#because in real life a lot of people do think of optimism as the inherently naiver choice that people are supposed to outgrow

[thegodofkhaosinkarnate]

Currently thinking about my character (who is technically just an au version of a public domain character but shh), who goes through the story being the designated Squishy Weak Human. A medic, a healer, constantly getting kidnapped by bad guys, being talked over and babied and patronized. "We need to protect you, you're fragile and weak, you're human- which means you can't protect yourself."

And imagining the exact scene where she finally loses it and uses ALL of her power at once. Decimating the space in a show of raw unfiltered power, screaming her lungs out as light and heat coalesce into horrid destruction. Everyone else watching in horror as she razes the earth and crushes buildings, clouds of dust exploding into debris. Destruction, fear, the most violent among them standing stock still in horror as he watches her great work unfold. And then it ends, and everyone stands up realizing that even though the space around them has been utterly destroyed, not a single person was hurt.

And the collective moment of "Oh. Oh, this was intentional. This was a choice."

Anyways all that to say I like characters who choose to be kind, gentle, and merciful. I like characters who are peaceful by choice, not nature, and who could revoke that choice at any point if they wanted to. They won't. But they could.

[dysthoepiadaily]

Could you tell us some about Phil’s vedic astrology?

So, a bit of a difficult question, because I do better with specifics... By that, I mean, when it came to Dan's chart, I was looking solely at his branding, and his fame, and that was the point. With Phil, I'm not sure what exactly it is that people would like me to talk about. A specific subject would be good to analyse, perhaps.

That said, if I look at Phil's chart, certain things do pop out to me, and those are interesting... So, lets discuss Phil's status as a niche icon, I think, because that is what his entire chart points to... This post is going to be even more technical than Dan's chart, because with Dan, I was only looking at Dan's branding, and the one single placement that impacted it (a lot I left out in that essay bc I could go on forever). Meanwhile, Phil's chart has more things going on, and I can't point to one single placement for one subject...

Once more, a disclaimer about how I'm uninterested in discussing whether astrology is real or not, and I'm mostly looking at the patterns and pointing out what could be coincidences.

So, Phil's first house contains Saturn and Venus, in the sign of Scorpio. These planets don't generally tend to do very well in the first house, because both of these planets are inherently related to those outside of you. As in, Saturn relates to society and community, while Venus relates to lovers and partners. These planets are friendly to each other as well, because Saturn exalts in Libra, which is ruled by Venus.

In a sense, Phil's chart is very Saturn led, with his Moon, Mercury, and Sun in the sign of Capricorn, and Jupiter in Aquarius (both signs ruled by Saturn). His Saturn is ruled by Mars in pisces, which is ruled by Jupiter, and his Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter sort of loop back to each other, making these influences strongest in his chart.

Saturn and Mars are malefic planets, both related to struggles and pain, so Phil has an extremely high tolerance for a lot of the problematic things that occur in his life. Because Jupiter, the planet of wisdom and optimism is also involved in this loop, he tends to take hardships as lessons, and tends to zoom past them.

Saturn is related to people who are marginalized, outcast, and somehow not accepted by the rest of society. A lot of times, it can indicate being part of a community that is somehow ostracized. The gay community is one of these communities. In the modern world, Saturn often presents as extremely alternative.

Saturn is often associated with ugliness in the ancient texts, but almost every beauty icon in the modern world has very strong Saturn placements. So, that is something that should be taken with a pinch of salt. What is more accurate to say is that Saturn gives people an unconventional look, which can be shocking to the eyes. They have something to offer that the rest of the world does not, something different. They tend to be trendsetters in their field, people who change the game.

Something I find very interesting that Phil has said is that he never related to the emo look, but that he had the emo look because he wanted to attract emo boys. This relates very much to his Saturn and Venus in the first house. I personally would interpret Venus in first house as him being attracted to people who he relates to, but because of Saturn (which numbs down ego and personal emotion, because it is about the other), he wasn't fully able to feel the way he felt.

Phil's first house is ruled by Mars in Pisces, in the 5th house, which is sitting with Rahu. This particular placement feels more to him like him, than other placements, because a Martian sign in first house is quite good. This makes him someone who gets attention (rahu) for his creativity (5th house). Phil's Rahu mahadasha (great rahu phase) was from 1993 to 2011. During this time is when I suspect baby Phil's habit of lying for attention really came into the picture, like when he lied about having a very cool twin brother (Rahu rules glamour and fakeness, which, in babies, can come across as lying to look more glamourous).

Rahu gives a sort of temporary fame and virality, and the fame given by Rahu doesn't usually last for too long. However, there is a way that fame can last for a longer time, and that is through Saturn, the planet of time, community, and public reputation.

I'm going to guess that 2004 to 2005 (his ketu antardasha, sub ketu phase within the greater rahu phase) was a difficult time for Phil, because he lost a lot of what he built, maybe he was exposed in a way he didn't want to be, but it was also a time when he learnt to be more true to himself, which is something that he took with him when his next phase of life (venus antardasha) started. I suspect this was the time when he was outed to his friends.

Phil's Venus antardasha was from 2005 to 2008, which is around the time where he established his aesthetic, based on what he was attracted to. To actually feel like himself, Phil always will have to figure out what he's attracted to, and become that person. When he does this, he finds that the kind of people who he wanted in his life were just flocking to him without him doing anything about it.

Phil made his youtube account during his Venus antardasha, and his Venus is sitting with Saturn, their qualities intermingling. Anything that he does in pursuit of love or relationships is likely to last for a long time for Phil. He won't be able to do casual relationships, whether with people, or with work, they'll fizzle out almost immediately unless its meant to last.

Saturn's downside, to a large extent, comes from the fact that... People with strong Saturn associated with the self, are often not treated like full people, but rather, as icons. A lot of times, because Saturn is such a stoic planet, people do not feel as attached to Saturn. Parasociality is hard to build with a planet like Saturn. Saturn tends to show up most as a planet that rules servants. It is associated with fame, because, in many ways, celebrities provide a service to society, through sharing their talent.

Saturn as a planet of service is interesting, because something that Phil would do with his fame as a young youtuber was to be a strong part of the community, collaborate a lot, and even with youtubers who weren't as big a deal as he was. Showing off his creativity with his videos is one aspect, but another, bigger aspect, was the community he was part of, and he was sort of a pillar in that community. He would encourage other youtubers, and give them exposure (like he did with Dan, LOL).

However, Saturn becomes such a part of the community that, outside of their field of interest (where they garner a LOT of respect and appreciation), they tend to become just another face in the crowd. A lot of what is special about them is taken away by the masses they serve, and there usually isn't enough personality left to keep an audience hooked. The 7 second challenge, and the toilet tag are prime examples of this, kind of. Popular concepts invented by Phil, but taken by so many people that it can't be traced back to him.

Something to think about is that with Phil, it's not JUST that he is creative. I mean, of course he is, but actually, his bigger strength is timing, and keeping up with the current trends, and the need of the hour. His Rahu in 5th house is very prominent, and is what makes him creative, however, his real strength is Ketu in the 11th house of community, which gives him a sort of intuition with what the audience will be most receptive to. 11th house is also associated with Saturn, btw.

Saturn does create icons, but it creates niche icons. Icons to people in the know, sort of. The inspiration for a lot of those people who gain much more popularity than they do. To gain mainstream popularity, what you need is not just Saturn, but strong Sun (which is being EXTREMELY good at doing something conventional) or strong Moon (very good branding, gets the audience invested in you as a person). Phil has a weaker Moon, and an okay Sun, however, Dan has a very very strong Moon. So, a lot of the mainstream flowers that Phil gets in the public are also due to Dan standing up for him in the public eye.

Right now, Phil is not in his icon era (maybe a bit. His Mars and Rahu antardasha will be going from 2024 to 2027, and that will make him go viral A LOT). He was from 1993 to 2011 (yeah, he was an iconic baby, ig. His creativity made him very popular with people who knew him), and will be again in 2027 (Saturn Mahadasha, where he will be known more for himself, and maybe for his relationship. which is lowkey the same thing to him).

Right now, he is in his Jupiter mahadasha, which is Jupiter in Aquarius, in 4th house. Jupiter gives wisdom and luck, but doesn't really relate to fame in the same way, and in the 4H, it gives a blessed home life. Unfortunately, his Jupiter and 4H is the sign of Aquarius, which relates heavily to the public, just as Saturn does. Not the best sign for a house that is about comfort, home, and emotional security. During his Jupiter Mahadasha, Phil has dealt a lot with the concept of the public, the private life, striking that balance, and creating his boundaries. The public feels entitled to his private life, and they show it. Phil cannot be away from the public life, the way Dan sometimes can, and he knows it. But, navigating his private life along with his work is something he's been dealing with, and will be dealing with until 2027.

[monstersinthecosmos]

okay I wanna talk about how Marius & Lestat are such similar people both in the sense of their personalities & behaviors but also the way they were turned and I keep coming back to this quote in BCtu:

So let me begin the narrative on a night when Marius, the ancient Roman Child of the Millennia, in a fit of pique became impatient with what he referred to as my “nauseating buoyancy and optimism” about the world in general.

I keep coming back to the thought that something divides them here, the big thing that they DON'T share is the optimism. Marius finds it nauseating! Part of this is like, the 1800 year age gap, so I always have to wonder like what that does to him and ask if Lestat will have calmed down even a little by the time he's that age. But it's hard to know how much is innate, and how much is locked in place by the Blood anyway, and how capable any of them are of real change. But I think it has a lot to do with the way they were each turned, and the immediate aftermath, and how Marius's life was basically instantly burdened with something enormous that caused him pain for 2,000 years. It feels more like, although they have so much in common, Marius is essentially sort of a pessimist, even though he likes to pretend he isn't.

“Lestat, you are the damnedest creature! Yes, a brat prince.” Slowly, he reinvoked every detail of Lestat’s face and form. The ice-blue eyes, darkening with laughter; the generous smile; the way the eyebrows came together in a boyish scowl; the sudden flares of high spirits and blasphemous humor. Even the catlike poise of the body he could envisage. So uncommon in a man of muscular build. Such strength, always such strength and such irrepressible optimism.

Anyway I bring it up because I was thinking a lot about how Marius ALSO has a drive for creative expression, but tends to spend his entire immortal life loathing his nature and feeling like he isn't allowed to be a part of the human world. Like this part about how he destroys all of his writing:

But then there came nights when I thought that everything I'd written was useless. After all, what was the purpose? I could not enter these descriptions, these observations, these poems, these essays, into the mortal world! They were contaminated in that they came from a blood drinker, a monster who slew humans for his own survival. There was no place for the poetry or history which had come from a greedy mind and heart. And so I began to destroy not only my fresh writings, but even the old essays which I had written in Antioch in the past. I took the scrolls out of the chests one by one and burnt them as I had burnt the records of my family. Or I merely kept them, locked up tight, and away from my eyes, so that nothing I'd written could spark in me anything new. It was a great crisis of the soul.

