#because I know how much false information exists

[violinios]

Corrupted!Dream

What if he ate the golden apples? More information below! (This au is not finished yet)

Some facts about him:

I wanted to use roots with thorns to reference Nightmare's tentacles, and also to recall the roots of a tree, like the tree the two guardians used to protect. It comes out of Dream's back, and the first time they came out, right after being corrupted by positivity, they tore the back of his clothes and his cape, so he eventually changed the clothes he was wearing, but the old cape remained. Another reference to Nightmare in his design are the yellow and purple carnations in his left eye, not only because of the meaning of the flowers themselves, but because Nightmare of the goo covering one of his eyes, so I decided to do something similar, but with plants instead of slime. Dream is blind from the left eye after gotten attack from defending his brother from the villagers.

As for the meaning of the colors of the carnations that come out of his eye, I did very brief research, so don't take the meanings I'll write here for certainty. Yellow carnations represent rejection and purple ones represent loneliness. Although they are attached to Dream's body, they represent Nightmare's feelings towards the villagers who often mistreated him. The flowers grew after the corruption and after Dream discovered what they did to his brother.

What is controlling Dream's body now is not Dream himself, but rather a parasite that has taken over his body and identity, while the real Dream remains semi-conscious and unable to regain control of his body.

He feeds on positive feelings and his objective is to exterminate negativity for his own survival. He is not capable of feeling remorse, and will not be afraid to exterminate an entire universe if it has a very strong negative aura (like universes that follow the genocidal route, for example), but he cannot visit these universes alone since his magic works using positivity as "fuel", so he's dependent on allies to travel to negative universes.

He doesn't kill because of his moral compass and doesn't really care about what's right or what's wrong, who's good who's bad, he will kill them anyways if their negative aura is enough to give him a headache. This means he will kill innocent people who hold suffering on themselfs only to end with their negativity.

He calls himself a hero/savior/angel to manipulate people with false promises, when in reality, he only acts out of his own needs and survival instinct, not actual kidness.

There's only one who is full of negativity that Dream wants alive; for now, names won't be mentioned (who the person/monster is still not decided, it can be an already existing character or maybe i'll make an OC for this, but for now, feel free to imagine whoever you want to imagine) but their aura, somehow, makes the burning feeling of overwhelming positivity inside of Dream feel a bit less like it's burning. Yes, the positivity is too much even for Dream to the point it feels like it's burning from inside (remember how in original Dreamtale, a human body would barely even survive with the amount of energy the magic held inside the siblings body? Well, now imagine that now the magic way more powerful to the point that even his skeleton body hurts sometimes), and their negativity makes it feel less painful.

He is not completely incapable of feeling negative feelings, but it is VERY rare. Some examples are his fear of owls, a trait from the original Dream that remained, or the anger he feels when he is disobeyed.

He killed the citizens of the village when he saw the amount of negative feelings they caused his own brother. At first, he didn't want to kill Nightmare, but after he saw Nightmare attack him after the genocide he caused, Dream now seeks to kill him as well. He thinks of him as ungrateful for trying to hurt him after finishing off the people who caused him so much suffering, and he blames himself for leaving him alive, knowing that he is also the result of negativity.

Nightmare doesn't want to kill Dream, because he knows that the balance in the multiverse is important and it is their existence that causes it to exist, he just fights against him to not be killed and when some universe/being is being hurt by Dream. He wants to find a way to bring his brother back to consciousness, he still wonders if he could kill the parasite without killing Dream too. Dream, on the other hand, doesn't care about the balance.

His spines possess a poison that gives his prey the illusion of comfort, hiding the sensation of pain and fear within his own positive aura so that they do not escape when captured. It is rare for their prey to regain consciousness to realize the danger they are in, but not impossible, and some may be immune to the venom or his aura, like Nightmare, who'd feel a big pain if he got captured, which is a good advantage if you don't want to be trapped with Dream forever or eventually die.

[getvalentined]

An open letter to @staff

I already submitted this to Support under "Feedback," but I'm sharing it here too as I don't expect it to get a response, and I feel like putting in out in public may be more effective than sending it off into the void.

The recent post on the Staff blog about changing tumblr to an algorithmic feed features a large amount of misinformation that I feel staff needs to address, openly and honestly, with information on where this data was sourced at the very least.

Claim 1: Algorithms help small creators.

This is false, as algorithms are designed to push content that gets engagement in order to get it more engagement, thereby assuring that the popular remain popular and the small remain small except in instances of extreme luck.

This can already be seen on the tumblr radar, which is a combination of staff picks (usually the same half-dozen fandoms or niche special interests like Lego photography) which already have a ton of engagement, or posts that are getting enough engagement to hit the radar organically. Tumblr has an algorithm that runs like every other socmed algorithm on the planet, and it will decimate the reach of small creators just like every other platform before it.

Claim 2: Only a small portion of users utilize the chronological feed.

You can find a poll by user @darkwood-sleddog here that at the time of writing this, sits at over 40 THOUSAND responses showing that over 96 percent of them use the chronological feed*. Claiming otherwise isn't just a misstatement, it's a lie. You are lying to your core userbase and expecting them to accept it as fact. It's not just unethical, it's insulting to people who have been supporting your platform for over a decade.

Claim 3: Tumblr is not easy to use.

This is also 100% false and you ABSOLUTELY know it. Tumblr is EXTREMELY easy to use, the issue is that the documentation, the explanations of features, and often even the stability of the service is subpar. All of this would be very easy for staff to fix, if they would invest in the creation of walkthroughs and clear explanations of how various site features work, as well as finally fixing the search function. Your inability to explain how your service works should not result in completely ignoring the needs and wants of your core long-term userbase. The fact that you're more willing to invest in the very systems that have made every other form of social media so horrifically toxic than in trying to make it easier for people to use the service AS IT WORKS NOW and fixing the parts that don't work as well speaks volumes toward what tumblr staff actually cares about.

You will not get a paycheck if your platform becomes defunct, and the thing that makes it special right now is that it is the ONLY large-scale socmed platform on THE ENTIRE INTERNET with a true chronological feed and no aggressive algorithmic content serving. The recent post from staff indicates that you are going to kill that, and are insisting that it's what we want. It is not. I'd hazard to guess that most of the dev team knows it isn't what we want, but I assume the money people don't care. The user base isn't relevant, just how much money they can bring in.

The CEO stated he wanted this to remain as sort of the last bastion of the Old Internet, and yet here we are, watching you declare you intend to burn it to the ground.

You can do so much better than this.

Response to the Update

Under the cut for readability, because everything said above still applies.

I already said this in a reblog on the post itself, but I'm adding it to this one for easy access: people read it that way because that's what you said.

Staff considers the main feed as it exists to be "outdated," to the point that you literally used that word to describe it, and the main goals expressed in this announcement is to figure out what makes "high-quality content" and serve that to users moving forward.

People read it that way because that is what you said.

*The final results of the poll, after 24 hours:

136,635 votes breaks down thusly:

An algorithm based feed where I get "the best of tumblr." @ 1.3% (roughly 1,776 votes)

Chronological feed that only features blogs I follow. @ 95.2% (roughly 130,077 votes)

This doesn't affect me personally. @ 3.5% (roughly 4,782 votes)

[drdemonprince]

I grew up with abstinence-only sex education, and it did a real number on me. But I’ve shaken off enough of my old cultural programming to realize that the transmission of bacteria and viruses is a thing that sometimes just happens when animals come together, no matter how stringently we might try to prevent it.

I have gotten urinary tract infections when a stray microbe found its way into my urethra after sex. Lube and bodily fluids have disturbed my vagina’s pH and caused a yeast infection many times. So has wearing a bathing suit for too long without drying it, yet another “risk” worth the pleasures of swimming along the sea wall.

Once or twice I’ve had an outbreak of cold sores, just like 80% of humans. If I’m like most people, I probably caught oral herpes when I was very young, sharing a sippy cup or rolling around at a sleepover.

None of this makes me disgusting, irresponsible, evil, or dangerous to others. It just makes me a living creature that exists in close contact with other creatures. I believe I have a responsibility to get tested regularly, to alert people who have been close to me when I get sick, and to use preventative measures like condoms, PreP, vaccines, toys, and masks to prevent the spread of infections as best I can. But I never imagine I can lead a life without risk — or that such a life would even be desirable.

There is no such thing as completely “safe” sex. A friend of mine can’t use condoms because they give her bacterial vaginosis. She chooses instead to fuck raw and take PreP and get anything else she catches treated. A guy I know who masks and tests religiously caught COVID while fisting someone (with a gloved hand!) at an air-filtered party. HPV is so prevalent that most sexual wellness clinics don’t bother testing for it, and can’t do much for a patient if they do have it. Our bodies are teeming at all times with various endemic viruses and microbes that we will never have the power to purge.

Then there are the possible costs of not having sex — vaginal atrophy, pelvic floor weakening, reduced access to endorphins, loneliness, touch starvation, the despair of harboring dreams that one never dares try. I can’t decide for anyone else which dangers loom the largest, but for me a gonorrhea shot is a fair trade for the hours of leg-cramping, bed-staining, hypno-kinky sex that led to it. There’s no guarantee that the next time I have sex it will be anywhere near as much fun, but the potential keeps me throwing the dice.

I hear quite frequently from sexually inexperienced Autistic people who crave an intimate connection, but desperately wish to remain responsible and “safe.” They want there to be a set of iron-tight rules they can follow that will guarantee they remain a virtuous person who never hurts anyone’s feelings, and never catches any sexually transmitted infection.

I understand why they want someone to impose order onto an unpredictable, terrifying world. But I can’t give that certainty to them, nor can anyone. All I can suggest is that they be honest with themselves about what they want, inform themselves of the costs and benefits to pursuing their desires, and then venture forward — proudly welcoming the correct risks into their life, rather than trying to avoid any risks at all.

Life is nothing but a negotiation of risk. If a person has gender dysphoria and they want to combat it, they must risk a transition they could one day regret. If an abolitionist wants to take a stand against the police state, they must plan for the possibility of arrest or political repression. When we open our hearts to love, we expose ourselves to grief — our partners will keep changing and growing, sometimes away from us. Each step that we take forward in life closes off potential paths. There is no avoiding this.

Instead of chasing after the false promise of “safety,” trying to remain completely insulated from harm and challenge forever, we must get better at admitting risk into our lives.

I wrote about all about the messy business of risk mitigation, and how the pursuit of perfect safety is used to justify isolation, theft of bodily autonomy, and political repression. It's free to read (or have narrated to you by the app!) at drdevonprice.substack.com

[mixtape-timeout]

Hi Stays, this is a post to warn everyone to be wary of a SKZ author here on Stayblr with the username @/gimmeurtmi

I followed them not too long ago, but they suddenly blocked me. I was confused why because I have my age in my account and followed all of their rules. However, I have some reasons to suspect that this user is a Zionist. As you can see I am very Pro-Palestine, it’s in my blog title and bio, and I think this is why they blocked me.

They made a post showing anger about Stays educating Felix on his live about Coca-Cola (For people who don’t know, Coca-Cola is on the BDS boycott list, they support Israel and built an R&D center in occupied Palestinian territory of Atarot) In their post they said it’s “pathetic” for Stays to inform Felix about this and that he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Felix made the effort to read about the issue on his live and chose to apologize to Stay for it, but this user thinks that boycotting a brand tied to a genocidal state is the same as bullying.

((Screenshots are not mine))

They also showed strong support for the new SKZ collab with Charlie Puth. Many Stays are boycotting this collab because Charlie Puth is a raging Zionist, and the track also has an Israeli producer, Johnny Goldstein who is also a proud Zionist. gimmeurtmi even made a whole tag for this collab on their blog to show how much they’re excited for it, even though two Zionists worked on it and will be receiving royalties for it. You can also see the tags in the third post showing them speaking of Tommy Hilfiger, yet another Zionist, in a friendly manner.

Furthermore, I talked to other Stays in the community about this because I don’t want to jump to conclusions and gimmeurtmi blocked other users who are showing support for Palestine, not just me. From reading their posts on their other blog (@/stuckonspidey) you can also see how far their beliefs about this go. That’s not to say them being Jewish means they must be a Zionist, because that’s a completely false idea. There are plenty of Jewish people who are not Zionist and support Palestinian liberation because we recognize that what Palestinians are suffering through is a history repeat of what our people went through. But this added with all the other questionable evidence makes me suspicious that this user is a Zionist, or at least an Israeli sympathizer who treats support for Palestine as an inconvenience.

From these posts on their main blog, you can see them refuse to condemn Israel or even say anything about their crimes when they got asked about it. Instead, they just talk about how this genocide has personally affected them. There are no posts (that I could find) of them showing any sympathy or support for Palestine, all their posts about the subject are just self-victimizing posts about how they feel. Yes, it’s a scary time to be a Jewish person as well, I know this as a person of Jewish ancestry, too. But fighting anti-semitism AND fighting for Palestine can and SHOULD co-exist. It’s a huge red flag that the only thing they have to say about the genocide is how Jewish people are the victims in this. They also made another post where they claim that “Zionist” is just a word people use to be anti-semitic. This is a tale as old as time that Zionists have used to excuse, deny, and even justify Israel’s war crimes. I was once told that a genocide of Palestinians doesn’t exist and is just an “anti-semitic blood libel”. This is the exact same rhetoric that Zionists in my community and Zionist news outlets use (which, I add, almost ALL news outlets are strongly biased to Israel because of America’s ties to it. Israel is heavily backed in support from some of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, it is not the victim and never was).

