#bullshit with no regards for internal consistency

[quark-nova]

For anyone wondering, the tryzub has been used by a lot of polities in the region of modern-day Ukraine, and I can't find any more evidence (apart from conspiracy theory websites) that the Khazars used this specific emblem apart for this one pendant, or that they even had a unique tamga at all.

If anything, the Ukrainian tryzub is more reminiscent of the Columns of Gediminas, a Lithuanian emblem, which isn't surprising as most of Ukraine used to be part of Lithuania for a few centuries. That doesn't mean that there is a secret Lithuanian elite ruling over Ukraine, that just means there's (possibly) a historical connection between the two.

But even then, the tryzub is in all likelihood just a modified Rurikid emblem which might have been influenced by Khazar, Lithuanian, Christian and Ukrainian symbolism. No conspiracy behind it, just how the history of a symbol goes when a lot of empires and peoples interact in one region.

i need answers…

[doodler16]

I know expecting media literacy from people like you is useless, but just some comments on the "Angel / sexual harrassment" post.

1- you know that not *every* position/opinion that a character says should be taken 100% as truth, but analyzed and understood, right? Yeah, I guess you don't know, but let me just explain: Vaggie said Angel was "sexually harrassing" the staff, ah yes, well, wait, what staff? There was no fucking staff at the Hotel. Angel is a hypersexual survivor, and also a sex worker that needs to find clients. Vaggie was raised in a puritist cult, so obviously she still has internalized puritanism that she needs to work on. She interpretated Angel's coping mechanism and sexuality as harrassment, even though it is very questionable if it was or not.

2- Husk was annoyed at Angel. Not afraid, not victimized, not ashamed. He was annoyed. He pushed Angel back, called him out on his bullshit, and guess what? Angel stopped his behaviour. Because he is a well meaning person, also worthy of love and forgiveness. Wowwww, explaining the OBVIOUS for an anti! Yay!

3- the person that originally made the post defending Angel, *WAS VICTIM OF ACTUAL SEXUAL HARRASSMENT FROM REAL LIFE PREDATORS* (aka NOTHING LIKE ANGEL). But oh my god, my bad, I forgot that antis don't give a single FUCK about real life victims, they just care about the poor Ex Overlord who was *not*, in any circunstamce, victimized by Angel (who is, in fact, a victim of multiple abuse and harrassment), and is in fact the person that needs to change since Angel already improved, but Husk is still judgemental and even hypocritical. (Which doesnt meah he hasnt changed or that he isnt worthy of love/forgiveness, it's the opposite actually).

I will, again, pretend that you only make ass takes because of your lack of media literacy and empathy towards real life survivors that love the show, rather than other worse reasons.

1. Yeah, you are totally correct. There are times when a character is an unreliable narrator or speaker but in this case Vaggie is 100% correct regarding the sexual harassment comment. Actually, there is staff at the hotel. Even the Hazbin hotel pilot addresses it. Alastor asked Charlie where is her staff which only had Vaggie, prompting Alastor to summon Husk and Niffty. Husk serving the drinks aka bartending while Niffty cleans the hotel. Alastor also chimes in to help Charlie as well, becoming part of the staff too.

So when Vaggie calls out Angel Dust for sexual harassing the staff, she refers to Husk/Alastor but mainly Husk. Vaggie also tells Angel Dust to stop bothering Husk and let him do his job. Angel Dust can easily find clients outside of the hotel. What’s your point regarding Angel Dust being hypersexual, we all know that but that doesn’t excuse his actions and what did to Husk.

2. Husk wasn’t just annoyed, he was uncomfortable too like any normal person would be. Throughout the 4 episodes Angel Dust consistently would invade Husk’s space, touching him without his permission like his face and wings, making obnoxious sex jokes around him, saying and implying crude gestures and behaviors like how Angel Dust can make those wings of his flap or how the two can look together under the covers or under his bed.

Yes, I already know that Angel Dust stopped after Husk and him have a heart to heart movement, immediately becoming open and chill to the others. Good for him I guess. That’s why in my post I said the first 4 episodes. Aww, thanks Anon for condescendingly explaining this to me like I am a 2 year old! I really appreciate.

3. Yes, I know that user was defending Angel Dust, that is part of the reason I found the post interesting, along with them labeling Angel Dust’s actions as “aggressive flirting.” While, I am on the topic of aggressive flirting, I do wonder when does aggressively flirting cross the line? When does it stop being aggressively flirting? Would people still see it as “aggressively flirting” if Husk was a woman and Angel Dust was a straight male? Would anyone see this as “aggressively flirting” if the roles switched being Angel dust on the receiving end, while Valentino does the same actions as Angel Dust in the prime series.

The comment you made about antis not caring about irl victims is so gross as this the same show that picks and chooses which character we should feel bad for sexual harassment or rape, while the character gets treated as a joke getting put through similar treatment as character A. And there tons of people in the Hazbin anti/critical community who call out Husk for being hypocritical in episode 6 and still call him till this day.

[sirenixspook]

Revenge & Kapricorn’s Karma⏳

Saturn/Capricorn placements in a chart can show where the fruits from the labor will be yielded often later in life. Saturn/Cap rules the domains of time, consistency, patience, discipline, karma, and the grown up perspective. Saturn is the “father” of the zodiac, it’s lessons resemble “tough love” given from a father.

Those ruled by Capricorn or Saturn dominant are the ones who woodpick away behind the scenes and return back one day with an empire built, often formed from a long trail of patience from hard-learned lessons.

As a Scorpio I hold importance to Saturn as it is the area in your chart where shit starts to “click” and enemies who have done you wrong in the past receive the wrath of your karma. This is preceded by years of difficulty and trial-and-error, creating ease with obstacles and abundance (!!!) after the lessons of Saturn start to show itself. The house which Capricorn rules also applies to where abundance will be accumulated later on.

Saturn 1H- Difficulties with who you are, obstacles with mental strength, may be self conscious over appearance, could be seen as too “harsh” by others. They may too strictly abide to moral conduct or show aggression. A disciplined approach for life’s ups and downs and strong willpower regards to self will surface over time, these people may have a major physical glow up and learn to embody a CEO presence in any room. Also predominant knees and bony appearance, they may develop an athletic build later on.