And this part about his paintings:

Always, there was that sense of familiarity - that I had seen this garden that I had known it long before I was allowed by Akasha to drink her blood. I had seen the stone benches in it, I had seen the fountains. I couldn't shake the sensations of being in it as I painted, so strong was the feeling. I'm not sure it aided me in my work. Perhaps it hurt. But as I gained skill as a painter, and I did indeed gain skill, other aspects of the work disturbed me. I was convinced that there was something unnatural in it, something inherently ghastly in the manner with which I drew human figures so nearly perfectly, something unnatural in the way I made the colors so unusually bright, and added so many fierce little details. I was particularly repelled by my penchant for decorative details. As much as I was driven to do this work, I hated it. I composed whole gardens of lovely mythic creatures only to rub them out. Sometimes I painted so fast that I exhausted myself, and fell down on the floor of the shrine, spending the paralytic sleep of the whole day there, helpless, rather than going to my secret resting place - my coffin - which was hidden not far from my house. We are monsters, that is what I thought whenever I painted or looked on my own painting, and that's what I think now. Never mind that I want to go on existing. We are unnatural. We are witnesses with both too much and too little feeling. And as I thought these things, I had before me the mute witnesses, Akasha and Enkil. What did it matter to them what I did?

But it's still something he feels he NEEDS to do, he has to appease his creative drive so that he can survive.

But now I took stock of them from my point of view not as Marius the rich man who can have whatever he wishes, but as Marius the monster painter who had rendered Pandora twenty-one times on the four walls of Akasha's shrine. I saw suddenly how inferior were these paintings, how rigid and pallid the goddesses and nymphs who peopled this world of my study, and quickly I woke my day slaves and told them that they must have everything covered over with fresh paint the following day. Also an entire supply of the best paints must be purchased and brought to the house. Never mind how the walls were to be redecorated. Leave that to me. Cover up all that was there. They were used to my eccentricities, and after making certain that they understood me, they went back to their sleep. I didn't know what I meant to do, except I felt driven to make pictures, and I felt if I can cling to that, if I can do that, then I can go on. My misery deepened.

This was a lot to copy & paste, apologies! But all of this stuck out to me as I've been thinking about the ways Marius and Lestat are both creative people who need to make things. With Lestat it was his music, and then his books. ((Also a sidenote but there were so many of Anne's journal entries that I saw at Tulane where she kept saying things like "I need to write stories" !)) Imagine if he'd felt Marius's shame and pessimism and had the foresight to destroy his work or to keep it private. And imagine if Marius's manic creative episodes had happened in the 1980s when it was instantly global and breaching containment to the detriment of vampire kind!

At this point in the book Marius is around 300 years old, so not that far off from Lestat. But he's still young and raw and emotionally dysregulated ! It's just fascinating that Lestat lived in a time where he couldn't just undo what he created.

[muthaz-rapapa]

Otona Precure '23: The Sequel We ACTUALLY Deserve

Let's not mince words.

Otona Precure wasn't just fantastic, it puts every reboot or sequel of an established series to shame.

Because yea, it's primarily aimed at an older audience alright but the issues and the themes discussed in the story are relatable and relevant to everyone's interests, regardless of age.

That reality is much harsher than we think it is, more than we can comprehend. That the world will never be perfect like we want it to be.

But also that, because we're on this planet right now at this very moment, we can't just sit around and resign ourselves to not do anything as situations continue to worsen.

Pollution, climate change, toxic society, war.

The show did not shy away from addressing these topics but what's even more notable is it pointing out that people, humans, are the source of them all.

And I appreciate the honesty of that statement because yes, frankly, we are the problem.

People are selfish. We indulge too much in ourselves, our own egos, that we are blinded to the welfare of others. We are also lazy and discriminating and even those who say we'd like things to be better often give up too easily because searching for a solution is too hard and daunting.

Mankind is the shittiest species to walk upon this earth and no one's gonna argue on that.

But does that make everyone inherently bad though?

No, of course not.

We're flawed beings but we're also capable of learning. We're capable of understanding and compassion. There are many among us who do try our best to make this world a kinder and more beautiful place to live in.

But as the finale shows, it cannot only be these few people (like Precure) to do all the hauling and pushing. Everybody has to pitch in. Everybody has to contribute for a better world to be possible.

And that doesn't mean tackling a conflict that's a lot bigger than you can handle. That doesn't mean you have to go at it all alone.

It means that you have to change the way you are, change the way you do things to get the ball rolling. Only by changing yourself first that you can begin to change your surroundings, not the other way around.

It's only through the collective effort of everyone wanting to change for the better that we can protect what we love and create the future that we envision.

Precure is meant to inspire that will to act which is best exemplified in Nozomi. Cure Dream, the Precure of Hope.

Nozomi stands out among the many lead Cures we've had over the years in the quality of leadership she displays as the head of her own team.

She is not the brightest nor sharpest person in any group but damn, does that girl woman never give up.

Not even when she pushes herself to the brink that she falls unconscious from fatigue several times did she ever consider the thought of giving up.

And that's exactly what makes her such a strong and effective leader.

It's not because she's been put into that position so she's only functioning as one.

It's because she inspires everyone around her to become the leaders of their own lives which would then repeatedly bring about the butterfly effect in people beyond their own circle.

Additionally, we must applaud at how well the themes of adulthood and personal struggle have been explored. Look at the girls! Look at how much they've grown, how much they've progressed from the time they were still just middle schoolers dreaming of what they want to be in the future.

(GODDAMNIT, MILK BECAME THE PRIME MINISTER OF HER HOME COUNTRY, I'M STILL NOT OVER THAT AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!)

They've accomplished so much and you can't help but be incredibly proud of how far they've come on their individual journeys.

But now that they're adults, they also realize just how difficult it is to keep the optimism they had when they were kids. Things don't always go the way you want them to. Real life is stressful and exhausting and the accumulation of all those negative feelings of helplessness is enough to send anyone into depression.

As an adult, you're constantly asking yourself "is it really worth it?" because you don't want to betray the hopes you had as a child but sometimes, it's just too hard that all you want to do is give up.

...and that's okay if you need to for a while.

Take a break, go talk to someone you can trust if you feel you've really hit rock bottom.

Find a secure, safe space to cry it all out if you have to.

It's okay to not be okay all the time.

Because that's pretty much what adulthood is.

Being an adult is not about doing everything but knowing you can't do everything and telling yourself that's okay. Because you're already doing everything you can. Your best is good enough.

It's good enough for one person. Nobody's asking you to save the world or become a magical girl to fight off monsters or resolve a major crisis with a miracle answer.

You just need to do your part of the whole in the best way you can. That's all.

And I believe Bell knows that as well.

She knows that just because today's worst was averted, it doesn't mean we're out of the doom radar yet. Because she's right. Humans still can't be trusted as proven by that after-credits scene. There are still plenty of jerks out there who don't give a damn about how much harm they're adding to the world.

But she also knows that as long as there is someone like Precure to do their part, to yell at those jerks to pick up their trash, then maybe, maybe, not all hope is lost just yet.

And so she leaves with the words "I'll be waiting for you in the future", hoping that what the Cures have taught her to believe won't betray her when that time comes.

That said, for us longtime fans of the series, Otona Precure is also a love letter.

A project of appreciation to us for the past 20 years of love and support we've given this franchise.

And I'd say we got what we wanted because before the announcement of this spin-off, I didn't think Toei would ever care to redeem Yes! 5 Precure on how badly it performed during its two seasons run.

Yet here we are and even 100 times better than the original.

They cut out all the fillers which was the primary flaw of those two seasons and focused entirely on the characters. The girls and the expansion of their story arcs. The stuff we actually want to see.

Moreover, the writers did a very great job of showing how everyone has matured. For example, Rin and Karen outgrew their bickering and even the uncalled for vitriol that Kurumi always directed at Nozomi is nowhere to be found.

Seriously! I laughed so hard when Kurumi switched the target of her criticism from Nozomi to Coco. I don't think we've ever seen her this concerned and sympathetic towards Nozomi to the point that she didn't even hesitate to yell at her superior to "cut it with your responsibilities crap and go comfort your lonely girlfriend, you idiot king!"

🤣🤣🤣🤣

Everyone is just incredibly supportive of each other and that's so heartwarming.

I also personally loved how they dealt with Komachi's episode, which introduced a sort of sub-theme of one's love for their hometown.

Komachi has always aspired to become a writer and it would've been fine to go down the route of getting her out of her slump.

But having Komachi put in effort for her community, learn about the history of her town, and becoming determined to defend it after her strengthened appreciation fit with the overarching theme and her personality so much better.

The inclusion of Splash Star into this story was awesome, too.

If I can be honest, I don't think Saki and Mai would've done as well as Otona Precure if they had 12 episodes only to themselves (including Michiru and Kaoru, btw). So by giving them a fair amount of screentime next to the Yes!5 girls, the show just felt more complete with their conclusions.

They're still chasing their respective dreams, had their relationship troubles (and Saki got engaged to her boyfriend/fiance who seems like a very good guy judging by how he's supportive of her going to Luxembourg, ugh so happy for her!) and career doubts but are still as close as ever which allowed them to pull through in the end.

Wonderful.

Finally, let's all agree that no anniversary season is complete unless proper spotlight is given to the dai-senpai Precure, FutariWa.

Maybe that's why 10th anniversary was such a dud?

They didn't get as much screentime as they did during the 15th anniversary (which included two episodes in Hugtto and sharing the main lead role with Hana/Cure Yell in the All Stars movie) but they still made a grand entrance in the penultimate ep of Otona Precure and kicked absolute ass in the finale and that's really all that matters.

So good job, Toei!

And ok, finally finally, NozoCoco officially got 💖MARRIED💖

Romance is not a vital aspect of Precure nor does it ever have to be because focusing on friendship and teamwork is still the most important aspect when it comes to this series...

But only a stupid numbskull would say Coco is unnecessary to Nozomi's happiness because he's the biggest reason she was able to become who she is today. The fact that she even tells him, right after she woke up from her coma, that she needs him to truly be happy is a proof of how irreplaceable he is to her.

She doesn't ask him to be with her because she needs a man. She wants him to marry her because he brings out the best in her. Because he is the one person who can understand her better than anyone else can and the one person whom she wants to share the rest of her life with.

Remember that Nozomi was inspired by Coco. She became Precure, became Cure Dream, because she met him. She aspired to become a teacher because of him. The butterfly effect for her began with him.

For them to overcome all these obstacles to their relationship and promise to be there for one another, through all the good and bad...it's the fulfillment of a dream they both deserve.

And the perfect ending to Yes! 5 Precure.

So congratulations to Yes!5 and Splash Star on an amazing sequel.

Congratulations to Precure for these precious 20 years you've given us.

Here's hoping to more successful years ahead.

See you in the new year!

[acti-veg]

Meat eaters make me really sad :(

The way they can excuse needless slaughter just because it's "natural". (Despite all the other options that exist, despite the fact that humans, in large, don't NEED meat).

The way they refuse to take into consideration the feelings of anyone who's not a human.

I don't know. I want to believe that the world is fundamentally good, that there's no bad people only bad systems, but that's difficult when I see the level cruelty and violence that most people are willing to excuse and even promote. All because it tastes good to them.

I don't know how to reconcile my want to be optimistic with the grim reality that we live in.

(Sorry for dumping this into your inbox. I didn't know where else to put it. Feel free to ignore. Just know your posts bring me a lot of comfort)

I've said this before, but optimism is not the result of seeing a lot of good people in the world, it's choosing to see the good despite all the bad. I think that evil is widespread, normal and as Hannah Arendt called it, evil is banal.