I am not making this for drama. I made this post just to tell fellow Stays to be cautious of which writers you’re reading from and supporting. If you are against the genocide that has been happening to Palestinians for 75 years now, I suggest not supporting this person’s work, because at best they don’t care about what’s happening in Palestine, and at worst, they actually endorse it. There should be no place in our Stay community for this hateful ideology.

[theminecraftbee]

okay, okay, superhero au concept of the day: soup group identity shenanigans au. the soup group all rent a house together, they became friends... i don't know when, still figuring this out, but they're all buddies. however, they're all involved in the hero scene in their own way, and everyone's levels of knowing how involved in the hero scene they are is varied.

impulse is a relatively new hero (name pending), after an accident at his desk job somehow left him with electricity-based powers. he's kind of awkward and new at the whole gig, but he is determined to do his best! he is keeping his identity secret to keep what he thinks are his two civilian housemates safe, as well as to keep his other friends safe. he's a bit over his head but he mostly fights low-level villains at the moment anyway. he knows the least information of everybody but he's ALSO the most likely to have a crisis if he learns anything about his housemates.

pearl is a vigilante known as the cleaning lady. she's not so much an active combatant most of the time as someone who takes advantage of existing fights and crime scenes for her own ends, helping to make sure she puts down criminals and collects information from the aftermath. she'll help either side in order to meet her goal of cleaning up the city from the chaos it's currently in, and she dislikes most serious crime, she just... goes about it in a way most heroes do not agree with. she's figured out impulse's identity and avoids him in her night work because she's certain he'd clock her immediately. as for the red deer... she's worked with her once or twice and is kind of terrified, but doesn't know her identity at all.

gem is the soup group's mysteriously rich friend who is the one helping them rent the house together. really it would be suspicious she was renting with the kind of money her job makes and how much she can afford with what she supposedly actually makes if both pearl and impulse weren't so busy hiding their identities. and gem's glad! she's excited to have friends she can play civilian with--that doesn't normally last this long! because gem is the terrifying mercenary and hitman for hire, the red deer. compared to both impulse and pearl (who are normally considered small-time), gem is considered a "if you are not specifically pseudo-hawk, do not engage" level threat. she's particularly known for, if her job is to take down someone interesting, handing them a weapon and letting them have a "fair fight" back. only pseudo-hawk (real name false symmetry) has held her off before. the rest of her targets go home in body bags, and she gets her money. she rarely actually kills someone who ISN'T a target, but she still hurts them enough to keep them out of the way if they try to interfere.

and gem... gem knows EXACTLY who her housemates are. she's keeping an eye on the chatter about them, too. right now, no one who wants their head is offering the kind of money the red deer is worth, of course, so she doesn't have to worry. her status as one of the most dangerous villains in the city remains safe, and she can have her civilian friends, especially since she's pretty sure they don't know who she is! but if any of that falls apart. if they find her identity. if impulse manages to piss off an actually powerful villain, or pearl finally steps on the toes of a gang that can do something about her... well. well. gem... doesn't miss a target. and it would be fun! it would be... something, at least. she's starting to not be sure what she'd do, and that's... dangerous, in her line of work.

but the thing is, it's nice sharing a house, the three of them. surely, the weight of everyone's respective secrets and allegiances won't collapse around them!

...right?

[many-but-one]

Satanic Panic, The False Memory Foundation’s Shaky Origins, and Why You Should Believe RAMCOA Survivors

(TW: mentions of RAMCOA, False Memory Foundation, child torture & death, cults, trafficking)

Pretty disappointed to see a fairly popular and well known blog on tumblr is encouraging the idea that RAMCOA doesn’t exist. Just came across this post and was pretty bummed to see the comments too.

For those that agree with them (most of my followers won’t but who knows who will stumble across this), please know that RAMCOA has been going on for much longer than the Satanic Panic. The Satanic Panic was fabricated in an effort to discredit RAMCOA survivors. It was supported by the False Memory Foundation, which was created by a man (and his wife) trying to prove his daughter’s repressed memories of trauma involving him did not really happen. [Explained further in the third article further down in this post]

For the record, false memory/planting false memories has been disproven, it’s not possible to fully plant false memories in patients. Some memories can be altered to an extent because memories can be disjointed and influence from others can cause memories to shift slightly, which is why it’s not encouraged for trauma patients to share exact detailed memories with each other. For example, if two trauma patients were abused by their father and had a similar situation happen and patient A spoke about their experience in detail, if both fathers wore glasses and patient A describes their father to have black rimmed glasses, patient B’s memory might shift to believe that their father also had black rimmed glasses, even though his glasses were gold rimmed. However, it’s not possible to fully plant memories that do not exist in a patient’s memory. The “base memory” so to speak has to be there in order for any alterations to occur, and those alterations that are possible are often rather minuscule, such as glasses or whether or not their abuser had facial hair or not, or the color of the person’s eyes. Not an entire scene of RA. [Again, explained well by the third article below.]

Repressed memory has been proven to exist. (Though it’s more accurately called dissociated memories by clinicians) It can even exist in people who have traumas that happen in adulthood. Pieces of a traumatic event may go missing in a patient’s working memory, and they may not retrieve it until they are ready to process the memory and all the emotions and information that comes with it. However, it still exists stored in the brain, just in a different area than working memory. It’s why triggers to the traumatic event (that the patient may not even realize are triggers until they occur) can cause flashbacks and memory resurfacing during said flashbacks.

Some sources explaining the False Memory Foundation and the harm they’ve caused: [a good overview of a woman who was major in the development of the idea of repressed memory being a myth, by a researcher of child psychiatry], [while this is a psychology today article, I think this explains well how misused the idea of FMS - false memory syndrome - is.] [A comprehensive article explaining the roots of the FMF and how the studies used to “prove” false memory are terrible and easily debunked, with several assertions from professionals in the field.] I want to add that while the FMF has dissolved and rightfully so, the British False Memory Society is still alive and well, as well as the Satanic Temple’s Grey Faction, and both groups still cite False Memory Syndrome as being real and claim that RAMCOA survivors have false memories of their abuse.

However, before Satanic Panic happened, people were starting to actually believe in the existence of RAMCOA and the concept of DID was brought into the mainstream. A survivor on tiktok has a very good video on this situation. And that scared people, especially the abusers themselves who didn’t want to get caught. That’s when the False Memory Foundation stepped in on the heels of Satanic Panic and literally rewrote the textbooks therapists learned from, and basically taught everyone that repressed memory doesn’t exist. Any therapists that spoke about their patients’ experiences with RAMCOA were sued. Therapists stopped wanting to treat RAMCOA patients for fear of being sued and/or losing their license or being told they planted these memories in their patients’ heads and possibly losing their licenses. It led to generations of old therapists not treating RAMCOA patients and generations of new therapists learning it doesn’t exist.

But it does exist. To outright deny that child torture cannot exist is absurd. 1-2% of reported child abuse falls under the definition of child torture. [source, TW: photos of children with serious injuries from torture included on page 7 of this document] For the record, my abuse was never and has never been reported, and most survivors—RAMCOA and non-RAMCOA, whose trauma falls under the definition of torture—never reported or plan to report.

Even if you find the mind control aspect to be far-fetched, ritual abuse most certainly does exist. I’ve seen videos on the surface web on fucking tiktok of all places of child torture and ritual abuse. Organized abuse such as sex trafficking and labor trafficking does exist. Two out of those three things in the acronym are well documented to exist. And for the record, ritual abuse and cult abuse even in adults can cause extreme mind and identity alteration, upwards to the point of nearly being mind control. Look up OSDD-2 in the DSM-V. Look up just about any cult survivors testimonies and hear how they talk about how they nearly became a different person within their cult, how the cult uses torture and mind altering drugs to get their initiates to commit terrible acts of violence to each other. Now imagine if that same stuff were happening to a child whose mind is significantly easier to mold and change. Even if the child RAMCOA survivor does not develop DID, it can cause extreme conditioned responses in which the child (or now grown adult or teen) will still do the responses even now because as a child they were threatened with torture or death if they didn’t do it.

Mind control is essentially an extreme form of conditioning, and with the plethoras of research on DID and how it functions, it’s not even a difficult concept to grasp that a cult member might learn how to split new alters in a child via torture and then manipulate those alters to do what they want individually. Anyone who knows fuck all about DID knows that alters can be triggered out via positive and negative triggers. All mind control programming is, is creating a specific trigger for a specific alter and then when that child is exposed to that trigger, that alter comes out and does the task it was taught to do—usually via torture, manipulation, and threats of harm to the child or those the child loves. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp, and with how long TBMC (torture based mind control) programmers have had to perfect their work, it’s no surprise that they’ve learned how to make alters do extremely complex tasks or hold onto specific functions, always at the ready for their specific trigger.

RAMCOA research doesn’t exist in mainstream spaces because it’s nearly impossible to be taken seriously because of people who claim it doesn’t exist when it’s not even a complex topic to understand. They just don’t want to accept that it exists. The concept is terrifying, harrowing, and at some times almost absurd—and that combination makes it easier for people to put their blinders up and decide it doesn’t exist. [Edited to add: On top of this, what little research is done on it is steeped in conspiracy theories that often have roots in antisemitism. While I’ve asserted that Miller’s deprogramming books are good reads for RAMCOA survivors, she does often sound conspiratorial, and quotes Svali, a known antisemite. While I don’t think RAMCOA is exclusively related to the Illuminati stuff she often talks about, Miller’s work cannot be completely discounted because of her beliefs of where the abuse originated. Where it originates matters much less than the fact that it happens. However, not from dark, underground, secret societies—but from normal places like churches, children’s own homes (yes, RAMCOA can be done by a single parent to a single child, it just may look different than say, a trafficking ring), trafficking rings, militaristic groups, political cults, etc. I wanted to put the above put there because I know someone is going to come at me and try to say the researchers who talk about it were conspiracy theorists. Yeah, they were. Maybe they were the only ones willing to talk openly about it because of the fact they’re conspiracy theorists? I don’t know. However, I think it should also be noted that just because the researchers sucked doesn’t mean the information taken from them isn’t useful when you weed out the conspiracy stuff. For example, a LOT of modern understanding of medicine was taken from Nazi and Japanese experiments during WWII. Arguably some of the worst doctors on earth. Do we discount everything we learned because they were horrible, evil, people? No. While those who studied RAMCOA went about it in shit ways, that doesn’t discount the information learned completely. Likewise, much of modern psych understanding came from roots that included incredibly unethical experiments that would never be allowed today. Do we throw out all of that info too? No, we don’t. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t hold these people accountable, I’m saying we cannot throw out all discussion of RAMCOA because the doctors who talked about it were shitty people.]

I wish I could decide it doesn’t exist. I have permanent scarring that proves what happened did happen. I have doctor’s visits that prove I am disabled because of the traumas I went through. I have a DID specialist who didn’t even know programming to our extent even existed before our parts started telling her what they went through and she heard it from our own mouth. She had to learn how to deprogram us on the fly because she’d never done so before. So fuck off with your “oh, RAMCOA patients only have RAMCOA because they’ve been influenced by their therapist to believe they do” bullshit.

I relive my traumas in flashbacks and nightmares daily. There have been periods in my healing process where I couldn’t leave the house without someone with me for months. I couldn’t hold a job for nearly a year. I didn’t know any of this happened to me until I was in my 20s. I thought my memory was just bad and the only parts of my childhood I remembered were little blips of good things, usually involving my parent that was not involved with the cult or memories with friends at school or when I was hanging out with my sports teammates. Living with this stuff is hell. You think I want to live with this stuff? If I could permanently erase it all from my memory forever I would. But I can’t. I don’t have that luxury.

It happened. And I’m not the only child it happened to, both in the area of my country I live in and in areas all over my country and the world. This is not an isolated phenomenon. It is more common than anyone tends to realize (though still rarer than most DID cases, thank fuck). I was lucky to survive. I survived because they wanted me to. I saw a lot of children, teens, and adults who were not as “lucky” as I was. If you won’t respect survivors and their stories, at least respect the ones who didn’t survive. They didn’t deserve their final moments to be so full of pain. All of the children in these groups deserved to be loved and cared for and treated with softness and compassion. So do adult survivors like me and many others.

If I could end on one thing, it would be to urge the doubters to have some fucking compassion and empathy for people who have been through things they cannot even begin to understand. My past feels like a nightmare I will never be able to escape. I cannot erase it. I can only try to heal from it. So heal I will do, and in the process I will continue to speak the truth of my experience as safely as I can.

You want proof it’s real? Survivors are your proof.

WE are the proof.

[Edit: changed some wording for clarification + added a section after rereading a couple hours later]

[Edit 2: I realized I said my abuse has never been reported, I meant my RAMCOA related abuse. Want to make that clear. I reported sexual abuse done by my church to CPS and nothing came of it. CPS actually wrongfully claimed that since they had no reports existing of that church harming kids they wouldn’t pursue it since it happened so long ago, when a cursory google search of said location shows they’ve been reported multiple times and all reports were dropped. Why, I’m not sure.]

