#and how their ''coming out''s to the wider human society differed and had way different responses

[transingthoseformers]

I've thought about this a lot but often I find that you'll find interesting and amazing worldbuilding in pieces of media that just... won't focus on it at all. I've read a few romance novels (I was getting desperate for what books to read at school) that had so many fun worldbuilding implications but nooooo the relationship drama was what mattered more (which is okay if you like those, it's just not my cup of tea) This happens in fanfiction too. The example that inspired this post gave so many interesting tidbits about how the autobots and Decepticons might differ culturally speaking (and even how the high commands have cool differences from their subordinates) but the fic was dark as hell and so... so much smut. Smut is great and all but I'd've loved to have learned more about how the factions have very different approaches to 'facing.

[thesoulshyperrealaslacreatura]

Drakenier: Violence as expression and affirmation - Pt.1

It has become a rather well-known piece of trivia (or at least, well-known within the niche internet circles I flow through) that 2010's Nier Replicant / Gestalt had its overall message thoroughly inspired by well, 9/11 - the discourse that produced it, that came of it, and became it. Although it may not be a direct quote, "to kill someone, you don't have to be out of your mind, you just need to believe you are correct" is a sentiment clearly echoed throughout the game; as the many layers of its central and side conflicts drop alongside the curtains to its second, third (and maybe kind of fourth) playthrough, so does what had, for quite a ways into the game, seemed like a story mostly about finding, nurturing and protecting a community - people to call home.

However, the statement above seems to somewhat conceal-so-as-to-merely-hint-at what I'd argue is a much more complex argument the games lay forth, when looked at as one series. I, myself, have found it difficult in the past to distill both Replicant and the wider series as a whole into one coherent message or thematic frame; partly (and beautifully), because there mustn't be one - this singular reading which eclipses the broad range of experiences that people have come to share with the series - such an idea is preposterously reductive. Still, I think that this mish-mash of "the game is about philosophy and tragedy and nihilism and existentialism and society and humanity and life" and whatnot misses a bit of where the different themes intersect, producing further instances of meaning from the text. I hope to discuss the evolution (were I to sound even more pretentious, I might have used the word genealogy, but I would never stoop to that) of a few central concepts surrounding drakenier's "philosophy of violence" and where they seem to have informed or have been informed by other aspects of the works.

Strap in, because just from writing the introduction I can already tell this is gonna have to come in multiple parts. Hopefully my writing can steer away from boring you to tears throughout all of it.

Spoilers for the whole series!

Part 1: Replicant, and the subjective experience gained from that funky 9/11 fun fact

"Blood is sound, sound is words, and words are power"

This quote, almost a chant from Weiss as the player starts to grasp the gameplay loop of attacking enemies to allow for magical attacks, ties in the game's teaching of that system with what I consider to be the most powerful writing from Replicant (I'm going to refer to it as Replicant for the sake of convenience, obviously Gestalt is included in that). And it is deeply tied to what Taro himself has credited as a major source of inspiration for Replicant in relation to his previous game, Drakengard.

In some ways, Nier Replicant isn't introducing a new, foreign idea over the original Drakengard, so much as bringing out new elements from within its predecessors' critiques of the gaming landscape. Though that only really becomes clear by taking future foresights the series would reach into account; this is the point at which it becomes prudent to ask ourselves one question - how might the game's design regulate the player's interaction with the game world? (A question that, if you're at all even familiar with Drakengard, you probably already know the answer to)

From this, we can extrapolate a lot of meaning from how the original Drakengard was conceived: a game about violence, from the perspective of people who were so immersed in their own awfulness and the general precarity of their world that they cannot enact anything but that same violence. And it is that violence which comes to define them.

I'd also like to do the pedantic thing and bring up the fact that violence can be thought of as more than just physical harm, but also in terms of violation. In that sense, when I claim that Drakengard's characters are defined by violence, I mean it in that their reduction of other people to objects serves as an exertion of themselves - the Dynasty Warriors inspired combat of cleansing battlefields as the only win state reflects back at Caim as his only method of building an identity of his own, one based on strength demonstrated from conquering his enemies. You might find that these 'enemies' are violated the moment they're placed into the game as props that sustain its overall narrative.

In fact, this 'loss of personhood as self-affirmation' theme reverberates into another key factor of the game's story: pacts. They explicitly deprive humans of something of themselves - their ability to communicate, to see, to age, to have hair (sure????) -, and reduces both parties into one shared essence, yet it is what permits its characters to have strength through which they find themselves as able to inflict that dehumanization onto others. Dehumanization becomes their characterization, both from the audience's perspective as well as in-world.

Following that, Nier Replicant does not dispute that destruction of the other simultaneously inflicts upon the self both corruption and affirmation. If anything, it only takes measures to strengthen that sentiment, in light of how the added theme of perspective brings forth a need to now more closely study the subjective experience of perpetrating violence. Thus:

"Blood is sound, sound is words, and words are power"

The gameplay system I've anchored this analysis to comes into play; attacking your enemies gives you the literal strength to continue your offense, by design - ridding them of their life force, their blood, perpetuates the narrative, the words being built, the sealed verses of a prophecy you've set for yourself: that of being a hero to your sister/daughter, friends and general community. This even extends to the lyrics of Ashes of Dreams:

"Are we the plaything of fiends or merely the dreams that we're telling ourselves?"

Though we shouldn't forget that Weiss' comment takes the form of X=Y=Z=W, and it seems I've neglected the 'sound' part of the sentence. As I was writing this, my brain immediately made the association between that and Drakengard 3's focus on the power of Song, which, in fairness, definitely was made with the rest of the series in mind - but, in this instance, that sounds like a bit of a lucky coincidence. Still, what the concept of sound brings to the statement doesn't seem too far off from what meaning could be made at a bit more of a general, rudimentary level, that being: our lifeforce (blood) translates into our ability to be heard (sound), thus effectively giving us narratives about the world around us (words), which gives our actions direction, purpose (power).

From that, we can take a closer look into a lot of different aspects of the game. After all, the reason I proclaimed this piece of writing to be so powerful isn't really because I could - and did - stretch its interpretation to its fullest, but also from the way it manifests itself around the struggles of various characters, while being tied to the game's overall systems and world. Emil receding into his identity as a weapon in order to redirect what he sees as his curse onto those who seek to harm his friends - leading to his sacrifice; Weiss, who also goes on to sacrifice himself, does so in the name of putting an end to this now 5-year mission, grown into his own center of existence; Louise, perhaps reacting to the world around her, saw humanity as something to claim from others, and faced erasure upon perceiving herself as incapable of acquiring it. For better or for worse, the moral codes characters create from their own intentions of living become rigid scripts to follow as self-fulfilling prophecies of their own identities.

We can see that, ultimately, characters across both games tend to follow journeys with a general structure of: bleak circumstances > feeling of powerlessness > violence as a misguided means of reclaiming the power to define oneself > entrenchment in violence becomes overbearing, coming to annihilate the very self which sought to instigate it. From the first Drakengard to the first Nier, this hasn't changed a bit. What changed is a distinct awareness in how the self, or what we might call "us" stands in conflict with the generalized other, "them", and where it uses morality as a catalyst for smoothing out the uncomfortable edges of that conflict.

In fact, the annihilation of the self as, paradoxically, an act of self-affirmation is the very core of ending D for Replicant. And this is, partly, where the inciting 9/11 quote comes into play - given our newfound empathetic understanding of where violence comes from, how do we process it? How do we make sense of it? From the way the world is established, the very act of surviving, for both replicants and gestalts, is somewhat tainted as immoral, and predicated on the erasure of an 'other'. It leaves room for later material to find itself more at ease with this question (and those circle back nicely to ending E from the new version, as well). For now, most of what the game feels comfortable in concluding comes from Kainé, who stands in contrast with most characters by fully rejecting the notion of being a moral agent throughout the entire story, yet the game still offers us the chance to save her - it, mirroring the protagonist, relentlessly believes in her. Not even that "she can be better", whatever better might mean, just that "she can be".

And obviously, finally, we can extrapolate plenty of social commentary from this. Playing off of the thematic material introduced in Automata, we could argue that Replicant's plot is, in retrospect, about slowly building up to the depiction of a certain "Death of God" - which, in nietzschean terms, is not merely society straying from religiosity, but represents an irreparable shattering in the very idea of a centralizing narrative that everyone could subscribe to and fit within. So ends humanity, not just as a species, but as a concept; no longer are people able to identify themselves as containing some unified essence of 'humanity', recognizing the other as a complete self in its own right, as they retreat into the violence that was inflicted against them, which they inflict back at the world - to have your totality reduced to a role in a play that the winner gets to write. And in that sense, I'd argue it captures specific facets of a post-9/11 climate pretty well.

Anyway, gonna make a separate post that's just about Drakengard 3, and then one that's just about Automata, but at a later time!

also, this thesis becomes more relevant when the time comes to analyze automata, but it was still helpful in having me think through the previous games, so I'll drop it here as a reference for now, and will mention it more loudly once we come to specific sections later (not about to be the next target for hbomberguy lmao): http://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/14525

Cool that there are people writing about it!! Thank you Xinlyu Tan, the goat!!! Would love to go through more material, but I'm writing this for fun on the side... hope anyone reading this has enough fun with it to go looking for more on their own, go extend the discussion further, blah blah blah. Also hope that I make any sort of vaguely coherent point. And, lastly, I hope you enjoy yourself!

[jplupine]

⛓Feral Possession: Chapter 26⛓

Binding

Pairing: Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez x Wynter Hughes [Nonbinary OC] Word Count: ~4.9k WARNINGS: 18+ Minors/Ageless get blocked, Exophilia, Demon!Grimmjow, Feral Behavior, Size Difference, Lingerie, Bondage, Chains, Praise Kink, Teasing, Handjob, Vaginal Sex, Cock Riding, Scratching, Biting, Creampie, Sub!Switch!Grimmjow Note: Terms such as pussy/cock/dick/etc. get used. If that makes you uncomfortable, you may want to skip this fic.

Summary: Wynter finds other uses for a binding spell.

You can also read it on AO3!

Masterlist | Chapter 26:

  There was a knock at the front door, and I set down my book on the couch to answer it. I was expecting the new overseer today, and I had no clue who they had decided to send. When I opened the door, I saw a woman around my height with big brown eyes and orange hair.

  "Hi! Are you Wynter Hughes?" She asked with a smile.

  "That's me. And you are?"

  "Orihime Inoue. I've been sent by the Soul Society." I recognized her name as an exorcist Ichigo had mentioned before.

  "Come on in." I opened the door wider, and she entered the house while still smiling. Dagur was already sniffing at her, and the woman lowered her hand to let him stick his nose in her palm.

  "How cute! What's their name?"

  "Dagur."

  "Why, hello, Dagur! It's nice to meet you." Orihime chuckled while rubbing under Dagur's chin. His tail was wagging as he ate up the attention she was giving.

  "Yo. Been a while, woman." Grimmjow spoke up from the kitchen island. He was sitting there in human form in just a pair of boxers while eating ice cream from the carton.

  "My, you've certainly made yourself comfortable here, Pantera." Orihime looked amused when she saw the demon rather than surprised or upset. And, shockingly, Grimmjow didn't seem angry like he usually would be when he saw an exorcist.

  What exactly had happened between these two?

  "Still getting your ass kicked?" Grimmjow asked before scooping some ice cream into his mouth.

  "I prefer to be a pacifist as much as possible. However, I am now a black belt in karate." She spoke so nonchalantly, and I looked at her with surprise.

  "So you two seem well acquainted." I said while sliding my hands into my pockets.

  "I held her hostage for a little while." Grimmjow stated, and I paused while looking at him.

  "Did you, now?"

  "Yeah. I took her from Murcielago when I found out she was a friend of Kurosaki's."

  "And then they beat the snot out of each other." Orihime chuckled while covering her mouth with her hand. Her tone was so light, and her words were not that serious in the slightest. But if what they were talking about was the fight that nearly killed both Grimmjow and Ichigo, why was she seemingly not upset at all?

  And why did I get the strong feeling Orihime was not someone I'd want to piss off?

  "I see. So, uh, do you guys....actually get along or something?" I questioned, and Orihime and Grimmjow exchanged looks. They both narrowed their eyes at each other as if thinking.

  "She's annoying, but she gave me my arm back, so...." Grimmjow shrugged before shoving the spoon full of ice cream into his mouth. My eyebrows raised at him as I balked.

  "Gave....your arm back?"

  "Oh, he only had one arm a few years ago." Orihime leaned in my direction while speaking softly. "One of my specialties is healing magick."

  "Well, that's certainly not in the Hollow Ones book."

  "It's complicated." She rubbed the back of her head while awkwardly smiling.

  "You ever end up fuckin' Murcielago?"

  "Pantera!" I shot him a look.

  "What? This chick was, like, the closest that old bat got to getting laid." Grimmjow said as he pointed at Orihime with his spoon. I was shocked yet again as I looked at the exorcist next to me.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Oh, come on. I saw how you two were. And how pissed he got when I kidnapped you? Way more than the usual." The demon was being rather blunt, and Orihime was starting to blush. "I half expected him to try and sniff you out."

  Complicated, indeed.

  "Would you like to talk in my office?" I offered.

  "Yes. We have much to discuss." Orihime nodded, and I saw how embarrassed she looked now. Was Grimmjow telling the truth? Had something happened between this exorcist and Murcielago?

  "Bye, now!" I waved from the doorway as Orihime walked to her car. She was smiling and waving back while looking like a ball of sunshine.

  "Until next time!" She then got into her car, and I shut the front door.

  "Orihime. Murcielago. What happened?" I asked while turning to the head of blue hair poking up over the couch. Grimmjow was just sitting there watching TV and still not bothering to put pants on.

  "Murcielago kidnapped the woman for some bullshit plan because of her powers. When I found them, they looked pretty cozy, if you know what I mean."

  "And what's with her attitude? I'd figure she'd be pissed about you nearly killing her friend."

  "She's just weird like that." Grimmjow replied as I leaned on the back of the couch. "I think she's a bit off her rocker. Got hit in the head a few too many times, yanno?"

  "That's not nice." I popped his shoulder.

  "You gonna tell me what you two were whispering about in your office now?" Grimmjow ignored me while grabbing the front of my shirt. He yanked me over the back of the couch and dropped me in his lap. "'Cause I know it was about me."

  "Did you really have to do that?"

  "Felt like lookin' at ya while talking to you." He shrugged. "Now, talk." Grimmjow was looking down at me as he turned off the TV to have it quiet in the living room.

  "She wants me to do a sort of training camp. Orihime offered to have you put under surveillance while I do so."

  "Fuck that."

  "I agreed to the training."

  "What?!" Anger flashed across his face, and I kept a steady tone.

  "It's for a few days, the trip will be paid for, and you'll be coming with me."

  "That doesn't explain why either of us needs to or should fuckin' go."

  "Dude, it's a free camping trip. Might not exactly be a vacation, but I'll also get to learn some more about the Soul Society."

  "This training- Are you gonna be fighting other exorcists?"

  "You mean like sparring? Yeah."

  "Cool." He raised his eyebrows, and I furrowed mine.

  "What?"

  "I'm gonna watch you kick their asses and laugh about it. When is it?"

  "In a few weeks." I scoffed at his response. Of course, that would get him interested.

  "Hey, Grimmjow!" I called out while sitting on the arm of the couch.

  "What?" The demon yelled back from upstairs.

  "Come here! I want to practice another spell but can't do it myself!" There was no reply this time, and I waited to see if Grimmjow was coming downstairs or staying in bed. He soon appeared in the hallway with his paws going silently over the hardwood floor.

  The demon froze when he saw me, and his ears perked to attention. I saw his pupils widen as his eyes looked me over while I remained where I was in nothing but the lingerie set he'd picked out. A grin pulled at the corners of his mouth before he vanished from sight.

  However, he reappeared when he seemingly smacked into an invisible wall. As I had suspected, the demon had been too distracted to notice the faint spell circle on the floor in front of me. He looked momentarily confused until he looked at the floor.

  "Wynter, what the fuck?"

  "You fell for the bait so fucking hard." I chuckled before waving my hand. The circle on the floor began to glow, and I flicked my hand up. Golden chains shot out of the floor to latch on to Grimmjow and drag him down.

  "You little shit!" He was snarling and struggling, but the chains quickly made him fall to his knees. Grimmjow growled deep in his chest like rolling thunder.

  Smiling, I drew an arch in the air with two fingers, making two more chains shoot out to grab his horns and pull his head back. The demon was still struggling as I sat there and watched.

  "This is a lot more fun than I thought it'd be." I said as Grimmjow looked pissed. He had chains around each limb, one on his waist, throat, and then the two on his horns forcing him to arch back. The demon looked as if he were about to yell at me until I waved my finger to have another chain slither up his inner thigh.

  His tail was whipping in agitation as he glared at me. I figured he wouldn't be giving me such a dirty look in a few seconds, though.

  The chain following the trail of my finger crept behind the hem of his pants before snaking down to curl around his balls. Grimmjow's expression changed entirely as his growling died down.

  "Guess who found out they have pretty good control with binding spells." I smirked while using chains to pull his pants down. They then slithered up his body like golden snakes to find their way into his shirt.

  The chain on his balls also coiled around his dick, and I noticed how he was already getting hard.

  "Oh, Little Rabbit, the Soul Society would not approve."

  "It's a good thing I don't need them to, huh?" Grimmjow looked at me while grinning as he licked over his top lip and teeth. "Mm, you do look rather cute like this, kitten." The demon gave a warning growl.

  Waving my finger, I made the chain on his cock start stroking. Grimmjow's hips bucked from the sudden movement, and he was soon fully hard.

  "I'm gonna ruin you." His low voice rumbled, and I chuckled.

  "Not if I ruin you first, kitten. We'll see how you're feeling when I'm through with you." My tone and words seemed to excite him more. His pupils were wide as the chain was still stroking. The links around his balls gave a gentle squeeze, making him softly grunt.

  Grimmjow began to slowly rock his hips while the chains under his shirt ran over his nipples. Watching him as I controlled the chains had lit a fire under my skin. He moaned, and I could feel the lacy panties I wore getting wet.

  Getting up from where I sat, I got closer to hold his face in my hands. Grimmjow purred as I leaned down. Kissing him, his hips bucked again, and I smirked while looking at him.

  "Does it feel good, sweetheart?" I asked, and his ears flicked back.

  "You're having too much fun with this." Grimmjow panted.

  "I think I'm having the right amount of fun." Brushing my thumb over his bottom lip, I absolutely loved the way he looked up at me. "And I'd say you are, too, kitten. Look at how hard you are and just fucking the air."

  The demon clenched his jaw while forcing his hips to stop moving. I only smiled before waving my finger to make the chain on his cock coil more to wrap around the neglected head. Grimmjow's entire body shuddered as he moaned.

  "Now that's what I like to hear." I cooed before kissing him again. I grabbed the bottom of his shirt to pull it up and expose the chains squeezing his chest and rubbing against his hard nipples. "Is this too much for you, kitten?"

  "Fuck, no." Grimmjow panted, and the chain wrapped around his throat bobbed from him swallowing. Grinning, I let my hands wander down his torso. I could feel the rolling curves of his muscles as he softly rocked his hips back and forth while the chain still had his dick and balls in its embrace.

  "You can smell how turned on I am, can't you?"

  "Yes." He softly growled as his eyes looked almost entirely black. Grimmjow looked as if he tried to pounce, but he barely moved with how strong the chains were.

  "Behave. I could just leave you here and fuck myself while making you watch."

  "Don't be a fuckin' tease." The demon growled, and I smirked while bringing my face close to his.