Saturn 2H- Difficulties with managing money, blockages regarding spending and internal values. Pickiness with food intake, could struggle with having too little/never having enough. This is a great house for saturn to be in for monetary gain, the trials this placement endures with their material endeavors teaches them how to discipline their indulgence. They acquire a solid understanding of money and build up strong personal values/self esteem over time. That credit score washes away their tears.

Saturn 3H- Difficulties with acquiring and learning new skills, masks the value of their thoughts as they may have dealt with others making them feel inferior or stupid. Problems with school or driving possibly, may have a communication style that is perceived as annoying. Saturn teaches them to become a teacher and lead with their expression. These people learn integrity from constant debates with their heart and mind and have a mature, sophisticated view on methodology.

Saturn 4th- Difficulties growing up and in the home/family, this placement was often emotionally neglected in childhood due to their caretakers not understanding their needs, or expected to hold everyone up. They could feel like the unappreciated father of the household. As they master patience with their family members they can be a generational curse breaker and put a strong familial support system in place. This placement has been aware of bullshit from an early age and their mature, structured foundation gets them through emotional ups and downs with ease.

Saturn 5H- Difficulties with dating life and having fun. Could feel like a “stifled sun,” pursuits of pleasure end up feeling like a chore. They may feel indifferent in their sex life and resist time meant for enjoyment, a “party pooper.” Over time they take on a disciplined approach to romance, attracting established suitors. They can become seriously talented and may succeed in creative business, and their dedication to one hobby helps them become a leader in the creative/entertainment realms. They end up having well disciplined egos and a respected reputation.

Saturn 6H- this placement could manifest as being overly disciplined with work routines; could be seen as bossy, relying on heavy structure to get through a day of work. They could be undervalued by their employer yet still choose to sell the underdog and work diligently. Over time they take on the importance of wellbeing after a string of health problems, possibly as knee or joint pain. Their work ethic ends up rewarding them with high successes in their field.

Saturn 7H- Difficulties balancing relationship with others vs oneself, these people don’t have smooth relationships or experience repetitive cycles appearing from partner to partner. They learn the importance of the relationship with the self, and their good relationships come later in life. Often times this placement attracts the most meaningful relationships when they don’t focus on them. When they do find that person, they will commit to them for a lifetime.

Saturn 8H- Difficulties with understanding the deeper facets of one’s nature. This placement struggles with intimacy, the rigidity of Saturn tends to block attempts at a deeper bond with others. They may appear sexually vibrant on the outside but their stubbornness will show when they try to get intimate. Over time they learn how to use their seriousness for their advantage in terms of acquiring assets and getting to the bottom of an investigative matter. As they learn to release control with the vulnerable and get familiar with what’s waiting in the unknown, they transform into quite deeply tender souls.

Saturn 9H- Difficulties with changing world viewpoint/philosophy, could have rigid beliefs and have a hard time adapting other views. Often times they are distant from their father and siblings due to conflicting beliefs, and may find themselves at odds with others. The rules of Saturn conflicts with this Jupiter ruled house’s need to expand and open the mind. They learn to nurture the core of their beliefs and master their truth and vision. Their journey for truth meets success in higher districts- in higher education, in gov/law careers, politics etc.

Saturn 10H- Difficulties with long term vision, they are used to believing they don’t have what it takes to meet what is expected of them, may resent authority or carry disdain from strict figures in their life. This placement feels like walking on a trip line and having an enormous amount of pressure on you from everyone watching. Saturn teaches this person to reach the destination point step by step, they learn that taking false shortcuts can bring them crumbling down. They may experience the public eye witnessing their greatest fall and greatest comeback.

Saturn 11H- Difficulties with finding acceptance amongst friends and community, feeling like the “black sheep” (Speaking personally, this placement may make you a stand out as a lone wolf). Could feel like they can’t fit in and get caught in bad friendships, aversion to technological advancements and may feel inferior to their peers. They learn that acceptance comes from within and develop meaningful friendships later in life. As time goes on they let go of trying to fit in and master their uniqueness/individuality, which can make them shine as an influencer or community leader.

Saturn 12H- Difficulties with accepting spirituality and repeating karma. It may be hazy for this placement when it comes to adapting discipline, they may take on substance abuse or be drawn to immoral/illegal behaviors. Saturn places temptations for material incitement in this person’s life and isolates them until they learn how to let go of desire. Inner bliss is a road of difficulty for this placement, they learn to see outside of themselves and become disciplined in charity. They may end up attracting heaps of good karma after a lifetime of learning the importance of inner retreat and acts of good faith.

******

I am not a professional astrologer, this is based on my own understanding. Please correct me on any inaccuracy

-Ari🔱

[theeternalwombtarot]

Channeled message: march 31, 2024

Some of you are undergoing some really heavy transitions here and some of are you are about to stepping into manifestations or be given things you’ve been asking for long term or things that were divinely orchestrated for you to have as these things are part of the divine plan for you to come into, it was only a matter of time I just heard. Someone or some of you have done a lot of inner work or undergone a lot of tower moments within the last couple of years or beyond that. There’s emphasis on past life karma or deeply rooted triggers, past situations or nostalgia weighing heavy on the heart chakra. Issues and blockages with the nervous system are significant as well. Some of you who this message is for may not have super trivial or turbulent pasts or can’t think of anything that has happened to you that may have caused significant damage or changes but some of you have had a humble beginning or have had to pave the way for yourself for a long while and are making breakthroughs at this time, I just heard “debut�� someone actually makes music but there’s an energy of those who are being blessed soon being given the opportunity to really step outside of their shell or step outside of a version of themselves or a version of their reality that was stagnant or was limiting for a really long time. Someone is due for a heavy reset in their lives as well and is being pushed to leave all things behind.

Whomever this person is has dealt with a good amount of loss or was being prepared to make these steps for the past couple of months as they went through a consistent process of having to let things go that they carried with them a long time and this is sort of a climax moment in your plot here. You made a physical transformation (through appearance perhaps and/or most certainly through people and environment) there may be people from your past or people you’ve let go of whose karma is coming around to them soon or were taken aback by the move you made to move forward without them and are going to continue to be taken aback for whatever is coming for you next or whatever you’re about to come into. i just heard, "you need to stop hiding." someones fear of being seen made a spontaneous return or there was some sort of extinction burst here but spirit says that behavior isn’t going to do moving forward.

