#and people are saying ‘I feel persecuted for playing a game’

[demilypyro]

Hey I thought I should elaborate on what's going on and what I'll be doing with this blog.

First of all, I'm not deactivating it, I'll still be posting things like what I'm doing in games, reblogging things, and of course stuff that's relevant to my streams. I just won't be posting anything overtly personal anymore.

While people have often told me that they appreciate getting to hear my personal trans experience, in recent years there's just been this constant pattern of people assuming bad faith on anything I say or do, that it's all a sign that I'm secretly evil, and it's been seriously impacting my mental health and my ability to even get out of bed. It's been making me feel persecuted in both cisnormative society and the trans community, and it's not sustainable. I've been having panic attacks. It's bad.

I've tried blocking people, I've been seeing a therapist, I've done everything I think I can do. I've considered just quitting my job entirely but that's not an option, since given my disabilities I have no other work opportunities. I'd be out on the street in weeks. So this is my solution.

I've made a new personal account, one that I won't be sharing here. I think I'll enjoy using this site without people watching me like a hawk. That's not to say this account will be inactive. Expect stream links, game screenshots, fanart reblogs, stream clips, media recommendations, some ask answers, the occasional selfie, things like that. I'm sorry I had to take this measure, but my mental health has been at a breaking point for a while now. I hope people will still be willing to support my content even without that personal perspective on my life.

If you want to stay updated on my content and maybe join me when I play games, you can always follow me on Twitch and join my Discord server.

https://twitch.tv/demilypyro

https://discord.com/invite/uR5GGeaXVy

Thanks for understanding.

[elkian]

More about GGG's finale and core plot (that is, BIG SPOILERS BELOW)

One recurring trend is loneliness. King's actions help connect people, and our protagonist continues in her footsteps, but the loneliness of the characters who play antagonists is especially notable.

The God Awards (which I've mentioned before, the whimsy of them made me totally blip over the red flags and implications) mention Inspekta doing everything for them. What would they be without him, Capochin asks?

"Lonely!"

Inspekta gathered the lonely hearts together. Gave them purpose. Gave them a charismatic leader to follow.

Saul is one of the most antagonistic non-Bizzy humans, and a recurring refrain in Milldread is how lonely everyone is. How gatherings are now somehow either discouraged or outright illegal (hmm, wonder whose idea that was). In fact, most of the Milldread citizens only have good or at least compassionate things to say about him.

(Sometimes I feel like the antagonists are shown a little much compassion given the way this plot goes, but it is also important to remember that deprogramming cultists etc. is based around showing compassion and reminding them that the world is not innately hostile to them. And there's only so much a single game can say in the span of a few hours, so, like, I get it.)

In fact, you have to insult Saul twice to progress in Milldread. How do you do this?

One, you get a dog to make a dog noise, and Saul loses it and comes over to harass the dog (and fail).

Two, after this point, he'll say that he "hates that shaggy little man". This is the line you need to give Budd to progress. When he asks for an insult levied at Saul, you can travel the town... and find that everyone has good things to say about him. He's misled, he's actually very sweet, his friends miss him.

It's very telling that the only way to effectively insult Saul to Budd is to use his own words to do it. Even writing this, I realize that this also implies a bit of a persecution complex with Saul - the people around him don't hate him, or even think he's particularly incompetent. They're worried about him. They understand that he's stressed. He was lead astray by a bad element but he snaps out of it (with help) in time to rejoin his community.

And speaking of throwing words back in faces...

Capochin shows a pretty regular skill for recognizing voices when you fling words at him - it's funny, because a lot of people in this game don't, so he's an outlier and that's amusing. In the battle against him, it means you have to work around him - you can't use his own words against him directly.

Instead, you put words in "Inspekta"'s mouth and bring that to Capo.

He shows an awareness, to a level, that this isn't really Inspekta talking. But this realization is a long time coming, and he can't repress it anymore. He can't deny reality when it's thrown in his face, when he's all alone, when nobody wants to work with him anymore. When even his god is only using him, spending more time with the Godpoke, leading him astray.

The Bizzyboys (and Hector; Yugo Limbo said that all of them come from Drain, hence them looking alike(?) ) evoke a very specific type of person, to me: the incel. Or at least, something adjacent. They're all referred to as "he" as Bizzys (I'm of a mind that Bizzyboys are all he/him while Bizzy, as, like, an honorary gender, mostly because it's just a silly idea; though in retrospect it also meshes with the enforced similarity situation). They're all lonely. They've banded together under a mutual purpose, but they don't really support each other.

And when they start to, between Hobbyhoo and BuzzHuzz? When they begin to collaborate, talk about taking a break from all this fash shit "investigating"?

Capochin shuts them down. Hard.

And Patty says he's scared of Capochin, but the other Bizzies say he would never hurt any of them. But when Capochin blows his top, all of them get really timid.

Capochin not getting involved in the violence until there's literally no one else to hide behind is so cliche that it almost just seems like a joke, until I took in the rest of the story.

Playing this game makes me think a lot of Fallout: New Vegas, a game where you can also destroy fascism and avert a cataclysm as a vaquero-themed courier.

One thing that becomes achingly clear in FNV is how the Legion is a cult of personality: it's not just the Legion, it's Caesar's Legion. Legate Lanius is terrifying, yes, but nobody talks about him as a leader so much as a warrior. Once Caesar dies, it seems obvious to me that the entire thing is going to crumple like a house of cards. Caesar didn't leave any backup plans, any true heirs, because the whole thing was his vanity project. There's no point to the Legion without Caesar, and he never once considered that there should be.

Inspekta and the Bizzyboys work very similarly. The whimsy and goofiness of the setting, which we also see in Smile For Me, lead me to miss some major red flags (I am also just. very dense.), which is a known problem in real fascism - the use of cutesy facades to cast absurdity on any claims of propaganda.

Anyways. My point is that the Bizzyboys seem at first to be a group, but are really more underlings in a cult of personality. Everything falls apart when faith in the system - in Capochin, in Inspekta - is lost. And Capochin is the Joshua Graham to Inspekta's Caesar; both of them culpable, both of them seeming in charge, with Capochin primed to take the fall as soon as things go wrong. But he volunteered for that! He wanted to be Inspekta's #1! The right-hand chump! The prime goon! He's getting everything he ever worked for, so don't question the system, Capo, because that's the same as doubting Inspekta. And doubting Inspekta means you're not a good Bizzyboy. Means you're ungrateful. Means that maybe what you have should go to someone who'll appreciate it.

They literally have their names stripped away - and I think the constant belittling and name-withholding of Patty, who genuinely displays real competence and intelligence at points if you pay attention, is a deliberate ploy. You don't want to be like P. You don't want to be a failure. Look at you, earning your letters! You almost have a full name! Not like that loser at the bottom of the barrel. You're a real winner, here.

And you, P? You need to try harder. Look how Alexei has his whole name back for doing hardly anything! How can you fail to get even a single letter back, compared to him? When Patty asks for his name back in Milldread, Capochin mentions solving mysteries - mysteries of "what does Capochin want for lunch", etc. It's silly, but it's also sinister. It's the most overtly self-centered bit of Bizzy lore we get for maybe the whole game. Capochin outright says he comes first and we laugh because of the delivery.

(The videos are fantastic, because they really set up the reveal in a lot of both subtle and unsubtle ways. Even the very first video, where Capochin insults Patty for asking a scripted question, before moving into the answer, is foreshadowing for the constant emotional abuse all of the Bizzys and Patty in particular are subjected to. There's probably much more I'm forgetting.)

Under the whimsy and humor of the game is a very real statement about cults and fascism and the kinds of people they recruit, and how they do it. They amplify the concerns of the disenfranchised and alone, people who have difficulty connecting with a community. They give those people somewhere to belong, ideals to uphold, and targets to gang up on.

Anyways. Good game.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Monsters Reimagined: Bandits

As a game of heroic fantasy that centers so primarily on combat, D&D  is more often than not a game about righteous violence, which is why I spend so much time thinking about the targets of that violence. Every piece of media made by humans is a thing created from conscious or unconscious design, it’s saying something whether or not its creators intended it to do so. 

Tolkien made his characters peaceloving and pastoral, and coded his embodiment of evil as powerhungry, warlike, and industrial. When d&d directly cribbed from Tolkien's work it purposely changed those enemies to be primitive tribespeople who were resentful of the riches the “civilized” races possessed. Was this intentional? None can say, but as a text d&d says something decidedly different than Tolkien. 