Humans are capable of perpetrating or at least ignoring real evils, especially when they're within systems that encourage them to conform. We have seen this throughout history, the fact that almost everyone seems more or less fine with the enormous suffering inflicting on bilions of animals is thoroughly unsurprising when viewed in that context. It doesn't mean that humans are inherently evil, it just means that evil is often the norm, and people generally conform to norms.

Kee your eyes open to the grim reality we live in, but look for the good as well. It is terrible that society at large is okay with killing animals for profit, but it is also truly remarkable that so many people do reject this global system of speciesism and animal exploitation, despite the propoganda, despite the misinformation, despite the social, political and economic pressure to conform.

That millions of people all over the world, from different political, social, religious and economic backgrounds, actively choose to sacrifice things they enjoy despite knowing that life will be more difficult, that it'll be largely thankless, that they'll be mocked, shunned and excluded for doing so - I think that is a wonderful thing.

[aesterea]

I fell in love for the first time. I think it'll tear me apart because that's what it did to my parents, but I think I'll let it

hi anon 💙

i’m sorry i took so long to respond to this. i had to spend a long time thinking about it. i don't know how much you really wanted from me, but you have my thoughts here under the cut nonetheless. 

first, i want to say i’m so happy for you! i think falling in love is one of the best, most wonderful things in life—for the feeling of it and for all the doors it opens. the first time especially, it cracks us open. it introduces us to new parts of ourselves and changes the way we see the world. i think that’s why it’s so terrifying; it asks us to transform. 

there’s so much vulnerability required in that process. and we know it doesn't always (or often) go well. those of us who grew up with examples of particularly bad relationships tend to be especially wary. 

when i was younger, i fully believed love was some kind of delusion that drove people to behave stupidly, and that all romantic relationships were hurtling toward some terrible end—the utter destruction of those involved, some miserable facade of companionship that left them feeling hollow, or (at best) a disenchantment that eventually freed them from the delusion. i wasn’t afraid of falling in love so much as i rejected it… still, when it happened… everything i thought i knew—about life and about myself—exploded like a star.

you sent such a short message, but it reminds me so much of myself. “i think it’ll tear me apart” and “i think i’ll let it.” i want to reach out and hug you, and i want to sit with you for six hours talking over hot chocolate. there's so much i wish i could say to my younger self, but at least i can share some of it with you, and i know we’re different people and your path will be different from mine, but maybe it can help you.

i think the worst mistake i ever made was to cross my own boundaries. i don’t think there’s any chance of overstating how much hope is involved when you fall for someone. the optimism and idealism (and the rarely-mentioned boost in courage) inherent in the experience makes us more willing to risk pain (longing, loss, betrayal…). i also don't think there’s any chance of real love without a willingness to get hurt, and all important relationships involve difficult emotions. but i have this dangerous tendency of thinking, “love is so precious, and now that i have it, i’ll do anything to make it work.” or even, “i love you so much, i’ll forgive anything if we can keep trying to work together.” that stubbornness and desperation and fear of loss… it’s poisonous. i’ve been hurt in a lot of ways, but the worst heartbreak did not come from loss or betrayal or even someone treating me badly—it was the sense that i had betrayed myself. healing is so much harder when you're wondering if you can trust yourself, because no matter how things go, you're the one who has to get you through.

maybe you’ll get hurt. we always run that risk. maybe you’ll be happier than you ever knew was possible. we just don't know! but you must be able to trust yourself to set and enforce boundaries, and if you find that your relationship is damaging to you, then you must be willing to walk away. 

i don’t meant to scare you or preach to you or anything. if this isn't what you wanted, i hope you will forgive me. i’m 22 years old and still figuring it out—i certainly have no great wisdom to share. it’s just… “i think i’ll let it.” your words resonate so deeply within me, it feels wrong not to offer you what i’ve learned. what i’m learning. 

i don't want to discourage you at all from embracing all the magic of the experience. the warm, happy glow, the lightness and the weight, how the world becomes more beautiful around you. feeling so safe, you want to sink down, curl up, and sleep inside the feeling. at the same time, feeling so happy, giddy, sparkly, all you want to do is laugh and dance. finally understanding all those songs and books and movies, and marveling at all the feelings you didn't think you’d ever feel, didn’t know you could feel, and suddenly becoming aware of how much the world has to offer you… there is nothing quite like this. 

[art-of-manliness]

5 Lessons From the Iron

Back in 2015, I started weightlifting seriously.  Over eight years of training, I was able to get strong. But more importantly, I discovered a hobby that brought me immense satisfaction.  While I don’t barbell train like I used to, I still religiously lift weights.  During my eight years of serious training, I’ve learned some important life lessons from the iron.  Below, I share five of them. 1. Success Comes From a Long Obedience in the Same Direction When people decide to get serious with exercise, they tend to focus on the minutiae of their new regimen. People spend a lot of time looking for the right program and the right equipment. They think they’ll see incredible gains if they find the optimal set and rep range.  But there’s something just as, if not more important, than the training program you choose: Being consistent with it for months and even years.  How did I deadlift 600 pounds? I trained consistently for six years. Sure, my programming changed during that time, but the thing that didn’t change was me going down to my garage four times a week to train.  The necessity of consistency applies to every other endeavor in life.  I’ve used the consistency principle to lose 30 pounds this year. I didn’t do any crash dieting. I just gradually reduced my calories and stuck to my macro target almost every day for eight months. That’s it.  When people ask me for advice about their online business, they often ask me about the tools and tricks Kate and I use that helped us get AoM to where it is today.  Keeping up with the latest trends in technology, marketing, and social media hasn’t been nearly as important as simply sticking to our publishing schedule; for coming up on sixteen years now, we’ve published several pieces of content nearly every single week. AoM isn’t slick, flashy, or even particularly cool, but it is consistent.  As Nietzsche put it, “everything of the nature of freedom, elegance, boldness . . . and masterly certainty”; everything to do with “virtue, art, music, dancing, reason, spirituality”; everything “that is transfiguring,” that makes “life worth living,” is premised on one thing: A “long obedience in the same direction.” The trick is figuring out ways to stay consistent over the long haul.  When it comes to exercising, we’ve written about how to work out while you’re on vacation, sick, or simply don’t feel like it. There’s plenty of good advice there, and I think it carries over to other parts of life, too.  But the real secret for staying consistent over the long haul is that . . . 2. You Got to Have Ganas Ganas is Spanish for desire.  I’ve written about the centrality of ganas��in finding success in whatever you do. Most of the things I’ve achieved in life were because I really wanted to accomplish those things. I had ganas for those goals. A big reason I was able to deadlift 600 pounds is that I really, really wanted to deadlift 600 lbs. That strong desire was what compelled me to rarely miss a workout for four years. My coach could give me programming and offer corrections on technique, but he couldn’t make me want to go after a 600-lb deadlift. I had to have the desire myself. Discipline is really harped on these days as the key to success.  Discipline is one way to achieve the consistency that’s essential to reaching your goals.  But constantly exercising self-control is exhausting.  A better way to stay consistent is to operate with inherent motivation — to enjoy the thing you’re doing so that you want to do the thing that will lead to success.  What William George Jordan said about duty applies to discipline as well: Duty is a hard, mechanical process for making men do things that love would make easy. It is a poor understudy to love. It is not a high enough motive with which to inspire humanity. Duty is the body to which love is the soul. Love, in the divine alchemy of life, transmutes all duties into privileges, all responsibilities into joys. I loved going for big PRs, which is why I could be… http://dlvr.it/T0301h

[circulars-reasoning]

If I recall correctly, you said you had created alters, right? If so, I was wondering how it happened and how they're doing right now. I'm trying to do a bit of research on it to help out a specific alter in our system, but to no avail. We're trying to do this as safely as possible.

Right now, they’re doing well, but when they first formed, it was horrific for them and us. Trauma was… not great! I think it might be time to expand on their stories actually. Too many people in syscourse assume they know things about my alters, and the last time I opened up about them, folks came into my inbox to tell me I was wrong about my experiences.

Tw for suicidal ideation, harassment, depression, and alter death.

Debra:

She was our first created alter, and the one we actually consciously purposefully created. In terms of us having a created alter, she’s probably the one who counts — LED’s experience is closer to a regular traumatic split, but I’ll get to him later.

Context for this time of my life: We were in high school. We had never heard of DID, we were being actively abused on two fronts (parental abuse and COCSA), and the only people who we felt understood us were folks much older than me online who I talked to on a daily basis. I thought my alters were just imaginary friends to represent my emotions. The voices I heard were just my emotions and feelings, very loudly, and I was imagining those emotions as people — like Inside Out!! And this was normal, my peer abuser told me. Yay! (Oof.)

Wade was our main fronter at home. He held onto a lot of our depression and dealt with the brunt of the current abuse from our parents. He was also dealing with gender issues and just generally was struggling. We started getting more and more suicidal and depressed, and our systems only way of handling that emotion was repression (via Numb’s emotional blocking or Sierra’s toxic optimism).

Finally, one night, Wade got the closest he ever got to self harm. It was nothing, really - the mark of it was gone within an hour - but it panicked him, and he reached out to our friend at the time.

This friend comforted him and told him that he needed to manage his depression somehow. We knew we couldn’t get therapy, so he suggested something he’d heard of before, about parts therapy. AKA, IFS. “Your depression is a part of you. What you need to do is talk to it. Imagine a person; someone who is all of those depressing thoughts. And talk to that person; why do they treat you that way?”

Those aren’t direct quotes. In all actuality, all of this is so blurry. I was so fucked up and stressed, it’s not hard to know I split. But the thing is, Debra’s split was entirely different than any other split I’ve had. All of my other alters, it was… one second they’re not there, the next they are.

Debra didn’t do that. When Wade imagined someone to talk to, it wasn’t in our innerworld. It was in a different space, where we imagine our thoughts happening. Deb was entirely imaginary, and she seemed to say things as I thought them. Each negative thought I had was suddenly her saying them. (Sometimes, it seemed almost as if she would say the thought before I had it.) For every night for a week, they talked — though, it was more Debra talking and us listening and feeling worse about ourselves.

That first conversation, I remember Wade feeling better — empty, but not suicidal. After imagining Debra for that first time, Wade only felt non-suicidal if she was talking to him. Sometimes that didn’t even help, because really, she was just imagined — we were planning her thoughts. Until, suddenly, we weren’t anymore.

Side note: Deb is the first marked hallucination we have had. We were walking home from the bus stop, which was always inherently dissociative for us, and we looked over at our house. Out of the corner of our eyes, we saw Deb, floating around the cars parked on the road. We panicked at that, but a second later, she was gone. We believed magic was real for a solid day after that, and that our imagination was coming to real life.

After that week, Debra was autonomous. She started to slip out of the void and into our innerworld. She started to harass Wade in a living hell 24/7, instead of from 11pm to whenever Wade finally passed out at night. And she hated a lot of us. She expressed that we should all kill ourselves so she could take over, because she was so much better than the rest of us. It was around this time that Wade made his trauma room in our innerworld and ceased fronting as often.

It only ended when Numb, fed up with her and panicked from even him feeling the suicidal ideation, killed her. Protector killing the persecutor, how classic. He crushed her to death innerworld.