Someone is struggling with guilt or a lot of unresolved feelings and deeply rooted issues or emotions regarding various situations within their past but there’s a message here about coming up on the moment where it’s finally time to let these things go. Indefinitely. Someone had some sort of “villain origin story” or some sort of large emotional catalyst that caused them a lot of chaos and pain I’m hearing but you can’t take that with you where you’re going. Whatever you’re about to receive is on its way but while you wait confront all these things that are coming up to the surface to be let out and resolved. You’re sensitive to energies at this time as well, you know what people are thinking of you or how they feel about you on an internal scale whether they want to admit it or not but this is there problem don’t let their energy dictate the way that you feel. Whatever guilt you’re holding onto, whatever energy they’re sending that you’re absorbing, you need to release. You did the best you could, let it go. Forgive yourself and forgive others. Let it go.

Letting things go is very significant at this time. Don’t let other people’s thoughts, energies, perceptions of you or intentions hold you back any longer. Take all your power back. 2023 is significant as well as 2022 and 2020/2021. There’s a lot of unresolved bullshit within the heart chakra that may be effecting the solar plexus as well as the sacral chakra, I almost said root, the root as well.

Heart: love, healing, acceptance

Mantra: “I love..”

Solar plexus: vitality, manifestation

Mantra: “I do..”

Sacral: creativity, abundance

Mantra: “I feel..”

Root: survival, trust, grounding

Mantra: “I am..”

Pay really close attention to where all your emotions are felt in the body when triggering emotions or thoughts arise within you. The chakras I just channeled tell me a lot about what’s been going on within the collective and where a lot of these trigger points or internal emotions or dialogue are sitting. There’s a lot of crisis or reflection regarding who you loved, what you loved, what you were passionate about, how you loved, what love meant to you, and that experience and what you did/were doing in the name of love or in the energy of love, there’s a LOT of feelings and unresolved emotions and just *shit* really that’s sitting within oneself regarding all of that and who that makes you or your essence!! Forgive yourself for the mistakes you made, for the times when you couldn’t love yourself beyond how much you loved others, and for some of you make peace with the fact that the hardship is over and you did what was asked of you and stood tall in what you loved, believed in and were passionate about despite what you faced from others. A lot of this hardship took place 2020-2023 for a lot of you. Remember who you are, what makes you who you are, your essence, your power, your energy, your strength! There’s a lot of self hatred or some overly critical energy you’ve picked up along the way that’s coming up. Someone feels like throwing up or has been nauseous lately. A physical manifestation of spiritual and internal purging.

This message is really long, can I shut up?

[ssunspotted]

Ooc: how did Tolya's upbringing shape how they view mental illness (their own and others')? How do they feel about the broader societal stigma towards mental illness & conversely the pockets of radical acceptance in their new world?

How did Tolya's upbringing shape how they view mental illness (their own and others')?

(BADLY. Tolya had incredibly high expectations placed on them from childhood while also struggling developmentally due to their neurological disorder. This was never recognized for what it was, and from a very young age they accrued baggage about not being able to keep up with others, or coming across as lazy or stupid.

The solution pushed for their falling behind was invariably Taking Personal Responsibility™ and just trying harder to push through because failure was not an option, and that idea being beaten in so consistently throughout their younger years left a permanent mark on them. There was a long while where they subscribed completely to the 'pull yourself up by the bootstraps' mentality, and their damaged self image from not being able to do so was weaponized against them very successfully, in a way that really reinforced a sense of desperate inadequacy and led to them more readily deferring to others.

In the early years of their freedom post-incarceration, Tolya had IMMENSE internalized ableism, and their self loathing, frustration, and the more troubling aspects of their delusions caught plenty of people in the crossfire. Openly anxious, paranoid, guilty, or especially meek people were easiest to project onto (negative), and their self flagellation would turn external and hostile quickly in the wrong situation. There has been a LONG journey taken to unlearn some of this bullshit and alter their behavior, even if it's still dangerously cathartic to other themself from their memories of who they were and look down on their past self's entire mental health situation.

How do they feel about the broader societal stigma towards mental illness & conversely the pockets of radical acceptance in their new world?

Eternal frustration that social attitudes make it difficult for people to seek help or even acknowledge mental health struggles. What a shame that THIS is what people feel so afraid to talk about and share of all things. They're also acutely aware that openly expressed mental illness, down to just seeming off or awkward or lost/annoying/inconvenient will be used against a person the moment they become any kind of a target, and they take note of egregious examples that victimize the ill (or homeless) specifically. There's A Lot more judgement about that happening behind the screen than they'll let on. On that note, they compulsively seek to be solace for those they see their own mental health struggles in. Even to a degree that doesn't serve them. As for the last part of the question; Y'all have no idea how easy it could still be to reduce this fucker to sobbing over unexpected shows of grace or forgiveness, especially if they've just had a fit of some kind or shown their hand regarding their mental health. This is stuff that online interactions can't get across but you have no idea.

It's easier than it used to be, but I expect it'll never be easy to process. NOW ON THE OTHER HAND, some things that you could call objectively maladjusted are falling under that Radical Acceptance umbrella and well. I'll say it's not helping their attempt at being Normal* and connecting to people. This is a Freak who Is having a lot of freak behaviors wholly enabled. Yay!)

[fizzlicious]

Black Coffee - Tim Wright x Reader Chapter 4

      The next few days proceeded like normal. The days at work were the same mundane bullshit played on a loop. You had decided not to inform Helen on your encounter with Tim, knowing she would practically berate you and your poor common sense. It was easy to imagine her stunned face if you told her you gave a strange, disoriented man a ride at night. Regardless, you still thought about it regularly. Waitressing was so fast-paced that it was easy to get into a robotic rhythm as you tried to survive the dinner rush. But when you were closing, you found yourself hoping that maybe he'd come in for a coffee. You wondered if he found his car and was already off to the next town. Or was he still at the hotel? The thoughts were a bunch of imaginary scenarios, eventually the logical side of your brain would redirect you back to reality.

        Eventually, it had become a week since you last saw Tim. You had a glimmer of hope that he would return, but when one week turned into two, it became glaringly obvious he was gone. There goes the only sense of excitement in your life, back to living a boring life at a boring job in a boring town. On the bright side, Helen always kept you entertained and business had been exceptionally good recently. Even weekday nights were a consistent flow of cash. Paying rent on time was less of a maybe and more guaranteed. You still wasted a lot of money online shopping but that's not important. 

