so many people talking about this lately and it makes me really really sad. Honestly, I feel like it’s a generational thing, esp for latino and asian families. Like in my culture my parents were taught that you have to always, at all times, respect your parents, because if you dare talk back or stand up for yourself then you’re immediately a disrespectful kid, so it’s always your parents who win. The whole situation ends up consuming you because of how unhealthy it is. And I promise I’m in no way saying my parents are bad people, my mom is the most important person in the whole world to me and I know she’s dedicated her entire life to raise me and give me the best, but she does have a tendency to guilt trip me so she can get her way and that she constantly releases her stress on me, which is something she got from her own mom (she’s mentioned it to me before). It’s a cycle. 

Being the “a good kid” in my family ended up being my only way to escape from the arguments at my house, but yeah, it fucked up my personality pretty badly and the way I deal with stress outside of my house. I literally end up shaking and tearing up after any type of confrontation because it gives me so much anxiety. 

Thank you for being sweet though, I wasn’t expecting to get messages about it but I totally get you and I wholeheartedly hope that when this generation has children, we as the ones who know about how unhealthy this whole situation is know how to make it stop and always keep in mind that our impact on kids is huge and will follow them for the rest of their lives.

[janiedean]

(part 1) ur gonna roast me for this but im legit curious why mafia AUs are so bad? im asking in a non confrontational way, i get it romanticizing mafia is wrong, but i also believe that 1)most mafia AUs are a really toned down type of mafia;2)they do make for some interesting kinds of dynamics with fanart and with fics; 3)in a fic specifically u can create your own world and call something mafia and still make it so they don't kill innocent people but only idk members of other gangs or sth

(part 2) plus theyre a way to put ur charas in a completely diff context and see what theyll do. i mean i dont believe that writing ships in a certain context (like mafia) equals romanticizing that context. mafia AUs arent even my fav things to read (in fact i almost never do), im sure many ppl romanticize it and i obvs dont agree with that but im just trying to udnerstand bc i believe fandoms are a way to explore things that we normally wouldnt.

I’m not gonna roast you don’t worry xD okay wait let me check if I replied to this already if yes I’m gonna c/p because it’s half past midnight otherwise I’ll just go at it again wait *checks tags* fff obviously I don’t have a general post but anyway pls read this after you’ve done with my post and then this which is also choke-full of links. plus for a (not nice) laugh: here. AH WAIT I FOUND THE POST.

okay, so, let’s have it out of the way: I have nothing against mob aus or crime aus. I have a problem against calling them mafia AUs because in the US mafia = organized crime at large, in Italy mafia = ACTUAL EXISTING ORGANIZATIONS THAT ARE ACTIVELY HARMFUL. now that I introduced the topic I’ll c/p you the reply I gave to another anon who while discussing the issue pointed out that most writers don’t even know Italian mafia is a thing, which is pretty much on the same discourse so...

*The thing is - in the US it might not be enough of a deal anymore and I honestly do get why people make the mafia = regular mobsters, since the mafia was the first foreign organized crime being exported to the US via italian immigrants (sorry if this sounds horrible in English but I just woke up and I still didn’t have coffee) so I understand that mafia became the umbrella term.But the thing is that - as you said, these people don’t even know that there’s a mafia in Italy anymore or where the word comes from.

 I’m going to link to italiansreclaimingitaly’s tag about the mafia and its perception outside Italy because they posted about this extensively and it’s an excellent resource, but meanwhile I’m gonna do a very short bullet point list and about the topic:

Mafia might not be a big deal in the US, but it still is here. We have the beauty of four different mafias (Cosa Nostra - the Sicilian one, camorra which is the one in Campania but has tendrils spread everywhere, the 'ndrangheta which is in Calabria and the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia) which are all active [especially camorra and 'ndrangheta] and whose actions have direct impact (negative) on our economy and on our society. Actually mafias are one of the main reasons we’re currently economically fucked up, and if I start talking about how mafia culture keeps some areas literally backwards I could talk about it for three months.

There are still people who are killed for standing up against them. These days the most prominent personality is Roberto Saviano who is a writer who dared to put together a book documenting minutely the way camorra works and he’s been living under protection for years by this point. Like, they want him dead because he wrote a book. And I’m sorta sure that he was talking about leaving Italy and going to the US after years of sticking with it here because he can’t take it anymore but I don’t know if it was a taken decision or if it’s still debating it.

It wasn’t even thirty years ago that we had the stragi di mafia - in english it’d be something like the mafia slaughters, basically around the beginning of the nineties there were a number of bombs planted by the mafia targeting people who were trying to oppose it including judges Falcone and Borsellino, actually the anniversary of Falcone’s death is like... tomorrow. And they’ve killed people for way longer than that. Here is a list of only Cosa Nostra victims including the ones from the eighties/nineties. And people are still dying because of it. The slaughters I’m referring to are just the ones in the nineties which are enough of a number.

They also perpetuate a culture where if you testify against your mafia-employed relatives you’ll be shunned forever. There are women who testified against their families and couldn’t see their children anymore never mind that they weren’t automatically considered a relative anymore the moment they sided against the mafia. Some people have committed suicide after becoming witnesses also because our police force/justice system can be terribly non-supportive in this kind of situation so they got left on their own. Never mind that back in the day - it was the beginning of the nineties? - I recall at least a particular story of - I think, correct me if I remember wrong but I can’t remember the names for the life of me - where this guy testified against the local mafia when he either used to work for them or was forced to pay them the pizzo and in retaliation his six-year old (or five? Anyway he had a son younger than ten for sure) got kidnapped, killed and thrown into acid to dispose of the body. That happened in what, 1993? 1994? It’s pretty much yesterday. And now the camorra is doing the same - there’s a list here of camorra victims among which accidental passerbys that got killed because they were in the way which I can tell just by glancing is not complete. And I’m not even going into the 'ndrangheta. That is to say, here mafia still kills people and cripples our country.

Now, I get that it’s a word, but the point was: let’s say that instead of the Italians the Japanese came to the US first and the umbrella word for organized crime was yakuza rather than mafia and let’s say yakuza was still what it was originally in Japan while in the US it stopped being a big deal and people write yakuza!AU instead of mafia AU. Let’s say someone Japanese gets angry at that and goes like 'listen the yakuza is a real deal it does this this this and that and it’s a plague in our country so can you please at least look it up before writing your fanfic’, which is what had happened way back then when this whole mafia and fanfic thing blew up. A bunch of people told us to get over it because it’s just a word and if it’s a problem in Italy it’s not in the US so why should they care? Now, if we had been Japanese (or Chinese or Russian or Mexican) would they have said the same thing? Considering the general tumblr attitude I’m pretty sure they would have received either an apology or 'this is an important deal let’s keep that in mind’ with signal boost reblogs and stuff. 

It’s the fact that we should get over people not knowing that it’s still a real problem for us and that they can’t take five seconds to google it that is the problem imo. Especially when instead of mafia au you can just say mobsters au or tag it as organized crime and everyone is a lot happier, mostly because as the tag above explains romanticising the mafia is a good thing for them because it means they can act outside Italy with less stigma because everyone thinks that the mafia is dead or not relevant anymore, if I’m explaining myself. (And it’s active outside Italy - like, there was a mafia kill in Germany in 2007 where six people died (sorry the link is in Italian but there isn’t an English wiki page, if you look the city up you’ll find something probably) and it was because of the 'ndrangheta.