  "Oh, kitten. I'm the one in control here. If I wanted to, I could tease you until you're begging and cumming all over yourself. Mmm, what a mess you'd be." My voice was almost a purr, and his ears turned back as he bared his fangs.

  Stepping away, I went back to the side of the couch and bent over to pick something up from the cushion. I could hear Grimmjow straining against the chains again as soon as I had bent over. Standing up with the bottle of lube in my hand, I popped open the cap while turning around.

  Facing Grimmjow again, I poured some of the lube into my other hand. Leaning my elbow on his shoulder, I reached down to circle my fingers around the head of his cock. Stroking over his shaft and the chain, the demon bucked and grunted.

  I kissed him while slicking up his cock. Licking his bottom lip, Grimmjow opened his mouth for me to slip my tongue past his fangs. He purred deep in his chest as our tongues slid together, and I continued to stroke from base to head and back.

  He grunted when I made the chain lightly squeeze his balls again. Grimmjow was itching to get out of the chains as he flexed and tested their strength only to find they were holding fast. He may not want to admit it, but it was obvious just how much he was truly enjoying this.

  Pulling away, I saw the drool leaking from the corner of his mouth as his lips were swollen from the kiss. I slowly licked the drool from his face before grinning while standing. He looked two seconds away from going feral.

  "If only you could see yourself right now, kitten." Placing my foot on his chest, I then tossed the bottle of lube over my shoulder to the couch. Raising my hand and lowering it, I had the chains pull him down to the floor.

  He was still fully erect while fighting the binding spell. His wrists were pinned over his head while his legs were forced to spread.

  "Oh, sweetheart, you look so good like this." I said as I looked down at the demon while still having my foot on his chest. Grimmjow was panting as his cock was leaking precum, and I felt my heart pounding beneath my ribs.

  "You look pretty fuckin' delicious yourself." Grimmjow licked his lips hungrily as his eyes wandered over me. Moving my foot from his chest to his side, I knelt over him as he watched my every move. The demon purred when I pushed my panties to the side without bothering to take them off.

  The chain held his cock in place as I rubbed my pussy against the head. Grimmjow's muscles flexed as if he tried to pounce again only to fail once more. He was so damn eager, and me dragging it out was driving him mad. It was a good thing he was also enjoying it.

  Lowering myself on him, he moaned while feeling the wet heat surrounding his dick. I made the chain lower to just the base of his cock before placing a hand on one of his knees. With my other hand on his chest, I lifted my hips before dropping back down.

  The golden glow of the magic circle and the chains contrasted with his skin and markings in such an exciting way. His spread legs clenched as I rode his cock and moaned. Grimmjow squirmed under me while flexing his claws and arching his back.

  The sound he made was a mix of a growl and groan that only turned me on more. His biceps flexed when he tried to lift his arms from the ground, but his wrists remained chained down.

  "Fuck~!" Grimmjow was becoming so desperate, and it made me grin. I picked up the pace to make him writhe more. His hips tried to rut up to meet me the best he could. "Oh, fuck you!" His voice was low and breathy, and I had the chain massage his balls.

  The mix of lube and slick dripping down his cock to his balls made the chains easily slide over his skin, and his head lolled back with a moan.

  "When I get my fuckin' hands on you, you little shit...." Grimmjow's threat trailed off before his hips bucked and he groaned.

  "Please, we both know you're fucking loving this." I didn't miss the grin on his face. "You might be a king, but to me, you're just my good boy, aren't you?" Grimmjow's chest rumbled with a growl, and he bucked his hips up to make me moan.

  "Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you." He panted as his head rested against the floor. He groaned with his eyes closed, and I licked my lips before grinning.

  "Admit it. You like what I can do to you." I made the chain around the base of his cock and balls tighten just a little. His back arched as his toes splayed in response while a loud and low groan came from his throat. His claws and fangs flashed, and I rode him harder. **

  "Fuck!" Grimmjow was struggling, and it only spurred me on.

  "Admit it."

  "Yes! Oh, fuck, yes! You stupid, little human!" He groaned. "I should tear you apart, but I- Ngh!- want you too damn bad! Fuck!" Grimmjow was finally falling apart at the seams.

  "Don't stop now, sweetheart." I grabbed the chain around his throat to pull him up closer to my face. "You're mine after all. Tell me exactly what you want." Our noses were only inches away from each other as his eyes widened.

  Something in the demon seemed to snap, and he managed to break one hand free from the chains. Grimmjow yanked my other leg over his hip to have me straddling him. His chest was rumbling as he was using brute force and magick to fight the binding spell.

  He had me in his arms while slamming his hips into me without mercy. I moaned and wrapped my arms around his shoulders to hold on for dear life. Grimmjow buried his face into my neck as his hands traveled up my thighs and back.

  I didn't even have the chance to comprehend what had happened. Moaning as my nails dug into his back, Grimmjow held me closer while pistoning his cock. His fangs scraped against the side of my neck before nipping.

  I could tell he was getting close, and what he was doing to me had me not too far behind. The broken chain hit me with every thrust as it swayed from Grimmjow's wrist. One of his hands slid higher to have his fingers curl over the back of my neck.

  Grimmjow's breath was hot against my skin as he moaned, and my thighs clenched around his waist. The demon didn't stop fucking me even when he was cumming. He ground his hips, making sure to rub against my clit as he buried his cock to the hilt in my pussy.

  We were panting and clinging to each other as my body shook from the orgasm crashing into me. All I could do was ride it out until Grimmjow finally stopped moving. Swallowing, I tried to catch my breath while relaxing.

  The demon still held on to me as he was breathing heavily. When I finally regained the ability to think straight, I looked at Grimmjow. He kept his face in my neck, and his ear flicked from my breath.

  "What just happened?"

  "....I don't know." His voice was quiet as he didn't even try to play it off.

  "Grimmjow."

  "I don't know." He repeated with a firmer tone. "You just...." Biting the inside of my cheek, I had a feeling I already knew what happened.

  "I said you're mine."

  "Yeah."

  "Did you....like it?" I questioned while speaking in a quiet tone. Grimmjow paused as his grip on me tightened.

  "Yeah. But that shouldn't have.... What the fuck is wrong with me?" He seemed to be genuinely asking. Brushing his hair behind his ear, I licked his cheek.

  "What do you feel when I say I desire you?"

  "Excitement. Heat." Grimmjow replied, and I made him look at me as I held his face in my hands.

  "And when I called you mine?"

  "There was....a lot of different shit at once."

  "You ever wonder why you want me to want you so badly?" I asked and watched as his brows furrowed. He looked confused as one of his ears flicked. "Yeah, I'm not gonna spell this one out for you."

  "Why not? You said you'd help me with this shit."

  "Because this one I think is best if you figure it out yourself."

  "So you know what it is?"

  "Maybe."

  "But you won't tell me?"

  "Yeah."

  "What the fuck, Wynter?" The look he gave me made me scoff.

  "You're smarter than you look. You'll get it eventually." I said before kissing him. However, in retaliation, he nipped my bottom lip.

  "Asshole."

  "Shithead." I smiled, and Grimmjow smirked while bringing his face closer.

  "Little fucker."

  "Bitch." We kissed again.

  "Twerp." Another kiss.

  "Heathen." And another one.

  "You're wearing the set I picked out, aren't you?" He was smiling as he purred.

  "Looks good, don't it?"

  "Fuck, yeah." I could feel Grimmjow gradually getting hard again, and he licked his lips. "You wanna get rid of some of these chains? Keep the one on my dick, though."

  "Horny bastard."

  "Maybe you shouldn't have used a binding spell to fuck me if you didn't want me to like it." Grimmjow licked my cheek while gently rocking his hips. I took in a sharp breath since he'd never pulled out, and I was still more sensitive from my orgasm.

  "Tear this outfit, and the chains go back on." Waving my hand, most of the golden chains slipped off of Grimmjow and vanished into the floor.

  "That's not much of a threat."

  "I didn't say that's all I'd do."

  "Mmm, I guess it does look pretty nice." He smirked before kissing down the side of my neck. "You should dress like this for me more, Little Rabbit."

  "Maybe if you ask nicely." I replied as my fingers slid into his hair. Grimmjow softly growled and nipped my neck.

  "You're cute." He snapped his hips, and I moaned.

  "Stop complaining and just pack the damn bag already." I rolled my eyes while stuffing folded jeans into my suitcase.

  "I'm not complaining!"

  "Right. Huffing and puffing about what you're gonna eat on this trip is totally not complaining." My tone was heavy with sarcasm, and Grimmjow shot me a look. The demon then snatched up a shirt and threw it into an opened duffle bag on the bed. "There'll be plenty of food."

  "Yeah, and probably poisoned."

  "You don't even need human food." I made a face while waving my hand and packing more clothes.

  "You plan on feeding me exorcist souls, then? 'Cause it's either food or souls, Wynter."

  "We'll be in the middle of the woods, O' Impressive Hunter." Looking over at Grimmjow, I saw the grumpy expression he was making. I knew that even if he joked about getting to see me beat up exorcists, he still really didn't want to go on this trip. He didn't want me to go, either, but I'd already made up my mind.

  The demon was in human form, so his upset face was less daunting without the long fangs and horns present. However, he still had that air of intimidation around him regardless. Too bad for him that I knew he wouldn't go any further than the angry look.

  "Someone's here." He grumbled before going back to packing his bag.

  "It's probably Orihime." I walked out of the room and down the stairs. Orihime was the only one I was expecting to have over today since she was giving us a ride to the training camp.

  The only problem being it wasn't Orihime on my porch when I opened the front door. We were both surprised after I'd opened the door just before he could knock, leaving him with his hand hovering in the air.

  "Gary?" I let the confusion show on my face.

  "Oh, are you going somewhere?" He asked when he saw that I was wearing shoes.

  "Uh, yeah. That camping trip I told you about."

  "Shit, I forgot that was today." Gary chuckled and rubbed the back of his neck. "You're not going alone, are you? Not that I'm underestimating you or anything-" He cut himself off when his gaze drifted past me. I knew what he was looking at from the tingling on the back of my neck.

  "What do you want?" Grimmjow questioned while standing behind me.

  "I, uh, have some work I wanted to ask Wynter to go over. You got a minute?" Gary looked at me again, and I could feel Grimmjow's stare.

  "Sure. Why don't you finish packing up?" I pat the demon on the chest before heading back toward my office. Gary quietly followed me while Grimmjow grumpily went back upstairs.

  "So....this camping trip. Is it just you and him?"

  "Who said he was going?"

  "I just assumed since he was also dressed to leave, and you told him to finish packing." Gary shrugged before pulling out some papers from his jacket to hand to me.

  "And why does it seem like you have a problem with him going?" I asked while taking the papers.

  "Maybe 'cause I've already made it clear that I don't like him. I don't exactly trust him, either." Gary then sat on the edge of my desk as I sat in my chair. "You're not....dating him now, are you?"

  "It's a camping trip, Gary. What about that could possibly make you think we're dating?"

  "I don't know. Maybe the fact it's just you two, alone, in the middle of who knows where."

  "It's a work-related training camp. It won't be just us." I scoffed as I flipped over the first page in the stack.

  "Oh."

  "And even though I appreciate your concern, it's not your place to put your nose in my dating life."

  "I mean, I know that. But he's an asshole." Gary's face scrunched up as he waved one of his hands. "And I still stand by what I said before."

  "Which is?" I quirked up a brow, and the man turned to look at me.

  "That he has feelings for you. I know he keeps saying he doesn't, but, come on. How else do you explain his behavior? You'd have to be dead not to see it." Gary gestured with his hand, and I sighed through my nose. "Do you really think it's a good idea to take him on this trip with you? It might put something in his head-"

  "Gary, could you please just drop it already? Whether or not he has feelings for me is none of your business. And it's pretty dickish of you to keep pushing it and making it sound so negative."

  "Dickish?"

  "Yes, dickish." I looked up at him while raising my eyebrows. "How'd you like it if someone made an assumption about how you feel and wouldn't stop blabbing about it when you weren't around?" Gary went quiet, and I looked back at the papers in front of me to flip the page. "Now you get it."

  "I still don't like him." He muttered like a child in trouble.

  "You don't have to."

  "I still don't get why you put up with him."

  "Because I don't 'put up with him'. Since you two don't get along, you don't see anything other than his bad side."

  "You're really gonna defend him?"

  "Look, I know he's not the easiest to get along with, but this is his home, too. You can't keep shit-talking him without expecting some pushback."

  "Oh, my God. You actually like that idiot."

  "What did I just say?" I shot Gary a stern look.

  "You're not denying it."

  "Grimm's got layers. It'd be impossible to not like a few."

  "So you're really friends with the guy? Not just helping him 'cause he knew your uncle?"

  "Yes. We're friends, I like him, and you can keep your opinions about it to yourself." I spoke with a calm tone while standing up and crossing the office. "These look fine, by the way." Handing Gary back his papers, I then opened the door to see Grimmjow standing on the other side.

  The demon froze as I looked at him, and I knew he had overheard the conversation between Gary and I. He quickly looked away while shoving his hands into his jacket pockets.

  "Our ride's here." Grimmjow stated, and I could see how his ears were turning red.

  "Eavesdropper."

  "I'm not an eavesdropper!" The demon snarled at me while keeping his fists deep in his pockets.

  "Sure, you're not." I had a sarcastic tone and pat his cheek before walking into the hallway. "Well, we've got to go, so I'll talk to you later, Gary."

  "Uh, right. Do you need someone to watch Dagur while you're gone?"

  "He's already at Yui's place." Bending over, I picked up the duffle bag set down near the door and tossed it to Grimmjow. The demon easily caught it, and I grabbed the handle of the suitcase.

  "Right. Probably why I haven't seen him." Gary said under his breath while tucking the papers into his jacket. Grimmjow looked at the man like he was an idiot, and I had to rush the demon outside before he said something that would start a fight.

**A/N: There is bonus art for this scene

[seventeensarmy]

(1) Stuck With You (OT7!Hybrid Au)

Pairing: OT7xReader, Jungkook x Reader, rest will come in the course of the story

Warnings: Toxic parents that lead to toxic relationship to food, reader isn´t eating good, character death (But not in detail), angst, fluff, some technical ballet words (but i explained them and they aren´t that important), tell me if i missed something!

Words: 4.750

Summary: In your society, hybrids are seen as pets, nothing more, not having many rights. You meet the bunny hybrid Jungkook, deciding not to follow the norms of society you befriend him and fall in love. On your journey to a happy life, you meet six other hybrids, who tag along in your journey. (The summary will get better as soon as i know where to go with the story, i promise xx)

Hybrids: New Zealand red rabbit!Jungkook, Black panther!Yoongi, Birman cat!Jimin, Tundra wolf!Namjoon, Red fox!Hoseok, gerberian shepsky!Taehyung, sugar glider!Jin, human!reader

Chapter one

“I´m Jungkook, but I don´t mind you calling me Kookie”    

15 years ago (Reader is 6, JK is 7)

How is a child supposed to know what right and what’s wrong? You would expect the parents to teach their child basic human decency, but sometimes it´s the parents who teach their child the exact opposite. You see, hybrids were weren´t a rare sight in your society, a lot of wealthy people owned some. While children loved to play with them, it wasn´t really a secret that adults, who could afford breaking the laws, had other plans with them. It is highly frowned upon, using hybrids, who still didn´t have the same rights as humans, to one’s gain, but at the same time, no one really did something against it. There still are a lot of people that believe that hybrids are just abominations and don´t deserve to be even alive, let alone have rights. Those are the people who want nothing to do with hybrids, who look away when a hybrid is being abused. Those are the people you´ve come to hate.

Those people are your parents.

“But Mother”, you whine, following her through the house, “I wanna go play with Hei Ryung, not with her hybrid. I won´t even look at her, I promise.”  Your mother shakes her head before she turns around, making you almost run into her, but you manage to catch yourself. Her gaze almost makes you flinch backwards, but you stand your ground, though you´re not looking up to her. “If you want to play with your friend, you´re going to have to wait till you see her at school, that way I know for sure no animal will come near you.”, you bite back the urge to correct her, saying that hybrids aren´t animals, like she makes it appear. You´ve met Hei Ryung´s hybrid before, a cute Pomeranian girl, just a bit older than you, but your parents could never find that out, the risk of you and the staff at home being punished was far too high. The last time you got punished you were not only grounded for two weeks, but you also weren´t allowed to attend your ballet classes, which was the only thing, other than school work, you got to do in your spare time.

Sensing that you aren´t going to argue back, your mother puts a smile on, “See, waiting till school isn´t that bad. Also, you need to train more, you´ve got a competition coming and I´ve seen you dance, you still need a lot of practice if you even want to attempt to win a medal.”

Ouch, you swallow. Your mother has always been your strongest critic, always finding something you could´ve done better. Still, you nod, knowing that with her last words the conversation was over and you should go practice.

Practice always ended with your muscles hurting, you weren´t dancing on pointe, your teacher saying you are still too young to dance like that, much to your mothers dismay. If it were up to her you would probably have started wearing pointe shoes as soon as you could walk and you were thankful, that none of your past teachers let her have any say in your training. You were training every day, four times a week with your teacher, the rest of the week alone, sometimes the staff came to watch, but now you think they might have been a bit worried about a six year old girl spending most of her time either in school or the practice room.

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You were alone again, both of your parents not being at home wasn´t something new. In fact, you hadn´t seen your father in almost three weeks, some business trip to Europe, though he promised to come to your competition in a week. You weren´t sure what your father was doing to earn as much money as he did, you just knew it had something to do with a lot of deals and signed papers, that made him swear in his study upstairs.                                                                                   

As for your mother, you really weren´t sure what she was doing, other than spending your fathers money, though she always said “our money”, but you weren´t asking, you learned fast that, if you are a child, people don´t really care about your opinion (or you in general) and therefore don´t feel the need to talk to you. You overheard her talking to kitchen staff, explaining that she was going on an important trip to Bali for a few weeks (as you grew older you learned that her trips to Bali weren´t really of important nature, more of needy and lying nature, but that´s a different story).

It was always the same; your parents leaving you alone with the staff at home, you´ve come to see them more as your family than your actual family.

Your nanny always took pity on you, when you were training the whole day, letting you watch some TV in the evening, something your parents never allowed you, telling you it´s a distraction, though you found yourself more at ease the next morning as when you would have gone straight to bed or studied some more instead. The kitchen staff also had a soft spot for you, always receiving a strict diet for you from your mother, which left the cook speechless. You never really knew if your diet plan was different than your usual plan, seeing as the chef never made it when your parents were gone. You overheard him talking to you nanny once, complaining how you would become too skinny and weak if he were to actually cook what your mother planned for you.                                 “Sometimes I think she´s crazy”, you once heard them whisper, “That´s not a diet for a child, not that a child should ever be on a diet. The portion size she wants me make is ridiculous, if I would make one dish and give everyone this portion I bet you I could feed half the street!”, the chef raged, he had been your cook since you could think and you sometimes think of him as your father or uncle by the way he cared for you. Your nanny agreed quietly, it wasn´t a secret how the staff thought about your parents, but the chef wasn´t done, you heard paper rustling and figured he was showing her the plan your mother made for you. “Two dishes per day. That woman has no clue how to feed a child. She wants her to eat only two times a day and then compete at a competitive sports competition.”

Needless to say, the staff took better care of you than your parents ever could. Which is why you were now sitting in the far back of the garden, with a box of cookies and a bottle of soda on your side. Today had been your dance competition, you won, but neither your mother, nor your father were there to witness, only your nanny, who gave you a tight hug after you came down. Your nanny was always there for you, always praising you and giving you little rewards for your good work. She and the kitchen staff saw, that though you won, you were still upset over your absent parents, so they told you to go enjoy yourself in the garden and they would bring snacks for you.