That's why today I want to talk about bandits, the historical concept of being an “outlaw”, and how media uses crime to “un-person” certain classes of people in order to give heroes a target to beat up. 

Tldr: despite presenting bandits as a generic threat, most d&d scenarios never go into detail about what causes bandits to exist, merely presuming the existence of outlaws up to no good that the heroes should feel no qualms about slaughtering. If your story is going to stand up to the scrutiny of your players however, you need to be aware of WHY these individuals have been driven to banditry, rather than defaulting to “they broke the law so they deserve what’s coming to them.”

I got to thinking about writing this post when playing a modded version of fallout 4, an npc offhndedly mentioned to me that raiders (the postapoc bandit rebrand) were too lazy to do any farming and it was good that I’d offed them by the dozens so that they wouldn’t make trouble for those that did. 

That gave me pause, fallout takes place in an irradiated wasteland where folks struggle to survive but this mod was specifically about rebuilding infrastructure like farms and ensuring people had enough to get by. Lack of resources to go around was a specific justification for why raiders existed in the first place, but as the setting became more arable the mod-author had to create an excuse why the bandit’s didn’t give up their violent ways and start a nice little coop, settling on them being inherently lazy , dumb, and psychopathic.   

This is exactly how d&d has historically painted most of its “monstrous humanoid” enemies. Because the game is ostensibly about combat the authors need to give you reasons why a peaceful solution is impossible, why the orcs, goblins, gnolls (and yes, bandits), can’t just integrate with the local town or find a nice stretch of wilderness to build their own settlement on and manage in accordance with their needs. They go so far in this justification that they end up (accidently or not) recreating a lot of IRL arguments for persecution and genocide.

Bandits are interesting because much like cultists, it’s a descriptor that’s used to unperson groups of characters who would traditionally be inside the “not ontologically evil” bubble that’s applied to d&d’s protagonists.   Break the law or worship the wrong god says d&d and you’re just as worth killing as the mindless minions of darkness, your only purpose to serve as a target of the protagonist’s righteous violence.  

The way we get around this self-justification pitfall and get back to our cool fantasy action game is to relentlessly question authority, not only inside the game but the authors too. We have to interrogate anyone who'd show us evil and direct our outrage a certain way because if we don't we end up with crusades, pogroms, and Qanon.

With that ethical pill out of the way, I thought I’d dive into a listing of different historical groups that we might call “Bandits” at one time or another and what worldbuilding conceits their existence necessitates. 

Brigands: By and large the most common sort of “bandit” you’re going to see are former soldiers left over from wars, often with a social gap between them and the people they’re raiding that prevents reintegration ( IE: They’re from a foreign land and can’t speak the local tongue, their side lost and now they’re considered outlaws, they’re mercenaries who have been stiffed on their contract).  Justifying why brigands are out brigading is as easy as asking yourself “What were the most recent conflicts in this region and who was fighting them?”. There’s also something to say about how a life of trauma and violence can be hard to leave even after the battle is over, which is why you historically tend to see lots of gangs and paramilitary groups pop up in the wake of conflict. 

Raiders:  fundamentally the thing that has caused cultures to raid eachother since the dawn of time is sacristy. When the threat of starvation looms it’s far easier to justify potentially throwing your life away if it means securing enough food to last you and those close to you through the next year/season/day. Raider cultures develop in biomes that don’t support steady agriculture, or in times where famine, war, climate change, or disease make the harvests unreliable. They tend to target neighboring cultures that DO have reliable harvests which is why you frequently see raiders emerging from “the barbaric frontier” to raid “civilization” that just so happens to occupy the space of a reliably fertile river valley. When thinking about including raiders in your story, consider what environmental forces have caused this most recent and previous raids, as well as consider how frequent raiding has shaped the targeted society. Frequent attacks by raiders is how we get walled palaces and warrior classes after all, so this shit is important. 

Slavers: Just like raiding, most cultures have engaged in slavery at one point or another, which is a matter I get into here. While raiders taking captives is not uncommon, actively attacking people for slaves is something that starts occurring once you have a built up slave market, necessitating the existence of at least one or more hierarchical societies that need more disposable workers than then their lower class is capable of providing. The roman legion and its constant campaigns was the apparatus by which the imperium fed its insatiable need for cheap slave labor. Subsistence raiders generally don’t take slaves en masse unless they know somewhere to sell them, because if you’re having trouble feeding your own people you’re not going to capture more ( this is what d&d gets wrong about monstrous humanoids most of the time). 

Tax Farmers: special mention to this underused classic, where gangs of toughs would bid to see who could collect money for government officials, and then proceed to ransack the realm looking to squeeze as much money out of the people as possible. This tends to happen in areas where the state apparatus is stretched too thin or is too lighthanded to have established enduring means of funding.  Tax farmers are a great one-two punch for campaigns where you want your party to be set up against a corrupt authority: our heroes defeat the marauding bandits and then oh-no, turns out they were not only sanctioned by the government but backed by an influential political figure who you’ve just punched in the coinpurse.  If tax farming exists it means the government is strong enough to need a yearly budget but not so established (at least in the local region) that it’s developed a reliably peaceful method of maintaining it.  

Robber Baron: Though the term is now synonymous with ruthless industrialists, it originated from the practice of shortmidned petty gentry (barons and knights and counts and the like) going out to extort and even rob THEIR OWN LANDS out of a desire for personal enrichment/boredom. Schemes can range from using their troops to shake down those who pass through their domain to outright murdering their own peasants for sport because you haven’t gotten to fight in a war for a while.  Just as any greed or violence minded noble can be a robber baron so it doesn’t take that much of a storytelling leap but I encourage you to channel all your landlord hate into this one. 

Rebels: More than just simple outlaws, rebels have a particular cause they’re a part of (just or otherwise) that puts them at odds with the reigning authority. They could violently support a disfavoured political faction, be acting out against a law they think is unjust, or hoping to break away from the authority entirely. Though attacks against those figures of authority are to be expected, it’s all too common for rebels to go onto praying on common folk for the sake of the cause.  To make a group of rebels worth having in your campaign pinpoint an issue that two groups of people with their own distinct interests could disagree on, and then ratchet up the tension. Rebels have to be able to beleive in a cause, so they have to have an argument that supports them.

Remnants: Like a hybrid of brigands, rebels, and taxfarmers, Remnants represent a previously legitimate system of authority that has since been replaced but not yet fully disappeared. This can happen either because the local authority has been replaced by something new (feudal nobles left out after a monarchy toppling revolution) or because it has faded entirely ( Colonial forces of an empire left to their own devices after the empire collapses). Remnants often sat at the top of social structures that had endured for generations and so still hold onto the ghost of power ( and the violence it can command) and the traditions that support it.  Think about big changes that have happened in your world of late, are the remnants looking to overturn it? Win new privilege for themselves? Go overlooked by their new overlords?

Art

[malicious-fisheeves]

Thoughts and Issues with the DLC

So I've made no secret I've issues with the DLC but in an effort to stop whinging and be less upset I've written up something a little more formal. To state first: if you enjoyed the DLC, by all means, I am glad. I'd much rather have people be happy than feel the way I do/did after beating the final DLC boss. And in talking w some people who did like the DLC story, I was softened a little bit in some regards.

However. Below the cut is ~3k words on my thoughts. I attempted some formatting but it might be a little disorganized. Needless to say, big dlc spoilers.

Marika:

I simultaneously appreciate Marika getting some much needed nuance back. Marika is complicated for a number of reasons. Her regime is oppressive and unrelentingly cruel, the Erdtree and its wars were incredibly brutal, and yet the DLC calls to mind that this is the outcome of her own people’s oppression, eg in that Marika was incapable of growing beyond the limited worldview transferred to her by living in a world wherein failed saints and ‘criminals’ were turned into meat goo. Cycle of violence and so on, but therein also lies some critique. Generally speaking, irl, such a thing is… basically impossible example wise, to think of off the top of my head. I suppose broadly one could perhaps liken it to the original Roman persecution of early Christians but that’s a fraught comparison for a number of reasons – wildly overblown for theological reasons, for one, and also makes an exemplar vs Roman generally crushing and enslaving ‘savages’. Also the current and historical violence committed via christian can by no means be rooted to mistreatment by Romans. So. It’s something I find interesting while also not jiving with 100%. Especially relating to what she’d end up doing to the Omen.

