#and those 2 are fundamental to who i am... this is such a huge psychological upheaval for me and im gonna need so much help after this

[myviewsreviews]

My fear of social media

I am going to say a lot of frightening to say and deeply self focused crud. I am afraid being on here. I think a lot of people are, in one way or another. The vast majority of social media interaction is passive, consuming the output of others. That makes sense and the world would be less bright if there weren't a huge swarm of small or even almost nonexistent accounts liking posts and being a portal to the worlds of others for people out there for every million follower juggernaut. But I think at least a chunk of the reluctance, at least for people like me, is that it's scary to be out there. To put yourself out there actively. What if you have The Wrong Opinions and regret inflicting them on a wide audience one day? What if you're just cringe to someone and they decide to hurt you?

I took a trivializing stance on cyberbullying as a kid. Mostly because it was the only form of bullying the school system seemed interested in while I was acquiring quite foreseeable and preventable PTSD at the hands of very much physical interactions. I thought it was wild that someone could have interactions that weren't mandatory in some way, like being hearded out to the people who would then hold me down physically while brutalizing my body and mind over and over, and then expect me to take seriously their being upset at how those interactions turned out. I didn't interact with my peers willingly, or the teachers, the medical professionals, my own family, any of the systems that hurt me personally out of a desire for connection. It was because you don't get a choice sometimes. So, "oh no, there's words on a screen in my home I can turn off and never interact with again" seemed close to the way my own struggles had been characterised at times (just ignore the unignorable) but with a real way out. A real way to trade something I had never known (connection and freedom) for a safety that finding was my only life goal.

Now I'm an adult, it's easy to see how that was... A colander genuinely not understanding what a broken bucket has to complain about holes. People need people, I needed people then, so deeply and darkly that it was hard to identify fully, obfuscated by the size of the obstacles between reality and ideal. Even those of us with robust real and close friendship circles are part of a wider world, want on some level to have strangers see us see them in return. It's scary to open yourself up. And not wholly irrationally, having someone hurt you hurts you (insightful, I know, but it has to be said because so many people gloss over that when it comes to others), it's stress, it's a window by which trauma can enter your life. Sometimes people's online presences, deservedly at times but oftentimes not, hurt their lives in very tangible ways as well as the stress of knowing you're hated. It's not irrational to fear being hated, it's a fundamental part of most people's psychology.

I want to add material to the internet, it would be nice, but "it's foolish to open yourself up to others" is ingrained in more of us than I suspect, bucket or colander.

2/10, almost failed a chemistry class where all results had to be posted on my uni's forum, going to try harder

[autistic-shaiapouf]

I uh. think I might get the 2nd vaccine dose today

[jasper-dracona]

It’s interesting to me the connection between:

-anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change

-ecological grief (aka climate grief or eco-grief)

-eco-anxiety

-the future amount of people in STEM

-and the happiness of those who are in STEM.

Some definitions so everyone can understand:

Anthropogenic Climate Change: Changes to the Earth’s climate and ecosystems which are caused by human activity, both directly and indirectly.

Ecological Grief: “The grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems, and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change.”

Eco-Anxiety: Extreme worry about current and future harm to the environment caused by human activity and climate change.

Here’s the thing: You generally cannot go into the sciences right now without hearing about climate change every day. Here’s what I saw/experienced in my first year of College.

Generally in university, in General Biology 1, you learn about how changes in temperature and acidity can cause vital proteins to stop working, and the potential ecological repercussions of this are usually discussed at least somewhat. In General Biology 2 there is usually an ecology unit, which goes into how we study ecosystems, biomes, communities, etc. the different kinds of each, and broadly goes over how humans are affecting them.

In my Intro to Geology course it was talked about a bit, with discussions of where and how we get coal, oil, and gas. We also spent some days watching a particular documentary series called “Earth: The Power of the Planet” (presented by Iain Stewart) and that brought up a lot of important things about climate change.

In both my Geography courses we learned/heard about climate change pretty much every day, and that’s not a huge surprise as one of them was about meteorology and climatology, so it’s pretty fundamental to the field.

But even if you’re not taking these kinds of courses where it is brought up regularly, there are posters and flyers posted all over campuses, depending on the school you might also get notices relating to climate change in your email, there was a slide show that played on a small tv outside the Geology & Geography Department, which is right in front of the stairs to that floor, that included this image.

If you’re going to my school to study fashion, at least a couple of your classes are also on that floor, and you walk past this at least a few times a week, so even STEM students who are going into fields that are not centred around or related to biology or ecology hear about, learn about, or experience climate change issues.

And I am not saying that the amount of education or awareness being spread about climate change is a bad thing, we should not stop talking about climate change and the effects thereof; because this is a reality and if people are going to go into these kinds of fields they have to know what’s happening and what’s changing.

What I am saying however, is that this is having an effect on people’s mental health. The people who need to know this info the most, and are most likely going to have to do the most about this, are also the people being so bogged-down by the weight of it, the pain of it, the hopelessness, grief, anxiety, and fear of it, that it’s hurting them. And here’s the problem with having to get up 4-5 days a week and go to campus, get told the horrors of the world and uncertainty of our future, and then go home and continue to study, memorize, and understand the mechanisms for how the human race is destroying the planet and the conditions that made them and allowed them to thrive before making dinner, and then get up and study that all again on the weekends: it’s really really depressing.

It causes those phenomena I mentioned at the beginning, eco-grief and eco-anxiety, as well as a bunch of similar things, people being psychologically impacted by climate change. Psychologists have been observing and giving different names to these things, like the previously mentioned, as well as ecoguilt, solastalgia, biospheric concern, etc.

And let’s be real here for a moment, getting a degree in anything isn’t a smooth ride, it’s not easy and it’s rarely super fun. (Though it can have its moments) However, adding these kinds of psychological issues to the mix is going to increase the rate at which students give up on getting these degrees and try to pursue something that doesn’t make them feel the crushing weight of what feels like the “inevitable” demise of the human species all the time. So my theory is that this will decrease the number of STEM majors (primarily in ecology, geography, biology, and related subjects) who graduate and go on to work in their field.

But for those that push through and want this degree and want to do this work no matter the news they have to hear to get there, or those who just manage to withstand the mental and emotional pain cause by climate change long enough to finish a degree and/or get a job, the effects are still there. My theory is that this will make these people far “less happy” overall, just from regularly having to hear about, witness, study, report on, understand, or teach about climate change. (“Less happy” being pretty vague, I’m using it to generalize higher levels of feelings of loss or grief, anxiety, depression, emotional distress, etc.)

According to this article (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00074/full) “acute events” (meaning sudden, short, but extreme events of climate change) can cause reactions in people that “act through mechanisms similar to that of traumatic stress,” and people who actively study these events and issues are more likely to witness these events at all, will witness them more often, and will have a deeper understanding of the severity. So an event which the average person may perceive as sudden, short, but simply just sad and not very extreme; is likely to be far better understood by these professionals, who would then perceive it as far more extreme, resulting in it being an acute event, and causing that kind of psychological response.

In summary, it is emotionally and mentally painful to study the sciences during this time of anthropogenic climate change. Increased understanding on the severity of climate change events, witnessing them more frequently, and having to work with/study them regularly as part of one’s education or career, worsens the negative psychological impact these events can have on one’s mind. This makes students in the sciences more stressed and unhappy, which decreases the likelihood that those students will graduate and/or continue to pursue that subject/career. This also makes individuals who continue to pursue the subject/career less happy, and they may experience a higher frequency of symptoms that are similar to those of traumatic stress. We should not stop talking about climate change, we should not stop trying to learn about it and find ways to solve it, but if it continues to be as soul-crushing and psychologically painful to learn about, study, and witness, then the people who we need to study and solve the problem will only get fewer and farther between, which will only make it harder to fix the damage we’ve caused and prevent further damage in the future.

(Anyone here ever heard of a positive feedback loop? Sorry, bad joke, too soon.)

To finish this off I’d just like to say that if you know a climatologist, ecologist, biologist, botanist, meteorologist, etc.:

A) give them a cookie and a hug (as long as they’re comfortable, they deserve it)

B) please don’t ask them to recount the climate change events they’ve witnessed or study regularly, especially not in casual conversation, unless they express interest in sharing. Don’t just bring it up at the family reunion and smiling and staring at them while you wait for them to talk, as they panic internally, trying to think of a way to make this not fill every listener with dread.

C) if you do want to ask them about anything about climate change, ask if they know a way you can help. Volunteering groups, projects, petitions, good papers and articles to share online, simple everyday practices they could tell you about or advise you on how to do right, like using reusable shopping bags and bringing a cutlery kit and a travel cup wherever you go, these are all things that they might know more about or be more aware of than you, and they’re all good things! This will also help to uplift that person, seeing that what they do is encouraging at least individual people to make good choices and good change. Because fighting with companies, politicians, and fighting for grants to get enough money for research and even just general operation, is so annoying and disheartening a lot of the time, and deals with a lot of frustrating bureaucratic processes. So not only are you helping the environment, you’re giving that person hope, hope that maybe this fight isn’t all negotiating with greedy CEOs and uncaring politicians like you’re talking to a brick wall. No, this fight can also be people just choosing to do the right thing.

Sorry for such a long post, just got my mind ticking as I was doing some reading-up on current events, and something in there opened the floodgates in my brain, cause I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I just couldn’t get my thoughts on it quite right before though, and today something just clicked.

[wistfulwatcher]

Hello I saw your tag on that "im 25 and dying post" please tell us how it got better for you. Im 26, still living with parents, currently having a fight with my boyfriend, and i still have a year until I get my bachelors. The comparison to everyone younger than me is killing me.

I'm really sorry to hear that you're struggling, but I hope you can take some solace in the fact that that post has a lot of notes and you are absolutely not alone in feeling the way you do! I can certainly try and share my experience, but unfortunately I think the biggest factor is just time (and like, a buttload of self-reflection).

I moved back home after college and worked full time at an administrative job I was doing during school breaks. I majored in psychology and anthropology in college, and was planning to eventually go into forensic psychology, but wasn't interested in going straight into grad school. So I did that administrative job for about a year, and tried to find something that was a bit more stable and at least semi-related to my field. I did end up finding a new job when I was 23 - stable, semi-related to my field (a psych/research background was required), and decent pay (especially as I was still living at home). Exactly what I needed, since I still wasn't ready to start looking into grad school.

I was doing pretty well, until I started getting comfortable at that job, and then I started getting hit with the "I'm not doing enough," and "I need to look into grad school," and "will I ever find a boyfriend?" (friendly reminder that 23-year-old me thought she was straight, yikes), "how will I afford to move out, I have to save my money and do it soon!", "I'm not doing anything but watching TV, I'm wasting my life," "I'm lonely, but I'm too tired to try and make friends," etc., etc.

But it wasn't constant. I'd have a flurry of those questions and fears, and then days where I was just living life and doing my job and taking care of my dogs, without any of that. And I don't think I felt good or particularly comfortable those days, it was more like I just wasn't actively thinking about it, like when you feel "good" after a physical pain goes away and you're just normal.

Eventually, I started thinking about all of these concerns I had, and the fact that it felt like it was URGENT whenever I thought about them. It felt like I needed to get my shit together immediately. I also started to acknowledge that there was this big sense of guilt around those concerns; I was too old to be living at home, I was too old to be single, I was too old not to be starting a career. I felt like I was wasting my life (cue the guilt), and I realized that part of why I felt like I was wasting it was that I felt like I was missing milestones I wouldn't be able to do at a later time because the older I was past "normal" the more humiliating it would be to try (cue the shame and embarrassment, hard).

I also started to doubt that I wanted to go into forensic psychology. More importantly, I started to seriously doubt that I wanted a "career" at all. My job (as I kept that same semi-related to my field one) was absolutely a job, not a career. And I think this was a huge tipping point for me, because a career had always been a given in my life. I'm passionate about what I'm interested in, so it literally just never occurred to me that I would be content with a job. I also started acknowledging that I had some messed up associations about being content with a job meaning that I was lazy (because the only way to be ambitious is with a career and, more damaging, a lack of ambition is fundamentally bad).

Now, I need to clarify that all of the above occurred over the course of years. I was constantly seeing "friends" (i.e., of the facebook variety) go to grad school, start careers, get married, buy homes, etc. And with all of that alongside the entire mess I've outlined in the above paragraphs, it was really, really, tough. It gets hard to find a foothold in better thinking, I believe, when seeing all of these people (some younger) doing things "right" was really just compounding my guilt and shame. (I feel like it's worth mentioning, too, that I was always "an individual" growing up, march-to-the-beat-of-my-own-drummer, yada yada. I feel like that's worth pointing out for others who may be in the same boat, because I think it can lead to another layer of shame in comparing yourself to those around you - especially if it's a big part of your identity that you DON'T do that, because I think it's inevitable as you get older, and you're looking to reach these milestones that prove you're an adult.)

So, here I am, acknowledging that I feel guilt and shame about what I'm not doing. And suddenly I ask myself my first really important question: Do I want a career? The question hot on its heels is: Do I want to go to grad school? Honestly, my answer is no. There is nothing in me that's excited by the prospect. But what, does that mean I'm just going to work my job for the rest of my life? How is giving up going to make me feel better about Not Doing Enough?

As I'm opening this door (remember, years), three things happen: 1) I realize I'm gay, 2) I watch Dirty 30, 3) I start playing D&D.

First, realizing I'm gay. Woohoo! Not only was this exciting because girls are amazing, but it made me seriously look at myself. Realizing I had spent 25 years assuming one thing about myself that turned out to be completely wrong made me question everything for a while. I started to ask myself, "Do I really like this?" more often, which seems like a really obvious question, but I'm not convinced that it's one people ask themselves consciously all that often. But once I did, I realized how freeing it was to answer, "No," and move on to something I did like.

Second, I watched Dirty 30, the Grace Helbig/Mamrie Hart/Hannah Hart movie. It feels dramatic to say that it changed my life, but the older I get the more I honestly think it did. Mamrie Hart's character is a dental hygienist who is freaking out about turning 30 and feeling very much like that text post I reblogged. But (spoilers), at the end of the movie, she decides that she loves her job (job, not career!) because it's comfortable and she has fun at work, and that it makes her happy. She has other things going on, but the idea that a character in a film is content with her job and choosing to "settle" into her life as-is and she's genuinely happy about it? I honestly can't think of a single other time I've seen that happen on-screen. I still think about that ending very often. And after seeing it, I started to ask myself another question regularly: "Am I happy?" Again, this feels pretty obvious, but I think there is something incredibly empowering about making sure you are happy on a regular basis, instead of just assuming that you're fine until something hurts.