After they arrived with the cookies and the soda, you went off to your secret hiding spot in the garden.  You knew no one could see you there, leaving you alone to your upset thoughts and snacks that you still didn´t touch.

You remember thinking, that maybe your parents were upset with you and decided not to come as a punishment, or maybe some important business hindered them from coming and they would call in a bit. Your six year old brain couldn´t accept the possibility of your parents simply not caring, it had to be something you did. Your thoughts were interrupted by a rustling coming from the bushes, you sit up straight, “Hello?” you call out. The rustling stops and a figure starts to rise, the first thing you see are... bunny ears? Then a head and in front of you stands a boy, not much older than you. A hybrid. In your garden? You quickly turn around, looking back to the house and let out a relieved breath when you see no one.

“What are you doing here?” you ask the boy as you turn around. He looks at you with big eyes; he looked scared, ready to run if danger should approach. “I was walking around” he explains and you raise your eyebrows, “In my garden?” The boy turned red, “I didn´t know that was your garden, I´m sorry, please don´t call the police”, he begs, suddenly in full on panic mode. Your eyes widen and you take him in, he was skinny, his clothes were dirty and he looked like he hadn´t had a good night’s rest in a long time. He´s a stray.

You raise your hands in surrender, letting him know, that you didn´t plan on calling the police or anyone on him. “Don´t worry”, you promise, “I´m not calling anyone. Are you hungry?” You offer him your unopened box of cookies. His eyes grew even wider and he surprises you by sitting down across from you. “You don´t mind?” he asked and you shake your head, opening the box and putting it down in front of him. “I´m y/n” you grin at the boy, who already had one cookie stuffed in his mouth. He replied, but you didn´t understand a single word, causing you to giggle, “I´m sorry, I don´t speak cookie or is your name cookie?” you giggle again, causing the boy in front of you to turn red, he swallows and speaks again, “I´m Jungkook, but I don´t mind you calling me Kookie”, he grins.

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The following days were probably some of the best in your life so far, thanks to your new friend. Whenever you could, you would sneak out loads of food and drinks, concerned by Jungkooks small figure. But he always insisted on you joining him eat, to which you only replied with a small smile, saying you already ate. You couldn’t risk your mother finding out that you ate something other than what´s on her diet plan for you or even worse, her seeing that you gained weight. The training she would then put you under is one you never want to repeat.

You saw that Jungkook didn´t believe you when you said you ate, he could probably smell if you ate or not, he once told you, that your house never really smelled of food, you only shrugged, not really knowing what to say. But he never said anything, not till the day he saw you almost faint on your way to your secret hideout in the back of the garden, where he was already waiting for you. As you arrived you let yourself fall back against the tree. “y/n”, Jungkook´s voice asked worried. You looked at your friend and smiled, “I´m alright Kookie, just a bit tired from practice. Don´t worry.” Your friend looked unconvinced and he got proven right, as he heard your stomach rumble. “You should eat   y/n-ah. When did you even eat the last time?”  You wave your hand, “You worry too much. I ate this morning and my mother comes home tonight, so I´ll eat with her this evening.” The bunny hybrid looked confused in your direction. “But what about lunch, didn´t you eat something now? You can´t just eat two times a day” he exclaimed.

The concept of you eating lunch is so strange in your mind that it´s your turn to look confused. You later realised, that even when your mother was gone, the staff gave you only two dishes a day, so you wouldn´t get used to eating three times a day. If your mother were to find out you would eat more times a day than she liked, the staff and you would be in big trouble. But your six year old you didn´t understand that at this time, eating three times a day was something you never did. Why eat lunch, when you could´ve also practised at that time?

“My mother says I don´t need to eat three times a day, I would get fat and then the judges won’t like my dances at the competitions anymore” you explain with a shrug, missing the way Jungkook tensed, he decided in that moment, that he doesn´t like your mother. How would you get fat? You first had to stop being underweight and from what he gathered, the only things you do are study, dance and meet up with him.

The sun started to go down and you knew you had to leave your friend soon. “Listen Jungkook”, you started and his ears straightened up, as you addressed him by his name, not the nickname you called him since your first day, “My mother will arrive today, my father probably too.   They are pretty strict-” “Are they gonna lock you away for talking to me? Are they gonna lock me away?!” You quickly took his hands in yours, calming him almost instantly. “No no no, nothing’s going to happen to you”, you promised, “My parents, they, they can never know about you, okay Kookie. They are not nice”, Jungkook frowned, not liking the idea to leave you alone with the mean people who don´t feed you and apparently don´t like hybrids, he remembered his first question. “y/n. Are they going to look you away?” You shrug, “Maybe, I don´t know if I did something yet.” You don´t look at him, you can imagine what he looked like, probably mad, he was the scariest seven year old you had ever seen. “What do you mean, you don´t know yet, wouldn´t you know if you did something?” You give him a wary smile, “Sometimes I don´t know what I did until they tell me, Kookie. Maybe I gained weight; maybe my dance is not good enough. They would want me to fix my mistakes. That´s why you maybe won´t see me for a while. I just wanted to tell you, so you don´t worry even more” you giggle a bit and poke his cheek, “If you keep frowning like this, you´ll have wrinkles as soon as you turn ten.”

If it were up to Jungkook, he would grab you and bring you as far away from those people as he possibly could. He didn´t have a family, never had, the streets are all he ever had and remembered, but even with no knowledge about family and love Jungkook knew, that what you had in this house, was neither. Before you left, you told him, he should keep the snacks and eat them, he shouldn´t wait for you and Jungkook didn´t understand how you could be so concerned about him eating enough, but still neglected your own needs so much. He wanted to help you so bad, but he was only seven.

And your worries came true, you didn´t see Jungkook for two weeks. The next time you were allowed to go out, he noticed that you were skinnier, but he didn´t say anything as you koala-hugged him.

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Five years ago (Reader 16/ JK 17)

It was a bit past midday when your parents left, leaving you alone once again. The only difference, this time, not even the staff stayed with you, this was a first, but it left you buzzing with excitement. It meant that you had could have Jungkook staying over for two weeks. Over the years your friendship with the bunny blossomed into one of the best things you could´ve ever asked for.

Your parents never noticed the teenager living in the small shed in the back of the garden. You both quickly realised, that it would be way too risky sneaking Jungkook into the house with your parents present. Their distaste for hybrids only grew over the years, since the government gave them more rights, giving the hybrids at least a bit of independence, though they were still nowhere near having the same rights as humans.

This wasn´t the first time Jungkook stayed over, over the years you tried to let him stay over as often as possible. It did help a lot that the staff in your home found out and decided to help, no longer questioning why to took so much food with you whenever you went to the garden.

Though, this was the first time they ever left you completely alone, you didn´t know why, but you didn´t question it, relieved to be able to spent time with your best friend, without having to worry about him. Your mother had given you a detailed plan of your diet, which you couldn´t help but follow, not having realised yet, that all those diets weren´t really as healthy as your mother claimed.

You were eating an apple, a snack you allowed yourself to enjoy, seeing as your next real meal would still have to wait a few hours, though you weren´t even that hungry yet. You just needed something to focus on while waiting for Jungkook and you knew it made him happy to see you eat.

You sat down on one of the garden chairs, waiting for the bunny to show up, though you didn´t need to wait long, as you saw his tall figure already approaching. “Hello little dancer”, he grinned, pulling you into a bone crashing hug, he eyed the apple in your hand with a satisfied smile. Over the years Jungkook grew up quite well, he was now towering over you and you couldn´t deny, that he was getting more and more handsome.

You smiled and pulled him into the dining room, “I figured you´d be pretty hungry by now, so I prepared some food for you, then we can relax for the rest of the day.” You had prepared some steamed vegetables and chicken, knowing that Jungkook loved your cooking. He frowned as he saw that you wouldn´t be eating with him, but he choose not to say anything, it was your first day and he wouldn´t want to argue with you immediately. He started to dig in, almost scoffing at how much you prepared for one person.  “You don´t need to practice today?” he asked confused, normally you would be training every day, especially seeing as you had a show in a few days. You smiled a bit sheepishly, “I got up earlier today and did my hours”, already knowing how Jungkooks face would look like you chose to study the picture on the wall in front of you. Your training hours were absolutely ridiculous in Jungkook´s opinion. Sometimes practicing up to ten hours if you didn´t have to study for school, he dreaded thinking about the hours you spent training today.

He finished eating and you started to clean the table, while Jungkook went and took a quick shower. You also started to look for movies on Netlix that he would like, both of you loved movies, but Jungkook never had the opportunity to watch them and you never had the time.

Jungkook came back, letting himself fall down next to you, arm around you shoulder, pulling you close. His was hair slightly wet and he had changed into new clothes, which you had bought for him. You stared at him, he really was handsome. You blushed at your own thoughts, but you couldn´t help but feel attracted to him. He noticed you staring at him, seeing as he was also busy staring at you, the chosen movie in the back forgotten.

“Kookie?” you asked quietly and he looked at you waiting for you to continue. “Do you want to come with me on Tuesday? To my show?” A smile broke out on his face, his ears straightening up, eyes wide. “Are you for real? Yes I´d love to”, but his smile fell as quickly as it came. “Do they allow hybrids there? How could I get in?” You frowned, you hadn´t thought about that. Then an idea plopped in your head and you took all your courage to speak it out loud. “We´ll just say you´re my boyfriend. They won´t question you if you cover your ears and you´ll be backstage with me.” The bunny thought about that idea and his smile returned, though there was mischief sparkling in his eyes. “Only if I get to give you a well done kiss after you´re done. Like a good boyfriend would.” Never has the usually shy bunny been so forward about anything and your breath stocked, but you found yourself nodding. No matter how shy you were, you couldn´t let the chance to kiss your crush and best friend fly away. He grinned and pulled you closer, pressing a quick kiss to your cheek, causing you to hide yourself in his chest. “Watch out mister” you warned, poking his chest. The bunny only laughed at your flustered state.

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Nervous. That´s the word that would describe you the best right now. You had already thrown up in the morning, leaving Jungkook worried, asking if you were really in the condition to perform. You had waved it off, telling him that´s how you are before every show, which didn´t seem to comfort him at all. Though your best friend and maybe boyfriend or fake boyfriend (who knows) stayed with you for the last couple of days, you didn´t really find any more time to relax, spending most of our days practicing. Jungkook didn´t seem to mind though, he started using the gym next to your dance room. Your parents never seem to use it anyway, so it wasn´t really a problem and Jungkook came to love having an outlet for all his energy. In the evenings both of you were too tired to cook, meaning empty take out containers were piling up in the kitchen.

“You got this” Jungkook murmured, warm hand lying comforting on your lower back. You were backstage already, wearing your plush bathrobe to keep you from freezing in your dance outfit. It wasn´t as hard as expected to take Jungkook with, a beanie covering his ears, his tail comfortable tucked away in his pants covered by a nice dress shirt you had bought him a while ago. You stood on your pointe shoes, still not being on eye level with the bunny but close, and hugged him.

“What if my mother finds out? Oh I shouldn´t have done this, maybe I can-“ you were interrupted by a pair of lips on yours, you felt yourself sinking into his strong hold. Jungkook smiled at you with the softest smile you had ever seen. He knew you were worried about your piece.

It was contemporary ballet, a form of ballet your mother despised. She was all for classical ballet, often making you train with the Cecchetti method, which Jungkook found out to be really hard on the body, no longer surprised why you were so drained after your lessons. But you had told him one day, that though you do love this form of ballet, you had started to fall in love with neoclassical and contemporary ballet. It was more modern, allowing you to bring more of yourself in your dance, Jungkook didn´t really know anything about ballet, so he had just nodded, but after seeing you dance in both, a classical and modern way, he understood why you liked the modern form so much.

“Hey, calm down, little dancer” he tucked a loose strand of hair behind your ear. You looked up to him with big eyes, he had just kissed you. Jungkook kissed you, and you found yourself craving his kiss again. “You worry too much, stop thinking about if something is a mistake. Maybe this kiss was a mistake, who knows, but it didn´t feel like it, I liked it and I know you did too. You like dancing contemporary, so do it, your mother isn´t here to support you or critic you. I´m here and I´ll support anything you do.” Touched by his words you found yourself hugging him closer than before. “Oh, what would I do without you?” you asked, playing with his hair that wasn´t covered by the beanie.

“y/n y/l/n! Ready to perform in ten, please move to the curtains!” came the loud voice of the director. Slowly Jungkook let you go, “You´ll do great, alright? Just have fun” the bunny smiled at you. You decided to collect all the courage you had and looked into Jungkook´s eyes, “Don´t I get a good luck kiss?” The male’s eyes twinkle and he can hardly contain a smile, “You get a well done kiss when you´re done, little dancer” You pout, but you know arguing with bunny won´t work, so you just sigh in defeat. Jungkook chuckled as he realised that there will be no arguing, he pressed a kiss to your forehead. “Go on little dancer, show me what you got. I´ll be right here when you get back.”

With those last words you moved towards the stage, ready to dance your heart out, but you felt oddly calm. With no doubt thanks to the bunny who was cheering you on from the side. The music started and you have never felt so free dancing.

And as promised was Jungkook waiting for you after your performance, you jumped into his waiting arms, “You did so well, you are amazing” he pressed little kisses all over your face, till he finally reached your lips. Needless to say, today was a good day and something told you, that it could only get better with Jungkook next to you, holding you close.

.-.-.-..-..-.-.-.-.-..-.-.-.-..-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

The past one and a half weeks had to be the best you’ve ever had. Life with Jungkook couldn´t have been easier and dread filled your chest, as you thought about how your parents would be arriving today and some part of you wished they wouldn´t.                                                                            Jungkook noticed your mood change too and tried everything he could to make you feel better, not even complaining about how you skipped breakfast this morning, which you knew took a lot for him. You were stood in the kitchen; the bunny had his arms wrapped around you, hugging you from behind, watching as you were gathering the ingredients to make you guys a shake. Occasionally he would sneak a kiss to your neck or cheek.

But all that froze, as you both watched a police car park in your driveway. “Hide”, was the only thing you said, as the doorbell rang and Jungkook didn´t have to be told twice, as he hid in the guest bathroom next to the front door. He was a bit confused, seeing as normally hybrid control would come to collect stray animals and these cops didn´t even have dogs with them, but he didn´t want to risk it, almost holding his breath as you opened the door.

“Good evening”, you greeted politly, though Jungkook could hear the slight tremble and smell your panic. He wanted to jump out of the bathroom and hold you close, never wanting you to feel scared if he could prevent it.

“Good evening, Miss y/l/n, can we come in, we have some bad news for you?    It´s about your parents.”

Time slowed down as you received the news. Your parents died. The blood in your ears rushed, you had trouble making out what they said. You heard that they were asking if they should call someone, but there wasn´t anyone you could call. You had no family here; the only person you wanted was hiding in your guest bathroom down the hall, probably hearing every word.

The police told you, that in the next days a lawyer would stop by to explain to you what would be happening next, you were still underage with no family. They were asking you, if you would want to sleep in a supervised home today, but you shook your head, explaining with shaky voice that the staff would be arriving tomorrow morning and you wouldn´t be alone. After the police left you sank to the floor, “Kookie”, you croaked, vision blurred with tears. You felt strong hands pulling you into a hug, “I´m here y/n. I´m here.”

next

Taglist: Open, just ask! 

Hope you enjoyed!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Podcasting "Qualia"

This week on my podcast, I read “Qualia,” my May, 2021 Locus Magazine column about quantitative bias, epidemiology, antitrust and drug policy. It’s a timely piece, given the six historic antitrust laws that passed the House Judiciary Committee last week:

https://doctorow.medium.com/moral-hazard-and-monopoly-42e30eb159a8

The pandemic delivered some hard lessons about quantitative bias — that’s when you pay attention to the parts of a problem that you can do math on, not because they’re the most important, but because you know how to do math.

The most obvious lesson comes from the failure of exposure notification apps, which were supposed to take the place of “shoe-leather” contact tracing, wherein a public health workers establish personal rapport with infected people to help identify others who might be at risk.

Contact tracing is a human process, built on trust: trust enough to talk about the intimate details of your life, trust enough to take advice on how to get tested and whether you should self-isolate.

That’s not what apps do.

Exposure notification apps measure whether a Bluetooth device you registered was close to another Bluetooth device for a “clinically significant” period of time.

That’s it.

They don’t measure qualitative aspects, like whether you were close to an infected person because you were in the same traffic jam in adjacent, sealed automobiles — or whether you were both at the Ft Lauderdale eyeball-licking championship.

And they certainly don’t create the personal rapport that’s needed to understand each person’s idiosyncratic health circumstances and complications — whether they need child care, or are at risk of losing their under-the-table jobs if they self-isolate.

We didn’t want to commit the resources to do contact tracing at scale, we didn’t know how to automate it — but we did know how to automate exposure notification, so we incinerated the qualitative elements and declared the dubious quantitative residue to be sufficient.

It’s the quant’s version of searching for your car keys under the lamp-post because it’s too dark where you dropped them.

It’s not just foolish, it’s also deceptive — quantizing qualitative elements is a subjective exercise that produces numbers that seem objective.

This is where antitrust law comes in. Prior to the neoliberal revolution of the Reagan years, antitrust concerned itself with “harmful dominance,” with regulators asking whether mergers and commercial practices were bad for the world.

Obviously, “bad for the world” is hard to measure. Regulators evaluated claims from all corners: both political scientists worried about the outsized lobbying power of large companies and workers worried about monopolies’ outsized power over wages and conditions got a say.

So did environmentalists, urban planners, and yes, economists, too.

The Chicago School — hard-right conservative economists with cult-like status among Reagan and big business simps — insisted that all this qualitative stuff had to go.

They argued that consideration of qualitative elements left too much up to judges, so two similar companies engaged in similar conduct might get different verdicts out of the antitrust system. This, they said, make a mockery of the notion of “equal treatment before the law.”

Instead, the Chicago Boys — led by Robert Bork, a Nixonite criminal and a sort of court sorcerer to Reagan — demanded that qualitative measures be left behind in favor of a purely quantitative analysis of whether a monopoly hurt “consumer welfare.”

The way you’d measure “consumer welfare” was by checking to see whether a monopoly was making prices go up — if not, the monopoly was deemed “efficient” and thus socially beneficial. Prices are numbers, numbers can be measured.

But that’s not how it worked in practice. When two companies wanted to merge, they could hire a Chicago fixer to construct a mathematical model that “proved” that they resulting megafirm would not raise prices.

No one could argue with this, because Chicago School consultants had a monopoly over building and interpreting these models — the same way court magicians laid exclusive claim to the ability to slaughter an animal and read the future in its guts.

And if the prices did go up? Well, the same Chicago model-makers would be paid to produce a new model to prove that the price-rises were not the result of monopoly, but rather, rising energy costs or higher wages or the moon being in Venus.

Even by their own lights, “consumer welfare” was a failure. Monopolies drive prices up. Amazon Prime is a tool to drive up prices in every store, not just Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#prime-facie

Apple’s App Store monopoly drives up app prices:

https://www.engadget.com/2019-05-13-supreme-court-apple-app-store-price-fixing-lawsuit.html

Luxxotica bought every eyewear brand and every eyewear retailer and the world’s largest optical lens manufacturer and drove prices up 1000%:

https://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-glasses-lenscrafters-luxottica-monopoly-20190305-story.html

The highly concentrated pharma industry raises prices every single year:

https://patientsforaffordabledrugs.org/2021/01/14/2021-price-hikes-pr/

What’s more, there’s a straight line from “consumer welfare” to price-fixing.