I think one can possibly point to a general corruption of goals, for Marika, by virtue of her godhood—once granted absolute power, she lost sight of her original goals of building a better world than the one she was born into. An empire of ruin built on top of a pile of corpses. Marika herself seems to come to this understanding and so sets in motion the events of the game���sending the Tarnished off, and shattering the ring—possibly incentivized by the death of Godwyn, or at least the understand of that her dominion was faulty.

Miquella:

Oh Miquella. Here’s the thing; I am by no means shocked or surprised that the question of Miquella’s charm/compulsion abilities would come into play for the DLC. I had a feeling that the NPC crew would be under Miq’s influence and that would be a source of conflict. I was not someone who thought ‘yay miq’s going to become god and fix everything.’ But the way in which this was accomplished felt not only like a dropping of the ball but a deliberate spiking of it at the ground.

In the base game, though we only rarely get information about Miquella, we have an understanding that he very much wants to do good. To create a new order not revolving around the oppression and subjugation of the masses. Miquella’s plans were already doomed in the sense his grand plans involved ‘what if I made my own Erdtree, but cooler’ and the fact the implications of certain items (the haligtree soldier ashes, the bewitching branches) indicate he has some ability to influence/control others, but this ability remained nebulous. St. Trina and sleep, the other half of his, again spoke to some interesting if troubling aspects, but also again spoke to a sort of attempted lighter touch in his approach. Someone confined to sleep forever can’t hurt you anymore, even if you basically doom them without killing them. When the DLC began with him shedding his flesh, his strength, his Great Rune and therefore ability to charm, I was very interested in how this all related. Except then he…. Becomes a God anyway? I’m still confused by this. Narratively, the game points towards him shedding these things to become a Perfect God, uninfluenced by things like love (which again, confuses me when he says that the new age will be guided by compassion, but I think the point here was to make the confusion The Point eg Miquella you can’t do both those things, sir) that might blind him or bias him. But Ranni also cast aside her Empyrean flesh… specifically so she could not become a God.

This wouldn’t bother me as much were it not for other issues, I think.

Miquella in the base game is defined by his compassion, outright bordering on naivety (hand in hand with his curse). He waters his new tree with his own blood rather than the blood of others. Elphael and the haligtree are specifically home to the unwanted and oppressed (namely misbegotten and alibnaurics)--he literally builds a secret treehouse. He forges the unalloyed Gold needle to save Malenia’s life. Of course there is a paradox here. To build his new order based on compassion, he has to betray the old. In the base game, originally I viewed this as a sort of corruption of his own goals ala Marika’s, by sending Malenia out to do this for him. She takes her army and conquers most of the continent save Leyndell and the Academy before getting defeat-by-tie’d with Radahn. Miquella does not want to do this but feels he has to, one might surmise. Given Malenia’s apparently reverence for him, we are led to believe that she did so because she really, really, believed in him, even if in doing so was at great personal cost.

And so the compulsion comes back into play in the DLC—just bend everyone else’s wills to your own as a God, is at least what I believe we’re supposed to take away. But this bothers me thematically in that why did Miquella not do this earlier? We kill Radahn and Mohg and suddenly game over, because Miquella brain-beams us into submission and we all prance around in perfect unending submissive euphoria. Why are we not only around long enough to stop it, but even able to? We (the Tarnished) have no influence on whether or not Miquella achieves godhood, unlike with the other ending options wherein we have quests to have NPCs fail or achieve their means by which they either create a mending ring or, in Ranni’s case, finally kill Marika for good and thereby have No Gods in the Lands Between. Even getting his great rune is just optional—if you don’t get grabbed twice, you don’t need to worry about the instant kill. So it all just feels a bit like a wet fart, especially given what happens after you kill him and Radahn. Which is a memory of when Miquella, pre godhood, asking Radahn to be his consort so that Miquella can achieve godhood and make the world better. You can’t even get ontop of the divine gate. It just feels so…. Nothing, in the end. We kill Miquella, and then that’s it, nothing. Nothing changes, no means by which to maybe try to make the world better. Annsbach tells us to be a lord of men and not gods but there’s no means by which to do so. Ranni’s ending takes us to the stars, the other endings have us become Lord Consort in various flavors, or we burn everything down. Elden Ring, to me, defined itself in some ways from Dark Souls and Bloodborne by having a certain hope where the others could be rather bleak. The DLC, giving you no means by which to make the world better, in any way, mostly going around just killing everyone and thing, and then returning to the sliding scale of ambiguously-good-ambiguously-bad-extremely-bad base-game endings. It’s just… it is something.

I also have more meta-textual critiques, which leads me to…

Mohg, Malenia, Radahn, or Incest et al.,

Mohg in the base game is defined by his evil. He bears on-its-face evil satanic imagery, growling and gurgling at you during his fight. He kidnaps and tortures war surgeons, the only one of which who survives relatively in-tact, Varre, is cast aside. Varre dies, begging for Mohg’s help, and Mohg could not care less, because Mohg is the self styled leader of a cult. He kidnaps Miquella with the hopes of raising him to godhood so he can establish his own dynasty. Albinaurics who come to him seeking assistance/shelter are also tortured. It speaks to a great evil. However, we also come to understand that Mohg is the opposite side of the coin as Morgott. Both were omen children of Marika, given the relative ‘mercy’ of not having their horns cut off and abandoned to their fate in the sewers beneath Leyndell. Morgott spends his whole life desperately wishing to be loved by the Erdtree and gets jack shit. Mohg abandons it, rightfully, but is violated by the Formless Mother and has his blood set on fire. Mohg’s tragedy actually serves better to illustrate how suffering makes no one a good person than Marika’s story in the DLC, in some ways, given that Mohg literally replaces the austere and thinly veiled cruelty of Marika and her Order with just outright violence and terror. And then the DLC goes ‘actually, Mohg was manipulated into being evil by Miquella for his elaborate plans for godhood!’

When I read this, I almost felt insulted.

Not only does it strip Mohg of his agency, making his evil the fault of someone else, it also completely demeans the original tragedy of the kidnapping. Miquella, trapped in a state of suspended animation, forever sleeping and therefore failing Everything he set out to do, because he was kidnapped by someone who he would’ve wanted to help? Mohg, kidnapping and abusing a person who abhors what was done to him and his people? This tragedy again spoke to the themes of Elden Ring. Having it so that someone who, while flawed, is shot in the foot by someone warped and corrupted by a life time of abuse suffered first by their mother and then by a greater cosmic deity? That the violence put upon by Mohg resulted in yet more needless suffering? Heart breaking.

Instead, the DLC makes it so Mohg is abused yet again, and this time it is far less meaningful.

Radahn’s story also frustrated me greatly. I am biased, as someone who went insane trying to piece together his motivations for the past 2 yrs and writing nearly 200,000 words about it, but during that time I came to the conclusion that the explicit point of his lack of motivation spoke to a sort of glory seeking that is why, while he had some apparently good personal qualities, also made him a war lord. In the base game, Radahn’s established as someone who cares about having a ‘good death’, who stopped the stars for Reasons, and learned gravity magic in-part to ride his favorite horse forever. However he also is the General of a large army, who at the very least in his absence have taken to stringing up corpses and setting people on fire. Grant it, it might be due to the Super Plague, but it’s just vague and unsaid enough it is entirely probably it was not Just That (nor makes it less horrific, burning plague victims caused by the Stupidest Fight Ever). He admires Godfrey, who served Marika in her genocidal wars. He tries to take Leyndell for reasons not known to the player, but one can surmise either A. he was trying to help Rykard (Rykard, who’s war in the Shattering was considered one of if not the Worst) B. he was just doing it for a laff (eg conquering for conquering sake, morally vacant and also abhorrent, but speaks to a glory hunting that says Something) and/or something to do with Godfrey. It speaks to, if nothing else, a Giant Ego.

So it felt really weird and out of left field to go. Yeah he and Miquella made a vow that Radahn would become his consort so he could ascend to godhood and establish the kindness brigade. Like, huh? Nowhere in the base game does Radahn, at any point, seem to especially care about being kind or helping the oppressed. There are certain elements that indicate he might not have sucked As Much, but by no means does that make him a good person (especially since he seems to hold some relationship with Rykard and Rykard is Extremely Awful to the albinaurics). Not only that, but again if we are to believe Mohg was not at fault for any of the evils he committed because Miquella forced him to be evil, then we cannot believe that anything about Radahn and Miquella’s relationship was consensual (not that any incestuous relationship can be but it adds another layer of coercion).