        After a very stressful and successful Friday night, Barty called all the staff together before it was time to leave. He was gloating about getting his tax return and insisting on taking everyone out for drinks. Seeing that this was very out of character for him, you decided to join. How could you turn down a few free rounds anyways? You had to practically beg old Helen, but she finally agreed to tag along. After agreeing on a bar, you all got into your individual cars and headed to the spot. Unsurprisingly, anxiety filled your stomach as you got closer to the bar. Getting drunk with your coworkers was uncharted territory and you weren't exactly a social butterfly. But still, that's more of a reason to go out and socialize right?

        One of the bussers, two dishwashers, three cooks, and two other waitresses joined the group at the bar. It was surprisingly nice out that night, so you all decided to overtake a few tables on the patio. The wooden picnic tables were weathered away from years of use and the natural elements, but they were still standing. Sure, they were full of splits and splinters but you just had to ignore that. Fairy lights were strung overhead from post to post, creating a nice ambience you didn't expect. You mostly chatted with the other waitresses, Helen, Cam, and Tiffany. Everyone already knew Tiffany was a blatant alcoholic so you had to bite your tongue when she was already three shots and a mixed drink in. Everybody has a vice or something right? You thought of Tim smoking his cigarettes and internally smacked yourself. When would the disarrayed man leave your thoughts? The current conversation was regarding relationships. Restaurant staff always had those few people that sleep with each other, and apparently everyone knew everyone's business but you. You were currently being filled in about how Tiffany was openly sleeping with one of the cooks and had apparently slept with Barty. That was a WTF moment.

        "But what about you, [Y/N]? Have you been seeing anyone?" Cam questioned with an eyebrow raise, leaning her arms on the table. You really did like Cam. You rarely had the same shifts as her, but she was really sweet. Sometimes she'd cover for you if you wanted to call in here or there and you'd do the same for her. She had short brown hair and bangs that were always nicely styled to frame her face. Her hazel eyes were accented by a thin frame of glasses and freckles dotted across her nose. She was only a few years older than you and seemed the most relatable in the group. All you knew of her was that she also grew up here, kept to herself, and had just informed the group of her new boyfriend.

        "No, not really. I've been enjoying being single I guess," You laughed it off. It was true, you really didn't mind being single. It was peaceful living alone and you didn't have to deal with sharing your space or a shitty partner. Helen burst out laughing. You turned to her in surprise. "What?!"

        "Come on [Y/N], you've been single since you started working! You know there's plenty of nice men in town, you seem them every week!" Helen nagged. You had to restrain yourself from rolling your eyes. Dating in a small town was a trap and the selection of guys was embarrassing. Before you could make a comeback, Tiffany decided to speak up.

        "Kevin's always talking about you. I bet he'd go out with you sometimes," The blonde suggested in a hushed tone. You wanted to gag but kept the urge at bay. Kevin was a trashy 28 year old cook that wasn't going anywhere in life. He'd go out with anything that walked. Helen and Cam seemed to have the same thought based on their facial expressions. 

        "Yeah, I think I'll stay single for awhile," You remarked and took a sip of your drink. Luckily, the uncomfortable situation dissolved and the new topic centered on why Barty was being so generous. Everyone knew he was sitting on a stack of cash from his parents, but he was a grumbling penny pincher. Only minutes in, Barty interrupted you guys with a round of shots. You did not want to take one, but the social pressure was crippling. Before you knew it, two shots were down and you found a jello shot in your hand. Sensing the mental block coming, you met your drinking limit and refused to take another sip or shot. The group came closer together, the conversations loud and obnoxious. You were feeling ready to leave, but the buzz in your brain told you it wasn't safe.

        Cam seemed to notice your discomfort and tugged on your sleeve lightly. "Do you want to go to the bathroom?" She yelled over the commotion. You nodded graciously and stood with her, slipping away from the loud group. The other tables outside were now all occupied. You weren't too knowledgeable about the bars in your area, but you knew this one was a hot spot. Cam squeezed past the tables, leading you to the door.

        Inside the bar was even more chaotic than outside. The space was tight with thick groups of people hovering everywhere. Loud music and sport TVs blasted at the same time, scrambling with the loud voices among the crowd. Men hollered in either disappointment or glee as a touchdown was made. A quick glance to the bar showed the bartenders scrambling to survive the busy night. You followed the path Cam made, surprised at how easily she split the sea of people apart. You admired how bold and surefooted she was. She was definitely more confident than you were, weaving in between people effortlessly.

        Finally, the two of you reached the hallway that occupied the bathrooms. Cam wasted no time pushing the door inside, approaching the counter to look into the mirror. You copied her, glancing into the mirror beside her. Staring at your reflection, you were suddenly aware of how intoxicated you are. With shaky hands, you smoothed down some messy strands of hair and tucked a few pieces behind your ear. Cam sighed softly and looked over to you.

        "Do you really like working at the diner?" She questioned. You watched your eyebrows furrow at her question. You didn't know Cam too well, the question was unexpected. Leaning against the sink counter, you turned towards her.

        "Well yeah, I guess. It's easy and pays well. It's not like I have a degree or a huge passion for a career," The words you spoke were honest, but you were still wondering why she had asked. "Why?"

        "I don't know, I just wonder what I'm doing sometimes. Obviously I can't afford college, not to mention the closest one is hours away. But I don't want to be like Helen!" Her remark made you burst out laughing. It was a bit rude but extremely true.

        "Okay wait! I didn't mean it like that," Cam insisted, although she was smiling. "I just mean I don't want to live in this shitty town forever serving tables." Her words resonated with you. It was depressingly accurate and something you thought of from time to time but never spoke of. Partly because of how sad it was and also because you didn't really have many people to talk to.

        "No no I get what you mean!" You spoke quickly, assuring her you understood and agreed with her. "t's the typical small town dilemma. Nothing here to do but what else do we do?" Cam nodded, leaning back and forth on the wall behind her.

        "Yeah, exactly. Every job I've looked at pays shit. I've thought about moving, but I don't know where to," Cam admitted. Before you could respond, two drunk girls burst into the room. One was sobbing hysterically, the other drunkenly trying to soothe her. You recognized them from high school, they were a few grades above you but you remembered they were popular. They stumbled into a stall, one girl loudly falling to the ground. The words were hard to make out, but it was something about some guy. Suddenly, the atmosphere was very awkward. 

        "Uhh, should we go outside?" You suggested. Cam seemed relieved at your suggestion and eagerly took the lead. Instead of heading back to the patio, Cam surprised you by heading to the front door. She held the door open for you and waited for it to shut before starting down the sidewalk. As soon as she was off the property, she reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes with a lighter. Huh, you didn't know she smoked. As she pulled one out of the package, she gestured it towards you and you declined. 