Think about publishing. A decade ago, the Big Six publishers were embroiled in a bid to force Amazon to raise ebook prices, which led to fines and settlements for harming “consumer welfare.”

Today, the Big Six publishers are the Big Four, because Random House, the largest publisher in the world, gobbled up Penguin and Simon & Schuster. When RH, S&S and Penguin were three companies, it was illegal for them to collude on pricing.

But after their mergers, the three former CEOs — now presidents of divisions within an unimaginably giant company — can meet in a board room and plan exactly the same price-fixing strategy, and that isn’t illegal under “consumer welfare” antitrust — it’s “efficient.”

The Chicago School’s “consumer welfare” was only ever a front for “shareholder welfare,” the ability of large firms to avoid “wasteful competition” and extract an ever-larger share of the take for shareholders at the expense of customers, workers and the public.

The entire business of “consumer welfare” is a fraud, starting with Robert Bork’s insistence that a close reading of the US’s four major antitrust laws will reveal that they were never intended to be used for any purpose *other* than consumer welfare protections.

This is manifestly untrue, a Qanon-grade conspiracy that is refuted by the plain language of the statutes, the statements of their sponsors, and the record of the Congressional debates leading to their passage.

Despite the wealth of evidence that US antitrust is not a “consumer welfare” project, neoliberals have insisted that their project was not “reforming” antitrust, but rather, “restoring” it to its original purpose.

It’s a Big Lie, and they know it. That’s why GOP Senators Mike Lee (UT) and Chuck Grassley (IA) introduced “The TEAM Act to Reform Antitrust Law” — a bill intended to neutralize the muscular new antitrust bills that just passed the House committee.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/06/25/the-plan-to-water-down-antitrust-reform/

The bill does two things:

It takes antitrust authority away from the FTC, sidelining the incredible Lina Khan, a once-in-a-generation antitrust scholar who now runs the agency; and

It codifies “consumer welfare” as the basis for US antitrust law.

That second part is the tell: after 40 years of insisting that any rational reading of US antitrust proved that “consumer welfare” was obviously its sole purpose, they’re now introducing a law to *change* its purpose to “consumer welfare.”

Like the Stolen Election lie, they never truly believed this one. The pose of objectivity that quantizing antitrust allowed was never about creating a truly objective standard for competition policy — it was only ever about neutering competition policy.

The thing is, there is a way to integrate both the objective and subjective into policy-making — as was demonstrated by David Nutt’s 2008 leadership of the UK’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which established the policy framework for a wide range of drugs.

Nutt’s panel of experts rated drugs based on how harmful they were to their users, the users’ families, and wider society. This allowed him to sort drugs into three categories:

Drugs that were dangerous irrespective of your public health priorities;

Drugs that were safe irrespective of your public health priorities; and

Drugs whose safety changed based on whether you prioritized the safety of users, families or society.

Those priorities are a political choice, not an empirical finding. Nutt told Parliament that it was their job to establish those subjective priorities, and once they did, he could objectively tell them how to embody them in the rules for each drug.

This is a beautiful example of how the objective and subjective fit together in policy — and the tale of what happened next is a terrible example of how “consumer welfare” hurts us all.

You see, booze is one of the most concentrated industries in the world. The “consumer welfare” standard let booze companies buy one another until just a handful remain — globe-straddling collosii with ample resources to influence policy-makers.

Nutt, an empiricist, reported just as rigorously on the harms of booze — one of the most dangerous drugs in the world — as he did on other drugs. He was fired for refusing to retract his true statement that tobacco and alcohol were more dangerous than many banned drugs.

Thanks to “consumer welfare” antitrust, the alcohol industry is able to choose who its regulators are, and use their political influence — purchased with the excessive profits of a monopolist — to rid themselves of pesky officials who actually pursue objective policy.

You can read the column here:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

And here’s the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2021/06/28/qualia/

As well a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the @InternetArchive; they’ll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_395/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_395_-_Qualia.mp3

And here’s a link to my podcast feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Image: OpenStax Chemistry: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Figure_24_01_03.jpg

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

[damnzawa]

henlo i'm not sure what your rules are for requests so i'm sorry if i'm doing this wrong i just love your writing uwu 👉🏼👈🏼 aizawa with an hero!s/o turned into a neko because they got hit by a quirk after fighting some villain? 🥺👉🏼👈🏼

(CAT)ASTROPHE — A. SHOUTA

Note(s): OMG ?? I ?? AM ?? SO ?? FLATTERED ?? THAT ?? YOU ?? LIKE ?? MY ?? SHITTY ?? ASS ?? AND ?? CLICHE ?? WRITING ?? also i live for these types of scenarios SO EFF YES

Warning(s): Poorly written fight scene, Aizawa having a mental breakdown, Cat Fluff

...

Being a pro-hero comes with a lot of pros and cons. For some, the pros may outweigh the cons and vice versa. Some even has a healthy balance of both. While you, you were one of the people who have pros outweigh the cons.

You weren't really the pro-hero to compete for the spotlight but you still had a good number of people who knows of you and what you could do. Though, you aren't as flashy as the others, you had a unique charm to you that draws people's attention towards you.

It was that charm that drew the infamous hobo man of U.A. to you, all in his yellow, shining (not really) sleeping bag glory. Though at first, he was irritated at the fact that you were just a natural at everything and everybody just seemed to love you. But as time went by, he realized that this charm of yours has truly captivated him. You weren't like the other pro-heroes he had met. No. You were unique. One of a kind. Genuinely different from the others.

After months of (silent) pining, he decided to just fuck it and ask you out on a date, in which surprisingly you happily agreed to. As time progressed, and two dates became 3, 4, 5, and counting, he got to know more sides of you. More characteristics to add to your charm. And by the time you reached your 2nd year anniversary, you guys decided to move in together—which was by far the greateat decision you and Aizawa has ever made.

Your charms are a part of your pros. It's what makes you, you. But unfortunately, you had yet to learn that it was one of your cons too.

It was the usual night patrol. Check any suspicious activity, check if anyone's doing crimes, check up on the stray cat on the alley, repeat. Honestly, some times patrols can be quite a bore. But you didn't mind. It was part of the job after all.

Cautiously walking down the street, you suddenly heard a scream from one of the alleys nearby. You quickly sprinted into action, not sparing another second as you rushed into the scene of the crime.

"Please! Don't hurt my child!" The woman screamed as the villain inched closer to them. Silently creeping up on the thug, you noticed that the villain had a weapon—a gun to be exact which was gonna be a pain if they ever shot the woman and/or his child. "Please! It's all I have! I promise!" A robbery? In the night? Typical villain move.

"Step away from them." You commanded the villain as you activated your quirk. A force field acting as a shield appeared out of nowhere, protecting the woman and her child from harm. You could tell that the woman was relieved, however, the child was still crying.

The villain chuckled as he turned around to face you, your hero name rolling off his tongue in a sinister way. "Well, well, well. If it isn't the saviors of society! The heroes! Protecting the world from evil doers such as myself." You could feel a speech coming. You honestly could feel it. "At least that's what you think. You heroes think you're good shit after taking down some bad guys but do you ever wonder about those who also suffer because of you?" He pointed the gun towards you making you squint at him. "I lost my family! Because of you guys! Because of that stupid Endeavor! You don't really care about the people! You just care about the fame! The money! The recognition you'll get after locking us all up in jail!"

"I assure you, heroes are not like that. Sure we have our own ambitions, but we all protect the people. That's our number one priority." Your response made him snarl. "And as much as I would love to stay and chat..." You activates your quirk once again, this time making whips out of light. "...It's time to pay for your crimes." You attacked him with the whip to which he skillfully dodged. He appeared from place to place with a blink of an eye, making it hard for you to apprehend him.

'Shit. A teleportation quirk? That's gonna be a pain in the ass.'

Dodging his punches that came out of nowhere, you kicked him in the gut. After reading watching his moves while dodging, you figured out that he has this pattern. He would first attack you in the back—which caught you by surprise the first time—then he would go for your front then your sides. It was the repeating pattern he used on you, so after getting used to it, you finally had the upper hand.

He was thrown a bit from the force of your kick but quickly recovered from it. He attacked you with another punch on your left which you countered by grabbing on his arm and twisting it until you heard a crack.

'Well now he certainly can't punch with that one.'

"You bitch!" He pulled out his gun and repeatedly fired shots at you. Every shot was a miss and then finally you encaged him in a box of light.

"Sweet dreams." And with that, you knocked him out with your quirk.

After putting on quirk nullyfing cuffs and a rope made out of light around his body, you checked up on the victims. The woman was repeatedly thanking you while the child was still shaken up.

"Hey now kiddo. It's alright. You're safe now." You approached him with a gentle smile on your face. You were about to place comforting hand on his shoulder when he suddenly shot up.

"No! Get away from me and my mom!" A sudden force emitted from his body as he pushed you to the ground.

"Oh my gosh! I'm so sorry about that!" You stood up and brushed yourself off as the woman repeatedly apologized for her son's behavior.

"No ma'am. It's alright. I'm fine, no harm done. See?" You flashed her a smile. "Kiddo, it's alright now. I'm a pro-hero. Police are on the way. Can you stay for a bit and tell them what happened?" The boy reluctantly nodded which made you smile even wider. "That's great then! You were brave out there kiddo."

"I'm sorry for using my quirk on you..." The boy muttered. You ruffled his hair and told him that it was alright. Though, you would surely see a paramedic later.

After the police arrived and collected your statements, you headed home with a headache. Apparently, the woman and her child doesn't know what his quirk actually is. The robbery might have triggered his quirk and you were the first one to be hit with it.

Great.

Just great.

You just hoped Aizawa was home too. You clearly need some of his A+ cuddles to ease the pain.

You arrived at your shared apartment shortly, but before you could even reach your shared bedroom, you blacked out.

...

Aizawa Shouta wasn't having the greatest day of his life. An eventful and rowdy day at U.A, then an eventful and extra rowdy patrol at night all while running with 3 hours of sleep? Yep. Not the greatest day of his life.

The grumpy man groaned as he remembered the stack of papers waiting for him back home. He could already feel the pain he was about to endure for the greater good of the future heroes he was teaching. He frowned as he imagined Kaminari's sloppy handwriting—and a possible doodle of him—in his homework, he could also imagine the cluster of words that didn't make sense brought to him by Mina Ashido.

But he could also imagine you greeting him with a kiss as usual. He could imagine your arms wrapped around him in a loving embrace, washing out the stress he previously had. He could imagine you rolling your eyes at him as he complained about you not getting enough sleep. He could imagine you helping him grade those forsaken essays he made his students do.

Well, maybe this day wasn't so bad for him. After all, he had you to go home to.

After opening the door, he expected you to greet him with open arms and ask him how his day went. He expected you to make fun of his struggles as a teacher and remind him that it was his choice to teach to begin with. But instead he was met with silence and no you.

To: Y/n

From: Shouta

Are you patrolling late tonight?

He waited for a few minutes but he didn't recieve a reply. He sent another message, and another, and another, until he finally decided to wash up and wait up for you just incase anything happens.

Just as he was about to enter your shared bedroom, he noticed your hero costume on the floor, a lump of something breathing underneath it. He lifted your hero costume, revealing a (h/c) cat—who stirred at his actions—sleeping peacefully. His hand instinctively reached down to pet it, feeling the smooth fur on his fingertips. The petting caused the animal to wake up, it's tired eyes looking at him with such warmness it was almost so familiar yet he couldn't remember where it's from.

"Shouta?" Aizawa froze on the spot as he heard your voice leaving the cat's mouth. He blinked owlishly, trying to process what the hell happened. Did the cat just speak? And did the cat sounded just like you?

"Why the hell are you so big? Did something happen?" You—the cute cat infront of him—asked as you unconsciously started to rub your cat chin into his shoulder.

"Y/n, I should be the one asking you that." You perked up at his response, head tilting as you waited for an answer.

"What do you mean?" Oh god you were giving him the cute eyes.

"Y/n, you're a cat."

"I'm a cat." You repeated. "Wait—what?" You blinked as you realized what had happened. Oh. So this was that child's quirk. "Shit."

"Shit indeed." Aizawa picked you up gently and placed you on the bed. "Mind telling me what happened?"

"Ok so..."

...

Aizawa secretly carried a laser on him the next day. You were dismissed of your hero duties for a week (because that's how long the quirk's gonna last) and was stuck in the apartment all day so he figured you could use a little fun right?

Right...

You greeted him as usual, but instead of human you, cat you is rubbing your body around his ankles and making a '8' shape as you circled his feet. It was quite cute to be honest. He had a soft spot for cats and you after all. He tried his best not to melt then and there.

"I've got something for you." Your ears went forward and your tail erected with it's fur flat at the statement. Clearly, you were happy. Aizawa brought out the laser thingy he had and started pointing it towards the wall, to which you suddenly leaped for. You followed the dot everywhere it landed and Aizawa couldn't help but smile at the sight infront of him.

...

"Shouta." You poked his cheek. "Shouta." You poked it once again. Why were you poking him exactly? Well, you were hungry and it was in the middle of the night. You couldn't reach the pantry nor the fridge handle so you reluctantly asked Aizawa for help. Somehow, he wouldn't budge. After poking him a couple more times, he opened an eye that showed that he was clearly annoyed by your behavior.

"What?" Came his gruff reply.

"I'm hungry." Aizawa sighed as he stood up and blinked the sleep out of his eyes.

"Fine." Sluggishly walking towards the kitchen, he looked at you silently trailing behind him. "You want tuna?"

"Haha, very funny Shou."

"Is that a yes or a no?"

"Yes please."

...

You purred as Aizawa rubbed the spot behind your ears. It was becoming a habit for Aizawa to pet and rub you like this and honestly, he was enjoying it—not that he'd ever tell anyone about it.

You insisted to not cancel your annual dinner date at your shared apartment which consisted of eating takeouts and watching whatever was on Netflix. You and Aizawa happily ate your food—you ate tuna... again—and now, the both of you were watching some Studio Ghibli film, well atleast you were supposed to.

You quickly got distracted once Aizawa started petting you, leading to you not focusing on the film at all. Aizawa's eyes was still on the film playing but you were sure he was also distracted. You found it a bit weird that the both of you quickly adjusted to this cat life and that neither of you freaked out at all. Maybe it was the pro-hero sides of you, who knows. But it was nice to see Aizawa helping you in any way that he can.

His petting abruptly stopped as he stiffled out a yawn. You looked at him and saw that he looked completely exhausted. More so than usual.

So, you hopped out of his lap and switched off the TV as you nudged Aizawa's leg with your paws.

"Come on Shou. Let's go to sleep."

Aizawa did not decline your offer and gladly followed you out of the room.

...

By the end of the week while having breakfast a loud 'poof' and smoke suddenly covered the whole room. After the smoke cleared, it revealed you in all of your naked human body glory.

"Welcome back, Y/n."

"Oh shut up, Shou."

ADDITIONAL NOTE(S)

This was fun to write! I hope I did this right though lolol. Also, requests are open!!

[opbackgrounds]

As many of you noticed, the other day I posted Part 1 in what has become a series on my thoughts on sexism in One Piece. If you are somehow seeing this post first, I would recommend clicking the link as I’ll be adding to the foundation I built there. 

I already had some pretty strong thoughts on this topic before receiving the original ask, but in the spirit of not wanting to sound like a douche academic integrity I decided to do a little cursory research into what other people meant when they said that One Piece is sexist. Here’s a collage of some of my favorite hot takes

As much as I’m...confused? Unsurprised yet somehow disappointed?...I don’t want to mock or belittle the people who feel this way. I think one of the most dangerous things in our modern internet age is that discussions only get surface deep before they devolve into shouting matches, and when the other side is vilified as ignorant or immoral or whatever it only serves to divide people into groups that grow evermore hostile to one another as the shouting matches get louder. It’s a short jump from your opinions are stupid and bad to you are stupid and bad for having them and I really don’t want to go there. 

Tl; dr: I don’t care if you disagree with anything I’m about to say, but if you send me harassing messages please know that I will laugh at you for presuming to think that I care.

Dropping the S Bomb

So first things first, a couple definitions. Sexism is prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination against a certain gender, in this case women. Chauvinism is excessive or prejudiced support for one's own cause, group, or sex. Misogyny is dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.

I start with definitions, because there are an astounding number of people who misuse these terms when making arguments. When talking about things like character design, Oda’s typical hour-glass figure is leaning into a stereotype that leads to the objectification of (fictional) women. An argument could be made that One Piece is sexist in that way. 

But it’s not that cut and dry, and I am always of the opinion that context matters. I argued in my previous post that there would be a wider variety of female character designs if there were more women, and the exaggerated aesthetic of the series lends itself to the exaggerated busts and butts typical of One Piece ladies. 

There’s an interview that came out around the time Strong World was released that I think is helpful when talking about this sort of thing. 

I approached it thinking that since I’m drawing for a boys’ comic magazine, then it’s my job to make sure they enjoy what they’re reading. When you actually do become a professional you’ll start getting fan letters and other things and you’ll soon find that the overwhelming majority of them are from girls. Boys just aren’t the type to pick up a pen. (laughs) They don’t have things like stationary or stamps and they don’t think about going through the ‘grueling task’ of writing someone just to say, “That was cool.” Boys are a life form that enjoy something but won’t bother to tell you that they actually do.

So I learned that girls will flood you with their opinions and when I took at step back and looked at the world of manga, I realized that there are a lot of people out there that made me think, “This [author] is really just going along with the girls’ opinions.” And ultimately, if you’re considering those opinions as the ‘needs of the customer’ when you write the story, you’re just left with a girl’s manga. (laughs) It’s like, if you do that, you’re only writing to entertain girls, and that’s just wrong.

Oda writes for his target demographic, pre-teen and teenage boys. He doesn’t seem to care much for the opinions of his female audience, which again could be perceived as sexist.

And to an extent maybe it is, but I also think it’s smart. You only have to look at the mess that is the new Star Wars trilogy to see what happens when a storyteller tries to appease a fan base. The end result is that everyone goes home from the theatre miserable. 

Humanity has been telling stories since time immemorial. They’re so ingrained into into the collective psyche that we have developed certain metanarriatives, types, and archetypes that have in turn been refined and distilled and applied to certain types of stories meant for certain types of people. The “rules” for telling a “boy’s story” are different than the “rules” for telling a “girl’s story”, just like I would not expect a romance to be told in the same way as one of Shonen Jump’s battle manga.

Incidentally, this is part of the reason why I think many romances in shonen fall flat. Stories best suited for fighting, camaraderie, coming of age, and growing into the best version of yourself are forced to try to include tropes and story beats that just don’t fit, and the end result is often just...bad.  

And, yes, these rules are arbitrary. They can and do change. Just look at shonen battle manga of the 80s vs the titles that were popular when One Piece started in the 90s vs what’s running today. The fact that Oda maintained an audience for over two decades while writing for a demographic that ages out every few years is nothing short of incredible. He clearly has a pulse on what his audience wants while maintaining a clear vision for the direction he wants One Piece to go.

Nor is this an individual effort. Oda works with his assistants and editors when it comes to making these decisions. It’s impossible to say how much he’s been influenced by these other voices, both in the past and now, even if he is ultimately the person responsible for what does and does not get put to paper.

What’s more, society changes. What is considered sexist now would not be thought of as such a generation ago. Our descendants will shake their heads at all the crazy, backward, terrible things we think are normative, and that’s not even taking into consideration differences in culture that not only exist between generations, but nations. America is going to have different ideas of what is and isn’t appropriate behavior than Japan, which undoubtably influences Oda’s sense of humor, which in turn influences the sorts of gags he puts into his comic.