[starwrighter]

A DpxDc prompt because I <3 all of you but am too shy to talk in the discord.

The Subnautica au I promised! (I might make two of them)

Okay, so Danny is around 14 or 15 in this. He is still a halfa but the portal has been temporarily closed for plot reasons. So the portal is closed and Danny has no clue what to do now. Due to the portal being closed Danny's grades have improved exponentially enough that he gets an work offer from Altera (ignore the child labor it's the Giw/Altera's shady business practices fault)

Danny is ecstatic because he's finally getting the opportunity to go to space! He knows if he waits the portal will be reopened and he'll never have a chance like this again so he takes it. In less than a month Danny has been trained and is shipped off to the Aurora. He's heading towards planet 4546b with very little information on the planet itself.

The crash happens and Danny doesn't use his powers to save the ship because something around the atmosphere was preventing full accessing his powers in full. Danny scrambles to the life pods and ends up being the only one in life pod five. The whole life pod scene happens with Danny being knocked out by the panel flying off the wall.

He wakes up with the life pod on fire and quickly uses what he can of his ice powers to put it out not realizing there's a fire extinguisher. Danny exits the life pod and realizes that a lot of people he talked to on the ship not even a day ago were probably dead. Judging by his inability to go ghost, he wouldn't be reuniting with them in the ghost zone any time soon.

He is devastated but goes about exploring and trying to find any other survivors. His hope of finding survivors near the crash zone dies when the ship explodes and starts leaking deadly radiation. Danny of course rushes to try and fix this. It's easier for him to get there because he can stay under water for an inhuman amount of time and has a built up immunity to radiation as a halfa.

Now to the DC part of this. Let's stick with only the batfam existing in this universe. The entire batfam are classified as leviathan's. All of them have two forms with one of said forms being semi humanoid mer like appearance. They are still pretty big in this form, think 7-8ft at the smallest (aka Damian) The other form is something I like to call

Big f-ken fish™

Which is full on terrifying reapers (we'll decide what each of the fam specifically look like later) and a lot of them are chilling in the crash zone when Danny is fixing the Aurora's reactor. Danny has not yet been spotted by the reapers.

Now they're already pissed off because a big arse ship just crashed into their planet and destroyed a great deal of it. They don't exactly know what a space ship is but they do know that the technology is advanced and the only thing remotely close on their planet is from the precursors who were a bunch of pricks.

Before the explosion the fam kept an eye on the weird creatures that crawled out of the metal eggs They watch them almost immediately start dying from predators or Kharaa. They were there when the ship exploded and started leaking radiation and killing the local wild life much to Damian's despair.

So the Fam are pretty pissed off at this point and are circling the ship. They immediately noticed when the ship stops leaking radiation and spot Danny swimming away from the reck quicker than any of the other ones that crawled out of the eggs.

Granted most of the other ones from the eggs immediately died and didn't have faces (the wet suits looked weird and Danny refuses to wear them no matter how much easier they would make things >:(

They start watching him because obviously there's something odd about this thing it looks kinda like a much smaller version of their smaller forms. Danny is getting pretty ticked off that his PDA keeps making false alarms of leviathan's. Duke, and tim are the ones monitoring Danny in the safe shallows. Jason and Dick in the crash zone. Barbra and Stephanie in the kelp forest. Cass and Bruce are patrolling the grassy plateaus.Damian is by himself at the quarantine gun/ sunbeam landing sight.

Danny sets up base near the quarantine gun™ because for some reason even though he's not infected he can't turn the damn thing off. So Damian is the only one currently capable of watching him. Damian has a theory that he 100% sure is correct. As a 1600 year old leviathan he's not a baby he's almost an adult and doesn't remember being a baby. This thing crawled out of an egg and is super tiny so it is obviously a baby and a very smart one at that. While it didn't have the claws, gills, tail, or scales they had it was super fast, could freeze things, had super strong hands despite looking dull and frail, it could take useless scraps and rocks and turn them into complex structures. It was obviously a new type of leviathan the ship carrying eggs. Danny was the smallest of the babies but he was also the strongest, and smartest; surviving long enough to have eyes and hair. This baby was young enough that he still needed to surface for air he needed to be protected.

Danny has no clue he's now being stalked by a group of reapers that decided he was their new baby brother/son

[violetrainbow412-blog]

Dressing for revenge [K. B]

Kaz Brekker x fem!reader

word count: 7k

summary: when Kaz and his crows return from Ravka they run into trouble, and to solve it, he looks for a childhood friend who is too resentful and too in love with him

warnings: trauma, PTSD, spoilers for S&B season 2, no physical contact, here Kaz has no romantic feelings for Inej

A/N: I LOVE Kanej, but I wanted to write something with Kazzle Dazzle because I love him too, lol. I hope you like it!

taglist (who I thought might be interested): @rustyyyyspoonz

The rumor had already spread throughout the Barrel: “Kaz Brekker and his crows are back” How long had it been since they had embarked into the Fold? Just a couple of months? They had felt like years, if you were being honest.

If it was true that they were back, you felt sorry for the trouble they were going to run into. The change of ownership of their club, the strengthening of the other gangs, and mainly the fact that they were being tried for murder thanks to the fact that Pekka Rollins had awarded it to them... all these problems were going to fall on them like a bucket of water cold. It had already fallen on them, in fact, since the rumor was accompanied that they had escaped from the stadwatch once they were captured.

You didn't know how much of what everyone was saying was true and how much was false, trying to stay as calm as possible when the name Kaz came from someone's lips for fear that Pekka had some magical ability and could read your mind or sense the fear in your eyes every time you met him. Afraid of him and afraid of what he might do to you if he knew you knew the black-haired man.

Things had changed a lot since the last time you saw the boy and that was more than noticeable. Your story goes back long before he made his reputation when you were just a couple of neighbor kids playing on the farms. You two arrived in Ketterdam together, with nothing but hopes for a better future and Jordie as your protector (or an attempt at that, at least), after your father and Mr. Rietveld died in the same accident, reuniting with Kaz’s mother and later to be matched by your mother, who had died of sadness, if that was possible. Three helpless children thrown into the cruel world were what came of that and the rest is history.

Crime, robbery, gangs, and a life of hardship were what you had to adjust to as a child, but you doubted very much that a single person living in The Barrel would be in a different situation. You weren't fully involved in the disgraced jobs of the majority, but if there was one true thing, it was that when it came to obtaining information you were, to say the least, excellent. You and Kaz had to fend for yourselves, and you learned what you could from the streets. In this way he and you became a team, so to speak, for a few teenage years, and for that period of your lives having each other was the only thing in the world. Over time he became ruthless, rude, a great fighter and earned the nickname 'dirtyhands' thanks to his gambling skills, from which he obtained most of the things you had. You learned to move quickly, to go unnoticed, and to defend yourself from those who tried to harm you, always supporting the boy’s plans.

Less than a year was enough for his name to become known and he began to think big. Sometimes he would tell you about the plans he had: to run Fifth Harbor, to establish the crow club, to become the best of The Barrel. All of that sounded like crazy ideas at first, but looking back you realized that he had accomplished too much in that pit for your relatively young age.

You never knew what made you and Kaz go their separate ways, but somehow it had happened. It was gradual, maybe that's why it was hard for you to notice, but one day you woke up and realized the distance that existed between him, who previously was practically the only family you knew, and you. It didn't take much for him to decide to break the bond that had held you together from a very early age; he never gave reasons for this and you never asked him.

You lived under some protection from the leader of The Crows, of course, but very few people could link you to The Bastard of the Barrel. Sometimes you still provided him with information, but when he found someone else, the inquiries became less and less frequent until one day they turned into none. You managed to eat and have a roof over your head pretty well (and mostly honestly) and you tried to stay out of trouble for a long time.

Until one day he flew away from Ketterdam without warning and order in the Barrel was disturbed in every possible way. With his team gone, it didn't take long for Pekka to seize control and anyone who didn't work for him was inevitably against him. It was only a matter of time before he found out the talent you had tried to hide and forced you to carry his lion shield... figuratively speaking.

If he ever knew that you used to work with Kaz he never mentioned it or maybe your relationship with him had been severed so long that no one remembered it anymore. Now you were just a little girl, as he used to call you, slippery enough that she seemed so harmless that, in his eyes, that became a benefit. You were never one to look rude, unfortunately for you, and that allowed men like him to feel entitled to take advantage of you. You thanked the saints that Rollins didn't find you attractive or who knows what other services he would have requested from you. It was always better to provide him with the information he needed than for him to force you to be his lover.

You weren't a part of the meetings that the Dime Lions had and you weren't considered a member either, which kept you calm every night. You were just another piece in the enormous chess game that Pekka moved at his convenience, the same game that was threatened by the mere existence of Kaz Brekker and much more so now that he had returned.

In the middle of the night it was logical to ask yourself, what kind of strange plans would he have in mind now?

One, two, and three knocks surprised you at the rickety wooden door and made you jump out of your chair, where you were already asleep. An old lamp was on the even older table and it illuminated the little space that your provisional home had so you took it to approach to open the door. It was raining outside (quite unusual for that time of year) and by the time it was you figured it was one of Rollins' idiots coming to do a job for you. What would he want now? Harbor information? Talk to a policeman? He was supposed to control everything, sometimes you kept wondering why he asked for your help.

When you opened the door, the air slipped in and almost extinguished the flame of the fire, but the temperature of the night wasn’t what left you freezing, but the presence that was in front of you. With his hat, a completely black outfit, and his cane in hand, but above all soaked from head to toe, there was him; Kaz. You almost feared you were imagining it, but you knew it was him by the clear, penetrating eyes that were watching you, even though you admitted that he had changed so much that in other circumstances you would have had trouble recognizing him.

“Did I arrive at a bad time?” he asked. No warm greetings, no smiles, no explanations. Just a cold, serious question, just the way he was.

“Someone followed you? If this place is horrible by itself, I don't want blood staining the floor” you replied with the same tone. You wanted to tell him that you had missed him, ask him if he was okay, and give him a huge hug, but those actions should be reserved for your nocturnal fantasies, because as soon as you took a step forward he would be able to hit you with his cane. Or at least that's what the Kaz you knew would do, but you doubted very much that the passing of the years would have softened his heart.

"Nobody followed me" was all he said and you stepped aside at the door so he could go inside. Even with his words, you felt the need to look out on both sides of the street in search of someone, but with the level of rain, you doubted very much that someone would want to stay and spy because he would probably die of pneumonia.

When you closed the door and turned around he didn't say anything, he just stood in front of you while the water drained from his coat. During that moment of silence, you allowed yourself to admire it under the warm light of the candle; his eyes definitely hadn't changed one bit, but now there was a tinge of contempt more noticeable than before. His features had hardened and he was thinner, barely resembling the boy you remembered, perhaps as a reminder of just that... that he was now a man.

“So the rumors are true…” you started to say “You are back”

"I think that's more than obvious," he exclaimed. For a second you forgot that it was he who had knocked on your door and you felt uncomfortable as if you were an intruder who had to get out of there.

There was silence again and you two just looked at each other. Kaz had made his own mental list of changes he noticed in you and was reflecting on when was the last time he had looked at you in such detail. You were wearing light clothes, because before he arrived you were about to go to sleep, and your face, although as childish as always, looked more tired than before. You had also cut your hair, which was messy around your shoulders and a bit darker in tone.

“And may I know to what I owe your visit? I guess you don't want to have tea” you said to break the silence. The dryness of your words in a certain way was to protect yourself because you never knew how much a sharp tongue like his could hurt you.

"I'm in a job and I need people"

Of course it was going to be due to a job, and of course that was why he had sought you out after so many years. A part of you, tremendously stupid, to tell you the truth, was hoping that during the time your friend was away from Ketterdam some divine clarity would have illuminated him so that he would realize that he had to look for you to repair your relationship and offer at least apologies. But you would have to pay him every kruge in the country for him to do something like that.

"I'm glad you considered me, but I'm sorry I have to decline."

"Why?" he asked immediately, his raspy voice showing annoyance at the refusal.

“Because it happens that you can’t work for opposing sides. At least not at the same time” you replied. Maybe it was due to fatigue, but you swore you saw a slight look of surprise on the man's face when you answered that. Most likely, he had assumed that you would be one of the few people who wouldn’t be on Pekka’s side and therefore a safe option.

“Do you work for Pekka?” he muttered. You knew him well enough to know that he was hurt, you could see it in his posture, in his voice, and especially in his look “After all he did to us?”

"And what did you want him to do?" you said, trying to ignore the fact that he had spoken in the plural. Us “You practically handed us over to him. My options were that or receive a bullet in the forehead."

"I didn’t hand you over to anyone"

"You abandoned us and left us in his hands, it's the same thing" you replied, shrugging. There was so much resentment and pain from never-closed wounds floating in the air that it was hard for him and you to think clearly. “Your vacation in Ravka may have been nice, but things only just went to hell here. So don't you dare judge me by the choices I made” you exclaimed defensively.

You didn't imagine that your first conversation with him after so long would be like this, but unfortunately, things never turned out the way you expected. After all, they were a crook and a spy talking in the dead of night.