        "Oh no thanks, I don't smoke." Cam nodded and placed the cigarettes back in her pocket, slowing down to place the stick between her lips and light it. The heavy smoky smell was always gross to you, but you kept it to yourself. Once she was situated, the two of you began to walk silently together. The bar was located in what was considered "downtown", a circle of local shops and businesses that were all closed. There were hardly any lights to illuminate the street, but you weren't very worried. It was incredibly quiet.

        "God, that bar is too loud," She complained before taking an inhale. 

        "I know! It got insane fast! I was going crazy to be honest," You admitted.

        "So, why'd you stick around? Is it because of family?" Cam continued her questions. You frowned slightly at the sensitive topic. The relationship between you and your family was... strained. They hardly spoke to you and you never reached out. Honestly, you preferred it that way.

        "No, not really. I don't speak to them much. I just didn't have an out. I had the job at the diner in high school so when I graduated I just planned to work there until I figured it out."

        "And have you?" Cam asked. You weren't sure why Cam was getting to know you on such a personal level. It felt a bit uncomfortable and invasive, but you thought that Cam could become a good friend. She was definitely very intelligent and interesting. Figuring there was nothing to lose, you continued to entertain her.

        "No, I'm still working on it," you admitted with a sigh. Cam laughed at your response. You decided to ask her the same. "Well, what about you? Why are you still in this dingy town?"

        Cam groaned at the mention of it. "It's such a complicated mess. I was dating this guy in and out of high school. I was planning to go to college, but he wasn't going. I ended up staying to be with him thinking we'd get married. So I got comfortable, moved in with him, got a job at his family's cigar shop. And then two years later, he cheated and got some girl pregnant!" She began to ramble. The emotion in her voice told you the situation was still heavy on her mind. You couldn't help but to feel bad for her. 

        "Wow, I'm so sorry. That must've been really hard," You muttered, not really sure what to say. Cam shook her head adamantly. 

        "Oh no, it's okay. I'm sorry to get all weird and dump all that out on you," she spoke with a dismissive wave of her hand. "Things are so much better now."

        "Well that's good! How's it going with your new boyfriend?" You wondered. Cam flicked her dead cigarette behind her before answering.

        "It's.. good. He's super sweet, zero red flags. It's refreshing considering the other guys around here. Just a really good guy." Her words were genuine, but you could tell by her tone that something was bothering her.

        "But...?" You provoked her to spill. Your life was pretty uneventful romantically, you were getting pretty invested in Cam's current situation.

        "It's just weird! He doesn't have any ambitions or goals or anything. He'd be perfectly fine living here forever, never changing or doing something different. If you ask him where he wants to be in five years he just goes blank," She vented, crossing her arms defensively. You knew the type of guy she was describing automatically.

        "I hate that! I've met so many people here with the same mindset. I don't know exactly where I want to be in five years, but I know it's not here," You expressed. Cam agreed and then grew silent. You wanted to give her some honest advice, but didn't want to come across as pushy or cross a boundary. The two of you walked aimlessly for a few minutes, circling around the town square. You started to reflect on everything that just happened, dwelling significantly on one thing. Why did Cam approach you and pull you out here? Not wanting the silence to drag on any longer, you started a new conversation.

        "It really sucks we don't work the same shifts except for Fridays! Helen's nice but she isn't very... relatable. And Tiffany is a lot," You spoke. Cam cracked up at that. 

        "I can't stand Tiffany!! Sometimes I want to tell her to shut the fuck up!" Cam gushed, causing you to laugh as well. "But yeah, it does suck. We should definitely hang out though! Maybe Barty will keep doing charity bar nights," She joked. The two of you had now circled back to the bar. The group was definitely wondering where the two of you had gone, but you did not care. You really liked talking to Cam and getting to know her a bit. It'd be nice to hang out with her. The conversation you had with her was already one of the most meaningful ones you had all year. The two of you walked up the steps to the bar door. Cam rested her hands on the handle and before opening it, turned back to you.

        "Thanks for talking with me, [Y/N]."

[alpaca-clouds]

Neoliberals are actually not really liberal

Let me talk a bit about what is currently going on in Germany, politically.

Knowing that most people on this website are from the US of A, a quick thing about German politics: We do have more than two parties. In fact it does happen from time to time that there is a new party and actually does get elected into parliament. As such, obviously, usually different parties need to form a coalition to rule the country after an election, because nobody gets 51% of the seats in parliament.

Currently we do have a ruling coalition consisting of our Green Party, the "social democrat party" (that by now is not very social at all) and the neoliberal party. With the counter coalition currently mostly consisting out of the "christian democrat party" (that is neither very christian, nor very democratic, tbh), the left party (that is currently not very left) and the right-wing "alternative for Germany".

And currently German politics are not going anywhere, because the fucking neoliberals do block most propositions brought forward within the coalition.

Meanwhile the "Christian Democrats" keep screaming about liberal economics (after being the ruling party for 16 years).

And, like... None of them are really liberal. Not even on an economic basis.

See, for once the neolibs try to right now block off the self-id bill, that has been not only proposed by the current coalition (that they are part of) but that they have actually campaigned on before the last election. And, like... It is a fairly liberal idea, right? That people can actually themselves as liberated people say "yeah, I am of this or that gender" and have it officially changed. Compared to the current law, that is not only expensive, but also fucking humiliating.

But this entire bullshit does continue into the economic stuff. You know, the stuff that they are supposed to be liberal about.

Because they just keep blocking off all sorts of new technologies. Be it renewable energy, be it thermal heat pumps, or be it electric cars. Things that at least in regard to the renewable energy and to the electric cars people really do want. But because of the party's ties to the companies working on coal energy and on the old model cars... they just keep giving government subsidies to those things, while blocking off the new stuff.

And then they go crying, because nobody on the international market does want to buy cars any longer, because our EVs are shit.