So they make this vow and Radahn later reneges. Maybe he realizes he’s been charmed and breaks it, somehow, but we don’t actually know. And so Miquella sic’s Malenia on him like a dog, dooming Caelid. Firstly, overall it just makes Radahn less compelling as someone who could’ve potentially been better but decided he loved war too much, doomed by the world he was born into to want something that destroyed him and everything he loved. Secondly, it just really hurts the construction of Miquella’s character as someone perhaps jaded and optimism crushed by a shitty world built by his mom (and also Malenia’s). But thirdly, and most importantly to me, it completely decimates one of the most powerful narratives themes to me in Elden ring.

The deliberate obfuscation of Why Radahn and Malenia fought in the first place was one of the most important pieces of the narrative to me. It spoke greatly to Elden Ring’s themes about war and violence. That there are no real winners, that it leads only to death and destruction. That whatever reason why they fought was not important enough to result in all the devastation. The point was that it was pointless. It spoke to both Malenia and Radahn’s weaknesses and showed how even great people (even people with good qualities) have those qualities ruined by war. The fight dooms both of them; Radahn becomes a zombie, Caelid is turned into a rotten hell hole. Malenia has to be dragged back to the Haligtree and without her brother, she basically just Waits To Die, now aimless. It is, again, tragic.

And again, in comes the DLC. It is now just a punishment for not wanting to marry your half brother. It turns Miquella into a childish abuser, and Malenia into basically just a dog Miquella can send out on other people, his original enforcer/tool to be discarded once she was at her usefulness's end before he even stripped himself of his love for godhood. It also becomes Extremely dark if you consider that Malenia knew of Miquella and Radahn’s vow and decided to go and kill Radahn anyway, but there’s also no way to say for certain. Speaking to Malenia and Miquella’s relationship, there is a part of me that wonders if she was originally supposed to be in Radahn’s shoes. It would still create issues, but others would at least be partly remedied. It would be bad and fucked up, but it'd feel way more cogent and meaningful. Their toxic and codependent relationship resulting in them both being at their worst would actually fucking say something. Giving Malenia and non-rot afflicted body, even if it means doing something incredibly fucked up to someone he already victimized? the sort of ruthless goal seeking that better speaks to how Miquella is flawed even as a god, because it’s impossible to be a Perfect or Good God?

Meta-textually it’s also just troubling to, yet again, only depict mlm relationships through coercion and incest. Fromsoft does not traffic in good or healthy relationships but the unhealthy heterosexual relationships are given much more depth and apparent care to its members at least somewhat. Marika and Radagon have a Whole Thing going on but its clear they’re equal players in their one million year psychic battle against one another. Radagon and Rennala had a loving relationship (though there are misogynistic elements of Rennala being So Crushed after Radagon left her, she at least was powerful and active at one time). Marika and Godfrey’s relationship is somewhat vague, but we do know Godfrey believed in her vision enough to give up many aspects of himself. Not healthy, but again Godfrey and Marika are both active agents in their relationship (and he does come back for her, even if either by feeling because he Has To or for other reasons it still says something about His character). Tanith and Rykard are on some Insane Shit but they are insane for each other in a mutual sense. Even the incestuous elements in both Miquella and Malenia’s relationship, and Lorian and Lothric’s in ds3, correctly points to incest arising from unhealthy family dynamics/life situations. Now we’ve re-contextualized Miquella’s kidnapping so that it edges dangerous close on 'victim of incest lying, actually, was manipulating everyone, should die.’ Like What Are We Doing Here, man.

By comparison, Mohg is completely stripped of almost all the elements of his narrative that made him interesting and compelling and Radahn is weirdly pigeon holed into being the victim of Miquella’s violence and coercion. Radahn is dragged back from the dead after an end to his suffering, and turned into Miquella’s new enforcer. Freyja says something to the effect that it’s ‘what Radahn would have wanted’ but given how the rest of Fromosft’s entire library of work operates I do not take the word of a single NPC as gospel. And then we kill him, and Miquella. Mohg’s body gets desecrated, the end.

To some points, one might say that Miquella viewed all these evils as a means to an end, and I can’t say you’d be wrong. To me, though, it feels like many of these actions needlessly muddle the narrative, speak to the worst impulses society has around coercion/abuse, and ruin a lot of the interesting character narratives of the base game. Cards on the table, I felt utterly crushed by the DLC, and am still feeling really raw. Partly because the flaws of the demigods being products of Marika and co., were fascinating and impactful. The changes made, to me, cheapen a lot and feel somewhat like Fromsoft was sort of spitting in my face for attempting to piece together all the item descriptions, dialog snippets, and environmental storytelling elements to make a hazy image of a group of people we don’t exactly get to know, or rather only get to know by their actions and the outcomes of such. I’m less upset than I was, but ultimately I still feel so sour.

[gumasantan]

i'm reviewing for my exams tomorrow...but i've been thinking a lot about 1000xRESIST lately.

it's a game, not a film or a show or a book. 1000xRESIST is a game about...many things: surviving an alien invasion, living underground, clones of human beings, stubborn parents, angst of a teenage girl, generational trauma, and a lot of things. i don't exaggerate when i say the title describes just how much themes the game dives into. since i finished the game a week ago, a feeling of longing has grown and grown inside me that can only probably be helped by replaying the game, but i can't anymore. i want to restart my memory just so i can play it again without any prior knowledge. we all feel like that sometimes, right? when we deeply resonate with a piece of media we now consider a transcendent level of art form we just wanna keep replaying it and have our minds reset, so that we may able to uniquely experience them again and again, forever, even.

i attached a pretty landscape of hong kong to not only help reel you and others in reading this, but also to remind myself how this game made me long for a memory i never had. it connected with me so much that everytime i try to recall parts of the game, it's difficult for me to dissociate myself from them, and so, i end up with a mess of thoughts, unable to properly communicate what i'm trying to say; the memories of watcher, iris, (two of the game's main characters) and i seemingly fused together into one. heck, it is not explicitly a "self-insert" type of game where the devs intend you to project yourself into it so that the story makes sense.

so, why do i reminisce about hong kong when i haven't even visited the place? for context, the troubles during the 2019 hong kong protests are ultimately what sets off the events in the game, even though the game takes place around 3047 onwards. it is one of the few games where i actually see and feel the emotional impact that such a historic moment had on the lived experiences of fictional video game characters. fictional, in name only, but they are very much real in our world: expatriates who had to flee persecution as a result of resistance. one could say that this game is dedicated to these courageous people. not only to them, but to their children who are yet to exist.

i mention this because iris was born from these people. walked on earth away from hong kong, and as she grew up, came to realize how homesick she was about that place she was a stranger to. iris and i—we are as different as we can be. i was born and am living in my native country, doing my best to live since birth. i shouldn't ever feel homesick, but weirdly, touching this game and seeing iris' life through watcher's eyes, i can't help but go back and revisit the life i swear i lived in hong kong.

i'm not the only one who feels like this, however. watcher feels the same way. of course, watcher was cloned from a clone that was cloned from iris. it's only natural that watcher retains some of that "irisness" two generations down. though she is aware that she is reliving an amalgamation of hers and iris' memories, i relate to her struggle to separate her own consciousness from iris'. this is my belief: when you keep confusing someone's memories with your own, that just proves that you two are more alike than you would think.

i said before that iris and i were as different as we can be, but by my own words, that shouldn't be true. am i hypocritical? delusional? i'm contradicting myself, but not intentionally. i would 100% disagree with myself here had i not played this game and this predicament came up in another situation, but after playing the game, i don't know. the more i think about it, the more i get convinced that iris, though raised in very different circumstances, ended up sharing some of the same traits as i do. i would argue that there are just human characteristics that we all just happen to share, kindness for example, but no, these ones—they're too personal for and very understood by me to say "no, we're different."

at the end, the game rewards you for sticking to the end: a future of your own choosing. this may be a part of the game where some people would get stuck in for more than an hour, or as short as a minute, depending how much the player sticks to their own convictions. for me, i don't know how to build a future i want because i don't know what i want out of it; i don't know what's right. the game slapped me in my face with my own hypocrisies and dared me to stick with these foolish principles. eventually, i did reach the epilogue, but it didn't feel like i actually crossed the bridge.

i'm still trying to understand just as much as i'm trying to examine every minute detail in the game. the game's mechanics are mainly built around memories and the more i keep playing the game and watch multiple playthroughs of it, i realize just how important each memory is to conveying a message that's ultimately different for all of us. a thousand different lessons for anyone to learn; it is THAT complex.

if you stuck around this long, thank you. please, please, PLEASE play 1000xRESIST. there's something here for us to learn, a thing or more. these things about hong kong and memories are part of a bigger whole that i will want to talk about once i know how to express it. especially to my fellow asians, this game will speak to your heart. i've never felt a surge of emotions this strong since i finished signalis, another masterpiece which i may get around to talking about later! (play that too!)

