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brucewaynehater101 · 2 months

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hii i just wanted to ask about the accuracy of the statement of "Talia abducted Jason during when he was arguably at his most vulnerable cuz catatonic and took advantage of his state (+no Bats knowing Jason came back to life) to indebt him to her and a cult + groom him to be a tool for whatever goal she had in mind" or if it's fanon and your opinions on this idea (+ actual canon if this statement is in fact fanon)

but just like how we play with the scale of good parent, bad parent Bruce we could also fuck around and do so much with this concept (fanon or not)

Hi! I'm not as familiar with this, so let's do the research together ^^ It's gonna be a long post!

I've heard many many many people curse out a few writers (I'm shitty at remembering names) for being a racist pieces of shit. I've also heard of Talia being thrown under the bus by a lot of writers. Here's a link to a wonderful Tumblr post that goes into Talia and how writers fucked over her character.

There's other posts, but this one quickly summaries what they did to Talia and briefly mentions the assassination of Ra's character as well.

Here's a post that goes further into Ra's character.

On that note, I have seen a few fics play around with two ideas that were (as far as I'm aware) retconned: Damian's conception being unconsensual and Talia having sexual relations with Jason.

As long as you keep in mind that these were retconned and come from racist, sexist, or both connotations, it's okay to explore the impact these actions would have on all characters involved (especially if we're utilizing the reasoning that Talia wasn't in her right mind during those actions).

That's a basic summary of why there's heavy debate around Talia and the al Ghuls as a whole.

Now! Let's get into Talia and Jason specifically!!!!

The comic run we want to look into is Red Hood - The Lost Days. I am unsure if there are any other comics that cover post-death Jason but pre-Red Hood. If anyone has any other canon material that covers or mentions this time period, feel free to comment, reblog, etc.

This is Talia's initial reaction to hearing about Jason:

She expresses concern, worry, and grief for Bruce

She then has spies give her updates on Bruce's situation. Everyone else states Bruce is "stepping up his game." She calls them fools (since Bruce is obviously just hurting)

Very quickly, we get into her discovery of Jason Todd:

So. Jason's catatonic and Talia was ordered not to inform Bruce. Regardless of if she wanted to, she would be betraying her father if she told Bruce

Then I'm just going to drop all of these panels:

This shows she somewhat cares about him. Whether that's for Jason or because of Bruce, that's irrelevant. She still cares and wants him to get better. She wants him to go home.

Talia only pushes Jason into the Lazarus Pits because she's run out of time

Now... she may be an unreliable narrator. She states she's doing this for Jason's sake, but it does seem like it's more for her own. Regardless, she doesn't have ill intentions.

Talia dips Jason in the Pits and then tosses him out

That line of hers seems suspicious, but I see it more as her trying to hide the fact she had Jason for so long. It's less "go be mad at Bruce" and more "gods, what is Bruce gonna think of me if Jason shows up on his doorstep?"" Selfish, but not in the way fanon characterizes it.

She had trackers on the bag, though. She just needed him away from Ra's

Ra's tells Talia she fucked up, Jason tries to blow up the batmobile, and then tries to tell Talia he didn't lose his nerve for revenge against Bruce

Talia realizes that reviving Jason with the Pit might have fucked Jason up

Jason asks Talia for her help with revenge against Bruce. Talia did not set that up. Jason was the one to suggest it without influence

Talia obviously does not want to be helping Jason right now. She still agrees, though

Let me just toss this here too:

So... She's not doing this completely because she cares about Jason or that it's the right thing, but she also sure as hell does not want Jason to be going down this revenge path

Despite all of this, there's this:

They then proceed to fuck.

Which is gross as hell, and how some people can say that she took advantage of him

I think them fucking got retconned, though....

So, it's slightly complicated?

In my personal opinion, the final answer is: "It is fanon!"

There may be some truth or canon behind it, but that most likely comes from more racist characterizations of her character. However, the canon material that explicitly covers this topic makes it clear:

"Talia was selfish with her help to Jason. She wants Bruce to love her. She thus ends up hiding Jason's existence out of fear of Bruce's reaction. She does not want Jason to be mad at Bruce or fight his dad."

This also matches the other characterization I've seen of this: "Talia uses the distraction technique to try to hold Jason back from murdering his own father. 'You can't murder Bruce without training, Jason.'"

To continue, whether Talia should've told Bruce or not is an entirely different matter. Sometimes, I've avoided telling people shit out of fear, which made the situations worse. It wasn't great of her to do that, but in no way should this villainze her. I also 100% love that this gives her a flaw. People make mistakes. She's trying. She may have gone about it poorly, but she did what she thought she could. It was selfish, but I don't blame her.

She could've also convinced Jason to give up his mission entirely right before they fucked. That's where it gets murky.

You are absolutely correct that we can use the fanon idea of the al Ghuls manipulating Jason. On the other hand, I haven't seen enough fics where Talia treats Jason like an unruly toddler instead.

"No, Jason. We can't murder Bruce. Obviously, you need training first." Her visible reaction is a motherly rolling eyes. Internally, she's just panicking ("fuck fuck fuck fuck. How do I curb bloodlust? How do I stop patricide? Procrastination!!!")

Anyways, thanks for bringing the question up! It allowed me to look into it and put my thoughts in order ^^

Feel free to read the rest of the run!

#talia al ghul #dc comics #thank you for the ask!!!!

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sewerdraws · 1 month

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Zach! Hello, howdy, g’day! Hope its goin good for ya :D

I have heard the Lawry lore but, other than in correlation w/ Lawry, have heard precious little about Niko. I am formally inquiring the Niko lore, Plz

Okay thats all :] (<— still doesn’t know how to type an ask like a normal person)

Niko time !!!!! His ref and biography already exist here but this is a fun opportunity for more lore !!

Lore wise he's in a parallel RED team to the canon one. Absolutely hated by all of his team except the pyro (likes witnessing chaos) and the scout (who's not related to him but also a shithead so they Tolerate each other. asshole solidarity yknow). He's hated mostly because of his awful attitude (aggressive, abrasive, makes demeaning comments and doesn't mind getting personal, stays isolated, lives in a flat outside of base etc), basically picture a high school girl bully, but with deadly weapon and intelligence gathering skills.

Went through a very chaotic, up-and-down life up until his days at Mann.co which are basically the best days of his life : he has plenty of money, is dealing in the legal which he prefers, while still making good use of his combat, intel and seduction skills.

[CW for suggestive and unhealthy content, as well as discussion of internalized homophobia]

OH YEAH seduction is a big thing for Niko. Goes through college exploring homosexuality, gets that beautiful world crushed beneath his feet, homosexuality becomes a perverse thing to him during his time in prison and opens up to years of compulsive heterosexuality and trying to prove himself through seduction. Despite his awful "real" personality, he can put on one hell of a persona when needing to seduce someone. That's a skill he discovers early and uses throughout his whole life.

But you can only repress your identity for so long and in his later years before Mann.co he starts going to bars to absolutely wreck himself on booze and pick up young men / get picked up by older men. It's very much a despair thing and not at all a pleasurable self discovery experience. Every time he does it he digs deeper in the denial and feels disgusted at himself.

Lawry is pretty much his real "gay awakening" at around 40yo, and it very much just starts with "oh that guy's obsession is pitiful, i'm gonna entertain it" and completely backfires over years of agonizing toxic back and forth. The layers get even thicker when he finally starts considering the idea that he might be gay only for Lawry to hit him with "hey so i'm not entirely a bloke ?"

i love his annoying ass so much you can ask anything u want about him <333

#tf2 #tf2 spy #tf2 oc #tf2 spy oc #niko #my art #asked #suggestive /#also im doing fine ty !! no need for such politeness ive seen what u send on the alt lmaoooo

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blueiscoool · 2 years

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Italy Hails 'Exceptional' Discovery of Ancient Bronze Statues in Tuscany

Archaeologists in Italy have uncovered more than two dozen beautifully preserved bronze statues dating back to ancient Roman times in thermal baths in Tuscany, in what experts are hailing as a sensational find.

The statues were discovered in San Casciano dei Bagni, a hilltop town in the Siena province, about 160 kilometres (100 miles) north of Rome, where archaeologists have been exploring the muddy ruins of an ancient bathhouse since 2019.

"It is a very significant, exceptional finding," Jacopo Tabolli, an assistant professor from the University for Foreigners in Siena who coordinates the dig, said on Tuesday.

Massimo Osanna, a top culture ministry official, called it one of the most remarkable discoveries "in the history of the ancient Mediterranean" and the most important since the Riace Bronzes, a giant pair of ancient Greek warriors, were pulled from the sea off the toe of Italy in 1972.

Tabolli said the statues, depicting Hygieia, Apollo and other Greco-Roman divinities, used to adorn a sanctuary before they were immersed in thermal waters, in a sort of ritual, "probably around the 1st century AD".

"You give to the water because you hope that the water gives something back to you," he said of the ritual.

TIME OF CONFLICT

Most of the statues date to between the 2nd century BC and the 1st century AD, a period of "great transformation in ancient Tuscany" as it switched from Etruscan to Roman rule, the Culture Ministry said in a statement.

It was an "era of great conflicts" and "cultural osmosis", in which the Great Bath sanctuary of San Casciano represented a "unique multicultural and multilingual haven of peace, surrounded by political instability and war," the ministry said.

The statues were covered by almost 6,000 bronze, silver and gold coins, and San Casciano's hot muddy waters helped to preserve them "almost like as on the day they were immersed," Tabolli said.

The archaeologist said his team had recovered 24 large statues, plus several smaller statuettes, and noted that it was unusual for them to be made out of bronze, rather than terracotta.

Tabolli said this suggested they came from what he called an elite settlement, where archaeologists also found "wonderful inscriptions in Etruscan and Latin", mentioning the names of powerful local families, the ministry statement added.

According to Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano, the "exceptional discovery ... confirms once again that Italy is a country of immense and unique treasures".

The ministry said the statues have been taken to a restoration laboratory in nearby Grosseto, but will eventually be put on display in a new museum in San Casciano.

#Italy Hails 'Exceptional' Discovery of Ancient Bronze Statues in Tuscany #bronze #roman bronze statues #ancient artifacts #archeology #archeolgst #history #history news #ancient history #ancient culture #ancient civilizations #ancient tuscany #ancient bath house #roman history #roman empire

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pinchinschlimbah · 6 months

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On "Coming Out" and Noel Fielding

I mentioned forever ago that I had this post in mind and then never got around to it, but now with the new interview quote I was yelling about recently it feels like a particularly good time to get it out of my brain and onto the page! tl;dr: musings on the concept of "coming out" as it has evolved over time, whether it's something that should continue to be necessary or expected of queer people, and why Noel is particularly inspirational to me in that regard since this is, after all, my brainrot blog. This may be extremely long and a bit disjointed but I hope some of y'all will enjoy it!

So a while ago myself and several friends were discussing the concept of coming out. All of us are some flavor of queer both in gender and orientation, but each is in a different place along their self discovery and identity journey, with some being long since out and proud, and others just starting to dip their toes into exploration past the expected cishet.

This discussion actually was prompted by a different discussion about Noel, spurred by comments we'd come across slamming him as being homophobic/transphobic on Bakeoff for making comments suggesting he has romantic or sexual attraction towards Paul, referring to himself with female-centric terms, playing female characters in the skits, and a particular moment where he brings up Old Gregg while talking to KimJoy and says "he was a sea transsexual....quite a demanding role for me" while laughing to indicate that that last part was said in jest. Hey fellas, is it homophobic/transphobic to be a little bit gay and trans? This got us talking about how the current culture of queer identity has evolved to the point where "coming out" feels more like something the public feels they're owed in order for them to view one's expression as valid, rather than its original purpose as something one does for themself in order to live most authentically. I don't think I need to go into detail about how many artists have been harassed by their "fans" into coming out before they were ready because people wouldn't accept the validity of that person's work without knowing exactly how that person identified, there've been plenty of articles and video essays and better written tumblr posts about that, but it's definitely a concerning trend. It can be particularly dangerous when it comes to people who aren't feeling confident or safe enough to come out, who end up being criticized and shunned by the queer community as being somehow problematic for not being able to fully articulate to a group of strangers the ways in which they're experiencing their identity. In this situation, the people who are struggling the most end up with the least support. Forcing people to either declare an identity or get out just leads to more people staying closeted out of fear of doing it "wrong" and never getting the chance to explore the most authentic and joyful versions of themselves, or even worse, feeling the need to out themselves before they're in a safe place to do so and suffering the resulting consequences. Questioning or cautious people deserve space in the community to experiment even if they haven't yet or maybe never will come out! My high school's Gay Straight Alliance was comprised entirely of "straight allies" when I was there. There was not a single "out" person in the school at the time. Nearly all of us in the GSA ended up being some flavor of queer or trans years later after graduation. But whether it was intentional closeting or just feeling an innate affinity towards something we couldn't quite pinpoint at the time, we all knew we belonged there and made that space for ourselves and others like us. Back when "coming out" first became a concept in the public consciousness, it was during a time where cishet identity was not just considered the default, but the only option. By coming out, queer people were giving genuinely revolutionary representation for themselves and others like them by telling the world that, as the old saying goes, we're here, we're queer, get used to it! Nowadays, we're lucky to live in a culture that is much more cognizant of queer identities being a thing, so in many cases coming out has become less about having to explain to those around you the basic concept of queerness existing, and moreso about which specific identity you fall under, and that's where things get messy.

