#and they're the most done with life restoration member ever

[sexcaliburs]

I wanna make a sonic sona but I can't choose which animal to draw myself as. help.

[wishcamper]

All in the Family Part III: Feyre the Harbinger

Pre-reqs: Part I | Part II

No content warnings, just some minor Mor slander.

Welcome back to my series on ACOTAR and Family Systems Theory! Today’s topic is how systems react to change, generational patterns, and special considerations in family integration.

When we last left off, we discussed the IC family system that, while dysfunctional, maintained relative balance as long as everyone played their roles in the nuclear family emotional process (NFEP). As a refresher, the NFEP is how anxiety moves through a family: 

Mor feels anxiety about Az's feelings for her, and she passes it off to the boys. Cassian steps in the middle of the conflict at Mor’s unconscious request and takes inappropriate responsibility for Azriel’s feelings of rejection and Mor’s anxiety. Thus Mor doesn’t have to deal with her emotions and Azriel suppresses his feelings once more. Everyone plays their part, and balance is restored until the cycle starts again. 

Now we’re going to talk about how Feyre is a harbinger of change for the IC’s dynamic. Let’s look at the IC pre-Feyre:

So let’s think about how Feyre enters the IC. She and Mor develop a friendship, and Cassian treats her with affection like he does Mor, though without all the touching. Azriel seems to like her well enough. Amren is Amren. And Rhysie boy is OBSESSED with her and will never side with anyone against her. Feyre has power over Mor, Azriel, and Cassian when she becomes High Lady, but she also has power because of her relationship with Rhys, the most powerful person in the family. What will this do to our system?

Mor, girl, you good?

I’ve added some new lines to represent the significant changes once Feyre enters the scene. The big gold blob between Feyre and Rhys is to represent their mating bond, which is canonically a stronger and more important relationship than all others. In this system, it’s the most significant relationship and the alliance that wields the most power. If Feyre and Rhys agree on something, it will be done.

The pink arrow between Feyre and Mor represents what to me is the compensating balance to the system. Mor develops a friendship with Feyre because that’s what keeps everything in harmony. She approaches Feyre with much more interest than we ever see toward Nesta or Elain, even when they're both in the arguably identical position of being romantically involved with her brothers.

And that, to me, is odd. Especially considering how Feyre first enters the system as opposed to her sisters.

Imagine this: your beloved family members returns home after having been held as a prisoner and the first thing he says when he sees you is how he fell in love with some girl. Excuse me???? Putting aside the fact that Rhys trapped his friends in Velaris against their will for the good of the city (arguably the same situation he was in UTM), wouldn’t you be a little put out? No hi hello I love you nice to see you, just she’s my fucking mate? I’m sorry sir but, who??!?!?!?!

Nevertheless, Rhys returns to his family saying he’s met the love of his life, and suddenly this person even before she’s present holds a great deal of power in the system. Rhys’ closest relationship is no longer Mor, it’s Feyre.

Remember that Mor is the most likely source of anxiety in the family. This displacement really unbalances her, I think, removing the moderating presence between her, Cassian and Azriel. So what do we see her do? Throw in hard for Feyre. IMMEDIATELY she tries to get Feyre alone to start establishing a relationship with her new symbolic mommybestie.

We also see her hanging out with the other two boys a lot, together or just Cassian alone. I have to wonder if that was the norm before, or what changed when Rhys was UTM. Now that Rhys is absorbed in Feyre, Mor is using that buffer in earnest. Without Rhys to balance them, she pingpongs between Cassian and Azriel through a lot of ACOMAF, enough so that Feyre, who just met them, notices it on several occasions. 

And this is not to downplay that Mor likes Feyre and they’re genuine friends. I’m more so saying that even if Mor disliked Feyre, it’s not likely she would’ve made that public. She needs her relationship with Rhys to be strong enough to justify her place because of the anxiety she brings to the system. The way to stay chill with Rhys is to stay chill with Feyre. We see that over and over and over.

Thankfully (?), Feyre is more than ready to integrate into the existing system. In fact, she reinforces Rhys’ power and acts as another moderator between everyone. She notices the weird Mor/Cas/Az triangle but has no outward reaction to it, doesn't even bring it up to Mor who is supposedly her friend, which in the sense of the system is accepting and condoning it to continue. She doesn’t question the family rules or interrupt the NFEP. Feyre generally wants everyone to get along all throughout the series. Do we ever see her disagree with anyone besides Rhys? Because I genuinely can’t remember her in an argument with anyone in her family besides him and her sisters.