Third, I started playing D&D. This is not a plug for D&D! (Well, maybe a little.) One thing that happened to me when I started to get into the urgent-guilt-shame-confusion mess of my mid-20s was that I got very much into a routine of go to work, come home, sleep, go to work, come home, sleep, be totally brain-dead on the weekend, repeat. I found it very difficult to feel creative because I was just wiped, and as all of my creative outlets (gifs, fanfic) are self-motivated, it was really easy to brush them off. I ended up starting Critical Role (this is also not a plug for CR! well, maybe), and I wanted to give D&D a try myself. (I was VERY lucky - my best friend happened to be listening to the Adventure Zone at the same time I started CR, and she wanted to try to run a game. The stars truly aligned!)

I started playing, then DMing, and found that it was a great fit for my interests. I used to be a theatre kid, and I was getting to act again (something I didn't realize I was missing). I was getting to build and flesh out characters, which is what I love the most about writing fanfic. I was also discovering that I was stretching myself - world building and plot had never been my strong suit, but as a DM it became the majority of my creative effort. It gave me soft deadlines with people I didn't want to let down, and it made me truly social again for the first time since college. Essentially, it was filling in all of the gaps of what I felt lacking in my life. This isn't a D&D plug because it wasn't D&D specifically, but rather a hobby that satisfied what was missing in my life. For example, I didn't realize how isolated I was before D&D until I had regular interactions with friends, and that isolation absolutely made the urgent-guilt-shame-confusion worse.

D&D gave me that final push to realize that I was OK with having a job and being passionate about hobbies instead of trying to fit myself into a career, because I was getting out of that hobby what I had been convinced I would get out of a career. I started to really value that I could punch out and go have fun doing exactly what I wanted to do. (It feels so obvious as I type this, but it took me a long time to get here! Sometimes it really is that simple!)

The above is specific to my job vs. career struggle which may not be in the mix of things you're struggling with. But what I do think is universal/can be your take away, is that sometimes you just have to actively choose to let go of the pressure to be doing things. Which, I know, sounds so much easier than it is (and part of why I think it just takes time/is part of growing older). But I think it's something that can be worked at over time, by checking in with yourself about what you feel, why you feel it, and what you need to make yourself feel better in the present.

It's been 6 years since I started that semi-related job, and I'm still there. I still live with my mom. I'm still single. My circumstances have not changed since 24, but honestly? I'm OK. When I check in with myself about it, I do enjoy living with my mom and our dogs (even though I'm 30 and "real" adults move out). I am happy more often than I'm not (much more, actually!). I have a job that allows me to be done after 8 hours, and I have hobbies I look forward to doing each night (and the energy to do them, most of the time). My weekends are free to play D&D with my friends and laugh until I cry. That is what I've worked out as my definition of what I want life to be right now. You'll notice it includes none of the "milestones" that those younger than me have hit.

As I noted on that text post tag, I still struggle with this. I definitely have days where I think, I'm a mess, I'm not DOING anything. It's hard. But time does help, those days become fewer and farther between.

I know that was probably a hundred times longer than you wanted it to be, but I did want to illustrate just how much of a process it is. It takes time. My summary advice is to check in with yourself often, be honest about what you want and what you need, do not let anyone else define where you "should" be. And if you aren't living life how you want to be, identify what you can do (however small) to make yourself feel like you're getting closer.

[athena-is-a-chaotic-lil-shit]

Of Ice and Blood

Part 3

Hey there! Thank you for taking the time to read this

There are so many left out details here that I did on purpose for future explanation within the fic for the element of mystery I'm trying to brew . Hope you don't mind! Enjoy reading❤

Part 1

Part 2

Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

1.7k words.

Pairing: Tai'chi Kashharzol (Orc) x Pearl Blackbell (Human OC/Reader)

Warnings: cursing, violence, injury and fighting.

*

Without thinking, I drove my fist towards the voice, regretting it the instant I recognized who it was.

Tai'chi.

I shouldn’t have been surprised when I found my fist encased in his hand. He seems unfazed by my reaction, seemingly expecting it.

“Oh shi— I’m so sorry!”

How the hell did he sneak up on me without making a sound??

“Feisty- I mean, I should be the one sorry, for startling you...And for following you. I just wanted to, make sure you were alright.”

I blinked. He was concerned?

He spoke up when I didn’t respond.

“So, are you okay?”

“Y-Yeah. I’m fine. Just, disappointed.” I breathed in and sighed as he gently let go of my fist.

Oh, and his scent helps right now. He smells so...wonderful I don’t know why. It’s not like I’ve been surrounded by disgusting odors my entire life. I swear I’ve inhaled appealing scents like lilac, sandalwood, cinnamon, even rain has its particular smell! But Tai'chi, he—he’s something else entirely.

“Shouldn’t you be somewhere else like, I don’t know, maybe getting lunch with some of your friends or in a classroom?” I asked. I wonder why he would even bother to be in my presence. Anyone should be creeped out by the way I spoke up earlier. I mean, who does that? Plus, I did throw a stranger down to the floor. But part of me knows he deserved that.

Definitely.

“Want to talk about it?” He ignored my question. Tai'chi was now sitting cross-legged beside me, the oak’s root in between us. His deep azure eyes studying, watching me carefully.

“What?”

“What you did back there, wasn’t something a plain, timid college girl would do.”

Wait. He knew I was pretending to be one?

“Yes, I knew.”

“You can read minds?!” I stammered out. He can read my mind this whole time?! Shit.

He held up for a second before a boisterous laugh broke out of him and echoed through the circling trees, scaring away some birds perched above. I don’t know if I should be offended or flustered by his guffaw. It was so, so deep and rich and —

What the hell Pearl? What if he's reading your mind??

Tai'chi faced me again, sighing once he calmed down.

“To answer your question, no, I can’t read minds. But like I stated before, your face gives it away. Or your brows since you’re wearing a mask, but I can imagine your expression.”

I let out an incomprehensible noise.

“How did you find out I was pretending to be…you know,” waving my hands around.

“The moment we made eye contact this morning when you entered. And the way you shifted your body at the last second to prevent yourself from plunging into the trash bin, I knew you were something more. Your eyes and your actions show your experience in combat. A skilled warrior would notice these little things right away.”

My jaw fell open, and I’m sure he knows. He left me speechless.

Should I tell him I am a trained martial artist and a weapon wielder?

But we just met like 5 hours ago!

He seems trustworthy. And he’s an orc, didn’t they have a code of honor or something?

My thoughts ran wild I swear Tai'chi could hear my mind, screaming.

“Hey, it’s okay if you don’t wish to. And I must’ve sounded, creepy when I admitted I’ve been observing you. But before anything else, will you allow me to introduce myself, for real this time?”

“You mean your name isn’t Tai'chi?”

Letting out a chuckle, he replied, “I swear to you, my name is Tai'chi. What I mean is, I want you to know my full name. Do you understand what this implies, Pearl?”

I racked my brain for a moment, trying to recall what my parents said about orc traditions when my uncle, papa’s brother, married the orcess he fell in love with. Something about an orc’s real name being reserved only to those they’re close to?

“I guess so? But what exactly?”

“I want to become your friend.”

I couldn’t help the slight warmth creeping into my cheeks behind my mask. He can’t see it, can he? A friend, he says. A friend!

“Oh,” was all that came out. A pause and;

“Uh, I mean, I’d love to be your friend! I never had an actual friend before. I mean, have cousins, but we aren’t acquainted enough to consider myself their friend— I mean— uh, what should I do?” I blurted out a little rapidly.

He smiled. He actually smiled! Oh, damn, it was adorable!

Tai'chi was about to say something, but he snapped his mouth shut and grimaced. I was confused by his sudden change of mood, along with his scent.

Then it struck me.

The two of us shot up when multiple smells filled the air, making my stomach clench.

We were followed, not just one but six individuals. One of them was the pretentious human from earlier.

My day can’t get any better. And is that a baseball bat? Great. Fucking great.

I swear. I’m cursed to find trouble anywhere I go.

“Hello, freaks.” The guy in the middle began. “Whatcha doin’ out here in the forest?”

The others began spreading out and surrounded us.

“Planning something nasty I bet.” A human to my right spat.

“You will pay for what you did to me, you bitch. Just so you know, my father is the dean of this university. No one will ever hear a word of what I did here and what we will do to you.

'Dean’s son, David Silverstone, assaulted by an insane student in the woods within campus grounds. His friends graciously helping him fight off the lunatic until she passed out and was carried to an isolation chamber for monitoring, later finding out about her severe psychological disorder.’ Now wouldn’t that be a hit in the papers!” The bastard and his companions cackled and snickered, some of them stealing glances between my legs and I felt my skin crawl.

Tai'chi growled lowly, silencing them for a brief moment. He was getting mad but held his ground.

“And you,” the human pointed, “you beast. It won’t be hard antagonizing you, people will no doubt believe you were the one who violated the schoolgirl and left her in the woods to die.”

This fucking—

I felt a hand on my shoulder just as I was about to start, gently gripping, in hopes of trying to calm me down. He knows they were baiting us on making the first move. He shook his head, and an idea popped up.

Taking a deep breath, I attempted to make my voice as girly as possible, sounding so hilarious, like those overdressed, flashy high school girls with flowery perfume so strong I wrenched every time I get a whiff of it.

Provoking them would do.

“Oh, I’m so scared! Should I get on my knees and beg for mercy? Oh please, great and noble one, have mercy on my poor soul.” My voice laced with mockery and sadness, with my legs fake trembling and my arms flailing.

And did Tai'chi just snort?

“If you beg nicely, I will perhaps give you a chance to— ”

My sudden wheezing interrupted him and I laughed. Hard. I can’t believe he bought my terrible acting! I expected him to straight-up be offended rather than actually bite the false bait. He is dumber than I thought.

I was holding my middle by the time I was done. Tai'chi’s shoulders were moving slightly, probably chuckling and trying to hold back his amusement.

“Did you honestly take it seriously??? I can't— oh my God!” I choked out once more before I went on.

“There’s no chance in hell I’m gonna bow to you, not even one degree of an angle, you foolish, idiotic, spoiled, bastardized son of a bitch.”

His face was turning red out of rage and oh! Wasn’t that a sight to behold?

“You brat!” Turning his head to the others, he yelled, “What are guys standing there for?! Get them!”

Good.

Perhaps they didn’t catch my hands slipping on my beloved crimson knuckle dusters out of the bag when I was laughing then, tugging down my hoodie’s sleeve to hide it.

“Don’t move.” I told the orc, whose eyebrows shot up in surprise.

“But—”

“Just don’t.” I said with my voice firm. I will take them on my own. I can’t have him getting in trouble and people blaming him for being an orc. Imagine that. The ones who attacked him will be viewed as victims because they were up against him, an orc. Numerous humans will jump at the chance to throw dirt at their race, a single act of self-defense treated as a one-sided assault to humans, the thought of it being enough to somehow remove all of them from the city, but everyone knows it's not that simple. Dimwits.

I strode forward without earning his response, waiting for the first person to come at me.

I took my stance, although it was more of preparing half of my body since I was still hiding both of my hands.

They all seemed confused and hesitant, which was what I was going for. To me, and those with experience in hand-to-hand combat, this is one of the most basic stances, but fundamental, nonetheless. A simple form that can determine the outcome of a fight. With my right foot forward, left foot back, both firmly planted to the ground, and my dominant hand wearing my dusters. In their eyes, it was…wrong, foreign. Some may even say it’s an open vulnerability, showing how inexperienced the opponent is, but oh, it is the exact opposite.

I didn’t see Tai'chi’s expression, though. I was on alert and getting into my zone to peer at him, one motion that can put me in a compromising position. Did he notice my brass knuckles? Likely.

“Scared to hurt a little girl like me?” I enticed.

Finally, the one beside their alleged leader charged at me.

A typical amateur approach.

The guy, about two inches taller than me, threw a right punch, which was a huge mistake.

Predictable.

I smirked under my mask and dodged it not a second before it connected. Making him falter as I grabbed his arm and brought it down to my knee, dislodging his joints.

A high-pitched scream of pain broke out of him as he dropped down on the forest ground, gripping his bent-off arm, cursing, but refused to rise and fight me again.

I gave him one last glance before I looked back at the others.

“Who’s next?”

****************************************

Those human shits just can't leave them alone! Interrupting their supposed-to-be official introduction! There's more to the orc that meets the eye *wink* Who is he exactly? Why was he so... observant?

Part 4 is actually on its third revising— and I'm still trying to come up on HOW to phrase my next words to lead to part 5. I let me brain take a break from spewing senseless words for now so I'll probably post the next part of this later or tomorrow

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed! And I'd appreciate it if you have some advice for me, or just point out some mistakes I made! Thank you

Ps. This is really not perfect formal writing if you're wondering. I just type away whatever comes into my mind, and then proofread it to the best I can. And I hope you don't mind me using a lot of spaces. It... sort of makes my mind clear and continue moving forward, and it helps me when I'm reading it again, mentally taking note that with every line between spaces there's a slight pause and again, read it clearly like you were the one thinking it. I don't know how to explain how my own brain works but I guess that's that?

Tags: @kokokatsworld @crackinanutshell

[thedreadvampy]

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about disability and neurodivergence over the past couple of years (I’ve actually just now accepted a contract to freelance write a section of policy on disability and ableism for my old workplace. I have done this because I hate myself and starting a new job with 1.5x the hours as my old one JUST WASN’T ENOUGH STRESS)

and I have decided I REALLY take issue with the concept of "disabled”. like. at all. I think the construction of “disabled people” is at the root of SWATHES of what’s wrong with our society and how we treat people with specific access or wellbeing needs.

like I think it’s basically fact at this point to take a postmodern approach and accept the common framing of “people are as disabled as society makes them” ie disability is a social construct and who is disabled is purely a matter of who society isn’t willing to work around as default (the usual example is short-sightedness, which historically was a substantial disability but is barely noticeable in a society where using adaptive tech for it is normalised)

but I wanna push it further because either EVERYONE is disabled or NOBODY is disabled imo. “disabled” is a broad enough category to be fundamentally meaningless. it’s a useful umbrella term for like...people whose physical and psychological needs and personhood are often diminished, overlooked or ignored, but it’s also very arbitrary and contextual what qualifies as a disability.

which is kind of what I’m saying about person-centred parenting (which. pinch of salt I am not a parent). EVERYBODY has special needs because everybody’s needs are different. And my experience has been that positing Capital-D Disabled as a specific, blue-badge-holding, Very Serious category, and limiting your concerns about access and wellbeing needs to disabled people is: 

a) unhelpful to people who aren’t disabled per se but who benefit from specific accomodations (for a very trivial example, “having shit internet” isn’t a disability, but it’s still an access need that things like video transcripts, image descriptions and alternate communication routes will help meet) b) unhelpful to people who are “disabled-ish,” who don’t feel able to clearly identify as disabled, or who don’t know they’re disabled (which to be honest is so many of us because invisible disabilities, partial sensory or motor loss, and mental health problems make up the bulk of disabilities and those are often invisibilised or downplayed) c) unhelpful to “properly disabled” people, because it creates a huge othering effect. drawing a hard line between “normal” and “disabled,” or even imagining that that’s a line that exists, allows disabled people to be dehumanised or treated as the sum of their Tragic Suffering, as opposed to the Normal Abled People.