My friends and I shared our own thoughts and experiences. One is currently identifying as "unlabeled" because they haven't found a term that feels correct yet, and therefore hasn't come out because they wouldn't know what to say. One spoke about how when they first came out they were much more insistent on what terms or pronouns people used for them but as time has gone on they've grown to find joy in being inscrutable and letting others wonder what they're perceiving. One expressed that given the state of the world they've been retreating somewhat back into the closet for safety reasons rather than being super outward with their queerness like they used to and is working on learning to embrace those parts of themself again. One said they felt like they'd already been existing as queer and expressing that queerness "before I even had the terms to come out to myself" and is now working on catching up on the conscious end of figuring out what's what. I myself never really had an official "coming out", I just became increasingly visually/socially/vocally queer as I became more and more confident in who I was and what I wanted to be and who I had on some level always been, and decided if people didn't get the hint that's their own problem. I came into consciousness of my queerness during the early 2010s original tumblr MOGAI microlabel boom, where there was a ton of focus on figuring out the hyper specific identity labels that exactly described what you were experiencing. I did a lot of digging and soul searching and experienced a lot of unnecessary stress trying and failing to find my perfect labels and landed on clumsy terms like "full time drag queen" because it was the closest I could get to what I was feeling about my gender, only to be told it was problematic for me to call myself that as an AFAB person because drag "belongs to cis gay men" (don't get me started on that statement, that's a whole other essay lol) It was a real wake up call once I distanced from these aggressively labeled and segmented online spaces and made my way into real world queer communities where I was relieved to find that in fact no one there asks to check your membership card before letting you in, if you feel like you belong there you're welcome no questions asked.

I had other people in these communities referring to me as "queer" and "fag" and "gay" and "queen" before I felt comfortable doing so myself based on online Discourse I'd experienced over who is Allowed to use certain terms, and having these community leaders I respected recognizing those things in me and welcoming me in like that gave me the confidence to really find my own footing in ways that attempting to find my exact correct identity label so that I could officially proclaim it never did. Once I could answer the question of what I was with a shrug and "queer I guess!" things became so much easier. Microlabels can be incredibly helpful and liberating for some, don't get me wrong if it works for you that's great, but let's not pretend that everyone is going to have the same experiences.

So anyway, back to Noel. Noel has never, to my knowledge, ever had any sort of official “coming out” or explicitly referred to himself as queer. So I know there are people out there who will disagree with me considering him to be queer. But so much of what he’s said and done throughout his several decades long career has indicated to me that this is clearly someone of queer experience navigating the world as such, and just as the queers in my local community welcomed me as one of them before I knew to do it myself, I extend that welcome forward.

Let’s take a look at some of the facts. In the public span of his career, Noel has.....(in no particular order, also if anyone wants to add additional instances of note in the reblogs or comments please feel free, this is by no means a fully comprehensive list) -repeatedly called himself "the woman of the Boosh" or Julian's/Howard's "wife" in ways that suggest that's how he actually felt about it rather than it just being a punchline that he was mistaken for female in the show [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] -referred to himself at the GQ "Man of the Year" awards as "never been a man" and "a sort of girl, he/she" -been referred to by Sandi Toksvig as being "on the cusp" in regards to gender, to which he reacts with amusement and acceptance -consistently expressed excitement and appreciation when others refer to him with feminine terms or say he looks like a girl [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] -said "I love being a man-woman, it's much more interesting than being one or the other" and expressed that the loved shooting the Boosh Electro episode for this reason -referred to Vince Noir (a character who he's been pretty open about being based on himself) as "wasn't seemingly one gender or the other" -expressed that he felt most free and happy when presenting femininely [2] -had Julian, one of the people closest to him, express that Noel and Sandi (an out lesbian) may have "real sexual chemistry" because Noel is "all over the shop, he's a different sex" -used the "Confuser" line of "Is it a boy? Is it a girl? I'm not sure I mind" to refer to himself rather than Vince, and express that he's had to work to find new ways to feel as androgynous as he'd like now that he's older -referred to himself as a lesbian [2] -said that he "sometimes looks in the mirror and sees a woman", in the same interview that Julian implies that Noel is in fact a girl -referred to himself as a "girl/boy" -consistently referred to himself with feminine terms on panel shows and bakeoff -made a joke on bakeoff about not being a testosterone-based person -responded positively when asked about the ways Boosh had influenced queer and nonbinary youth -has said he's "quite obsessed with the man/woman mixup thing" -has said if he was an animal he'd want to be a seahorse because the males get pregnant -Had Lee Mack, who Noel used to live with, refer to him as "the little transsexual one, yeah I think she's fantastic" in a Boosh documentary and "a young lady who came out here happy to be herself" in response to Noel's Wuthering Heights drag performance -had his own mother refer to him as "the daughter I always wanted" -described his own appearance as that of a "transsexual witch" and when an interviewer attempted to make fun of him for calling himself "a transgender witch" by showing Noel a drawing the interviewer clearly found repulsive, Noel responded that the interviewer was "holding up a mirror" and called the image his passport photo

And I'm not even going to bother citing sources on the countless times he's made comments suggesting romantic or sexual attraction towards men. Literally just watch any non-character appearance he's ever done, it's kind of his whole thing??? Not to mention his penchant for picking up explicitly queer and gnc character roles, and also just [gestures vaguely to everything Noel and Julian have said about each other suggesting romantic and sexual tension between them and how they used their characters as an excuse to explore those feelings in a less scary way, again that could be a whole other essay on its own but ooh boy] I also think there's something interesting to explore in the idea of Noel repeatedly referring to his appearance as transgender or transsexual rather than identifying himself as such- at what point does the appearance of something become reality?

It all begs the question- is it even a joke anymore if it's that consistent? Either it's not a joke and it's an authentic expression of his real feelings and experiences, or he for some reason really really wants everyone to believe that he's queer when he's not, with this behavior spanning back to a time before the concept of queerbaiting was on anyone's minds and when being publicly queer could mean the end of your career. Which scenario do you think is more likely? And, does someone who’s been conducting themself like this for their entire career really NEED to come out? Honestly, I find this level of simultaneous authenticity and inscrutability aspirational.

In this Velvet Onion interview from 2012, Noel compares his penchant for dresses to both Grayson Perry and Eddie Izzard. This is interesting because those two people represent pretty opposite intentions behind their presentation- Grayson identifies solidly as cis male, and for him the shock value of crossdressing is the point, saying “I signed up for a gender and I want them to be very clearly delineated so I know I’m dressing up in the wrong clothes.” This doesn't seem particularly in line with where Noel is coming from given him famously referring to himself as "the Confuser" and stating in that same Velvet Onion interview that he "never even bothered giving it a label, I never went oh I'm a transvestite, I just went yeah if I fancy wearing a dress I do, never really thought about it really" Eddie on the other hand has famously said "They're not women's clothes. They're my clothes, I bought them." indicating that they were a genuine part of her authentic expression rather than a crossdressing costume, and has subsequently over the years identified more and more solidly as transfemme. I find Eddie's trajectory particularly fascinating because it's been so non-linear. In the 90s when the language for transness was much less public knowledge, she referred to herself consistently as a transvestite- a cishet man who enjoyed dressing as a woman, as well as using terms like "male tomboy" and "male lesbian" and "a full boy plus extra girl". Despite doing most of her standup shows in femme looks, most of her acting jobs were male-presenting, and there was a period of time in the 2010s where she dropped the femme presentation entirely in an attempt to be taken more seriously as the "crossdressing" was seen by many as a gimmick. Swinging back around more recently, Eddie has been explicitly identifying as genderfluid and transfemme, and in recent years has made the decision to "be based in girl mode from now on", and use primarily she/her pronouns. Since this announcement, in her trans advocacy work Eddie has described herself as being "out" as trans since the 1980s despite all of the above. She always knew who she was, it's just she's gotten access to more accurate terms over time to describe what she was experiencing, as well as feeling more safe to do so the more that transness became a known and accepted concept in the public eye.

The interview I mentioned at the very start of this post isn't really a coming out from Noel. And I don't think we'll ever really get one from him. In my opinion Noel has spent the past several decades conducting himself as someone who is in fact already out- it’s pretty clear Noel knows and is proud of who he is regardless of how he chooses to describe that identity. At this point, making some sort of official statement would just be for the benefit of others looking for clarification on their own perception of him and people who want to be able to put him in one box or another, and that’s not what coming out should be. The statement in the new interview is not "I am genderfluid", its "I've always been genderfluid", simply putting an accurate name to what's always been publicly visibly true now that he's got the terms to do so.

#noel fielding #gender files #gender files masterpost #gay yelling #the mighty boosh #shouts into void #a lot of this could also apply to my other wife #but that discussion is way more of a minefield so I'm not touching that for now plus many more people already have

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syzygyzip · 7 months

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The Soul Still Burns: Analysis of the Lords of Cinder (DS3)

What follows is a short essay on the Lords of Cinder from Dark Souls 3, exploring their symbolism on spiritual and metatextual levels. After that is a related reading of Slave Knight Gael, the final adversary of the Dark Souls trilogy.

The Lords of Cinder are in many ways the primary adversaries of Dark Souls 3. This title they share, “Lord of Cinder,” refers to a personage who has rekindled the first flame, keeping the cycle of light and dark going.

Cinder is a substance which continues to burn without the presence of fire but does not reduce to ash. So euphemistically, it seems that the Lords are somehow stuck in their process of purification, and the game suggests that the world is stuck along with them; this is why it is the Ashen One’s task to “set them upon their thrones”—to hurry them along and thus allow the world to follow its natural decline. As individual characters, each of these Lords represents a different attitude that complicates and prolongs the cycle.

Through these stubborn Lords the game is commenting on at least two things. On the metaphysical level, it reflects the Buddhist idea that certain attitudes keep people reincarnating over and over again, unable to extricate themselves from the material world of suffering (samsara). While on the metatextual level, the game is suggesting that certain attitudes keep players coming back to Dark Souls again and again, starting new games, making new builds and revisiting old files.

The idea there on the metaphysical side finds an easy analogy in Buddhist doctrine: the “three poisons,” the three root causes of suffering. These are hatred, greed, and delusion. What’s interesting is that these essential vices also fit pretty easily onto the different types of players that are being caricatured by the Lords. We’ll break these correspondences down in a second.

But First: Why Do They Correspond? So we have these sets of three. Three lords, three poisons in Buddhism, three types of Souls players. How convenient. When we analyze art, we sometimes ask, “Huh, is this structure really there, or am I projecting it into the material?” And if the structure is really there, baked into the work, that doesn’t mean that it’s due to developer intention. Archetypal forms sometimes show up in work via an unconscious influence, be it due to the cultural milieu, personal psychology, or some a priori biological disposition of the human being.

And the thing about Dark Souls is that it’s an unusually honest piece of art, in that its creative team allows their own free associations and intuitions to show up in the work without too much self-censorship or questioning. They make space for a mystery to show up on its own terms, and in leaving its riddles unanswered, there is more space for discovery by the people who play it.

It should also be said that cultural ideas persist for a reason. Beneath the ethics and ideology of the people who originally named the Buddhist “three poisons,” there may be something timeless, something perennially descriptive of human nature. If that is the case, then it would make sense for this same triplicity to unfurl itself in other cultural products. So for one reason or another, these three poisons, these addictions, show up diegetically in the characters and are also expressed in player psychology.

I say all this just because sometimes I feel very aware of the disconnect between much of Souls lore discourse and the broader field of mythological study. Since we are gamers first, there may be this tendency to want to “solve” the lore, but that’s not what we’re doing here. Myth functions because it elaborates our experience of the world through affective resonance; it attaches images and characters and stories which help us anchor our own prelinguistic impressions of the world, cultivating our sensitivity there.

Anyway, let’s look at these Lords.

Abyss Watchers Poison: Hatred The lore of the Abyss Watchers is pretty clear: they have an obsessive fixation on the abyss, and are ready to raze an entire town if they suspect abyssal encroachment. This obsession has literally possessed them, as they are now “abyss touched.” Gaze too much into the abyss, etc. They carry such strong contempt for the disavowed object that they don’t care what comes between it and their sword. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that they are a brotherhood yet are unhesitatingly slaughtering themselves again and again. Hatred has made them blind, and has also caused them to resign their individuality (they are identical, mere instruments of a transpersonal grudge). They cannot die, their hatred keeps them locked in combat.

Type of Player: competitive | Interest: combat The Abyss Watchers are a representation of PvP addicts. They have no powers other than tenacity; they perform the same combos repeatedly. When you are really gripped by a PvP binge in Souls, you often end up doing the same thing again and again. The fight takes place in a mausoleum, on top of many chambers filled with human remains. The fact that this boss fight is instructional about combat, specifically about looking for tells (a cloud of dust always signifies the end of their combos) might be another clue. There is no limit to how good you get at Souls PvP; every foe is an opportunity to improve timing and strategy. You can just keep stacking anonymous bodies under yourself.

Aldrich Poison: Greed Aldrich invokes the concept of supremacy many times: he is in the supreme area from Dark Souls 1; in the supreme boss room of that area; he wears as a crown the former supreme lord of that area. This is because he devours lords; he tries to take prestige upon himself through acquisition and incorporation—greed.

Type of Player: completionist | Interest: content Aldrich is a commentary on completionist players. He is someone who “plays the game to death”, acquiring every object, reaching every achievement, devouring the soul of the game through taking everything into himself. He becomes bloated by consuming as much of the game’s content as possible. The old God whose likeness he has adopted is Gwyndolin, who was, in narrative terms, the one pulling the strings in the land of the Gods. And in gameplay terms, he is a secret boss. So on both counts we have someone who is elusive, and exists more or less at the boundary of the gameworld. When a player tries to see every last little morsel of a game, they become somewhat like Gwyndolin, a manipulator of a virtual world. If you know too much about a game, you have the risk of being less immmersed.

Yhorm Posion: Delusion In Buddhism, the poison of delusion secretly underlies the other two poisons, as the impulse toward hatred and greed are ultimately born of some false view about reality. This is akin to how the profaned capital sits below the rest of the kingdoms. To beat Yhorm you essentially have to “play pretend” with him, picking up a fake super-weapon, or fighting alongside Siegward, a knight who appears to be somewhat deluded about the state of the world, enthralled in the same fantasy as Yhorm himself.