[sleepyking]

To any other trans people living in America:

I know how hopeless it feels right now. I know that there’s a chance you want to die, and there’s a chance you’re planning on it.

I know you’ve probably had people tell you that suicide won’t fix anything, and I’m not here to say that.

I’m here to say this: We. Must. Survive.

No matter how hard it is, no matter how much you want to end it all, you have to keep going, you have to keep living.

We can’t give up.

We can’t give them what they want.

I spent a good chunk of the night after the results came in staring at the knife in my hand, and I know that others probably did as well.

But I didn’t. And you want to know why?

I have my entire life ahead of me—hell, I’m thirteen, I’m not even in high school yet. If I’d killed myself—and, god, I wanted to—I would have missed everything—waking up with my cat laying on my chest, playing games with my sibling, joking around with my dad, talking with my mom about random things, seeing my class—my friends, my twelve extra siblings that I’ve known for over nine years, the people that I can always count on to have my back on put a smile on my face.

But I also did it for my family—if I had died today, it would’ve destroyed them—my dad, my mom, my brother, my sibling, my friends; everyone.

And I did it for the future.

My younger sibling is ten years old, and I promised them that I would be there for them every step of the way as they figure out who they are, and I intend on keeping that promise.

So, don’t stay alive for me—hell, you don’t even have to stay alive for yourself or the people around you.

Stay alive for the future. Stay alive for what all the young children represent—a chance for a better future.

We have to survive.

We have to survive so that the next generation isn’t filled with the same hate that the generations before them were.

If we can do that, then all the future generations to come won’t have to endure what we have to.

If we can shield them from the hate and the suffering and the pain, then this persecution, this struggle, it can die with us—it can die naturally.

Suicide will only keep the pain alive. All it will do is pass on your pain to someone else. The cycle will continue, over and over and over and over again, just as it has for centuries, and nothing will change.

We have a chance to try and break the cycle.

Reblog to share the message with other people that might need it(if you want to, of course, it’s your choice)

[germiyahu]

People who say Israel is an ethnostate sound like they're just reaching for every buzzword they can find at this point. If you're going to criticize Israel, at least do it with accurate information instead of throwing out every word you can think of and seeing what sticks.

People want to sound smart and informed, and also edgy. I don’t just mean edgy like controversial, but on the cutting edge. They regurgitate whatever the content creators they look up to say. They want to sound like they’re in the know, so it’s always the hottest of takes. Then it’s a game of follow the leader.

Someone who had been talking about Rafah sees others calling it a Genocide, a 21st century Holocaust, and they scramble to adjust accordingly. Because if they don’t, they’re now a genocide apologist. Either they think that about themselves or others may accuse them of it. So there’s an outside push as well as an inside pull. They may also feel embarrassed that they apparently weren’t “informed” as much as the people who engage in escalation and hyperbole.

To more clear minded people who can see through stuff like that, this folds back around to being cringe. It sounds like kids reaching very hard to spice up their two page double space times new roman book report.

Nobody on this website can ever just say “this is bad” or “this is immoral” or “I don’t like this” oh no. They must include whatever they’re denigrating as part of a Narrative, or dissect its place in the cisheteroneurotypical hegemonic white supremacist settler-colonial violent late capitalist imperialist patriarchal kyriarchy.

(Note they’ll never include a dedicated slot for the role antisemitism has played in the formation of Western civilization and all its faults).

When they’re talking about video games or erotic fanfiction about characters in a young adult book, it can be funny if you’re into that whole thing. It’s pretty harmless. When they’re talking about real life, geopolitics, the fate of a historically persecuted and despised people who are still not safe globally? Then it’s not so funny. And it is not harmless.

[whoredmode]

i do feel like there is a discussion to be had (or at least something to mull over) in terms of how over the course of each game after sr2 it very much feels as if they’re trying to, for lack of a better word, separate or remove itself from hip-hop and gangsta rap even tho the series’ core identity was built around these genres. and even if it’s not the intention, it does come off as them seeing these genres as having less artistic value or even finding them embarrassing, which in and of itself is just. wrong. but examining the games from srtt onward i feel like you can see a clear emphasis on completely different genres (srtt i’d say gives more priority to classic rock/pop, sriv w its electronic music and dubstep, and srr w pop subgenres and internet rap). not to say any of these genres are bad—they’re all very good and important genres in music—but it does create a very stark contrast tonally to the first two games; i’m not sure if people realize how much music plays into the literal tone of a story. and to be clear: these genres DO work for the tones of their respective game’s story. but the question is “why do fans and the later sr games themselves seem to think that hip-hop and gangsta rap are genres they need to step away from when this music was integral to what made the original games what they are?” sr1 was thought of as a story told through the lens of a hip-hop music video. music is part of what made saints row what it is. so why do they make such a point to separate itself from that. like hmm what could be the issue here, i wonder.

like there is very much a problem w fans thinking hip-hop and gangsta rap are inherently lesser genres, but i do think you can make a good argument that the games themselves also end up playing into this belief the longer the series went on. regardless of your thoughts on sr1 and sr2, you can’t deny there was a very clear point to their stories. they centered on an actual struggle, on social persecution, on politicians and cops and corporations quite literally killing the oppressed for their own benefit.

removing these themes that are the basis of hip-hop and gangsta rap—removing the prominence of these genres themselves—is how you end up w something like sriv being so far removed from what sr was. idk. it just makes me sad.

[fantasyinvader]

I’ve brought up how the tapestry at the end of Flower immitates Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne, linking Edelgard to the real person. Now Napoleon does have a complicated legacy, some see him as a hero others a villain, but there was something I feel that often overlook when it comes to this comparison. The Russian Czar at the time was Alexander the First, while Dimitri’s middle-name is Alexandre and of course Dimitri itself is a name of Greek and Russian.

The devs did say that the Empire is based on Germany and Italy and the Kingdom Northern France, but they do reference Napoleon with Edelgard and he was the Emperor of France. The thing is though, when we look at Napoleon’s history, we do see him conquering nations and putting his generals in charge. King Charles XIV John of Sweden was one of Napoleon’s marshals, calling to mind Edelgard putting Caspar’s father in charge of the Alliance in exchange for his support, and Napoleon betrayed his ally Spain to make his brother his puppet king which kicked off the Peninsular wars. Likewise, Napoleon invaded Russia because Russia refused to go with the Continental System Napoleon was imposing on all of Europe in his grand efforts to someday defeat the British (it was economic warfare).

When Moscow was taken, Napoleon discovered that the city had been set on fire. This wasn’t a petty screw you, it left Napoleon’s army without means to provide for itself, leading to them retreat before the winter set in. Along the way, Napoleon suffered catastrophic losses and was forced into exile. And in Edelgard’s case, Rhea sets Fhirdiad on fire as part of her tactics. If the city’s on fire, the Empire can’t send in all it’s troops and would instead send in a small, elite force. The BESF, led by Edelgard and Byleth. This is actually stated in the game, all while the Kingdom forces talk about protecting the city and their country from Edelgard.

(It also references Zhuge Liang from Rot3K, who while benevolent loved attacking with fire, but his attempt to trap Sima Yi in a fire attack failed due to a sudden rainstorm, which calls to mind Tailtean immediately prior).

As those forces are defending their city from your forces after Rhea had it set on fire, it’s EDELGARD’S final boss theme that plays. It’s marking the player’s army as the villains, and Rhea and her allies as the heroes who fail to beat the final boss.

Not only that, at the time the Russian Orthodox church viewed Napoleon as the Antichrist. We know that Edelgard’s personal weapon invokes the pop culture version of the Mark of the Beast as the false messiah who will lead people astray, while she also fits the mould of figures identified as historical Antichrists who persecuted the faith such as Emperor Nero.