"You could get information from him more easily," Kaz concluded, shrugging the same way you did. "And so we sink him from the inside."

"And risk him finding out and killing me?"

“You know that would never happen,” he said firmly “The thing about killing you. I wouldn't allow him” his eyes stared at you almost offended by the lack of trust you had towards him. There was silence for the third time and this time your gaze moved away to focus on anything but him.

"Plus you have this girl you took out of The Menagerie, don't you?" you said in your defense. The one you replaced me with, you wanted to add, but held back "So I don't know what you might need me for" 

"With so many problems going on, I thought it would be better to have as many alliances as possible," he explained to you. You continued without looking at him, with your head still full of worries and sorrows, and when he didn’t receive an answer, he spoke again "You know that it is your best option"

"I don't know that, but I do know that I would have liked you to at least ask how I am before asking me to join the team you never wanted me in and from which you separated me as soon as you had the chance" you exhaled, in an attempt to lighten the weight on your chest. 

It was no secret that you had always felt betrayed by Kaz’s treatment of you, even though he treated dozens of others the same way, because you somehow thought that your backstory was enough to deserve at least the sympathy or some consideration on the part of the crow. And of course you wanted to run from Pekka's clutches and plunge him into the deepest muck, but the resentment for what you considered your friend’s abandonment was stronger. You didn't even know if it was correct to call him ‘friend’.

"You would be a good ace up my sleeve" was all he replied, in an attempt to convince you. Kaz begged absolutely no one, but if there was one thing he had decided before coming to find you, it was that he wouldn't leave until you agreed to help him. Although the nature of your current job made things a bit difficult for him, "Pekka never knew you worked for me, did he?"

"With you" you corrected him "I didn't work for you but with you. We got to The Barrel at the same time”

"Y/N" he murmured. Your name sounded strange coming from his lips after so long without hearing it and that caught you off guard “I'm trying to help you so you don't end up hurt or dead. If you work for… with me, I can tell you where not to be. Otherwise I could find you in the rubble of some confrontation or with a knife from Inej or a bullet from Jesper through your chest”

"Always so thoughtful," you replied with a smirk, but as much as it pained you to admit it, he had a point. You knew what he was capable of and what Pekka was capable of… which side was more convenient to be on? "How much are you going to pay me?" you asked and Kaz smiled, but it wasn't a sign of happiness but mockery “You've always said that's what's really important, haven't you?”

He took something out of his coat and tossed it on the table. They were bills. 

"An advance, when I recover the crow club, I will pay you the rest"

“So my pay depends on whether we win or not. That doesn't sound so convenient to me,” you muttered, clicking your tongue, as you fought the urge to say yes just to be near him. It was cold outside, the rain was making a lot of noise and you just wanted to sleep at once, but you knew that you could have been arguing with him all night and neither of you would back down. Kaz was stubborn, one way or another he would get what he wanted. "This isn't just about the club, is it?" you said, with your voice noticeably lower and you would even say with a touch of softness. You and Kaz never talked about what had happened, but each of you was dealing with the weight of the trauma in your own way. He didn't say anything and this time you saw something in him that was different from his usual behavior, knowing that it was those ghosts from the past tormenting him.

"If someone should make him pay, it's us"

Us, again. 

"I'll think about it" was what you answered, after reflecting on what would be the appropriate response. The speechless moment gave you something else to think about, and you knew that a huge flaw of yours was how easily you let your heart take over. Because even with all the other feelings on top, you still worried about him "Now that the crow club isn't yours..." you started to say, afraid of what he might say "do you have a place to stay?"

You would have offered to sleep there if he said no, but instead he said he’d manage. That didn't completely reassure you, but you decided not to insist.

“First thing tomorrow, send a reply to this address,” he asked you, holding out a piece of paper that had a few drops on it “Don't go there personally or you'll screw everything up, just send me a note. A yes or a no will suffice”

“What if someone tracks down the note?” you asked, which was a totally valid concern.

Kaz was silent while he thought of an alternative, and then spoke again.

“Just write crows of a feather, murder together. I'll understand” he murmured and you nodded. You knew the poem he was quoting from, had read it many times from the worn-out book he had gotten for you. Kaz didn't wait for anything else and took long steps to the door, which he opened as soon as he could. "Good night, Y/N."

And then he left.

That night you thought a lot about the solution you would give him in the morning, thinking about the pros and cons of each possible answer, until you decided that it was best to say yes. You needed to do it if you wanted to live peacefully (as much as the place allowed) but the main reason was to support him. If he had been about any stupid dispute you would have said no, but you knew this was something else. Kaz missed Jordie every day of his life and his way of honoring him was by planning revenge against the one who led him to that fate, so it was kind of an obligation for you to help him with that too.

You wrote the note on a piece of paper and carefully folded it to put it in an envelope. You signed the outside with his name, written in the best handwriting you had, and although you were hesitant to do so, at the end you wrote a little ‘from a friend’ in the hope of making it clear to him, and perhaps even encouraging him that, if he was willing, you could recover a little of what you had lost. And you weren’t referring to physical things, but to what existed between you.

All your life you had lived with almost opposite feelings when it came to Kaz. Somehow you were upset with him for only seeing you as an instrument that he could dispose of for his interests, but this was linked to the feeling of affection that you wanted him to experience for you and that apparently didn’t exist. It was difficult to decipher anything he was thinking, not just about you, since he had taken it upon himself to build such a convincing facade that it made it complicated to see beyond. Added to that was his aversion to touch of any kind, which, while quite understandable and justified, still made you feel sad. More than once you tried, in vain, to be able to touch him in some way, even if it was something tiny, but he always pushed you away. He pushed you away physically and eventually emotionally, and yet with all this background you wanted to help him.

You knew you couldn't expect a reply to your note, but you were confident that he had received it, and your suspicions were confirmed when another letter came back a couple of days later. It contained a day, a time, and a place, which you assumed was a meeting with him.

You were very careful when you headed there, because you thought that the fewer people saw you together, the better, or else Pekka might suspect something. You covered yourself with a long black cloak for this task and when you arrived you noticed that it wasn't Kaz who was there, but a couple of boys.

"Who are you?"

"And you?" you asked, with the same defensive tone. The place seemed to be an experiment workshop and looking at it in more detail you noticed that there was a bed, so it could even be some kind of apartment. The two men, one brown-skinned and the other pale as snow, wore simple brown suits and were looking at you warily.

“She is Y/N,” said a voice behind you. By the sound of the cane accompanied by the footsteps you knew it was Kaz, “she will work with us”

"Oh," said the dark-haired boy, looking happier with the answer, as he walked in your direction "Welcome, in that case" he muttered flirtatiously, as he held out his hand for you to greet him "Jesper Fahey, at your service”

"I am Wylan" intervened the other, from his place, timidly and quickly.

"You arrived" Kaz spoke again. You turned and a couple of women appeared, you guessed that the shorter one with Suli features was the famous wraith of Kaz. And she was beautiful, you couldn't help but notice.

There was a brief conversation with the six of you there and then Kaz asked you to walk him up to the roof of the place. Once there you instinctively stood next to the only one you knew and he just looked at you out of the corner of his eye while he adopted the typical position of him leaning on the cane.

“Brick by brick” whispered the man’s raspy voice and you were about to ask what you were supposed to do there when an explosion went off in the distance so impressively that you stepped back a bit. It didn't take you more than a few seconds to locate the space and realize the place it was.

"The crow club" you said in a low voice, only for the black-haired man to hear you, while you watched him in profile. But he didn't look at you, just exchanged words with the others and talked about how Pekka's apparent reign was coming to an end.

You'd always known that Kaz Brekker was a little unhinged, and that night you proved it for sure, but you weren't even the least bit afraid. Rather, it was some strange hope that this madness would allow you to go far. Even freedom, perhaps.

After that clear declaration of war, things got considerably complicated, especially when you were summoned before Pekka and he asked you to investigate someone in particular and it turned out to be none other than the man you were now secretly working with. You assumed it was something logical, but even so you feared that Rollins had noticed the slight tremor in your hands when he asked you to complete the task.

You summoned Kaz to Black Veil Cemetery, late at night, and there you confessed to him everything that had happened. He of course found something good in this and devised a way to use it to your advantage, which put you at ease. It still amazed you a little at how nervous you became around him as if you knew nothing of what you were doing, but when you regained your composure you thought it was an excellent plan.

Meetings with Kaz were regular, but always in secret and alone, and they worked to exchange information that you considered useful for him with what he would allow Pekka to know.

You didn't know the full plans and you weren't part of them in any way, or you would be found out, but you knew about almost everything that was going on. The attacks, the fights, the traps, the injuries... you had to look at everything from the outside without being able to intervene. It was frustrating for you, more than anything in the world, and you had to admit that you had taken a liking to crows, even if you had seen them only a couple of times, so you also looked after their safety.

One day you received a note and went to a meeting with all the members of his group present, to finally hear the full version of what Kaz intended to do to finish off your boss. It was a brilliant idea, but you were a little worried about your position in all of this.

“You mean I'm going to be there watching everything Pekka and his thugs do?”

"It will be the best" he answered you. His face still had a bruise on his cheek, a memory from the last fight he had, and he looked exhausted "Jesper and Nina will be there, plus you'll be in disguise" he added and you nodded at that.

When the moment came you thought it would be an easy task, but when Kaz started to get brutally beaten you had to muster all your willpower not to throw yourself into trying to face Pekka, even with your zero skill. He sounded so convincing when he said about Alby that even you believed it, feeling suddenly awed by the cynical smile on Kaz's blood-smeared face. And he also mentioned you in the story, although not directly, saying that it was all about revenge for having abandoned you two when you were children.

You were able to breathe again until Pekka and his entire gang left the place in search of a son who wasn't really buried and you four were left alone. Under other circumstances you would have run to Kaz, cupped his face in your hands, sobbed, and told him it was over. But instead, you just stood in front of him and watched him; his eyes were wild with fury and a thirst for revenge that had already been quenched, but you sensed a hint of calm when he became aware of your presence.

"Breathe," you said in a whisper. Jesper and Nina were dismayed by the closeness with which you spoke to him, as they knew little of your history together “You're fine. We all are,” you assured him. That situation took you back to multiple panic attacks in the past where, given the impossibility of physical contact, all you could do for him was talk to calm him down. It always worked and Kaz had forgotten how soft your voice was and the way you brought him back to the real world. You decided to risk trying to do something else to comfort him and cautiously stretched out your hand towards him, instantly seeing his eyes widen in terror. But your hand ended up landing, more like a touch than a squeeze, on the man's bicep, which was covered by his coat; it wasn't intrusive, or abrupt, and Kaz was surprised that he didn't feel anything negative about it. He looked at your hand and then he looked at you with that usual serious expression, but he didn't push you away and allowed you to stay that way for just a few seconds, after which you decided to move your limb back.

You didn’t receive a verbal response at any time, but you did see him exhale shakily (so softly that you barely noticed) and nod his head while still looking at you, as if he were letting go of a huge weight that was stuck in his chest and at the same time assure you that it felt like a victory. Victory for beating Pekka, victory because he wasn't engulfed by an attack when you touched him, and victory because somehow you were there. You were with him, again.

“Now can we go back to normal?” Jesper asked, to break the silence, and you felt like laughing. Have they ever had a normal life? you asked yourself, but you didn't say.

"Yes" was all Kaz said and taking one last look at you he began to walk in the direction of the exit.

Both of them were curious about the type of relationship you had with Kaz but neither thought it wise to ask at the time, although Nina was getting an idea of things thanks to your racing heartbeat and his that it was impossible not to hear a moment ago. You stayed there just long enough to have a drink with Jesper and then you left the Emerald Palace. You didn't want to go back home, but going with one of them didn't seem like an option either, and once you were on the street you felt worried about remembering the state the black-haired man had left. You trusted that by that time he would be calmer and as if they thought for themselves your legs began to walk to look for him.

It was cold again and you feared you would meet someone dangerous on the road, but you only saw a couple of drunks and a girl looking for clients. Until you were in front of the door, you wondered if it was a good idea to go in, thinking that you would probably be crossing a line that Kaz was not going to allow you to, and wondering if you were going to put up with his refusal, which was a pretty good chance.

With trembling hands you opened the door, which luckily was unlocked, and as if some unknown instinct were guiding you, you found Kaz's room; it was the only one from which light came out through the crack in the door and something told you that he was there. You knocked twice, fearing you had knocked so low that he hadn't heard, and even considered walking back the way you came, but didn't have time to as the door opened a few seconds later. He had already taken off his coat and vest, probably because they were stained with blood, and his black shirt was open at the top buttons, with the suspenders that held up his pants hanging on his thighs. But what caught your attention the most were his pale, gloveless hands.

"What do you need?" he asked you directly. His face looked worse now that the bruises had swollen and the blood was dry. He'd probably have them for a couple of days, and he was definitely going to have a scar over his eyebrow.

"I wanted to see you" you replied, instantly regretting not having considered your sincere words better "I mean... to see how you were" you tried to correct. You thought he would slam the door in your face, but instead he scooted to the side to let you in, then closed the door behind you with a soft click.