“Disabled” is, as I say, a useful generalisation/abstraction sometimes, but when we’re talking about actual material things (whether that’s material need or material change) it’s not a useful category. I honestly don’t think we can create a society which consistently confronts ableism while we’re trying to operate in a binary framework centred on “disabled” vs “not disabled” or “neurotypical” vs “neurodiverse”. We need to be willing to throw out the whole construction of “abled” and instead commit to handling needs without interrogating cause. 

This DOES NOT MEAN that doctors, therapists, individuals, communities etc shouldn’t try to diagnose, treat or understand conditions, or that we should throw out the idea of labelling condition groups. It just means that we need to flip how we look at it, and take a descriptive not prescriptive approach. We need to understand that these labels (whether something as broad as “disabled” or as specific as “Ehlers-Danlos type 2″) are useful as groupings, but that the function of them is to give a general idea of what issues might arise and what might help.

Every person with, say, EDS type 2 is using that to refer to the same symptom grouping, but a) they’ll all manifest, experience and describe symptoms their own way and b) they’re all individual people with other shit going on in their minds and bodies, and so what helps one of them may absolutely fuck another up. And somebody who doesn’t have EDS type 2, but who finds using a wheelchair helpful, potentially has more in common with EDS patient A (who uses a wheelchair) than Patient A has with EDS patient B (who has no mobility impairment but huge digestive problems).

And like. ok. I’m not hearing impaired but I do have audio processing issues, so subtitles are really, really useful to me. I’m not, technically, disabled in that way. it would be dodgy for me to claim I was. but it’s still super useful for me to feel able to request that. and then we have to ask - where’s the line? I’m disabled because my knees are fucked at 27. but if my knees were in this state at 80 I’d be in rude health. but if I was 80, it would still be an absolute pain in the ass to climb 5 flights of stairs, even though contextually I am healthier than expected. 

Or like...I was chatting to a pal about disability disclosure and all the little things you don’t notice affecting your life and therefore don’t report or ask for help with. I said “I have agoraphobia and there’s this like. physical resistance I have to push through to leave the house so I stand around going ‘oh no I have forgotten something’ because I’m procrastinating on having to go outside.” She said “oh I also do that but in my case it’s because I usually have forgotten something so I’m always paranoid.”

forgetfulness isn’t a disability (except when it is). and ultimately although the root is different the material impact is broadly the same. and the world is full of things we find hard that others find easy, but that may not be socially understood as disabilities. I just think we’d get a lot further if we took a solution-centred view on this. it does matter to me why I can’t leave the house, because how I handle it is affected by what the problem is. but it shouldn’t matter to eg my work why I need to give myself an extra 20 minutes to get out of the house (whether it’s agoraphobia, forgetfulness or something else) as long as we can, between us, figure out a workaround.

anyway that’s why I keep textdumping on that parenting post. because we shouldn’t have to ask “does my child have ADHD” or “is my child autistic” or “is my child trans” in order to justify finding ways for them to manage being restless, depressed, overwhelmed, manic, afraid, angry etc, or to let them wear what they feel right in and self-describe how they want to. It might be helpful to know if they’re ADHD/autistic/trans/whatever, because it can help you get ideas and resources for strategies, but it shouldn’t be necessary, and “because this thing is harmless and makes them safer/happier/calmer” is fundamentally a more important justification than “because they are autistic”

idk. treat people as people. try to do right by them. don’t build a hierarchy of Normal and Abnormal problems. just meet common needs and create space for people to express their needs without needing to disclose their whole medical history or litigate their disability status.

(TO BE CLEAR: in the current world legislation specifically related to defining disability as a protected characteristic and disabled people as at-risk/special interest groups are VERY NECESSARY. but in a world governed by an expectation of tailored accessibility and wellbeing approaches I think that necessity would at the very least be heavily reduced. and in communities trying to do more than the bare minimum to create an anti-ableist space I think the best single thing we can do is almost always to remove gatekeeping and disclosure barriers to asking for adaptations)

[princessofgayskull]

The last chapter of UWS, right when catra and adora meet up at the bakery before their date

HEY GIRL I’M SO SORRY THAT I HAVEN’T GOTTEN AROUND TO THIS WHEN YOU WERE SO NICE AND THOUGHTFUL TO HAVE SENT IT IN i COMPLETELY UNDERESTIMATED MY AMOUNT OF FREE TIME BUT HERE WE GO I HOPE THIS IS WHAT YOU HAD IN MIND!

So a little backstory about the last chapter: usually a chapter of about 16k-20k will take me about a month, if I’m lucky not to have enough off days. I got this chapter done, (I think it was about 33k words?) in about three weeks. I was full on sprint writing because I wanted to be done before season three dropped on what was either August 3rd or 4th? Anyways, I was eating, breathing, sleeping upper west side. Almost all of the big plot points I’d spent a lot of time dreaming up for the past nine months so they ended up just flowing out of me. I’m still amazed I got it done and it was cohesive enough for the audience because I was spent. 

I got this chapter up, lost my mind over season three- especially because I’d written Angella in this chapter and it gave me and quite a few readers EMOTIONAL WHIPLASH- and then I took the entire month of August up from any writing.

I have no idea why Rob was Scottish but I am LAYING IT ON THICK WITH THAT SHOW DON’T TELL RIGHT THERE. I was exhausted by the time I was writing this part, because I write linearly, so I just wanted to be done. 

I get asked this question enough to say I’m not sure what the significance of the migraines was in upper west side. There’s no canon equivalent, so I think I was just putting a little bit of me in Catra to I dunno, help with realism? At this point I’d only suffered with chronic pain- fibromyalgia to be specific- but back in April of 2020 I started experiencing migraines and my first thought was “HOW COULD I DO THIS TO CATRA?” Life imitates art.

This will be discussed more in cruel summer, but I wrote Catra as having Borderline Personality Disorder. I’ve never been fully diagnosed with BPD, but I’ve struggled with some syndromes of it, and she comes across that way to me in canon (she fits a DSM-V profile to the letter, almost). I’ve always wanted to have mental illness as a fundamental element of any of my stories because in my own life, I’ve experienced many barriers there and there’s just almost no positive rep for M.I, especially not unconventional disorders like BPD.

So Catra is talking about how she cycles through the entire spectrum of human emotions as a result of everything that’s happening to her, but also just how her psyche is reacting to it. To me, if you feel anger really intensely, the flip side can be feeling happiness really intensely, and I can testify to that.

For being completely exhausted I don’t think that first paragraph is actually too bad.

Catra has such a unique voice in Upper West Side; it’s what I believed her voice would be like if she’d been raised in the modern world, so there’s a lot more cursing and aggravation and even sarcasm, because not only is this the modern world, she’s also about three years older than she was at the end of canon. 

One of the things that I think is being expressed here is the idea of resilience. Catra is resilient by nature, she’s a born fighter, and so she breaks but she gets back up. I think the biggest difference between her and Hordka- and the reason why Catra survives such an onslaught of abuse and mistreatment but doesn’t need Adora to whisk the bad out of her- is that Catra is psychology resilient. And I put her through the wringer in this universe so I wouldn’t her resilience to be very loud and apparent. 

Entrapta is, without a doubt, a cyber criminal in the uws universe. But as they say, BE GAY. DO CRIME.

They won’t be ghosts for much longer, Catra.

But look at that progress! One thing that I think is really jarring for people when they start she’s god and I found her is that Catra seems to have regressed to being against the vulnerability she seemed so open to in this scene, but I’m never not dealing with some sort of cognitive distortion in a character’s head. When you’re mentally ill, you can be pro-recovery and can be making changes and strides, but you’re going to get set back, and it’s much easier at the start to get moved back to square one than say after months or years of therapy and meds. One thing that I hope people who move through this universe remember is that Catra is at the beginning right here. She’s having one of many hundreds of epiphanies you have when you are going through recovery. In Cruel Summer, we’re going to see how she’s moved forward and what she’s doing to keep herself moving forward.

 I think I got the idea of the “curiosity killed the cat” motif when I was making a pinterest board for this story. See, pinterest boards DO work for inspo!

“Walk cock excuse for a human.” I stand by that ASDFHGJK

I love the line in Alessia Cara’s song “My Kind” (which was a HUGE inspo for uws, that whole album was) “I wish we could’ve told those little girls they’re gonna be okay”/ “Wish somebody would’ve told me that we'd be alright.” It just hits me so hard. So there’s a repeated element I want to carry through the universe of “If my past self could see me now, she wouldn’t be so ready to give up 24/7”

I love writing thirsty!Catra, almost as much as I love writing thirsty!Adora.

Okay, just how obvious is that I know nothing about alcohol? I grew up Mormon, and I’d drink now but I can’t because, you know, meds, so I feel like I'm always overcompensating when I write about drinking. 

I really, really like working in motifs.

My, my, my, how the turn tables. Definitely a nod to Season 2 when we all lost our minds.

This moment feels very finale Best Friend Squad, which we’ll see more of in Cruel Summer. 

Writing a character with a broken arm, I have to say, was strange. The cast is just one more out of a million things to keep track of in your working memory. Writing Upper West, especially as the seasons continued to drop, sometimes felt like I was balancing stacks and stacks of plates on my head, hands, and one foot while trying to whistle Beethoven. 

I love that she keeps Sea Hawk’s bracelet and that she adds her “What Would Scorpia Do” to it and wears both.

I have spent hours listening to AJ and Aimee’s voices. Between the actual episodes, youtube clips, and interviews because I am so worried that my characterization is not going to transfer to readers. When AJ is playing Catra as teasing, she sometimes will go up in her register and so that’s what I was going for when she’s teasing Bow. 

Also, writing PDA is hard.

Because I go hard on the angst, I have to go hard on the fluff, of course. 

And the humor.

I THOUGHT HAVING THEM BE AT THE WINDOW WAS THE FUNNIEST THING IN THE UNIVERSE I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW. 

Writing confident and flirty Adora is sooooooo fun, especially because I don’t think that’s really how the fandom thinks of her, but she can be like that in canon, so I like to bring her out when it’s appropriate. And because, obviously, Catra is whipped for her.

WRITING KISSES IS SO, SO, SO DIFFICULT. THREE SO’S OF DIFFICULTY. It can so easily become gross or unbelievable, but I didn’t want every single time they kissed to be the same, so then they each have to be different in some way. 

Catra’s mentality of doom is a result of years of trauma and untreated mental illness. It’s branching off of learned helplessness that she and Adora both suffer from. It also sets up for the universe to be explored more beyond the end of this story.

For those who didn’t catch it, the last line of upper west side and the first are the same: “Bright Moon, ugh.” She speaks it here, instead of thinking it. That was the plan from the very beginning to have them kiss in front of the bakery and for her to say this. 

Thank you SO much for sending this ask and letting me divulge all of my random thoughts about this scene. I had a blast and I hope it lives up to expectations! Thank you for reading!

You can find upper west side here, and the follow up series, she’s god and I found her, here, and keep a look out for the third series, cruel summer, coming soon!

[aspoonofsugar]

Hi! How are you doing? Not sure if it's already been asked, but what are your top 10 favourite canon couples?

Hello!

I am doing fine, thank you! How are you doing?

It is alright, nobody has asked this before, so I can answer! That said, I am not really a hardcore shipper, so I am not sure I will come up with 10 pairs :’‘‘). I’ll do my best though! Also I have interpreted the term “canon” very freely.

As usual, here they are in no particular order:

1) Claire Stanfield and Chane Laforet (Baccano!):

I love their dynamic because they are fundamentally two almost opposite individuals who end up together in a surprising way. On one hand Claire thinks that he is the protagonist not only of his own story, but of the whole world. As a matter of fact he believes that the world is nothing more than a dream of his. Ironically, it is because of this selfish delusion that Claire is able to embrace the whole world:

“So what if I'd spare him? In my mind it's the certainty in myself that I possess which allows me to have that kind of mercy or compassion. There's no wavering on that point. It's fixed like the stars. The fact is I'm never gonna be killed! So remember this: mercy and compassion are virtues that only the strong are privileged to possess. And I am strong.”

On the other hand Chane has chosen to be nothing more than her father’s puppet. She is a satellite character in her own life and can’t absolutely think to live as a protagonist. If Claire’s world is too big, Chane’s too little because it has only her and her father in it. What is more, Chane has gone out of her way to make sure that it stays that way. For example, she asked her father to take her voice away and has not learnt alternative ways to communicate (like sign language).

Given this premise, it is interesting that a person so self-centered like Claire puts a person with such a frail sense of self like Chane at the centre of his world. Claire makes Chane, who is not even the lead of her own story, the heroine of his huge world. Claire instead plays a support role in Chane’s story. It is precisely because of this contradiction that their dynamic works. All in all Chane gets to get in contact with the world through Claire. Because of this, she is challenged to grow. This is another interesting difference between them. On one hand Claire is basically like Peter Pan and can’t really grow psychologically. On the other hand Chane is a character who has changed, but who is scared of this change. This is why she tries to actively regress, but she can’t really go back to who she was.

2) Komugi and Meruem (HxH):

I have explained here what I love about them. Their relationship conveys the themes of the chimera ants arc beautifully. I especially like it because it would have been easy to have Meruem grow fond of Komugi because of her kindness and goodness. However, this is not really what happens. The reason why Meruem is so attracted by Komugi is her prowess as a Gungi player. Komugi is not a character who coddles Meruem, but one who challenges him. As a result Meruem’s attraction for her is rooted in respect. Meruem brings out from Komugi her talent and stubborness, while Komugi brings out from him his caring and kind side. Meruem becomes interested in her because of the traits they share and grows to love what makes her different from him.

3) Ash Lynx and Eiji Okumura (Banana Fish):

I like their relationship, but I would have loved for it to be explored even more throughout the story. All in all, they are attracted to each other because they want something the other has. Eiji wants Ash’s initiative and daring personality, while Ash wants Eiji’s freedom and soothing personality. Eiji wants Ash’s ability to fight for himself, while Ash wants Eiji’s talent to heal others instead of hurting them.