Type of Player: lore researcher | Interest: meaning The profaned capital is full of statues—fixed images of myth; and empty goblets—treasures with no utility. Not to mention the area with the swamp which is full of symbolic imagery, but serves no narrative or mechanical purpose. The entire profaned capital challenges us to make sense of it; it is the ultimate temptation of lorekeepers in DS3. It throws at us a disproportionate amount of reference to DS2, which is famous among Souls players as the least thematically sensible Souls game. The Greatshield of Glory is found right outside Yhorm’s room, in a conspicuous room full of treasure, and yet it is a very impractical shield and offers very little lore value. If a lore-minded player picks it up, it directs them to a legendary personage from the War of Giants, which raises far more questions than it answers. The same is true of much of this area—the Eleanora, the Monstrosities, the Profaned Flame itself—they are all there to get you to speculate. These are the players who come to Souls games again and again, trying to find the “ultimate meaning.” They seek the grail, claim to find it, and then chuck in a pile with the others.

Yhorm's story also imitates the primordial Artorias myth: forsaking his shield in preservation of something more valuable. Other than that Yhorm is largely a cipher when it comes to biography, with a void for a face, which itself epitomizes what must remain at the center of mythology and storytelling: mystery.

Sit Down and Seek Guidance So we have the three reasons that people become fixated on Souls: the combat, the achievements, and the mystery. But there is a fourth lord of cinder boss, who is conceptually apart from these three: the Lothric Twins. They represent yet another kind of person who must keep playing Dark Souls: the developers. Lothric is striving to produce “a worthy heir,” a proper sequel to Dark Souls 1. The Princes are bound to their chamber as the developers are bound to their project, as that is their curse—“but you may rest here too, if you like.” In this context we can see their duality as the dual nature of having to work on the game and also play it to death. The privilege and the loftiness of the promise of a great piece of art (Lothric), and also having to go back "into the trenches" of the work itself (Lorian). Notably, neither of them can walk, they just teleport around. They are stuck at work, trying to bring the new world into being. Also I can’t go this whole essay without mentioning the obvious: that the Ashen One is bringing Lords to their thrones, and we players and developers have to assume our little chairs and couches when we access this world.

Playing Beyond the Point of Pleasure Of course the most extreme example of someone stubbornly remaining in the world no matter what is Slave Knight Gael. He is looking for pigment, which seems to be a euphemism for the substance of humanity (the Dark Soul). He wants to give it to the painter, the world-creator, so that a new world can be made. He is willing to indulge in a wasteland of abject violence for as long as it takes in order to renew something. Ironic that he is probably only prolonging the current world in his obsessive drive to recycle it faster.

Let’s examine the relationship between the figure of the painter and her relationship to Gael. That she is a spiritual entity is obvious: we never see her touch the ground, she is always in an upper room and lifted on a piece of furniture. Among other things, she is a clear metaphor for life springing eternally. A creative child who continues to paint despite kidnapping and imprisonment. She is the heart of the painted world, itself a place that symbolizes the idea of the representation of reality.

I want to make sure this is clear, because it is a bit of a kaleidoscope to consider. Any subject in Dark Souls stands for many things, but something that the painted world specifically represents is the very concept of representation. So of course the places in our imaginations are painted worlds, but so is this physical world of appearance, the maya of mundane reality. Not to mention that a work of art is a painted world, and the game we’re discussing is a painted world. When a work of art is able to recreate itself in itself, we can see this funny effect of mirrors reflecting mirrors infinitely. This results in seemingly inexhaustible symbolic content—there is so much potential to find meaning and create connections. Because Moby Dick represents a work of literature; the Tempest represents a play; Twin Peaks represents a TV show, these works can offer extensive insights not only into their medium but into the nature of reality. In these and other examples, the representation of the medium within the work may or may not be a single subject, but since Dark Souls is formally a game about levels and level design, the painted world is the heart of its self-reflexivity. The painted world can be pointed to as the summary of this fractal device. And the personification of that device, its ambassador to the player, is the painter.

The miracle or divine child is also an archetype familiar to us from Lothric, in their struggle to produce the “worthy heir.” Reality seeks salvation through the appearance of grace. They want it in a clear, incontestable form—to be able to point at it and say, "thank goodness we went through all that, because look, now here is the meaning, here is that which validates all that came before." In the world of Dark Souls 3 the religion of the masses is the Lothric stuff; meanwhile knowledge of the painted world is much more obscure. Lothric’s religion is obviously regulated and hierarchical, while Gael’s devotion to the painter is highly personal and private: he carries around a scrap of painting; he prostrates to a hidden idol in a small chapel; he considers the painter his family. He is emotionally close to the object of his worship.

But whether it’s Lothric or Ariandel, they are anticipating the divine child to redeem the world. As an archetype, the child ultimately represents surprise. The possibility of being delighted by life in its creative novelty. The child as an archetype appears in our own behavior when we do something without any sort of contrivance or mental interference, doing something in the world which doesn’t seem to have come from who we conceive ourselves to be. This is miraculous. Such an action enchants the world, and there is no explaining it, even if it may weave all kinds of stories around itself, retroactively framing things that have led up to it as portents or promises. (Though not exclusive to him, this trait is well-known in characterizations of Christ, and DS3 is clearly indebted to Christian iconography, so do with that what you will). Regardless of the specific cultural invocation, the divine child is a personification of something that happens within the human spirit. TFW you are renewed by a fresh and spontaneous engagement with life.

The grace of the miraculous often comes to us through play. Play is more of an attitude than an activity; the feeling of play may come to us through making a painting, or chatting with a friend, or moving around in a video game. We can play video games idly, competitively, experimentally, creatively, studiously, whatever, the feeling of “play” can show up regardless. We can sit there playing a certain game from a certain motivation, and feel totally rote and joyless, and question, “Why am I doing this?” Or we might sit there and play the same game with the same motivation, feeling totally lit up by it, its purpose to us obvious and self-validating. We are not even questioning why we are doing it, we are enjoying life.

This is really the ground that the miraculous tends to land on. Grace, meaning, and an immanent love of life are more likely to show up when we are in flow and not exercising our capacity for self-assessment. But like everything in life, we mistake the images and objects around us for the feeling of grace. Any given object might only be the catalyst once; it’s not about the object. This is extremely easy to see in cases of acute nostalgia; adults chase enchantment through collecting Zelda memorabilia or going to Disneyland, in pursuit of what kindled their spirit as a child. It was never really the game or the character that was doing it, it was what they were able to access within themselves.

So anyway Gael has yet to realize this. He thinks the Dark Soul is out there in something else. That it will be yielded as a drop if he just kills the right enemy, or 10,000 enemies, or goes to the right place at the right time. You can see that this is something of a synthesis of all the other Buddhist defilements: there are elements of completionism/greed, violence/hatred, mysticism/delusion. There is even the suggestion of the developer of these games again, in that Gael is a “slave,” forced into participation in the world to assist some creative apotheosis. (Isn’t it funny that his weapon is a worn-down executioner’s sword?—whether the person coding or the person playing, we are all “executing” command after command). The thing that really keeps him on the wheel is something beyond any of the player types and their vices; it is almost some sort of pure, amoral automatism, a churning drive that on one side resembles wanton nihilism, and on another side single-minded piousness. Is one disguised as the other, or has Gael somehow stepped beyond this binary? Yet another dichotomy in Dark Souls that begs to be reconciled, but whose tension creates the opportunity to participate creatively in its expansive mythology. When things are held apart we can move between them.

To really understand Gael, we have to contend with the question of a person’s relationship to their own soul, since that relationship is so plainly suggested by Gael and the painter. (This question, by the way, is much elaborated in Elden Ring, with its repeated foregrounding of the image of the maiden or “consort”). If we were to see Gael and the painter as partitions within one person--whether she is his soul, or his inner life, or his better nature, whatever—then in any case Gael is the side which goes out into the world and experiences it. He is the creative extension into the world as its active participant and realizer. Yet he is clothed as the warrior, the executioner. While the one who is dressed as the artist, the painter, just stays in her room and imagines the world—but this is where the magic of creation is really felt. We involve ourselves in life, or in a game, but we are only really changed and renewed when that exterior experience is “brought home” into the inner life. We do something “in the game,” but the act of “painting,” in renewing the world through our creative interpretation, is a decidedly interior experience.

#dark souls #dark souls 3 #lords of cinder #game entrainment #dark souls analysis #dark souls lore #ariandel #slave knight gael #the painted world

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thebadjoe · 4 days

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BAD JOE'S DRDT CH.2 CRIME SOLVING THEORY PART 6

Wow! It's been a long while, but it's finally here! DRDT Chapter 2 is back with part 2 starting since more than a week ago!

...Oh? What's that? There's some reveals that is damaging my theory and I should get to fixing? Awwww, man.... what a drag.... I am so doomed... nanchatte!

Anyways, hi! It's me, the dude who makes-overly-complex-and-ridiculously-long-theories-in-the-hopes-of-trying-to-solve-the-murder-case-that-not-many-people-agree-with-for-more-reasons-than-my-theory's-word-count. (Okay, the last part about the reasons is probably not true... yet!)

I am back yet again with some more updates regarding my theory.

NOOOOO!!! NOT AGAIN!!! PLEASE, I DON'T WANNA READ ANOTHER GODDAMN DICTIONARY LENGTH OF A THEORY POST!!!!

Woah! Calm down, imaginary self that is under the impression that some people were way too overwhelmed by my latest part of the theory post! You have nothing to worry about!

It would be silly of me to rewrite all of it again with some small changes. I will of course link up my part 5 later as source of reference, but really, all I'm gonna be doing here today is point out the newest problems with my theory ever since episode 12 and 13 and give my personal thoughts on those.

Also, to make sure that people hasn't forgotten what I've been all about since the beginning, I will do a short recap of my theory, displaying only what's most relevant to the murder case.

Besides, ain't no way I'm writing something this long ever again (except for maybe trying to solve the future chapters, but that's a matter for the far future).

With that said, I feel obliged to point out that this is spoilers for the fangan Danganronpa Despair Time Chapter 2, up until episode 13.

With that out of the way, let's get to it!

Hey look! I still remember how to use that show more button again, hurray! (I'm really sorry again to @1moreff-creator and everyone else who's been reading my very first posts last year that didn't have a show more button)

So, first things first, I'd like to apologize in advance because as amazing the episode 12 and 13 were, I will not be doing a reaction post of said episodes. I think I'm just too lazy to actually display my whole stream of consciousness through two whole videos and I think it is safe to say that practically all of us had a very similar reaction to those episodes.

What was the common reaction, you may ask? Well, it's simple, really... it went something like... OMG, THIS IS SO FUCKING HYPE! OMG!!! THAT WAS SO INSANE!!! THE DRAMA!!! DAVID BEING DAVID!!! THE LEVI REVEAL!!! THE FLASHBACK PART 2 SCENE!!! OMG, WHAT IS EDEN DOING?!! AREI IS HOLDING DAVID'S HANDS?! WE'RE FINALLY TALKING ABOUT THE MURDER METHODS?!?! OMG, SO GOOD!!!

...right? Yeah! I thought so! :D

Although I may not be showing proper and precise reactions to these episodes, if you're interested, I'd definitly recommend reading @venus-is-thinking 's, reactions on episode 12 and episode 13, @1moreff-creator 's reactions on episode 12 and episode 13 and @accirax 's reactions on episode 12 and episode 13. They're pretty good reads (and no, I'm not just saying this because they all believe that Eden is the culprit, I swear!).

And for those who are totally blind or new to my shenanigans, yes, I do believe that Eden is the culprit behind this murder case.

There is indeed a few problems that arose ever since the latest episodes, so to make sure that everyone is up to speed with what I'm gonna be talking about, I'm now going to be doing a short recap of the events, according to me.

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THE RECAP

DAY 1 : The day where everyone receives their mixed up secrets and explore the second floor. DAY 2 : The day where the attempted murder on Ace happened. DAY 3 : The day where Whit suggests David to chill for the evening in the relaxation room. DAY 4 : The day (morning) of the body discovery announcement.

Ever since Arei bullied Eden who then cried and exited the playground on DAY 2, that was what triggered Eden to decide to commit murder for the sake of escaping this hellish killing game. Knowing that her secret is that she kissed a girl, I deduced that she's probably trying to escape because she misses her beloved dearly.

So while she was off screen during most of that day, she spent time making plans for the murder set up and narrative, which is why she decided to share Arturo's secret (as seen in the flashback).

During the evening of DAY 2, Ace was working out in the gym, then he hears a conversation happening between David and Arei in the relax room. The conversation that Ace was quietly listening to did not happen in the evening of DAY 3, but rather the evening of DAY 2. Ace lied about when he was listening to that conversation.

At some point during the conversation or perhaps even after the conversation, Eden sneaks up on Ace and knocks him out with the turpentine that anyone could've gotten access to that day. Ace is Eden's chosen murder victim.

Sometime later, Eden eitheir used a letter or called out Arei's name to lure her into the playground or somewhere close to knock her unconscious with that very same turpentine. She then moves Arei's body into the relaxation room to lock her up inside because of the specific nighttime rules regarding that room.

Eden also brought old spares of clothing to cover Arei's body to make sure she doesn't get stained with starch from the water misting formula from the relaxation room.

During the night of DAY 2, she prepares the murder mechanism in the gym with some needed tools from the storage room and some wire that she took out from possibly a grandfather clock that she may have in her dorm. I deduced it as such because of Whit's description of everyone's dorms being suited to their needs.

I also deduced that there is actually a switch to turn on and off the fans, which is important since the attempted murder involved the fans. As Eden finished setting it up, as she was about to clear up with evidence, she heard someone using the elevator.