Again you felt alien to the place for a moment, thanks to the fact that he looked at you from head to toe as if your presence bothered him. You had to mentally remind yourself that he saw most of them that way.

“Your pay will be ready soon”

"That doesn't matter," you said softly. Several things had changed since the first conversation you had with him, because now that you knew why Kaz had done everything he had done and the traumatic memories returned to both of you, the money had taken a backseat.

You didn't say anything for a moment and you looked for a place where you could sit later. Kaz’s room, once painted green but now just damp walls, had a small bed by the window, a desk littered with papers and a lamp facing another window, with a simple bookcase placed on the top of the side wall; a nightstand, a place to wash your hands with a mirror above it, a circular table in the middle of the free space, and a single armchair that at least looked comfortable. It wasn't the prettiest place, but at least it was cozy.

"Your girl, did she leave?"

“Inej is not my girl. Or from anyone, she is free now” he answered you. He still wasn't looking at you and you noticed that he was having a hard time staying on his feet.

"I'm glad to hear it. She deserves it” you murmured sincerely. You thought that she would be important to Kaz, like all his partners, and you decided to venture out to see if he revealed something else to you. "She's very smart."

"She is"

"And she's pretty too" you added and without moving his head he looked out at yours. You felt as if he was reading your intentions through your eyes, a quality he had always had.

"I think so," he said without much interest.

"Are you very hurt?" you asked, changing the subject, as you took a step towards him. By inertia he took the same step, in the opposite direction, and that made you stop abruptly.

"Nothing to worry about" he exclaimed and though he thought, you couldn't have known, of course, get close to you, you decided to take that step back before he did anything else. 

"Can I ask you something?"

"Mhm"

"What did I do to make you walk away?" you exclaimed, finally expressing a question that had been eating away at your chest and tormenting you for many nights in a row. And since there was silence, you spoke again: “Not like right now, but a long time ago. It's just… I never understood it. Before we were friends and for me… you were even like a family. I loved your brother too and I know losing him never affected us the same, but I was glad you were there for me after that. Then we got older and things got more difficult, but I still had you and that calmed me down. And then… we just drifted apart,” you muttered, shrugging, as you avoided his gaze. Kaz still didn't answer anything and you felt the obligation to fill the silence “Sometimes I remember the things we went through when we were young. The good ones, of course. Like that time we stole a cake to celebrate your birthday and it was probably the best sweet I've ever eaten” you commented, smiling at the memory "And when I made you laugh with my bad jokes, no matter how angry or sad you were... I haven't seen you smile for a long time and I don't know if you celebrate your birthday anymore” you reflected wistfully, almost as if you were talking to yourself. And well, in the face of Kaz's inexpressiveness, that's practically what you were doing.

He hadn't said anything yet and you concluded that all your effort was useless. It had been a mistake to go looking for him, as well as trying to get even the slightest proof that he had ever missed you and you wished you had never opened your mouth. You sighed to contain the urge to cry and without saying anything else you turned towards the exit, intending to leave and return only for your money, but Kaz's voice echoed. 

"Do you remember what I told Pekka?"

You stopped.

“You told him many things, you will have to be more specific”

"About not loving anything" he replied. Your hand trembled on the doorknob at the mere thought of what he was implying and I was able to hear your racing heart pounding in your chest. You heard footsteps and, still without moving, you heard him speak again "That's why I drifted apart”

You never, even in your wildest dreams, imagined that he would say something like that to you and perhaps you were just deluding yourself with the implication of the words, but it was enough to make you freeze in place.

"I still don't understand how that relates to me” you expressed in a low voice. Kaz took a few more steps towards you until you could see his shadow mingling with yours and you felt it was time to turn. He was watching you from above, seriously.

"I didn't want…" he trailed off. You would almost say he was nervous “I didn't want you to be…”

"A weak spot," you said without thinking, followed by a sigh that sounded almost amused "That's your problem, Kaz," you continued, your gaze far across the room, "You think love is a person's greatest weakness, when it's not like that"

"It is not?"

"No" you exclaimed with determination "I believe that... many times love is what keeps us alive. Struggling"

You were speaking for yourself when you said this. What was your motivation every day? In the past, the love for Kaz. Now, it was love for yourself and the hope that one day someone could love you with the intensity with which you loved others.

“I had already lost Jordie. I didn't want to lose you too,” he finally said and that's when your eyes locked with his. You never thought he would verbally express something like that.

“And did you prefer that I lose you?" you whispered in pain. You wanted him to be aware of things, because it seemed like it had never crossed his mind to stop thinking about your well-being and start thinking about your feelings. “You don't just lose someone when they die, Kaz. You can also lose those who are fully alive”

He didn't say anything, because he clearly didn't know what to answer to that, and while he reflected on your words, you caught a glimpse of a certain vulnerability in his blue eyes that you had rarely seen. I couldn't say that you knew the man in front of you better than anyone, but you had a considerable advantage thanks to the years you had lived with him.

“Okay, just… listen” you started to say, knowing he most likely wouldn't give you an answer “I know it's hard to live as we do— as all of us at The Barrel live, but the risks I decide or don't take. They are my decision, not yours. These years you have sought to keep me out of danger and I appreciate it, but you have to learn to trust me”

"I do. I trust you"

"Then show me," you replied. You couldn't help noticing that, even with his stained face, Kaz was still the most handsome man you'd ever seen “Friends do not avoid each other, nor do they move away and despite that, during all these years I have trusted you as from the first moment we were left alone”

You didn't know if you were saying the right thing, but at least you were saying something.

"And if it's too late?"

It was too late? Kaz wondered. He wondered if it was too late to open up to someone, to try to get over his trauma, to let go and finally love you the way he wanted to.

But all this remained as a thought, phrases that couldn’t leave his throat.

“It's not for me,” you assured him. “But my patience won't last forever. I think you should know that”

You couldn't even imagine how many emotions Kaz was trying to process at that moment, but even he himself didn't understand what a mess you'd made of him with that conversation. From his perception, he had admitted that he loved you, but from his eyes, you didn't seem affected by it. And you, contrary to what he thought, felt like you were going to faint.

You were about to leave, for the second time, but he spoke:

“Stay,” he said, sounding more desperate than he would have liked. “I don't know what to say, but… just stay here. I don't want us to be alone tonight”

Us. That fucking habit of Kaz's to speak in the plural and make you a nervous wreck.

You looked at the bed and found that it was too small for both of you, to which we had to add his refusal to be close to others. Proof of this was the unconscious movement of sticking your hands as close as possible to his body during the entire time you were talking.

"Use the bed, obviously you need it more than me" you muttered and went directly to the armchair. Fortunately your first impression wasn’t wrong, it was very comfortable.

The room was so small that the apparent distance between the pieces of furniture didn't mean much, so when he sat on the bed you could see him perfectly.

The memory of one of the times when both of you were in similar situations came to your mind. That night you had been woken by frightened screams from the next room, in that abandoned house where you and Kaz found shelter, forcing you out of bed to investigate.

It was hard to comfort a person without physically touching them, especially when he had nightmares, and over the months you'd had to get used to it. The boy hated waking you up, it made him feel guilty and stupid, but you always kept him company. You never spoke, never asked questions, you just stayed there so he knew he wasn't alone.

Maybe something like that was what Kaz needed tonight. 

"Rest" you exclaimed. His head turned to look at you and you detected a different and special glow in his eyes; as if it were a mixture of fear, softness, and gentleness. You appreciated that look for a few more seconds, which you feared you would never see again in your life, and then you reached out your hand to turn off the light on the desk.

Silence reigned in the darkness.

You settled in the chair, trying to figure out what would be the best sleeping position, and at the same time you heard Kaz slide between the sheets on the bed. After a while, your eyelids felt heavy, a consequence of the fatigue that the hustle and bustle of the day had left you, and when you were about to fall asleep, a voice pulled you out of your reverie.

"Thank you. For everything”

The phrase was a whisper, a delicate caress in your ear, but you understood it clearly. And you decided to think that when Kaz said 'for everything' he meant literally everything you had selflessly done for him during his life; like he just realized you were important. But it's not that he had just noticed it, but that he had just accepted it.

You wanted to stretch out the moment as long as you could because, even if you weren't looking at him, you knew he was awake thanks to the sound of his breathing, but at some point sleep overcame you and you fell fast asleep.

Kaz had nightmares that night, like always, but the difference was that when he woke up in shock in the morning, you were in the same room. So seeing you there, keeping him company, was reason enough to calm him down.

And like every time this had happened, he felt like the luckiest man in the world.

[lilisgardensblog]

Stream theory! time:

I am here to write my thoughts about the Neuvillette part of the stream/trailer, feel free to share yours too!

"The Melusines can't be trusted! That goes for Neuvillette too!"

So, first I have to say I'm heartbroken to hear that the Melusines and Neuvillette can't be trusted, but idc idc i trust them no matter what. And the Melusines saying: "I'm confident that we'll find the meaning of our existence one day" truly broke my heart.

To keep going with the Neuvillette angst we have The Chief of Justice himself saying: "I find it difficult to express my emotions, because I cannot fully understand myself" The struggle to deal with accusations from your own people that they don't trust you while being unable to show them how you really feel... and to add to that whatever rumours saying that u were born from calamity?? I'm so confused and sooo hyped to get the full lore.

'is this what justice means to u? answer me neuvillette!'

First, let me point out THE VOICE ACTING FOR THIS LINE IS CHEF KISS. It sends shivers down my spine every time I hear it. And every time I hear it I'm thinking, what verdict did Neuvillette come to for Wrio to deliver such a powerful line? Maybe it's about Lyney and Lynette? Because we hear Freminet asking Wrio about his siblings and I'm thinking that maybe Wrio goes and demands an explanation from Neuvillette?

"You will see much in the human world, from the delightful to the depressing and one day, when you have dwelt among humanity long enough, you will be placed to bring judgement over all, as the spokesperson for Fontaine's past"

Can't move on from this line without pointing out the informal addressing here. No Monsieur or anything. Straight up Neuvillette. I'm curious to see how close the characters are and why does Wrio sounds so hurt/betrayed.

edit: a lot of people told me the voice line is from an npc but im too tired to delete everything👍

THIS??? raised so many questions in my head it's crazy. it's unnecessary. The hold this last line has on me is absurd. I think it's directly addressed to Neuvillette and I'm curious why is he the one bringing judgement over all? why is he the one shown all alone in a grey and dull Fontaine?why not Furina? What does "spokesperson for Fontaine's past" suppose to mean??Like we already speculated about him being the Hydro Dragon, but this is *sniff* i smell GREAT storyline.

Genshin is about to drop heeeeavy lore and I'm here for it.

"its unnecessary to hold me in such high regard"

Last line in the trailer. Neuvillette said this right after being shown as one of the most powerful people in the whole nation really. He is either really modest or just tries to hide the fact that he's the most powerful in the nation. Or both. Honestly I'm not even sure of what to say about this, I just had to add it here because Neuvillette said it and I'm in whoo for him.

Him🤝Zhongli , fancy talking and acting like they don't have supreme power.

Last thought: this trailer was so powerful and sad over all. I'm expecting the archon quest to be an emotional rollercoaster with one or two emotional punches. I just know Neuvillette story will make me sob. Just look at him.

p.s. : I saw someone pointing out that the creators said that Neuvillette made a law so that the Melusines to be addressed as she/her and that fills my heart with joy. Neuvillette is shown to be oh so powerful and 'born from calamity' or whatever and yet he's one of the sweetest and kindest characters. 🫶🏼

Conclusion: i love neuvillette and idc about false accusations 😊🫶🏼

[battybiologist]

I hate how every time you have to stand against Palestinians being inhumanly slaughtered, someone pops up out of the woodwork to say "of course, but surely you must agree antisemitism is wrong"

I hate it because yeah, antisemitism is a plague on humanity, I wholeheartedly believe it. But opposing Israel isn't synonymous with antisemitism. In fact, Israel's attempts to make us believe so has done more to perpetuate antisemitism than anything pro-Palestinians (or anti-crimes against humanity, in my house) have done.

People have always fallen for Israeli propaganda. The consensus in the West for decades was "this conflict is extremely complicated, but in the end, Israel is in the right". It's not because of the prevalent racism in the West (although that certainly didn't help), but because the information was controlled by governments that had a vested interest in the existence of a Western-allied nation.

Now, with the decentralization of information, the October 7th attack brought the attention of many people towards Israel, much like the Bataclan attacks did, despite the fact that France was and still is doing far worse in Mali.

However, Israelis leaders, too busy relishing the opportunity to wipe out Gaza from history, launched their genocide while people's attention was still in Gaza's direction. And never as many people saw them for who they truly are: genocidal monsters

Then, they tried to peddle the same "antizionism is antisemitism" rhetoric. By doing that, they're forcing people into a choice: either support a genocide, or be branded an antisemite. A false dichotomy

Those who knew better, not least of which were the Palestinians, ignored this false dichotomy, but there are many people who don't know better, thanks to Israel's propaganda.

Some of the latter already didn't see us Arabs as humans, so it was thumbs-up for genocide, but for those who saw the brutality of the occupation, who felt the agony the Palestinian people were put under, they felt they had no choice but the non-genocide option.