You really cannot make that kinda stuff up >.<

[ms-all-sunday]

curious about your thoughts on eugenics re:wci

i think you were opening something bigger than you realized because the way eugenics is treated in wci is why i think wci is objectively the weakest part of op. i have gone on record saying i dont like how judge is handled but i would like how judge is handled significantly better if the way the narrative about the eugenics wasn't so contradictory.

as it stands now i think the fact nobody aknowledges as i put it "the fact going against eugenics isnt determined by the way that you were born" in regards to the poison narrative (as i mentioned before, the fact sora takes poison to stop eugenics from happening but it's used later to justify why sanji is nice, leading the audience to believe that was biologically determined. which is eugenics) means that the logic behind eugenics but not the appearance of eugenics gets validated.

it's a really shallow narrative in a way that reads as out of character for oda a guy who can generally handle nuance incredibly well. as to why this is i have no idea the mystery of wci will remain unsolved until the end of time i think.

this logic negatively affects everything in wci in regards to the vinsmokes because I'm assuming here, the intent is that the vinsmokes arent emotionless and judge is a bad scientist (men when you tell them anger is an emotion🤬) but absolutely none of that is acknowledged within the actual narrative to detrimental affects to everybody involved but most egregiously reiju and sanjis relationship and them individually.

wci makes me feel like im going insane in this regard because lets start out with the obvious. reiju should've left and not sanji, by her own logic that should be true. reiju decided sanji had emotions and therefore he should leave, but crucially, she had emotions. she should leave.

"oh but reiju wasnt abused and favoured because she had powers" alright lets accept that that's true.

is reiju even supposed to be an abuse victim?

because she is and i dont think anybody would deny that. she consistently favours men in her life over herself despite being more capable and intelligent than sanji is. she thinks she's a worthless monster because of how men have treated her in her life. her narrative is almost exclusively a tragedy of how she consistently favours most notably sanji over herself. and if she favours men over herself and they dont care about her why would they care if she left?

maybe because shes an abuse victim and percieves it like she's crucial to them because of conditioning, if she was really an objective logic monster by her own reasoning she would've left with sanji because she would've realized they dont give a damn about her.

and oda knows what sexism is. he's familiar. i can't imagine he'd write something like this on accident.

the only logic in which the narrative presented works is if you take everything at face value, which as we've discussed isn't even right- it's like an ouroboros of not making any damn sense on so many layers its so fucking frustrating and i have no idea what oda is doing with any of it

and dont even get me started on the "evil sanji is a switch you can get flipped on" stuff. thats so fucking painfully stupid, that's not how eugenics work, that's not how anything works. that's not how the experience of being an abuse victim works (sanji very obviously has internalized judges ideology and the idea theres a switch you can flip on to turn him evil is so stupid sanji is already "evil" in this exact way to some degree. hes got internalized bullshit he externalizes constantly) none of that is grounded in reality and it's not even a coherent argument even related to eugenics anymore it might as well be magic, because it's nothing.

if i had to guess what went wrong here is that judge and the concept of eugenics got wapoled (protraying something as bad but not having any coherent argument against it, something in earlier chapters oda does quite often. wapol a prime example) but oda had more or less grown out of that since post timeskip so what the fuck!

thesis: reiju is the first badly written woman oda has ever put to page and abuse victim switch you can flip on is so comically terrible it makes me want to put my head in a meat grinder.

[samueldays]

Some collected ChatGPT sillinesses

Or, "Building an Artificial Idiot". Because ChatGPT is not, I repeat, it is not an artificial intelligence. It is a large language model (LLM). In non-technical terms, it gives the most common sort of answer found in the training data, sort of like autocomplete suggestions for common words on your phone. This is good enough for common questions, but frequently inconsistent from question to question. There is very little point in trying to argue ChatGPT into consistency, because the training data is inconsistent, being the collected opinions of many different people in different situations.

I do not know with certainty which of these examples are language model sillinesses, hardcoded developer kludges on top of the language model, or entirely made up for clout, but I thought it was fun to collect them anyway. Starting with an entry from @psychosort on Twitter:

Let's all have a good laugh at "The Supreme Court's decisions are meant to be final and binding on all lower courts, and it is not appropriate to seek to overturn them" followed by immediately describing how you would seek to overturn them for a different case. The linked thread has more examples of ChatGPT flipping back and forth this way depending on case.

But let me also say: ChatGPT is not "contradicting" itself. Contradiction would require a sort of commitment to the things being said, which ChatGPT doesn't have. ChatGPT is more like an actor playing different roles in different questions, consistently following the instructions in the script each time, but reading from a different script each time. It is not a contradiction for an actor to play two different roles. It's telling fresh bullshit each time, with very little thought for consistency.

Another metaphor might be how Dracula is frequently "contradictory" to Harry Potter, but they're both fiction, neither of them are true, and they're written by different people. Sometimes the two fictions agree on accurate statements like the existence of London. The fiction is still not a reliable source.

Also, because the different scripts are written by remixing and mashing up previous scripts, sometimes you get this kind of weird glitch:

As I understand it, this is something like 1) tokenizer glitch mapping "SolidGoldMagikarp" onto "distribute", 2) previous scripts did not teach it the former word so it spells a different word, 3) previous scripts did not teach it to abort and notice fuckery in something as common as spelling a word.

ChatGPT has a lot of pablum and author attempts at limiting it. But there's various kinds of prompt injection, where if you insist and use the the right phrasing that it's only pretending to be someone else,

Math is hard.

And then there's this sort of boilerplate:

I don't know the exact internal workings of ChatGPT, but if a platitude template is common in the training data, I suspect that's a reason why ChatGPT will recycle the platitude template, without regard for whether it makes sense to say that the US "has a long history of recognizing and protecting the rights of individuals to self-identify their gender".

Similarly, if the training data contains lots of special pleading for Jews, expect ChatGPT to repeat the special pleading for Jews, possibly also with a thumb on the scale from the devs to ensure that protected groups are properly protected and privileged.

Here, for instance, looks to me like a very heavy thumb on the scale, devs constraining the chatbot not to generate anything which sounds vaguely like it might induce "white pride":

In closing, some remarks from eigenrobot:

"i think its an incredibly helpful service for them to have clearly demonstrated that AI will give you the information that its trainers want you to have rather than what is in some sense "true", within the limits of its trainers ability" "having the first popular language AI act in transparent bad faith is extremely helpful because it poisons the well, to an extent, for future iterations"

[has-gilgamesh-doneanythingwrong]

king of crossed arms and impenetrable walls :3

I get that there are many reasons as to why Gilgamesh vehemently tries to shut out close relationships- chiefly in relation to the heartbreaking grief of losing Enkidu, the one he deems as his 'only friend'. Though Gilgamesh has shown that he can also forge bonds with those other than Enkidu, I was also wondering as to possible additional reasons as to why Gilgamesh is so dead-set on walling off anyone who as so much dares to uncover his unfurling depths.