I want to walk a fine line here, because I think there are objective standards that people should be held to regarding sexism while also acknowledging that getting people to agree to those standards are is impossible. If people truly feel as strongly about Oda’s character design and fan service as they make it seem online, then by all means comment on it. It’s not going to change Oda’s mind, but maybe with increased awareness the next generation of storytellers will be better. 

At the same time, I think that the indignant masses need to take a deep, hard look at what they’re calling sexism. Are you really going to claim, as I’ve seen, that all fan service is sexist? Are you really going to say that Robin and Nami are weak characters because they don’t get fights? Are you really going to say that Oda’s the most sexist mangaka out there, using, Fairy Tale as an example of female characters done right?

Because if you are, you’re setting yourself up to be thought as just as vapid and uniformed as those who are only reading for tits and ass. There are legitimate criticisms to be had, but just because you don’t like a thing doesn’t mean it’s bad storytelling. Just because Oda puts something out there that you don’t approve of doesn’t make it sexist. Audiences need to be better at thinking critically about the media they consume and learn to look past the sensationalism of click bait articles to truly explore the issues at hand. 

This is getting long again, so I think I’m going to split this into another post where I’ll dive into some specific examples within the series itself. Once again, thank you for your time. I promise I’ll wrap this up soon and move onto other, hopefully more positive, things.    

[spaced0lphin]

Massive Speculation

On N7 day of this hellscape of a year, BioWare announced they were making another Mass Effect instalment. Naturally, being sat up here in the bridge as I am, it gives me a lot of time to speculate and here are my thoughts on the wider picture.

These remasters are intended to revitalise the fandom for the upcoming project.

That much, to me, seems obvious. Whatever this new instalment is, it’s some years off and it makes perfect sense to give something to the (not insignificant) fanbase Mass Effect still has to attract them again, as well as new fans. These remasters will be well positioned to buy them a few years of good “fandom time.”

This upcoming instalment after the remasters is going to be Mass Effect’s last hurrah.

And maybe, as much as it sucks to say, BioWare’s last hurrah in its current form, too. It’s no industry secret that BioWare has outlived its life expectancy since the EA takeover. EA notoriously acquires and dissolves spirited, highly skilled studios once they stop being profitable (and sometimes even before that.) Unlike films, where franchises are just allowed to limp on indefinitely despite litanies of failures (think Terminator, Alien vs Predator and its ilk) games “enjoy” no such luxury. Beloved franchises are taken out behind the barn on the regular. BioWare’s productions in particular are large, grand, expensive, and alarmingly the past two have been both critical and commercial failures, vastly underperforming expectations. Mass Effect: Andromeda sold well initially, but proved to have no legs in the market; so much so, that all its DLC was cancelled and the title unceremoniously shelved. Anthem suffered a very similar and drastic fate. Whatever this upcoming Mass Effect title is going to be, it needs wide, iconic and lasting appeal.

Mass Effect can only be a flagship title.

There is no way to make a cheap Mass Effect game, and so all the stops are going to have to be pulled for this one. The studio learned a painful lesson when they left ME in the hands of their passionate, yet relatively inexperienced branch. Narratively, that puts the upcoming title in a very interesting place.

Mass Effect: Andromeda 2 is not a safe investment for a flagship title.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to rile up interest in the ME universe again just for the next offering to be a sequel to the broadly disliked and violently shelved Andromeda. Such a decision seems counterintuitive. ME:A seems like a very bad basis to hitch a project of such importance on.

In terms of Mass Effect, what is more iconic than Commander Shepard?

As discussed, the new title is going to need to capitalise on broad appeal and fan favourites to survive. Mass Effect: Andromeda’s premise of sidestepping the whole Reapers debacle by being pioneers seeding the stars in a new galaxy was an excellent idea. Unfortunately, that ticket has been used up. Doing that same idea again seems ill-advised at best. Fandom has been hungry for more Commander Shepard for almost eight years, now... Easily, they and the N7s are the most recognisable, iconic figures. But, and it is a krogan sized “but”...

However, the endings were not meant to be written around.

Whatever you think of them, each “candy flavour” has far-reaching consequences that narratively speaking would be intensely difficult to write a meaningful and interesting continuance for. I’m not saying it isn’t possible, but it is extremely challenging and I think the only way to go forward with that would be to piss off a lot of people, for lack of a better term. It presents several challenges: 1. Okay, so the protagonist is Shepard. How? We have to pick the only path forward from here, which is to say that only the Shepards who chose this particular colour candy ending can proceed. This essentially makes one of the decisions the “canon” ending, because you can only make a game based on one of these outcomes, realistically. Scope becomes too huge if you’re trying to include all the branches. So... we are faced with the age old problem that caused such outrage over the endings initially... a lot of people are going to feel like their choices didn’t matter. This said, there is a slight precedence for this in that one could get their squad and themselves all killed in Mass Effect 2, and only my man Joker is left. That’s a bit of a different situation, but it’s all I got. 2. Okay, so only the Shepards who chose x ending can load their save and continue on. Shepard doing what? N7s are an interesting concept and the Mass Effect universe is a very interesting one with many kinds of narrative possibilities, however, it’s a real pretty corner the writers have painted themselves into on this one, gotta say. This leaves only two other narrative possibilities: 1. The least interesting of all the options, a prequel. This presents challenges of its own, because in Mass Effect’s own lore, it’s not actually that long ago that humanity came into contact with the rest of the galaxy. You can either write about the First Contact War, which involves only humans and turians and shrinks the scope drastically so much so as to be disappointing and lose much of the colour of the universe... or you go so far back into the past that it’s the Protheans’ cycle, in which case there’s no opportunity for a human protagonist - which is a massive problem - and is narratively not very compelling because we know everyone and everything dies, unless you want to do something stupid like time travel. Mass Effect is already high concept enough, I don’t think time travel is a particularly good mechanic to introduce to the series... Unless it’s short-term and single-use, like Shepard has to stop themselves from making a choice in the third game’s era. Even then, that’s opening a big can of worms that I don’t think is a good fit for the series. 2. Mass Effect: Mandalorian The only way to retain the colourful scope, the human protagonist, and the aliens we’re familiar with is ditch the iconic N7 situation entirely and set the instalment maybe 5 or 10 years before Shepard’s time. This ensures humanity is still an up-and-coming member of galactic society, yet the whole Reapers business isn’t going on yet. They won’t go for N7s because as we know, Shepard was the first human Spectre, so the protagonist could be some kind of smuggler, criminal or vigilante rather than military. Touching on what fans loved so much about Mass Effect 2, which was the feeling of getting together your motley crew of misfits to do a real big job, your role could simply be to amass a group of space jerks to do a mission of much smaller scale than the Reapers’ plotline, but no less fun. I’m going to bet it would be called something like Mass Effect: Renegades (you can have that one for free, BioWare) and the player could be pitted against C-Sec and other galactic law enforcement agencies. This even gives the opportunity for small cameos, such as Garrus’ time in C-Sec, and other characters to appear in different points in their careers. Whilst it wouldn’t make up for the loss of the iconic N7 visual and idea, it might go some way towards helping broad appeal. Also just look at how successful the Mandalorian has been for Star Wars. The only reason I don’t like these ideas is because I don’t get to date Joker in any of them. Seriously, BioWare, I don’t care what you do, just let me date the damn scruffy pilot. Not a different one, that one. Specifically. You could get an impersonator if Seth Green doesn’t wanna do it. Say his voicebox got damaged, I don’t care, just something, please In all seriousness though, I’d love for Shepard to come back. My ideal situation has to do with only one of the endings being “canonised” and is that Shepard somehow survives. Then it’s about rebuilding the galaxy after the Reapers have gone. I’m sure there’s drama to be had in that. And it gives me the opportunity to hope for Shepard to finally, FINALLY hook up with Joker. Seriously it’s so narratively powerful they’re always there for each other come on give me this I think that option would be challenging to write and would involve a sacrifice of pissing some fans off quite a lot, but the fact is, Mass Effect needs to be saved if it’s going to continue on, and it might be possible to orchestrate a situation where Shepard passes the torch on to new characters at the end. That’s also a common theme in shows and games these days.

[aion-rsa]

MCU Phase 4 and 5: What the Multiverse Means for the Future of Marvel Movies and TV

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article contains Loki spoilers and potential spoilers for the wider MCU.

The ending of the Loki season finale made one pretty substantial change to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The introduction of a full multiverse, caused by Sylvie killing He Who Remains, is an enormous shift in the cosmogony of the MCU. And it opens up some fascinating story possibilities for Marvel’s film heroes. So what does the introduction of a full, unlimited multiverse mean for the future of the MCU?

Hopefully, everything. Literally.

There are obvious near-term implications to Loki’s finale. It answered questions that Spider-Man: No Way Home (with its purported multiversal Sinister Six) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness asked back when Loki first premiered. Specifically: “What do you mean there’s only one universe?” 

The beauty of time travel is that now, there is and has always been a full multiverse in the context of the MCU. Because whatever Kang War happened far in Loki’s subjective past (because the timelines were left to run wild when Sophie killed He Who Remains), the entire history of the MCU is now potentially subject to retcons as necessary. So the strong implication from Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse that that movie and all its various spider-people existed on Earths parallel to Tom Holland’s MCU can now be considered accurate, even though the movie came out years before Loki was even a twinkle in Kevin Feige’s master MCU spreadsheet. 

Time travel is a trip, man. It’s also beautiful. Literally anything is possible now. 

What Does the MCU Multiverse Mean for Marvel TV?

This sort of thing happens all the time in comics. The slang is “retcon,” comics-speak for retroactive continuity, where creators reach into their characters’ pasts to change something that impacts their present. 

Loki’s infinite multiverse sets up the entirety of Marvel history for any number of retcons that the folks in charge might deem necessary. It allows current MCU casts and crews to cherry pick what they liked from old MCU projects and fold them into this new normal. All those times Agents of SHIELD didn’t quite line up with what the movies were doing? The show was on an alternate Earth! Want Ghost Rider back without the TV baggage? Blame it on a Kang!

And grabbing the stuff that worked from old projects means porting in the good actors, too. That means people like J.K. Simmons, the Platonic ideal of J. Jonah Jameson, can continue playing the role across from three different Spider-Men, or Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio can show up as Daredevil and Kingpin in Spider-Man: No Way Home while Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings nukes Netflix’s Iron Fist continuity from orbit.   Wondering how Ms. Marvel could potentially deal with concepts from the Inhumans without ever mentioning that disastrous TV show? Now we know. 

Could the MCU Multiverse Retcon Marvel Movies?

This same ability to pick and choose the continuity most appropriate for the story applies to decisions the movies made, too. A full multiverse lets future filmmakers bring back Chris Evans as Captain America or Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow (OK…maybe not ScarJo) without burdening the MCU with yet another time paradox. As far as we’re concerned, pre-Marvel Studios curiosities like all those crazy old live action Marvel TV shows or Howard the Duck or Dolph Lundgren’s take on The Punisher are now officially canon somewhere within the multiverse.  

Phil Coulson could show up in Phase 6 leading a Squadron Supreme (just like in the comics), out for vengeance against the Avengers because they let his Earth 20085 brother die. Hell, if they really wanted to get dirty, Nick Fury could hire Deadpool to kill Coulson in retaliation, like in the comics. Wait, that was Secret Empire,wasn’t it? Never mind, don’t do that. 

Anyway, you get the idea.

The possibilities are as infinite as the imaginations of the writers, limited only by Kevin Feige’s patience/sense of humor. Don’t expect anything too crazy: the time travel solution in Avengers: Endgame was wild, but before Loki, that was far and away the most ridiculous comic book science the MCU had trafficked in. Typical MCU adaptations include much more modest nods to comics’ wackier elements – Eternals pending – like secret societies that had taken over SHIELD or Kurt Russell being Chris Pratt’s dad. So that ultra-maxi series that starts out a movie, moves into a TV show, has a comic tie in that directly crosses over with the show, and wraps up in Avengers 6 that we’re all hoping will come to pass is probably not on the horizon.

The Crisis on Infinite Earths Problem

An infinite multiverse doesn’t just mean possibility. It has a trap built in, too. The biggest multiverse story of all time, probably the one that set the template for future interactions with the concept, was DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths. That book set the standard for multiversal destruction, collapsing DC’s infinite comics timelines down to one single Earth and one single timeline. Gone were the separate Earths for the modern Justice League and the World War II Justice Society, replaced by one, unified timeline. And while the comic itself was a masterpiece, miraculously balanced by Marv Wolfman and beautifully drawn by George Perez; what it wrought on the DCU was 30 years of explainers why the Green Lantern of World War II still looked 35, or why Batman has only been operating for five years but went through six Robins in that time.  

The cautionary tale here is one of inward looking stories versus expansionary choices. Post-Crisis DC retcons were about fixing problems the writers and editors perceived with the new timeline, and not about telling the best story they could with the characters and continuity they had. This is an easy trap for a new, expanded (but not all the way expanded) MCU to fall into. There are key pieces of the comics that haven’t been ported to the films yet. 

The Fantastic Four

The temptation is likely huge to use this new, beautiful, infinite multiverse to introduce the Fantastic Four and the X-Men to the MCU. That’s probably half of a good idea.

The cosmogony of the multiverse is ingrained in who the Fantastic Four are. Their story begins as explorers of the unknown – Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Ben Grimm, and Johnny Storm are bombarded with cosmic radiation after an unauthorized space launch. That origin is very of the time when they were created, and would probably hit different now when the only unauthorized space launches are led by giant assholes. So why not take a page from the end of Secret Wars and have them get their powers exploring the new multiverse? It makes so much sense to do it that way that one is almost suspicious of this entire retcon. But that doesn’t make it any less cool.

The X-Men in the MCU

While introducing the Fantastic Four to the MCU by saying they’ve been off exploring the multiverse would make a certain elegant sense, if Marvel tried to introduce the X-Men that way, it would be hugely problematic. 

The core concept of the X-Men is the mutant metaphor, the idea that mutants are hated and feared because of who they are. On a completely superficial level, this is nonsense: what’s the difference between Cyclops’ eye blasts and Captain Marvel zapping Kree ships with fist beams? Why are mutants singled out for scorn and bigotry when someone like Doctor Strange has MUCH more terrifying abilities?

The difference is the idea that mutants are humanity’s destiny. There’s no concern that the majority baseline human population is going to someday be replaced by handsome super-soldiers or radioactive Catholic lawyers. But that genetic distinction – the idea that Magneto and Apocalypse and Pixie and Skids all share a distinct identity, while Captain America and Daredevil and Dr. Druid and Tigra do not – creates tension that allows real world out groups to superimpose their struggles onto X-Men comics and makes them infinitely relatable.

As superficially attractive as the idea of plopping the mutants on their own parallel Earth might be (and trust me, this definitely seems like the simplest justification for keeping Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool in the MCU while jettisoning anything else that is less appealing for audiences or studio execs), putting the mutants on their own separate Earth strips that struggle from the story and makes them just another cape crew.

Worse, using the multiverse as justification that suddenly mutants are here because they came from a parallel timeline disrespects the marginalized people who identify with the X-Men who, like left-handed people, have been here the whole time. Whether society noticed or not.

The Sony Spider-Man Problem

What keeps me up at night about the new Marvel multiverse is the Spider-Man family. The Marvel/Sony relationship has always been…complicated. 

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While the new multiverse provides creators with endless storytelling opportunities that could expand the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it also sets up an easy out for the studios to separate the Spider-Man movies from the rest of the MCU. Cleaving off the Spider-family movies wouldn’t be great – I don’t need to be reminded of complicated business deals while I’m at the movies. Dedicating all of a future Spidey movie to explaining why Pete isn’t in the master MCU and can’t talk about Iron Man anymore would almost certainly be a nightmare.

But these inward-looking continuity fixes are the types of stories that Marvel, on page and on screen, has generally avoided (before you jump in the comments to shout “CLONE SAGA” please take into account how much work “generally” is doing in this sentence) with its big multiverse stories. Hopefully they’ll keep making those wise decisions going forward.

The post MCU Phase 4 and 5: What the Multiverse Means for the Future of Marvel Movies and TV appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2Vqw7iX

[holographic-chogi]

Protector pt.15/?

Author: holographic-chogi

Pairing: fem!reader x skz

Warnings: minor sexual content, mentions of abuse. Please let me know if I’ve missed anything!

A/N: I’m not entirely sure if anyone is still around (I’ve taken quite a long hiatus), but my laptop is back and in pristine condition, so I’m planning to continue updating protector. I would love some feedback if anyone has any! And friendly reminder, the Taeil in this story refers to the Taeil of Block B, not NCT.

Summary: a virus has wiped out most of humanity, and society has collapsed. People survive in groups where they live in constant fear and a struggle to survive. Women were the primary victim of the virus, leaving few behind. You are one of the few, kept in secret since the beginning. However, you’ve just been caught.

Masterlist

You reckon it’s about November now.

As you watch the scenery through the car window, you notice the rusted leaves and the first signs of snowfall. Not enough yet to gather on the ground, but soon.

The silence inside the car was suffocating. Unlike the old, worn truck that the boys would always drive around, Jiho drove a Sedan. You were stuck in the passenger’s seat beside him.

Did you believe Changbin and Minho? After all, you’ve known Jiho much longer. You remember when he was just the boy next door, playing basketball in the back alongside your brother.

That’s right...they were close. You had almost forgotten, due to the shocking nature of what you had just been told, but you remember now. You remember the days where the three of you walked side by side to get ice cream. You remember Jiho applying to your brother’s university, unwilling to go anywhere he wasn’t.

You remember Jiho holding your brother as he sobbed about whichever girl just broke his heart. You remember how he gently rubbed his back, murmuring little affirmations to keep him calm but never speaking over him.

It reminds you of how Jiho treated you when this had all started.

Subtly, you sneak a glance at the man in question. Like you had previously observed, he was much thinner now. Tired. Maybe he was a little more erratic now, but you have no idea what he’s gone through since you’ve been gone. Sure he’s different, but he is your family.

“We’re almost there, Y/N.” he says, keeping his eye on the road.

Caught off guard, you stumble over your words. “O-oh, cool.” you pause, “I wasn’t trying to rush you or anything…”

He doesn’t respond at first, his eyes still on the road, but eventually he glances at you. “You seem nervous. Why?”

Your own gaze snaps back to the window, and you shrug, hoping he can’t see the panic on your face. “A little bit, but just to meet your group.”

“It’s late, you don’t have to meet them right away. You can get some rest and meet everyone in the morning.”

You nod, still feeling his eyes on the back of your head. You keep telling yourself you trust him, but why do you still feel so uneasy?

The car came to a halt just outside the opening to an old nature trail, and wordlessly, Jiho got out of the car. You scrambled behind him, getting out and shutting the door quietly.

“Is this the way to camp?” You asked, slinging the backpack with your few belongings over your shoulder, “Are you guys in tents or…”

He looked back at you briefly, “Some of us, only the newcomers.”

You nod in understanding, “So I’ll be in a tent then?”

He chuckled, showing the most amount of emotion he’s shown on the trip thus far, “Of course not, you’ll be indoors.”

The walk was long. Oddly long. Your legs were sore as you tried to keep up. Perhaps you hadn’t been keeping track correctly, but it almost seemed like you had been walking in circles.

You could’ve sworn you remembered that sign.

“Jiho, I don’t mean to nag, but are we almost there?”

He stops, and his whole demeanor changes as he turns to look at you with doting eyes, “are you tired?”

You hesitate, unwilling to complain, but you knew he’d know better. “A bit, but I can keep going.”

He smiled warmly, “I could carry you the rest of the way if you’d like, you could even get some shut-eye.”