I normally would blame those people for being ignorant dunces, and I partly do, but this ignorance was carefully cultivated by Israel and its allies, so the blame cannot rest on them themselves.

And I'm not just basing that on a couple of Internet dumbasses. I'm part of the Algerian diaspora, and I've seen so many other French-Arab people act exactly like I'm describing. Coincidentally, these people were almost always marginalized economically, culturally, legally, and most importantly, by the education system, all things that contribute to an inability to access the ressources necessary to learn more.

They were forbidden from educating themselves, so the lie that was ingrained in their brain is harder to fight (I know that, I tried to fight it locally for years and haven't succeeded yet)

And when you jump to condemn antisemitism in a conversation that didn't have anything to do with it, but did have a pro-Palestinian message, are you not contributing the perpetuation of the lie?

[safety-pin-punk]

Punk 101: A Guide To Critical Thinking

We all know that critical thinking is important, and it's something that any punk will tell you is an essential component of advocacy and pushing for societal changes. But, what exactly is critical thinking? As defined by the dictionary, it's “the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment”. And that's a good, short definition! But it can make the act of thinking critically seem a bit hard and over complicated for some people. So lets phrase it in a way that seems more manageable:

Critical Thinking is the act of taking in information, understanding it, and forming or connecting ideas because of it

Sounds easy enough, right! So then what are the steps one has to take in order to be a critical thinker? I’m glad you asked! Here's a list in no particular order:

Learn About Things - In order to fully understand information and evidence, you need to know about the topic! Whether the issue is social justice or environmental protection, you need to have a base knowledge on the topic in order to form opinions on it. Researching topics on your own or taking classes are great ways to get informed!

Recognize Bias From The Source And Prejudices From Yourself - No source of information will ever be without bias. A good example of this is how different new networks discuss the same event. One might praise it, while another says it was bad. When trying to understand the information to form your own opinions, it's important to separate the information from the biases of the source. In general, it's good to remember that a pure fact is just the information without an opinion attached to it. On a similar note, you also need to be aware of your own bias! When you form opinions, ask yourself *why* you have that opinion. Do you have a reason? If you were to have grown up with different life experiences, do you think your opinion would be different?

Go Straight To The Original Source - A good way to try and avoid bias is to go to the original source. Maybe news network A and news network B have differing opinions on a Tumblr post. Instead of trying to navigate those conflicting opinions to find the facts about the post, you can just go straight to the post itself!

How Reliable Is The Source And The Evidence - How much should you trust the source that you got the information from? Do they have a reputation of giving factual information? Can you find the information on any other sources? Or maybe someone is yelling about something online, but they’ve failed to add a link. It might make sense to trust what a well established researcher says without a source for their information, but maybe not some random person on twitter. Even if you have a primary source for where the information came from, it’s good to be cautious of the information itself. Sometimes false information is spread around on purpose or because of misunderstandings. 

What Is Being Excluded - Because biases exist, it is always possible that the source you are getting your information from is excluding more information either by accident or on purpose. To avoid missing information about a topic, it's good to check multiple sources and see if any have information that the others didn’t. A simple example of this would be two children playing on a playground. Child A pushes Child B, who gets hurt. When asked about what happened, Child A would say that Child B got hurt, but exclude the fact that it was their fault to avoid getting in trouble. Meanwhile, Child B and any bystanders would likely provide that information. 

What Is The Other Side Of The Issue And Why Does It Exist - You don’t have to agree with other sides of an argument, but it’s very important to be able to understand what they are, who thinks that way, and why they think that way. This will help you to see other points of view and counter any points they make in a discussion with understanding rather than anger or frustration. This is also important because it can expand your own opinions and judgments on a topic. Maybe the other side has points that you have never considered before, but now thinking about them has developed your own beliefs.

Avoid Black And White Thinking - Remember that the world does not exist in a good/bad duality. Everything will have problems, and the things that have problems might even have benefits. The world and its problems exist on a grayscale. To incorporate this into your thinking, try to understand *why* someone or something is doing something, the impacts it may have on multiple different communities, who it helps, and who it hinders. It's important to understand all facets of something before you form your opinion, otherwise you may be lacking very important details.

Don’t Forget To Fact Check - Never trust just one source, no matter how reliable it is! I usually recommend finding the information from at least 3 different sources before you confirm whether it's true or not!

Be Willing To Change Your Mind - Part of being a critical thinker that is often forgotten about is remembering to keep an open mind. Because critical thinking is based on the practice of learning new information, understanding it, and then forming/linking ideas, it is an opportunity to grow and change. You may start out advocating for one thing, but then through time, experience, and thinking, end up advocating for something slightly (or majorly) different. That is more than okay, and it's a sign of growth and maturity!

Resources to help learn how to think critically:

The Foundation for Critical Thinking https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/index-of-articles/1021/

The University of Tennessee https://www.utc.edu/academic-affairs/walker-center-for-teaching-and-learning/thinkachieve/critical-thinking-resources

The Element of Thought https://theelementsofthought.org/further-exploration/links/thinking/

The Better Future Program https://www.betterfutureprogram.org/liberation-library.html

My entire masterlist can be found here!!

[needlepokes]

how to write a diabetic character: CGM edition

is your diabetic character wearing a CGM? do they have to? CGMs these are Continous Glucose Monitors that can detect how much sugar is in your bloodstream.

How are they different than tradtional fingerprick (blood) tests? they take blood sugar readings 24/7, and provide you with how your sugars are doing at all times, rather than just at that moment. This leads to tremendously better control over blood sugar.

The way they work is that they can "sample" your blood sugar by testing your subcutaneous tissue for sugar levels then adjusting that value.

However, they're less accurate than a fingerprick (blood) reading and will often "lag" behind by about 15 minutes.

SO if you have a character who is expereincing low or high blood sugar - they'd get an alarm on their CGM, and then they might take a fingerprick reading to make sure. CGM false alarms DO exist and it can cause some very annoying situations.

A less careful/depressed/struggling/burnt out character might A. not care or "sleep through" alarms B. not double check with a finger prick C. not care that they're wearing a CGM - pump into stuff or just rip it off (although they are very expensive!).

can you mute them? yes, and a character might choose to do this while they're sleeping, having an exam, or if they know they're about to fuck up their blood sugar.

how long do they last? the libre ones last 14 days. the dexcom ones last up to 10 days.

can you shower with them? yes

can you swim with them? yes

can you have sex with them on? yes, and i've read very funny anecdotes from diabetics having to pause during sex because their cgm was beeping

are they expensive? yes! sometimes, they're covered by insurance, but not completely. If a character is in poverty, or do not have insurance, they likely would have to rely solely on fingerpricks.

Who usually uses CGMs? they are very widespread between T1Ds and are increasingly being used by T2Ds as well.

can you share the readings on multiple devices? yes! your character might share their info with their SO, parents, roommates, close friends...etc. It is genuienly one of the most telling signs of a close relationship between people - because those people will see your "mistakes" and decisions.

where do you stick them? the libre ones (circular ones) officially just go on the back of your arm. The dexcom ones can go on just about anywhere that's "soft" - stomach, thighs, back of arm, chest...etc.

does putting them on hurt? sometimes! the way they are installed involves a needle going into the skin then sitting in the subcutaneous tissue. This can sometimes cause some bleeding, and soreness for a few hours.

Often times the process is completely painless, but this is not the case for everyone. A thinner character might struggle to find a place "cushy" enough for a cgm.

can you put them on your own? yes the process is made for one person to stick it on, but i've seen some couples on instagram act all romantic and sappy about applying it together, so that should give you some ideas for your diabetic characters' budding romances ;)

Some CGMs are just naturally faulty, i'd say about 4 sensors is a busted one, and in that case you'll have to replace them - which most companies just do without any hassle.

do they work with insulin pumps? some insulin pumps can work in tangent with CGMs and provide feedback for the user to automatically generate the correct doses of insulin, depending on their current blood sugar.

do they come off easily? depends on who you're asking. some people swear up and down that they never last and have to put on patches, which are admittedly very cute. Weather, clothing, and how clumsy a character is all factor in this. For me personally i just put them on raw and keep them together by sheer willpower.

CGMs can cause anxiety in diabetics. The constant flow of information can easily burnout people, and this can possibly be the case for any diabetic character you might write. Seeing arrows going down or up can be very distressing, especially knowing how painful some of the consequences are. I personally take breaks for both myself and my wallet from using CGMs to avoid burn out.

nonetheless, CGMs are WONDERFUL pieces of technology that have personally made me much happier as a diabetic, freer and a lot more independent.

does your character want their CGM to show? lots of people, including myself don't like revealing their CGMs - but your character might like showing them off!

and lastly - my favorite thing about CGMs - taking them off and having a "naked" shower once a month where i dont have to worry about it coming off. - They look like this:

[damnstrawhats]

Thinking about Sabo again & just… Sabo being framed as the most thoughtful of the trio makes a lot of sense when considering the fact that he is near-constantly in pursuit of ideas- ideas of what freedom, morality, understanding, & family look like. Of how & where he fits into those things. Of who he is in the aftermath of waking up a person he previously could not remember, and of how much of that person he can really get back. Sabo comes across as if everything that could & cannot be are constantly swirling in his mind, fuelling his iteration of the indignant recklessness at the core of the trio’s characters. & this all feels as though it’s reinforced by the way that, upon his reintroduction into the story proper, Sabo needs to wear Luffy (literally, though it is worth noting that this was still done through a false-identity that Luffy invented) & Ace’s (narratively) identities- seemingly in part because he no longer knows where his own fits in with theirs.

In addition, the multiple ironies existent in Sabo’s story as a result of how these traits manifest are absolutely heartbreaking. Sabo wanted to go to sea to understand the world, & he got the chance to, but without the context of from where in it he came. He wanted to write about the world, and he got that context of his person back as the result of a news article. He wanted a family who accepted him and allowed him to be free, and he got it, but only at the expense of the predecessor he’d tried everything he could to save. He wanted freedom, but only gained the ability to fight for it after the loss of his identity. He lost his identity in desperate chase of what he felt he needed to survive. It is arguable whether the boy that set sail that day really did survive. He sent a letter with the promise to find each other again to the brother who died before they ever got the chance to. Sabo is still chasing the ghost, though, or arguably multiple. He is trying to take on the will of a man he did not get the chance to see a boy grow into, perhaps also the man he didn’t get to grow into himself. He is trying to live a single life on behalf of a pair. And the real sick thing is that I think Sabo knows it. He is written to be much more introspective than either Luffy or Ace, & we’re shown in Dressrosa that he’s discussed the matter with Koala, even that he’s semi-comfortable doing so while actively in tears. We’re told that he has nightmares, & that he thought Luffy would hit him at the colosseum. When Koala comforts him, it’s through telling him that for all he could question how things may have gone, they can’t know any speculatory outcome for certain. It isn’t entirely out of left field to say that Sabo’s grief is informed both by the loss of Ace, & the loss of who he used to be. That doesn’t mean he cares any less for the revolutionary army- just that there was a personhood, as well as a person, that was taken from him and that I think he’s aware of it. All of which plays into where his story goes during & after the Revery quite well. I don’t know, all this to say that I’m deeply excited to see where his story goes.

[weirdmageddon]

ok. let's finally talk about this thing i've been wanting to go public with for ages

so i am not a fan of needing THC to help me curb the embarrassment i have in being happy talking about my real realll special interests, because perceived rejection of my interests feels like rejection of myself since i put so much of myself (my time) into them. i anticipate rejection from others because the stuff i find myself occupied with is detached, abstract, highly technical, or niche, and i'm aware of the surrounding cultural assumptions. some of them, and the level at which i am in involved in understanding them, are really specialized or esoteric, so even opening up about them is like "fuuuck im gonna be made fun of or it’s gonna be too technical that they zone out and dont understand why this is so meaningful to me" ive even posted about that feeling before.

see if i start accumulating too much self-context made in my own mind without sharing it i start to feel more and more isolated from other people around me, that they’re not seeing the full extent of what im seeing myself. i don’t share it, because i fear rejection or superficial judgments in other people’s eyes (probably because it’s happened to me and i’ve seen it happen to others). but at the same time it has to be shared with more people around me or else i feel like i have an intestinal blockage in my mind. what happens is my mental colon explodes from all the shit accumulated over time and vou get a post like this. i’m sorry for that mental image btw. anyway back the point of this post

anything where i can systematize archetypes in real, everyday situations has always been my strong suit. so when people ask me my hobbies im like ... uhhh what am i supposed to say? i analyze stuff about the world and rotate it in my mind. when carl jung wrote there are “as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life” i know exactly what he was talking about.

i’ve been toeing the line to really talk about this thing for two years, so let me tell you about socionics. if you already know what im talking about i love you. if you don’t (or even if you do, keep reading there’s probably stuff you don’t know in here), it is part abstract cybernetic model, part jungian concepts, part philosophy of information exchange. it classifies how people communicate and exchange information. it was created in eastern europe in the late 70s, developed primarily in the 80s-90s by other authors and it’s been an endlessly fascinating, elegant, and reliable tool for me.

usually people dismiss personality typology systems because the mbti became so watered down and pop-culturally saturated that people seemed to collectively take a stance of not taking anyone that genuinely cares about it seriously, or at least that’s the impression i got.