Despite this, they are not fully able to grow as they could have because of the violence of the conflict they are in. Eiji makes some steps in the right direction, but the moment a wound incapacitates him he goes back to his more passive behaviour. When it comes to Ash, he is not able to take fligth like he would like because of self-hate. Their ending is tragic, but I wonder if it could have been different. For example, after a meaningful conflict the two of them decide to avoid fighting and to simply enjoy the time they spend together. This is a relatable choice, but a series of things are left unexpressed and because of this they are not really able to overcome their flaws. Maybe, if they had fought a little more and had called each other out more, things could have been different in the end.

4) Claire Nunez and Jim Lake Jr (Tales of Arcadia):

I have talked about them here. They are two very similar people to the point that they have basically the same flaw. They both feel responsible for bad things happening to them and to their friends. This is why they end up trying to fix everything by their own and fail spectacularly. It is nice to see them find help and support by their loved ones. And it is heart-warming that they keep being there for each other.

5) Chidi Anagonye and Eleanor Shellstrop (The Good Place):

Eleanor and Chidi are completely different people and this is why they are perfect to challenge each other. Chidi inspires Eleanor to be more selfless and to open up to others, while Eleanor inspires Chidi to be daring. This is obvious since season 1 and it is a constant throughout the series. Their relationship is a good example of a relationship which is conflictual, but enriching. In order to stay together they (other than escaping hell) must overcome their respective flaws. Eleanor must be vulnerable and let Chidi in her life, while Chidi must be decisive and actively choose Eleanor.

I also like that this is true even in those timelines where they do not develop a romantic relationship. The fact that their relationship is the same, but also slightly differs in each reboot makes it gain a very nice thematic meaning and enriches it. All in all, what Chidi and Eleanor represent for each other is always the same and what changes is the platonic/romantic aspect of the bond.

Finally I like the motif of them leaving messages to their future selves about the other. At the end of season 1, Eleanor writes to herself: “Find Chidi”, while at the end of season 3 Chidi writes  to himself: “Eleanor is the answer”. This is a very cool motif which conveys their respective growth thanks to the other. Eleanor who only trusts herself chooses to trust Chidi’s ability to help her. Chidi who has spent his whole life searching for answers and failing to write them down decides that Eleanor is all he needs to find meaning in his life.

6) Roy Mustang and Riza Hawkeye:

Their relationship is my favourite of the whole series. Their characters are beautifully intertwined to the point that they can barely function without the other. This aspect of their bond is not excessively romanticized, but it is presented as a dreadful consequence of the traumatic past they share. At the end of the day Roy and Riza are too highly idealistic people whose ideals were shattered before they could evolve in something more than childish dreams. Despite this, they were able to put the fragments of those great dreams back together and have chosen to sacrifice their personal happiness to realize them.

All in all, Riza and Roy want redemption for their crimes and they find comfort in each other while they try to obtain it. In order to make things better they are ready to sacrifice their own existences and they have given up on the chance of living normal lives as civilians. However, they still have each other.

Roy gives Riza someone to protect, so that she does not fall apart and remains functional, while Riza restrains Roy’s most negative instincts. They make each other better even if they can’t completely overcome the pain of their past. They can just share it with the other.

Finally I especially like the scene where Roy chooses not to transmute humans even if it means Riza will most likely die. As a matter of fact, despite it all, that act is not framed as a betrayal of Riza, but rather as the only thing he can do not to betray her. I love both relationships where a character fixated on an ideal lets go of it because of people and relationships which make a person realize the importance of an ideal. They are both beautiful when well written. Here we are in front of a bond where both aspects are present. On one hand Roy must let go of his desire of vengeance not to lose Riza. On the other hand Roy must let go of Riza not to betray the ideals they share.

In the end theirs is a very tragic and strict relationship, but also a very warm and human one.

7) Kokomi Teruhashi and Saiki Kusuo (Saiki Q):

They are not properly canon since they are not together by the end. However, I think there is enough in the series to support the ship. Anyway, it is still a ship I enjoy a lot (and it is one of the few I feel strongly for, so I am adding it to the list no matter what).

I love their dynamic because it is hilarious, but it could also be surprisingly deep if the narrative wanted to explore it more. Teruhashi is my favourite character of the series because she is a nice subversion of both the yamato nadeshiko trope and of the alpha bitch one. She presents herself as an incredibly beautiful and yet innocent girl, but she is actually very aware of her looks and of others’ reactions. Despite this, she comes along as likeable mostly because she often genuinelly means well despite her being self-centered. Saiki instead projects the image of an average person, but he is actually the most powerful being of the world. In short, Teruhashi and Saiki are both opposite and the same.

They are the same because they both wear a carefully crafted mask. They are opposite because the masks they were are opposite. On one hand Teruhashi’s mask of the perfect girl attracts attention. On the other hand Saiki’s mask of the average guy is meant to make him invisible.

The difference between their two personas is the reason why Saiki wants to avoid Teruhashi at all costs. He wants to be average, so he can’t stay close to a person who attracts so much attention. At the same time, it is clear that Saiki grows to admire Teruhashi specifically because of her ability to always keep her mask up. He knows how difficult it is to realize such a feat and he recognizes Teruhashi’s dedication. Basically Saiki is the only person who knows the real Teruhashi and appreciates her for who she is and not for who she pretends to be.

In short, the series could have done a lot with them if it had wanted to go deeper in their dynamic. Saiki ends up coming to the spotlight multiple times to help Teruhashi, while Teruhashi breaks up her image of perfect girl when close to Saiki.

Unluckily this is the end of the list :’‘‘) I tried to think of other canon couples I enjoy, but even if there are some, I would not call them proper faves. At the same time, there are some ships I enjoy, but they are not properly canon/confirmed to be romantic, so I am not adding them.

Thank you for the ask!

[snapeaddict]

My interest in MBTI has dwindled for a long time now (I used to love all those types of tests, which led me to study the enneagram in school) but seeing your posts/rbs on its inaccuracy made me think of how recently, corporations in my country have been asking job applicants to write down their mbti types and how when I first heard it I was just struck by how weird that was,, I don’t know exactly how they use the info, but I fully agree that treating this as a science could have real damages

Yes it is exactly what I'm taking about when I say it can be damaging! It's really not about people enjoying it as entertainment or trying to find meaning in it while being aware it isn't psychology or science, I mean we all like to do this and it's great if it can be of use to people and for self motivation <3

For example saw on twitter:

To people bringing it up, I’m fully aware that Myers Briggs is essentially pseudoscience. I’ve never even understood it to be something people took literally at all? It’s just a fun personality test that can double as a nice way to self reflect.

And NO problem with that. It's even lovely and interesting.

BUT it is what it is: pseudoscience. You give it the meaning you want it to have. You cannot be not biased when it comes to yourself. And like my mother, a specialist, said, "it's not psychology, and there is often no point in this, because most people will be unable to improve their behaviour even with a broad overview of how they function at the moment they took the test." What can help and IS science is cognitive psychology (for example find out what are your automatic thoughts, the most important values in your life and your motivations to ACT accordingly. This works).

Dr. Adam Grant explained, “The Myers-Briggs is like asking people what do you like more: shoelaces or earrings? You tend to infer that there’s going to be an ‘aha!’ even though it’s not a valid question. ... [It] creates the illusion of expertise about psychology.”

Personality tests like Myers-Briggs give people labels. Those labels are often taken at face value and used as a fundamental aspect of a person's identity. "I am a [fill in the blank]."

Why is it harmful that this is used when hiring people?

1. The scientific grounds for the MBTI test are missing and based on OUTDATED science.

In 1917, Katharine Cook Briggs began research into personalities to determine her future son-in-law’s personality. Soon she was joined by Isabel Briggs Myers, who added the different personality types based on the then recent work of Carl Jung. Neither Myers nor Briggs were formally educated in psychology and lacked scientific credentials in the field of psychometric testing. The work attracted the attention of Henry Chauncey, head of the Educational Testing Service. They developed their work to a commercial test in 1975 then sold the test and the manual to Consulting Psychologists Press (CPP). MBTI is based on eight hypothetical assumptions and until this day there has been no scientific proof to support the claims of the method. Carl Jung admitted the basis of his research was anecdotal and has not been subjected to any control study. So he just made these things up by himself and added some stories from his friends. 

2. The black and white MBTI scales force binary behavior

3. The MBTI test results are a Self-fulfilling prophecy

4. It is a huge BUSINESS using pseudoscience to make profit

The test only takes 45 minutes and can be purchased by certified MBTI organizations. Most of the time it is an online test program. The MBTI test is owned by the MBTI Foundation and executed by Consulting Psychologists Press (CPP), a privately owned company with no annual report available online. At the MBTI Foundation you can certify yourself as an official MBTI testing facilitator (amongst others). A percentage of the money you pay for your MBTI test goes to CPP. A study by David J. Pittenger shows 2 million copies of the MBTI test are being sold annually. This roughly calculates to a market with an annual turnover of about 500 million dollar in testing fees alone. This explains the extensive investment in marketing and research projects to generate pseudo-scientific proof for this method. There is a lot of money to be made from MBTI testing and from the additional training and coaching programs. MBTI is big business.

5. Makes people believe PERSONALITY IS INNATE. Spoiler, it's not.

So using this in workplaces is damaging and wrong and unethical. It has no predictive value so isn't predictive of your performance.

[deltaengineering]

Fall Anime 2019 Part 4: also, he has a gun for a head

Beastars

So here’s the CG anime that everyone for some reason decided way in advance would be the best show of the season, more or less by default. I was very skeptical of this for a multitude of reasons. First of all, that is a bad name for a show and you can’t convince me otherwise. It’s actually even worse because you’re supposed to write it in all caps, but I refuse. Second, it has a terribly on the nose conceit in which all sorts of animals live together in a high school setting and it’s all metaphorical ‘n shit. The main character is a wolf but get this, he’s actually all sensitive and quiet! Yeah, this is definitely rated D for Deep. And finally it’s by Orange, the CG studio that got an inordinate amount of acclaim for making Houseki no Kuni, the show that everyone thinks looks great and finally made CG anime worthwhile (actual real fact: HnK does not look great most of the time and CG anime was worthwhile well before it). 

But enough about my preconceptions since Beastars is... pretty good, actually. If you ignore the setting, which is indeed terribly on the nose. And there’s not much else to say about the story so far besides it. However, it looks significantly better than Houseki no Kuni because it actually has really good character animation throughout instead of a one-minute action scene with flashy spinny camera tricks every other episode. The directing’s strong too, even if the show conspicuously mainly consists of obvious manga panels. I’m still not too hot on the animal stuff but the general writing seems to be sufficiently competent it would work simply on a character level. So I don’t love it, but it seems solid enough to see if it goes somewhere with its “Zootopia but also Beverly Hills 90210 but also they eat each other sometimes″ plot.

Rifle is Beautiful

Remember the whole “anime about some assorted anime girls joining a club doing an oddly specific activity” thing? This is another one of those, and now it’s about air rifle sports shooting. Except it’s not about air rifle sports shooting because that’s apparently way too violent, so they use rifles that look like exactly like air rifles but are actually based on lasers or really bright flashlights (they can’t keep their bullshit straight between scenes, sorry) instead. I just don’t think “girls doing activities” anime should blatantly misrepresent their subject matter like that, you know? With the possible exception of idol anime that is, ain’t nobody who wants to hear about that shit. Apart from that it’s nothing special, so if you are really into air rifles and wish to watch an anime that’s not about those, knock yourself out. It goes through a whole “club needs 5 members” arc in the first half of the first episode, so I really can’t say where it goes next. Nowhere much, I would guess.

Oh right, there’s one more thing: They frequently render the bodies in CG and the heads in traditional drawings, and they do it every time when they’d actually have to draw a rifle otherwise. It’s a weird effect that I think I haven’t seen anywhere else before, and it’s not great but also not terrible. And it’s the most interesting thing about the entire show.

Kabukicho Sherlock

“Let’s take a bunch of public domain characters and put them into a hip modern setting” seems to be its own genre at the moment, and not only because the BBC did that with S. Holmes, Esq. already. Obviously this show is influenced by that (besides other public domain namedroppers like Bungou Stray Dogs), mostly in Watson and his relationship with Sherlock, but Sherlock-san is rather different here; he’s neither the classic Victorian bohemian nor the abrasive sociopath of the BBC version, and tends more towards a bumbling 90s pop culture version of autism and/or general wackiness here. These two are surrounded by a bunch of campy transvestites for some reason, and I’m not quite sure whether I’m supposed to find this particular stereotype offensive or empowering this week, but it sure is annoying. And it has the same character designer as Joker Game, so if you like chiseled, angular anime men, you’re in for a treat here - even if they tend to wear a lot of makeup and dresses sometimes. I don’t know man, it seems sort of okay-ish for the most part but it’s neither as funny as they think, nor as weird as they think, nor is the murder of the week intriguing at all. Oh yeah, he’s hunting noted public domain character Jack the Ripper. Because of course he is.

 Shin Chuuka Ichiban!

I am told this is the sequel to episode 19 of a 52-episode anime TV show from 1997. Okay. I am also told to not dare watch this without the important setup therein, which makes me think I should pay less attention to what I’m told because understanding Shin Chuuka Ichiban and its backstory is not hard at all. Kid is superawesome cooking champion in ancient China and goes around clowning on lesser cooks, got it. It’s not a complicated setup and it’s not a complicated genre either: This seems to be mostly about sick shounen cooking duels. Besides the setting, the main difference between this and Shokugeki no Soma seems to be that SnS goes for ridiculous and Chuuka Ichiban goes for epic - which is to say that it fancies itself emotional as well. Apart from that it’s what you’d expect from a cooking shounen, big moves, big reactions, huge twists and so on. One notable thing is that this show looks really, really nice. Production I.G seems to be establishing a sideline in taking stuff from the 90s and updating it with smoother animation and shinier lighting, while keeping the overall look intact; They did it for Mahoujin Guru Guru, and this looks much the same. Still, I’m just fundamentally not really interested in what appears to be a very straightforward cooking shounen from the 90s.

