#bad governance the series

[katabay]

LUNCH DATE

I probably won’t cite a lot of the Ancient Rome plot inspirations when I launch Bad Governance for real, but for now we’re just vibing, so citations here we come!

once when Caesar was on the point of setting out for Spain as praetor, and had no money, and his creditors descended upon him and began to attach his outfit, Crassus did not leave him in the lurch, but freed him from embarrassment by making himself his surety for eight hundred and thirty talents.

Plutarch, Crassus

The Roman Revolution, Ronald Syme

the Christmas Party Incident is an act of extremely petty revenge against Felix, Crasso brings Cesar as his plus one and introduces Cesar to a lot of Felix’s influential business friends who aren’t aware of how bad Felix wants Cesar dead, more or less ruining Felix’s plans to freeze Cesar out of politics for good.

Lucky invited Crasso ALSO against Felix’s wishes because Lucky might be in bed with Felix, but he doesn’t answer to him, and he thought it’d be fun to see what would happen.

⭐ places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app / tip jar!

[fogwitchoftheevermore]

The second part of my Life Series/PUNCH by Authoheart series is done! This time, we’ve got Factories and the Bad Boys. I hope you enjoy!

[amipenthe]

Yo…in retrospect Allen Walker and gang’s fight stats go crazy. He’s like 15 and has fought the earl, aka THE big bad of the holy war, one-on-one in the Noah’s ark arc. Everyone on team Allen walker has fought the Noah—AKA the borderline immortal beings most exorcists of this era have never even seen before and those who have died at the hands of—so much they know most of them by name (like when Kanda said “shut up road” after he took her ribbon in the Alma karma arc).

If it wasn’t for the the whole Allen turning into a noah thing you know these kids would have been legendary exorcists with fan followings after getting back from the ark

[shhhhimwatchingthis]

the X-Files is fascinating because whatever truth is out there whatever alien higher intelligences, mythological creatures, legends and spooky stories are true the scariest threat remains....the US government

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Charlie Tangaroa and the God of War

book 2 in a middle grade series about a boy whose father is a Ponaturi (sea-goblin)

charlie and his brother are back living their normal lives - until a visiting scientist is stabbed in a local campground, right before a meeting between iwi and the government over local resources

they try to investigate and quickly learn that Whiro, atua of chaos is involved, sowing discord between various groups, and they have to figure out a way to solve things before anyone else gets hurt

cover & illustrations by yours truly!

[itwoodbeprefect]

happy 1 year anniversary to the election results that were so fucked they had me trying to take my mind off of things by watching what seemed like a toxic chinese queerbait show only to find something far more thoughtful and genuinely queer and interesting than expected and end up watching a bunch more unrelated things that are talked about in vaguely the same realms of the internet and then watch bad buddy twice in a row and fall into an endless bingewatch of thai media (some of which is mediocre, some of which is bad, much of which is simply pretty good, and some of which is genuinely incredible) and go, well, it would be a waste of all this language input i'm accidentally giving myself right now if i didn't at least learn a few words. thus accidentally locking myself into watching even more thai media because now i gain serotonin from hearing a sentence i know i could write

[clairedaring]

Nonkul just opened a new IG account to post his future directing works ٩(๑❛ᴗ❛๑)۶

[mossiestpiglet]

[ID: Text box from a manga. Text reads “The kingdom of Granzreich became a republic as the result of a national referendum. King Leonhard was its last king.” End ID]

Absolute funniest possible way to end a series about a gaggle of princes competing to be king. You won but at what cost

[crazy-fangirl2524]

Why do I feel like Jeremy’s trauma is somehow related to exy??? Like his grandfather is mentioned and then the fall banquet what if his family is part of the ECCLA (??? What ever the exy people are call) or something idk where this is going but since we all know it’s family and stuff what if it’s exy idk

[themyscirah]

Suffering more than Jesus atm (being a fan of 80s/90s Suicide squad in 2024)

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

something i desperately need writers of, like, Everything to understand is that if you invoke nazis in your story you are invoking the holocaust, and it is your responsibility to consider very carefully what you are communicating about it and whether it's an appropriate context in which to bring it up at all.

the nazis aren't bad because they're saturday morning cartoon villains to root against. the nazis are bad because they had victims and continue to have them, the latter through both the generational trauma they inflicted and the ways their movement has evolved with time to keep targeting people. they were responsible for one of the worst atrocities in history, and they did it by taking advantage of the political infrastructure available to them at the time in specific ways to devastating effect. they operated, and operate, in certain ways for certain reasons with certain goals in mind, with certain victims in mind; and they had, and have, Things to Say about those victims, both to make the direct harm happen and to cover their tracks.

and that last bit is one of the reasons why it is so goddamn important that you are careful about bringing those victims into your stories, even beyond writing a historical tragedy like this with respect in general. the holocaust has always been surrounded by lies and propaganda, spread by the nazis and their vocal allies and by people who were complicit but realized it would be a bad look in hindsight to be associated with them. some of it is pretty fucking obvious (or at least it should be lmao), some of it is less so, and the vast majority of fiction about it just regurgitates it even when trying to write nazis as the bad guys.

in fact a lot of that propaganda relies on using the evil of the nazis, in particular nazi germany, as a distraction from everyone else involved, because the nazis did not work alone. not on a logistical level, and not on an ideological one--they were great big buddies with the US for a while, for example, and actively took inspiration from us for things like the eugenics movement, and boy it sure is telling how much of nazi fiction since then has involved jerking off about Americans Beating Up Nazis, Specifically Those Weird Kinda Gay Foreign Ones. (hi Gay Nazis Myth!)

when you try to write the nazis as a standalone symbol of evil, divorced from the context of that evil, you are erasing its victims and the fact that what the nazis did mattered because it hurt them, and you are also letting a fuckton of other people responsible for what happened to them off the hook.