Deb didn’t make a reappearance until college, when she emerged from dormancy. But in the meantime, there are two blank years of my life after we killed Debra. I have so few memories from those years, I could count them on my hands. Clearly, killing her destabilized us, but if we hadn’t, I have no doubt I wouldn’t be alive today. She was succeeding in her goals, and it sounded logical to us at the time. We’ve worked hard to make peace with what happened.

LED:

College. We’re now self dx’d as having DID. We’re no longer around our peer abuser, and in fact had ‘broken up’ with her after she ‘crossed a line’. I was now an hour away from my parents (though I had to call them each night and drive home each weekend). I was living with my then-roommate-now-fiancé and I was best friends with the only person in my life who knew I had DID, who lived in a different dorm. We were convinced Rice was a host by people online, and we were in pro-endo spaces (though had yet to strongly participate in syscoruse spaces).

Deb came back. At the time, I was in a nice Singlet Era Lite(tm) — aka, Rice fronted almost constantly, until she would collapse and meltdown and then we would rapid switch for the next few days, only for Rice to power back to front. It was unstable, unhealthy, and an incredible burden on Rice (one she is still recovering from to this day). Until, one night (at 3am), Rice was on the verge of a mental collapse again. She was down on herself, convinced she was a failure.

And then Deb was there, telling her she was, telling her how worthless she was, and altogether making everything harder.

That summer, Deb would take to harassing Rice, in particular. We had a flawed idea from the systems we spoke to that Rice was the “original core identity” and that the goal of DID healing was to integrate* those identities into one. She wanted Rice to feel out of control, so Deb could take over as host. If she could just become the original identity somehow, then we could fuse and just be perfect like her.

The best way she could think to make Rice no longer be in control? Make Rice split. Force a split, make Rice create someone, just like how we’d made Deb, and make Rice realize she was pathetic.

So, the nightly torture began. No sleep until 3am most nights, passive influence of suicidal ideation, near constant whispering about our mistakes. And, long story short, one night it worked.

Rice finally had enough, and completely went dormant in her room. And, in her place, was LED. Not visualized like Deb had been, but planned by Deb, and made specifically to counteract her. Debra is a being of darkness and shadow; LED’s name is literally Light Emitting Diode. Debra is an ageless demon; LED is a 10 year old ray of sunshine.

Only… Debra came for him, said hello, and. Well. LED took one look at her, screamed so loud I thought it happened in real life, and shattered. Broke apart into a million pieces and went immediately dormant.

This shocked Debra enough to actually break through to her at least. Damage was done, though. A new split and two dormancies in one night. Deb retreated from the front and left everyone else to clean up the mess while she watched. Rice remained dormant for a few months, and would only come back for, at most, a few hours at a time before having a breakdown and leaving for, usually, around a half a year. LED didn’t come back for almost a year after that. Debra had a “come to Jesus” talk with our friend who was in the know, and she started helping out some.

Now:

They get along really well! It’s been years and years since those incidents. Deb feels guilt for what she did back then, but everyone’s forgiven her — LED being one of the first. He actually apologized to her for being scared. Goddamn sweet guy.

Both of them have adapted to the system, but needed time to adjust. LED adjusted in dormancy, whereas Debra had to adjust after she returned from dormancy. It was… incredibly unstable for us after Debra’s creation. Our therapist cites that as part of the risk of IFS with DID systems, and how it can lead to increase dissociative barriers. It did for us.

We call both created, because there was purpose behind their splits. Debra was imagined consciously, purposefully, to hold trauma. LED was purposefully made (even if unplanned, visually and personality wise) to make Rice feel worthless (and instead made her feel stronger… after a year or so). We also distinctly call both of them created traumagenic alters.

Whew. That was a long one. I’m gonna to rest after that…

[shellyswirlz]

I saw your post on anti-shroomy and anger. I don't know you much, I never will, but if you care to listen or something, I can give you some words on my part. Ignore these if you want, if anything I say angers you in any way I'm so so sorry in advance and I apologize.

People say that anger is always controllable. That's not how everyone works. People can't really separate one image of you from another. By what I'm told, I feel like some people just treat you like a walking time bomb then an actual person. But, your anger is not inherently a bad thing. It's a part of you that's angry at the world because that's the part that loves you the most, it knows that it wasn't fair enough to you or to anyone else. It wants the treatment you deserve to have. You lash out at people you consider 'bad', like family or the internet strangers you said before. I know I shouldn't be making comparisons of this sort, but it sounds to me that these people in your life are your 'demons'. I don't have background knowledge, but sometimes people get mad at their family for a lot of things. You just don't see it as often because family is harder to get angry at. To lash out at, because they've been with you your whole life. I get that you want it to stop. You don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, either. I'd suggest therapy, but that record is broken again and again, so I'm going to suggest alternatives.

try keeping an 'anger journal'. Write what makes you angry in a situation. Write and vent in it, draw, rip it, I don't care. After you've finished the journal, you could burn it. Burn it and watch your anger burn away, in a sense.

Or sometimes you just need to fuck shit up. Something to yell and cry at. It's not socially acceptable, but you need to do it sometimes because everyone experiences their emotions differently.

Again, im sorry If i offended you in any way.

Nono it's ok I understand! You didn't offend me at all... It just feels so uncontrollable to me personally 'cause when I'm angry I'm throwing things around or hitting people even though I really don't actually wanna hurt people.. My nasty behavior just.., doesn't feel like me cause my friends and family know me as this happy cheerful person, but when I lash out it feels like a sudden explosion went on in the house.

My mom is usually saying how she knows I don't mean it and she tries her best to separate my anger from my optimism. She tries her best to help. But I know that my anger is still apart of me because it's an emotion everyone has... 😭

I get what you mean completely. Whenever I'm angry I'm usually playing Fortnite or typing long paragraphs in google docs or in vent/rant channels on Discord so the people I'm mad at can't see. But at the moment after the person made me angry I start to lash out cause I want them to hear my opinion on what I think about them. It feels like I'm unable to stay calm when people insult me or do things I don't like.. And it became a real bad problem.

I might try your therapy suggestion to see if that works...

[crystalelemental]

Did it really have to be all 24 options at once, DeNA?  I feel like this is a Dick Move.  The last few times you did something like this, it was multiple different scouts so you could get a couple options.  Now we have to pick just one?  I don't like it.  And somehow you didn't even include the SC alts, or the recent Summer alts.  So there goes like every high-priority pick I had.  Ugh. Anyway, with so many options, I’m sure plenty of you are wondering who’s worth it.  Here’s my perspective:

Winter Rosa - Has some utility at 3/5 with Hail on entry and her trainer move giving a whole +5 total buffs, albeit to randomized stats.  Her only consistent buff is attack, and she doesn't offer much besides this and Hail support.  Anything below 3/5 is outright bad, and 3/5 is only useful for Summer Steven combos.  Grid expansion when?

Winter Siebold - A lot of people dunk on the guy, but honestly, Scald's burn and Octazooka's accuracy debuff isn't terrible utility.  Natural Hostile Environment is actually great for that burn rate.  It's just that he's not that strong and his utility is a bit awkward and there's someone else who can burn reliably in this very pull that's better in like every way.

Winter Erika - Don't.  All she does is heal, and she's not even that great at it.  Sycamore is outright better than her as a free option.

Winter Skyla - There are better Flying damage dealers.  She's not inherently bad, but Tri Attack isn't the best DPS, most multipliers are inconsistent given her setup, she can't reliably self-buff, and of course there's the issue with Flying Zone being unavailable due to her alt having it.  1/5 really doesn't offer anything either, so like...I can't recommend it.

Winter Leon - Finally, someone legitimately good at 1/5.  Leon's got strong Ice damage, and a solid freeze chance by default on an AoE attack.  The AoE doesn't even penalize his freeze chance because it's a passive skill.  Winter Leon's fairly strong, and flexible in his setup options, but definitely needs support to make it come together.  Still, a very solid 1/5 pick.

Winter Nessa: Not really useful until at least 2/5.  Hail is okay utility, but very little uses it.   1/5 just doesn't offer enough to really stand out compared to Candice.   And at 3/5...her sync nuke is still worse than Candice.  Her DPS is better, and she can have a high flinch rate, which is her real niche.   But there are tons of flinch bots in the game, so like...I don't think she's all that great.

New Year Lance - Hey kids, do you like HYPER BEAM?  Do you like the CRIPPLING INABILITY TO BUFF?  Then boy of boy, is LANCE DRAGONDICK your man!  Good at 1/5 for the raw damage, but woefully dependent on team support, including both special attack/crit buffing, and Rain.  If you don't have SS Kris, you cannot perform optimally with this guy due to lack of Flying Zone or Rain in every other comp.

New Year Lillie - Decent 1/5.  Crit buffing is solid, and evasion buffing is fairly unique.  Applying condition shield off her trainer move is also valuable for Gauntlet, as it stops things like Cresselia from ruining your life.  Leech Life is okay damage for healing, but really wants the 3/5 for best performance.  She also has Team Sync Regen, which is really nice if you're willing to EX her.  Functional, but nothing groundbreaking, I would say.

New Year Volkner - A decent 1/5 pick, due to being some of the highest Electric-type damage in the game, and a special striker for the dreaded Electric-weak Aaron.  But.  If you got Archie this month, Archie's Thunder is stronger, and better off-type.  Archie requires less setup or support.   Archie's move can never miss under rain.  EX Hau is capable if you need F2P, and we're getting two Pikachu for anniversary, at least one of which is confirmed to be about damage and is undoubtedly stronger.  I'm just saying, there is a lot out right this second that's really good for Electric damage, and the guy who got massively struck by the on-type bat DeNA was swinging around in that era isn't my favorite pick here.

New Year Sabrina - Decent 1/5 pick.  Sabrina offers some nice utility, like Endure on a healing move, Condition Shield to block status, and the coveted combination of special attack/crit buffing.  Granted, the crits, as well as the special moves up next effects, are RNG based and improbable, but she can do it 1/5.  The real issue is that everything legitimately nice about her as a unit is 3/5.  That's when you get the MPR, the defenses and speed buffing potential, Recuperation, All Ramped Up.  1/5 Sabrina is fine, but she doesn't shine until 3/5.

Palentine's Dawn - Speaking entirely on her own merits, Dawn is one of, if not the best pick for a 1/5 acquisition.  Her debuffs are fantastic, her buffs are solid and apply healing, and she's not a terrible tech nuker for Gauntlet in a pinch.  But.  Lucian exists.  If you're looking for new utility, and you have Lucian?  There is no need for Dawn.  Lucian is outright better on Growl utility alone, but then has an absurd sync nuke and better self-buffing on top of it.  Personally, I love debuffers and can't get enough, so I advocate for her still, but it's something to be aware of.

Palentine's Serena - Serena's got really interesting and unique utility that...isn't always what you need.  She can buff speed, which is rare for Gauntlet where it's most needed, and can debuff speed to the tune of -2 AoE.  That's really nice for Cakewalk sync nukers like...most of the common gachas.  She even has AoE paralysis, which is pretty handy for Electric-weak Phoebe, and Paralysis is the best status to have in Gauntlet.  Any damage utility only starts to matter at 2/5, but her general utility tools are, I think, fairly under-appreciated.

Palentine's Marnie - Steel Wish is the main draw most go for, but I think that undersells Growl utility, her debuffs giving a nice defensive debuff, and her Team Sharp Entry, the latter two of which activate twice thanks to Mega Evolution.  She has a lot of solid utility 1/5.  Damage is just low, speed is horrendous which isn't great for your other slow steel types, and special stages can and will break you.