Assassins Pride

Straight from the Department of Chuuni, we have this light novel masterpiece about a cool as fuck teenage assassin who teleports behind u and nothin personells fools all day. He then meets a princess he’s supposed to off but just kinda decides not to, probably because she seems to be smitten by his m’lady act. Now he has to use his sick skillz to keep them both alive. It’s awful and terrible and no good and also kind of adorable. This truly is the most 13 AND A HALF MOM years old anime in a while, and it’s not even isekai! The writing’s just so amateurish and corny you can’t help but smile when princesses exposit their backstory for no reason while being accosted by pumpkin monsters (without knowing that Awessassin McCooldude happens to be listening in, which is certainly convenient). Or when the episode ends with the man just reading the synopsis of the show out again, in case you were too fascinated by this plot to pay attention to what it’s about. Yeah I’m not going to watch this in a thousand years, but it sure made me chuckle. Your mileage may vary.

Mugen no Juunin - Immortal

Speaking of 𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔫𝔦𝔫𝔢𝔱𝔦𝔢𝔰 𝔢𝔡𝔤𝔢, another anime adaptation of Blade of the Immortal appeared! You know, the manga for the cultured and historically minded guro fan. The first episode of Blade of the Immortal runs with this and is an arthouse production that someone most definitely directed the shit out of. I don’t think I’ve seen this much directing since, well, Sarazanmai, but “Ikuhara amounts of directing” is pretty much the idea here. And most of the time it even works! The quickly edited, disorienting style gives episode 1 a feeling closer to horror than to a cool swordmen action show, and that really brings out the best in the material, which is grotesque splatter bordering on the comical - It’s somehow a better Junji Ito anime than the actual Junji Ito anime. I think it tries too hard in a few places, but at least it does try.

But then I watched the second episode and that one’s a fairly conventional splatter-comedy swordin’ anime. I am not at all pleased with this development. The third episode was better again and seemed to split the difference between 1 and 2, even if it mostly uses the tricky editing to save on effort in the action –  I would much prefer actually readable fights and the wacky mannerisms in the more psychological stuff, thank you very much. Based on episode 1 I thought we might have something special here, but as of episode 3 I’d already merely call it pretty decent. I guess I’ll still stick with it but man, that’s a real bummer.

No Guns Life

No Guns Life is a neo-noir thriller about a guy who has a gun for a head. That’s fuckin rad and exactly the kind of silliness I am totally down for. He also has a gun for a hand, and there’s also some battle nun’s who carry revolvers with two cylinders, so in short I think the title is false advertising. This sounds very wacky (and it is), but it also takes its noir very seriously, down to details more wannabe neo-noirs tend to neglect (like being set right after a big war). The look and feel is pretty excellent, with sharp design and high-contrast artwork, and the music goes all in on the moody saxophone as you’d expect. And there’s some really adorable “look mom, I’m writing” stuff about how Man With Gun For A Head really “needs someone to pull his trigger” and so on (which is, as the astute reader might remember, at the back of his head). It feels like a throwback but then I can’t really think of many 80s/90s shows like this, so it’s actually more like the sort of faux-retro idea Trigger/Imaishi would come up with on a lark. Trigger/Imaishi would, of course, make a far worse anime out of it, so it’s all good. Well, it has some pacing problems and as always it’s a fine line between amusingly camp and not so amusingly camp anymore, but No Guns Life seems to have enough real qualities that it can probably stand on its own even when its conceptual gimmick eventually doesn’t suffice anymore. I give it a two gun’s up.

Hoshiai no Sora / Stars Align

And finally, here’s an anime about middle schooler softboys playing a tennis just as soft as themselves, while being henpecked by the elites on the girl’s team. This is not an “actual” sports anime though: for starters, it’s not based on some shounen manga and is an anime original with quite some staff pedigree instead. It’s also more of a character drama that already goes to some surprisingly real places by the end of episode 1, reminiscent of the recent and quite good Run with the Wind. Furthermore, it looks delicious, with minimalist but distinctive and varied character designs and animation that’s both extremely detailed for a TV anime and also not trying to shove that fact into your face with flashy stunt cuts. In short, this show seems very simple at first glance but every aspect of it just oozes quality. If nothing else, it’s already worth watching just for the excellent ending sequence where the characters show off their “best” dance moves and the chunky student council president dunks on everyone. This one caught me by surprise and it’s an easy pick for most promising show of the season.

[allensalkin]

10 Things to Know and Understand Prior To Beginning A Renovation

Any remodeling job is going to be tough and requiring. There are numerous things you should know before starting any renovating job. Listed below, you will discover 10 suggestions that will help you get going on your restoration journey.

Know What You Want

As the client bring in trades/service providers to see and assess. It is necessary that much thought has been provided. Spend some time thinking of fundamental objectives. Essential should -haves, a wish list. If you are not able to equate your desires, hiring a designer, is an ideal way to help draw up your thoughts. Generate a couple of; I am certain you will find the concepts will be valuable to your bottom line. They understand the principles of building principles they can normally easily identify what, will provide you the greatest value. Regularly customers struggle with generating yet another decision maker. Nevertheless, an impartial third party is a great method to redefine, the goals while considering timelines and budget plans in conjunction with each other. Another set of fresh eyes can never injure. Professionals in business see things rather in a different way. Enjoy and check out!

Research

Yet another essential tool in remodeling work, understand the job. As well as the ability of everybody brought to the table. Frequently specialists can conserve your money and time, by limiting the huge field of choices. I can stroll into an area and immediately deem a list based upon what stands apart and is shrieking to be dealt with. Often customers tend to concentrate on the little things. It is the larger impact products that are going to make the task feel lively and as though great strides have been made. Trust me when the visual products are modified. The little items will be lost in order of top priority.

Planning

Organize your ideas. Make lists. Rank your leading priorities and pencil in your ideas and the cost connected with that product. Do a rough budget, a budget plan, not what you would like to invest. What quantity of cash you feel relatively requires the expense of that item and or job? Do you see value in altering all your light? If so what quantity of cash do you consider a suitable investment? Then do a bit of research online or browsing at shops what type of fixtures you like. Is that number achievable? If not, is this a location you want to compromise? In order of importance where did lighting fixtures rank? This is the process, which is done referring to various products within the task lifecycle experts in the industry can ballpark to a degree, having background understanding of brand name specifics, along with vast resources to pool from. Often bargain costs feature deal service. It tends to be the sacrificial lamb. Stores cannot preserve high level staff when the pricing is based upon low margins. I make sure you comprehend you can buy an item at a store and it is more costly elsewhere. However, their customer service is second to none. Is it worth it to pay more for less irritation? This is yet another concern two people frequently do not address the exact same. It returns to your relationship with cash and the worth you place on service.

Get a Quote

A book needs to be written on the art of understanding how to get a quote. All I will say here is clearly specify the scope of work to guarantee all quotes are produced equivalent. Comprehend what adjustment costs will be, are they time and materials? Re quotes? Simply a recommendation; there are constantly modifications. No matter how well planned. If you know this in advance, it will assist psychologically prepare you for the months ahead. I cannot stress enough the significance of preplanning.

Trust

Interview professionals to guarantee a fit. A relationship needs to blossom here. Everybody likes to work with individuals we like. If you can, bring in a few specialists. Do they "hear" what you are stating? Do you trust they understand your needs? Retreat from anybody who is all about cash, purchasing, and or large deposits? Believe me the check writing will quickly follow, however in the meantime a strong emphasis on preplanning will assist, the loss of funds by making haste selections and reduce the number of mistakes. The idea here has to do with method. There are great deals of time to invest. We must plan every purchase, so your money works for you. This way if you lay out some rough costs, you can see in black and white where you have an ability to bump up or scale back, in specific areas.

Set Limits

Set reasonable specifications, to ensure everyone comprehends. If you wish that trades keep the hours worked within timelines, this is something that needs to be attended to. If you do not desire subs, in on the weekends, it is especially important to point that out. What timeline have you set out for the execution of the scope of work? Is it realistic? Do you realize if labor is included and/or modifications are made this can modify the dates of execution? Is that ok with you? Could this be a stage 2 part? Lots to think of ... Strategize

It is necessary to interact how you like to work. Are you a busy professional who just desires the interaction of the bigger picture? Do you want constant updating relevant to all information? Are you a spreadsheet addict? Do you need to be within budget plan? This is where an expert must work with you and outline the job from start to finish. How this job can best be tailored to your convenience level. This will be demanding; things will fail. Embrace the fact that when one door closes, another opens. As a matter of fact, some of the best style ideas have been produced vicariously through a problem. Pandora's box- as soon as opened we are all in uncharted area accept it! This is where some support can direct you through critical, services. To wind up at the exact same fantastic result!

Contracts

Know what you are accepting. Customize as needed, beware here. A contract is meant to be a document that binds both parties accountable to what was concurred. If changes are made the contract must show this. Typically, this kind of work hurries by, a lot work and or changes is being finished rather on the fly. One piece of advice, conversations get forgotten. People make mistakes. A lot is spoken about daily. It can be difficult to bear in mind where you ended. Bear in mind the employees are most likely on six other sites. They do tend to blur together. If high interactions are expected, interact this upfront so, the business can change and or increase the staff needed to upgrade as per your demands. Numerous trades are sole owners, have trouble with the administrative side of business. If they know this is an expectation, arrangements can and will be made. Possibly it can be by means of day-to-day development contacts us to the designer, so we could send out recaps/questions and so on. Via email? You choose, be as in advance as you can with your convenience level.

Understanding the Big Picture

Are you a visual person? Is a drawing needed to visualize the concepts? If yes, this can be a valuable investment. Just like any service there are costs associated with this, however it conserves hours of miscommunication and costly errors a picture/rendering can deserve its weight in gold. Once again, only you are familiar with you, the more in advance you are re your ability or failure to see things. The clearer all can be figured out. Customizing a method is the key to success. You ought to love the procedure as much

Know When to Start

Are you sitting? Begin the "process" a year beforehand. This is simply the start, clip images out of magazines. Prepare yourself to a level of convenience and knowledge so you can begin having individuals come in to evaluate and stroll you through the steps. Understand that quality business is in need, most have a waiting list. This is not a service to be hurried through. Excellent decisions take time and tactical preparation, prior to implementation. Roughly map out a vital path on a calendar. January- considering project objectives specifies each look/feel of areas. Find an excellent designer or a couple of, book visits, to examine area and chat about base project concepts. Are seeing where I am going here. A common remodeling takes six months to strategy but can take several more months to execute based on those choices. Always much better to ignore and over provide.

Delight in the fruits of your labors. Renovation work is a tricky undertaking. You will gain from this experience. Hindsight is 20/20. Live vicariously through others who have traveled this road before you and the many that will follow later.

[thecrystalye199]

The Hero Archetype

The Jungian archetypes, developed by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, theorized that everyone shared instinctive patterns and universal characters (Fordham, 2020). In simpler terms, Jung realized that there existed a number of these archetypes - model images of a person or a role - that everyone can recognize and personally connect to. And while these archetypes exist in people throughout society, the model images of these roles have largely been adapted in storytelling and are often incarnated as characters in myths, novels, and films (Psychologist World, 2020). 

An overview of the Jungian archetypes:

After reading about each of these archetypes, and completing a questionnaire to determine if I am living any of them, I found myself connecting the most with the Hero archetype - establishing that the Hero’s role and characteristics actually play a huge part in driving my actions and forming the foundation to my beliefs. 

The Story

When you analyze the narrative of the Hero throughout stories, films, and real life, the progression of the hero story line follows similar characteristics  - they start off as just another person (not the hero yet), finds themselves in circumstances that begins to challenge everything they are and believes to be through multiple trials and tribulations (Jeffrey, 2018). However, the end of the story typically results in success and closure with some gain of tremendous spiritual and mental value. Ultimately, fuelled by their desire to prove their worth, their goal is to improve the world by doing things for others while always believing that there is always a way to accomplish what they have their sights set on. 

Why the Hero?

I was initially drawn to the Hero archetype because of how prevalent the Hero role was in modern storytelling and film, and then it dawned on me how easy it was to relate the story and feel like I was living it. Growing up, movie nights at the cinema with the family were the days I looked forward to the most. On these days, pulling up to the parking lot already had me drooling over the popcorn we would always get, waiting in line had me anticipating the next superhero movie I had always begged to watch, and sitting in those big (at the time, for my size) comfortable movie seats ensured my eyes were always glue to the screen from the beginning of the movie to the end. Marvel movies were my favourite - and still are - because of the wins that always resulted by the end of the movie, the will to save humanity and those who couldn’t help themselves, and the pure fact that it was badass. Whether it was Iron Man, Spiderman, or Black Widow, I would always leave the theatre talking to my own version of J.A.R.V.I.S., pretending to shoot webs from my wrists, or believing that I could grow up to be a world-class spy. 

So from the young age of 5, I started fantasizing of what it would be like to be the hero. Being a child who loved to live in my own fantasies, I always thought about how cool it was if when the day would come where I would wake up with my own powers. I was convinced it would happen and no one could convince me otherwise. Needless to say, however, that day never came. I came to possess the ability to shoot webs from my wrists, superhuman strength, or some type of badass, superhuman anything. And yet, growing up, I still realized that the need to be the hero and living the hero story still very much exists inside of me. I am drawn to this archetype because, aside from the fantasy world these movies take place in, the ability to be the hero is not absent from my life. 

The Hero in Me

“When life puts you in a tough situation, don’t say ‘why me’ say ‘try me’.” (Brand Personalities, 2020)

To me, being the hero is about making a difference, standing up for myself and others, being someone that others can count on, and holding firm on the beliefs and values that drive me as an individual. Although my life may not replicate the storylines in the superhero movies that I love so much, the hero in me exists in her own way. Younger me always felt like just one-in-seven-billion, but the support of my family (pictured) made me believe that there was more to life than just feeling like I should merely fit in. Since I was old enough to have dreams for myself, my parents have always told me that I could reach for the stars if I wanted to. They taught me resilience, never giving up, and being a kind person which, in my opinion, are all qualities of the type of hero I am capable of being. Like the supportive people my parents were to me, I try to emulate that same help and support to those who I am fortunate enough to have in my life. Being a hero to me today means doing everything I can, when given the opportunity, to help those who might need the extra hand and to grow into the best version of myself that I can be when putting my best foot forward. 

One specific role I play that particularly makes me feel like a hero is the fact that I am a big sister. With an age gap of nine years, the best part of my brother and I’s relationship is the fact that I can support him through all of the different emotional and life stages that I have already experienced for myself.  No matter if it’s high school math, friendship/relationship problems, or just a pure bad day, knowing that I can be the person my brother can consistently count on and go to means the world to me.

The Caveat

The hero is a lot of great things but like everything else requires the balancing of the good and bad sides of many traits. Although persistent, eager, and confident, the Hero can evolve to be arrogant if not kept humble or reminded of the primary purpose for their actions. My tendency to always feel like I can “fix” everything has, on multiple occasions, resulted in my failure to complete or excel at anything at all. Sometimes, I have taken on too much than I can handle at work because I failed to evaluate how much bandwidth I had. Similarly, sometimes I have worried too much for other people and failed to leave enough time to dedicate to myself. As a result, it is necessary to not lose sight of why a task was important to take on in the first place and maybe even knowing when to give up when it might be needed. I ask myself:  Am I putting myself out there because I can, or just because I want to?