With Napoleon, Dostoevsky portrayed his story as a negative influence in his work Crime and Punishment, where it’s protagonist views Napoleon as an example of what he considers a higher class of being who doesn’t let morality get in the way of his goals. Wanting to prove himself as a member of that class, elevating himself above others around him, the protagonist commits murder and proceeds to nearly go insane from the guilt of his actions no matter how he tries to justify it and it only eases when he sincerely repents. This calls to mind the inflence Edelgard has on those in her class, how they can join her despite previously being disgusted by her methods while believing they will accomplish great things through this. There is also War and Peace denouncing the great men of history theory through Napoleon. And there was Horatio Hornblower, fighting against Napoleon whose first trilogy of novels were written between 1937 and ‘38, before WWII happened, and inspiring no shortage of literary heroes set against the backdrop of fighting against the Corsican Ogre (and Star Trek). When Conan Doyle attempted to kill of Sherlock Holmes, he created the “Napoleon of Crime” for his creation to die fighting.

Really, linking Edelgard to Napoleon should be a big red flag despite the nuances of history. You could argue that Napoleon did some good, but there’s also a bunch of bad he’s remembered for as well. He is widely considered the first modern dictator for a reason.

[power-chords]

Tony Gilroy is so great. "Tell him our ghosts have strong hands and a long memory." What a killer line that instantly tells me these guys have a familiar way of conjoining history and the spiritual realm. Love that the rebellion is terrifying in action and fragmented internally for reasons that, given the types of people who would logically comprise a rebellion (I.E., desperate people accustomed to prisons, persecution, and poverty), make dramatic sense. (It's also more realistic, because human beings are dramatistic in nature. Kenneth Burke would love this show.) The rebels are disciplined soldiers, but their real guerrilla expertise lies in psychological warfare, ideological loyalty as intimidation display, because when they point guns at women and children to declare they have nothing left to lose, they know Beehaz believes them.

And, duh, obsessed with The Eye, the primal draw to cosmic wonder, one that serves in witness from the Empire's perspective and in judgment from the Rebellion's.

In judgment of... what else? The things they feel forced to do, and the collateral damage — idealism, because of course it's Nemik who is crippled in the translation of theory to action — in Abrahamic mimesis, as anti-cathartic, botched pseudo-fulfillment of Old Testament child sacrifice. (But the manifesto, the book, survives. So Nemik is also redoubled into a Mosaic remnant of the Law.) This is also why Skeen commits his betrayal only after The Eye has "closed." Ironically, he is guilty of thinking almost exactly like the Empire, where the panopticon is the only game in town and winning is a condition of optics that must be maintained lest the breach with compliance result in physical/social death. He has a vestigial sense of a deeper moral order, he acknowledges it almost instantly when the first few meteorites streak across the sky, but after an adolescence of authoritarian rule his only concept of a god is one that doesn't inspire fealty unless it's sensibly, verifiably present. Contrast Cassian, who of course kills Skeen to save himself but still holds certain absolutes as inviolable, seemingly because they affect him in a way that is emotionally intolerable. (For example: Never abandon your countryman.) Which in the best-case heroic scenario results in a Marcus Aurelius and in the worst case... well, [gestures at everything]. Fascism and faith are both emotional responses to human social realities, a need to belong/be "initiated" into a cultural order — a structure, an authority — and in the Empire's case that "order's" lethality escalates in proportion to its absurdity, the arbitrariness of its application. In a galaxy far far away, which is to say "right here, right now," you can join the army or you can go up the mountain in silence/be smuggled down the river. Perhaps if you're "lucky" enough not to be scapegoated or drafted or both you can devise a compromise. You could try to play A Serious Man. (Some living!)

I brought back my copy of Killing Time from my folks' place and I'm wondering if it merits a reread 16 years after I first kinda dismissed it. Watch me be like, "No, wait, this is the Blackhat of Caleb Carr novels." Information is not knowledge, and the corollary that Tony Gilroy is writing about is that for knowledge to survive a totalitaran information economy, its transmission cannot be externalized and standardized, converted from exchange value to market value. Knowledge that judiciously permits for dogmatism, polyphony, and revisionism where necessary is what I like to think of as wisdom.

[project-do-over]

Violet_M00n is available

Violet_M00n: Heyyy sorry for the delay! Got caught up with work stuff...

Bookwyrm1982: literally no time has passed.

Violet_M00n: Right. Right. Habit, I guess.

Violet_M00n: Anyway, what else did you want to know about the future?

Bookwyrm1982: Well you said you had AI, right?

Violet_M00n: Well... Yes and no. We have programs people *call* "AI", but they're really just advanced machine learning. They can't actually think or anything, but they can put together a surprisingly human sounding sentence, and draw things that could at first be mistaken for art.

Violet_M00n: But of course it's awful. The results are full of factual errors or have way, way too many fingers, companies are trying to use it to replace creatives, and it burns a ton of energy doing essential nothing of value.

Violet_M00n: So could you go on ChatGPT and talk to a convincing facsimile of a human but underneath it's just a more advanced version of Dr. SBAITSO.

Bookwyrm1982: that's a shame. But then again at least you don't have to worry about them taking over the world, right?

Violet_M00n: Luna, at this point I'd welcome our robot overlords. Better than the fucks we have running things these days.

Bookwyrm1982: Are things that bad?

Violet_M00n: *sighs* no, I suppose not. I still have a job, a family, I can exist in public without fearing persecution, and I'm mostly free to do as I please.

Violet_M00n: But trust me when I say the people who very much want to take that away have much more power than feels comfortable.

Bookwyrm1982: that sounds scary though.

Violet_M00n: More enraging than scary, really. Just so many people who can't or don't want to see things from anyone's point of view from their own.

Violet_M00n: Well, that, and capitalism.

Bookwyrm1982: I thought capitalism was good though?

Violet_M00n: *sigh* we have so much to learn.

Violet_M00n: Honestly though, and you should be able to find these online if not in the library, but read some Marx.

Violet_M00n: It may not resonate a lot yet, but it will.

Bookwyrm1982: I always thought that Communism was a good idea in theory but it needed a global revolution to actually work.

Violet_M00n: You may be on to something there. And someday, hopefully in our lifetime, we may get there. But it's a long, long road. Especially here in America, where it's been used as a boogeyman for like 80 years now.

Violet_M00n: (55 for you)

Bookwyrm1982: Wow, that's.... I'm not sure I want to grow up now.

Violet_M00n: Well maybe your timeline will invent actual time travel and you can keep that wish. Luna knows I wish I could.

Bookwyrm1982: so

Bookwyrm1982: um

Bookwyrm1982: Can we talk about something more fun? Like, what's something good in your time?

Violet_M00n: Well Magic the Gathering is still pretty good.

Bookwyrm1982: We're still playing? I kinda lost interest and stopped following it a year or two ago.

Violet_M00n: Oh yeah, we're still playing, and the game is... Well, it's way different from your time but also at its heart the same.

Violet_M00n: Like it's still Magic but also there's D&D and cowboys and Gandalf, for some reason. It's cool but it's also kinda scary how much they're pumping out.

Bookwyrm1982: Oh that sounds cool! Is it just D&D and LOTR?

Violet_M00n: They've done a ton of crossovers, they call them "Universes Beyond". They've done, let's see...

Violet_M00n: Dr. Who, Warhammer, Assassin's Creed, Final Fantasy, they're doing Marvel soon, Transformers (those are Hasbro though so they were among the first), The Walking Dead, Fortnite, Stranger Things (you... Don't know about those yet, don't worry), um, lots more stuff too that I'm forgetting, but those are mostly in like five or ten card bundles.

Violet_M00n: Unlike LotR which was a full set, with boosters and everything. And the best selling set of Magic in all time, unless Bloomburrow has passed that already.

Bookwyrm1982: Really cool! You'll have to send me some pictures sometime!

Violet_M00n: I'll be sure to downscale them appropriately this time!

Bookwyrm1982: What else do we like? Is Star Trek still running?

Violet_M00n: It had a long break there where it seemed we weren't going to get any more Star Trek.

Violet_M00n: But then JJ Abrams (a director/producer of some renown) made a Star Trek movie that was meh, but good enough to get people interest in the franchise again.

Violet_M00n: Soon after that Paramount spun up Star Trek Discovery, which had a rocky start but Grew The Beard soon enough for them to greenlight Star Trek Picard. Then Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, Academy, and probably one or two others I'm forgetting (not to forget Short Treks and Very Short Treks).

Violet_M00n: Prodigy! I forgot Prodigy!

Bookwyrm1982: The online service?

Violet_M00n: No, Star Trek Prodigy. It's a CG animated series for kids made by Nickelodeon.

Bookwyrm1982: You're making that up.

Violet_M00n: I swear, it's true. Lower Decks is animated too, but 2D, and it's for adults and probably the best thing Star Trek has ever created. It's hilarious!

Violet_M00n: SNW follows Captain Pike on the 1701

Bookwyrm1982: And Discovery?