You won’t deny it, getting off your feet would be nice. Besides, you want to keep Jiho in this sweet mood that’s suddenly reappeared. You don’t want to seem ungrateful. “S-sure, if it isn’t that much trouble.”

He beams, and you do your best to muster a smile back. Odd, you can’t explain why the smile doesn’t come naturally to you.

He walks behind you and you realize that he wants to carry you in a bridal style.

Just like Changbin did. The day Jiho ditched you.

“Actually, would it be okay if you carried me piggyback? I don’t mean to be picky, I just have a bad shoulder.” You lie, but it’s easier than the truth. You don’t want anyone else to hold you the way Changbin does. Or did.

You notice the brightness leave his eyes slightly, but he stretches his smile even wider. It almost appears forceful. “Sure, of course.”

Your grip on him is slightly loose as he trudges along. You keep telling yourself you love him, he’s like family, almost like a second brother, but it doesn’t keep the nagging suspicion at bay. And you hate yourself for it. Eventually, the pull of sleep conquers all, and your eyes fall to a close.

The first thing you notice when you wake up, is that it’s morning. You quickly shut your eyes, not yet willing to process a new place. You know you’re in a bed, the sheet and single blanket slightly rougher than you’d grown accustomed to, but you weren’t one to complain. You wiggled your toes, noticing your lack of shoes and socks. You could also tell you were indoors, from your quick glance earlier and the lack of wind.

Finally, you open your eyes. Wood walls again, but this was not a bedroom. The walls are covered in framed butterflies, each one pressed between panels of glass. Your bed was awkwardly placed beside what appeared to be someone’s old desk, still covered in papers, a clip board and various desk toys. You could tell based on the scrapes on the wood paneled floors and squares of discoloration in the carpet that there had been more furniture, it must have been moved recently.

You definitely didn’t feel as brave as when you woke up in the farmhouse. You remember how brave you were, instantly instantly exploring the old place. You chuckle as you remember almost giving Felix a heart attack in the kitchen.

But then you feel a pang of nostalgia as you remember the breakfast he made you. And how he talked you down from your initial fear, making you feel safe and welcome.

You flinch as the door opens, and a man steps in. The expression on his (you’ll admit it, kinda handsome) face is bored at best, and you don’t exactly approve of his decision not to knock.

“Hello? Can I help you?” You ask pointedly, pulling the blankets up to your chin. You were still wearing your tank top, but you wanted to be dramatic.

Wait.

You had been wearing two shirts and a jacket on top of this. Someone stripped you down.

“Hello? Earth to Y/N?”

You snap out of your thoughts, and focus back on the mystery man. “Y-yeah?”

His tone continues to be as careless as his expression. “Breakfast. I’m supposed to take you there.”

You nod, carefully removing your covers before trodding behind him, and as the two of you emerge from the office, you are led directly outside. It seems that the office is the only room in the cabin you had been staying in. The surrounding area outside is a forest, but to your confusion, there’s no other surrounding buildings.

“Where is everyone else?”

The man simply scoffed, his voice pure poison, “You get your own little den, since apparently you’re too good to sleep outside with the rest of the newbies.”

You don’t bother responding, this man clearly doesn’t like you, and you doubt you could make any progress with him. However, you took notice of his words, and you can’t help but believe them. Is Jiho really keeping you hidden away?

Just like he did at the cell block?

---

Eventually, the two of you come across several tents littered across what assume is an old campsite. There are three cabins, two small and one large, and two long picnic tables at the center of the site, which are currently packed with people. While no one has eaten yet, there are several unopened cans and defrosted packages still dripping with residual condensation.

The sound of chatter is almost deafening, but it completely ceases as soon as the two of you are in view. You recognize Taeil from the cell block, staring daggers into you.

“Took you two long enough. Did our precious Y/N sleep in?” His voice is thick with hatred, sending a chill down your spine. You much preferred the carelessness of the man who woke you up.

The man in question pushes you forward, roughly. “Go to the big cabin, the boss is waiting.”

You simply gulp and nod, shrinking into yourself as you speed walk past the picnic tables, feeling eyes all over you, all the way until you make it through the cabin doors.

But somehow what’s waiting for you makes you even more uncomfortable.

There’s a single table set for two, with freshly cooked meat and eggs, much nicer food than what everyone else was provided. There’s a man stationed beside it, and his look of pity only makes your heart beat faster.

“He’ll be down soon. You’d better sit down fast.”

Taglist (lol it’s only one person, but just lemme know if anyone wants me to add them): @leetaemintrashnumber1

[elaz-ivero]

The Worldbuilding Diaries- Chapter Five; Fantasy Languages Part One

Languages are an integral and crucial part of how we as a species connect, communicate and is susceptible to cultural evolution, it develops with the people who carry it and can be built on an already established language or be sprung out of a desire to teach beyond simple mimicking. 

It’s important to understand that implementing a fantasy language into your work isn’t as easy as mixing up the English alphabet and trying to find a word that sounds nice, your readers will be able to gauge whether your language includes things like unique phrasing, conjunctions and vowels. What you should aim to create is a conlang, a constructed language, elvish is an example of a conlang, a real language created through artificial means. 

First here are some important definitions; 

Language; the words, their pronunciation and the methods of combining them used and understood by a community. 

Accent; an effort in speech to stress one syllable over adjacent syllables 

Dialect; a regional variety of language distinguished by features of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation from other regional varieties and constituting together with them a single language.

Jargon; The technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group. 

Language is a large topic hence why this diary entry has been split into two parts, here we’ll discuss how languages originate and how you can evolve your culture and language simultaneously through understanding the process, sound theory and how to charecterize a group of individuals using their language and how biology can affect how language is spoken. 

Language originates when people, or intelligent life forms need to pass on information or discuss concepts beyond simple sounds, imitation and hand gestures, it’s important to understand that there must be an observable and instant benefit to your group if they use language for modern humans it allowed us to perfect tool making and make plans before executing hunts, leading to more food and an increased rate of survival. If your fantastical group is nomadic and isolated, hardly coming across another of their species they may not have ever needed proper or intricate communication and hand gestures and simple phrases might have worked just fine. 

Langauge is also diverse and I encourage you to listen to music and audio of the hundreds of spoken languages around the world, you’ll hear distinct differences in tone and pronunciation, for example, you might notice that a lot of northern languages use more rushed breaths, the mouth opens wider when speaking some African languages use clicking sounds as a substitute for words and these differences could help inspire some raw and new originality in your work.

For example, in one of my own fantasy languages, Nyefis , every word is spoken in two parts, Nye...Fis because the cultural group it originates from had to because of the protective gear in their mouths protecting them from the harsh arctic winds could only keep their mouths open for so long, words had to be spoken in two breaths and the words tend to be quite short until cultural evolution occurs and the group’s ancestors travel down the mountain to a warmer climate and explore literature and art more, later words associated with these things are longer and more romantic. 

By understanding how language originates you can also explore how your society originated and understanding how language dies will help you establish how fragile/well preserved the language in your story is. Has a language been outlawed due to war, is slang allowed or frowned upon, is everyone allowed to learn the language or can only a select few speak it? What birthed your language and what could possibly kill it?

Now you have your origin, what exactly is the language, if you choose to make your own alphabet (good luck making up over 20 new sounds) or use a pre-established one understanding how sound can indicate a culture or personality is interesting. I split my languages into three main types, light, harsh and medium. Light languages are built on soft sounds, H’s and S’s, whispered through pursed lips and delicately spoken, a lot of romantic languages play with lighter sounds, using o’s and frequently a persons’ pitch gets higher as they near the end of a word. By formulating a language using softer, sweeter, song-like tones and sounds the reader might already associate it with, civility, education, history, royalty.

Harsh languages are formulated with harsher sounds, k’s, t’s and q’s, it snaps on the tongue and you might notice a lot of ‘villainous species’ languages are either very huffy and low or sharp and loud this is because these sounds immediately convey anger, hostility and harshness. 

Medium Languages are a middle ground with both harsh and soft tones, it can be kind sounding or cruel and is open to interpretation. I like to choose the primary sounds of my language based on its origin, if the language originated from a hot climate it’ll likely be softer and shorter whereas if it originates from a harsher, survival against mother nature type climate it’ll be colder with stronger tones and sounds and include longer words. 

Treat your language like an art piece, chose the tones and shades carefully, did your people have the time to sit and chat and have long conversations or did planning have to be quick and concise and long words that mean several sentences had to be created. 

Biology is...important, human mouths are structured in a way that allows us to create a variety of sounds and yet some people struggle to roll their r’s or pronounce languages outside of their own, is their mouth structured differently? Nope, when we speak our mother tongue we cycle through muscle movements and tongue placements natural to us, pronouncing something differently forces us to figure out how to replicate the sound this is what leads to original accents poking through. If your society involves unique species that aren’t human clones with horns or longer ears think about their biological makeup, if they have fangs does that affect how they can open their mouths, can they whistle through one side of their mouth and that is a stand-alone letter in their language? For example, in my story I have a fantasy race that have black teeth which are shaped in a way that they have diastemas (gaps in their teeth) they can whistle through, a long whistle is a calling the equivalent of ‘come here’ or ‘follow me’, a short whistle is the equivalent of saying, ‘uhhhhhhhh’ its a thinking sound, a, please give me a moment I’m thinking. This is because they talk so much and so quickly they use this as a quick easy way to communicate to others without having to fully open their mouths. 

Think about other ways your species could communicate and how they could integrate that into your language, is a breath through the noise a way to breathe out after speaking for a long-winded period of time, is your language a mix of verbal and physical ques like signing or facial expressions. In order to avoid menial ‘small talk’ do the people wear necklaces with their name, parents and occupation on it so that they and a stranger can talk about what’s more important? 

Part 2 coming soon; 

Enjoy creating, there are so many amazing resources out there including the official conlang website https://conlang.org/resources/ 

Bye for now, -E

[sambinnie]

1. On bank holiday Monday I woke two of the housemates at 4.15am, and we made a pan of hot chocolate and opened the door to hear the dawn chorus. One of them sensibly remained on a chair in the garden, insulated against the early May morning with a duvet and blanket and thick onesie; the other walked out with me, into the dark, and we tramped the streets together, along the silent pavements, towards the river and fields.

We discovered that a large ivy-covered tree is home to a bat colony, members of which flapped silently about our heads in their haste to return before full dawn. A cuckoo was audible across the water. A starling clicked its beak and jittered up and down the branch. The housemate called me a boomer.

Of all the odd things I miss from last year, it’s the silence of the roads that is the greatest loss. At 6 o’clock in the morning there would be almost no traffic at all; now the birds are almost drowned out by the constant roar, even some distance away. Whether it’s hormones or poor emotional processing or a rational reaction to a damaged world, I feel angry at the traffic. I’m not saying it would necessarily be a 100% smooth process, but I do wish the world could be run by peri-menopausal, menopausal and post-menopausal women for a year or two. Just to see.

2. I am still obsessed with Orlando Wood’s short book Lemon (I was banging on about it back in February), and am so grateful to have so many people in my life who care about those same ideas. We’re in a left-brain cycle of culture at the moment, he explains: the left brain has a tendency to “isolate parts from the whole and to see them in the abstract… It likes to break things up into smaller parts, to categorise, and therefore favours the familiar, consistency, repeatability and predictability”. It also “prefers to see things in terms of simple and linear cause and effect. It prizes utility, power and control, and its ability to abstract and isolate things from their context enables it to manipulate the world”. What’s that you say? Wider cultural discourse and rights of individual groups, inability to have dialogues about, you say? Mmm. 

My favourite part of the book is when Wood breaks down two adverts: Heineken’s ‘Water in Majorca’ from 1985, and GoDaddy’s 2018 ‘Make Your Own Way’ ad. Remember that? No, me neither. ‘Make Your Own Way’ is full of colourful images, isolated people, or tiled with images of themselves to make a ‘conveyer belt’ effect, and clean-face words which could be applied to almost any product or company (watch it to cure your insomnia/trigger a panic attack); everything is buzzword-y, inspirational, keynote, statement, unilateral, and utterly, utterly devoid of humour, humanity, or engagement. 

One of the most striking things about Wood’s ad breakdown is that, once you’ve read it, you can’t stop noticing how in, say, three ad breaks within an hour-long programme, there might be one advert at most which doesn’t fit this left-brain pattern. Adverts for products as diverse as cars, period reusables, white goods, clothing catalogues, insurance, snack food, and supermarkets all, to some extent or another, fit the mould: bright images, little human connection, bland Instagram visuals, large slogans, spoken-wordlessness (better for the global market), a vague puff of do-gooding, and absolutely no wit at all. The only one I’ve seen recently attempting anything different is Maltesers, about a breastfeeding mother and her mother-in-law, which I admired for the milk-leak and loathed for the Hahahaha, aren’t women awful to each other?.

It’s draining to imagine the flat meetings and endless audience segmentation that enabled this ad trend: this sector engages on social media in the evenings and this demographic prefers a friendly looking home and our audience here is more about food as a pleasure. I’m loathe to break it to them, but for all that laser-focused research you are all making the same ads. And as Wood exposes so brilliantly, those ad campaigns are costing more and more to receive less and less engagement. Congrats, lads. 

3. Speaking of left- and right-brain world views, as so often happens this episode of Hidden Brain popped up serendipitously, with the wonderful host Shankar Vedantam interviewing Iain McGilchrist about his 2010 book The Master and His Emissary. It’s just over 45 minutes and is worth every second — McGilchrist is so clear and insightful about how to tell what type of brain is leading at any given time, what we lose in a left-brain society, and what we need to do about it. (I went back and checked and only then saw the book is in Lemon’s bibliography. Bliss.) 

4. For various reasons, a small toilet room here has been stuffed with balloons for the last week. It’s absolutely staggering both how not one of us thought to remove the balloons, instead bobbling through them to reach the facilities at any given hour of night or day, and also how immensely relaxing it is to go in there since they’ve been removed and humanely destroyed (I assume). It’s A Squash and a Squeeze in action, a life philosophy I cling to pretty robustly and find pays dividends. A housemate pointed out recently that whenever they are travelling in my car, they play a game to see if they can ever see another car in worse condition, and they say they never, ever can. It’s the Squash and a Squeeze philosophy that, in part, enables me to drive the dented, rusting, bubbled, scratched, lichen-furred, beloved piece of garbage I do, having previously had no driving license for almost two years after my seizure. It’s such a delight to drive any car at all. 

5. We’re rewatching Ghosts, which of course I recommend, and I suddenly realised that the Captain (Ben Willbond) is the speaker of possibly my favourite newspaper-based gag in the entire run of The Thick of It. Please watch all of Ghosts and all of The Thick of It, then perhaps The Death of Stalin? All thoroughly excellent, and the latter two contain my favourite kind of Muriel’s Wedding-type comedy, where I am tearfully wheezing with laughter one moment, then gaping with discomfited horror the next. 

6. I made Nigel Slater’s cardamom-spiced rice pudding this weekend, (although I times everything by 1.5 except the rice, which I up to 200g) and it was as good as always, if I say so myself. Cardamom, like capers, coriander, and pistachios, is an ingredient I’ve only come to love as an adult — I often long to make cardamom buns but am in such an emotionally entangled relationship with my sourdough starter that I never have yeast in the house, so have to rely on my favourite local coffee shop for a hit every now and again. If someone wedges themselves against the fridge door this weekend, I might attempt these. 

[soyosauce]

Cyberpunk 2077: Is This To Be An Empathy Test?

Cyberpunk 2077 is an adaptation and extrapolation of the popular tabletop pen-and-paper role-playing game Cyberpunk, originally published in 1988. The video game uses an extrapolation of the setting and Interlock system, translated to video game format.

When I finished the game, credits rolled. And rolled. And rolled. More than 15 minutes went by.

Now, days later, as I reflect on more than 70 hours of playtime, Cyberpunk 2077 feels like many people have had their hands in the pie. Its strengths and weaknesses stem from its massive ambition, marketing, and promises.

Different Experiences

I played CP2077 on a Ryzen 7 3700x with 32 gigs of RAM and an RX 2700 GPU. I was able to get around 35 FPS at 1440p without noticeable drops (except when looking in mirrors), and I played on ultra-settings without ray tracing on. I began playing it with the rest of the PC consumers with the day 1 patch.

As a crafted experience, I can say that it is the most impressive looking game I've ever played, and my playthrough seems to be a fortunate one, with maybe a handful of glitches or bugs across the entire 70 hours. None of which were remotely game-breaking. I was never unable to progress in the story. I never had a crash. The most annoying thing I experienced was sometimes crosshairs from a gun would continue to stay onscreen after it was holstered.

I mention this because I think a major component of why I come away with a positive experience is because my computer could deliver the intended experience. And Cyberpunk 2077 is unrivaled in its execution of a funneled narrative. Characters and environments have never felt more genuine and cinematic.

The sound design is some of the best I've heard, and it's perfect in every aspect of the game. From the sound of a throaty exhaust to the scraping of metal-tipped hands against hardwood, the sound is superb and adds to the immersion.

 The World

With a setting as old as Cyberpunk, there will be consumers who are familiar with the setting and have a grasp on the worldbuilding. For the uninitiated, however—of which, I think most customers will be—the aesthetic and gameplay elements the marketing team used in advertisements will be the primary hook. The game doesn’t go out of its way to communicate that it is anything more than that, either.

What was most compelling about Night City was the meticulous detail and care devs clearly put into every nook and cranny of the city. Distinct and disparate, no part of it feels reused or like its filler. It is the most gorgeous and well-realized environment I've encountered in a video game.

Yet the gangs, fixers, and side jobs located within it feel one dimensional when viewed from a macro, worldbuilding perspective.

Typical fixer missions are varied enough and have different small bits of story, but usually just elucidating that specific mission and its characters. You’ll find little bits of lore some of the time, which augment the siloed stories, but often don’t give a wider context to help situate the faction you’re interacting with.

The gangs seem to have a central theme, but I never learned why they were actually there from a worldbuilding perspective, beyond the fact that the game wants you to be looting and shooting.

Culturally, the gang elements are too often a pastiche and don’t feel real. They have scripted lines that are often dehumanizing and feel unrealistic. Some of them don't even make any sense. They'll find a dead body and start yelling for you to come out, "cunt", or some other misogynistic pejorative. How do they know it's a woman? Making them all say and act that way feels so cheap, encouraging you to take them out because they're demonstrably “bad” people. And it doesn’t matter what kind of mission it is. Context doesn’t matter.

With the bits of lore you’ll find all over the place (often repeated), it feels like a missed opportunity to not humanize and characterize the gang identities as a whole; even if you are spending most of your time mowing them down, at least you’d come to understand why the city is the way it is and what its general makeup is better than just knowing which gang claims which area of the city.

The world feels overly concerned with aesthetics that the player never gets context for, so it feels like a caricature used for aesthetic purposes only.

For instance, Arasaka, the megacorporation controlling/running Night City, has a highly traditional, tyrannical, Japanese businessman who has had his life extended with cybernetics. He’s over one hundred years old and controls Arasaka with an iron fist. The inference on my part is that locations in Night City with heavy Asian aesthetics are there because of this megacorp’s influence. But it still feels strange because, in other lore given, the city has been run by other corporations not that long ago and had other cultural influences asserted. So why is Little China, Japantown, and Kabuki a weird pastiche and the only place that seems to assert its cultural influence on the city? When you enter other areas, they don’t look like they’re trying to recreate foreign cultures. Is it because of the Arasaka influence? Possibly, but I never found any lore that explained it. Visually, this aesthetic dominated my playthrough.