(and more often than not, it's a vehicle for all kinds of other fun little ways to spread holocaust denial. hi Gay Nazis Myth!)

it doesn't matter what you do with nazis in a story: you are always making a statement about their victims. and if you balk at the idea of your story making commentary on holocaust victims then god damn maybe that is a sign you shouldn't touch it, isn't it?

[katabay]

sort of revisiting this scene, mostly just playing around with it while I figure out the visual vibe I want bad governance to have! this is more like an abridged version of the scene I ended up writing.

for some scene context, Felix was planning on red tagging Cesar as payback, since Cesar’s family was Felix’s political opponent in the elections, but Crasso convinced him not to do it (Crasso’s family was murdered by cops when he was a teenager. It’s a cycle, baby)

I don’t really like to attach too many Ancient Rome sources for these anymore because it’s not supposed to be a modern retelling (again, the naming conventions were inspired by the Iron Heart, but for fun I thought I’d lean into it more. really ham it up, especially since Ancient Rome has a “relationship” with the Philippines lmao), but we’re still in the fucking around stage so as a treat, I’ll mention that this particular thread was partially inspired by the theory that Crassus might have been involved in getting Sulla to back off harassing Caesar. ymmv on whether or not it’s likely, but for me it’s delicious drama to think about.

I’ve also introduced Seth into the plot because politics and business go hand in hand, like you can’t really do one without the other. This is Seth’s historical counterpart, btw!

Crassus, Catilina, and the Vestal Virgins, Ronald Syme

⭐ places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app / tip jar!

[skydigiblogs]

Okay, we're like

actually finally reading Seekers

(and by "reading" I mean listening to the Lost in Translationmon fan audiobook version at work)

We've finished the first chapter and I am tentative about most of it aside from the fact that Loogamon is a little shit and we love that for them.

[astranauticus]

i am really having a Day today

[karimelthefloof]

I wanna post more art so have this first redesign of a somewhat older OC Read more for rambling??

His name is Cyber and He's my favorite little villain that does not deserve redemption <3 He looks so innocent 90% of the time- Any ways this is mostly me figuring out his patterns and anatomy, cause thats whats really stumped me for the past 3+ designs

THE OLD ONE WAS SO BAD I DIDNT LIKE IT AT ALL BUT I STILL KEPT IT UNTIL NOW TWT I like this one much better, the only thing I hate are the legs but im having a hard time drawing legs today (I should draw them a bit-)

I should Figure out his other designs (He has SO MANY like the true multiphase boss with angsty backstory he is)

Prepare for more quickly drawn art of him cause he's on my mind again (He often is cause he's so fun to imagine to music :D)

[redheadedbrunette]

Cool so I reread the series and I noticed a lot more than I did the first two times I read it which is fun. The relationship between Ben and Erica is more explored than I remembered which is good and I can definitely see her character arc a lot clearer.

X is still my least favorite book and there’s absolutely a corner that Gibbs wrote himself into on that one unless he’s entirely giving up on the idea of having Ben and co. be secret agents.

Ben’s a lot more of a competent spy than I remember too, which is refreshing.

I also completely forgot that all 10 of these books happen in the span of like a year and a half which is hilarious.

Oh and the age gap seems like something that would be a lot more of an issue if there weren’t only like 300 people in the world they could have contact with. Even Erica and Josh had a bit of a gap since she had to have been 14/15 or so while he was 17/18. A gap of 2.5 years would be problematic for normal kids but I think different rules would apply.

I'm so glad it was clearer on a second go around! Honestly, I didn't even really see it all that clearly until I reread the series a couple years ago (SSAS came out my first week of college) and had a lot more experience with how stories work on a fundamental idea. Erica's development is very much in the background, but when you're looking for it (excluding SSPX, but that's a different rant) it's so clear and interesting and I love it.

SSPX bothers me for SO MANY REASONS the biggest of which is that Mr. Gibbs puts the message before the overarching plot of everything, and then! It's not even a relevant message! Like, what twelve year old is hardcore believing QAnon (it's pretty obviously meant to be that or something similar). I feel like something could have been achieved and a message about privacy, like Murray makes getting a video of Ben part of some TikTok knockoff challenge, because that seems like a much more likely thing kids would do, but gotta make fun of people who remember what the news said two years ago and comparing it to what they say now! Can't have people with good memories! But yeah, it does shoot the series in the foot kind of, and I understand the reasoning behind why things were done the way they were! I just don't agree with it most of the time.

It's even funnier when you realize that it's not a year and a half evenly spread out, it's one mission his first year with five months before summer, one that summer, and seven his second year. Eight if you want to count SSGS and SSBI as different missions (I go back and forth as to whether or not I do). It's so funny. Please give poor Ben a break.

And yes! Ben is actually so much more competent than people seem to give him credit for sometimes. It's just that his skill set tends to be less flashy and useful in battle scenes, but he's very much the chess master of the group. He's the one planning and strategizing, and all the karate moves in the world aren't going to do you any good if you can't actually foil the plans.

My reasoning for why I'm okay with the age gap is because the narrative treats them as equals who are more or less in the same place in life. Like, yes she's two classes ahead of him, but for all intents and purposes, they're teamed up together constantly with others in Ben's class and I think Erica is the only one we really know about in her class (can't remember Chip's age, but he might be? idk, doesn't really matter). It's never dwelt on, and it bothers me when people try to make a deal about it! Like, they're not going to be in the same place in their lives forever. It's high school. Almost no one marries the person they dated in high school. I've long held that they'd break up sometimes after Erica graduates and starts her adult life while Ben is still in school (or something similar depending on how Mr. Gibbs decides to do things moving forward).