Palentine's Bea - Bea sucks.  Only sets Hail on entry, and all her useful tools are 3/5.  She can kinda buff offenses but not crit, and has Potion I guess.  There's a better Potion user with better buffs in this list, there are better offense buffers, Hail isn't super useful and she can only do it once. I do not respect Palentine's Bea, and demand a better Hail support.

Spring May - Spring May's damage is not good, and the amount of needed support is insane.  Setup phase is slow and requires first sync, but even after that needs some accuracy or missing High Jump Kick will kill her.  She really doesn't have anything particularly useful.

Spring Burgh - Legitimately good, I just don't like him.  Defensive buffer that can cap crit and gives the rare accuracy.  Can technically buff offenses but inconsistently.  He's SS Blue, but can reliably cap crit 1/5 and buffs both offenses at the same time.  So better SS Blue.  Yes, I am making this argument.

Summer Steven - The other Ice damage guy.  If given the choice, Leon should pretty much always be the pick.  He's way stronger, and freeze is a strong effect.  But I do like Steven resetting Hail every sync.  It's a funny gimmick for Moltres.  I don't think he's bad, just outclassed.

Summer Lyra - Bad.  Damage too low, speed bad, can't really buff herself, needs both offenses for sync and move damage.  At least she can hit sleep on sync, which is funny.

Summer Gloria - I don't respect this alt.  Her only good option is the Water damage, which is fine, but do you really need Water damage?  There's like a billion Water type damage dealers, and most are better self-setup units.  Also, you’d be using Intelleon, and is that really what you want for yourself?

Summer Marnie - Great self-setup, solid damage, still just not that interesting to me.  I can't say she's bad, and a lot of her good tools exist at 1/5.  She's honestly one of the better picks.  It’s just...if I, personally, we looking for Fairy damage, I’d go P!Serena, because I like utility being baked in.  But Marnie’s objectively stronger, so...

Halloween Acerola - Bad.  Damage is bad, MP limitations make it worse. She can confuse but not as well as Sidney, and Confuse isn't super useful.  She's just not good.

Halloween Hilbert - Good damage, but Double Edge.  1/5 offers one (1) stack of Standfast, which will still get you killed pretty fast.  2/5 gets most good tools, but I do not love recoil strategies.

Halloween Caitlin - My beloved.   She's really good.  Desperately wants 2/5 to be virtually perfect, but isn't terrible 1/5.  Buffs a ton of stats, has healing per sync for the team, and is unstoppable under the "permanent field effects" condition in CS.  But...honestly does really want 2/5.

Halloween Morty - Not bad, actually.   I appreciate status application, even if it’s Burn.  The main thing is his 2/5, where he gets access to Overwhelm and Vigilance.  While his damage needs 3/5 and is still not that impressive, those are interesting defensive tools for a guy who can buff his own defense to cap.

FINAL THOUGHTS Given that most pulls would be 1/5, the ones who work well 1/5 are: Winter Leon, NY!Volkner, P!Dawn, P!Serena, P!Marnie, and S!Marnie.  All of these options either have enough power 1/5 to accomplish their main damaging role, or their primary utility is baked into their moveset and passives.

If you’re willing to candy to 2/5, H!Caitlin is, as always, my pick for the best.  She’s an incredible buff support who gets virtually every tool she wants at that move level.  Spring Burgh gets Vigilance, a Potion MPR, and basically becomes actually useful at 2/5, just like SS Blue.  H!Hilbert also gets pretty much everything of value at 2/5 as well.  W!Nessa becomes an option thanks to Hail MPR turning her into a Moltres counter, though she kinda wants 3/5 for the flinch rate.  P!Serena gets her Inertia sync nuke so she gets better with this.  H!Morty goes from a Burn bot to having Vigilance and Overwhelm 9, which could be useful for an odd sort of tank in Gauntlet.

The ones who become significantly changed with 3/5 are NY!Sabrina, NY!Lillie, and Palentine’s Bea.  NY!Lillie has good tools 1/5, but 3/5 is when she gets to actually play as a respectable sustain tank, which is an entirely different unit in my eyes.  You go from having some niche but fun utility, to actually being a threat.  NY!Sabrina has literally all of her useful tools locked behind 3/5; if you don’t 3/5 her, the tools are okay, but significantly worse off.  Palentine’s Bea gets access to Hail every sync, buffing her own defenses, and double Potion MPR, to actually have an identity she cannot establish at lower move levels.

Pretty much everyone else is a “recommended against.”  But I will make some notes.  NY!Lance is really good at any move level, if properly supported, but note that optimal support requires SS Kris to access needed Rain multipliers and Flying Zone simultaneously without being a bad comp.  Summer Gloria is in a similar boat, not really having much in her grid to help damage output, but having decent enough base damage that all she needs is the significant support for offense buffing.  Lastly, Winter Skyla isn’t entirely terrible, though she needs similar setup help to Gloria.  Her issue of not having access to Flying Zone hurts, but isn’t a death sentence.  But her damage is really low without Rising Tide, and her utility is either ridiculously inconsistent (Tri Attack status), or a dime a dozen (oooh, a 60% flinch rate, never seen that before).

My personal recommendation is either one of the optimal 1/5 picks, or a 3/5 pick.  Caitlin and Burgh are solid 2/5 picks, but generally speaking, those two are at least solid 1/5, while the 3/5 ones are so life-changing that I think they’d take priority.  If you’re looking for a new acquisition, play to what your roster needs in coverage.  Ice, Fairy, and Electric feel like fairly unique offensive typings, so any of the damage dealers are good.  P!Dawn has a powerful debuff set, if made somewhat redundant by Lucian, while Serena’s options are incredibly unique, if not always helpful.  Marnie offers great utility for Steel teams, but often won’t contribute a ton beyond attack debuffs and Zone without higher move levels.

“Which one are you picking?”  God, I don’t know.  I didn’t ask for this to be so hard.  I was hoping there’d be like two more of these after the next datamine and I could pick a couple out, with only minor conflict, but nope.  Guess that’s not happening...

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

i need to know the pros, cons, critical reception, and ethical implications of Big Yudkowsky's "anti-death stance" and what it means.

Pros

* "Anti-death stance" is catchy and catchy things are cool

* "No immortality is without suffering" is a really cool quote

* "There are no ethical constraints on creating life" is cool

* I'm a Bayesian, so

* No more "life is only an illusion, but not an evil one"

This is the first step in the "reboot all of my beliefs" exercise I did earlier this summer, in the wake of reading Shtetl-Optimized.

Cons

* [long list of things where it is not obvious that I am in any sense an expert, some of which overlap with the "pros" section]

* I'm not very confident in my claim that no ethical constraints apply to creating life, or even my specific ethical concerns, and I would like people to have independent confirmation of that; the quote is, after all, kind of a summary of my ethical views, and I'd like to back that up with some additional words/quotes. I also would like people to read the book more closely to find out about the exact details.

* To be clear, there are no concrete ethical problems with creating life that I'm aware of. The only things I have to back up the claim that no ethical problems can be produced by creating life are quotes like the anti-death one; this is, after all, not a book where I present a case for my claims with some sort of argument. The more concrete claims of the book seem to be just (the parts about AI and AI alignment), which I find pretty plausible.

* I'd also like the case to be a bit more fully fleshed out, even if I am right about it; that's the other reason why I asked in the first place, since it's not obvious to me just from reading the book that the ideas there have been developed further. This is a reason to check the book with a critical eye.

Critical reception, pros and cons

* The critics are not impressed, but there's no real way to read the book and not be inspired by the thought of "anti-death"

* Also, there are some cool things in the book

This is getting more personal than I intended, but it's a topic I am interested in, so it's worth noting that I didn't have this reaction to all of the parts of the book. For example, I read a lot of the sections on MIRI and I read the chapter on Bayesian rationality and that was not very inspiring either. Reading the book also made it clear that I really don't understand Bayesianism. So, in sum, the book probably didn't work for me, but it was still nice to read.

Ethical issues

A common objection to utilitarianism is that there are some people who would be happy or sad in other circumstances than the ones we have. For instance, there might be people who would be happily dead but for the fact that we keep creating new lives. These people are not doing well, but they would be unhappy if there were no ethical constraints on creating lives, because the reason we create new lives is because we enjoy doing so.

The "anti-death stance" puts a lower bound on the happiness and joy that new lives can bring. If we create a life with utility less than "no ethical constraints," we mustn't create more of them. (This is what I was saying in my response to that link -- the point is that some people, if not you, would still enjoy the creation of new lives, if we had no moral constraints. The lower bound comes from not enjoying a life if you'd be happy with the world if you didn't have that life. If you do enjoy that life, then that's one more case in favor of the idea that a life is not a value in itself, but is good if you would like to have more. So it's less "no ethical constraints" and more, the creation of new people might not actually be very happy, but the creation of more people is not inherently an evil.)

Conclusion

I've done a big post on this elsewhere, which you can read here if you'd like. (Don't trust any of my arguments about what I think about the ideas there, it's not very thorough or serious).

[spectrumed]

10. contact

The key to success is networking. Oh, God, how am I ever going to succeed? Networking? Talking to other people? Making friends? That’s not me, that’s not me at all. I don’t want to make superficial connections with other people just so that I can one day use my connections to get ahead in life. I don’t want to force myself on others, trying to convince them that I am some decent guy that’s totally worth getting to know and be friends with. I don’t know if you’re going to like me or not. I imagine some people would like to be my friend, and I imagine some people would hate to be my friend. I’d rather just forget about the latter group, and not torture myself trying to make friends with people who are fundamentally at odds who I am as a person. I’d rather have a small circle of close friends than a thousand acquaintances. But the key to success is networking.

I’ll never be an insider. This is not me just doubting myself, not some decision to undermine myself. I know that making statements about things that are impossible for you to achieve comes across as very self-defeating, but I know that I will never be an insider. I will never fit into a social clique. I am not going to be part of the boys’ club, yucking it up with my mates. I’m not going to be in any gangs, no bands, most certainly no crews. I am a solo-player. I prefer to work on my own. All my life, I’ve kept to myself, one way or another. I don’t ask for help. Growing up, my sister used to get a lot of help from my mother with school assignments, because she wanted it and she asked for it. My sister and my mother would spend a lot of time together making sure that my sister’s schoolwork turned out well. Looking over spelling, fixing grammatical errors, making sure that the text was easy to read and had a flow to it. Normal parental stuff, really. Kids are supposed to get help from their parents, it’s part of the learning process, no-one gets by all on their own. Well, except for me. I never asked for help.

I actually found it really unbearable to have my mother look over my schoolwork to see if I made any errors. Not because I am such a horrid narcissist that I refuse to admit that there were any errors, but rather because… well, it felt invasive. Like as if you spot someone spying on you through your window. It made me feel very self-conscious, in a way that I realise now is similar to how I feel when I make eye contact. Yes, I am bad at making eye contact, especially when I am speaking at the same time. I don’t mind making eye contact when you are speaking, but I don’t want to make eye contact with you when I am speaking. Is that funny? Is that odd? Well, the way I feel about it is that eye contact is intimate, it’s almost like touching. It’s mental touching. If you share eye contact with somebody you are sharing a connection. You are mind-touching each other. Oh, well… I guess that maybe it’s not quite like that, but I still don’t find it easy.