She hid in the dress up room, then Nico enters the second floor, looking for Ace to kill him. As Nico explores the gym, Teruko shortly enters the elevator to get to the second floor as well.

Teruko, looking for her spares, runs into Eden, who was hidden in the dress up room. After some talk, they heard a loud noise coming from the gym, which they both take a look inside.

Upon seeing this mess of a crime, Eden realised that her murder plan failed and that she needs to come up with a plan B really quick. So while she is taking time to "process this emotionally", Teruko was investigating.

Eden finally comes up with a plan B and figured that she needed to get her hands on the roll of tape ASAP. She managed to do so with a sleight of hand when Ace "suddenly wakes up", knocking Eden out of the way, distracting Teruko in the process.

Later that night, Eden proceeds with her plan B by making a murder mechanism in the playground. She also took the rope from the storage room. Once it's all properly set up, all's left was waiting for the relaxation to unlock at 8:00 AM on DAY 3.

In the morning of DAY 3, she retrieves Arei's unconscious body and proceeds with murdering Arei. Then, she proceeds to conceal the body somewhat behind the curtains in the relaxation room. She also grabs her glove, her monopad and the necessary materials in the dress up room for the next step of her plan.

She spends the rest of the morning to prepare her disguise trick. Then during lunchtime, Eden spends a short amount of time disguised as Arei to hide the actual time of death.

Once lunchtime is over, she returns to eitheir her or Arei's dorm to remove the disguise, spend time cleaning up, relax, power nap, etc. Then, during the evening of DAY 3, she spends time with Hu to fabricate her perfect alibi.

Later that evening, David explores the relaxation room. That's when he notices something wrong with the room and becomes the first person to discover Arei's dead body.

For some personal reasons, David brings the body back into the playground and hangs it by the swingset. Eitheir he or Eden (earlier in the morning) balls up the clothes and hides it in the closet of the dress-up room. Then, in the morning of DAY 4, David grabs everyone's attention to the fact that Arei is missing right before the secrets reveal. Then fast forward a bit, then we get the BDA of Arei

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And there ya go, that's my recap regarding how I believe the murder case happened. Pretty short, eh?

HELL NO!!! THAT WAS STILL PRETTY LONG!!! AHHHHH!!!!

Eh... I guess I couldn't really make it that shorter, my bad! If I tried to make it any shorter than that, it would've been extremely confusing.

Ah! Speaking of which, if you're confused in the sense that it feels like none of this should work at all, and there's a lot of contradictions and whatnot, then I would heavily recommend reading my actual theory post. I am not going to spend time refuting with people in the comments about points I've already pointed out in my previous post.

However, if there are things that are unclear to you, things that you do not understand and want to know what I'm talking about, please, feel free to ask away! I will help in any way I can.

With that out the way, I guess I can now start with pointing out the pr-

HAH! THERE IS A MAJOR ISSUE WITH YOUR THEORY!!! BASED ON EPISODE 12, THE MURDER COULD'VE ONLY HAPPENED IN THE MORNING OF DAY 4 BECAUSE OF THE BODY SWING! YOU'RE DONE FOR!

Ah... yeah... that! Of course! That's not a problem!

!!!

Let's talk about it first, shall we? :D

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AREI'S BODY SWING : CONFIRMED TIME OF DEATH???

I'd like to come clean with something, everyone. Ever since I came up with the theory that murder happened at a totally unexpected time, there was something that was constantly bothering me.

That's right, I was very well aware of the body swing happening during the BDA ever since the beginning.

HUH?! Then all this time, you wrote all of this despite knowing that?!

Correct! I'm really sorry about that, but please, understand that I had a very good reason for it. For you see... everytime I saw it, I was often under the impression that this was simply an eerie effect / animation, to give a more dramatic intensity towards the BDA, without meaning anything. I legit thought it could be a thing, I swear!

But despite all that... I couldn't help but feel uneasy about it. Deep down, I felt like that maybe there was an actual meaning to it, maybe it was an actual clue that I shouldn't disregard. But I figured that because of my theory beliefs, then it would be rather unlikely that it would be used as evidence.

But alas, I was wrong about that. The body swing plays a very important rule in determining what happened in this murder case. I cannot deny that fact, especially since Teruko brought it up, plain as day. Despite it seeming like it damages my theory, I'm thankful that the dev finally cleared that little doubt I had since then.

Then you admit it, the murder actually happened in the mor-

Oh, not so fast! Let's not jump to conclusions just yet, alright? Arei's body swinging by the swing set doesn't quite exactly prove that the murder occured during the morning of DAY 4. The body swing only proves that someone messed with the body by the swingset.

W-What?! That doesn't make sense! The murder clearly happened in the morning of DAY 4!

Nuh-uh, not quite. You believe it clearly happened in the morning because that's what the cast concluded on top of Charles pointing out that the culprit could've clearly fake the time of death by saving the fishes for later.

But unless we have decisive evidence that the murder happened in the morning, we can't be 100% sure that the murder happened in the morning of DAY 4.

From the looks of it, you just seem very desperate, if you ask me.

At first, when episode 12 released, I kind of was... up until I figured out a fairly logical solution to it. That's right! I have a way to explain who made the body swing and why.

You're not going to suggest that David did all of what he supposedly did in the evening of DAY 3, but instead in the morning of DAY 4, right?!

Nope! Not at all. Disregarding the facts that it wouldn't really make sense and that he'd have to move the body out of the relax room anyways before nighttime (because of the water misting rules), David actually has an alibi in the morning of DAY 4.

(As does Veronika too as she was with them in the cafeteria)

With all of these reasons mentioned above, as much as I initially wanted to make it somehow possible that David came back to the crime scene to mess with the body somehow, it just isn't possible.

So instead, someone else did it.

Then out with it already, you staller! Who is it?!

There is only one possible candidate that would make the most sense in that scenario : Eden. Eden is the person who messed with Arei's body in the morning of DAY 4.

WHHAAAAT?!?! WHY WOULD SHE DO THAT?! THAT'S SO RISKY!

That's what I initially thought at first, not gonna lie. But then... something hit me : Eden doesn't have an alibi for the morning of DAY 4 eitheir.

I thought that there would be absolutely no need for Eden to come back to the crime scene a certain short amount of time before the BDA, so instead, I needed to reverse my way of thinking.

What could she possibly aim to do that would prompt her to come back to the crime scene last minute?

Considering the facts (based on my theory, mind you) that she killed Arei in the morning of DAY 3, hid the body somewhere in the relaxation room, built up an evening to night alibi with Hu and that David was the first person to discover it during the evening, there is a simple explanation behind it.

Arei's BDA was meant to be triggered much earlier than the morning of DAY 4. The original intent behind this whole scheme was to have the BDA trigger during the evening of DAY 3.

That doesn't make sense!

No, that's wrong! It does make a whole lot of sense. Think about it. Let's say you were a participant in this killing game and were in David's shoes during the evening of DAY 3... you come across a dead body in the relaxation, what would you do?

!!!

That's right, you wouldn't just mess with the body and move it somewhere else, now would you? Aside from freaking out, the most natural and human thing to do would be to gather help.

If it were anyone else than David who discovered the body in that exact scenario, they would cry out for help, tell everyone that they found Arei dead inside the relaxation room, which would then result in a body discovery announcement.

But what if the person who found the body were to personally ask for Hu's and Eden's help, wouldn't that ruin her plan since it wouldn't trigger the BDA?

There's an easy solution to that. Eden could've simply decided to find more people to share the news to meet up with the corpse. This wouldn't ruin her plan in the slightest.

Quite the opposite, actually. If the body were to be discovered and trigger the BDA during the evening, it would solidify her air tight alibi even further as she wouldn't have any possible timeframe to commit murder in the evening as she was spending time with her friend Hu.

Ugh, so what? It didn't really happen anyways because of David being David! That doesn't change anything!

Actually, it does change things considerably. If you put yourself in the culprit's perspective where the whole intent was to have the body discovery happen in the evening of DAY 3 and that during the whole night, nothing happened, you would certainly find that very strange.

The culprit would be clearly confused, yet really curious to find out what even happened.

Couldn't she have taken a look much later during the night?

Perhaps, but she figured it would've been pointless. The reason why is that if she thought that nobody found the body, then the body would've still remained hidden in the relaxation room which would then be currently locked away because of the water misting.

So instead of checking it out during the late night of DAY 3, Eden decided to investigate during the very early morning of DAY 4, sometime past 7:30 AM.

But the relaxation room is still locked up until 8:00 AM! Why not wait until then?

It's simple! She just wanted to be there a little bit in advance to make sure she can enter the room as early as possible. And so... while she is waiting for the relaxation room to unlock, she probably figured that she should take a look around the other rooms, why not?

And thus, that leads to Eden finding the body being hung by the swingset, alongside fishes scattered around the floor for some reason.

To reconfirm, I still believe that David is the first person who discovered Arei's dead body in the relaxation room and that he's responsible for hanging her body alongside placing those fishes by the playground.

Okay, Eden discovers that the body has been moved to the playground? What now? Everything's already in place, so what could she possibly do with the dead body?

Well, since the BDA was not triggered on the evening of DAY 3, she figured that she may as well put Arei's monopad back into the corpse's pockets.

But what about her missing glove? Why didn't she return that as well if she wanted to return her monopad?

That's a good point, that's for sure. But there are two easy fixes to this counter argument. First one being that she simply forgot about the gloves. No one's really perfect, after all. She was so concerned about the body not being discovered yet that this completly slipped her mind.

The second fix would be that it would've been way too risky to try to retrieve the glove. Maybe initially, Eden, after she removed her disguise, she placed the clothes and the glove back into Arei's dorm. So if she wanted to retrieve the glove, she'd have to return to Arei's room, unlocking it with a monopad that isn't her own.

Would she really risk that again after making this much progress without getting caught so far? Like imagine if she tried to take that risk one last time only to get caught, that would be quite the devastating result, wouldn't it?

Ok, fine. Nevermind the gloves. Is that all she did?

Pretty much, yeah. She returned the monopad back into her pockets, which moved the body somewhat.

...

Well, it's also possible that she tripped and moved the body even more by accident. Or perhaps she felt like she was in such a hurry to avoid getting found out that she accidently bumped into Arei's dead body.

...Are you kidding me? There's no way that's gonna be enough to move the body for this long!

Well... maybe her being there at exactly 7:30 AM is not the exact time. She could've been there a couple minutes before 8:00 AM, which could make this possible.

But that's ridiculous! There's no way Eden is strong enough to make the body swing that way. To make the body swing for a good amount of time, she'd need more than just accidently bumping into the body! It needs considerable force.

And I'll stop you there. If you've read my last theory post, you should know by now that I'm a firm believer that because it's a work of fiction, anything that seems unlikely can become possible.

The main thing we should take from Arei's body swinging during the BDA is that at some point in time during the morning, someone messed with the body, proving that someone was there during the morning of DAY 4.

And there you go, that's my whole explanation as to how Arei's body was swinging during the BDA that doesn't necessarily mean that the murder occured during that exact morning.

If you're not quite convinced yet, there is a certain part of my theory that begins to make a lot more logical sense with this solution in mind. Take a look at this!

Thanks to the solution I suggested, these two lines become a lot more fitting to my updated theory. Here's why!

If Eden were to explore and find the body hanging by the swing set during the morning of DAY 4, she would know that at least 1 person found the body, but not who exactly.

Because of Whit's silly comment, Eden immediatly thought of the body in the playground and jumped to the worst conclusion : Whit is the person who found the body first.

So if they were to open the door to the playground, the BDA would not trigger since Eden is the culprit. So in a moment of panic, Eden uttered : "Teruko, wait--".

It is still pretty much the same as what I had in mind according to the previous part of my theory post, except that it works a whole lot better now that Eden personally saw the actual state of the dead body in the morning of DAY 4.

So there you have it. This seemingly major problem for my theory actually turned out to be very beneficial for my theory after all! Ah, the joys of making logical sounding deductions! My theory should be saf-

HAH! YOU THINK YOUR THEORY IS SAFE FROM HARM YET?! WRONG!!!! IN EPISODE 13, THEY ACTUALLY SHOWED HOW THE MURDER MECHANISM WORKED! NOT ONLY IS EDEN TOO WEAK TO OPERATE IT, BUT THEY PUT FISH WATER INSIDE THOSE JUGS! SINCE THEY REVEALED THAT MURDER METHOD, IT HAS TO BE THE SOLUTION. YOUR THEORY IS RUINED! GOOD DAY SIR!

Oh, you mean this?

Oh no, this murder mechanism is different from mine and this one requires a certain amount of strength that Eden possibly doesn't have! And the fishes! Since they brought it up, then there's no way my theory can work! Whatever shall I do??? It's joever.... just kidding!

I don't mean to alarm you guys, but the current proposed murder mechanism idea actually has flaws. Let's talk some more about the murder mechanism in the playground, shall we? :)

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TERUKO'S CURRENT MURDER MECHANISM IDEA : RIGHT OR WRONG???

Before I get into it, I'd like to remind everyone that just because we've been shown how the murder may have been done for the first time means that's how it actually happened. Let's not forget that they spent so much time arguing and discussing about the secrets that they barely ever talked about the murder case in itself.

So if anything, episode 13 is practically just them beginning their actual work! Mistakes are bound to happen. We shouldn't jump to conclusions just yet. Besides, there is actually a problem with this murder mechanism.

I'll present it to you in pictures to show you what I'm talking about.

The taped up wrists. This was practically the decisive proof that this wasn't a suicide nor could it have been an assisted suicide. So now that they've introduced a murder mechanism in an actual episode... what's actually the point of the taped wrists in that scenario?

If the culprit used exactly this kind of murder mechanism, then there would be absolutely no need to tape up her wrists together.

Maybe it was to stop Arei from trying to struggle?

Nope. If that was the case, we would've seen much more signs of struggle coming from Arei. There may be scuffs on the ground, but there's absolutely no other form of injury on Arei aside from her broken neck.