I’d really like to not get worked over it because it meant it was a thing of the past y'know, but the problem is that it isn’t and I’d rather spread some awareness in hope some of these writers look it up (because it’s a good thing that people know what mafia is since as stated they have tendrils everywhere - if you read Saviano’s book the entire first chapter is about how camorra regularly deals with Chinese import/export in Italy for one) than shrug and figure that since they’ll think everything is good for fanfic then it’s not even worth my time.*

Now, ^^^ that was the c/p-ed reply that should answer most of your doubts. What I didn’t address was:

im sure many ppl romanticize it and i obvs dont agree with that but im just trying to udnerstand bc i believe fandoms are a way to explore things that we normally wouldnt.

aaaand as we say here in Italy, this is where the donkey falls (sorry we have weird sayings), because in theory there’s nothing wrong with that... except that in 99% of the mafia aus I’ve seen around the thing is that they’re supposed to be cute.

like, I see a lot of shit with TINY MAFIA BOSS STEVE ROGERS with RUSSIAN ENFORCER BUCKY (????? bucky isn’t even russian???) and the yoi thing I saw before had the japanese character being the leader of a russian mafia gang which is... like... guys it doesn’t happen it really doesn’t, and a lot of them re-use wrongly terminology taken from the godfather without context or knowing what the hell it means, and it’s always from the criminals’ pov and they’re somehow seen as criminals doing justice where the police can’t (???) and like... no. mafia bosses/enforcers/employees are bad people period, and at least here if you try to leave or repent they kill your family in retribution. like, not even ten years ago there’s been a woman who used to belong to a mafia family (or one colluded with the mafia) who testified and her entire town/family shunned her and she couldn’t take it anymore and... killed herself drinking acid if I don’t recall wrong. it’s not even special cases. this shit is not funny, it’s not cute, it’s not adorable and it’s not good fodder for your imagine your otp scenario (srsly I saw one like.. let me find it,

LIKE. just look at this shit. in a regular context, the enforcer goes to the show owner to force them to pay a monthly sum to their boss lest they destroy their shop and their lives and their family’s life never mind that mafia culture is deeply homophobic so the mafia enforcer flirting with the shopkeeper is like completely fucking out of the question. I mean, people here like to shit on the sopranos but that show was actually excellent representation of Horrid Criminals Who Were Never Supposed To Be Good People and the small arc that happened when one of tony’s friends turned out to be gay (closeted) was REALLY well done. btw, it ended that when they found out he was gay most of the crowd rejected him and thought badly of him until I think they killed him also for other reasons, but that spiraled from finding out he liked dick. and that’s american mafia that they actually based on well-done research of the culture in Italy it came from, I assure you that here it doesn’t work that differently. like. the shit above is so inaccurate and frankly offensive, it’s like... I get people romanticizing problematic stuff but the thing is that when you tell them that it’s actually offensive you get brushed off as ‘ah well you’re being too sensitive it’s just a word u__u’. now, I’m all for exploring shit we wouldn’t be into, but not like THAT, because that’s like mafia romantic comedy and that’s not how it works. now, you wanna do a fic where the mafia characters are deeply flawed and bad people and the police tries to catch them? fine, great, go ahead. you wanna do a fic where the enforcer above deals with dunno an entire life of internalized homophobia when he finds the shopkeeper attractive and feels conflicted over having to con money out of him and doing horrible shit for a living and maybe understanding that crime isn’t worth it and then he actually collaborates with the police and gets shit from about everyone he knows and loves for that? okay, awesome, go ahead. nothing bad in that.

but the shit above is not exploring things we wouldn’t/writing darkfic, it’s THINKING THAT A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION WHICH IS STILL A THING IN OUR PART OF THE WORLD IS CUTE AND ADORABLE. and that only plays in their favor because it takes the bad aura out of the word and we really should not let that happen. like. that is what is bad about mafia aus and mafia discourse, that people don’t realize the mafia is alive and well and thriving and not a thing that doesn’t exist or a generic word for organized crime.

you wanna write the shit above? okay, CALL IT CRIME AU or mob au, not mafia au.

btw, add-on: idk if I mentioned it in the above post or not, but in case I didn’t, I said that people would balk at the idea of a mexican cartel au. sadly since then I’ve found out a fandom where not only there is one but it’s also extra cutesy and people apparently love it and it has a bunch of kudos/comments and idek I’m not even touching that with a ten foot pole but like... I’ve avoided it and everything that author wrote because to me it’s just... nope. like, nope. if you do mafia aus don’t make them fucking cute. (also: in the same fandom I had to mute a v. famous fanartist whose art I actually liked but did cutesy mafia aus and.. like... haahahhaahahahahaha nah sorry. can’t go there. nope.)

[shinigamikarinkurosaki-archive]

ur last text post piqued my interest, so headcanons on how karin's temper is (how she lets it out) depending on the person?

This post? I’m actually glad you asked!! I don’t get to explore this part of Karin often.

Largely shinigami!Karin.Just forewarning– this is about as long as a Doctoral thesis which is totally your fault, & the entire thing contains potentially triggering content. Warnings include alcoholism, implied BDSM, minor character hate, mentioned suicide, discussion of: dysfunctional family units, violence, racism, LGBT+ prejudice, misogyny, sexual harassment, & various manifestations of abusive situations. I would like to publicly apologize to mobile users.

Karin’s expression of her anger his highly dependent person to person. I’d first like to say that Karin rarely gets angry. Most of her anger is frustration. Of course, she does get angry, but that is caused by violation of her values which I’ll explore after her expression of frustration with specific relationships.

With her loved ones, her reaction to her frustration is a slider of violent to nonviolent highly dependent upon individual to individual, rather than offense. When Karin does become violent, it’s not to achieve an end like Aizen’s abuse, it’s because she’s legitimately reached the end of her rope & violence is her best method to get back at her slights, perceived or otherwise. Mostly.

With Toushirou, violence is a part of their sexuality. I won’t discuss this much because expression of sexuality in teenagers is Wrong™ which throws Me & literally every COCSA survivor under a fucking bus & promotes conservative sex ed which doesn’t work & I will get yelled at. I will say that any violence between Karin & Toushirou is perfectly consensual & performed after they’ve compromised in an argument to blow off steam & I will also say that aftercare is of utmost importance to them.