The Heros in Humanity

The biggest display of heroism are the acts I see other people do as a means to help those who cannot help themselves. If you took some time to observe others in the world, it can be amazing what you might realize about our humankind. Some of us have a voice, some of us don’t. Some of us are capable of helping, and some of us need that extra helping hand sometimes. While life may not be a story of the destroying of mythical villains to save humankind, it is the story of ridding of our own demons that hold us back from being kind to one another. Fundamentally, we all start in the same place, but our own life journey and story can be written to be whatever we’d like it to be. We all have shared dreams we want to attain: to be the best version of ourselves, to be able to be depended on by others, and to support the ones that we love and care for. But in between these fundamentals is finding the drive and passion that pushes us through the monumental moments of our lives in order to do so. Everyone’s hero story is different - some are fuelled by the unquenchable thirst for success, some are fuelled by the ever-growing need to help others, and some are fuelled by the combination of both. No matter what it is, being a hero is not something that is unattainable, but rather a something that anyone can, and should, strive to be. 

Works Cited

Brand Personalities. (2020). The Hero. Retrieved from Brand Personalities: https://brandpersonalities.com.au/personalities/the-hero/

Fordham, F. (2020, June 2). Carl Jung. Retrieved from Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carl-Jung

Jeffrey, S. (2018). The Hero Archetype: Friend or Foe?Retrieved from CEOsage: https://scottjeffrey.com/hero-archetype/

Psychologist World. (2020). Carl Jung: Archetypes and Analytical Psychology. Retrieved from Psychologist World: https://www.psychologistworld.com/cognitive/carl-jung-analytical-psychology

[gofancyninjaworld]

The World of Heroes. Part 2: What is a Hero, Anyway?

Part 1 here

I realise that one of the things we think everyone agrees on is what a hero is.  We also tend to think we know what ‘hero’ means in One-Punch Man.  But let’s walk this thinking back a bit. 

A Chimera of a Beast

To start with, there are many definitions of hero. Originally, a hero was a man (or woman) who opposed great adversity with strength, courage and ingenuity. Critically, they did this for the sake of personal glory. If it helped anyone, that was nice, but it wasn’t the point.  We have the one many are familiar with from the Bible (and from Maccabees, if you’re Catholic), where the idea of sacrificing oneself for the sake of others was held up as both a heroic and loving thing to do. The hero is an altruist.  More modern readings (Middle Ages onwards), have conflated 'hero' with 'champion' (a defender of a cause or person) and have the hero doing these acts for the sake of others, sacrifice optional. 

Tying these definitions together would be Philip Zimbardo (yes *that* Zimbardo), who sees heroism in terms of the willingness to act for what one perceives to be right. Crucially, he sees the choice to act when one might otherwise have stood by as the key definition of a hero: the opposite of heroism is not villainy, but indifference. The bystander, the person who could have acted but chose not to, is the one complicit in evil.

So which one is right for One-Punch Man?

All of them. 

We get all these strands in OPM, in all their uneasy contradictions. It’s rare to find any hero who doesn’t have more than one of these ideas motivating them at the self-same time. The heroes whose strongest motivation is to act to show their power and gain recognition rub shoulders with those 'just doing what is right'. The strong desire to experience triumph butts heads with the satisfaction of knowing one has helped someone. Often, they're the same damn person. 

Does it make sense to talk about acting with moral courage when one gets a paycheck at the end of the month? After all, we don't go lauding the police or doctors as heroes -- unless they do something that is truly over and above the call of duty. If we say that a hero is one who is not just willing to act to oppose evil, but do so to the point that they would put their lives on the line, what if they're so strong that this resolve is not tested?   It’s no wonder that within the story, we have so many differing views on heroes from near-worship to regarding them as self-indulgent fools.  And it’s no wonder that outside, fans find plenty to argue about which hero is better. 

How do we unpick all this?  So this isn’t too long, I’ll just pick on Saitama, not just because he’s strong, but also because he wrestles with many of these aspects within himself.  

Even He Contains Multitudes

Philosophically, is Saitama a hero? I'm with Zimbardo on this one: a hero is the one who sees a clear moral line that once crossed, compels them to act.

The important part is choice. So heroism is not being a trauma surgeon saving a patient's life -- that's just her job. On the other hand, if a group of armed men burst into the theatre, hold a gun to the surgeon's head and demand that she stop operating right away to focus on saving their bandit chief, heroism would be keeping calm, persuading the men to quit menacing the surgical team and work out a way to save both original patient and bandit.

Even if the choice is far less drastic, the fact that a person has a) noticed the problem, b) decided that it is a problem and c) decided that it's one they should do something about is what makes a hero a hero. Heroes are busybodies. They're pests. They're the ones who harsh the vibe in the room by telling people about Steve -- you know Steve, the one who's a bit of a laugh (but you don't want to be alone with him when he's been drinking). They hound, they ferret, they badger, they wear out their friends in their pursuit of what they think is right. Until such a point as their efforts are noticed, many a hero is a pest who keeps harping on about the same old shit.

This willingness to personally step up despite the potential for embarrassment or worse is something that ONE refers to when he's thinking about heroes. As ONE puts it, when you see a child being abused, you want to step in and stop it. However, if the abuser is bigger than you, what do you do? Whether or not he has the means to change things, Saitama is one of those people who simply couldn't walk away when he saw a child in danger. Saitama is a hero. A hero might be about taking a stand, but a hero who can WIN, now that is a mighty one indeed.

Coming to Saitama specifically, he's an old style hero with more modern motivations. Sometimes. He really wants the joy of a hard-fought battle, for his own glory and self-satisfaction.  This is a real and valid part of Saitama: 

AND Saitama is also someone who will literally give the clothes off his back to get a child shivering with cold and humiliation safely home. Clothes he really needed himself at that time to not make a fool of himself at a competition.

AND Saitama is someone who consistently defends the very idea of heroes, even to the point of sacrificing what would have been a very easy ride, not just out of Class C, but all the way to Class S. He did so that the greater sacrifices other heroes had made to keep the crowd alive long enough for him to come  save them would not be disparaged.  

All of these are part and parcel of Saitama. With so many different motivations, it’s little wonder that Saitama struggles with what and why he decided to become a hero in the first place.

He Who Raises Himself Up Is Watched

The ancient world has one crucial aspect right about heroes: they are watched.  Because they take a stand, heroes stand out.  And thus, they are noticed, whether with disdain or admiration.  Better make sure the figure you cast is worth watching.

Whatever Saitama’s still-evolving thoughts on why he became a hero and what heroism means to him, by his actions, his heroism has had some profound impacts on others.  Which is worth examining as different characters draw very different things from Saitama. 

Suiryu would say that Saitama's heroism lies in his power to restore hope to people. No matter how black things are, don't give up; someone might yet save you.  From chapter 74, page 34. 

  "Only now do I understand... that when people find themselves in darkness, they seek light. And it doesn't matter how faint or small it is, as long as it's there." (emphasis in text)

There is an important psychological truth to this -- in disasters, the ability to hang onto hope influences one's ability to survive. Knowing that help is coming or might yet be coming can have a huge impact on people's willingness to do more for themselves and so survive. A hero is the one who gives you reason to avoid despair.

To Genos, Saitama's heroism is something different: he is the symbol of strength, the strength to end evil. From chapter 84, page 131.

 "Master Saitama's battles are showing me the way forward. The symbol of strength. That is the goal towards which I should strive.. That is where I’m headed." (emphasis in text). 

A hero is the one who has the power to end an oppressive situation. Justice may be the heart of a hero, but justice without power is empty. Without that power, courage, good intentions, a strong sense of right and wrong, fighting technique, intelligence, self-sacrifice, all of them are for nothing -- the situation doesn't change. Those on whose behalf you act are betrayed.

Glasses sees Saitama's heroism in yet another way -- it's the courage to follow your own path, despite what others might say. From chapter 20.6, pages 26- 27.

Glasses: "Normal people have limits! Talented people are fundamentally different from us!" 

Saitama: "Who said so?"... "Who decides limits? And based on what?"

 And from then on, Glasses quit the Blizzard Group and started running. Why? A hero sticks out -- standing up for something when you might otherwise have walked by means going your own way and not being constrained by what others might think of you. That is the aspect that Glasses wants. As he says much later in volume 16's bonus chapter, 

"Knowledge, experience, decision making... I am lacking in all of those things. The only thing that has changed for me is determination. I have decided not to be bound by my limits."  (emphasis mine)

Whose version is right? Which one would Saitama agree most with? Who knows? It depends on which day of the week you ask Saitama! And in a way, it doesn't really matter. What matters is first, that Saitama is taking a stand against the evil that monsters wreak on society: he did it before he was strong and he's not stopped doing it now that he's overwhelmingly powerful. Second, what matters is that Saitama inspires others. He might not be getting the parade he hoped for, but he's sensitive to the fact that a hero is as much a symbol as an action. We sing songs of praise to heroes because they inspire us to do better in our daily lives, they challenge us not to ignore what we might by our action end.

From the start, the point has been made that there is too much evil in this world for any one hero, no matter how powerful, to stop. The argument has been made that in a sense, heroes act out of self-satisfaction. Nevertheless, heroes matter. Someone has to stand up for what's right. 

But man, heroes can't win. If they work for extrinsic reward, like recognition and money (ha!) they're shallow and hypocritical. If work for intrinsic motivation, like justice, they're deluded. If they find intrinsic reward in helping, they're self-indulgent.

Part 3, I plan to look at the world of pro-heroes. 

[mentalillnessmouse]

(p1) Hi, I'm writing because I feel there is no hope for me. I'm 30, I live at home where I get verbally mistreated (it was physical when I was younger.) I'm morbidly obese, agoraphobic, I literally didn't leave the house for a 2 year period and still rarely do. I have 0 friends and never had any except a few online ones who ditched me years ago. I was bullied constantly. I have self-harm marks all over my arms. I've NEVER had a job, or finished high school. I still almost never leave the house.

(p2) I’ve asked for help to learn to drive, but they tell me I can’t. I guess because they call me autistic and tell me I am not very smart and make jokes about me having ADHD. I took those comments seriously and they told me I was “looking for problems.” WHAT? I made the mistake of speaking with a few psychiatrists about it who shut me down because, in their words, I didn’t “look” like I had those issues. And that my parents had hard jobs so it made sense they would lash out at me. 

(p3) I deal with other issues too like menorrhagia. A doctor had me do an ultrasound (this was like my 3rd one since ‘06) and sent me to a specialist because they saw something. The specialist said she didn’t think anything was there and wasn’t going to actually examine me. I gave up. I’m afraid to speak up for myself, I genuinely don’t understand how to live, make friends, talk to people. I feel like I just have TOO MANY issues. And at my age I don’t see why anyone would bother with me anymore.

(p4) I have an appt with a psych at the same place as the others because I have my city’s free insurance and nowhere else to go. I don’t know if I can do it again after this? I just wanted somewhere to reach out at least one more time :( I’ve reached out to others (like extended family) who will talk to me for a bit then ignore? I can’t help but to feel damaged or like I’m doing something wrong I can’t figure out. I feel like a weak loser and I didn’t try good enough.I’m sorry this is so long

Hello Anon, 

I’m mod Bee and I’ll do my best to help you out, but I received help myself from the other mods to write you back. So this is a communal effort!

Thank you for reaching out, and I’m sorry you’re going though such a difficult and distressing situation. You sound strong and tenacious, and I’m proud of you for the way you keep trying to improve your life. 

We have some suggestions that we hope can be of help. They’ll concerne:

finding online communities/groups to hang out with

finding a professional that suits your needs 

looking for courses you can join 

thinking about possible job options 

Just an head up: this is going to be long, and it will contain tons of links. I’ll highlight one - that I think it’s most useful - for each section, but I suggest you to go through them all. 

1. finding online communities/groups to hang out with

Having friends is important for our mental health, but it can get difficult to make new ones, especially when we’ve been burned before.  

Online communities, forums, and groups, can be good places to start looking for friends again. You can approach them with as much caution as you need, and find those people you relate with the most.

If you like games, and rpgs in particular, there are online options that allow you to connect with other others all over the world. Activities like Dungeon&Dragons are based around players’ interactions, so you’d get to know people without putting the stress on forging new friendships. The article 10 Best Online Chat Rooms & Games suggests other equally fitting games. 

Forums and groups where you can share your experience and fears are another important tool you can use. I’ve looked into active ones and found Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia Forum, r/Agoraphobia/ (on reddit), bus (a self-harm support forum), Mental health support group and discussion community, Online Support Groups by Turn2Me, PsychForums (Psychology and Mental Health Forums), and the ReachOut app.

Trying with pen pals - a one on one exchange - could also be a good idea: InterPals and PenPalWorld are only two of the many websites dedicated to this purpose. Here’s some tips on how it works.

Finally, there are apps with the specific purpose of finding new friends, like Bumble BFF. Try to see if you there’s one of your liking in this list.

2. finding a professional that suits your needs

We usually recommend what it’s colloquially called “psychiatrist/therapist shopping”, the act of choosing a professional after inquiring what we need to know of their line of work, based on our own wishes, and asking this to more than one.

It’s difficult when insurance covers just a little portion of professionals, but not impossible. 

Can’t afford therapy? No insurance? Need low cost options? Here is a great list of ways to get help when money or insurance is an issue.

Therapy For Every Budget: How To Access It

9 Ways to Get Free or Cheap Therapy When You Don’t Have Health Insurance

Dial 211 for Essential Community Services: if you call 211, you can ask about free therapy options in your area, or how to work with you insurance to afford other professionals.

If none of these options work out, and you have to stick with the professional your insurance provides, there are measures you can take that might help making the sessions successful. Check out 21 Tips for getting the most out of each therapy session and How to Talk to Your Doctors When They Don’t Listen. 

If your new psychiatrist tries to dismiss you without hearing everything that you have to say, insist that they write on your record exactly what they did and why, and that you absolutely want a copy of it before you exit their room. It’s your right to have both your requests accomplished. I know it’s not easy to have them respected: you’ll probably have to stand your ground and that can be difficult, but I think it’s important for you and fundamental for what you can get out of this session. This is a post with links to various module you can complete to help you assert yourself, which I suggest you to start before going to your appointment, if you can. It can be useful to face your family, too.