Well, I saw a theory where the accomplice was Levi and he could've easily overpower her!

(I believe that was something that @1moreff-creator theorized, if I recall? At least, that was the theory pre part 2)

It used to be borderline possible, but not this time anymore! Thanks to the first two episodes of part 2 of chapter 2, it seems extremely unlikely that Levi wanted to work with the culprit as an accomplice.

Not only because of what we find out regarding his secret, what kind of character he is, but also because of something he said in episode 12.

I don't know about you, but this doesn't look like something an accomplice would say at all, right? If the culprit was someone who didn't have an alibi in the evening, it would be a different story, but the most fitting theory for having Levi work as an accomplice is to work for Eden, who happens to have an alibi in the evening as you already know.

So since we gotta take Levi out of the equation, then we don't really have much other possible candidates who could've easily overpower Arei to the point where taping up her wrists would've helped better on that regard.

Therefore, the most logical solution would be that Arei was knocked unconscious with the turpentine. But since that's the most likely scenario, then what's up with the taped wrists?

If the taped wrists weren't used to prevent any remote chance for Arei to try to get out of this situation, then it must've been used as part of the murder mechanism.

But since the murder mechanism as shown by Teruko doesn't explain the taped up wrists whatsoever, then this becomes a discrepancy. Therefore, that can't be quite the correct answer to solving the how this murder mechanism works.

And since this murder mechanism idea is flawed, it also means that there's no guarantee that the jugs contained fish water inside, they could've simply gathered water somewhere else or perhaps there jugs were already filled with clean water to begin with.

Because this murder mechanism idea is flawed, there's no guarantee that the culprit used this method which required some unknown amount of strength, but an amount of strength regardless (unless the author wants to pass it off as anyone could've done it since it's easier to do it by spinning it, I'm not sure).

Because of that flaw, my theory isn't affected by the murder mechanism idea that Teruko suggested since there is no guarantee that this is the correct answer.

So yeah, there's no problem whatsoever! Also, as far as I'm aware, since the release of the latest episodes, I have a very logically sound reason to explain the taped up wrists as shown in part 5 of my theory.

To give you a small reminder, it was for something like this!

(Whole murder mechanism not properly shown in the drawing because I'm lazy as heck, but just take a close attention to the arms)

By having Arei's arms go between the pillars of the seasaw, you can make it so that she can't get out of it by taping her wrists together, which plays an important role in the murder mechanism. Not going to elaborate further, if you want to know more, you gotta read the big post right there!

And there you have it! Those were the two main concerns that could've negatively affect my theory, but fortunately for me, it doesn't. In fact, it supports it even more than before.

Especially regarding the David / Arei conversation flashback (shown from David's memory's perspective). This conversation told us a lot more between these two, do you know what that means?

That's right! It means that Ace is full of shit! There's no way he didn't hear anything else. The only way he could've not hear anything else is if he gets snuck up from behind and gets knocked out with the turpentine, but it could've easily simply been Ace witholding that information to make David look more suspicious.

Therefore, if he lied about this, he could've also easily lied about when he actually overheard that conversation for his own selfish gains!

There's also a few couple other points that could further support my theory, but I don't feel like going over every single little detail as of now. I mainly wanted to solve these two issues and nothing else.

So, DRDTers, I need to ask you the following : Do you still believe that I am delusional with this overly complex theory of mine? :)

Thanks for reading another one of my big posts, as usual!

#drdt #drdt spoilers #drdt theory #drdt solve #danganronpa despair time #I can't believe I'm doing this again #Can't wait to see what's gonna happen in episode 14 #I remain undaunted

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queenshelby · 1 year

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Yes! Mr Murphy (Rewritten)

PART 29: THE PERFORMANCE

Pairing: Cillian Murphy x Reader

Warning: Lots of Angst, Age Gap, Teacher x Student, Pregnancy Loss, Infertility

Chapter Note:

This chapter explores the next six weeks from Cillian’s Point of View.

Cillian’s POV

A few days following your latest encounter at Cillian’s apartment, Dermont and Cillian sat at the pub, drinking pints of Guinness. The dimly lit room echoed with the sound of lively conversation and clinking glasses. Outside, rain drizzled down on the streets of Dublin, adding to the gloomy atmosphere that matched the melancholic state of their minds.

Cillian took a long sip from his pint, contemplating the weight of recent events, including the break up with you and the fact that, again, Nina was struggling with his separation from Danielle.

While Nina’s mental health was something Cillian and Danielle had addressed in recent days, following her having run off from his apartment, the breakup with you still had left him shattered. It was something he could not come to terms with and struggled to accept.

"You know, Dermont," Cillian began, his voice tinged with melancholy. "I can't stop thinking about her. It's driving me mad."

Dermont took a swig of his Guinness, his eyes narrowing as he studied his troubled friend. "You are still caught up on her? Jesus, man," he spoke.

"I can't help it," Cillian confessed. "She's all I think about,” he admitted in the midst of being somewhat tipsy and Dermont leaned back and crossed his arms.

"I have to admit, Cillian, I never understood why you let her go in the first place,” his friend pointed out, causing Cillian to sigh.

"It's the age difference, Dermont," Cillian lamented. "She is half my age, for God's sake. It felt wrong,” he explained and Dermont tilted his head, a sceptical expression on his face. "Age is just a number, my friend. If there's love, it transcends all that rubbish.”

Cillian snorted and took a sip of his Guinness. "You make it sound so simple, man."

"Because it is," Dermont affirmed. "Besides, you're not getting any younger either, mate."

Cillian glared at his friend playfully. "Thanks for the reminder, Dermont,” he said before asking his friend what to do.

“You should try and resolve this. If you want her back, then tell her,” Dermont pointed out and Cillian's face contorted with uncertainty. "I don't know, Dermont. I don't even know if she'd want me back after the way I ended things."

Dermont scoffed, a smirk playing on his lips. "Oh, the classic self-deprecating Cillian Murphy. Trust me, mate, shoot your shot. You never know until you try."

Cillian chuckled, his eyes lighting up with a newfound determination before remembering something else that, just days ago, you had told him about when you were made to resign.

Cillian, of course, then told Dermont all about it, including the fact that there had been an email that was sent to the dance academy, signed off by a “concerned parent”.

“I thought me and Connie were the only ones who knew at the time?” Dermont acknowledged, resulting in Cillian to nod.

“From the parents, yes…” he determined as the discovery of someone sabotaging your career had ignited a fiery determination within him. He couldn't let this stand and wanted to know who did this to you.

Dermont, ever the curious friend, frowned as he listened to Cillian tell him about the email that had, apparently, given rise to your forced resignation. "Who could have done it then, you think?" he asked, his voice tinged with concern.

Cillian sighed heavily, the lines of worry etched deep on his forehead. "I don't know, Dermont. I can't think of anyone who would stoop so low," he replied, frustration evident in his voice.

Dermont's eyes narrowed as a thought struck him like a lightning bolt. "What about Kit? She knew…" he suggested, causing Cillian's eyebrows to shoot up in surprise.

"Kit? Why would you suspect her?" Cillian questioned, his tone laced with disbelief. Kit had always seemed loyal.

Dermont leaned in closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Think about it, Cillian. Kit knows how much you still love Y/N, and you fucked her. Perhaps she grew jealous and decided to take matters into her own hands” he suggested.

Cillian's mind spun with the possibility, a flicker of doubt igniting within him. Could Kit have orchestrated this? He mulled over Dermont's theory, his eyes clouded with suspicion.

“It was just sex, man. Kit said so herself,” Cillian pointed out though while running a hand through his unruly hair. “I just can't imagine her doing something like that,” he then told his friend.

Dermont leaned back, resting his pint on the table. "Are you sure about that, mate? Kit's been acting a bit off lately. She knew how much you love Y/N, and let's face it, jealousy can turn even the sweetest of assistants into vengeful email-senders,” Dermont said jokingly, causing Cillian to chuckle momentarily.

"Don't ruin Kit for me, Dermont. She's been nothing but supportive and she is a pretty good assistant,” he pointed out as he could not believe that it may be her who sent the email.

Dermont leaned in closer, voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "But what if she's secretly in love with you and can't bear the thought of you being with someone else? People do crazy things for love, mate. Crazy things,” he pointed out.

Cillian stared at Dermont, trying to gauge whether he was being serious or just pulling his leg. "You can't be serious. Kit has been with me for years,” he said.

Dermont shrugged, a devilish grin on his face. "Hey, I'm just saying. It's worth considering. Love can make a person do all sorts of mad stuff,” he argued.

Cillian rolled his eyes, taking a long sip of his Guinness. "You watch too many telenovelas, Dermont. Kit is not the culpri-" he began to say and, just as Cillian was about to finish his sentence, his phone buzzed, signalling a new message. He pulled it out of his pocket and unlocked the screen, eyes widening as he read the name on the display - Kit.

"Speak of the devil," Dermont chuckled, raising an eyebrow. "Go on, mate. See what she wants,” Dermont told him and Cillian hesitated for a moment before opening the message. His eyes darted across the screen, his face contorting into a mixture of confusion and disbelief.

"She... she just sent me a meme of a cat wearing a hat, some Oppenheimer thing…" Cillian laughed, and Dermont burst into laughter, doubling over with mirth. "Oh, mate, you were so close to discovering her sinister plot, and she distracts you with pictures of dapper felines. She's good,” he joked.

Cillian's forehead creased with frustration as he slid his phone back into his pocket. "I can't believe I'm even entertaining this nonsense, Dermont. Kit would never betray me like that,” he was certain, but Dermont was not.

Dermont wiped away a tear of laughter, struggling to compose himself. "Okay, okay, I'll drop it. But remember, cats in hats can be dangerously distracting, especially those which build atomic weapons. Stay vigilant, my friend,” he carried on, and Cillian shook his head, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. "You're an ejeet. I don't know how you come up with this stuff,” Cillian acknowledged, causing Dermont to wink playfully.

"It's a gift, mate. A gift that keeps on giving,” Dermont told his friend before they clinked their glasses together, the sound echoing through the pub as they shared a moment of lighthearted camaraderie amidst the chaos of love and betrayal.

Little did they know, the truth was lurking in the shadows, waiting to unveil its twisted face. And when it did, everything would change.

But for now, they would enjoy their pints, laughter, and the blissful ignorance that only a good pub session could provide. The mysteries could wait; they had Guinness to savour.

***

About two weeks later, Cillian and Dermont were still hunting for cues, and it was Nina who told them both to give up and let it be. According to Nina, you took up a new job with a theatre production company that specialises in musicals and dance performances, and it was one of those performances that she wanted to see.

Nina had followed you on Instagram and Facebook for weeks, and you stayed in touch. You offered her some tickets to attend the show with either her mum or dad, now that you knew that Danielle no longer held a grudge against you.

In fact, she even tried to get you reemployed which, in the end, was an offer you declined even despite the fact that the owner of the dance academy apologised to you.

"Dad, you have to take me to see her perform! Can you take me? Please?" Nina thus pleaded, her blue eyes wide with anticipation after Cillian slumped onto the couch, his brow furrowing as he stared at his daughter, who was bouncing with excitement in front of him.

Cillian sighed heavily, running his fingers through his tousled hair. "Nina, we've been through this. I don't think it's a good idea," he repeated as, just two days ago, she asked him the same question.

Nina pouted, crossing her arms stubbornly. "But Dad, she's been teaching me everything she knows about dance, and I really want to see her perform.” She begged.

Cillian's gaze softened as he looked at his daughter. He hated to disappoint her, but he had his reasons for not wanting to see you perform.

"Nina, you know how things ended between us," Cillian said, his voice tinged with sadness.

“All I know is that you broke up with her,” Nina pointed out in response, to which Cillian sighed, finding it difficult to explain to his young daughter the complexities of your relationship.

"It's a complicated situation, sweetheart. We had our differences, and age played a big part in it,” he pointed out and, immediately, Nina, being the insightful teenager she was, raised an eyebrow sceptically.

"Wait, Dad, are you saying you dumped her because she's young and cool?" she asked and Cillian shifted uncomfortably in his seat, feeling like he was on trial.

"Well, it wasn't as simple as that, but yes, age was a factor. I did not know how young she was and when I found out I realised that it couldn’t work. I didn't want her to miss out on experiences and opportunities that someone her own age could provide. Despite, my career, it…" Cillian began to say, but Nina interrupted him.

Nina crossed her arms, her eyes narrowing with determination. "Dad, you're being ridiculous. Your career? Really? You hooked up with your assistant, it’s all over the papers, but you are worried about bad press because of Y/N?” Nina spat, causing her father to gulp.

Cillian shook his head, willing himself to stay firm in his decision. "Nina, it's not that simple and I would rather not revisit this. Okay?” Cillian then shut her off which caused Nina to sit down next to her father, wrapping an arm around his shoulders.

"Dad, you need to grow up. It’s okay to be in love with someone who doesn’t quite fit within your ideals. Love is an iffy little thing, worth making sacrifices for” Nina said like a grown-up and Cillian glanced at his daughter, love and pride shining in his eyes. Nina's words struck a chord within him, making him consider her perspective.

“I read this in a book at school, don’t judge” Nina then pointed out, but the words had already sunk in.

"Maybe you're right though," Cillian reluctantly admitted and Nina beamed, her blue eyes sparkling with triumph.

“Does this mean you take me to see her performance?” Nina wanted to know and Cillian nodded.

“Yes, but only because I know it means a lot to you and you grew up to be so wise” Cillian chuckled softly, giving Nina a playful nudge.

Nina squealed with delight, throwing her arms around Cillian in a tight hug. "Thank you, thank you, thank you, Dad! You won't be disappointed, I swear!" she told him while Cillian found himself chuckling again, unable to resist his daughter's infectious enthusiasm.