Karin will never be violent with Momo ever. Don’t get me wrong, Karin does get frustrated with Momo. Karin gets frustrated when any guardian figure won’t let her do something– namely dangerous, possibly fatal things. For instance, if Momo & Karin are on a senpai-kouhai day date & there’s a hollow, Momo will normally let Karin slay it herself if Momo thinks it’s in Karin’s capability. If Momo thinks Karin will get worse that little scratches, Momo will force Karin to sit on the sidelines while she takes care of it. Well, Momo isn’t around all the time, & Karin knows she can take anything up to a Menos Grande, so Momo denying her this is very frustrating to Karin because Karin knows she can take a lot on despite the injuries she may suffer. But like I said, Karin will never get violent with Momo. Momo is too important to Karin, as Momo is one of the few people whom would respect Karin’s autonomy so long as nobody is harmed, including Karin. Karin expresses her infrequent frustration with Momo by pouting, but Momo easily diffuses Karin’s frustration with affectionate gestures like baking Karin cookies or giving her a big ol’ wet senpai forehead kiss.

Yuzu is the person Karin gets frustrated with second most. Now, Yuzu doesn’t do anything to really trigger Karin’s frustration. Even Yuzu’s infatuation with their brother doesn’t really tick Karin off. Karin loves Ichigo just as much as Yuzu does, the only difference is Ichigo’s treatment of them. Ichigo’s favoritism of Yuzu– namely he giving Yuzu more freedom than Karin, such as not policing Yuzu’s friendships– isn’t Yuzu’s fault. That said, Yuzu is the only reason Karin doesn’t kill herself through junior high & high school. Yuzu is legitimately the other half of Karin’s soul. But keep in mind Karin isn’t fulfilled by a normal human life. It’s only a matter of time before Karin resents Yuzu for keeping her from living a happy life as a shinigami. Karin hates herself for feeling this resentment towards sweet Yuzu but never gets the resources to really soothe herself. Karin snaps at Yuzu a lot because of this resentment. As sweet as Yuzu is, Yuzu is still a Kurosaki & won’t roll over for Karin. Their frequent screaming matches eventually get as heated as Ichigo & Karin’s. Really, the only difference between them is that Karin has never struck Yuzu.

Karin has struck Izuru on occasion. They mostly fight about Izuru’s passive aggressive treatment of Toushirou. Toushirou was one of the most important support systems while Karin was still alive. While she doesn’t support Toushirou’s harassment of Izuru simply because of Izuru’s proximity to Momo, Izuru’s equally assholish behavior is offensive to all the things Toushirou has helped her through. When Karin & Izuru are fighting about Toushirou, Karin normally storms out. If Izuru follows her, regardless of his intent to apologize, Karin normally socks him. Thankfully, Toushirou & Izuru start getting along while Karin is in the academy so she & Izuru don’t actually fight much anymore. When they do, they’re mostly drunk, not sure what they’re fighting about, & end up just being petty & scathing & totally cool in the morning.

Karin isn’t infrequently frustrated with Ururu & Jinta. That said, she’s never been violent with either of them while she’s frustrated. Karin is mostly frustrated by their refusal to divulge much about shinigami for fear of retaliation from Ichigo. These are Karin’s battle partners. They’re her longest & most important friends. It’s offensive & demeaning that the two most important people in Karin’s life won’t be honest with her, just like Ichigo. Karin throws tantrums, she screams & bawls her eyes out, she begs for them to have the decency to love her like she loves them– with total trust & devotion, but to little avail. Karin may not speak to Jinta & Ururu for a few days after these tantrums, but that’s about all. Karin can’t stay away from them, they’re simply too important to her.

Ichigo is the person Karin is most often frustrated by. I won’t discuss this much since I already talk about Karin & Ichigo so much, but Karin hasn’t gone one argument with Ichigo without trying to hit him. She’s at the end of her rope the minute Ichigo walks in.

Where do I even start with Ichigo’s crew? I was originally going to do original sections for each of them but Karin’s reasons for her frustration with them & reactions to them are virtually the same. Karin does not like anybody in close proximity to Ichigo. At all. Karin thinks all of them are blindly loyal to Ichigo & agree with Ichigo’s treatment of Karin. This isn’t true, Yasutora & Rukia are especially offended by Ichigo stifling Karin’s potential so. Even so, neither of them do anything to put Ichigo in place which, in my opinion, is almost as bad as agreeing with Ichigo. The only person spared from Karin’s violence is Orihime, & only because Karin gets very soft, kind vibes from Orihime which reminds Karin too much of Yuzu to raise a hand against Orihime. Otherwise, everybody else is fair game. Byakuya is included in this category.

Renji is not included with them. Karin harbors complex feelings for Renji. On one hand, Renji reminds Karin strongly of her brother. Renji & Ichigo share similar body language, syntax, & “vibes,” & Renji’s proximity to Ichigo worries Karin. That said, Momo trusts Renji & Karin trusts Momo’s opinion. There’s not one thing that ticks Karin off with or about Renji, because her mixed feelings themselves trigger her frustration. Now, Karin doesn’t act on her frustration herself. Karin gets violent when she feels trapped her pestered by Renji. Her attacks rarely work since Renji is so much larger & stronger than Karin, but Renji is very respectful of Karin’s space for the most part so there aren’t a lot of altercations between them. The rare times Karin tries to beat the shit out of Renji normally result in Renji putting her in time out with Momo & Momo making Karin apologize for her behavior after Karin has cooled off. Karin’s never sure if she’s really sorry.

Isshin genuinely loves his children. Isshin doesn’t know how to be a father. That’s perfectly reasonable, it’s not like there’s a manual for raising children at all, let alone children with troubles such as the Kurosaki siblings. That said, Karin doesn’t feel like Isshin takes her seriously. This makes it hard for Karin to go to Isshin for any amount of help because he just makes a joke out of everything. Of course, nobody can bottle up the turmoil Karin experiences without it negatively impacting their behavior. When Karin feels mocked by Isshin, she gets violent with him. It’s mostly spontaneous violence, while Isshin is being a goofball.

Karin’s relationship with Shuuhei is hard to articulate. It’s pretty uncomplicated since Karin doesn’t hang out with Shuuhei as much as she hangs out with Izuru, Momo, & Toushirou. Karin has never been violent with Shuuhei, she hasn’t even really fought with him. I just want to touch on this though because Karin does get frustrated with Shuuhei on occasion. Shuuhei is still very loyal to Tousen despite Tousen manipulation & hypocrisy. THIS doesn’t anger Karin. Karin knows emotional abuse is extremely complex & takes time for the survivor to process their experience, heal, & relearn self-respect. Karin admires Shuuhei incredibly though as Momo admires him too, which is rare for Momo. Karin just wants Shuuhei to learn to give himself the respect he deserves, she just wants Shuuhei to see how wonderful he is. She mostly keeps this to herself though.

Karin generally loves Rangiku. Rangiku is fun & bright & is almost as good as Rose & Momo at cheering Karin up. Karin just has one complaint– Rangiku’s avoidance of work & Toushirou consequentially picking up her slack. Rangiku isn’t a bad person, but Toushirou is very overworked & a good partnership requires lifting one’s weight in & out of battle. Karin’s frustration with Rangiku slacker habits never escalates into a screaming match or a fight, but Karin can be quite venomous if she catches Rangiku slacking off somewhere. It never really hurts Rangiku’s feelings. Rangiku knows Karin loves her but loves Toushirou just as much, & Rangiku knows Karin is right, Rangiku’s just so sad that it’s hard to sit down & concentrate. Karin understands, she was disassociated her entire senior year & literally flunked out because she got nothing done, but being sad doesn’t excuse burdening loved ones.