(btw — i need to go on this brief rant — i will never forgive 16personalities for being the big five rebranded and people thinking it's mbti. 16personalities gives you your big five type. they explicitly state on their website that they don’t borrow any concepts from jung. -A and -T don’t exist in the mbti and correspond directly to low and high neuroticism respectively. i figured out myself they mapped each letter dichotomy to the other four measures on the big five: extraversion (I/E), conscientiousness (P/J), agreeableness (T/F), openness to experience (S/N). which is stupid and it’s false advertising. take 16p and a big five test see for yourself how they match up. your personal mbti type can be different from its correlated big five type. the actual mbti using jungian concepts as a base is alright though. oh, and the best neo-jungian mbti stuff is by far michael pierce’d takes on it. if you actually fw that heres a carrd i created a few years ago about the cognitive function axes.)

but i always end up going to the bottom of the iceberg in anything i get really into, and i basically integrate it into my own understanding of the world around me for a while. maybe it was because i had a bad experience genuinely talking about it a few years ago from some people who made superficial judgments about it that made me sort of quiet about my interest in typology systems. i assume it’s because myers and briggs used the tool towards racist ends; it acquired negative connotations, bullshit intuition supremacy, and left the study of psychological types tainted in the united states. even if the individual’s study of the system is neutral, unbiased, out of pure curiosity as a way to classify and relate different personality structures to each other, as was the case with me. in addition to 16personalities being an invalid “mbti” test that bought their way to the front page of google, and rampant superficial information at all levels of study, finding anyone who was into it like me was basically impossible. the reason i have a preferred interpretation of jungian + mbti concepts is because i’ve tried different ones on and sensed how well they conform to reality as a way of describing phenomenon, ditching old ones that werent as clear. michael pierce’s i’ve found are the closest to what i sense jung's intentions were. (actually quite likely this is something i would attribute to being because all three of us are types LIl (and also all infj too, how about that?) brain-to-brain communication LII (carl jung) to LII (michael pierce) to LII (me)). so i felt like michael pierce kept the things that worked in real life and ditched the things that didn’t, leaving behind his elegant integration of the concepts.

anyway, i was under the assumption that anything that could be mistaken for it—which socionics often is at a glance—would be dismissed out of hand, even though it’s entirely different. plus, there’s all the context i’d need to clarify about how “it’s different from the “fun” unserious pop-psych mbti and also absurdly more technical” and what's the point in doing that if they don't respect you enough to hear you out anyway? so it just made me closed off.

they share a common ancestor though. the concepts are still based on carl jung’s book ‘psychological types’ which is why there is some shallow overlap, but the scope, structure, and application of it is different. i feel like this system is a lot more “living” and relevant to real interactions and communication between people in our everyday lives. i am always seeing specific examples of these concepts in play in real life and in characters depicted in media. it’s also been more empirically studied and successfully implemented over in eastern europe, and has gone under constant development and contribution. while since the 50s, mbti had crystalized and become stagnant with diverging interpretations to the point where it’s become basically meaningless to try to talk about because nobody can agree on concepts or semantics; there are virtually no distinctions between “schools” or “models” to differentiate interpretations — (although i have my preference for what i think are the most meaningful and reasonable one; as i said, that goes to michael pierce.) eastern (not so much western) socionics is incredibly more well put-together than mbti or kiersey for squeezing the potential from jung’s original ideas, and goes much deeper. that said, i will ALWAYS advise self-studying typlogy concepts over taking a test. the algorithm of a test can never possibly know you and your individual biases in interpreting the meaning of the words better than the knowledge you just have about yourself. if you learn the theory underlying it you will actually learn about yourself and others and it will actually mean something to you instead of a being an empty decoration for your profile.

here is a comparison chart i translated into english so you can get some idea of where these systems actually differ.

Букалов, А. (2019). On the advantages of socionics over other post-Jungian typologies. Socionics, Mentology and Personality Psychology, (6), 5–7. Retrieved from https://publishing.socionic.info/index.php/socionics/article/view/2603

for me it’s been super insightful applied to real life. it is like a toolkit for interpreting why some people just rub me the wrong way and our communication feels disjointed. or why some people pass my vibe check to enter my personal inner circle and i feel like talking with them is easier and not an uphill battle. who i feel drawn to and want to get to know better. to deconstruct why i and other people interpret information in the world the way they do, and how that explains the kind of people i end up curating in my life. it has put into words the concepts i haven’t been able to find the words for beforehand, and thus enables me to retrospectively pinpoint exactly what unconsciously makes people feel more at ease or why communication is just easier with some and why it’s harder with others, regardless of any other factors. there are other factors of course, that are the result of unique circumstances—nurture, culture, and upbringing—and i of course account for those, it’s not as pertinent to me as the framework that provides the skeletal structure regardless of those individual variations that are simply already a given for me. that was actually the whole point of its creation.

the system gives me a common language to communicate these ideas with, at least to the few people i talk to who have learned it, but i can adapt the concepts in how they relate to specific circumstances and convey it to a lay audience. i’ve been doing just that to explain why, of the people who have been made aware of the hs rarepair john-aradia, i have seen no one object to it, and instead, everyone i saw found it intriguing the more they thought about it, even when they initally thought was “so random”. and i realized, “hey wait! i know how to explain that!”, but that's in another post i've been working on.

[i was actually originally writing this post in the middle of said aradia and john analysis but i felt like there was way too much i wanted to talk about as its own thing. i figured people are going to be reading that post for john-aradia explanation, not public updates about my mind. i just didn’t want to rewrite this to account for the context because the point i made was still relevant]:

but now i’m thinking okay… i’m talking to a bunch of homestucks. why am i prostrating myself here? why am i so defensive? they’re probably creaming their pants at the idea of another symmetrically divisible system of classification to get their hands on. homestuck itself is founded upon a bunch of ideas with symmetrical divisions and classifications (divisible products of 2). aspect dichotomies, quadrants, cards, black-white, yin/yang and literally countless other abstract systems. if there is a common word to refer to these sorts of things, please let me know.

but in socionics terms, all of this sort of stuff i’m refering to would be within the domain of extraverted/black intuition (Ne) information, and classifying or positioning someone within those frameworks would be introverted/white logic (Ti). you can read more about these “elements” here. homestuck has familiarized you with notionally irreducible aspects present in everything, dual yin/yang forces permeating everything, so if you understand all of the sorts of abstract classification systems in homestuck you’re basically already 75% the way to fundamentally grasping model A socionics. it is way more structured and stable than the typologies in homestuck though. but you will perceive there to be similarities in the need for archetypal/thematic sense skills.

if you want to learn socionics, for the love of god start here. there are many weak places out there to start out with that will set you up with a faulty and loose understanding, but school of classic socionics is the best foundation to start with. i saw it emerge from the beginning when it was founded, having been part of it since late 2022.

this is an introduction to SCS, what makes it special, and and how differs from other socionics schools. i find SCS to be the most comprehensive, and i’m active within a side discord to discuss theoretical constructs related to model A. i’ve helped find the links between some concepts in model A that weren’t fully substantiated in augusta’s original works, specifically the importance of the asking/declaring reinin dichotomy, how it fits with regard to the rest of model A’s structure, how it underpins the ring of social benefit (which was missing from her writing), and how it can be used as an information element charge just like positivist/negativist can (i.e. all process types have positive asking Ne (+Ne? and all result types have negative declaring Ne (-Ne!). i’m still working on transfering my essay on that to a document.)

i know the intricacies of this system like the back of my hand but yeah i never post much about it because it’s so niche and i dont know who would even want to hear it besides people who i already know would, like in that small specialist group, but they actually been quiet lately even though i’m still active in there sharing things i realized. and i even feel alienated in most casual socionics discussion groups, especially larger ones. i need people who can match my freak about it.

because i have nowhere else to talk about it i’m starting to feel guilty yapping my friends’ ears off about it when i deconstruct everything i come across in light of this system like i’m being annoying about it. but at the same time when im doing that i am constantly reinforcing the merit of the system in successfully finding some dynamic i see in the drama of real life in connection to some idea from the model. i can immediately lock on to the core principles that are at play in any situation, validating the patterns that have been observed by others. by what measure do these people / characters / groups relate to each other, how do we define the specific “feeling” of the energy between them together? i could do a socionical analysis for anything that captures my interest.

it’s also been incredible for self-insight. i can now accurately explain my thought process.

i can change my perspective of the scope of my thinking on different levels. depending on the urgency of a situation developing around me and my respect for other people’s time, i can expand my reasoning from splitting hairs at the smallest pedantic specifics—although i prefer not to, to the most holistic global hard binary 0/1 (no/yes) judgment.

it’s fractal-like; once i know how to classify and compare the features of something to another, everything else with overlapping logical relationships instantly rises up in the same way, which of course is what leads to me having insights that reinforce the potential inherent in the things around me, because my way of thinking is isomorphic. i also experience strong animated mental imagery accompanying my conscious thoughts about these systems, minimalist shapes or lines of the barebones motion happening. i feel like my mental activity and what i actually write down is trying to capture what im seeing in my head.

i prefer to be brief, but that requires sharing contexts with someone. once i've established similar ways of talking about the same thing with someone so that we’re on the same page, our messages basically become exchanging code words with each other. all of the potential densely packed into these efficient little terms.

the effect is that i am reducing the amount of time and energy i have to spend trying to explain things to someone. i just want to communicate easily and be understood by the people i talk to so that i can enjoy my time with them. this is why i felt like such a long, clarifying, in-depth post was necessary, which would rip the bandaid off and pull it all up at once, instead of on a private, individual-to-individual level. i had to have it engraved somewhere i could just point someone to instead of repeatedly having to explain the same thing over and over cause that’s a waste of time and energy.

in fact, that revelation i had about myself just now can be explained by model A too! my own type is LIl and this type’s id block houses the information elements +Te! → +Ni?, which aushra describes as “The quality of deeds and actions and the efficient expenditure of energy in work—only performing for what is truly necessary—leads to peace of mind in the future.”

or, for example, coming at it from another angle, here is an older post i made before i was even aware of socionics. i was already talking about my experiences, patterns of thinking and self-awareness in a way that was so on the nose for a socionics analysis.

is that not the clearest example of phase 2’s sensitivity (for me it is information about sensorics)? -Fi? → -Se! superego block, anyone? and did you see how much i gave attention to the time i spend working; +Te! -> +Ni? id block? [information element descriptions here]. you could also derive the progression of the information metabolism stages in my own psyche (phase 1: Ethics -> phase 2: Sensorics -> phase 3: Logic -> phase 4: Intuition).

(from The Characteristic of SLI)

so through socionics it’s like i can find an explanation for just about everything i observe in others and myself just because i’ve extrapolated the logical relationships from that system and can isomorphically apply them to anything.

and i don't say that lightly! i'm not saying anything in this post lightly. like i have a degree in biopsychology from an honors college (ncf; yes, the liberal arts college desantis got his soulless hands on because it was “too woke"). having taken courses in statistics, research methods in psychology, and others, i know all about proper research design (and designing them myself). and of course i ended my four years there with my undergrad thesis, examining temporoparietal synchrony in autistic individuals when working alone and together, where for months on end i was doing nothing but reading and interpreting the validity of research papers. i even deconstructed poorly designed psychological constructs commonly used in autistic research in mine.

i also took personality psychology as a course during my time there. i got a birds eye view of most of the popular paradigms and still felt like i was more knowledgeable in the discourse behind some of the topics we glossed over since the course material was more of a broad comprehensive thing than an in-depth one for anything specific. in totality, all of the models i read about in relation to each other seemed so fragmented into different cuts and perspectives in trying to understand and find the patterns in people’s mental life. and yet none of the models i read about hold as as great of an everyday explanatory power as socionics does for explaining ways of thinking, people's proneness to certain tendencies, and the energetic tension that happens between certain people.

people can say otherwise that it’s pseudoscience. even though there are numerous studies built on real-world observations, the large-scale statistical data like from victor talanov. there's school of system socionics who emphasize its practice. it would be impossible to add all the evidence i can to support my claims to this post but you can see for youself - there are still countless new articles being published from different authors. regardless of that, even if it isn't accepted within the rigors of “scientific canon” i really dont give a fuck since it absolutely does indeed have explanatory and predictive power, and that’s all i care about. i’m confident in this not only through firsthand experience, the ability to frame what i know to be true about the real world within it and have it successfully describe those things, as well as talking to other people about my observations.

additionally, i see people make conclusions about interpersonal dynamics where they unknowingly repeat information that can be derived from socionics concepts.

something i noticed a LOT and ive repeatedly thought about and come to the same conclusion multiple times is that i think i naturally might "embody" the most optimal ways of interacting with other people for myself. it gives me insight into the nature of the personal relationships that i already procure in my life, but it’s not really a self-fulfilling prophecy because i dont use socionics to prescribe who i "should" be friends with. that's silly. thats a silly thing to do because people do have idiosyncracies that don't perfectly align with a system if you rigidly adhere to it, so you're bound to be set up for failure if you try to force that and you will be disappointed. it's better to let these feelings happen naturally without pretense, because that's where the observations that fuel my insight comes from.

i have a subconscious sense for who i will be able to get along with in the long term almost instantly without the need for any kind of system, just based on their actual mannerisms and “vibes”, but that alone is not good enough for me, i want to know why. socionics just gives me tools to figure out why so that i know what im dealing with and its not just ineffable energies, but i can put a name to those energies to think and talk about it and compare and discover patterns in what ive curated in my inner circle over my life, what i feel drawn towards. and indeed i do find plentiful amounts of recurring patterns. the simplification and abstraction is not to destroy the soul and expression of individuals but to wrap my head around them and understand them deeper in relation to everything else, including myself.

i am aware it can be confusing for many people which turns them away. but if theres any questions you have or youre confused about any concepts i can answer them

but yeah um, i’ve really only scratched the surface of this cognitive cybernetic tool. if you are genuinely interested in what i have to say and want me to talk more about it please openly tell me since i’m not a mind reader! i assume disinterest by default.

anyway if you got to this point thanks for reading. i wanted to just put it out there for context about any posts i make in the future. just stating my honest thoughts and whats been occupying my mind for the past two years.

be on the lookout for the john and aradia analysis soon where i’ll use it in practice to deconstruct some things about those characters. and if you’re coming to this post from that analysis after ive posted it, i’m sorry this post is so long in the middle of an already long-ish post. i just thought the context was important.