So in summary:

Feyre temporarily unbalances the system by diverting a huge amount of Rhys’ attention and care.

The system rebalances though Feyre and Mor’s friendship and Feyre’s tacit endorsement of the IC’s rules, the power structure, and the NFEP regarding the buffer triangle.

Feyre's entry reveals the weak points in the system, like the buffer, as well as the HUGE dependence on Rhys as a moderator for everyone else. This sets the stage for the Archeron invasion to take the whole thing down.

Let’s talk a little about family rules before we wrap up.

All families have rules, some spoken and most unspoken. Rules can be things like we always have dinner together, throwing things when you’re mad is not allowed, children have to wear helmets when they ride bikes. They can also be things like don’t tell outsiders our business, do whatever dad says when he’s drunk, don’t show your feelings ever. The IC has some rules I want to highlight, one being: don’t bring home a love interest.

In all the 500 years, why are all these kids still single? We never hear of any long-term relationships of any significance until ACOSF. None of them have partners or lovers worth naming. What the hell? Is the mating bond that sacred, even though it's so rare, that you assume you'll fuck around until you hopefully find it? Personally, I don't believe people work that way. I think we crave companionship and love that we don't get from our families. There's between an 81-86% chance you will be married at some point in your life, and I know America isn't Prythian but it feels against the odds that ALL of them are unpartnered without some other explicit reason why.

The important thing to remember is that all rules have a source point, like those laws that say don’t drive with an alligator in your car or whatever. Someone did this thing once and it was bad, so don’t do it again. Often the source point goes back many many generations, but with the IC I think it’s what happened between Mor and Cassian when they were seventeen. Love in the friends group = bad. So let's never talk about it again, until these three fuckin' humans show up and goddamnit we have to.

And that’s what you missed on Glee!

[nangbaby]

This is a genuine question, absolutely serious. What is your opinion on the ideas of restraining orders? They're very much like "blocking" a person IRL, as a means of self-protection. Is trying to keep a harmful person away from you in real life fundamentally different than trying to keep a harmful person away from you online? Does it seem "less real" on a text based medium?

I've answered similar questions before, but I don't mind answering them again.

I have no problems with restraining orders (even though there is always an element of justice system bias when the law is involved), but there are three fundamental differences between them and blocking.

The first is that restraining orders cannot be distributed arbitrarily. You cannot wake up one day, encounter an annoying person in public, then decide to get a restraining order against them for offending your sensibilities. In fact, if you were to use the same logic in real life when applying for a restraining order (block whoever you want whenever you want), you would be in big trouble with the law. Even though some people use the restraining order process maliciously to deny people legal access, that there is an actual process in place reduces the ability of an order to be imposed because of personal preference.

The second, which is also extremely important, is that restraining orders generally expire. There are no contact orders for 90 days, 120 days, etc. You can't just get an order for someone to not ever contact you ever again based on one incident (or even no incidents, as blocking is often done based on someone else's word) . After all, a restraining order is a restraint on the other person, and generally one's rights cannot be restrained permanently even if they commit a crime. I remember vividly a local magistrate declaring in the case of arguing neighbors that a no-contact order would be too restrictive given that neighbors living in proximity may have to talk to each other.

The third, a point which I haven't argued yet, are that restraining orders are public record. Unlike with blocking, one can't reliably lie about being blocked or about not blocking a person. That means that there is some sort of verifiability beyond the two parties involved.

The reasons for these restrictions on restraining orders are because they are a legal means of stripping someone of some their rights. Compare the restraining order process with blocking.

First, it's encouraged to block whomever and whatever you want at any time. You know, that's kinda what Scott Adams is encouraging. The problem is that infringes on the rights of people in society. Blocking all members of a religion from a store isn't just bigotry; it's against the law. If you're operating a service open to the public, you have to service the public. Even the "no shoes, no shirt" policies usually don't hold up under legal scrutiny, and there are groups fighting against that. In fact, this is what part of the fear over the "bakery ruling" was about, that people could "choose" to deny services to those who are marginalized. With blocking, you don't need to prove someone is a danger to you to block or even have cause. You can just discriminate based on legally unacceptable ways without any way for someone else to prove otherwise.