Yukio rarely triggers Karin’s frustration. There’s this ease between them Karin doesn’t get with many individuals at all. I’m not even sure what they’d fight about, let alone either of their reactions. Yukio’s initial disdain for Toushirou would tick Karin off at first, but Yukio & Toushirou eventually develop a friendship of their own eliminating any reason for Karin to get upset over that, & Karin can easily see through Yukio’s aloof, sarcastic facade because it’s exactly like her own. I think any problems Karin & Yukio would have with each other would be resolved quickly & maturely.

Karin’s friends Ryohei, Heita, Kei, & Kazuya are people Karin considers “underdogs” like herself. I’ll make another post about my headcanons for Karin’s friends another time– probably reblog it from my roleplay blog– but Karin has only been violent with these four once. Like, with the intent to get back at them instead of just shut them up when they’re being obnoxious. It’s just after the five of them enter junior high. It’s weird for boys & girls to be friends now, & Ryohei, Heita, Kei, & Kazuya don’t like being teased for being friends with a girl. They try to just stop talking to Karin, “let her down easy” so to speak, but Karin’s having none of that. When Karin confronts them about their distant behavior, they really don’t have any choice but to tell Karin they don’t want to be friends with Karin anymore. Of course, Karin is broken-hearted. Kazuya, Ryohei, Kei, & Heita have given Karin a sense of normalcy throughout elementary school. She throws a fit, throwing two of them into the river, dislocating one’s arm, breaking another’s nose, & storms off. She never sees them again. Fine by her, she tells everybody, despite how her chest aches.

Karin is scarcely frustrated with Shinji to point of violence. His lax demeanor in the office gets on Karin’s nerves frequently, but she respects Shinji too greatly to throw a temper tantrum of any sort. This wasn’t always true. Oftentimes, Karin felt Shinji was comparing her to her brother, but Momo talked to Shinji about Karin’s disdain for her brother & Shinji respects that Ichigo hurt Karin very much, so even if Shinji still cares about Ichigo he & Karin just don’t talk about anything having to do with Ichigo.

Rose normally doesn’t irritate Karin in any capacity. Rose used to sound condescending, with his insistence to make the most of life & exploration & art, but after Rose & Karin converse about making oneself happy, pursuing the things that bring them joy instead of seething in misery, Karin likes him. It’s summarily what she did when she killed herself, however tragic. The most Rose does is irritate Karin when he’s being prissy & finicky. It doesn’t even elicit any smart comments from Karin, mostly just an eyeroll. Nothing ever escalates into violence.

Kensei, on the other hand, can make Karin go from 0 to 100 in a third of a second. Karin doesn’t totally despise Kensei. She actually doesn’t know Kensei very well as a person, but she knows how Kensei treats Shuuhei & it’s totally unacceptable. I’ll cover more about Karin’s reactions towards witnessing abusive situations in a couple of paragraphs. But the moment Kensei snaps at Shuuhei while Karin’s in the vicinity, she’s almost immediately up in Kensei’s face screaming at him how he’s a captain & should know better, how Shuuhei’s done jackshit to deserve being berated like Kensei sometimes does. I think Kensei would be ticked off that some kid is screaming at him like Karin is, but Karin has a lot of good points. I won’t explore my thoughts about the dynamic of Squad 9 in this post so I’ll stop there.

Karin doesn’t really know what she thinks about Mashiro overall. I do think Karin is sometimes annoyed by Mashiro’s immaturity but otherwise Karin doesn’t find a lot to get annoyed with Mashiro, nothing that warrants more than a couple of ticked off remarks at least.

That’s all for Karin’s individual relationships– 2.3k words of it…. Just real quick, I’d like to cover a little bit about Karin’s biases towards certain relationships.

Karin’s family relationships leave much to be desired. She doesn’t really care much for her family, since they’re so distant & Yuzu is the only one who hasn’t betrayed Karin in some fashion. She doesn’t think very highly of her family as a whole because of their dysfunction, however much she may love them. She responds to anger with them similarly to her friendships.

Karin is a very insecure person. There aren’t many people whom are forward with her, & she’s already ostracized from her classmates thanks to shit that went down with ghosts in her primary school years. When Karin gets a new friend, she is entirely loyal & loving of them. Anything she may view as wrong or as a betrayal Karin will react to with incredible hostility. Like her family, she thinks friendships are based in honesty & when that is violated she’s broken-hearted & volatile.

Boyfriends & girlfriends are a different matter altogether. Karin will forgive a lot more with them. You see, Karin is a very physical person. Her two primary expressions of love are physical affection & emotional support. It’s more normal for romantic partners to snuggle, so if Karin is ticked off or just finished throwing a tantrum, she’s going to forgive pretty much anything & everything. If her tantrum is interrupted however, Karin will immediately equate this action to Ichigo’s demeaning behavior & she will turn violent & terminate the relationship.

Moving onto violations of Karin’s values. Overall, if Karin even thinks something is amiss she’ll get ticked off & start screaming or beating the shit out of someone. Karin is intolerant of intolerance, even from her loved ones. Truthfully, if any of her loved ones violate her morals, she’ll react even more hostilely than she will a stranger because her loved ones know better. It’s not to say she’ll never forgive anyone for these, of course, but she believes that cruelty needs to be met threefold.

Karin’s biggest trigger to violent action is LGBT+ discrimination. Being bisexual herself, Karin is directly impacted by homophobia & biphobia. She doesn’t care who or where or when this occurs, she will destroy anyone who exhibits homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, aphobia, et cetera. However, Japan has a very repressed culture, & Karin is aware that some people aren’t malicious, simply ignorant. While she’s most likely to respond violently to LGBT+ prejudice, she’s also most likely to forgive it in the future.

Karin is also really ticked off by xenophobia. The Kurosaki kids are biracial– German/Japanese mix, Masaki being German/Japanese herself– so Karin & her family are impacted by this. Less so Karin since she looks more traditionally Japanese, but Yuzu gets a lot of unwarranted harassment because of Yuzu’s more Western appearance. Karin will react violently to any amount of racially or culturally centric discrimination, regardless if Yuzu is on the receiving end or not. This is an unforgivable offense to Karin & if she sees the same individual over & over again, still behaving xenophobically, Karin will beat the shit out of them until they totally disappear from Karakura.

Misogyny is a good way to elicit Karin’s wrath. It reminds Karin of Ichigo’s treatment of her, & seeing as how Karin & Ichigo can’t go a day without trying to rip out each other’s throats, of course Karin acts hostilely towards this behavior.

Abuse & rape apologism wasn’t high on Karin’s radar until she met Momo. Of course, it was on there, but it had more to do with misogyny than abuse itself. Karin’s violent streak is triggered by praise of known abusers & belittlement or harassment of survivors. This is an unforgivable offense & Karin will at least try to chase said offender out of town.