[bartypluto]

Everything wrong with the marauders fandom ── rant

Long rant about everything that I think doesn't make sense in the fandom since marauders TikTok is driving me crazy (I did not proofread this and I don't know how much sense it makes but I hope you get the point).

People in the marauders fandom ship characters and make friend groups based on tropes and the personality of the characters (e.g. Regulus being with James bc of the brother's best friend trope and because their personalities are cute together) instead of taking the characters' morals and opinions into account (e.g. James (canonically) hates Slytherins and blood supremacists, therefore he wouldn't like Regulus (romantically or platonically)). By doing this, the characters are reduced to stereotypes without morals. Everyone likes each other (the Death Eaters are friends with members of the Order) and there's no room for a plot. Why would blood supremacy exist if not a single Death Eater or member of the OOTP actually upholds their beliefs? What's the point of the Harry Potter novels if everyone is best friends with each other? (I'm not saying personality doesn't matter or that the tropes make no sense, but ignoring everything a character stands for is taking it too far).

Characters are limited to being "bad people" and not being allowed positive qualities or "good people" who don't have flaws (e.g. the Marauders being perfect (except for Peter) and Snape being irredeemable and the devil incarnate). Why is it always so black and white? You've already stripped characters of their morals and now you're also not allowing them to have both good and bad in them?

So basically friend groups and ships don't make sense, lore doesn't actually matter anymore, and talking about anything is pointless since everyone is arguing about headcanons (which can't easily be disproved, cause if you say someone's headcanon isn't realistic, they'll start talking about how "nothing is canon so it doesn't matter!!!" Which is just plain out wrong by the way).

The ideas of a good work of fiction and character analysis are ruined since no one cares about the canon things we know about characters. They are under the illusion of not having any canon information, even though there's actually quite a lot of info in the books. Character headcanons should be an expansion of said person, an elaboration of what they're like. Making random things up is not valid unless we genuinely don't know a lot about someone (e.g. Dorcas, but even in her case we still know she was against Death Eaters and blood supremacy, so saying she'd be friends with Death Eaters is a reach unless you're claiming she actually doesn't have strong morals or you think she was friends with them before they got blood supremacist beliefs).

Also please come up with better names cause what are "Slytherin skittles", "Partyvan" or even "dead gay wizards"? I'm sorry this might just be the hater in me but I cannot take this anymore. Being gay has become some kind of quirk and making every character lgbt is seen as a good fandom trait (the dead gay wizards name has been around for a while, but point still stands).

The fandom claims to be oh so inclusive because everyone is gay, yet they make Sirius a femboy because God forbid two masculine men are in a relationship. One of them has to be feminine, right? You're definitely not promoting negative stereotypes by doing that! Also Jily and other straight ships being seen as boring because "all heteros suck and only gay characters deserve a fandom!" You're literally setting us back under the false narrative of "being inclusive". You're perpetuating stereotypes (again) and you're acting like being gay is some special personality trait.

All the characters from the Marauders era are so interesting and the era has so much potential, but it's being wasted because of the fandom's poor understanding of fiction.

[qqueenofhades]

https://www.tumblr.com/qqueenofhades/742700762243727361/you-can-tell-you-work-in-academia-with-how-much

Hi, sorry, Asshole Anon here (I’m not giving myself that nickname to lash out, I’m saying it because I was an ass)

To clarify: I mean “I don’t know what to trust anymore” in that “people whom I normally respect and would otherwise agree with are now sharing material that I find either morally indefensible or overtly simplistic, and at the same time people on the ground in Gaza are saying that Hamas IS a liberation organization, so I trust their word, but there is also the existence of the “We Want To Live” protests, and the fact that there’s now apparently a protest against a child that got killed that isn’t widely reported, with an attached video of said protest from somebody on the ground in Gaza, but it’s in Arabic, there are no subtitles, I cannot speak Arabic, and I don’t trust Google Translate”

I just want an objective sense of what is happening on the ground. I want to know what is and is not propaganda, because I (white, raised in a liberal(?) household, surrounded by white people) am especially susceptible to it. Once I have that objective sense of what the people in Gaza want, then I will be able to effectively and efficiently advocate for shit. But that also necessitates listening to orgs like Standing Together, B’Tselem, people IN Israel who want this shit to stop, and hoo BOY that ain’t gonna fly with those people I mentioned because of:

1. BDS saying that the org “normalizes the occupation”, but they’re made up of Palestinian activists and anti-apartheid veterans, I can’t discount their statement, not fully.

2. Netenyahu’s… Netenyahu

3. Twitter’s doing a great job of asserting that everyone in Israel is a — quoting directly here from a half-remembered Tweet — “genocidal maniac”, or wants the bombardment to happen. (Which I know for a fact is not the case, if the protests calling for a new election are anything to go by)

That’s not even getting into the domestic stuff. I’m in an org rn and I’m getting the sinking feeling that they’re gonna drop this thing like a hot potato when a ceasefire gets called. Just sucks.

Anyways, back to improvement. Just closing this out

I agree that we're currently in a paradoxical state where there is simultaneously ALL THE INFORMATION EVER and ACTUALLY NO INFORMATION AT ALL, and that's what makes it difficult to sort out true from false. It's also what contributes to compassion fatigue, where we are able to get extensive real-time information and/or eyewitness accounts about pretty much any tragedy or catastrophe anywhere in the world, and social media has created a space where we are expected to both immediately react to all that information and to do so in the "right" and "correct" way. Which is basically impossible, and is also what burns out young well-meaning people so hard, where they insist that there's nothing to be done except The Revolution, because they have been so inundated with this torrent of human suffering and it seems like small steps are in fact useless. I am a historian and I can tell you upfront that humans are simply not made to process that volume of information about ALL THE BAD THINGS EVERYWHERE. It's also impossible to have an informed opinion on all or sometimes any of it, but there is still the pressure to visibly do so and to do it in a way that fits in with what everyone in your peer group is saying, even if you don't understand it. So yes -- that is absolutely very difficult, and it's hard to filter or parse it.

That said, I don't think we actually need to have painstaking piece-by-piece analysis of every single piece of information out there, because there are in fact so many competing narratives, perspectives, fake news, disinformation campaigns, opinions, etc., and it will lead you to the same information paralysis: there's just too much of it to even start processing, and so your brain just gives up and reverts to those same simplistic cliches and things that "feel" right, regardless of whether or not they are. When you're trying to decide on the fine details of something, it helps to have an overall sense of the context and narrative that they're operating in. So for reference, these are some broad and basic analytic paradigms that I personally use when reading or thinking about any material in regard to the Israel/Hamas situation in particular:

No person of basic good faith and human decency wants the current situation in Gaza to be happening. However, the person/group that has the power to call it off -- i.e. Netanyahu and the current Israeli government -- has not done so despite increasing pressure from Western allies, because the situation is beneficial to Bibi personally and he sees more use in continuing it than making the decision for it to stop.

The governments of Western allies, therefore, can voice disapproval of Israel's actions (which they have been doing more and more frequently) but unless Netanyahu himself makes the choice to end the war, it will not stop. The West has recently given more and more signals that they are not prepared to countenance the ongoing destruction and genocide of Gaza, but yet again, Israel is its own sovereign country with its own powerful government, military, intelligence services, etc. The "anti-imperialists" who think the collective West can just reach in and turn off the violence whenever they please, and have just refused to do so because they're "bad people," are not being realistic. Western allies can exert pressure and leverage, but as long as Netanyahu himself wants to keep going, he will.

"People in Gaza" and "people in Israel" are not homogeneous blocs who think exactly alike. Some people in Gaza support Hamas. Some people do not. Hamas support has recently grown as a result of Israel's post-October 7 response, but it is not unanimous or unquestioned.

Hamas is the entity that started the current war by attacking Israel on October 7 and murdering/raping/kidnapping 1,000+ Israeli civilians. Hamas is also associated with Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and other terrorist regimes/states, which are often defended by Online Leftists simply for being "anti-Western," regardless of how heinous their actions also are.

Netanyahu was wildly unpopular in Israel for MONTHS before this current war, due to his autocratic attempts to neutralize the Israeli Supreme Court and make the country even more of his personal fiefdom. There were huge, massive, ongoing protests against his naked power-grab for almost all of 2023, and he was so preoccupied with pushing it through that he ignored warnings from the Israeli and Egyptian intelligence services that Hamas was planning a major attack. These anti-Netanyahu demonstrations have continued and ramped up in intensity even in the middle of the war/attacks on Gaza.

As such, painting every single Israeli as mindlessly supporting the current actions of Netanyahu and the Israeli government is antisemitic nonsense and reflect the current Western Leftist tendency to assume that "all Israelis" and "all Zionists (read Jews)" are evil and personally responsible for this.

Israeli Jews have a right to exist and to reside on the land currently called Israel. Modern Israel was founded in 1948, three years after the end of WWII and the Holocaust, the greatest incidence of antisemitic mass murder in history, which is a fact that cannot be ignored and which western leftists eagerly calling for its total eradication and treating it as an illegitimate "white western settler colony" nonetheless do in fact repeatedly ignore.

This is why many Jews do not feel safe in other countries, because there has literally been thousands of years of history proving that they often aren't, and which the rabidly antisemitic response to the current conflict is doing nothing to dissuade.

Jews have had a presence in the land alternately called Palestine, Israel, the Holy Land, Judah, etc., for over 2,000 years, and their entire religion and history is founded around the exile from Jerusalem. That is the history that the current state of Israel is drawing on. It does not vanish just because it is inconvenient for western leftists to acknowledge.

Israel currently has a militant far-right government (after tending toward rightist/right wing domestic politics more generally, partially due to post-Holocaust trauma) that has deliberately erased, ignored, and violated the equally valid claims of Palestine and Palestinian people to that same land, and which is currently committing full-scale genocide against them.

Palestine and Palestinian/Muslim people have the same right to exist on that land as Israel and Israeli/Jewish people (and Christian people, and none-of-the-three people). They both have equally long and historically relevant claims to this land and one of them (in an ideal world, which we do not live in) should not be artificially prized over the other.

However, this land is some of the most bitterly and violently contested in the entire world, for the last two thousand years and counting, and there is no one good guy, simplistic answer, or quick way to stop it. The three Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) have fought bitterly over Jerusalem and its associated territories for a cool few millennia, and human nature being what it is, there is no way for one person, group, organization, government, etc to just step in and make it stop.

The Western/American leftist response to the current conflict has often made absolutely no attempt to take into account any of this troubled and complex history, and has reduced the whole thing down to whichever antisemitic and/or anti-Democratic Party soundbites will get them the most traction on social media. This often rests on whitewashing any moral responsibility belonging to Hamas and defending them no matter what, labeling all Israeli Jews as "evil genocide supporters," and assuming that if Biden wanted to magically shapeshift into Netanyahu and give the order to make it stop, he would, but he's "just not doing it," ergo something something Trump Would Totally Be Better!

These people also often call themselves "anti-imperialist" while thinking/demanding that America swoop in and play Big Global Policeman Daddy (as it indeed has often done in the past) and spank all its naughty children (but if it actually did do this, etc etc it would be evil). Biden could very much do more and has not necessarily done enough, but he has also done more than any other American president in history to shift away from unconditional unquestioning support of Israel only, and to advocate for a Palestinian state, a lasting ceasefire, and other basic precepts of Palestinian self-determination and dignity of personhood. These two things can be true at the same time.

I don't necessarily expect everyone to agree with every single fine detail of these statements, but I do expect them to at least make a basic effort to let all of these facts to inform their response, and not just the ones that they most agree with and which most fit their ideology or preferred conclusion. So that's one way to approach the situation, even if we obviously can't wring every single drop of meaning out of every single competing piece of information or evidence, because there is just too much of it. When we have a broader understanding of the space that we are operating in and the precepts that are factually true, we are able to make better judgments about who is trustworthy, who is worth listening to, what message they are pushing, and whether it corresponds with reality.

Good luck. I'm sure you'll continue to think about this and take the steps that you feel are best. It is all any of us can do.