The result is a siloed microworld that feels like it might be there simply to justify some of the predominantly Asian gangs, who seem to be basically just cyberized yakuza and come up fairly often in fixer missions. The main story also springboards off some of these locations, so the game really wants this look to make an impression on the player.

When you explore in-depth, all of the interactable, consumable portions of the city have a faux quality because you can only look at them. Sometimes you can buy food from a couple of vendors and clothes, but everything exists solely to be interacted with in a hyper-specific way, rather than extrapolated from a perspective divorced from what would be merely aesthetically interesting and actually realistic enough to let V feel like a character that is a part of this world.

You can sleep with and date a few different people, depending on your gender presentation, but the relationship's extent beyond that varies. There are some texts between characters, but you don't get to, say, go home and do anything with them. Their interactions with you in person are the same as though you had phoned them.

You can talk to people on the sidewalk, but they have a regurgitated one-liner and then go back to what they're doing. You can't go up to a gang member and talk to them because once they see you, they’ll attack you if you get too close.

The only things that feel genuinely next level are the prescriptive story elements. And that's okay! It just doesn't jive with the level of detail or how much you think you'll be able to interact with things when you first see them. Marketing makes it seem like the world at large may be something you can interact with, but those all end up being the curated narratives.

Because the worldbuilding framework is from a first-wave cyberpunk perspective, unfortunately, pitfalls like techno-orientalism are prevalent.

The themes around the commodification of those things that make us human, from our body, faith, and art, are all interesting themes present in the genre—but here they are skewed toward fetishizing minorities and subcultures, just as first-wave cyberpunk texts tended to do.

V is ostensibly a cyberpunk and it follows that they would be a part of the same subgroup as the minorities who are underrepresented and lacking nuance in the CP2077 world, but V is actually traversing the story with their only integration into a subculture being that they’re a mercenary. With few exceptions, they all seem to not really share punk values, either. Some take jobs from corps (you certainly can if you want), some don’t like the corps but aren’t particularly anti-establishment or pro direct action. Most just seem to hang out at a bar. You don’t hear about what they do on the news or in the world. You don’t get jobs from fixers that are ideologically aligned with being punk. And you don’t integrate with any other subcultures when out of the main narratives.

The exploitation of people and the world's general themes and sensibilities still feel firmly rooted in the late 80s, early 90s. It is not aware enough to fully realize an actual subculture or even the dynamics of criminal elements in the city, so it frames the story from a mainstream perspective for mass appeal.

The problem is that, with so many people consuming the game, this becomes the default that those consumers will adopt. It has a responsibility precisely because it is so popular and will become a part of the general intellect. Rather than be progressive with its themes and push mainstream depiction of cyberpunk to something in line with what can be found in literature today, it is regressive.

Ultimately, the worldbuilding is the most disappointing aspect of Cyberpunk 2077. The main narratives, however, are a different story.

 Story

Arguably, the most important thing for a role-playing game experience is the story. In 2077, you play V, a mercenary on the edges of society trying to make it big in Night City. In classic cyberpunk genre fashion, a chance at a big score drops into your relatively inexperienced hands, and you seize it. A heist is planned; it doesn't go as planned—and Johnny Silverhand, a long-dead anarchist and misogynistic jerk—basically a proto-typical embodiment of 70’s rock ethos—ends up in your head. He has his own agenda, and V can either go along, get along, or make their own decisions about what to do next. For the most part.

The story beats are as meticulously crafted as corners of Night City. The character animations are the most advanced I’ve ever seen—: they’ll smoke a cigarette for a portion of the conversation, stub it out, then get up and pace nervously while delivering their lines. Their emotions will be written on their face and flow naturally. They'll touch items or other people in the scene. They look and act like real people and sound like it too.

There’s a 4-part storyline with a trans character in which you just won’t ever learn their story unless you talk with them and earn their trust. You can go through the whole narrative and help them out (or not), and never learn much about them. But if you spend the time and ask questions, you'll always get something from these storylines, even if they initially seem to be just another gig on the map.

Because the game's worldbuilding, including in-game ads, is blind to its own defaultism, stories like this are absolutely vital. I wish there were more of them and I hope the free DLC forthcoming are things like this.

2077 is populated with genuine, human moments. They communicate why you should care about the city and the people you encounter. And most importantly: these moments define V as much as the main storyline.

Whether intentional or purely a byproduct of how each facet of the game was developed, these stories augment the play experience a tremendous amount.

What I remember most is finding out if Johnny can, and will, actually change or if he's just trying to manipulate me, discovering how my decisions alter the way he interacts with me, and going down a rabbit-hole, sex trafficking narrative that initially feels a bit too archetypical, only to have it morph into a multi-part story that rooted V's narrative in an emotional and impactful way.

These are the stories that you can actually, meaningfully change. And because I did them all before the main storyline, they all felt like they meshed well with my V’s overall story.

Of course, you could do the main story right away and then go back and do these side stories. I think the experience would be quite different because of the knowledge and relationship you have with Johnny at the end of the main story experience, though.

The main storyline has multiple endings; I've experienced four of them, and they all deliver fairly well on expectations. These endings do not consider anything that isn’t a main or side job, which is labeled as such in your log. Your relationships with the main characters do change the endings slightly, but they don't change the overall outcomes for V and Johnny. This made the game's main attraction for me the fleshed-out side narratives and a few other mysterious side jobs that crop up without a fixer giving them to you.

These other stories were more enjoyable because I felt like I really mattered and could actually mess them up. The main storyline is only preoccupied with whether or not you did X and, if so, you can see the Y ending. It felt like it had lower stakes.

 Conclusion

I do feel like 2077 is a new way to consume an immersive role-playing video game experience. It's unfortunate and unfair to many people that multiple promises the game makes cannot be fulfilled unless they can experience it on a particular platform (with a fairly sizeable amount of money in the investment). A decent computer to play it on is the best way, and it’s expensive if you want to max out absolutely everything. Next-generation consoles aren't even optimized for it yet. Last generation consoles are struggling. Crashes, bugs, poor textures, and framerates.

What is Cyberpunk 2077 when it can’t replicate the ideal delivery for its desired experience?

So much of what made the experience singular and noteworthy for me comes down to how life-like and human the people I came to care about the most in the game looked and acted. Take that veneer away, and the cracks in the façade appear.

Doing most of the side content before the main jobs gave my V a meta-narrative: they were a ruthless killer that would do pretty much whatever a fixer asked of them. Those were the expectations set by the world outside of the story. But then V morphs into a person confronting that life, questions who they want to be, and what it takes to thrive in Night City when you hit the main narratives. That’s why I had a positive experience. And that’s why I’ll return to the city and do things differently.

Ironically, Cyberpunk 2077's overall game experience relies on technology to build empathy between the player and the main cast. Yet, the world outside of the main narrative denies that same empathy to the denizens and factions it populates Night City with. If the platform you’re playing on can’t effectively utilize the demanding Red Engine developed for Cyberpunk 2077, the most likely outcome is an experience devoid of the only substantive thing it has to offer.

[revlyncox]

Origin Stories 2020

The stories we tell about our past affect the way we view the present and orient toward the future. This is true about the myth of Thanksgiving, stories we tell about  Ethical Culture's past, stories we tell about our individual journeys, and more. When we recognize the impact of origin stories, we can be intentional about how we tell them in the future and how they guide us to bring out the best. 

This Platform Address was written for the Washington Ethical Society by Lyn Cox, November 29, 2020. 

Has anyone seen the movie, Captain Marvel? You know I did. Back when going to movie theatres was a safe thing to do, I saw it in the theater. The nostalgia for the music of the mid-1990’s alone was enough to catch my interest. I don’t want to spoil it for those who are waiting for a quiet evening to watch it at home, so I’ll try to speak in general terms.

The movie opens with an interstellar super soldier named Vers, who is having trouble with memory, but nevertheless goes out on a mission with her team, part of the Kree empire. Throughout the movie, she learns more about where she comes from, and more about the origins of the conflict with the people she thought were her enemies. Once she has come around to a different understanding of who her people are, the personal qualities she has been criticized for are reframed, and she can draw from them as strengths. This revised worldview moves her to an entirely different sense of her mission in life, as well as a different sense of connecting and belonging.

The paradigm shift that the main character goes through in Captain Marvel reminds me of the power of origin stories. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves--as individuals, communities, and countries--affect how we reach out to others and what we think we’re capable of. As we reflect on this holiday weekend, we’re confronted with one version of the origin story of the United States, the one some of us were presented with as children at this time of year. That version of the story is infused with myths and half-truths, and depends on the erasure of the historical and contemporary perspectives of Native Americans, among other groups of people. Whether we are dismantling the settler-colonial narrative, incorporating new insights into our understanding of ourselves as a community, or finding personal empowerment in reframing our individual origin stories, returning to the stories about beginnings or turning points with open minds can help us reshape our future.

Whether we are speaking individually or collectively, origin stories matter. Events get baked into information we regard as fact, or perhaps legend. Left unexamined, these stories can divide people who need not be divided and disempower people who could be living fruitful, generous lives. It matters how we tell those stories. The inclusion of truths or half-truths, and which facts are emphasized or glossed over has an impact. In communal stories, whose perspective is centered makes a difference.The way we understand the narrative structure of the story is also a choice. The good news is that stories can be reframed, even within the bounds of verifiable facts. Origins are not destinies. We can rearrange the emphasis, lift up silenced voices, and find strengths that had previously been minimized. That’s what we’re talking about today. With regard to both individual and collective narratives, (1) Origin stories matter, (2) the way we tell origins stories matters, and (3) stories can be reframed.

Origin Stories Matter

Earlier, we heard an excerpt from a talk by Emily Esfahani Smith. She has done interviews and followed studies in positive psychology, first asking the question about what makes people happy, then shifting to the question of what helps people live meaningful lives. She said, “Creating a narrative from the events of your life brings clarity. It helps you understand how you became you.”

In her review of the available research (excerpt from her book on the TED talk website), she found that the stories people tell about the pivotal events of their lives can affect how they feel about themselves, their level of confidence or anxiety, and what behaviors they choose in the future as they subconsciously live by their stories. I’d like to add a caveat that not everything in our personal narratives is about perspective or attitude; sometimes a person’s anxiety or adaptive behaviors are shaped by oppression, trauma, or other circumstances. Even so, examining our lives for the agency and resilience that we do have gives us some extra tools and is worth a try.

When you add humans together to tell a collective story about the turning points of a community or a movement or a country, origin stories can have an even wider impact. Last month, I drew from An Indigenous People’s History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz when we discussed Christopher Columbus. In the introduction to her book, in reference to Thanksgiving, Dunbar-Ortiz wrote:

Origin narratives form the vital core of a people’s unifying identity and of the values that guide them. In the United States, the founding and development of the Anglo-American settler-state involves a narrative about Puritan settlers who had a covenant with God to take the land.

Then, in chapter three, Dunbar-Oritz picks up this thread again:

The United States is not unique among nations in forging an origin myth, but most of its citizens believe it to be exceptional among nation-states, and this exceptionalist ideology has been used to justify appropriation of the continent and then domination of the rest of the world.

In other words, Dunbar-Ortiz credits the mythological version of the Thanksgiving story, a particular version of the origin story of the United States, with fueling some of the worst behaviors of the United States and many of its citizens. A story that was framed to make heroes out of the Pilgrims and inspire patriotism has also inspired exploitation, theft, and violence.

Dunbar-Ortiz is not alone in this observation. James W. Loewen, in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American history Textbook Got Wrong, also unpacks the Thanksgiving story as an origin myth with devastating consequences.

Loewen says that, in the cases where the Thanksgiving holiday is observed without examination or critique, “the civil ritual” marginalizes Native Americans. That marginalization comes not only from perspective or emphasis, but from actual falsehoods that are re-told in mythic versions of the story. These false myths serve to reinforce what Loewen calls white “ethnocentrism.” He says that when textbooks promote this version of the story, they diminish the capacity of students to understand the culture they are in or how to relate to each other.

At the time of his original writing, the term white supremacy culture was not as widely in use as it is now, but it is apt in this case. The outdated version of the Thanksgiving story idolized the colonizers and erased the humanity of the Indigenous people they encountered. This is both a manifestation of and fuel for white supremacy culture.

We’re finding that, just as our personal origin stories can lead us to make choices so that we live by those stories, national origin stories guide our future behavior. Origin stories matter.

How We Tell Origin Stories Matters

Now that we’ve established that personal and collective origin stories can have an impact on our self-concept and our future choices, let’s talk about how we tell those stories. We have choices in the perspectives and events we emphasize, and in the shape of the narrative arc.

Earlier, we heard a passage from A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present by Howard Zinn, in which he draws an analogy between historians and mapmakers. Zinn is more generous toward mapmakers or cartographers than I would be, saying that the choices about what projections to use or what details to include in a map are mainly technical. I think maps are much more political than he implies in this comparison, but the point stands that both historians and cartographers have to make choices in conveying information. It is incumbent upon us to examine our purpose in making those choices, and to think about the impact of those choices. How we tell the story matters.

This is where the collective storytelling and the personal storytelling intersect. As we are figuring out how to tell our personal stories, we’re also trying to figure out how we fit into the larger picture. When we are not truthful in our collective stories, we make this task of fitting into the larger story much more difficult for everyone, especially those who have been marginalized. If we have the privilege and responsibility of telling a collective story, we should try to ensure that all of the people in that story are reflected as their whole selves. Incorporating multiple perspectives into our stories makes it easier for the community and for individuals to understand ourselves and to find meaning and purpose.  

My colleague Jone Johnson Lewis from the Riverdale Yonkers Society for Ethical Culture has demonstrated this beautifully in her research about the history and historiography of the Reconstruction era. She notes that narratives of the Civil War and the Reconstruction period that were taught in school for decades do not match the evidence. (Here’s her August 2 Platform Address as a guest at the New York Society.)

Starting in the 1920s, professional historians who were collectively known as the Dunning School were training school teachers to talk about the Civil War as a matter of “states rights,” despite the fact that all of the documents about secession referred to slavery, and the founding of the Confederacy did not allow states to have the right to opt out of slavery. This tradition referred to Reconstruction as a disaster, a burden placed on the South (meaning the white landowners of the South) by opportunistic northerners. The Dunning School presented an egregious misrepresentation of the facts of Reconstruction, and was part of perpetuating the idea that African American people were not capable of self-determination. This view lent support to voter suppression tactics such as literacy tests, and fed racist white resentment that is still an active force in politics today.

The deliberate revisions of the Dunning School were partly the work of David Saville Muzzey. Muzzey was not only a professor of history, but also an Ethical Culture leader. Muzzey wrote a history textbook that was heavily in use from 1927 to 1938, and was source material for textbooks for at least another generation. If we’re going to note the successes of Ethical Culturists throughout history in promoting justice, we also have to examine the ways that Ethical Culturists supported white supremacy culture. By learning from the mistakes of our kindred in the past, we can help prevent ourselves and our successors from repeating them.

According to Jone Johnson Lewis, part of Muzzey’s goal was to tell the story of the United States as a gradually unfolding arc of human rights. Acknowledging the initial flowering of human rights and democracy immediately after the Civil War--before the backlash against Reconstruction led to voter suppression, Jim Crow laws, and the great nadir of civil rights--didn’t work for Muzzey. Being honest about the steps forward and then backward did not match the shape of the gradual arc Muzzey was trying to fit history into, and did not comport with Muzzey’s racist views about what African American leaders and thinkers were capable of. He rejected evidence that did not fit his hypothesis, and because of that, generations of students were taught a false history of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

There are a couple of things we can learn here. We can learn that impact matters more than intention. We learn that stories about a community or culture should include the perspectives of all of the groups in that community or culture. Primary sources from the people who are most deeply affected are important in lifting up a complete history. In our local communities, we should be asking whose voices are missing.

As a point relevant to both collective origin stories and personal origin stories, sometimes the truth that is most important to tell does not follow a smooth narrative arc. Neither our individual lives nor our shared history necessarily follows a three-act structure or a linear path. History does not always make narrative sense even if the events follow a logical sequence of cause and effect. Trying to force our personal or shared history to follow a straight line might lead us to cut off important branches of truth.

Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson wrote about how this affects our personal stories in her 1989 book, Composing a Life. (Here’s Bateson in an episode of On Being with Krista Tippett.) She wrote that how we grow and change is less like building a linear brick wall and more like improvisational cooking or quilting, putting a life together with the bits and pieces we have in the time available. Noting that people who have been marginalized don’t have the luxury of being able to hold a singular focus, Bateson said that a non-linear art of living has equal dignity and grace.

How we tell our stories matters. It matters that we include truth. It matters when we include multiple perspectives in a collective story. It matters that we allow our stories to take their natural twists and turns. When it comes to our personal stories, we need not be ashamed when our journeys don’t follow a simple or well-recognized path. Meaning can arise from growth and learning, and we don’t always arrive at growth and learning by the direct route. Realizing that stories need not be linear helps to remind us that it’s not over until it’s over - we are not bound to keep going in what is now the wrong direction. Make some room. How we tell our stories matters.

Stories Can Be Reframed

A corollary to the idea that we can choose how to tell our origin stories is that, at any time, we can choose to reframe those stories. We are not stuck with narratives that are inauthentic. We can emphasize different events and different voices to help us figure out a path for the future.

Taking the myth of Thanksgiving as an example, if we are going to treat it as an origin story for the United States, we can reframe that story by correcting falsehoods and expanding the sources we consult.

In 1970, the Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoag People to select a speaker for a Thanksgiving event to mark the 350th anniversary of the English arrival at Plymouth Rock. Frank James, also known as Wamsutta, had to show the event planners what he had written. The organizers did not allow him to read it, and offered him a different speech, which he refused to read. Instead, Frank James gave his original speech on Cole’s Hill, next to the statue of former Wampanoag leader Ousamequin, to a crowd of supporters. This became the first Day of Mourning, now an annual event of the United American Indians of New England. It was a turning point in the Native American movement in the United States.

James’ speech included this acknowledgement of history:

It is with mixed emotion that I stand here to share my thoughts. This is a time of celebration for you - celebrating an anniversary of a beginning for the white man in America. A time of looking back, of reflection. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People.

Even before the Pilgrims landed it was common practice for explorers to capture Indians, take them to Europe and sell them as slaves for 220 shillings apiece. The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod for four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors and stolen their corn and beans.

James goes on from there, addressing more of the history of oppression against Native Americans, the way history was being taught in American schools, and the continued persistence and resilience of the Wampanoag and other Indigenous people.

Remembering that the English colonizers who arrived at Plymouth Rock were not innocent or peaceful, remembering that they committed theft and violence on the original inhabitants of the land both before and after the event that is remembered as the First Thanksgiving, means that we can no longer base a national identity on trying to emulate this origin story. It means we can’t pretend ignorance and wonder where it all went wrong when we look at the atrocities committed in the name of the United States in the intervening 400 years. But it also means we have a choice about what to do differently. We can commit to not repeating the past. We can learn to tell our stories differently. The history of Frank James and the first Day of Mourning is incorporated in materials for the 400th anniversary of the landing at Plymouth Rock. An origin is not a destiny.

Collectively, we are the authors of the future of our communities and our nation. Individually, as Emily Esfahani Smith reminds us, we are the authors of our own stories. As we heard earlier, “Your life isn’t just a list of events. You can edit, interpret, and re-tell your story, even as you are constrained by the facts.”

Just as with the process of updating our collective stories, reframing our personal stories may be hard, even painful. We will have to face uncomfortable truths. Yet out of those truths, we may find an ability to learn and grow, a sense of meaning and purpose, and capacity for acceptance and compassion that comes from whole-hearted experience. By changing the emphasis of our stories, we may find a call to service, or a desire to make amends, or a sense of connection with those who share a similar experience. The power to reframe our stories is in our hands.