Any form of harassment or abuse of Karin’s loved ones will result in hostile reaction by Karin. Karin is incredibly protective over her “clan” & would risk her own life for anybody she cares about. While Karin won’t immediately resort to violence, an example being Kensei, if the situation is taking a turn Karin doesn’t like or the behavior against her loved ones continues, somebody’s gonna end up with a knife in their lung. This offense is rarely forgivable to Karin, but she’s not so black & white minded to think that everything is simple as it seems. Sometimes, abusive behavior really is just a mistake that can be remedied, but Karin never receives mistreatment of her loved ones peacefully.

Karin would react just as protectively over strangers. It’s the violation of her morals that triggers her violent behavior, not the person, it just so happens that her loved ones can trigger more volatile reaction.

I want to cover relationship violence specifically for one reason– Karin will plainly murder any romantic or sexual partner of her loved ones whom are mistreating them. No warning, no forgiveness. This is basically because of Toushirou. It’s hard for Karin to watch Toushirou be sad in any capacity, especially when Toushirou blames himself for Aizen’s abuse of Momo. That, & Momo has a huge influence over Karin. Momo talking about Aizen’s abuse make Karin’s blood boil. Between those two influences, Karin has no tolerance nor forgiveness for abusive spouses or partners.

Hm. I was revising this when I noticed Karin’s misandry. I want to specify something here too– Karin does not give preferential treatment to women because they’re women. Most of the offenses Karin has suffered have been via men, & most of Momo’s horror stories are of Aizen. Karin has a very skewed perspective of men therefore she more likely to react violently against men, not because women need to be protected.

[arcadeidea]

The Magnavox Odyssey [1971] + Pong [1972]

The most famous Magnavox Odyssey game is Table Tennis. It was the direct inspiration for Pong, and there is an infamous lawsuit decided in Magnavox's favor to that effect, which became famously the first of decades of copyright trolling putting up a hundreds-of-millions tollbooth on the mere concept of video games at home. If we take gaming as a legitimate art form, which is the essential premise of this blog, then it's the equivalent of copyrighting the concept of canvas. Despicable! If we are to take gaming as a legitimate art form, though... It behooves me to mention its business legacy, and move on briskly.

Table Tennis might look for all the world like Pong, (I'm not going to pretend like we can talk about one without the other,) but the way each handles is worlds apart. The elements of Table Tennis are the two pawns, the ball, and the line separating one side of the screen from the other. The pawns are controlled with both a horizontal and vertical dial, much like the horizontal and vertical alignment control dials familiar from period televisions. This direct inversion of The Outer Limits' famous promise is telling of its conceptualization as a "TV Game," designed by a television manufacturer. It's a peek at TV from the technician's perspective, or perhaps the television's itself, all light and no content. The ball always travels at a constant horizontal rate, changing direction when it hits something solid, but its vertical position can be directly manipulated by the last player to touch it with an "English" knob, which fictionalizes it as the spin you give the ball... but that's a lie. Spin, in real life, is applied at the moment and thereafter set. If the ball goes off-screen The line exists, but is, in Table Tennis, intangible and powerless. Players can cross the pawns across the line freely or eliminate it or change its location.

This marks a distinct change from the inherently hostile gameworlds we've seen up until now. Here, the players are in nigh-absolute control of the game. It inherits something of the designer Ralph Baer's experience, the sheer delight of drawing light on the CRT. Basic components like the size of the squares or width of the net or speed of the ball can be customized by the player. The TV screen has become a playground. For example, the players could theoretically completely ignore intended play to create a state of equilibrium and adjust the distance between the pawns for use as a metronome, or at incredibly-close distances, granular sound synthesis. This freedom isn't really the players', though. They could exercise it, but they're not encouraged to. It's the designer's. To freestyle with your square of light would be "play", but it would be the play you do with a toy, not with a game. A game has rules, constaints. The Magnavox Odyssey can have a lot of rules, they're just not enforced by hardware. Thus far, paratext like genre or history has informed how we fictionalize the mechanics of a game, now the rules themselves bare their artificiality and voluntary nature as they leap out of the screen and onto the page. Literally, you are given transparent overlays to superimpose on your screen and circumscribe yourself. Lots of the games come with further extensions like board games and cards.

The games of the Magnavox Odyssey beg to be considered as a whole, like the games of a WarioWare or other minigame compilation, seeing as they all came bundled together with the unit. They are all variations on a theme, which is to say all the other games are based on Table Tennis. It reminds me of the old "creativity test" where you have to write down as many things as you can think of to do with a paperclip. These people, who as far as they know are the innovators of the video game, sit at the dawn of the medium and are really roaring to take it for a spin and see what can be done with three squares and a line. Some games, like Cat And Mouse, want you to move on a grid. Some games, like Handball, make the line solid. Some games, like Invasion, use the "RESET" button that returns the ball when it leaves the screen instead as a "fire" button. Some games, like Fun Zoo or University Of The Solar System which are quizzes to challenge children, or Ski in which you trace a dotted line, could be adequately replaced with two tokens or better yet flashlights to shine on the board to indicate player position. Some games, especially the ones that attempt to emulate team sports with only two pawns like Baseball or Football, spiral into arcane knots that run on for pages and are approximately as complex as... let's say Settlers Of Catan [1995].

The Magnavox Odyssey also has lightgun games, bringing us 3 for 3 on games being a medium where perhaps the most significant direct interaction you can have with the world is shooting it with a gun. It makes you question if there's something fundamental about video games that makes them well-suited for shooting and/or violence. I think there is, but moreover that it's not driven into existence by a rotten, violent culture. Less cynically: It's a way of conceptualizing space and extending player agency beyond the immediate vicinity, nigh-instantaneously and in immediately apprehendable and intuitive ways, same as the ball off the pawn in either Table Tennis or Pong. And death is easy to program, a moving object becomes a non-moving object or even stops existing.

The visual impact of the two square pawns, not to mention the way they explore rules and rely heavily on external text and for the most part familiarity with external referent to function as legible, reminds me of nothing so much as The Marriage [2006], a flashpoint for discussion of the expressive potential of rules as art and a bold stride of minimalism, which almost could have been on the Odyssey save for the gendering colors. I'd like to take a closer look at the alphabetically-first Magnavox Odyssey game: Analogic.

In Analogic, the players begin at opposite corners of the board and the goal is to get to the other corner. Whoever is first wins, but motion is confined to a grid labelled with arbitrary numbers, and moreover, each player can only move to adjacent squares that would make the sum of the number they're moving to and the sum of the number their opponent is currently on either even or odd (depending on starting position.) On top of this strategic level that could again be replicated with tokens or flashlights, the players must maintain a constant volley of the ball. Keep in mind, the players will be positioned diagonally at the start, and possibly for the entire run of the game, while the ball without constant player input automatically moves horizontally. Once again, even with the OdySim emulator I am bereft of the experience of actually being able to get hands-on and play the damn thing, not only because of the lack of a player 2, but because of the fundamental difference between a keyboard press that will move me at a constant rate and the dial that will let me zip the ball or creep along, so I'm really mostly analyzing the manual here — but I can only imagine that this experience is tense and taxing, even if you know your addition front and back. Also, the players are nominally in competition by virtue of the win condition, but in every other aspect they are inexorably, fascinatingly mutually parasitic. Not only must a connection between players constantly maintained with effort, but the very rules of movement are constructed only collaboratively. This doesn't "mean" anything, like The Marriage is explained to... but it could, easily, with a simple twist of the mind, a recontextualization. There's just as much here as there about the balancing act of pursuing your own goals while maintaining the fraught interpersonal bonds that keep us healthy. It goes to show there's still gold in the 1-Bit Singular Activity Game hills, that works of art don't truly get superseded, be it Table Tennis by Pong or Pong by Ultra Pong [1977]. Art lives in the eternal now.