"All right, calm down, you. Now, tell me more about it. Is it a ballet?” Cillian asked and Nina's eyes sparkled with excitement as she launched into an animated description of the contemporary ballet assembly you were part of.

Listening to Nina, Cillian found his curiosity piqued. Maybe it was time he saw for himself what he had been missing and, as Nina continued to regale him with tales of your talent, Cillian couldn't help but wonder if he had made a mistake by letting you go.

The performance was weeks away, but Cillian promised Nina that he would take her to see you. Deep down, he hoped that by witnessing your prowess on stage, he would find closure and the strength to move on. But, unfortunately for him, he would soon learn that the opposite was the case.

In the days leading up to the performance, Cillian's mind became consumed with memories of you.

He recalled your laughter, your teasing smiles, and the passion that ignited between you both, erasing any concerns about age differences or what society might think.

As the date drew nearer, Cillian's heart felt heavy, a mixture of anticipation and trepidation. He found himself becoming increasingly nervous and couldn't help but wonder what seeing you dance on stage again would do to him.

***

A few weeks later, when the night of your performance had arrived, Cillian waited at the theatre's entrance, fidgeting with his ticket in hand.

Nina, dressed in an elegant dress, bounced beside him and Cillian's heart swelled with pride at Nina's excitement. He took a deep breath, hoping that tonight would bring him the closure he needed.

They had good seats, three rows from the front and when Cillian took his seat in the dimly lit theatre, a flutter of anticipation in his stomach.

The lights dimmed, hushing the buzzing crowd. The stage came alive, bathed in ethereal hues of purple and blue.

The first dancers appeared, their movements captivating the audience. But Cillian's gaze remained fixed on the edge of the stage, waiting for your entrance.

And then, there you were, gracefully gliding across the stage, your body a mesmerising blur of movement.

Cillian's breath caught in his throat as he watched you, his eyes hungrily drinking in every sway of your hips and arch of your back.

The music swelled, and you leapt into the air, defying gravity with an effortless elegance. The audience erupted into applause.

Cillian's heart raced, torn between the memories of what once was and the undeniable beauty he witnessed before him.

As the performance went on, Cillian found himself entranced by your talent, lost in the way your body spoke a language all its own.

He couldn't look away from you, from the raw emotion etched across your face, from the way your body moved with a combination of strength and vulnerability.

Cillian's breath hitched as you effortlessly leapt and twirled through the air, your passion radiating from every pore. It was as if time stood still, the world narrowing down to just the two of you.

Act after act, Cillian remained glued to his seat, unable to tear his eyes away from your performance. The audience erupted in applause after each routine, but for Cillian, it was an internal symphony of emotions.

As the final act approached, Cillian's heart pounded in his chest. It was a moment of truth, a moment where he had to face his feelings head-on and decide what he truly wanted.

The lights dimmed, leaving only a single spotlight illuminating the stage. You stood there, a vision in black, poised and ready to unleash the depths of your soul through movement.

Cillian held his breath as the hauntingly beautiful music began. Every step you took seemed to echo in his heart, the ache of longing mingling with the bittersweet melody.

The dance spoke volumes, conveying a story of love and loss, of two souls intertwined in an eternal dance of desire and hesitancy. Cillian couldn't help but see himself in the narrative.

The climax of the performance drew near, a moment of climax and intensity where you and your partner poured all your emotions onto the stage. The chemistry between you was palpable.

Cillian's heart raced, his fingers involuntarily clenching around the edge of his seat. His eyes locked with yours, and he knew in that moment that he couldn't deny his feelings any longer.

The dance came to a crescendo and the audience erupted in thunderous applause, but Cillian was rooted to his spot, emotions swirling within him.

Nina's eyes flickered between you and her father, sensing his conflicted emotions.

She reached out a hand, resting it gently on Cillian's arm. "Dad, are you okay?"

Cillian tore his eyes away from you, his voice thick with emotion. "I... we should go soon” he stammered and Nina gave him a sympathetic smile, squeezing his arm reassuringly.

“Do you want to go and talk to her?” Nina asked as tears glimmered in Cillian's eyes.

“No, we should go,” Cillian told his daughter just as the lights came on.

#cillian murphy #cillian murphy smut #cillian murphy imagine #cillian murphy x reader #cillian murphy x y/n #cillian murphy x you #cillian murhpy #cillian x reader #cillian murphy fanfiction #cillian murphy fanfic

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literaryvein-reblogs · 1 month

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Writing Notes: The Moon (pt. 2)

Earth’s Moon is thought to have formed in a tremendous collision. A massive object ― named Theia after the mythological Greek Titan who was the mother of Selene, goddess of the Moon ― smashed into Earth, flinging material into space that became the Moon.

The brightest and largest object in our night sky, the Moon makes Earth a more livable planet by moderating our home planet's wobble on its axis, leading to a relatively stable climate. It also causes tides, creating a rhythm that has guided humans for thousands of years.

The Moon was likely formed after a Mars-sized body collided with Earth several billion years ago.

Earth's only natural satellite is simply called "the Moon" because people didn't know other moons existed until Galileo Galilei discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610. In Latin, the Moon was called Luna, which is the main adjective for all things Moon-related: lunar.

The many missions that have explored the Moon have found no evidence to suggest it has its own living things. However, the Moon could be the site of future colonization by humans. The discovery that the Moon harbors water ice, and that the highest concentrations occur within darkened craters at the poles, makes the Moon a little more hospitable for future human colonists.

With a radius of about 1,080 miles (1,740 kilometers), the Moon is less than a third of the width of Earth. If Earth were the size of a nickel, the Moon would be about as big as a coffee bean.

The Moon is an average of 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers) away. That means 30 Earth-sized planets could fit in between Earth and the Moon.

The Moon is slowly moving away from Earth, getting about an inch farther away each year.

The Moon is rotating at the same rate that it revolves around Earth (called synchronous rotation), so the same hemisphere faces Earth all the time. Some people call the far side – the hemisphere we never see from Earth – the "dark side" but that's misleading. As the Moon orbits Earth, different parts are in sunlight or darkness at different times. The changing illumination is why, from our perspective, the Moon goes through phases. During a "full moon," the hemisphere of the Moon we can see from Earth is fully illuminated by the Sun. And a "new moon" occurs when the far side of the Moon has full sunlight, and the side facing us is having its night.

The moon's near and far side.

The Moon makes a complete orbit around Earth in 27 Earth days and rotates or spins at that same rate, or in that same amount of time. Because Earth is moving as well – rotating on its axis as it orbits the Sun – from our perspective, the Moon appears to orbit us every 29 days.

The leading theory of the Moon's origin is that a Mars-sized body collided with Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The resulting debris from both Earth and the impactor accumulated to form our natural satellite 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) away. The newly formed Moon was in a molten state, but within about 100 million years, most of the global "magma ocean" had crystallized, with less-dense rocks floating upward and eventually forming the lunar crust.

Earth's Moon has a core, mantle, and crust:

The Moon’s core is proportionally smaller than other terrestrial bodies' cores. The solid, iron-rich inner core is 149 miles (240 kilometers) in radius. It is surrounded by a liquid iron shell 56 miles (90 kilometers) thick. A partially molten layer with a thickness of 93 miles (150 kilometers) surrounds the iron core.

The mantle extends from the top of the partially molten layer to the bottom of the Moon's crust. It is most likely made of minerals like olivine and pyroxene, which are made up of magnesium, iron, silicon, and oxygen atoms.

The crust has a thickness of about 43 miles (70 kilometers) on the Moon’s near-side hemisphere and 93 miles (150 kilometers) on the far-side. It is made of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, with small amounts of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and hydrogen.

Long ago the Moon had active volcanoes, but today they are all dormant and have not erupted for millions of years.

With too sparse an atmosphere to impede impacts, a steady rain of asteroids, meteoroids, and comets strikes the surface of the Moon, leaving numerous craters behind. Tycho Crater is more than 52 miles (85 kilometers) wide.

Over billions of years, these impacts have ground up the surface of the Moon into fragments ranging from huge boulders to powder. Nearly the entire Moon is covered by a rubble pile of charcoal-gray, powdery dust, and rocky debris called the lunar regolith. Beneath is a region of fractured bedrock referred to as the megaregolith.

The light areas of the Moon are known as the highlands. The dark features, called maria (Latin for seas), are impact basins that were filled with lava between 4.2 and 1.2 billion years ago. These light and dark areas represent rocks of different compositions and ages, which provide evidence for how the early crust may have crystallized from a lunar magma ocean. The craters themselves, which have been preserved for billions of years, provide an impact history for the Moon and other bodies in the inner solar system.

If you looked in the right places on the Moon, you would find pieces of equipment, American flags, and even a camera left behind by astronauts. While you were there, you'd notice that the gravity on the surface of the Moon is one-sixth of Earth's, which is why in footage of moonwalks, astronauts appear to almost bounce across the surface.

The temperature on the Moon reaches about 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) when in full Sun, but in darkness, the temperatures plummet to about -280 degrees Fahrenheit (-173 degrees Celsius).

During the initial exploration of the Moon, and the analysis of all the returned samples from the Apollo and the Luna missions, we thought that the surface of the Moon was dry.

The first definitive discovery of water was made in 2008 by the Indian mission Chandrayaan-1, which detected hydroxyl molecules spread across the lunar surface and concentrated at the poles. Missions such as Lunar Prospector, LCROSS, and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, have not only shown that the surface of the Moon has global hydration but there are actually high concentrations of ice water in the permanently shadowed regions of the lunar poles.

Scientists also found the lunar surface releases its water when the Moon is bombarded by micrometeoroids. The surface is protected by a layer, a few centimeters of dry soil that can only be breached by large micrometeoroids. When micrometeoroids impact the surface of the Moon, most of the material in the crater is vaporized. The shock wave carries enough energy to release the water that’s coating the grains of the soil. Most of that water is released into space.

In October 2020, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places. SOFIA detected water molecules (H2O) in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the Moon’s southern hemisphere.

The Moon has a very thin and weak atmosphere, called an exosphere. It does not provide any protection from the Sun's radiation or impacts from meteoroids.

The early Moon may have developed an internal dynamo, the mechanism for generating global magnetic fields for terrestrial planets, but today, the Moon has a very weak magnetic field. The magnetic field here on Earth is many thousands of times stronger than the Moon's magnetic field.

Earth’s Moon was born out of destruction.

Several theories about our Moon’s formation vie for dominance, but almost all share that point in common: near the time of the solar system’s formation, about 4.5 billion years ago, something ― perhaps a single object the size of Mars, perhaps a series of objects ― crashed into the young Earth and flung enough molten and vaporized debris into space to create the Moon.

Five Things We Learned from Apollo Moon Rocks

The chemical composition of Moon and Earth rocks are very similar.

The Moon was once covered in an ocean of magma.

Meteorites have shattered and melted rocks on the Moon’s surface through impacts.

Lava flowed up through cracks in the Moon’s crust and filled its impact basins.

Lunar “soil” is made of pulverized rock created by meteorite impacts.

If these writing notes helped with your poem/story, please tag me. Or leave a link in the replies. I'd love to read them!

Writing Notes: The Moon (pt. 1)

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solisaureus · 9 months

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Let’s talk about a trend in queer Jason Grace headcanons

I have been seeing headcanons about Jason Grace actually being queer since House of Hades came out (Jason was not popular before that. trust me). While there's nothing inherently wrong with queer headcanons, it is frustrating that the most common ones I see are already included in canon in the less-acknowledged character arcs of Reyna and Piper. It feels wrong that Jason fans are so willing to read deeply into the story for evidence that that this white boy could be affected by compulsory heterosexuality and is actually queer, while Reyna and Piper are not appreciated nearly as much despite comp-het being a part of their canon stories.

I even recently saw someone say that Jason's character arc of learning who he really is outside of the norms of Roman society is suggestive of a queer coming out journey. If only there was a character in this series who canonically struggled with heteronormative expectations of Roman praetorship, who then embraced their canon marginalized sexual identity after stepping away from Roman society....does this ring a bell to anyone else...?

In addition to Reyna's canon arc getting projected onto Jason by fans, Piper's queer journey also gets applied to Jason while Piper herself is largely brushed aside by fans. Like Jason, Piper's memories of her hetero relationship with Jason were implanted in her head by the goddess of marriage, and she later realized that her feelings of love for Jason weren't genuine. She then goes on to break up with him and explore her queerness, later dating a girl. This is a very compelling allegory for the real compulsory heterosexuality that wlw experience, and as a lesbian I found myself relating to it a lot. It makes me sad that Piper's queer journey so underappreciated by fans, while every other day I see posts imagining Jason with a very similar journey.

Why Jason? Why do I see so many people put so much thought into how Jason could be read as queer, while largely not touching the female characters with canon stories of queer self discovery? It's hard not to wonder if this is linked to the bias of prioritizing white men over women and especially women of color. This isn’t anyone’s individual fault: if it were just one Jason fan doing this, I would chalk it up to just a preference for his character over Reyna or Piper’s. However, the presence of a trend, the fact that this happens repeatedly, suggests a bias in favor of centering white male characters to the detriment of brown female characters. If you feel targeted by this post, sit with that discomfort. Examine and question your preferences. None of us are free from bias, and leaving it unexamined doesn’t make it go away.

I’m not against queer readings of Jason’s character, I just wanted to point out that people’s headcanons tend to recreate the canon queer arcs of Piper and/or Reyna to project onto him. I’m pointing this out because I don't think people even know they're doing it. Part of me wonders why Reyna and Piper don't get the same kind of attention and celebration for the traits that people want to apply to Jason. Except I think I already know the answer.