At times, I find much of the discussions about neurodiversity online somewhat off-putting. Especially when it comes to those people who are really keen on being all out positive, all the time. Those people who see any shade of negativity as outright hazardous. Don’t bring up the fact that being neurodivergent can be difficult, don’t mention the difficulties that come with being on the autism spectrum. Engage with self-empowerment! Celebrate what makes you different! Go out there and be proud of yourself, be happy about your autism, it is cool to be autistic! And, sure, I understand the importance of injecting optimism into the neurodivergent community. We need optimism, we need to profess our desire to be happy, to show the world that you don’t need to be neurotypical to be content with your life. No-one wants to be around a sourpuss just wallowing in their discontentment. But, sometimes things just suck, okay? Having a positive attitude may project confidence, may make others think you’ve got it together, but be wary when that positive attitude just becomes a mask you hide behind.

Look, we live in a society. Whether you like it or not, you live in a society. We need to rage against this society, because this society is no good. Things may look good to some people, but those people are wrong, and I am right. I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore! Let’s have ourselves a little revolution and see if we can piece a new society together, one that doesn’t commit to the same mistakes as the last one. Oh, wait, how do we do that? And how do we make sure that we win the revolution, we could easily lose, and that might actually just make things worse for us. What if this society we live in got even worse? Yikes, that’s a thought too scary to even really consider. Can things get worse? I don’t want things to get worse. Maybe I just shouldn’t rock the boat. Let’s calm down, and let’s not make any rash decisions here. We can overthrow society at some other point. For now, let’s just have some tea.

Yes, society stinks, but what can you do about it? It is absolutely the case that neurotypical people have it easier navigating modern society than neurodivergent people. Others expect you to function just like they function. If you wish to fit in, you are required to act more neurotypical. People expect that from you. Learn to adapt, to hide amongst them. Trick them. Make them think you are one of them. Be the wolf in sheep’s clothing. They’ll never know the truth of who you are. An outsider that managed to get on the inside. You stand by the watercooler, and by gosh, you make yourself laugh at their jokes even though you’d rather not be there at all. You partake in the small talk, talking about the weather, feigning interest in the footballs, and pretending to be an all-around wholesome compatriot. You’re not at all secretly some kind of anti-social misfit, who’d rather stay at home sitting behind a monitor and playing strategy games on your own. Do you want to come and join your workmates for a drink or two later? Oh, yes, of course you’d like that, but you might need to limit your alcohol intake so that you don’t get too drunk and begin to let the mask slip. It’s too easy getting into hyper-specific rants about obscure topics no normal person would care about when you’re inebriated, so let’s not risk that.

“Be yourself.” Pfth, bah, humbug. Neurotypicals love to state empty platitudes. You don’t want me to be myself. You’ve made it very clear that you don’t want me to be myself. Call me a cynic all you want, but you can’t get nowhere in life simply by being yourself. For better or worse, authenticity is nowhere near as desired as some people make it out to be. Name a single really successful person who is truly themselves. Fake-authenticity does better than the real deal. True sincerity, of the kind that’s naked, shameless, ugly, and challenging, it is difficult to love. And that’s not all bad, it’s just a fact of life. We all need to cover some things about ourselves up, and need to keep some secrets, because that is what is expected from us. Just as we wear clothes to cover up our naked bodies. No shame on the nudists, they’re free to embrace whatever alternative lifestyle they want, but I don’t want to see your naked body. Don’t get nude in front of me. I already struggle with eye contact, I sure wouldn’t struggle less if you stood in front of me nude as well.

Actually, to a certain extent, these social rules we all conform to can actually be quite appreciated by those of us who are on the spectrum. It is easier to know what you must do in a formal social situation than in a casual social situation. Casual people, they’re just so… unpredictable. Sticking their casual bits everywhere, acting like guests at your house who don’t seem to understand that your home is not their home. Even as a kid I hated having friends of mine over at my place. They’d play with my toys, place my toys where they don’t belong, or even worse, they may break some of my toys. Don’t touch that, it’s mine. Don’t put your icky hands on my bed, I sleep there. Don’t rip pages out of that book, it’s my favourite book. Don’t breathe in my room, I breathe in my room. I just can’t handle you coming here and disturbing the peace. I had it all ordered, I knew where everything was, and I liked it. Now you brought with you the forces of chaos, and dealing with that is just now what I had in mind for today.

I could never be a freemason. Sure, I have some good ideas for how to secretly rule the world, but if you’re a freemason, you’re expected to be part of the team. There’s no “I” in freemasonry. The secret cabal that controls all of the world’s governments, they don’t want independent folks like me to show up thinking that I can do my work assignments on my own. The Illuminati is run by a committee. You don’t get far in that world by being some freewheeling bohemian incapable of getting along with others. You don’t establish a New World Order by promoting self-reliance. Institutions are great for those who like to get chummy with their pals, the gregarious sorts who know exactly who to talk to in order to advance in the ranks. You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours. Favours for favours. One of the reasons why I inherently distrust many institutions is because they are rife with nepotism. You know that whoever gets to sit on the high council of the Illuminati didn’t get there via competency alone. No, they knew a guy, who was cousins with this other guy, who used to work for this guy, and y’know, you pull one string and suddenly there you are on top of the social hierarchy. Most often people get promoted, not because they do good work, but because they happen to know the right people. But again, maybe I’m just being cynical.

I’ve had a recurring fantasy, in the past, of being a lighthouse keeper. Living out somewhere all on my own, not having to deal with any human relationships. Maybe I could befriend a seagull, but even that seems a little too much. Seagulls can be very needy. No, I’d just get on with whatever I’d most like to be doing, writing or making art, just enjoying my solitude. I imagine that the toughest thing about being a lighthouse keeper is the loneliness, but the loneliness is only a plus for me. I’ve long ago decided to like being lonely. I don’t want to face the fact that I too yearn for company, I like to pretend as if I am fine with being alone. So the fantasy of being a lighthouse keeper is perfect for me, I could get far away from society and I could earn a living not having to give a fuck about what others think about me. I could allow myself to get as weird as I would want to get, not having to wash my image, acting like I’m all rational and well-adjusted. It would just be me and my seagull. How simple life would be. Too bad I think most lighthouses are automated, these days.

Maybe being the perpetual malcontent cynic incapable of fitting with mainstream society isn’t all so bad. In some regards, I have made that my brand. Generally, I like to think that I don’t take myself too seriously, but like a lot of people, I’ve turned those edgier parts of my personality into armour that I wear to protect myself from the scorn of others. You can’t accuse me of being a miserable piece of shit when I’ve decided to make being a miserable piece of shit my thing. It’s what I am, and I am not going to change. I’m not really all that mean, or nasty. I am fairly cynical, but I don’t act like some asshole. I don’t think anyone is upset with me for how I act. I’ve only occasionally gotten told off for being too gloomy. But the problem here does not lie with how I end up treating others, but rather how I end up treating myself. I don’t want to make cynicism part of my sense of self. I don’t want to be this person, this misanthrope who only sees problems, and never celebrates the good things in life. I should engage with self-empowerment. I should be happy.

It’s okay being neurodivergent! Sure, you may find other people strange or foreign, with their yapping mouths and their over-eager desire to look you directly in the eyes, but just ignore them! Neurotypicals are just so last century, the future is all neurodivergent! You’re on the right side of history, bud! You’re cool, and radical, and you’re absolutely a sexy little cupcake. You either learn to love yourself, or you lose yourself. Make funny memes, find some online community to be a part of. You can absolutely be a freemason if you want to be a freemason. Don’t let your diagnosis get in your way, so long as you’ve got that inner fire driving you, you can be anything you want to be. Go ahead and rule the world, babe. Remember, what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, and right now, it’s good vibes only.

[firelxdykatara]

The unfortunate reality that most ATLA fans seem uniquely unwilling to engage with is the fact that the original show was deeply, deeply flawed. And fixing any one of the show's biggest flaws would have the net result of radically altering the landscape of the show.

Oh, you want to complain about Sokka no longer being as cartoonishly misogynistic as he was in the original (which was largely played for laughs and would not translate to a live action storyline nearly as well as you might want to believe)? You want to complain about Katara possibly not being treated as a stand in for her own mother by her entire family, her community, and especially her brother (and more problematically, her love interest)? You want to complain about the 'gender issues' not being as pronounced in the live action (POSSIBLY! we don't even know exactly what is meant by this because the show hasn't even come out yet, but too many people are jumping the gun and reacting to the clickbait rather than the actual content of the article that was published) as they were when the show came out? Ok, let's talk about that.

But first, let's talk about why it is that the Water Tribes are the only societies in the world of ATLA to exhibit such overt and hamfisted misogyny in the first place. This despite the fact that much less overt sexism is baked into the worldbuilding--and not the kind of in-your-face misogyny that the show realized it was dealing with intending to subvert, but the kind where every single world leader in the show is a man (Azula's brief stint as Fire Lord doesn't count), the entirety of the White Lotus (the only group of people aside from the gaang to be shown attempting to put the world back into balance) is comprised of men, and every mentor in the show is a man with one (1) exception--and that one exception and what she taught Katara are both ultimately villainized and treated as a cautionary tale.

There's been a lot of chatter over the years about the way Katara was treated in LoK, and the misogyny inherent in her 'arc' (if it can even be called that)--but very little acknowledgement that the seeds of her eventual treatment were planted in the original show. It's in the way that of course the only girl (EDIT: in book 1, and I could get into the way Toph's issues with gender are handled but that's really another post; also, much as I love Suki, she doesn't count either. She's in a handful of episodes and has very little character to speak of except 'girl badass who showed Sokka the error of his ways', and no real character arc.) in the gaang is The Mom, including to her own love interest, and while I enjoy momtara and dadko as much as the next girl that doesn't mean I think that this necessarily has to be an immutable cornerstone of her character. I think more interesting things can be done, and I don't know whether the live action show will do them, but I'm not willing to write it off just because the showrunner thinks Katara's warmth, optimism, and compassion are more key to the core of her character than her being everyone else's mom.

It's also in the way that there's this collective amnesia about the fact that Katara's attempt to fight the patriarchy in the North Pole ended not with Pakku realizing that girls can so learn combat bending just as well as boys... but with Pakku noticing the betrothal necklace he'd once given Kanna, putting together that Katara is Kanna's granddaughter, and allowing Katara to be an exception to the rule (which, as far as we know because it was never revisited and there were no girls training alongside Katara at the end of book 1, remained in place) because of that connection. Because of who her grandmother was, not because of who she is or what she was able to accomplish or how skilled she was with bending even before she found someone willing to teach her.

Not to mention the fact that Katara's endgame romance, which we're then supposed to believe lasted her the entire rest of her life, was one in which her feelings were decidedly unimportant, textually and subtextually. Aang didn't care about the fact that she'd never once expressed to him that she had romantic feelings--he cared about his feelings, pushed them on her multiple times, and despite the last time including an outright rejection from her.... she resolves those feelings off screen and then evidently is in love with him after all.

Katara's story was great for 2005... but this isn't 2005 anymore, the live action show is not going to be a cartoon aimed at seven-year-olds, and I think people are freaking out a little too much about the possibility that maybe there are other interesting stories to tell with these characters than an exact rehash of what we got in the cartoon.