Second, most people do not unblock after blocking. Blocking paints a specific individual as irredeemable trash. Imagine if you messed up and were blocked; because there is no recourse or remedy, there is no way of even knowing how you messed up. Even if you do know how, there's no point in redeeming one's behavior, because one has already been written off with no hope of recovery. This prevents the very growth needed to resolve disputes. Restraining orders, ideally, are to give people the opportunity to cool down. Maybe someone did cross a line, but there is a path for reconciliation and restoration. Even in the case of clear-cut wrong, it's the difference between timeout and eternal exile.

Third, incognito blocking can definitely be used to abuse people. One of the popular forms of harassment is for people to block an individual then to spread a smear campaign against them. Because the individual is blocked, they either don't know about the lies being told or can't stop them from being spread because of being blocked. An outsider looking at their words might just accept the claims of the party and by blocking prevents the very investigation needed to judge whether or not someone is telling the truth. While this can be the case with both a private block and a public block, with a private block someone may assume that silence on the part of the accused means that they are guilty of what has been alleged, when in reality, that person can't reply to someone's claims because they're blocked.

There does not even have to be a public use of a private block in order to cause friction. For instance, a self-selected group of users can be part of a group project. Then they can all block a person from the project to sabotage them participating. Then they can unblock that party and say that party never bothered to contact them and disappeared on them, making that person look unreliable. If the person who is blocked has no other ties to any larger community, this communal block defines their experience. It's another way of damaging people's reputations without recourse.

Now about the difference between online and real life, yes, there is a fundamental difference. Nearly every experience online is based on active participation. The only reason, for instance, why I can be pointed to an individual by the general public is because I put up a screen name and I post. If I were to stop posting, eventually, the records of what I wrote would fade and I would no longer exist. Therefore, unlike real life, where even if you lock yourself away in a domicile, there are independent markers* of your existence that can be identifiable, online experience is defined by how other people interact with you. However, when you go online and create an account on any service with a public platform or setting up a site and start interacting in an active manner, you're no longer just "going about your business." You are essentially setting up a table in the town square. You might not be selling anything. But you're being the "change my mind" guy. You're out in public with the intent of being seen and you can't stop anyone from looking at you or filming you (at least in the US, thankfully).

The equivalent of harmful people online are those who set up phishing sites, spread ransomware, spammers, and such. Arguably, pirates can also considered harmful for IP holders. You know, people who hijack the actual experience and interface in order to involuntarily cause clear-cut identifiable harm. I would also include Internet mobs formed against people who do not derive money from their account directly or indirectly, as this can cause harm based on an inability for that individual to experience the Internet with the same capacity. Likewise, those with prioritized and paid speech (including those with tip jars and Patreons and Ko-fis and such) harm people those who do not have money behind their words. Unfortunately, I have no means of removing the harm paid users cause, and their very means of harm (blocking) reduces any ability for me to even mitigate it by becoming a paid user myself because my audience is permanently reduced. The harm is just as real, but it's not the person who is blocking being harmed but the person being blocked.

After all, if forcibly isolating an individual in real life is considered causing harm, then how is forcibly isolating an individual online not causing harm? One can only forcibly isolate if there is a power imbalance. As someone with no power, I can't harm another user any more than a baby can harm a grown adult. The worst I could do is cry, and you can't block babies from crying. In fact doing so is child abuse. I know this post is all over the place, but I wanted to show why I feel that blocking is fundamentally harmful in a way that restraining orders are not. It's a weaponized form of silence. The actual equivalent of a block offline is SLAPP suit. *obviously there are digital markers of existence, too, but I'm arguing from the point of a third party observer, not someone on the back end.

[stevishabitat]

Climate change, racism, and environmental violence share the same last name: extraction. They find root cause in the same atrophying of our national moral character and loss of communal responsibility. We are really up against old problems that every so often like to present a new face; today in the ways of police brutality, of insurgent wildfires, or of acid rain.

We all participate in the economy of extraction when we practice the belief that our Earth has no dignity, no life, or inherent value apart from what we get out of it for utility and for short-term profit. We participate in this economy when we continue to strip the dignity from any sort of bodily — or embodied — work and exploit mainly Black and brown bodies for hard labor with criminally low wages and working conditions in exchange for comfort enjoyed only by some. We all fall prey to the logic of extraction when we engage mindlessly in consumerism and accumulation, whether through buying stuff we do not need or wasting what we have. There are a thousand ways to participate in the economy of extraction, and most of the time we do it in willful ignorance.