Conclusion

The stories of our beginnings as individuals, as communities, and as a nation have power. They can move us toward compassion and connection, or they can move us toward division and disrespect. But that power is not absolute. We can take responsibility for comparing those stories with the available evidence, and for examining the story from a variety of perspectives. We can reframe a story as we learn from both mistakes and successes, seeking purpose amidst the patchwork of love and care that sustains the best in us and in those around us. May it be so for each and all.

[arcticdementor]

In the David Fincher produced, 2017 Netflix series, Mindhunter, two FBI special agents travel the country interviewing serial killers in the 1970’s. The series, based on the non-fiction book “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit” by John Douglas, chronicles the beginnings of advanced criminal profiling techniques developed by the FBI in response to a number of high profile, and gruesome crimes carried out during the era, beginning with the Manson Family murders of 1968. Throughout the show the fictional special agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench meet with frequent resistance from other law enforcement personnel as they attempt to unravel the minds of the serial killers they meet. Everyone from their bosses in the agency to the local police officers they encounter along the way express extreme discomfort at the thought of empathizing or attempting to understand the killers Ford and Tench interrogate. These men are just evil. There’s nothing more to it. Nothing can be learned from them. No insight can be gained. They’re simply, purely evil, and attempting to say anything more on the subject is an affront to the victims, their families, and to human decency and capital-J Justice in general.

Fictionalized though the series may be, in our own time, in the era of mass shootings, one doesn’t have to go far to find similar responses to this uniquely contemporary category of violent crime. Media coverage of the killers oozes sensationalized language that depicts them as dark, evil, twisted, vile, abhorrent, insane. The public, in internet comment forms across social media, offer up their thoughts and prayers, and inevitably, the discussion devolves into a debate on the second amendment and the merits of gun control as politicians and journalists quickly move to steer the national conversation to more politically fruitful areas in order to amass momentum in passing various pieces of long desired legislation targeting gun owners or the NRA. The killers themselves, their personalities, their motivations, their worldviews, the experiences that shape them, every time quickly slip through the cracks of the conversation and are forgotten long before their respective cases are ever brought to trial.

…

Over the course of hundreds of hours beginning in 1959, Ted Kaczynski, the future unabomber, participated in an intense psychological experiment conduced at Harvard by Dr. Henry A Murray. During World War II, Murray had worked for the Office of Strategic Services in developing personality assessment techniques designed to test potential recruits on how well they would endure interrogation and torture by the enemy. At Harvard, Murray went on to further develop his method, transforming it from a diagnostic assessment of mental anti-fragility, into the basis of a radical personality modifying procedure he hoped could be used to forcibly evolve human consciousness in order to prevent the nuclear annihilation he feared was inevitable in light of mankind’s petty national prejudices and self-interest during the period of the Cold War. Kaczynski was among his unwitting test subjects, and though his personal, radical Luddite beliefs would ultimately diverge from the kind of technocratic globalism Murray intended to inculcate in Kaczynski, in a strange way, Murray was also more successful than he could have possibly anticipated.

…

No case provides better evidence of this possibility than that of Adam Lanza, the 2012 Sandy Hook shooter. After years of denied requests, more than 1,000 pages of evidence relating to the Lanza case were finally released to the Hartford Courant in December of 2018. Lanza, who killed himself following the attack, left behind no manifesto. He had even taken the precaution of smashing his devices’ hard drives prior to the shooting. In the end hundreds of pages worth of Lanza’s writings were ultimately recovered by the police, and it’s only from these scattered fragments that his beliefs and opinions emerge. Like Holmes in the weeks and months leading to the Aurora massacre, Lanza was no stranger to psychiatric evaluation. Throughout Lanza’s entire life, from the age of 3, when he was first diagnosed with speech and developmental problems, he knew little else but the offices of therapists and counselors and psychiatrists. A rotating cast of mental health professionals drifted in and out of his life. They all recognized the so-called ‘warning signs’ all too well, but even with a lifetime’s worth of treatment, they completely and utterly failed to prevent his transformation into mass murderer.

…

Lanza goes even further, and characterizes the years of psychiatric treatment he received since childhood explicitly as abusive: “I was molested at least a dozen times by a few different adults when I was a child. It wasn’t my decision at all: I was coerced into it… What do each of the adults have in common? They were doctors, and each of them were sanctioned by my parents to do it. This happens to virtually every child without their input into the matter: Their parents sanction it.”

…

The United States spends more per capita on primary and secondary education than almost any other country. As of 2014 the U.S. is in the top 5, below only Switzerland, Norway and Austria. Despite this however, year after year, a majority of Americans report dissatisfaction with the quality of K-12 education in their country. Alternative education remains a persistent source of controversy within the public consciousness. Private schools, charter schools, school vouchers, homeschooling, all are topics that filter in and out of the national political conversation. Democrats, on the whole, maintain an unyielding support for the compulsory nature of public education in America, while practices like Homeschooling are largely written off as the exclusive province of religious fundamentalists and political separatists. The same goes for the diverting of public resources to charter schools by means of a tax exemption or credit. The argument that has formed over time to circumvent these controversial alternatives boils down to a single word: Socialization.

Public schools not only educate students in facts and skills, the argument goes, but also serve to socialize children by serving as a microcosm of the pluralistic, diverse society in which these students will one day have to live and contribute to. A private, all male school, for instance, will fail to prepare its students for the modern workplace, where they’ll have to cooperate and even take orders from female colleagues or superiors. Likewise, desegregation busing is required to ensure students experience a sufficiently diverse environment. When it comes to a wide variety of controversies in public education, the socialization argument continues to form the backbone of liberal resistance to conservative attacks on the public schooling monopoly.At the same time, as liberals defend the practice and theory of socialization, the scourge of bullying has, on-again off again, served as a cause célèbre among many of the same people. Since 2010, October has become National Bullying Prevention Month, a campaign by the non-profit PACER organization in coordination with companies like CNN and Facebook, among others. Television shows and documentaries have tackled the subject, and celebrities like Ellen regularly champion anti-bullying causes. But what is bullying but the core of Socialization? In a sense the two can almost be considered synonymous. Bullying is, after all, the school of hard knocks which children undergo to learn the complex, unspoken rules of social game playing. Socialization is about instilling conformity, and bullying remains the core experience for many children in learning about all the ways the deviate from the norm. When children are unresponsive to bullying, that’s when things are kicked up to the teachers and administrators and school counselors, and that same unpliability and unresponsiveness is re-conceptualized by well-meaning adults as developmental disorders.

In 1975 Autism was diagnosed in children at a rate of 1 in every 5,000. Today that number has soared to nearly 1 in 100. This has ignited a public controversy over the source or cause of what by every definition deserves to be called an public health epidemic. 75% of children diagnosed with Autism today are boys. There’s no need to go searching for a cause. Vaccines aren’t behind the explosion in Autism rates. Teachers and school psychologists are. School psychology today is a booming industry, one which the US Department of Labor identifies as having some of the best employment opportunities across the entire field of psychology. 75% of school psychologists are women, with an average age of 46. It is this same group of people most empowered to conduct psychological monitoring of children across the country, and over the last 30 years, they have come to classify a larger and larger percentage of young boys as having developmental issues, to the point where it’s not clear whether there is anything wrong with these children at all, or if school psychologists have simply written off a wider and wider range of behaviors which they find problematic or incomprehensible as constituting autism.

…

In 2013, a Texas teenager named Justin Carter was locked up for threatening a school shooting. Whether or not the threat was legitimate is another matter entirely. In a bout of online shit talking over League of Legends Carter wrote “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts…” in response to a quip by a fellow gamer calling him crazy. He quickly rejoined: “lol jk,” likely realizing the fact he could get himself in trouble saying such things. Whether or not it was a good idea for him to make such a comment is immaterial, what matters is the violent, disproportionate response that followed. A Canadian woman, thousands of miles away, reported Carter. He was arrested and locked in jail. Bond was set at half a million dollars, which his family couldn’t afford to pay. He languished in jail, was assaulted by fellow inmates, and then locked up in solitary confinement for his own safety. After 4 months in jail an anonymous donor paid to have Carter released on behalf of his family. The state dragged out the matter for years, delaying the trial as long as possible on tenuous grounds. In the interim Carter was banned from using a computer. It wasn’t until spring of 2018 that a plea agreement was finally reached and Carter was let off with time served.

This is the paranoid system which today we entrust with rescuing at-risk young boys. This is what stands between us and more school shootings. Never mind the fact that as this system has grown, it has only led to a rise in mass shootings. Maybe the real cause of such cases is not guns, or a failure to identify and treat students, maybe the cause is these same students, following a protracted process of isolation and attempted psychological modification, learning to play the part the system has assigned to them, that of the security threat. When schools spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on active shooter drills and security systems, isn’t it just wasted money until someone comes along and gives them an excuse to use it? The complicated apparatus of psychological surveillance and socialization that prevails among schools today is, like the TSA checkpoint at the airport, nothing more than an elaborate piece of (psychological) security theater, and theaters require drama, and more importantly, villains. People like Adam Lanza and James Holmes are certainly killers of the very worst kind, guilty of evil, but on a larger scale, their evil is a only a reflection of our own, of the perverse societal mechanisms we’ve developed to give ourselves piece of mind, regardless of the children that must be fed to the machinery for it to function.

[religioused]

Bigger God, Bigger Religion

Bigger God, Bigger Religion

by Gary Simpson

Isaiah 42:1-9 (KJV)

Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth; I have put my spirit upon him: he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles.

2 He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth. He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set judgment in the earth: and the isles shall wait for his law.

5 Thus saith God the Lord, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out of it; he that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein: I the Lord have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles; To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.

8 I am the Lord: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images. Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare: before they spring forth I tell you of them.

Acts 10:34-43 (KJV)

Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him. The word which God sent unto the children of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ: (he is Lord of all:) That word, I say, ye know, which was published throughout all Judaea, and began from Galilee, after the baptism which John preached;

38 How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.

And we are witnesses of all things which he did both in the land of the Jews, and in Jerusalem; whom they slew and hanged on a tree:

40 Him God raised up the third day, and shewed him openly; Not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead.

42 And he commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify that it is he which was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead. To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins.

Matthew 3:13-17 (KJV)

Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him. But John forbad him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?

15 And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered him.

16 And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

I recently purchased the prayer book Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. Given this church’s rich heritage of social justice, I think that I might need a prayerbook for extraordinary radicals. Common Prayer has a liturgy for every day of the year. January 12’s liturgy reminds us of an important event that took place on January 12. On this day in 1948, Gandhi began to fast to achieve peace in the Indian subcontinent.

Gandhi was influenced by Christianity. He often read the Sermon on the Mount. Ghandi decided to live out Jesus’ teachings in an effort to bring peace to the region.(1) On a day that we reflect on Jesus going into the wilderness to be baptized and to bring peace to humanity, we also reflect on Gandhi’s life. When Ghandi was in the wilderness of conflict, he strove to bring peace to an important region of the world.

To put the Gospel reading in context, I am going to refer to the passage in Isaiah that is part of our lectionary reading. Isaiah Chapter 42 is considered by many people to be a Messianic passage, a prophetic passage about Jesus, the gentle Messiah, who will not “break off a bent reed or put out a dying flame.”(2) This gentle Messiah is predicted to bring justice to the world.(3) The gentle Messiah is important, because Jesus is considered to be the ultimate revelation of God to humanity. Some people might picture the passage in Isaiah as saying that God will bring justice without yelling at people on street corners and without breaking a bent read or putting out a weak flame.

There are times when we need to back up and place a Gospel reading in context of the lectionary schedule. Christmas Day, the lectionary reading covered Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus. In St. Luke’s narrative, shepherds are invited to the stable to see Jesus in the manger. Shepherds were “despised” by good people of the time. There is no way the ancient shepherds could keep the ceremonial laws, such as hand-washing.(4) William Manson wrote the commentary on the Gospel of Luke for The Moffatt New Testament Commentary set. Manson notes that the shepherds are the “centre-piece” in Luke Chapter 2. The inclusion of shepherds is significant for those living in the “Judean home of Christianity.”(5) Luke refers to Jesus as the savior, which shows that Jesus is going to make an “appeal to sick and suffering humanity.”(6) Luke is very inclusive, including Samaritans, Gentiles, and the impoverished, disreputable, outcasts, and sinners.(7) Luke pictures God as having a universal embrace.(8) Commentator and Greek scholar William Barclay refers to the Gospel of Luke as the “universal gospel.”(9) There is also a universal element in the Gospel of Matthew. Alejandro Duarte, a Catholic theologian who worked in Beunos Aires, says that Jesus is the Messiah who is “geared toward those who are not considered important.” He supports his position by citing examples of Jesus healing ‘outsiders,’ lepers, blind, and Gentiles.(10) The life, ministry and passion of Jesus needs to be seen within the context of the universal gospel. We can see the theme of the universal gospel in Jesus’ baptism.

Matthew Chapter 2 contains Matthew’s Christmas story. In Matthew’s narrative, wisemen, Magi, arrive in the Palestine region. They tell Herod that they have been following a star and that they have come to worship the new King of the Jews. The wisemen ask Herod where the new king can be found. Herod summons Jewish scholars about where the Messiah will be born and they tell him that the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. Herod asks the wisemen to search for the child and to come back and tell him where the child is. A star then leads the wisemen to Jesus. After they see Jesus and worship Him, angels warn them to not tell Herod where they found Jesus. The wisemen return home by a different route, so they would not encounter Herod. Angels warn Joseph to leave and go to Egypt where Jesus will be safe. Herod is so threatened that he gives the order that all children under two years of age in Bethlehem be killed. And Jesus becomes a political refugee. Jesus’ family lives in Egypt until Herod dies.

When I was a student at Pacific School of Religion, I had the privilege of taking a course with Jim Mitulski. When searching for ideas for this sermon, I found a sermon that Jim Mitulski gave a Cathedral of Hope, a megachurch in Dallas, Texas. He was preaching on the Gospel passage.

Christianity traditionally holds that Jesus is God incarnate, God in human form. Mitulski makes the point that the God incarnate in Jesus was not just for Jewish people. The God of the chosen people is available to all people, regardless of religion, culture or background.(11) In Matthew’s birth narrative, Magi came to the stable, to the manger to worship Jesus. Jim Mitulski observes, that the Magi came, saw, worshipped, were transformed, and moved on. The Bible does not tell us that they converted to Judaism. While they appreciated Judaism and saw something of value, they did not need to co-opt it, corrupt it, domesticate or own it; they enjoyed it and experienced it, and “It opened their minds, their bodies and their spirits to see the world differently.”(12)

Who witnessed Jesus‘ baptism? Who was His audience? This is a question that we need to ask ourselves over and over again as we read the Gospels. The high priest and the Caesar were not at the river waiting to be baptized. The Gospel of Mark’s account tells us that John was preaching for a baptism of the repentance of sins.(13) The leading religious figures are not likely to have considered themselves sinners and the thought of publicly acknowledging that they needed to repent from sins was a no go. Those getting baptized were more likely to be the religiously marginalized, a class of people that the priests looked down on. Jesus told parables, because they “resonated with the lives of the poor, the tax collectors, the prostitutes . . . the marginalized.”(14) As we read Bible, we need to be open to reading the Bible from the perspective of those who are marginalized. There is power when we understand the Word from the perspective of the margins of society. The Gospels had to resonate with the common person or Christianity would not have rapidly spread across the Roman Empire.

Mitulski notes, “Experiences of divinity are meant to open us up to see wider, to see broader, to experience more. If our religion results in a smaller world, then we have missed the point. Religion is meant to expand, enlarge, inspire our imaginations, our spirits, our bodies, how we live.”(15) As we reflect on a story where we are presented with an encounter with the Divine, as the Spirit descends and speaks, the baptism experience calls us to expand our view of God and of religion.

There are far too many merchants of fear in religious circles. Some of those merchants of fear may claim that people who made serious mistakes or who are spiritually marginalized are not people of faith even though they are baptized. This is not true. Experiences with God cannot be taken away by people. Mitulski makes the point emphatically when he says, “Baptism can never be taken from you. I want to renounce as heresy any notion that a promise made to you by God and symbolized by water can ever be broken by human error . . . If you were baptized and were later told that you did not somehow belong in a faith community, that person committed a grave error, because you cannot take what is God’s to give.” He goes on to observe, "The devil did not give it and the devil cannot take it away . . . God gives us grace . . . no human can take it from us. When they try to, it says something about them, not about God, not about us.” (16)

Our task is not to over analyze the story. Our job is to focus more on how to apply the Biblical narratives to our lives, to improving society. Miguel De La Torre, a professor at Illif School of Theology, appears to believe that the task for the church of God is more to spend time learning how the our communities takes possession of the Bible texts than it is to spend hours trying to determine the exact words Jesus spoke. (17)

And there are those who may question your faith. I am not sure if you have ever wondered how to respond when a person asks you if you have a personal relationship with Jesus. Miguel De La Torre has an interesting response for his students who ask if he has a personal relationship with Jesus. He responds, “No, I have a public relationship with Jesus Christ.”(18) In the waters of baptism, Jesus showed He had a public relationship with us and that is the kind of relationship that we are challenged to have with God and with people.

Arsenius was known as Arsenius the Great and Saint Arsenius. He lived from about the 350s to the 440s of the Common Era. According to Wikipedia, Arsenius was a tutor for an Emperor’s sons. Later, he entered more religious work. Arsenius’ teachings influenced the development of the contemplative life.(19) An old story about Arsenius is that he “consulted an old Egyptian monk about his own thoughts.” Someone who knew this happened, asked Arsenius why Arsenius, a man who knew Greek and Latin asked a “peasant” about his thoughts. Arsenius is reported to have replied, “‘I have indeed been taught Latin and Greek, but I do not know even the alphabet of this peasant.’“(20)

Living out the spirit of Christ’s baptism can be as easy as taking the time to learn the alphabet of those around us, of having a public relationship with marginalized members of society.

Notes

(1) Shane Clairborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Enumu Okoro. Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2010), 102.

(2) Isaiah 42:3 Contemporary English Version.

(3) Isaiah 42:1.

(4) William Barclay. “William Barclay's Daily Study Bible: Luke 2.” n.d., 17 Oct 2019. Study Light. <https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/dsb/luke-2.html>.

(5) William Manson. The Moffatt New Testament Commentary: The Gospel of Luke. Kindle ed. (Seattle: Source Digital Pub., 2018. Originally published in New York by Harper and Brothers Pub., 1930), ebook.

(6) Manson. (2018, originally published 1930), ebook.

(7) William Barclay. The New Testament: A Translation. Vol. 1. (London: Collins, 1968), 123.

(8) Barclay. (1968), 124.

(9) Barclay. (1968), 123.

(10) Daniel Patte, et al., eds. Global Bible Commentary. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2004), 353.

(11) Jim Mitulski. “‘Matthew 3:13-17’ - Gospel Lesson.” Cathedral of Hope. YouTube. 13 January 2014, 26 December 2019. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT_cjZIVYgI>.

(12) Mitulski. (2014). <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT_cjZIVYgI>.

(13) Mark 1:4.

(14) Miguel A. De La Torre. Reading the Bible from the Margins. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2019), 31.

(15) Mitulski. (2014). <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT_cjZIVYgI>.

(16) Mitulski. (2014). <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT_cjZIVYgI>.

(17) De La Torre. (2019), 136.

(18) De La Torre. (2019), 136.

(19) “Arsenius the Great.” Wikipedia. 02 Jan 2020, 05 Jan 2020. <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenius_the_Great>.

(20) Clairborne, Wilson-Hartgrove and Okoro. (2010), 95.