Violet_M00n: Complicated! It starts out pre-TOS but... Spoilers! And Picard is... Also here!

Bookwyrm1982: Is that about young Picard or something?

Violet_M00n: Old Picard, but close.

Bookwyrm1982: Hey my mom... our mom... just told me to get off the computer so

Bookwyrm1982: ttys!

Violet_M00n: See you in literally no time at all!

Bookwyrm1982 is away

[notarobot1006]

As much as I otherwise love, Baldur's Gate 3, I really do not like the game's approach to inherently evil races. Because that approach boils down to 'yes they exist, fuck you.'

It first shows up if you brain bond with the Gnoll Flind: This creature that's intelligent enough to communicate with other species and use tools is also incapable of seeing the world in any terms other than Pack and Food. This is an inherent part of her nature. Gnolls are a type of demon in this setting, but that's the opposite of an excuse. It just means that instead of wondering why this one species is self-sabotagingly dim, we're left wondering why an entire class of species is.

Later act spoilers about the Mind Flayers under the cut:

Yeah, Mind Flayers/Illithids are the other example of this. They are canonically soulless, inherently manipulative bastards who don't see other people as people. Not due to some twisted ideology or because the big bad Elder Brain is controlling them, but because it's in their nature. On one hand, you have Omeluum, who's a genuinely decent person actively looking for a more ethical food source than the brains of sapient beings. But on the other hand...you have the player character.

I went full Mind Flayer at the end of my playthrough because I thought it was my best bad option: Karlach wasn't in the party and I'd feel like a bit of a dick making my friend do something I wouldn't do myself, and I thought that making Orpheus do it would screw over the entire Githyanki people.

It led to some interesting interactions in the post-bossfight and epilogue, but it also had the narrator outright saying that in order to not be a huge dick, I had to overcome my nature. My nature of being a huge dick. And then in the epilogue, I had to roll at the tail end of a perfectly normal conversation not to eat my friend Shadowheart's brain.

Sure, Mind Flayer Karlach will say that she's starting to forget who she was the more brains she eats, so I can buy that the bonds of friendship might fray a bit if you become literally a different person as a Mind Flayer.

But Shadowheart is also an ally and a twelfth level character and at a party surrounded by people who would get really upset if I hauled off and ate her brain. Even the narrator says the desire to eat her brain is illogical. But the game still makes you roll not to do it. Because Mind Flayers, the psychic tyrants with the big brain Intelligence scores, are not only literally soulless for...some reason, but also apparently too stupid and weak-willed not to eat brains even when eating brains would get them killed.

Because it's in their nature. And for a game that goes out of its way to show that Tieflings aren't evil and that their persecution is wrong (I played as a Tiefling), it shoots that message of tolerance in the foot to also say "oh but this other group really is inherently evil and soulless."

Because now the message isn't "persecuting people because of their demographics is wrong", but rather "make sure you persecute the right people because they just can't help themselves from being evil."

[book51ut]

Review of Decolonial Marxism by Walter Rodney

A wonderfully modern revolutionary read. I think the main problem that most of the people i know see with communism is that it was supported by a bunch of stuffy old european men in a time before many of us had rights- rights that the communists barely addressed, if they did at all. Their words don’t squarely fit into our 21st century American perspective. Rodney points out that they don’t need to. The idea that marxism and communism are white western european ideologies are simply false unless you want them to be true, if that makes sense. Places that have adopted Marxism in some form, many of which were not white at all, took the theory and adapted it to their cultural and historical contexts. Of course Marx doesn’t make sense in 21st century USA: it was never meant to. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be taken and adapted to our needs. Saying Marx doesn’t work for us is the easy way out. The hard task we have is to implement a communist reality within the American historical context. That’s certainly not easy, but also not impossible.

Another thing that really stood out to me was Rodney’s strong criticism of “riding the line” He used the example of Senegal under Leopold Senghor - a man that decided the economy into three sectors (foreign, joint ownership, and a fully publicly owned sector). This is not communism and cannot even approximate communism because it still operates within and benefits from the white supremacist heteronormative ableist capitalist system. While when we try to play the world game, we do exactly what we are trying to avoid. To build something that genuinely functions as a communist society, we need to move past any dependence on capitalism in any form. In order to decolonize our societies, we need to move past any dependence on capitalism in any form.

I’ve had a realization similar in my own journey with theory which is as ive become more political i’ve given less of a shit about party politics. The movement is really happening on the ground in community building and what we are doing for each other. It’s also about making this theory more accessible (another criticism of Marx and stuffy old european men who can go fuck themselves). I just moved back to the US from spain and i was really weirded out by their government. They have a thriving communist party in the government. This was weird because communism is super persecuted in the US and is literally a prohibiting factor to enter the US as an immigrant and i had a very american perspective that governments everywhere felt that way BUT also. While spain is a relatively left ish country, it still participates in this colonial capitalist society. To me, it feels like a waste of time to send communists to work in the government when they could be directly helping people. Changing the working hours from 40 to 37 a week is great but if you believe in the fall of capitalism there’s more to do than that. Let the government fall into disarray around you and don’t lose sight of the goal with the piece of candy capitalism places in your mouth every once and awhile. We want to exist outside of it, not within it.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Refugee Issues

So apparently they're going to be rounding up as many of the refugees in this country as they can find, in kind of blitz attacks, in preparation for sending them to Rwanda. Which ... I mean ... it feels like an exaggeration to say "this feels like some Nazi bullshit" in this day and age, but the scary thing is that it's not an exaggeration.

It's getting more complicated and worse, too, because of the whole thing with Ireland being in the EU and Northern Ireland ... not. Because some have taken the risk of trying to get around how shitty the UK is being about refugees in small boats by going a little further and going to Ireland. Ireland is now saying they're going to punt them over the border into Northern Ireland because "they're not our problem", and the UK is going, "Only on the understanding that they're getting sent right back to France; hey, why don't you send them right back to France, since you're both EU?" and ... it's all too fucking complicated but people are playing this massive game of NIMBY with people who just want to live somewhere that they speak the language and won't be persecuted.

Seeing the accommodations for refugees who are sent to Rwanda ... it worries me. On one hand, it sounds pretty sweet, but ... there are a couple of issues I'm having. One - where are they getting the money for this? From us, one would assume, given that it's the UK's stupid project, so why don't they build something similar here? So I don't entirely trust it. I also don't like what I see between the lines of "They can go wherever they like; we're not keeping them incarcerated or anything!" Yes, it sounsd good, but ... like ... I feel like given Rwanda's history? They seem to be setting the stage for refugees just ... disappearing and for them to be able to say, "Well, we haven't been keeping them prisoner or anything; we're not responsible!"

I think the worst part is that the whole set-up gives one of two options for how to proceed: "We will help you live in Rwanda, or we will help you go back to your home country". Neither of those options sounds very good. Rwanda is away from friends and family, and is a strange country where they're only welcome to a point because some other government gave that country money to be rid of them, might have to learn a new language (though English is one of the languages used in Rwanda, along with French, Swahili, and Kinyarwanda, so I guess it depends on how widely English is used). Alternatively ... why the fuck would they want to go back to their home country? They risked their lives to run from it because staying there was worse!

Meanwhile, more and more refugees are being created - Israel vs Pakistan, Iran vs Israel, gods know how many others (there's only so much news I can stomach, I admit) - and nobody seems to care beyond yelling "NOT IN MY BACK YARD!" every time these people who lost everything but their lives need a place to stay.

And this country? They're now talking about cutting down on the number of international students allowed to come here. They just ... really, really hate foreigners right now. And I know they probably don't mean me - not even so much because I'm white, because the Polish population of the UK got so much horrific shit thrown at them in the time around the Brexit referendum, but because I'm North American. People still ask "What part of the States are you from?" because I think they forgot Canada exists. Despite being part of their Commonwealth, which ... kind of grinds my gears, but anyway. Point is that none of that "They probably don't mean me" helps. First, I'm angry as hell that they mean anyone when they're talking about cruelty to people who were not born in this country. But also? When it's everyone who wasn't born here - the families of healthcare workers, university students, anyone who doesn't make enough money? It's hard to avoid the idea that they do mean me. Especially since I'm not cis, I'm not het, and I am not healthy and fully abled.

I try pretty hard to look on the bright side of things, or at least focus on the small joys of my life. The latter works better than the former. The "bright side of things" is getting smaller and smaller every day, and ... yeah.