Yet this legacy of extraction cannot co-exist with God’s dreams. In God’s order of things, nothing is created in vain, nothing goes to waste, and everything is treated with care. God longs for and is working toward wholeness and healing, toward justice and restoration for all created beings. We know this and we want to participate in building this radical and sacred economy — one where each person and every created being is indispensable and worthy of care.

This election, we have some choices. We could carelessly take a pen and scratch in a few checkmarks in one direction in alignment with our favorite political ideology and think our responsibilities are done. Or we can welcome the ballot as an invitation to examine our lives and consider how we might carefully inhabit our homes and communities in the years to come.

So can we each take our vote on Nov. 3 not as the end, but as a vow toward a renewed beginning? Christ followers cannot be single-party or even single-issue voters; Our alignment is always and only to God: God’s desires of wholeness and liberation. God’s dreams of radical welcome. God’s movement toward justice — especially for members of our community who continue to be oppressed by the relentless churning of the extractive economy. We are not called simply to “vote for climate”; our responsibility is to show up season after season, in the personal realm and the public square, as a people committed to care-giving and to building vital community, no matter our position in the world.

“Justice is what love looks like in public,” Dr. Cornel West rightly says. So this election season, can we think of our vote as a humble gift to each other in an act of community care — just one gift in an entire ecosystem of ways to practice care-giving and love? We all know that no vote and no candidate will ever be perfect. But we can vote in the direction of justice for the oppressed. We can vote for the candidates — on the local, the state and national level — who are authentically committed to an ethic of communal responsibility, of wholeness and restoration for God’s people and world. We can vote for the people who have, season after season, shown that they are willing to be held accountable to the people they represent and serve. We can say yes to the candidates who are on the journey with us to reverse the legacy of extraction in our lives and communities.

Our vote is a renewed beginning. Yet we already know that the deep work of real healing and wholeness must extend far beyond one voting cycle; this requires more responsibility than a few checkmarks in one direction, in one election. The work of unlearning racism and undoing our habit of exploitation — of the earth, of other bodies, and other neighborhoods — is long. How, then, should we consider personal and common life in every season, behind and beyond every election season?

Here I’d like to offer three suggestions to build a fuller ecosystem of care and restoration practice in our lives and our communities in every season. My prayer is that they would spill over into every crevice of our lives, from where and how we engage our free time to the values and character we bring to our vote.

We can recover and restore the dignities of embodied work and embodied life. The lifelong work of undoing extraction and exploitation begins within our own bodies, ourselves. We can resist extracting our poor bodies for productivity and profit by listening to our body’s needs for rest; we can seek out ways to move and work our whole bodies throughout the day in celebration that we were truly made to move and live in the world three-dimensionally. Through full-bodied activities like gardening, making food, or creating things, we begin to restore the dignity and essentiality of embodied work in ourselves and extend this respect and dignity for other bodies who practice this for a living.

We can be fully attentive and present in our everyday lives to what is around us. When we take a walk or go outside, we can do our best to be fully there — to notice details in the little wonders of the earth and of every person we pass by, each created to reflect a slice of God’s full image. Sustained attention blooms into care, which breeds real responsibility. So as much as we can, we may try and live our lives with deliberate attention to everything: how and where we get our food, how we move around and get from place to place, whom we talk to and whom we might willfully ignore. Over time, we may finally become fully attuned and responsive to both the joys and cries of the little piece of earth that envelops us and to the cries of our neighbors, especially neighbors who don’t live or look like us. This kind of practice, over time, can build vital place, vital community.

We can cultivate deep wells of spiritual disciplines to nurture a heart oriented towards care-fullness and cherishing of a vital community. We would do well to remember it is God’s spirit that is behind any meaningful restoration work that happens in ourselves and our communities. Form a regular practice of solitude, worship, and prayer to listen to where and how God is leading you and your communities.

This election season, let’s vow to free ourselves from the economy of extraction in every corner of our lives and instead choose to build God’s dreams of justice, healing, and liberation for God’s creation and people — starting with our vote and continuing in the weeks and years beyond. In the words of Emma Lazarus, “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” Yes, it’s a lifelong work. Arm in arm, let us get free together.