Pong still largely retains the sheen of the "first video game" in popular culture, even though it's since been outmoded many times over on that count, and part of that is the business savvy of Atari — such as pioneering video game microtransactions by charging 25 cents a taste, instead of $100 upfront (equivalent to $611 in 2019 dollars) for something almost nobody on Earth knew what was yet — turning Pong into something actually popular with the mass public, but part of it is also that, in its stripped-back constrained style, it really does look and feel like the ur-game. Even a short survey of game history up to this point (like of Galaxy Game [1971]) shows that the technology at Atari's disposal could have been pushed much further towards representation and sophistication than they were. No, the primitivism of Pong shouldn't be understood as economic or technological limitations, but as aesthetic ones. Pong is minimalist, honed to a sterile knife's edge.

It was Atari's second time up to bat with the arcade-game model, the first being Computer Space [1971], which was their take on Spacewar [1962], but changed up far more compared to the inspiration than Galaxy Game or Pong, with UFOs that moved in different patterns instead of a star or another player, and bullets curving under the influence of gravity. Their next game would have a punchier name, to match less convoluted gameplay. Pong was actually apparently designed as a telephone-game version of Table Tennis, the designer Allan Alcorn in ignorance of it, under orders to make a tennis game from Nolan Bushnell, who had seen the Table Tennis game. It kinda shows: There's none of the delight in the novelty of drawing on a CRT monitor that bled through into the open design of Table Tennis. For the first time on this blog, the quietly confident craftsmanship of a video game that knows what video games is. The instructions are three lines long, printed on the front of the machine.

The square screen enclosing the play is mostly empty space, but all that vertical space means is that you have more ground to cover and less time to react than on a more standard horizontal-rectangle display. Points (an Atari concept inherited from Computer Space) are the point, written out far bigger than anything else, parceled out one-by-one until victory. The paddles are small, the ball is smaller, and both are fast, in contrast not just to Table Tennis but also the downright stately and methodical Spacewar. The "English" mechanic is replaced with harsh zig-zag trajectories either randomly assigned from half-court or ricocheting wildly from encounter with the minutely different parts of the paddle, so there's no thought, nothing clever, just action. It's a raw reflex test: you can get to any point on the screen in no time flat, but can you operate the dial with both speed and precision? It's a closer approximation of a real white-knuckle sports experience than anything the Odyssey could provide. Such a frenzy entranced.

Magnavox Odyssey games may have pitted players 1 & 2 against each other, but given how the construct of the games only exist by a constant act of collaboration and good faith on both parts, or how it's pitched squarely at the hypothetical nuclear family unit, it makes more sense to conceive of the relationship between the players as nominally adversarial. Pong is much more the competition, and without the constant labor of just upholding rules, players can enter a flow state of conquering the challenges (or challengers) before them. Its location in public means that this is a game anyone with sight and a hand can pick up, even complete strangers, who will then have something to relate about. The advertising shows as a demographic, instead of rosy-faced children, hip 1970s young adults, or boast that its understated cabinet is suitable for "sophisticated locations," perhaps coyly alluding to the massive sexual tension of mingling over a game of Pong [1972] surrounded by ferns and wood paneling. (Atari’s first attempt at a wholly original title, Gotcha [1973], would be infamous for its purposefully boob-evoking controllers.) Video games wouldn't become widely solitary affairs like their cousin the pinball machine until taken back into the home for good with the rise of the Atari 2600 and the first personal computers instead of ARPANET-connected mainframes. I'll regrettably be skipping ahead past multiplayer games from here on out, and thus most of this 1-bit era I'm growing fond of. It's worth noting, though, that in doing so I could arguably be missing the entire point of the medium of games, those communal or outward-looking experiences that the titles covered so far have been purpose-built for.

Like Table Tennis was on the Odyssey, Pong was taken as prototype in the arcade, both by Atari and by what was now an industry of a new class of professional video game developers. Just look at this incomplete list of Pong variations and derivatives, which doesn't even count, like, Breakout [1976], sideways solo Pong. As much as that paints a bleak picture of an industry unwilling to explore the boundaries of what games were capable of like on the Odyssey in favor of chasing a quick buck, well, it's a very incomplete picture of what quickly became a pretty big industry: Pong, overnight, forever changes video games from a utopian proposition into a primarily commercial one.

[bornsinnrs]

👫 any or all the ships hoe :)

   ur lucky i love u  . x

adrian and raven.

( 01. )  adrian immediately regrets it when he allows raven to leave. it wasn’t until a week later   ,   where he feels drained of energy   (   and her sweet affection   )   as he would spend days more lonelier. there was a change in him   ,   more vulgar and on the brink perchance   ?   he could only be altruistic for an extent   …   a good conscious keeping him composed when he was frenzied to see her. but he had made his choice   :   work over love    (   a piece of knowledge he was not comfortable with conceding either   )   years later   ,   he discovers she has a companion and child. 

( 02. )   when adrian and raven reconcile   ,   adrian gets a tattoo of his child’s name on his arm and an  r  for raven tattooed on the side of his neck. 

( 03. )   he is not the best photographer   ,  but he enjoys taking pictures of raven and himself sometimes. she has the most gorgeous eyes he’s ever seen for a woman and such unique features    ,    that he wants to capture her natural beauty. at their time of separation  ,  he still held onto her pictures despite how difficult it had been to resist burning them.

( 04. )   a family has never been of interest to adrian. and though it’s only been a few months since adrian is adjusting to the behaviour   ,   it brings him the most satisfaction. he clutches on to his mother’s ring which he vows will manifest on raven’s finger   (   and only hers   )   the reason is he does not see himself with anyone else than the mother of his child   -   a child which he has grown to have such an overwhelming amount of love for. it almost feels like she is truly his wife   ,   however he wants to shower her with the wedding of her dreams and everything she deserves   ,   after putting her through enough stress prior. 

audrey and kaiser.

( 01. )   audrey often sends pictures of their child to kaiser   ,   hoping that he will keep his promise of being around as a father. co parenting is a challenge as the two are at different points of their lives. 

( 02. )   audrey and kaiser have iterative   ,   minor arguments after months of their child’s birth. they have a fight when he wants to have their child stay at his house for two days. audrey is against this   ,   not wanting her child around his girlfriend who she does not trust   (   and perchance   ,   spiting him like this out of mere envy   )  

( 03. )   kaiser comes to audrey’s apartment one evening when the baby is just a few months and he stays for a while   …   feeding them   ,   caressing them    ,   infatuated with how little their digits are. upon putting the child to bed   ,    audrey and kaiser have a good conversation and strangely    ,   they do not clash once about a topic. they accidentally fall asleep together on her couch.  