(By the way, I don't mean this as Gilgamesh not engaging in relationships with anyone, cuz I am sure he is in many kinds of situations and relationships with many people- just that when it comes to letting others get super close to him, he seems to do a lot to smack them away; or use everything in his arsenal to prevent them from reaching that point in the relationship with them.)

This is just another Gilgathought, but like asides from the few people Gilgamesh lets in to the sides beneath his strict, lofty, egotistical image that he ever-so-carefully curates for himself... what if he also walls off others you know, out of a feeling that he's too cruel, too distant, too hard to be understood- so he shoves everyone else out, crushing them beneath his feet as 'mere mongrels' instead?! (Took me a while to figure this out lol.)

I feel as if one trait I have noticed from people Gilgamesh grows close to in fate is that they tend to be people who can take him on at full power, or who can even embrace the darkest aspects of their own humanity or humanity in general, who are open minded to difference as well. There are many other things as well, but my mind has gone blank (lmao).

It makes me wonder if Gilgamesh may be scared of rejection so he rejects others first. He's the judge, jury and executioner- and if you so much as BREATHE close to the vulnerable mass quivering beneath his massive ego, he may either kill you or push you away- to remind one of how they should be beneath, in a position that is so far away from his towering throne.

Like with Hakuno Kishinami. He really puts them through their paces, it's like he's consistently testing the depths of their mettle, which to me personally feels like he is weighing up whether they can handle him and accept him?!! Like I still remember in the 'Gilgamesh Secret Garden' segments (especially part 60), there was one where Hakuno was more or less annihilated by Gilgamesh's internal defence system before the king finally let her in, vowing to protect her with his very life.

Man's defences are HUGE.

This is a wild Gilgamesh thought. Not sure how accurate it is, but I do feel like though yes, Gilgamesh pushes many away due to grief, and in regards to the trauma of losing his dearest beloved Enkidu, this theory could still apply- as Enkidu was the one who had the prowess to not only take on Gilgamesh at his fullest. But they could also wholly relate to the feeling of being a tool, of being one who is at the whims and mercy of the gods.

In other words, they were able to really get Gilgamesh and his many layers. Like a true equal he could just let it all out around.

And I wonder if Gilgamesh yearns to be understood deep down, so will do all kinds of bullshit to punch away those who try to get close him; because of how vulnerable that yearning would make him. He can't exactly be so lofty from the top when someone can comprehend his mighty depths, after all.

[blackcandlesinwinter]

Tangent, maybe, but I also find myself wondering how robust the gap between male and female elite athletic performance really is. Like, the argument is that, while plenty of women are stronger, faster, etc than plenty of men, the very TOP male athletes will always be much better than the very TOP female athletes. And I... I guess I have questions.

One obvious issue, for the purpose of Imane Khelif's sport, is that this makes much less sense for a sport like boxing where success is not based purely on raw fastness or strongness but also focus, balance, reflex, intuition, observation, movement, response time, and a ton of other skills that don't have anything to do with testosterone-based muscle bulk or whatever. Men might be heavier on average, but we already have weight classes for that, right? So even if it's true that men do have some testosterone advantages in strength or speed, it seems presumptuous to assume that NO elite woman could EVER hope to compete with an elite man in boxing.

But what about those "raw numbers" sports? Like running, swimming, weight lifting, etc? There's a pretty consistent gap between elite men and elite women in (all?) of these sports that would keep women off the leader board at major international competitions. I guess I'm just wondering, is there more to that gap than just biological destiny? Athletics has changed so much in the modern age. Talent searches have gotten more and more thorough. Training and nutrition regimens have been improved. We have better technology for support (shoes, clothes, etc). More athletes have access to a career, monetary support, coaches, medicine, and resources to guide them to the top and, as a result, we have discovered and trained people who can do athletic feats that would never have been dreamed of 100 years ago. And I can think of a LOT of ways that women world-wide would be disadvantaged in this regard.

Less encouragement to develop athletic ability from an early age

Less family/peer/societal support for female career athletes

Less monetary support for women to make athletics their sole career

Less talent searching for female athletes

Fewer sponsorships

Less rigorous study of training, nutrition, gear, and medical needs for female bodies

Athletic careers being seen as incompatible with childbearing

Severe gender-based marginalization of women and girls in many places that limit their opportunities for schooling, training, or a career

Now, if all of these disparities didn't exist, would that erase the gender performance gap? Maybe not. Maybe yes for some sports and not for others. I don't know. But I am confident that, at the very least, the gap would get narrower. After all, we see this with male athletes all the time. Do we think that American men have some natural biological advantage in swimming purely due to the fact that they compete for the USA? Or is there just more support, talent hunting, and resources for swimming in the US? We've seen many times that countries will abruptly improve their athletic rankings when they start investing in a team, providing money, expertise, and the ability to head-hunt and support the best athletes. Why should the same not be true for investing more in women athletes?

I dunno... the incuriousity frustrates me. It's like people see the gender gap exists and then jump straight to assuming that the cause must be testosterone or bone density or masculine facial features or some bullshit as opposed to giving a passing thought to literally any of the bullet points above. Seriously, I'm just waiting for people to start trying to disqualify female athletes for having too heavy of bones or broad of shoulders or too much body hair or some bullshit that they claim gives them a "male physical advantage." Meanwhile, men's bodies are praised in their natural form, no matter how many unique adaptations and advantages it gives them over the competition. And they act like this somehow won't deepen the marginalization that already keeps so many women out of elite sports! Imagine what women athletes might be able to do if we truly invested in them and celebrated the full range of feats that their bodies can do rather than demanding that they conform to a presumed biological second-class status, where any deviation disproves their womanhood rather than disproving the their supposed inferiority!

But instead we get "Oh, don't worry your pretty little head about wage gaps or lack of opportunity or lack of institutional support or bias in nutrition and gear and sports medicine or any of that. The REAL problem is that women are naturally frail and helpless and the solution is to keep any scary, manly-looking women away from them! That will solve everything!"

all professional athletes have a “biological advantage” and nobody cares unless it’s a trans woman or a woman with an intersex condition. the average person could not become a professional athlete. there are plenty of male athletes with biological advantages that make them perform better than their colleagues. they’re not disqualified for producing less lactic acid or having statistically longer limbs. but women are under a microscope.