Does your insurance cover a different specialist for the gynecological problem your doctor wanted you to check out? Is there any free or low-cost clinic near you, like Planned Parenthood or Free Clinic? You can inquire about their services through email.

3. looking for courses you can join

Online courses can be helpful for a number of things, like keeping busy, learning new stuff, feeling accomplished, and possibly getting some qualifications. 

There are some free options that end with a proper certificate, but not all are accredited, meaning that they’re not automatically accepted by employers (they can choose to consider them valid or not). Still, there are no downsides in joining such a course, seeing that it doesn’t cost anything but your time.

Not accredited certificates/no certificates:

Alison’s Diploma Courses and Certificate Courses 

FutureLearn doesn’t grant you certificates with their free courses, but it still provides learning access

edX’s Courses

Udemi, not free but it offers up to 90% discounts generally once a month

Learn how to code, a masterpost that lists different courses to learn coding

Free Online Language Courses, a masterpost that lists different courses to learn languages  

24 Invaluable Skills To Learn For Free

Accredited certificates

coursera offers some free courses, and/or the possibility to apply for financial aid

Online Degree require no tuition, no applications, and no interviews, and has worked so participating Universities around the country will consider the courses for credit, potentially finishing up to an entire freshman year of college

edX’s Professional Certificate Programs are not free, but edX offers up to a 90% discount to those who prove they cannot pay a full price.

University Of The People is tuition-free, which means there is no charge for teaching or instruction, only initial fees (around 160$) for each course. You can also apply for scholarships.

on StudyPortal - Scholarships, you can find a huge number of scholarships available in your country, and here you can find the easiest scholarships to apply to. There are also scholarships for online courses.

There’s also the possibility of completing high school through virtual courses, and if they’re organized by your State’s public school system, they should be free. You can find more info on this here. 

4. thinking about possible job options

Working towards finding a job is important for our own self-worth and feeling like a valuable member of society, and of course it can also help with looking for better therapy. 

It can be tricky when mental and physical illnesses are at play, though. That’s why I’d like to give you some online options here, too, that don’t ask for any particular prerequisite, and would give you enough free time to focus to get better. Jobs like data entry or app testing are doable from home, and may not pay much, but they’d allow you to start building some savings. 

5 Online Jobs That Require Little or No Experience

No Experience? Start One of These Online Jobs

Best Data Entry Jobs From Home

10 (Legit) Data Entry Jobs from Home

Work At Home Data Entry on Indeed.com

FlexJobs

Glassdoor

Whatever you choose, creating a strong resume is always a good step. I’m giving you some resources on how to do that:

How to Create a Professional Resume

How To Make A Resume 101

Help Everyone Find A Job In Their Field

And between checking out all these options we gave you, please try to do some of this Workout For Daily Life, because focusing on a screen for too long can cause so many aches!

You’re not a loser, you’re strong and you keep fighting for yourself, which is admirable. I hope these resources can be of help, and please do send another ask if you need anything else.

Take care,

mod Bee

[kcwcommentary]

VLD7x08 – “The Last Stand Part 2”

7x08 – “The Last Stand Part 2”

This episode is so frustrating for so many reasons. Killing Adam is offensive because Joaquim Dos Santos and Lauren Montgomery explicitly used Adam and their announcement that he was gay and had been romantically involved with Shiro in order to bait people into watching this season, and then they kill him, having since said that they did so because they needed to kill a notable character to make the Galra feel threatening; in other words, they built Adam up as gay (because that is all that he is in this show) and then killed him; they specifically killed him because he was gay.

This episode also continues to act like Sam is right about everything and Sanda is wrong about everything. This time, the show doesn’t even pretend to care about writing realistically. Sanda is an admiral. Sam’s and Iverson’s insubordination would not be tolerated in an actual military. It makes this show seem like its creative team have a huge disdain and disrespect for the military. At the very least, it makes the creative team seem completely ignorant of how solid the command structure is in the military. Sanda ends up just letting Sam and Iverson do whatever they want, and that would not happen.

Sam continues to benefit from Perfect Pidge plot armor, and his obnoxious constantly being right about everything makes me really not like his character.

The Veronica “death” and reveal to still be alive a few minutes later has little-to-no emotional impact. It mostly just gives me narrative whiplash.

This episode really needs some help.

The episode starts with Sendak leading the invasion. The last time Sendak seemed interesting to me was 1x11 “Crystal Venom,” and that was because of how much his disembodied voice messed with Shiro psychologically. He has never felt more threatening than he did in the scenes in that episode, scenes in which he did nothing but have some taunting dialog while being unconscious.

The music continues to be really nice.

Sendak orders the Galra fleet to fire upon various cities on Earth. Only the Galaxy Garrison has any defense, with its forcefield blocking blasts. Sanda orders a military response, surface-to-air blasters and a wave of fighters with a second wave ordered to prep for launch. Sam – I am so tired of him – objects to her “us[ing] the standard defenses.” If everything is as dire as Sam has told everyone, then they need to use literally everything they have, including “standard defenses.” Sam wants to use the MFE pilots. Yeah, that’s fine and good, but there are only four of them, right? James Griffin, Rizavi, Kinkade, and Leifsdottir. The four of them are nowhere near enough to handle a planetary invasion. Sam tries to juxtapose the four MFE pilots with the Paladins of Voltron, and that is annoying on multiple levels. One, the Paladins are flying battleships, not fighters, and the technology of the Lions are way more advanced than the MFE fighters. Two, his comparing the two groups of characters seems like it’s part of how this invasion and occupation story was the attempt to prove a spinoff viable, but this just reminds me of how this is setting the show’s main characters aside in order to introduce a bunch of new characters, none of whom are as interesting as the actual main characters of the show.

Iverson is hesitant to follow Sanda’s orders. This is a failure of military discipline and a demonstration of the EPs’ and writers’ ignorance about how the military functions. Iverson says to Sanda, “I know you have wartime authorization, but maybe we should listen to—” Forget “wartime authorization,” how about the fact that Admiral Sanda outranks Commander Iverson. If Sanda wasn’t busy trying to initiate a defense of the planet, she’d have every right to have Iverson charged with insubordination. I really don’t like that this continues pushing the idea that Sam is right and Sanda is wrong. I don’t necessarily reject the idea that the MFEs and the new fighters should be involved, but the idea that four of them are exponentially better than a broader force is absurd.

Oh look, it’s Adam. Joaquim Dos Santos said that they just had to kill Adam here because “we knew seeing a familiar face bravely make the sacrifice along with the squadron he led (and countless others) would help get across the gravity of this invasion” (quoted from JDS’s post season seven apology letter that he posted on his social media). The only way Adam is a “familiar face” is because of how much he was used to promote the season. He has not been seen since his brief scene in 7x01 “A Little Adventure.” Despite what JDS said in his letter, if you’re going by just the episodes themselves and not any of the promotional work, then Adam is NOT a “familiar face.” It feels like this part of JDS’s attempt to justify killing Adam is built on a lie.

Sam says to Sanda, “You just doomed those men and women.” This is more of Sam benefiting from this show’s use of Perfect Pidge. The premise the show is using in Sam’s argument is absolutely absurd, but the show makes Sam right because he’s Sam. It just amazes me that this show thinks that they’re demonstrating how much better Sam is than everyone, but because the show is basing Sam’s argument on something unrealistic – that the four MFE fighters are superior to the entirety of the rest of the military – it has the opposite effect for me. The show wants the audience to think Sam is being shown to be smarter and wiser than everyone else, but I end up disliking Sam more and more. I am really hesitant to ever use the term Mary Sue, but Sam is really close to being one.

The Galra destroy the ground-to-air blasters. The fighters’ missiles do nothing to the Galra ships. Some of what this battle does is try to present the idea that the Galra are so superior to Earth technologically, but that’s so obvious that it shouldn’t need to be said. We know from interviews that JDS and LM thought killing Adam was necessary to prove that the Galra were a threat. Having the protagonist side of the battle have zero success, like here in having the missiles impact the Galra ship but do no damage, does not make the Galra look formidable, it makes them look unrealistic. I do think Earth would be thoroughly outclassed by the Galra in a battle, but demonstrating the futility of Earth’s attempt at defense does not require the Galra to be undamageable.

There’s either an animation, direction, or editing error during this battle. Track this sequence of shots: ONE, the Galra shoot a blast at Adam and the other fighters, TWO, the first-generation fighters that they’re using dodge the blast, THREE, Adam comments that their weapons had no effect on the Galra, FOUR, the Galra shoot multiple smaller blasters from the side of their ship, FIVE, second-generation fighters dodge the Galra attack and one of them is blown up.

Given that the whole manufactured contention between Sam and Sanda right now is that Sanda is using the first-generation fighters instead of the MFEs and the second-generation fighters, to have the animation show second-generation fighters (which aren’t even supposed to be in the air) being shot at and one destroyed totally undermines Sam’s argument. Let me add some visuals.

Here is a shot of the first-generation fighters from 7x07 “The Invasion Part 1.”

Here’s a shot of the first-generation fighters at this moment here in 7x08 “The Invasion Part 2” where they’re about to dodge Galra blasts (shot TWO in my list above).

Here is a shot of the second-generation fighters from 7x07 “The Invasion Part 1.”

And here’s a shot of the animation/direction/editing error from 7x08 “The Invasion Part 2” of second-generation fighters being shot at during Adam’s attack mission. This is shot FIVE referenced above.

In addition to killing Adam to supposedly demonstrate how threatening the Galra are, this sequence is supposed to be about proving Sam right. It’s a fundamental element to the story of this sequence. I understand that sometimes weird animation errors happen. I’m far more forgiving of something like accidentally coloring the bayard pink in 7x03 “The Way Forward,” for example. But this animation is directly tied to the show’s own argument for Sam and against Sanda. This error makes it seem like the creative team were so Sam-is-right that they ran on autopilot during the production of this sequence. It also suggests a flaw in the design work for the two generations of fightercraft that the animators could apparently so easily mistake the two designs.

The battle shifts to the command room and the main display in the room shows most of the pilots sent in the first wave are gone. Back to the air, the last few Earth fighters are blown up.

Adam is the last fighter. The last we get to see of him is him screaming as he is blown up.

If I did not know who Adam was through all the promotion of the season that was reliant upon their having shown 7x01 “A Little Adventure” and Lauren Montgomery having tweeted about Adam being Shiro’s “significant other” and all the interviews that JDS and LM did about the revelation that Shiro was gay and Adam had been his boyfriend, if I had not had Adam’s significance inflated far more outside the show than it was in the show, then Adam’s death here would not have meant anything. If JDS and LM had not purposefully used the promise of queer representation in the show, had not used the single, short scene of Shiro and Adam’s breakup as promotional bait, then I would not have been attached to Adam. I don’t think that I would have recognized him in this episode as having been the guy who broke up with Shiro seven episodes ago.

JDS thought killing Adam would show us the stakes of the battle. Adam, whose entire presence in the show until now was one scene in which he broke up with Shiro, was a character who only had one single dimension: Shiro’s boyfriend. In other words, Adam was nothing more than gay. If, as JDS has said, killing Adam was about showing the stakes – an idea that a story has to kill characters that the audience have become attached to in order to show how much a threat the plot is – then the only reason the audience was attached to Adam was because he was gay and Shiro’s flashback boyfriend. Adam had zero other connections in the story, zero other connections to any characters. Yes, I’m fully accusing JDS and LM of killing Adam explicitly because he was gay. They can say that their intention wasn’t to use the bury-your-gays trope all they want to. Whether either of them have the self-awareness to realize this or not, whether they ultimately care or not, their decision to kill Adam is based on him being gay.

And they were surprised the audience would be upset about this. At least, they pretended they were surprised. It really says something that I’m even debating with myself whether JDS and LM were genuinely surprised that people were upset that they introduced a gay character specifically to kill him, or whether they callously did it and faked surprised to try to deflect blame for their having done it. I don’t know which is worse: that they were so socially inept that they didn’t anticipate the audience being offended or that they just didn’t care to begin with and baited people with the promotion that Adam was gay in order to increase the number of viewers for season seven.

I could probably rant about this all day.

Sendak broadcasts that he’s come for the Voltron Lions. Shouldn’t he be able to scan Earth and tell that they’re not there? Sanda replies, telling Sendak that they do not have the Lions, nor do they know where they are.

Finally, hidden in the middle of this scene’s dialog, the show finally informs us of some of the structure of the Galaxy Garrison. Sam says, “Tell all Garrison bases to call back fighters.” So, there is more than just one Garrison location. Though the Galaxy Garrison has always had some military element to it, it has been presented as an organization that conducted space exploration missions. Now, the Galaxy Garrison seems to be some kind of unified, worldwide military. I don’t know if this is the show having failed to properly define the parameters of the organization or if it’s a retcon. All Garrison bases have been attacked and are flying defense missions.

The one base Sanda and Sam are at is the only one that has forcefields for defense. It kind of makes the Garrison’s focus on developing fightercraft, since it seems they did so to the detriment of any other systems development, seem pointless. It makes me feel like the struggle of the previous episode is invalidated. I know the show would counter that the whole point is that last episode gave us four MFE pilots and the second-generation of fighters. Last episode’s position within the narrative makes it need to be about the broader totality of preparation for attack by the Galra, not just introducing four characters and their four fighter jets.

Sam tells Iverson to launch the MFEs and power up a fusion cannon. (They have a fusion cannon? This is literally the first mention of it.) Sanda threatens to court martial if any commands are given against her orders. This feels like the show is expressing a fundamental disdain for the military. Sam, despite having a supposed rank, does not at all behave like he’s progressed through a military program. Iverson too is now being written to disregard all military protocol. It is not in any way realistic for them, if this is actually supposed to be a military organization, to disregard the command of an Admiral like this. Every time Sam is pushed by the narrative to be right and Sanda to be wrong, it feels like the show is attacking the entire concept of the military. Either that, or those who wrote and produced these episodes are vastly ignorant of what the military is like.

Sam and Iverson pretty much throw the command structure in the trash. The four MFEs launch in their second-generation fighters. (I still can’t get over the animation error earlier). It’s still absurd that four fighters would ever be enough. The Galra fire on the particle barrier, which repels the attack easily.

James says, “Okay team, we’ve trained for this. We know their maneuvers and have the firepower to knock them out.” This doesn’t make any sense. How do they know Galra maneuvers since this is the first time they’ve fought them? Were there supposed to be files about Galra battle tactics in the bunch of files Sam had on his device? Wouldn’t all of the Garrison fighter pilots have trained to “know their maneuvers” then? Is the show really trying to say that only these four MFE pilots were properly trained? This is absurd. And how can James say they have “the firepower to knock them out,” when Sanda said that they hadn’t properly tested the second-generation fighters? I assume that these fighters have specific weapons systems that the first-generation did not? We only ever saw the first-generation launch one single salvo of missiles at the Galra ships, even though the first-generation fighters have a massive cannon on the underside of their nose, a cannon that looks identical to the one under the nose of the second-generation fighters. The MFEs and their fighters are feeling more and more contrived.