#this post is going to invite hornets into my home i just know it i’m battening down the hatches #robin text

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year

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By: Jon Haidt

Published: Mar 9, 2023

In May 2014, Greg Lukianoff invited me to lunch to talk about something he was seeing on college campuses that disturbed him. Greg is the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and he has worked tirelessly since 2001 to defend the free speech rights of college students. That almost always meant pushing back against administrators who didn’t want students to cause trouble, and who justified their suppression of speech with appeals to the emotional “safety” of students—appeals that the students themselves didn’t buy. But in late 2013, Greg began to encounter new cases in which students were pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech. These students arrived on campus in the fall of 2013 already accepting the idea that books, words, and ideas could hurt them. Why did so many students in 2013 believe this, when there was little sign of such beliefs in 2011?

Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression.

What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT.

I thought the idea was brilliant because I had just begun to see these new ways of thinking among some students at NYU. I volunteered to help Greg write it up, and in August 2015 our essay appeared in The Atlantic with the title: The Coddling of the American Mind. Greg did not like that title; his original suggestion was “Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions.” He wanted to put the reverse CBT hypothesis in the title.

After our essay came out, things on campus got much worse. The fall of 2015 marked the beginning of a period of protests and high-profile conflicts on campus that led many or most universities to implement policies that embedded this new way of thinking into campus culture with administrative expansions such as “bias response teams” to investigate reports of “microaggressions.” Surveys began to show that most students and professors felt that they had to self-censor. The phrase “walking on eggshells” became common. Trust in higher ed plummeted, along with the joy of intellectual discovery and sense of goodwill that had marked university life throughout my career.

Greg and I decided to expand our original essay into a book in which we delved into the many causes of the sudden change in campus culture. Our book focused on three “great untruths” that seemed to be widely believed by the students who were trying to shut down speech and prosecute dissent:

1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker 2. Always trust your feelings 3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

Each of these untruths was the exact opposite of a chapter in my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, which explored ten Great Truths passed down to us from ancient societies east and west. We published our book in 2018 with the title, once again, of The Coddling of the American Mind. Once again, Greg did not like the title. He wanted the book to be called “Disempowered,” to capture the way that students who embrace the three great untruths lose their sense of agency. He wanted to capture reverse CBT.

The Discovery of the Gender-by-Politics Interaction

In September 2020, Zach Goldberg, who was then a graduate student at Georgia State University, discovered something interesting in a dataset made public by Pew Research. Pew surveyed about 12,000 people in March 2020, during the first month of the Covid shutdowns. The survey included this item: “Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?” Goldberg graphed the percentage of respondents who said “yes” to that item as a function of their self-placement on the liberal-conservative 5-point scale and found that white liberals were much more likely to say yes than white moderates and conservatives. (His analyses for non-white groups generally found small or inconsistent relationships with politics.)

I wrote to Goldberg and asked him to redo it for men and women separately, and for young vs. old separately. He did, and he found that the relationship to politics was much stronger for young (white) women. You can see Goldberg’s graph here, but I find it hard to interpret a three-way interaction using bar charts, so I downloaded the Pew dataset and created line graphs, which make it easier to interpret.

Here’s the same data, showing three main effects: gender (women higher), age (youngest groups higher), and politics (liberals higher). The graphs also show three two-way interactions (young women higher, liberal women higher, young liberals higher). And there’s an important three-way interaction: it is the young liberal women who are highest. They are so high that a majority of them said yes, they had been told that they have a mental health condition.

Figure 1. Data from Pew Research, American Trends Panel Wave 64. The survey was fielded March 19-24, 2020. Graphed by Jon Haidt.

In recent weeks—since the publication of the CDC’s report on the high and rising rates of depression and anxiety among teens—there has been a lot of attention to a different study that shows the gender-by-politics interaction: Gimbrone, Bates, Prins, & Keyes (2022), titled: “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs.” Gimbrone et al. examined trends in the Monitoring the Future dataset, which is the only major US survey of adolescents that asks high school students (seniors) to self-identify as liberal or conservative (using a 5-point scale). The survey asks four items about mood/depression. Gimbrone et al. found that prior to 2012 there were no sex differences and only a small difference between liberals and conservatives. But beginning in 2012, the liberal girls began to rise, and they rose the most. The other three groups followed suit, although none rose as much, in absolute terms, as did the liberal girls (who rose .73 points since 2010, on a 5-point scale where the standard deviation is .89).

Figure 2. Data from Monitoring the Future, graphed by Gimbrone et al. (2022). The scale runs from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum).

The authors of the study try to explain the fact that liberals rise first and most in terms of the terrible things that conservatives were doing during Obama’s second term, e.g.,

Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.

The progressive New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg took up the question and wrote a superb essay making the argument that teen mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue. She dismissed Gimbrone et al.’s explanation as having a poor fit with their own data:

Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.

After examining the evidence, including the fact that the same trends happened at the same time in Britain, Canada, and Australia, Goldberg concluded that “Technology, not politics, was what changed in all these countries around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word “selfie” entered the popular lexicon.”

Journalist Matt Yglesias also took up the puzzle of why liberal girls became more depressed than others, and in a long and self-reflective Substack post, he described what he has learned about depression from his own struggles involving many kinds of treatment. Like Michelle Goldberg, he briefly considered the hypothesis that liberals are depressed because they’re the only ones who see that “we’re living in a late-stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world,” to quote a tweet from the Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz. Yglesias agreed with Goldberg and other writers that the Lorenz explanation—reality makes Gen Z depressed—doesn’t fit the data, and, because of his knowledge of depression, he focused on the reverse path: depression makes reality look terrible. As he put it: “Mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin is just what depression is.”

Yglesias tells us what he has learned from years of therapy, which clearly involved CBT:

It’s important to reframe your emotional response as something that’s under your control: • Stop saying “so-and-so made me angry by doing X.” • Instead say “so-and-so did X, and I reacted by becoming angry.” And the question you then ask yourself is whether becoming angry made things better? Did it solve the problem?

Yglesias wrote that “part of helping people get out of their trap is teaching them not to catastrophize.” He then described an essay by progressive journalist Jill Filipovic that argued, in Yglesias’s words, that “progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want.”

Yglesias quoted a passage from Filipovic that expressed exactly the concern that Greg had expressed to me back in 2014:

I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or even violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response.

I have italicized Filipovic’s text about the benefits of feeling like you captain your own ship because it points to a psychological construct with a long history of research and measurement: Locus of control. As first laid out by Julian Rotter in the 1950s, this is a malleable personality trait referring to the fact that some people have an internal locus of control—they feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them. Sixty years of research show that people with an internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. People with an external locus of control are more passive and more likely to become depressed.

How a Phone-Based Childhood Breeds Passivity

There are at least two ways to explain why liberal girls became depressed faster than other groups at the exact time (around 2012) when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones and the girls joined Instagram en masse. The first and simplest explanation is that liberal girls simply used social media more than any other group. Jean Twenge’s forthcoming book, Generations, is full of amazing graphs and insightful explanations of generational differences. In her chapter on Gen Z, she shows that liberal teen girls are by far the most likely to report that they spend five or more hours a day on social media (31% in recent years, compared to 22% for conservative girls, 18% for liberal boys, and just 13% for conservative boys). Being an ultra-heavy user means that you have less time available for everything else, including time “in real life” with your friends. Twenge shows in another graph that from the 1970s through the early 2000s, liberal girls spent more time with friends than conservative girls. But after 2010 their time with friends drops so fast that by 2016 they are spending less time with friends than are conservative girls. So part of the story may be that social media took over the lives of liberal girls more than any other group, and it is now clear that heavy use of social media damages mental health, especially during early puberty.

But I think there’s more going on here than the quantity of time on social media. Like Filipovic, Yglesias, Goldberg, and Lukianoff, I think there’s something about the messages liberal girls consume that is more damaging to mental health than those consumed by other groups.

The Monitoring the Future dataset happens to have within it an 8-item Locus of Control scale. With Twenge’s permission, I reprint one such graph from Generations showing responses to one of the items: “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” This item is a good proxy for Filipovic’s hypothesis about the disempowering effects of progressive institutions. If you agree with that item, you have a more external locus of control. As you can see in Figure 3, from the 1970s until the mid-2000s, boys were a bit more likely to agree with that item, but then girls rose to match boys, and then both sexes rose continuously throughout the 2010s—the era when teen social life became far more heavily phone-based.

Figure 3. Percentage of boys and girls (high school seniors) who agree with (or are neutral about) the statement “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” From Monitoring the Future, graphed by Jean Twenge in her forthcoming book Generations.

When the discussion of the gender-by-politics interaction broke out a few weeks ago, I thought back to Twenge’s graph and wondered what would happen if we broke up the sexes by politics. Would it give us the pattern in the Gimbrone et al. graphs, where the liberal girls rise first and most? Twenge sent me her data file (it’s a tricky one to assemble, across the many years), and Zach Rausch and I started looking for the interaction. We found some exciting hints, and I began writing this post on the assumption that we had a major discovery. For example, Figure 4 shows the item that Twenge analyzed. We see something like the Gimbrone et al. pattern in which it’s the liberal girls who depart from everyone else, in the unhealthy (external) direction, starting in the early 2000s.

Figure 4. Percentage of liberal and conservative high school senior boys (left panel) and girls (right panel) who agree with the statement “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” From Monitoring the Future, graphed by Zach Rausch.

It sure looks like the liberal girls are getting more external while the conservative girls are, if anything, trending slightly more internal in the last decade, and the boys are just bouncing around randomly. But that was just for this one item. We also found a similar pattern for a second item, “People like me don’t have much of a chance at a successful life.” (You can see graphs of all 8 items here.)

We were excited to have found such clear evidence of the interaction, but when we plotted responses to the whole scale, we found only a hint of the predicted interaction, and only in the last few years, as you can see in Figure 5. After trying a few different graphing strategies, and after seeing if there was a good statistical justification for dropping any items, we reached the tentative conclusion that the big story about locus of control is not about liberal girls, it’s about Gen Z as a whole. Everyone—boys and girls, left and right—developed a more external locus of control gradually, beginning in the 1990s. I’ll come back to this finding in future posts as I explore the second strand of the After Babel Substack: the loss of “play-based childhood” which happened in the 1990s when American parents (and British, and Canadian) stopped letting their children out to play and explore, unsupervised. (See Frank Furedi’s important book Paranoid Parenting. I believe that the loss of free play and self-supervised risk-taking blocked the development of a healthy, normal, internal locus of control. That is the reason I teamed up with Lenore Skenazy, Peter Gray, and Daniel Shuchman to found LetGrow.org.)

Figure 5. Locus of Control has shifted slightly but steadily toward external since the 1990s. Scores are on a 5-point scale from 1 = most internal to 5 = most external.

We kept looking in the Monitoring the Future dataset and the Gimbrone et al. paper for other items that would allow us to test Filipovic’s hypothesis. We found an ideal second set of variables: The Monitoring the Future dataset has a set of items on “self derogation” which is closely related to disempowerment, as you can see from the four statements that comprise the scale:

I feel I do not have much to be proud of. Sometimes I think I am no good at all. I feel that I can't do anything right. I feel that my life is not very useful.

Gimbrone et al. had graphed the self-derogation scale, as you can see in their appendix (Figure A.4). But Zach and I re-graphed the original data so that we could show a larger range of years, from 1977 through 2021. As you can see in Figure 6, we find the gender-by-politics interaction. Once again, and as with nearly all of the mental health indicators I examined in a previous post, there’s no sign of trouble before 2010. But right around 2012 the line for liberal girls starts to rise. It rises first, and it rises most, with liberal boys not far behind (as in Gimbrone et al.).

Figure 6. Self-derogation scale, averaging four items from the Monitoring the Future study. Graphed by Zach Rausch. The scale runs from 1 (strongly disagree with each statement) to 5 (strongly agree).

In other words, we have support for Filipovic’s “captain their own ship” concern, and for Lukianoff’s disempowerment concern: Gen Z has become more external in its locus of control, and Gen Z liberals (of both sexes) have become more self-derogating. They are more likely to agree that they “can’t do anything right.” Furthermore, most of the young people in the progressive institutions that Filipovic mentioned are women, and that has become even more true since 2014 when, according to Gallup data, young women began to move to the left while young men did not move either way. As Gen Z women became more progressive and more involved in political activism in the 2010s, it seems to have changed them psychologically. It wasn’t just that their locus of control shifted toward external—that happened to all subsets of Gen Z. Rather, young liberals (including young men) seem to have taken into themselves the specific depressive cognitions and distorted ways of thinking that CBT is designed to expunge.

But where did they learn to think this way? And why did it start so suddenly around 2012 or 2013, as Greg observed, and as Figures 2 and 6 confirm?

Tumblr Was the Petri Dish for Disempowering Beliefs

I recently listened to a brilliant podcast series, The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling, hosted by Megan Phelps-Roper, created within Bari Weiss’s Free Press. Phelps-Roper interviews Rowling about her difficult years developing the Harry Potter stories in the early 1990s, before the internet; her rollout of the books in the late 90s and early 2000s, during the early years of the internet; and her observations about the Harry Potter superfan communities that the internet fostered. These groups had streaks of cruelty and exclusion in them from the beginning, along with a great deal of love, joy, and community. But in the stunning third episode, Phelps-Roper and Rowling take us through the dizzying events of the early 2010s as the social media site Tumblr exploded in popularity (reaching its peak in early 2014), and also in viciousness. Tumblr was different from Facebook and other sites because it was not based on anyone’s social network; it brought together people from anywhere in the world who shared an interest, and often an obsession.

Phelps-Roper interviewed several experts who all pointed to Tumblr as the main petri dish in which nascent ideas of identity, fragility, language, harm, and victimhood evolved and intermixed. Angela Nagle (author of Kill All Normies) described the culture that emerged among young activists on Tumblr, especially around gender identity, in this way:

There was a culture that was encouraged on Tumblr, which was to be able to describe your unique non-normative self… And that’s to some extent a feature of modern society anyway. But it was taken to such an extreme that people began to describe this as the snowflake [referring to the idea that each snowflake is unique], the person who constructs a totally kind of boutique identity for themselves, and then guards that identity in a very, very sensitive way and reacts in an enraged way when anyone does not respect the uniqueness of their identity.