If what you want is the cartoon with no changes..... go watch it. It's right there and it hasn't been changed.

I am more convinced than ever that virtually no one in this fandom can read.

[oumakokichi]

What's your opinion on Kaito and Maki! I don't know if anyone's ever asked this before (sorry if yes) Ur blog is epic btw!

This question is pretty recent, so I feel like this is a great one to kick off with getting back into writing full meta! I know in the past I’ve answered a few brief questions on how I feel about Momota and Maki respectively, as well as their relationship in-game, but I don’t know if I’ve ever written at length about the two of them.

I also don’t know whether you want my opinions on them both as individual characters or their relationship together, so I’ll probably touch on both aspects! This ask will obviously include spoilers for the whole game, so I’ll talk more under the cut!

Momota and Maki are definitely two of the most important characters in the game. Both their dynamic with each other, as well as their eventual friendship with Saihara, are pivotal plot points that come up again and again. Momota’s good intentions and attempts to help Maki come out of her shell and self-imposed isolation from everyone else are initially met by her with skepticism, distrust, and a feeling that he’s being incredibly overbearing and putting his nose where it doesn’t belong—but in the end, she does find herself pulled in by his unrelenting optimism and offers of friendship.

As Momota helps Saihara begin to overcome his anxiety and self-doubt by pushing him forward and reaffirming that he believes in him, Maki also begins to face some of her own demons. Like Saihara, her issues are rooted in deep-seated trauma from a young age, though hers is considerably more severe as it concerns both physical and mental child abuse, as well as a life filled with violence and murder.

It’s interesting, because both Saihara and Maki struggle with what I would call self-loathing, but go about showing it in completely different ways. They both doubt their own ability to do anything right and feel that they’ll only hurt people in the end, but where Saihara overcompensates for this by trying to please everyone and being afraid of saying no, Maki’s approach is much firmer: she tries to shut everyone out completely, keeping everyone at arm’s bay in order to prevent any attachments from forming in the first place. As someone who lost pretty much everything at such a young age, she’s clearly afraid of the same thing happening all over again, as well as wary of anyone who might try to get close to her, only to attempt to “take her out” in the same fashion that she’s had to kill people her entire life.

Momota’s persistence in striking up a friendship with her is therefore really, really interesting. It’s the first time in Maki’s life that anyone has ever been so adamant about wanting to get to know her. Considering how harsh and unfriendly she initially is, as well as the fact that her talent is revealed to everyone by the end of chapter 2, it would make complete sense if Momota wanted nothing to do with her, in her opinion. She’s used to being alone, and she’s already convinced herself by that point that it’s preferable to the alternative.

But Momota is a character who fundamentally refuses to take no for an answer. This is simultaneously both his best and worst trait, in my opinion: it’s literally right in his catch phrase, whenever he claims that he’s going to reach the stars someday. He runs purely on the idea of faith and belief. There’s no middle ground with him: either you trust someone implicitly, regardless of everything stacked against them, or you don’t. Shades of grey, especially at the beginning of the game, are virtually nil. It’s a very “shounen protagonist” sentiment that winds up being somewhat challenged for him as the game goes on.

He’s interested in Maki, and wants to know why she closes herself off in her research lab. When the finger is pointed at her in chapter 2 and she falls under suspicion of murdering Hoshi, he defends her even at the expense of making himself look worse, and even to the point of claiming that he would “bet everyone else’s lives” that she’s innocent (a line which was completely omitted in the localization and dub, but which you can still hear him say in the jp dialogue of the chapter 2 trial).

There’s absolutely no evidence to back Maki up or support her; Momota’s defense on her behalf stems more from the fact that he hates Ouma’s equally black-or-white “guilty until proven innocent” approach, and resents the attempts at mutual suspicion and paranoia that Ouma tries to force between them. Momota is, in a word, stubborn. He figures things out by “feel” or “intuition” and is extremely slow to change his opinions even when facts and evidence are presented before him.

Again, this can be a good trait: his loyalty means he’s the last person who would ever throw someone else under the bus, and it’s the main reason he succeeds in getting closer to someone as emotionally closed-off as Maki at all. It’s less of a good thing, however, in later chapters like chapter 4, where his stubborn refusal to look at the facts genuinely endangers everyone’s lives in the trial and results in a huge blow-out that threatens his friend group with Saihara especially, but really with the whole training trio.

It’s this stubbornness of his that really baffles Maki. Initially, she doesn’t know what to make of Momota’s attempts to befriend her. She assumes he must be reckless, or stupid, or both, to want to get close to someone as dangerous as she is. But as she gradually begins to let her walls down and starts opening up despite herself, it’s such a nice change to see her eventually starting to believe in herself and view herself more positively as a result of Momota’s own belief in her.

I think momoharu as a ship works really well and has potential specifically because of these themes of “self-love” and “believing in yourself” that come up in the main game’s narrative again and again. And unlike the dynamics between Momota and other characters, such as Saihara, I feel like Momota and Maki are on much more of an even footing, where the two of them can view each other as equals and aren’t afraid to challenge each other whenever one of them is in the wrong about something.

For example, Saihara and Momota have much more of an imbalanced, sometimes one-sided friendship. That’s not to say that they aren’t both extremely important friends to one another—but between Saihara’s inability to say no to people and Momota’s tendency to take charge and view himself as “the hero” while everyone else is his “sidekick,” their relationship becomes incredibly uneven very quickly.

Add to this Momota’s unspoken jealousy of Saihara’s talent and his pivotal importance to the rest of the group in trials, and it gets even messier. I’m reminded of the chapter 4 trial, when Saihara really goes against Momota’s opinion on something for the first time by proving that Gonta is the culprit, and Momota is livid. Even when all the proof is laid out before him, and even when he knows, logically, he feels so betrayed by Saihara’s lack of “belief” in him that his underlying jealousy bubbles up and he lashes out. The localization considerably dulled the impact of this, but in the original Japanese dialogue, Momota even stops referring to Saihara by his first name for a long time, referring to him much more coldly by his surname from the end of chapter 4 until the latter half of chapter 5.

Momota and Saihara never feel as though they’ve really escaped that “hero and sidekick” dynamic until the very end of chapter 5 when they say their farewells, and even then there’s a real hesitance with Saihara to call Momota out when he’s wrong or ask for an apology even when Momota owes him one. If the game had explored more of Momota’s jealousy and feelings of inadequacy compared to Saihara, I would have really loved that, and I feel like there would be real potential to explore how they could eventually be on even footing… but as it stands, in canon we don’t really get that, and most of Momota’s shortcomings and flaws are somewhat brushed aside after his death in favor of Saihara remembering him more fondly.

This isn’t to say that Momota doesn’t have any flaws when it comes to how he interacts with Maki, of course. His character has a lot of “toxic masculinity” baggage, including unironically believing really outdated things like “women shouldn’t be fighting, they should be raising children,” or thinking that women are inherently weaker physically and more fragile emotionally than men. Luckily though, Maki often consistently proves him wrong on all of these points: her ability to wipe the floor with him during their training sessions is of course part of it, but it’s worth noting that she’s also considerably more level-headed than Momota is in many ways.

Where Momota is superstitious and afraid of the occult to a comedic degree, Maki remains the rational, down-to-earth one who doesn’t believe in such things. Where Momota is prone to letting his pride and temper get the better of him and refuses to speak to Saihara or apologize for the things he said during their fight in chapter 4, Maki is the one who attempts to push them into interacting with each other again, and believes that Momota is being much too childish about the whole ordeal. Again and again, Maki proves Momota’s outdated and harmful stereotypes about women wrong, and isn’t afraid to poke fun at him or get exasperated with his bullshit whenever he’s being kind of a dick.

Her relationship with Momota works specifically because of how much it feels like the two of them are on a more even footing. Where Saihara somewhat meekly accepts the “sidekick” role, even when he thinks it’s unfair, Maki doesn’t really accept it or go along with it in the first place, beyond showing up for training sessions. And when she gradually begins to develop romantic feelings for him, it feels authentic—particularly because it ties back into the idea of Maki learning to believe in herself the same way that Momota has believed in her from the start.

Deep down, Maki is someone who fundamentally believes herself not only undeserving of, but borderline incapable of love. She feels as though any human emotions she might have once had were stomped out of her from a young age and that absolutely nothing remains, to the point where she says “even Kiibo is more human than she is.” This self-loathing and dehumanization are the main reasons she keeps people at arm’s length: she simply thinks she doesn’t deserve any kindness, and that even if it’s given to her, she doesn’t know how to reciprocate in turn.

Her entire character arc is about unlearning this, and gradually coming to accept that she does have the capacity to love, including love for herself and for others. I’ve seen some people who believe Tsumugi when she claims in the chapter 6 trial that she “gave Maki those feelings for Momota” for the sake of the show, but I feel that believing that at face value really doesn’t do justice to Maki’s autonomy as a character.

Even if Tsumugi somehow did insert those feelings there (which I highly doubt, especially considering how she blatantly lies about giving Momota his illness too despite pretty obviously not knowing he was sick prior to chapter 5), the whole point of Maki’s confession to Momota in chapter 5 and reaffirmation of those feelings in chapter 6 is that she eventually comes to believe that they’re her feelings, and no one else’s. As someone who was denied any free will or choice for her entire life, her coming to view Momota as someone precious to her, as well as herself as an individual capable of making decisions and loving other people, is an incredibly powerful arc of character growth. I honestly really love to see it.

And it’s clear that Maki coming to love and value herself as an individual is exactly what Momota wanted to see from her. We don’t really know if he reciprocated her romantic feelings or not since he dies without really giving her an answer. I personally think he spared her an answer because even if he had said he reciprocated, it only would’ve hurt her worse to see him die immediately afterward.

But what he does make really clear is that he fully believes that because she could come to love him, she could also eventually come to love herself. Whether it’s romantic or not, he clearly cherishes her a lot as a person and wants her to be happy. He wants her to live on as herself, and not any of the roles she’s had to take thus far in order to survive. She eventually does do this, and I think he would’ve been absolutely thrilled to see it happen.

All in all, I feel like momoharu has a lot of potential for character growth (both for Maki and Momota), as well as for cute moments, comic relief, and all around as a feel-good ship. Momota definitely has some issues to work out with misogyny and toxic masculinity, and while it’s certainly not Maki’s job to hold his hand and walk him through those things, she’s the type of person who doesn’t mind putting her foot down and telling him no when she feels like he’s crossed a line, which is exactly the type of dynamic I like to see in relationships.

Anyway, I’ll wind this up here. This was a really fun question to go into, thank you again anon! I had a lot of fun getting back into the swing of writing meta, and I’m glad I got a chance to write a little more about my thoughts on momoharu, and Momota and Maki as characters.

[yellowocaballero]

ugh what you said about jon just helplessly missing deisha and despite being able to connect, still ultimately grieves alone forced me to think about this one book that said something like “grief is a room you enter alone” and I just ;_; something I love about your metas so much is that you rlly pick apart how it can be true that multiple things can be happening at once - he’s being understood, but he can’t be understood, he’s monstrous, but he’s human etc. basically I adore these essays and just reading how you build and present flaws in characters I think is genuinely making me a better writer

THANK YOU...I think we all grieve alone, just a little bit. With people, and maybe especially with more intangible things - when we move to another city or country, when we live alienated from our home cultures, when our bodies fail us, or when relationships fail. It’s inherently such a solitary thing.