The fusion cannon at the Garrison base has come online, and Sam orders it to fire. Sanda just stands there. This is bafflingly badly written. This is more of the writers having already arrived at where they want the story to go with the characters rather than writing the story to develop to that point. And I continue to think that either the creatives on this show are offensively disdainful of the military, or they’re just totally ignorant. Sam has effectively successfully executed a mutiny, and I just don’t see how everyone under Sanda’s command would be so willing to go along with this.

Not that this show probably bothered to actually craft a command structure for the Galaxy Garrison, but since we’ve had both Commander and Admiral ranks used, let’s compare it to the United States Navy. Sanda is an Admiral, whereas Sam and Iverson have both been called Commander, though I question whether Sam is a ranked Commander or if he was just the Mission Commander in an astronaut sense and not in a military sense. If it is indeed that he was just a Mission Commander, then that makes his actions against Sanda even more egregious. In the US Navy, the rank of Admiral is five ranks above that of Commander. What Sam and Iverson are doing in acting against Sanda is so wrong.

The fusion cannon destroys one Galra ship. Sendak orders his fleet to attack vulnerable targets rather than this one base. The MFE pilots in their second-generation fighters didn’t really do much.

Sam says that the “rest of the globe […] need[s] to evacuate to safe zones immediately.” There are safe zones? Sanda says, “We should go after them.” She is the clear commanding officer, except for the Sam-Iverson mutiny, having her speak like this makes it sound like she’s trying to convince an officer who outranks her of a course of action. She’s an admiral, she should not be having to convince anyone here of anything. Sam got exactly what he wanted, the MFEs were put into use. And now that he has what he wanted, he no longer wants it. 

The Galra are tearing up Earth. Sendak’s subordinate tells him that there’s no sign of Voltron. Since Voltron has participated in battles far bigger than this, the idea that Sendak would think Voltron was hiding here somewhere is absurd. His subordinate asks, “Should we continue the occupation, sir?” The Galra haven’t started an occupation yet. This is still the invasion. This is simple writing to get correct and the fact that this show can’t even write something this simple correctly is a sign of a seriously malfunctioning writing process.

At the GG base, Veronica says, “Commander, we are no longer receiving responses on any channels. What are your orders?” The camera focuses on Sanda, like Veronica was addressing her, but if she was, why would Veronica have addressed Sanda as Commander instead of Admiral? The show has this be a moment that’s supposed to show how incompetent Sanda is, how she’s supposed to be obviously a bad leader, and Sam steps forward to give the heroic, commander speech. It just all seems so wrong to me.

Sam effectively taking command away from Sanda makes me think of Keith taking Black Paladin away from Shiro. In both cases, the show does not properly write any sort of transition that makes sense. It’s nothing but executive decree. It’s what the EPs want to happen, so it happens. They don’t really care that it makes no sense or is very poorly developed. Sanda says, “When this is all said and done, I’m going to have you stripped of your rank and thrown in the brig for defying my orders.” Why are they even still here? I cannot imagine an Admiral actually tolerating two Commanders undermining her authority like this. They should have already been arrested.

Sanda asks, “We don’t have the Lions. Why is Sendak still invading.” Sam says, “You don’t understand the Galra.” The implication is that Sam does. I can’t stand how much arrogance that Sam is written to have, and I know that the EPs and writers don’t even realize that they wrote Sam to be so extremely arrogant.

There’s a small meeting. Food supplies are limited and there aren’t the necessary supplies to finish building the Atlas. Veronica points out there’s an abandoned supply location not too far away. There’s apparently an underground tunnel system from World War III. There was a WWIII and the show is only just now in the seventh season mentioning this? I know we haven’t been on Earth for most of this show, so maybe that excuses what feels like really late world-building. This really does make this feel like the start of a totally different show.

Veronica says the Galra are using “what looks like random patrol patterns.” If it’s random, then it’s not a pattern. How did this get written? I mean, maybe, in a first draft I could see this being written, but it should have been fixed in a script revision.

The MFE pilots are going on this supply grab mission. Why are the four supposed best pilots in the world doing anything other than being near their fighters in case they’re needed? This is absolutely absurd. Really, they’re going because they’re the main characters now, not because it makes any operational sense for them to be going. This show seems to have no sense of what division of labor is, which is baffling since in order to get an animated show made, you have to use division of labor. Veronica is going with them, and I can understand her being part of this mission.

Veronica introduces herself to the MFEs, saying, “I’m an analyst and your handler.” James replies, “We don’t need a handler.” What does this show mean by the word “handler?” Is Veronica supposed to be in command of this mission? If so, then it’s more insubordination for James to reject her authority. It’s like this show seems to think that the military would work better if every lower ranked officer defied their superior officers.

Veronica asks James if he knows how to get to the depot, he says he doesn’t, that he’ll just use a guidance system. Veronica says that the guidance system uses a network that these tunnels block. So, James and the MFEs were being sent on a mission without any kind of mission briefing? This show has no clue whatsoever how anything in any organization works does it? I guess the dysfunctional ways organizations in this show are presented should be seen as a representation of how dysfunctional this show’s production organization was.

How is Kinkade kneeling on top of the vehicle they’re using and not being thrown off it? They get to the depot where both the supplies and the train are located. They load the train and start to repair it. As time passes, James spots two Galra sentries walking down the tunnel. He, Leifsdottir, and Kinkade fire on them, but their weapons have no effect. Veronica has a suitcase sized, Gatling gun style weapon. She says she’ll hold them off. It takes a lot of shots, but she’s able to eventually bring down the two sentries only for more to come walking down the tunnel. The MFEs board the train, Leifsdottir helping Rizavi, James and Kinkade continuing to try to use their rifles. Veronica tells them to go, but James says they’re not going to leave her. There’s a huge explosion, the tunnel collapses, though the train begins its journey.

We’re supposed to be sad, thinking Veronica is dead. Maybe I would feel more about her supposed death if she had an established character. That’s a huge part of the problem with these episodes. The show wants the emotion of these events, but the characters haven’t been built enough to produce the desired emotional impact. Rizavi asks if anyone knows how to get back. Again, it’s absurd that these four were going on this mission but had apparently almost zero preparation for the mission. How to get back is not a question that anyone would need to ask if this had been written properly. Leifsdottir memorized the path on the way in, so they get back.

Veronica’s “death,” especially knowing that it’s a narrative fakeout, feels like a disrespectful manipulation of the audience. Sam says, “We have a chance now” that they have the supplies. James rants, “A chance for what? We just bought ourselves time. What is that going to do for us?” Uh, yeah, buying time was the mission. Why are these characters written this ignorantly? Sam says, “Voltron will come.” He also wants to use the bought time to finish working on the Atlas.

Sendak orders the Galra to destroy Earth’s communication network. I thought it was already not working, but okay. It seems weird that the Galra have left it functioning until now. Sendak says if Voltron knows things are bad on Earth, they’ll be cautious, but if they don’t hear anything from Earth, they’ll come with “haste.” Whatever.

There’s a montage of time passing. Work on the Atlas. The Galra are building weird partial domes over areas.  Sanda asks Sam if the Atlas will be able to defend the Earth, Sam says, “It’s just one ship, and an untested one at that.” I remember a bit earlier in this episode when Sanda objected to the use of the second-generation fighters because they were untested, but Sam didn’t care about that then. It’s so inconsistent for him to care about ships being untested now.

I remember the first time I watched this episode, I was really confused about how much time had passed. I know the show used a montage, and montages imply time passing, but this episode doesn’t say how much time passed during that montage. Sam is called to the hangar. There, he sees Veronica has returned. She has a bunch of other humans with her. She says she was saved by and has been working with “an underground resistance network.” The montage is not enough to produce a sense of time passing that Veronica’s return feels like some hopeful development. There is only three minutes and 49 seconds between the tunnel collapsing and Veronica being shown to be alive. She hasn’t been “dead” for enough screen time yet for her return to feel triumphant. Since her return is in the same episode she died, it makes her death even more blatantly manipulative than if she had returned in a later episode.

Veronica says this resistance group’s intel “led [her] to [her] family.” It would help to know where this Galaxy Garrison base is. I thought it was in the southwest of the US, but if that’s where they were, then how was Veronica able to get her family from Cuba? Yeah, Veronica is Lance’s sister, but the show hasn’t bothered to state that explicitly until right now. I am baffled why. Knowing she was Lance’s sister while going through all the threat of this episode would have made the tension of that threat and the emotion of her fakeout “death” actually have more impact. By keeping her relationship with Lance unstated until now, the episode deprived itself of the necessary connection to the main characters that this episode really needed.

Veronica reports that the Galra have been putting humans into work camps and using them to build Galra installations around the planet. This isn’t really a report of anything new since this was part of the montage.

Sam declares they need to get “one last message out to Voltron.” They suddenly have a big rocket that they’re launching into space. The launch animation made me unintentionally laugh because the booster rockets separate from the main rocket, which they would do once they had finished burning their fuel boosting the main rocket, but the problem is that the boosters after separation while they’re falling away from the main rocket, those booster rockets were still producing visible thrust exhaust, so there’s no reason they would have separated yet. Sometimes like this, even the animation looks like no one bothered to do even basic research.

Sendak orders the rocket destroyed, and the Galra seemingly blow it up, until somehow a bunch of smaller satellites or something are flying all over the place. Sam says, “He fell for it.” It’s so confusing. This show does this a lot. Something is depicted visually with no explanation, and it makes you go, what just happened, and then a bit after it happened a character explains it. It’s a storytelling style that I just find disorienting. Apparently, the missile, despite being blown up, distributed “micro transmitters, millions of them, spreading throughout the sector.” Really, “throughout the sector?” They’re only shown being around Earth.

Unsurprisingly, they’re broadcasting the message Sam sent and Voltron received at the start of last episode.

Cut to who knows how much time later. Sam is giving a big speech like he’s the leader of everyone, Sanda, despite significantly outranking Sam stands quiet, obediently behind her subordinate. Sam’s speech is supposed to be inspirational, but because I don’t buy into Sam as a leader because of the absurdity of how he’s assumed this position, it just frustrates me. He says they have resources left only for one last stand.

Then cut to back millions of light-years outside the Milky Way, Voltron there, and the third time Keith has piloted Voltron forward.

Like I said about rewatching last episode, this one also does not hold up well under my increased scrutiny of this rewatch. I’m still furious about the show killing Adam and JDS’s and LM’s pathetic attempts to defend that decision. This rewatch, I was more baffled by the, at best, ignorant way military command was written.

Like most of this show, this episode really needs help.

[thecurlybiochemist-blog]

My 4 best reads of 2018

I read 36 books last year. It’s definitely not the number of books that makes people go ‘Wow!’, but considering that I had my final exams this year and only really started to read a lot when I went to high school, I’m quite proud of myself. However, there were 4 books that especially impacted me in one way or another and that I enjoyed the most, which is what I want to tell you about today!

Let’s start with a book that was, in a way, life-changing for me, as it began my fascination with neuroscience!

1. ‘The Brain: The Story of You’ by David Eagleman

Locked in the silence and darkness of your skull, your brain fashions the rich narratives of your reality and your identity. Join renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman for a journey into the questions at the mysterious heart of our existence. What is reality? Who are “you”? How do you make decisions? Why does your brain need other people? How is technology poised to change what it means to be human? In the course of his investigations, Eagleman guides us through the world of extreme sports, criminal justice, facial expressions, genocide, brain surgery, gut feelings, robotics, and the search for immortality. 

Like I said, the book is absolutely fascinating. I read it in about 2 days (school days!), because I just couldn’t stop reading. It explains some basic neuroscientific concepts as well as talks about some recent breakthroughs in neuroscience. I really recommend it to anyone who is curious about what the part of us that makes us us really does. Now, however, after reading a few more books about neuroscience I can see that the book is kind of vague and doesn’t really get into the hard science behind a lot of the concept, but that is a good thing. It is meant for people without a scientific background and it is supposed to interest you in neuroscience – I can assure you that it does that really well!

2. ‘Mindset: The New Psychology of Success’ by Carl Dweck

This is another life-changing book, but in a different way. It really impacted the way I think about life, my achievements, school and my future.

Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., discovered a simple but groundbreaking idea: the power of mindset. In this brilliant book, she shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavour can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. People with a fixed mindset—those who believe that abilities are fixed—are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset—those who believe that abilities can be developed. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishment.

I really recommend this book to anyone interested in self-development, but also anyone who feels that there’s something holding them back in achieving what they dream of. I’m going to share with you a quote from the book that I find really inspiring and that I implement in my life:

Think of times other people outdid you and you just assumed they were smarter or more talented. Now consider the idea that they just used better strategies, taught themselves more, practiced harder, and worked their way through obstacles. You can do that too, if you want to.

3. ‘Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking’ by Susan Cain

I’ve always debated where I truly lie on the introvert-extrovert scale. There used to be a time when I thought that I was an extrovert (the thought is now hilarious and surreal to me!). As I realised that I was, indeed, an introvert, there were times when I thought of my introversion as something undesired, something to be ashamed of, even.

This book helped me realise that it is not true at all. I’ve learnt to accept, and even love, my introverted nature! I recommend it to any of my fellow introverts, but also anyone who is interested in psychology!

Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating. Shyness is inherently painful; introversion is not.

4. ‘Origin’ by Dan Brown

You may or may not know that I am a HUGE fan of Dan Bown’s books. Unfortunately, there’s one thing that I really hate about them now – I’ve read them all! ‘Origin’ was the last book that I had left and I hugely enjoyed it! It’s the only fiction book here, but I just had to include it.

Robert Langdon, Harvard professor of symbology and religious iconology, arrives at the ultramodern Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to attend a major announcement—the unveiling of a discovery that “will change the face of science forever.” The evening’s host is Edmond Kirsch, a forty-year-old billionaire and futurist whose dazzling high-tech inventions and audacious predictions have made him a renowned global figure. Kirsch, who was one of Langdon’s first students at Harvard two decades earlier, is about to reveal an astonishing breakthrough... one that will answer two of the fundamental questions of human existence.

This book is for everyone, really. It’s extremely interesting and again, makes you never want to stop reading it!

And these are my 4 favourite books that I read in 2018! If you have already read any of these, feel free to share your thoughts with me. See you soon!