Nagle described how on the other side of the political spectrum, there was “the most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of 4chan.” The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men, so there was an increasingly gendered nature to the online conflict. The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred, as often happens in a culture war. The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence, while the young men on 4chan moved in the opposite direction: they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy. It was out of this reciprocal dynamic, the experts on the podcast suggest, that today’s cancel culture was born in the early 2010s. Then, in 2013, it escaped from Tumblr into the much larger Twitterverse. Once on Twitter, it went national and even global (at least within the English-speaking countries), producing the mess we all live with today.

I don’t want to tell that entire story here; please listen to the Witch Trials podcast for yourself. It is among the most enlightening things I’ve read or heard in all my years studying the American culture war (along with Jon Ronson’s podcast Things Fell Apart). I just want to note that this story fits perfectly with both the timing and the psychology of Greg’s reverse CBT hypothesis.

Implications and Policy Changes

In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:

They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).

They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).

They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).

Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas. These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups. Just as Greg had feared, many universities and progressive institutions embraced these three untruths and implemented programs that performed reverse CBT on young people, in violation of their duty to care for them and educate them.

I welcome challenges to this conclusion from scholars, journalists, and subscribers, and I will address such challenges in future posts. I must also repeat that I don’t blame everything on smartphones and social media; the other strand of my story is the loss of play-based childhood, with its free play and self-governed risk-taking. But if this conclusion stands (along with my conclusions in previous posts), then I think there are two big policy changes that should be implemented as soon as possible:

1) Universities and other schools should stop performing reverse CBT on their students

As Greg and I showed in The Coddling of the American Mind, most of the programs put in place after the campus protests of 2015 are based on one or more of the three Great Untruths, and these programs have been imported into many K-12 schools. From mandatory diversity training to bias response teams and trigger warnings, there is little evidence that these programs do what they say they do, and there are some findings that they backfire. In any case, there are reasons, as I have shown, to worry that they teach children and adolescents to embrace harmful, depressogenic cognitive distortions.

One initiative that has become popular in the last few years is particularly suspect: efforts to tell college students to avoid common English words and phrases that are said to be “harmful.” Brandeis University took the lead in 2021 with its “oppressive language list.” Brandeis urged its students to stop saying that they would “take a stab at” something because it was unnecessarily violent. For the same reason, they urged that nobody ask for a “trigger warning” because, well, guns. Students should ask for “content warnings” instead, to keep themselves safe from violent words like “stab.” Many universities have followed suit, including Colorado State University, The University of British Columbia, The University of Washington, and Stanford, which eventually withdrew its “harmful language list” because of the adverse publicity. Stanford had urged students to avoid words like “American,” “Immigrant,” and “submit,” as in “submit your homework.” Why? because the word “submit” can “imply allowing others to have power over you.” The irony here is that it may be these very programs that are causing liberal students to feel disempowered, as if they are floating in a sea of harmful words and people when, in reality, they are living in some of the most welcoming and safe environments ever created.

2) The US Congress should raise the age of “internet adulthood” from 13 to 16 or 18

What do you think should be the minimum age at which children can sign a legally binding contract to give away their data and their rights, and expose themselves to harmful content, without the consent or knowledge of their parents? I asked that question as a Twitter poll, and you can see the results here:

Image: See my original tweet.

Of course, this poll of my own Twitter followers is far from a valid survey, and I phrased my question in a leading way, but my phrasing was an accurate statement of today’s status quo. I think that most people now understand that the age of 13, which was set back in 1998 when we didn’t know what the internet would become, is just too low, and it is not even enforced. When my kids started 6th grade in NYC public schools, they each told me that “everyone” was on Instagram.

We are now 11 years into the largest epidemic of adolescent mental illness ever recorded. I know so many families that have been thrown into fear and turmoil by a child’s suicide attempt. You probably do too, given that the recent CDC report tells us that one in ten adolescents now say they have made an attempt to kill themselves. It is hitting all political and demographic groups. The evidence is abundant that social media is a major cause of the epidemic, and perhaps the major cause. It's time we started treating social media and other apps designed for “engagement” (i.e., addiction) like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling, or, because they can harm society as well as their users, perhaps like automobiles and firearms. Adults should have wide latitude to make their own choices, but legislators and governors who care about mental health, women’s health, or children’s health need to step up.

It’s not enough to find more money for mental health services, although that is sorely needed. In addition, we must shut down the conveyer belt so that today’s toddlers will not suffer the same fate in twelve years. Congress should set a reasonable minimum age for minors to sign contracts and open accounts without explicit parental consent, and the age needs to be after teens have progressed most of the way through puberty. (The harm caused by social media seems to be greatest during puberty.) If Congress won’t do it then state legislatures should act. There are many ways to rapidly verify people’s ages online, and I’ll discuss age verification processes in a future post.

In conclusion: All of Gen Z got more anxious and depressed after 2012. But Lukianoff’s reverse CBT hypothesis is the best explanation I have found for Why the mental health of liberal girls sank first and fastest.

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spacemagicandlaserswords · 1 year

Text

Open and Waiting (Chapter 1)

Gif from this post by @ashr-jedi

Summary: You try out something new with Tech. As it turns out, like with pretty much everything, he knows exactly what he’s doing.

Relationship: Tech x f!reader (eventual mentions of Hunter x f!reader, Crosshair x f!reader, Echo x f!reader and Wrecker x f!reader)

Warnings: NSFW, cock warming, domination, submission, humiliation, Dominant Tech, submissive reader, cock ring, saliva/drool, restraints, leather wrist cuffs, leather collar, naked and kneeling reader, subspace, tiny hint of poor self worth, star wars swearing, playing fast and loose star wars canon details, not beta read

Word Count: 1604 (Chapter 1)

Authors Notes: Help I’ve written fanfic. This is the first time I’ve ever written fan fiction and the first time I’ve ever written smut so please be gentle. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing but this idea has latched onto my brain and refuses to let go so here we are. Creative writing is not my strong suit so I hope this is alright.

Also, this is absolute filth. If you think this is saucy then strap in cause you ain't seen nothing yet. Tech says some truly filthy things in Chapter 5. Yes, there are 5 chapters of this monstrosity so far and I’m nowhere even close to the end. I’ve written 7700+ words of this thing. There’s 18 pages so far. What have I done to myself?!

If I’ve screwed something up or forgotten a warning or missed something out, please gently let me know and I will be more than happy to fix it!

Please read the warnings! And please let me know if you liked it and if you’d like to read Chapter 2 or more.

Chapters: Two, Three, Four, Five, Six | Ao3

Open and Waiting (Chapter 1)

The durasteel floor of the Marauder is cold.

Which makes sense. It is metal after all and we’re not exactly on the warmest of planets right now.

What makes it particularly noticeable is that my bare legs are currently kneeling on said cold durasteel. In fact, my entire bare naked body is kneeling on the floor of the Marauder. Wrists cuffed behind my back, my right cheek pillowed against fabric stretched over a lean, muscular thigh and my jaw kept open as Tech’s cock just sits there on my tongue and fills my mouth.

I’m grateful that he chose the softer leather cuffs with the adjustable chain. Saves my shoulders from being constantly wrenched back and the harsh metal of binders biting into my wrists. Tech has always been decidedly considered, thorough and aware of these matters though so it doesn’t surprise me. That man will assiduously research anything and everything, including new kinks to explore. I’m always nervous about broaching these sorts of topics, but at least with Tech I know he will approach the idea with an open, inquisitive mind before launching into discovering everything there is to know about my new suggestion.

When I first bought up the idea of trying cock warming with him, there was a definite flare of interest behind those goggles. It only increased as I did my best to explain the concept while valiantly trying to shove my worries and fears into the nearest storage crate. I know I shouldn’t be ashamed about my sexual interests, and Maker knows they all so gently remind me of this regularly, but old habits are hard to shake. I really shouldn’t have worried though because when Tech came and found me later that night, I’d hadn’t seen him that intensely interested in a new discovery in a while.

Well, not since we found those rare Tarisian bark beetles anyway.

So here I am, completely completely naked, save for a leather collar and cuffs, kneeling in the middle of our ship with Tech’s cock in my mouth. Just kneeling in front of him, completely still, arms restrained behind my back, cheek resting on his inner thigh, eyes closed, jaw slack, tongue touching my bottom lip, drool spilling out the sides of my mouth and dripping obscenely down my chin, and that glorious, firm cock just resting in my mouth, filling it up.

There’s nothing I can do apart from kneel here and drool around Tech’s cock.

Nothing I’m allowed to do either. Sir was very clear that I was to make no movement whatsoever. Not even to swallow. Which is why my mouth and chin are now covered in my own drool and I’m sure I must be making a complete mess of the floor.

At least durasteel is fairly easy to clean up and wipe down. Trying to get stains out of the red leather of the cockpit chairs is another matter entirely.

Tech is sitting on a storage crate while he tinkers with a project on the fold down workbench above me. Those long rangy legs bracketing me in. Close, but not quite close enough to touch the rest of my body, apart from where my cheek rests against his inner thigh.

Damn man knows exactly what he’s doing.

Heavy boots rest on the floor well past where I’m kneeling and serve as another reminder of just how tall and imposing Tech can be. He might not be as overtly muscular as Wrecker or even Hunter but that lean frame belies a beskar imbued strength. At six foot four, Tech absolutely towers over me, even when he’s sitting and I’m kneeling on the floor between his thighs. He’s an all encompassing presence and it’s making something curl deep within my gut.

It’s also making my cunt wet but there’s not much I can do about that right now.

At the end of our pre-session conversation, Tech also gave me strict instructions that I was not to touch myself. While that’s a little hard to do with my hands cuffed behind my back, Tech could’ve bound my hands directly to my cunt and I still wouldn’t have done a damn thing. He knows how desperately I crave praise and will do anything to be his good little girl–

Oh kriff, don’t think about that right now. Don’t think about Tech calling me a good girl. Do not think about it. You’re just going to make your current predicament even worse.

Dank farrik, my pussy is definitely wetter now. It’s going to end up dripping onto the floor and then there will be an even bigger blotch beneath me.

The collection of drool covering the lower half of my face and hanging off my chin has been progressively getting worse the longer this has gone on. The humiliation of being turned into a drooling mess is both delicious and excruciating and my poor hazy brain cannot figure out whether it wants to lean into it or run away. I’ve been stripped down and reduced to nothing but a tight, hot void to keep Tech’s cock warm.

Warm, and hard.

When we started, Tech had certainly been interested but he wasn’t exactly at full mast either. It had been fairly easy for him to slide my open and eager mouth over his cock before gloved hands gently leant my head against his inner thigh. Since then he’s been steadily hardening inside my mouth while he completely ignores me and works on his current project that is strewn in bits across the workbench above. It’s almost like the more I drool, the harder he gets. I can just start to taste the hint of his pre-cum when that clipped, precise voice breaks through the silence above me.

“I require an additional tool and need to momentarily step away in order to retrieve it. This will necessitate briefly moving your position. You will remain kneeling with your eyes closed and mouth open. Am I understood?”

I do my best to answer with a “Yes Sir” around his cock but all it ends up sounding like is a garbled “...eth…er”. Thankfully, this must be enough to appease him because a gloved hand is running through my hair before gently moving my head and then pulling my mouth from his hard cock. I can feel the heaviness of it slide over my tongue and brush my bottom lip as the solid weight leaves my mouth. There’s a moment of bereft emptiness before a collection of drool follows Tech’s cock out of my mouth and spills over my chin in a wave of tantalising humiliation. Tech doesn’t immediately move and I realise he must be observing me.

Observing his naked, collared and restrained submissive kneeling in front of him with their mouth open and drool hanging from their chin.

I must look like a completely and utterly ruined mess.

The thought only serves to cause a further spike in delectable humiliation.

After a laden beat, Tech rises from the storage crate, effortlessly swings a leg over my head and then marches off towards his bunk. The slide of metal dragging against metal can be heard before a soft click signifies that his personal storage box has been unlocked.

Why is he going through there? His tools are usually kept in mystifyingly precise locations around the ship if they’re not already on his person.

A few more clicks indicate that an internal compartment has been opened and whatever he was looking for must have been inside because the lock-box is swiftly snapped shut and shoved back under his bunk.

A marked stride makes its way back to my position of supplication on the floor but Tech doesn’t immediately sit down.

I’m being observed again.

I can’t do anything to stop the reactive shiver that runs through me at the realisation.

There’s an odd, slightly slick sliding noise above me and then Tech is sitting back down on the storage crate. A hand runs over my head as he tells me–

“You will assume your previous position.”

I’m given no chance to respond as he pushes at the back of my head, making my mouth slide over his cock again. My cheek is leant against his inner thigh once more and then I’m left there just as I was moments before, mouth full of Tech’s cock while he goes back to working on his current project.

As I breathe through the returned presence of his cock filling my mouth, I realise that my nose had just barely brushed against something smooth and different.

A cock ring.

So that’s the additional tool he required.

I’m not sure I’d call a cock ring a tool but I’m in no position to argue. Tech must be enjoying this even more than I thought if he’s had to pull one of those out of his collection. I can’t tell which one it is, though if it starts vibrating then at least I’ll know it's one of his later inventions.

I almost startle out of my rumination on Tech’s assortment of toys when long fingers card through my hair and his palm smooths over my head. The tips of those fingers start lightly scritching back and forth against my scalp and I have to stop myself from moaning and going completely boneless against him. It’s soft and gentle and, despite the fact that I’m basically just a glorified cock sleeve for him at this point, it’s oddly calming. Tech continues to tenderly caress my head and I drift, floating in a haze of submission.

Drool continues to drip onto the floor of the Marauder.

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