[thistle-and-thorn]

I just watched Katharine Hepburn's 1936 "Mary of Scotland" and I was a bit surprised at how pro Mary it was? I barely know the basics of the Tudors and Stewarts, much less any particular knowledge about the historical figure of Mary herself. What do you think of Mary Queen of Scots? What's your opinion on Darnley and Bothwell? What about Moray?

Buckle your seat belt. Of course I have unreasonably strong opinions of this. And I haven’t seen the Katharine Hepburn movie though it’s all my favorite things and people (1930s historical dramas, KH, Tudors) in one place so I should.

I think a lot of popular culture is very sympathetic with Mary…There’s the play Mary Stuart which I Love very much but is very pro-Catholic in its approach (in response to the playwright’s problems with German Lutheranism rather than Anglo Protestantism). There’s the tv show Reign (?) and the recent movie with Margot Robbie and Saoirse Ronan which felt very pro-Mary as well. And I sort of get it…like she was executed, leaving behind a young son, and she had many spouses and a cinematic life. The contrasts between her and Elizabeth are appealing—a woman married three times disastrously compared to a woman who never married, Mary being younger and beautiful and fertile, the irony of James I becoming king of England later, etc Some of the way that Elizabeth is portrayed in these adaptions reek of the ca 2011 Taylor Swift “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women” brand of feminism. Which is…not how monarchy works lol.

My personal opinion of Mary is that you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. The more interesting parallel of Elizabeth and Mary to me is that they were both imprisoned at times when their religious affiliation and political position was dynamite. Elizabeth was imprisoned under her sister (also called) Mary, who was instituting an aggressive campaign of Protestant persecution, and Mary of Scots, under Elizabeth during a time of a lot of Catholic terrorism. Both were implicated in plotting to varying degrees of truthfulness and both were faced with a Queen who viewed them as existential threat because of their youth (and ability to have heirs), their sympathizers (including internationally, in Mary of Scots’ case), their claims to the throne. The difference is…Mary of Scots actually plotted to assassinate Elizabeth. The Babington letters and code are likely to be real. So. Like. There are consequences to that. I don’t know what to say. Elizabeth was extremely reluctant and cautious in handling Mary in the wake of her reign falling apart until she couldn’t be anymore. Elizabeth’s ruling style was very conservative…she didn’t make decisions quickly or lightly….which made her really, really effective but also could turn into indecisiveness and you see the benefits and detriments of that approach all over her handling of Mary. HOWEVER: You plot to kill someone, they’re probably going to kill you right back. So I’m not overly sympathetic with Mary in her political struggles tbh.

Her personal struggles on the other hand are different. Darnley was an asshole and killed her friend in front of her. This is wild. As to whether or not she had a hand in his death…like would we blame her necessarily. It is a 50/50 guess as to whether she was forced into marriage and sexual relations with Bothwell or not. Maybe she wasn’t but theres a solid chance that she was. These are horrible things and she was surrounded by horrible men who destabilized her position. That’s terrible and I’m sorry for it. I feel a lot of pathos for her personal life. I don’t have a strong opinion of Moray, except that I think he was smart about some things and stupid about others. He was a Protestant with a Protestant agenda and opposed Mary’s marriage to Darnley but knew enough to remove himself during Darnley’s murder. I don’t think he would have brought peace to Scotland lol. He had a habit of just…burning stuff to the ground lol. Which is a great authoritarian tactic and not maybe great for reconciliation.

Tracy Borman wrote about the gender of Mary and Elizabeth in a way which is sort of fascinating. Elizabeth played into her sexuality and femininity in certain ways—her dramatic dress, her appearance, and her flirtations with marriage and symbol as the object of courtly love. But she existed in a politically androgynous state—she was often called “the female prince,” drew strong parallels between her and her father, referred to herself as a King. She dominated the men around her in interpersonal interactions. She did not marry (even men she probably loved like Robert Dudley) or have children. Mary’s performance of gender was much more traditional and a lot of her biggest political disasters, like her marriages, are described as being the result of her passions and being “weaker” than the male power players around her. Elizabeth’s refusal to have heirs prevented immediate instability while also causing a lot of uncertainty. Mary’s son provided a future in a way, but also was the result of terrible persona situations that contributed to her downfall. No woman can win lol. I think we see this gender contrast, in some ways, in how they’re treated in fiction.

anyway, thank you for indulging!

[hiswordsarekisses]

This post is so wonderful. I found this on a Facebook page called “Waiting Well Changes Everything”

“We all know and love Jeremiah 29:11, but I urge you to go back to verse one and lean into some game changing truths:

Verses 1, 4 & 7 …

King Nebuchadnezzar had deported God’s chosen people from Jerusalem to Babylon in exile. But in verses 4 and 7, the Lord made it clear through Jeremiah’s letter that GOD alone was responsible for the deportation of his people. I often skipped over that inconspicuous detail, focusing more on the exile itself, but it’s critical to realize our loving Heavenly Father will sometimes bring us to incredibly uncomfortable places for our own benefit - although there’s nothing that feels good at the time.

And we often cast blame on the person or situation causing our pain rather than consider that there’s a spiritual aspect in play. The Israelites, no doubt, looked at the king as the source of their pain and suffering. He received their wrath because he was the one they could visibly see, the one who uprooted them, who forced them from their homes and radically altered their lives; he was the issue. But God told the Israelites twice that HE was responsible for deporting them. The God they worship; the God they can’t see; their loving God orchestrated in the spiritual realm an exile in the physical realm. What we see is not ever the true reflection of our reality.

Verses 5 and 6 …. Accept the fact that you’re going to be in this season for awhile. Before God told the Israelites how long they’d be in exile, he gave them his expectations: “Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Find wives for yourselves, and have sons and daughters. Multiply there; do not decrease.”

These are all long term directives in a place the Israelites didn’t want to be. Our seasons of exile or wilderness will all look different, and I’m praying they won’t last the 70 years of the Israelites, but what I can tell you is the longer you fight it, the longer you will be planted there. Leaning into all that God has to show you, how he wants to mold you, will insure the greatest transformation in the least amount of time.

Inhale, exhale and accept verse 7 … “Pursue the well being of the city I have deported you to. Pray to the Lord on its behalf, for when it thrives, you thrive.” I can imagine how hard it was for the Israelites to pray for the king and all those who persecuted them daily. God was calling them to bless the very people who were hurting them. And so are we called. God says, when we pray for them and they thrive, then we thrive. How counter intuitive is that?! Only you and God know who should be the focus of your prayers in that exile. It’s hard to swallow at first, but God massively blesses and ministers to those who can rise up and pray for the souls of those doing the persecuting.

Verse 8 … You’re searching YouTube and Facebook for prophetic words from ANYone; you’re seeking advice from friends and family; you’re desperate for a sign, a dream, anything to give you direction. Warning! When we are desperate for a word, ANY word will often suffice, and the world is all too willing to supply it:

“You need to move on.”

“God wouldn’t want you suffering like this”

“Are you sure you heard God right?”

“Really … just put it all behind you.”

“Maybe God didn’t mean for it right now, but later ... when things don’t look so impossible.”

God knew you would go seeking. That’s why he gave his declaration in verses 8 and 9: don’t be deceived; don’t go seeking dream interpretations; don’t go seeking advice, for they are prophesying FALSELY to you in my name. I HAVE NOT SENT THEM.

If you go looking for someone to walk you out of an exile, that God has deported you to, make no mistake, you’ll find an escort, and most likely they’ll be a handsome, pretty, sweet-talkin’ package that looks and feels so “easy”, but it won’t be a Heavenly-orchestrated escort. You’ll wake up one day to find a greater prison then you had in the exile. Don’t allow your social circle, your family or friends, your co-workers to have more influence in your decisions then what God had said directly to you.

And finally, verses 10 and 11 … so often we glorify verse 11, but we miss the fact that God, in verse 10, had just announced the Israelites were to be in exile for almost a life time - 70 years to be exact. God was reassuring his people that despite the length of the exile, and the pain and suffering of the exile, he had a plan … a plan for their well-being, not for disaster, to give them a future and a hope beyond the exile. He was reassuring them that in this exile they can call out to him, pray and seek him, and that they will be heard by and find him. And that God planned to restore their fortunes and their relationships from the place HE banished them to.

In the midst of our exile, there is no greater beauty than the sweet words of God saying, “I will restore you to the place from which I deported you.”

We are encouraged to have faith in the exile; keep faith in the exile; and know that faith always proceeds the evidence that is most assuredly on the way.”