( 04. )   audrey and kaiser are merely co parenting for a while. as they are each others company more   ,   audrey begins to develop feelings for the father of her child and it seems he may reciprocate the same emotions   …   however she hears from a friend of a rumour where a student claims she is pregnant with kaiser’s child. 

cleo and gabriel.

( 01. )   cleo and gabriel visit her hometown in milan    ,    italy    ,   where he meets her family. this is important for her as her family is close to her heart and so is he   ,   as she feels he is her soul mate.

( 02. )    a month after gabriel awakes from his coma    ,   they return to their penthouse in new york    …   a place she’ll truly envision when she thinks of the word home. the doctor provided her with specific instructions and medication   ,   and an opportunity to enroll him into rehabilitation. though it pains her to make him go   ,   after securing him from a fatal death   ,   she knows he requires help. she decides to tell him that night and the conversation takes a rocky coarse. however   ,    she vows she will never leave his side   (   as it had been her biggest mistake once   )    and she will wait a lifetime until he is ready to come home.

( 03. )    gabriel returns home after time spent in rehabilitation and the two work to rebuilding a healthy relationship. until a brief argument arises about him going back to work. she is concerned for his safety as his work involves potentially killing him and visuals of him in the hospital haunt her periodically when sleeping.  

( 04. )   flash forward to the night of their wedding   ,   after hours of sweet slow dancing   ,   the two arrive at their villa. cleo nearly gets stuck in her wedding dress   -   a gown woven of silk and fine threads   ,   bejewelled with crystals and delicate detailing which took weeks to perfect. gabriel is more than willing to cut the dress   ,  however cleo is entirely against ruining such a beautiful and costly dress. they are at odds   ,   but to make his wife content   ,   he settles to struggle with the zipper for a while.

giovanni and marisol.

( 01. )    in their new life together , giovanni surprises marisol one afternoon by taking her to art museum in rome   ,   italy    -   considered as their first official date. they tour the city  ,   visiting little cafes   ,   hopping on the bus  , taking pictures at historical structures. spending time with her this day   ,   reminds him of the primary reason why he left his past life for the opportunity to start a new journey with her.

( 02. )    giovanni loves to spoil marisol and their children   ,  wanting to give them the very best. he genuinely feels they are blessings in his life that he should never take for granted. hence  ,  why one of his biggest and challenging projects had been designing their dream house which would cater to all their needs and wants. 

( 03. )    not a single day goes by where giovanni misses dinner with his family. his work schedule is complex   ,   with minimal flexibility at times. however he will always prioritize family. sometimes he’ll bring home food   ,   giving his wife a couple hours to relax and primarily focus on their son. giovanni will spend time with his son   ,   giving him baths before sleep and talking to him in italian   ,   his first language next to english. next   ,   he’ll give his wife shoulder rubs   ,   listen to her as she rambles on about her day and play with her hair until falling asleep.  as a parent and husband   ,   this lifestyle was much better than he could have ever conceptualized. 

( 04. )   they don’t know many people in the new neighbourhood they’ve settled in   ,   however their next door neighbours   ,   maria and luigi   ,   always invite giovanni and marisol over. giovanni dreads going because he feels they are odd   (   and luigi is a bit   too   friendly towards marisol   )   however marisol persuades him to attend to maintain their new personas as good citizens. despite their obscure nature and tendencies   ,   the neighbours are genuinely the only people they consider as an acquaintance.  

jordan and kiana.

( 01. )    365 days of being a couple   ,   jordan and kiana move into a new apartment together. at this time    ,   they had plenty of money to furnish with modern decor and put towards saving. it’s an exhilarating time for the both of them   ,   for him because he’s settling down with a girl which he’d never imagine doing at his young age. still   ,   he knew she was going to impact his life greatly from the moment she entered his garage last year    ,   but not the extent of being his first   (   and only   )   love. 

( 02. )    kiana visits jordan in the rehabilitation centre   ,   after their daughter is three months old. he’s   different   this visit   -   amber hues hold more appreciation for the woman who birthed his child   ,   and a warm smile is painted upon brims as she’ll manifest pictures of their petite family on her cellular device. before she leaves   ,   he tells her he loves her   ,   remembering the advice he was given to appreciate her more. then he feels emptier than ever without the warmth of her presence.

( 03. )    jordan and kiana wed on a beach in the south   ,   with their closest friends and family surrounded. the ambience is serene with intimacy   ,   the waves at coast rippling gently and soothing to the eardrums. their daughter is the adorable flower girl   ,   wearing a beautiful baby pink dress.  they state their vows   ,   jordan claiming the longest as he articulates their past    …   his mistakes   ,   challenges and how he couldn’t have overcome them without her at his side. how he promises he will give her all she deserves and more   ,   because he does not feel anyone is better to be at his side for eternity.

( 04. )   flash forward to when jordan and kiana have a second child   ,   they hire a nanny who slowly falls in love with their family and attempts to overthrow kiana. 

travis and gia.

( 01. )    in the first few weeks of signifying their relationship    ,   travis is super protective of gia. he holds her hand in public   ,   gives her an affectionate nickname   (   which is does not use for anyone other   )   and stares icily at others who ogle gia.

( 02. )   gia reads to travis one day    ,    in the meadow of a sunny afternoon. they lay underneath a tree   ,   where nimble fingertips flip the delicate pages of a wonderful tale and he’ll watch her lips as they maneuver to sound each word. he plays with her golden tresses absentmindedly   ,    admiring how the sun rays accentuate the oval of her face and brighten the brown rings of her eyes. 

( 03. )   travis meets gia’s family for the first time on thanksgiving and it is decent   -   great overall with a few awkward moments. still   ,   it had been her parents and he knew how important it was to make a well poised impression. stumbling upon the hallway of family photos while heading to the restroom   ,   he’ll notice a familiar face   …   a male with his arm around gia playfully in a frame. he instantly recognizes the male as someone from his dark past and suddenly   ,   he feels uneasy. he knows this had been the biggest karma   -   to pretend to be a good man in a good relationship when all he ever does is cause riots. 

( 04. )   at the court trial   ,   travis is found guilty and thus sentenced to incarceration for 18 months. gia is in tears   ,   and travis is angered by the action of the court   -   however hides the enmity as he’d prefer being happy in the last moment with gia   ,   as a free man. they argue about the future   ,   confide each other with embraces and in his arms   ,   gia whispers that she is pregnant. 

(   send a 👫 and I’ll write four headcanons  have about our muse’s relationship   )

[ber39james]

Willpower Is a Muscle—Here’s How to Make It Stronger

According to the American Psychological Association (APA), children who demonstrate stronger willpower in the lab end up having better school attendance and stronger academic performance while also being more likely to have “greater physical and mental health, fewer substance-abuse problems and criminal convictions, and better savings behavior and financial security” as adults. Yet, in the APA’s Annual Stress Survey, lack of self-control is the leading reason Americans fail to follow through with healthy lifestyle changes. We’d all like more willpower. Unfortunately, many of us lost whatever lottery would have given us more self-control.