And yeah, so often in life we’re feeling so many contradictory things!! Maybe even ALL THE TIME! I’ve loved and hated simultaneously, I’ve never wanted to see someone again and found myself constantly seeking out contact. You ever never want someone to text you, but you’re sad that they don’t text? I want to go back to my workplace but also I want to keep working from home forever. So it’s a real, legitimate feeling, I think.

But that’s also not why I write it that way. Stories inherently kind of have to work on both a literal and symbolic/metaphorical level. You said that you were interested in the writing bits, so I’ll get specific - I determine what happens in layers. Some things are the most essential aspects of the story, and everything else has to warp around that. Hope Etc is a very weird and bad example because a) I put no thought in this story and b) the nature of daemons is that they literalize the metaphorical. So basically every physical thing that Jon does is metaphorical for something. 

So what a story is ‘about’ is the most important thing, and this can change and shift throughout the story as you realize what keeps cropping up time again and again (which is kind of oxymoronic). I use monster vs human a lot for this specific fandom, because monsters can have whatever metaphorical significance you fucking want them to, but other stories such as hope vs desolation, optimism vs pessimism, wanting to die vs choosing to live, etc, work too. The second thing is tone - which determines the message of the story dramatically. What a story is ‘about’ can’t be pessimism when you have a light-hearted and comedic tone. Unless you’re getting REALLY creative. You can add a lot of additional themes to that, but a bunch of themes together make is what something is about. Also very important is that for me what something is ‘about’ includes genre. 

Then what’s kind of wrapped around that is the metaphor. Literal things happen, which have metaphorical meaning, which advance what a story is ‘about’. Not everything that happens is metaphorical - sometimes things have to happen to advance the plot - but things that happen need to advance something. Either plot, or a character arc, or they need to have metaphorical significance. In my opinion the most deft writing is when everything that happens has all three. 

I think over metaphor is character arc and character. When something happens in a story it has to advance the plot and advance the character’s arc. The character’s arc forms a trajectory that spells out the theme. A character arc for me frequently means the relationship between two characters, which often really really work to highlight theme. I think people push each other to change and grow a lot. If it’s a romantic relationship I push that ‘growth instigated by the other’ hard. Also, foils. I think the best romantic relationships are foils. I love foils. I always write foils. Just adore them, they’re so easy to write. Just make someone the opposite of someone else but give them the same theme. It’s great. This is also why I’m always saying that I don’t really sit down and ‘make characters’, characters just happen based on what needs to happen. I don’t decide anything about a character when I start out besides “haha exact opposite of canon character” or “haha amnesiac PI” or “haha roleswap”. And that’s coming from someone who rarely uses canon characterizations and who writes everybody as a thinly veiled OC...and maybe that’s why everybody kind of ends up a thinly veiled OC...

Over that is plot. Plot is what has to happen to make all of these other things happen. I can’t plot. I think I can’t plot because I’m too worried about these other things and I forget ‘oh yeah, Things Have To Happen’. Maybe there’s other people who plot first and then figure out these other things based on what happens in the plot? ....why...

So I kind of made that a gumball, layered thing, because that’s how I build the story. And I shouldn’t have, because these things all feed each other. What a story is ‘about’ is highly dictated by what you’ve decided the character arc to be - highly - and it creates a feedback loop as both of these things get changed and twisted and tangled during writing. A story never ends how I intended, because different things crop up. But there is a ‘priority list’ for me, and that’s kind of the layers - these characters have to act in X way because that’s one of the cornerstones I need to hit for the genre, so I have to have their character arcs match this. Characters can’t act in a certain way just because the plot makes them - granted, sometimes they do, but that means that you have to go back and tweak their character arc to match. You cannot have something metaphorically happen that goes completely against the theme, unless that has repercussions. Plot isn’t the story for me, the about is the story. None of this is hard and fast, and there is nothing that you can’t do, you just really have to view all of these things in a complex interplay that constantly affect each other.

I think of it like gears? They all work together and churn together to make the story work. But if you twist one gear, the others move too. You first imagine it this one way, but then you keep on tweaking and tweaking and tweaking, and then everything else has to change too, so then you’re like why did I even bother to outline, outlining is stupid, and also I have this funny joke so I have to go back and change everything, and...

Wow, maybe that’s why I’m so bad at planning shit..

My...goal? Is to make it so that Everything works on every level. You should be able to read a story completely literally and completely miss the metaphorical meaning and still vibe. But unfortunately the way it turns out for me sometimes is that the symbolism outweighs the literal. When I write absurdist/surrealist stuff it’s just me being lazy and not having to have things be literal, lol. What you get when something only works on a symbolic level and not on a literal level at all is Utena. And I’m writing trashy fanfic so I can’t do that. What normally happens in practice is that things happen literally for a bit, and then I’m like ‘oh I’m Sensing a Theme’ and then I start playing into the theme, and then things happen because it’s thematic. Plot is...plot should be more important to me...

And then of course there’s grounding all of this in human emotion and making sure there’s a climax (me, shaking hope etc: THERE’S NO FUCKING CLIMAX), and dealing with all of that stuff that makes it actually emotional and impactful instead of just abstract and dumb. 

I chose not to use examples for all of that because I wanted it to just be broad writing advice? I can kind of point out there examples of that line of thinking in my writing, and I probably can for Hope, Etc, but it would be a bad example - both because the NATURE of that story is that the literal is INHERENTLY a metaphor so you really cannot view anything in that story as literal, nothing in it is literal - also because I put no thought into it. 

Of course that’s not my process. That’s not my process at all. I don’t sit down and figure this shit out. I didn’t read any of that anywhere, it’s just me bullshitting, that entire thing was just me bullshitting relentlessly I am so fucking sorry. My process is that I joke about ideas with friends, I sit down at a computer and I kind of thump a keyboard for a few hours, I live my life and daydream stuff and kinda make little movies in my heads, I go home and slam the keyboard some more, halfway through I walk up to my beta and go “hey what’s the plot of this?” she helps me figure it out by giving me very bad ideas, I kind of slam my keyboard some more, and then it’s done. And then I kinda edit it a little maybe whatever and then I post it. 

There’s not a lot of thought involved. I really can’t stress enough how I don’t think about all of this when I write. I’m really brain empty. When I do these analyses what I’m doing is that I’m looking back over my story and then I’m like...Oh That’s What I Was Doing! Huh! Neat!

Haha that got long. I’m not a good writer. Thanks for the ask!

[tiredofthedrive]

Why I Decided to Stay

tw: suicide

Last thursday, I thought about killing myself. I'm not really sure why. It wasn't a bad day; my sister had just come home for the weekend and it was nice to get together as a family again. School was going okay; a little stressful but nothing out of the ordinary. Something in me just could bear the thought of going on living, couldn't imagine a life in which I was really happy. I wasn't really thinking straight and part of me knew it, but it didn't stop the feeling from being there.

I didn't do it, obviously. I've thought about suicide a lot over the years, but I've never actually tried to go through with it. There's always something that stops me. Most of the time it's thinking about my mom, or my dogs. She'd probably never recover if I did it, and they'd never understand where I'd gone. I've had other reasons throughout the years but few of them have really stuck with me.

The problem, in my mind at least, is that the conventional wisdom when it comes to pain sucks. A million useless phrases jump to mind. It'll get better. Time heals all wounds. Focus on the positive. Find the beauty in life. You'll be okay. They sound real nice, but think for a second. Is there really anything to them?

Saying that things will get better or be okay is just plainly bullshit. No one knows if things are going to get better for anyone. There's no reason to believe that things have to get better for you, there's no cosmic scale weighing all the good and bad things that happen to people. Things happen. Sometimes people get hurt. Sometimes they don't. That's it.

And the ones that tell you to get through it, that you're strong enough to make it through? They

don't really hold up either. Because even if I can go on, why should I? These platitudes place this inherent, untouchable value on life when that just isn’t a reality for everyone.

I’m reminded of this Theodor Adorno quote: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

What he meant by this, or at least one interpretation of it, is that the horrors of the Holocaust couldn’t be expressed in a medium as subtle and as playful as poetry. The facts need to be stated conclusively, the horror needs to be acknowledged outright, and playing linguistic games after such an atrocity is disrespectful to its victims.

I think the same is true of platitudes. You reach a point where being told that it'll be okay,

that everything will work out, is insulting. You don't know that, so why tell me? The truth is that 

you think my life will be easier if I believe it. But it's too late for that, I know that it isn't true. There are too many people who have suffered too much, too many horrors and injustices for me to ever believe that justice is automatic. I don't believe you anymore, I'm sorry.

So that's where I was on Thursday. Sometimes, reading philosophy helps. A while back I read Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus and thought it was what I needed. The book is about how one can go on living without hope. The central metaphor of the text is Sisyphus, who is forced to roll a boulder up a hill and watch it roll down again, forever. Camus' argument is that even Sisyphus could find contentment with the right mindset, that "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart." The problem is this just isn't true. Not for everyone anyway. Definitely not for me.

Not all philosophers are so optimistic, and I tend to be drawn to the ones that aren’t. There’s something about pessimism that so easily seduces me. I have to consciously fight it, and I don’t always win. 

That week I'd been reading about Thomas Ligotti and Phillip Mainlander. Ligotti is a horror writer who specializes in psychological and existential horror and Mainlander was a 19th century philosopher who committed suicide after the publication of his first major work. In their eyes, life is a burden, not a gift. They believe that human beings are capable of causing and experiencing so much meaningless pain that trying to justify this world is absurd. Both argue that existence isn’t worth the cost of admission, that it would be better if we gave up the goose. Mainlander specifically says that death is the only redemption we are capable of.

I can’t bring myself to disagree with them. Too many terrible things have happened to innocent people for me to be able to make a legitimate defense of life. That inherent, untouchable value that we prescribe to it? I don’t think it exists. I think Sisyphus would want to end his torment any way he could, and I don’t think anyone has the right to take that away from him. Your life is your life, and no matter what anyone says the choice to live or die is always yours, and yours alone.

So why did I, in spite of all of this, decide to live? Well, part of the answer is cowardice; suicide is scary, really scary. But more than that, as I said before, I also knew that if I killed myself I’d also be killing my mom, and my sister. I could never do that to them, even if I really wanted to.

And that, I think, is the point of all of this. If I forget myself for a moment, and remember everyone else, the picture shifts. Most people are suffering, in one way or another. Most people want to live. And all of them need help. 

Capitalism, racism, imperialism, sexism, abuse, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism; there are so many cancers destroying the lives of so many people. If we lived in a perfect world without suffering, or if I were completely alone like Sisyphus, I think I could go right ahead and take my leave. But to do so now would be to abandon all my brothers and sisters and gender nonconforming siblings. If I can’t justify living, then so much the less can I justify leaving them all to live without me. People are hurting and we just can’t let that stand.

So fuck optimism, fuck platitudes, fuck “things will get better”. I’m going to live because I’ve got these two hands and the world is full of people who need someone to help them up.

And as for you, what I want you to get from this is that you don’t have to believe in life to keep living. If you’ve known enough hurt to consider suicide then you know just how much good you can do if you help ease the burden for others. All we have is each other. We can’t afford to lose you.