Right?

Wrong. It turns out that willpower is a skill that can be practiced and strengthened.

Your inability to keep your hand out of the cookie jar despite years of New Year’s resolutions might actually come down to a weak or underdeveloped willpower muscle rather than a predestined lack of self-control. But, before you start berating yourself about wimpy willpower muscles. . .

Take your eyes off the cookie jar. Look at me. This is exciting.

. . .new research shows that your willpower may not really be all that weak. In some ways, our modern world sets us up to fail. But in the face of all this, you can get better. So, how do you increase willpower?

What Is Willpower? How Does It Work?

Before we dive into the juicy stuff, it will be helpful to get on the same page about what we mean when we say “willpower.”

Essentially, you use willpower when you forego immediate gratification in order to achieve long-term goals.

According to Roy F. Baumeister, author of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, understanding self-control comes down to understanding these things:

Willpower is like a mental muscle.

It fatigues like a muscle if it is worked too hard, leading to “ego depletion” or “willpower depletion.”

Exercising restraint isn’t all that can exhaust the mental energy needed for self-control; decision-making of all kinds also depletes willpower.

With that context, it becomes more clear why your willpower might not be the problem: your environment plays a role, too. Dr. Kathleen Vohs explains, “[t]here is research that shows people still have the same self-control as in decades past, but we are bombarded more and more with temptations,” and “[o]ur psychological system is not set up to deal with all the potential immediate gratification.”

Just let that sink in.

All the media we consume, all the advertisements, the fast pace of life, the seemingly unlimited options at the store—even having too many clothes in your closet can be a drain on your willpower! Between all the temptations we encounter and the thousands upon thousands of decisions we make each day, no wonder that willpower is nowhere to be found when we need it most.

So, what’s the good news?

According to loads of research, you absolutely can strengthen and increase willpower so that in the face of everything, you will reach your goals.

How to Increase Willpower

More good news: there are several research-backed strategies to help you manage your willpower resources and strengthen your self-control muscles—even if you think you have none. The simplest strategies for improving self-control include meeting your basic physical needs and removing unnecessary decision-making from your daily life. The more complex strategies will take time and effort but are most effective in helping you fortify your willpower over time.

1Eat regularly.

The severe lack of determination you feel when you’re hungry isn’t just in your head. Research supports the idea that willpower requires a lot of brainpower, and the brain needs food. If you aren’t feeding your brain enough or often enough, your willpower will suffer. For this reason, if you’re trying to lose weight—or even write that term paper—eating small meals often improves your self-control.

2Remove temptations.

In his ground-breaking Marshmallow Experiment (yes, that’s what it was called), Dr. Walter Mischel and his team placed a plate of marshmallows on a table and gave children a choice between eating one marshmallow immediately or waiting for an unspecified time for two. What they found is that children who distracted themselves—closed their eyes, looked around, etc.—were able to resist temptation much longer than those who didn’t take their eyes off the plate of pillowy marshmallows. This “out-of-sight-out-of-mind” tactic has been confirmed to work for adults—in offices, with candy. So, if you want to avoid willpower depletion, remove some temptations.

3Reduce the number of decisions you have to make.

Remember willpower feeds on the same energy as all your decision-making. Try to limit the number of decisions you have to make. Here are some ideas for how to reduce the number of choices you make day-to-day.

Prepare your meals in advance once or twice a week.

Plan your weekday outfits on the weekend or try a capsule wardrobe. While planning an entire week of outfits is great if you live somewhere with reliable weather, a capsule wardrobe can have a similar effect and give you flexibility. Basically, you just pick items that match one another. My closet, for example, is all based on the same pallet. It makes dressing—and shopping—much less stressful.

For projects, create a structured plan to follow or get a professional to help. If you’re doing something like trying to get in shape, doing the same structured exercises might help you stick to it. Also, hiring a professional to handle the details can pay off big time. With my personal trainer, all I do it show up. He worries about the rest—which exercises, how much, and he gets it all set for me. Plus, I made a friend.

Outsource! Somewhat related to hiring a professional, outsourcing decisions is a good way to get things off your plate or just have a little fun. For example, at our office we get lunch deliveries from various places nearby—we just have to order it. Some folks, however, have discovered someone else on the team with similar tastes and told our office manager to always order what so-and-so is having. For larger projects, like publishing a report or planning an event, learn to let go of control. Get everyone on the same page to start, but then let others own some decision-making.

Batch tasks. This won’t really help you limit the number of decisions you have to make, but it will help you remove the distractions that some decisions cause. Check your email at fixed times or, if you use Slack, learn to love the “Remind me about this” function.

4Focus.

According to Baumeister, one of the worst things you can do for your willpower is try to make too many changes at a time (ehrm, New Year’s Resolutions?) You’re much better off picking one.

5Do some emotional TLC.

Unsurprisingly, emotions can have a big impact on your willpower.

Show your emotion. Tom Heatherton and Katherine Vohs measured self-control of people who had just seen a sad movie. One group had been told not to show their emotions and another group had been told to let their emotions out. The group that showed their sadness performed better on the willpower tests, presumably because they didn’t need to use up their self-control supply trying to hide their emotions. So, let it out!

Stop people pleasing. Making others happy and conforming to their standards is a surefire way to zap your willpower. Find ways to motivate your behavior that don’t require external approval.

Check your frame of mind. Baumeister found that just thinking positively about one’s willpower improved self-control outcomes in tests. So, if you’re having trouble resisting temptation, think about a few examples where you exhibited restraint successfully before trying again.

6Increase your motivation.

Inevitably, there will be times when your willpower is waning. In times like these, focus on motivation. Research by Mark Muraven shows that low-willpowered people perform better on self-control tasks when they’re told they will be paid. When you’re feeling temptation taking over, focus instead on how you can better motivate yourself. In the weight-loss game, for example, there apps like Gympact that bill you for not hitting the gym and pay you for living healthfully.

7Use some “Implementation Intention.”

In Willpower, Baumeister and co-author John Teirney outline how to cope in the face of temptation and bolster your self-control using a technique called “implementation intention.” It works this way: before you experience a temptation, you should already plan out your response. Let’s say you are avoiding unhealthy food. If you’re at a party and someone offers you dessert, you can plan to decline and instead ask for some fresh fruit. The key here is to think about situations when your willpower will be tested and prepare a response in advance—basically make your decision in advance.

8Practice self-control.

The most challenging but best way to strengthen your willpower muscles is to actually use them. Baumeister suggests creating simple but challenging tasks that require some effort to adhere to. For example, you can commit to turning the light off in every room you leave, putting away your clothes at the end of each day, or eliminating filler words from your speech. These relatively easy tasks, practiced diligently, will hone your self-control skills—and build your confidence in the face of temptation.

Without a doubt, fortifying willpower isn’t easy, but the benefits that come with reserves of self-determination can give you an edge. Researchers have even shown that strength of willpower is more strongly correlated with academic performance than IQ is. The investment you make in your self-control skills is one of the best you can make in your life.

So, now the question is, what are you going to do with your willpower?

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from Grammarly Blog https://www.grammarly.com/blog/strong-willpower/