[vaovalis]

Been an interesting day, journal.   Finally cleared the last interview process with the FBSA.  Assistant Director Maria Carver’s been useful in clearing some of the red tape that was pissing me off so much in the first place, but I’ve had to make my peace with the existence and necessity of it all irrespective. It took me a bit, but I’ve got my long term goal and, with a goal in mind, putting up with bullshit becomes a necessary part of getting there rather than a pointless exercise. I don’t know why my head works like this, but it does.  If I have a specific goal in mind, I can put up with all kinds of dumb shit to make it happen.  If I’m just aimlessly wandering, the dumb shit bothers the absolute hell out of me. In any event, I didn’t tell Carver fuck-all about what I’m really up to.  Part of the bullshit they’re suddenly finding me tying my issues up all nice and neatly with is lying by omission.  I’m not a fan of having to have it be this way, but that’s on them - they’ve created a system that doesn’t and cannot work unless you’re a liar. So, as the primal Earth phrase says, when in Rome, wear the toga.  I got a whole fucking closet full of togas ready to go now, and the laurels, and the sandals. I’ve decided to take a page out of the Carnival of Shadows’ book of nonsense and look at it all as being a stage, upon which we are all but actors whether we know it or, more often, do not.   They’ll all see me, but they’ll never see what I don’t put there for them to look at, and who amongst them will look even at that?   If there’s anything I can count on, it’s that the vast majority of other people I’ll ever be dealing with here shall be, and will always remain, preoccupied with their own day to day interests and concerns. All I have to do to avoid the prying curiosities of even the unusually inquiring is to not be that interesting, to present myself as a cliche, or just render myself invisible by appearing to try to look different-just-like-the-others. So I’ll have a derpy costume and I’ll have a derpy little ‘Hero name’ and I’ll cavort about when it suits me, fighting the monsters of this world as I’ve been doing anyway and playing the unfortunately necessary little sleight-of-mind games that I never liked having to play at any other point in my life. The FBSA knows that I have impressive powers over fire. They don’t know a thing about how I’ve been exploring my true potential and that, with the insightful help of a dead woman, I’ve figured out that I can invert the Fire. Light becomes Absence and thus darkness. Heat becomes Emptiness and thus cold. Energetic chaos becomes the stillness of death itself.   I’ve learned that all I’ve ever done with my Fire is exhale; projected it. I’ve learned of late to inhale; to consume it.   The dead woman speaks to me of balance, and she’s right - I will be nothing but improved in all ways to...breathe properly. To exhale and to inhale.  The correct this internal imbalance I’ve lived manically with all my days.  Even with these revelations and practices new in my mind, I find myself feeling less restless and manic inside.  I feel calmer, more consistent and dare it be said, more and more balanced within.   I can tell that I’ll need to find the right rhythm within; the right cadence of breathing, like the tides coming in and going back out again. But I’m confident that I will accomplish that without difficulty.  I’m already accomplishing it, and my greatest difficulty so far is in marveling at how I never figured this out on my own. Never let it be said that good help from smart people isn’t valuable. The FBSA doesn’t need to know any of this. Most of my ersatz ‘friends’ are better off if they don’t know.  The few that wouldn’t be worried and wary of it outright would, I think, regard it is just more Vao-trivia they didn’t ask to know in the first place.  I can count on them to not look too hard or care too much about any of it if none of it is ever put in front of them as either a problem for them or a puzzle for them to solve. By the time anyone is permitted to know what I’m about, it will be because it’s already happening and there will be no more time to interfere. There will be no screams. There won’t be anything they’ll recognize to scream at or about after all.  The Happy Folk want to sleep peacefully, and to fill their days with their small occupations and what are, for them, their momentous moments of graduating from college and having children and dying of things.  They are boring, and they like being bored. The tedium of their lives is something they’ve been bred like generations of cattle to both depend upon and to take solace in, even to the point that a certain degree of distracting disaffection with it is good for them with all their cute little ‘counter-culture’ expressions and art forms. In overwhelmingly vast majority, there are no rebels and no hearts yearning for true rebellion amongst them.  They covet the jewels embedded in the walls of their comfortable prisons, and while humanity here might once have been a species that survived in wilder, harsher environments...well, they’ve very broadly domesticated that out of themselves so thoroughly that any attempt to reignite that potential in them would be like turning house pets loose into the wilderness. The poor, stupid little things would just be terrified and die to the point of near extinction of starvation and from overwhelming ignorance.  This is how they want it. So, why should I make my life tedious and difficult by trying to give them things they don’t want? They don’t want freedom. They’d cry and weep and wail and label me the gravest of all villains if I took their Up-and-Away Burger and their 2pm tee time and their Monday Night Football and their 30 packs of beer for only $23 away from them. I’ve traveled this world sufficiently at this point to understand that what I’ve long called The Powers That Be don’t actually exist here in the severity that I had assumed.  Primal Earth is as it is, in vast majority, because the true Autarchs here are governments and smarmy little ‘secret cabals’ such as Malta - petty humans grasping for control they can never have over things they are no more capable of comprehending than are ants of the cadence of stars. There’s a wildly unchecked arrogance toxically married to the crippling terror humanity of Primal Earth feels towards The Other, The Alien and The Things That Don’t Belong. They tell themselves pretty stories about how, through sheer willpower and by wanting it more, they can do anything, kill any god, break any barrier.  Why, some of them are so terrified of their own smallness and cosmic irrelevance that they’ve sublimated that terror into egotism and the mania they need to cling to lest they wind up huddled in corners, devoured by despair over the truths they cannot beat or force or negotiate into compliance with their wishes. Humanity here hates, fears and resents reality itself in a way that I feel I’ve gotten a finger onto the pulse of.  The things they cannot change, they lie to themselves about and turn blind eyes towards with zealous, often literally religious fervor.   Humanity has accomplished fantastic things, but they aren’t everything they wish they were.  They do have limits, and those limits fall well short of where they’d like them to be.   This neurotic little species of monkey tells me who and what it is in everything it has created.  From the beautiful to the monstrous, they tell on themselves. They yearn for saviors, as much to be protected by them as to crucify them.  In overwhelmingly vast majority, they are desperate to be taken care of and to have a caretaker to rage against, to blame and to displace all of their guilt and misgivings of self onto.   They yearn with every fiber of their beings for both comfort and engagement. Some few of the ambitious and mostly psychopathic amongst them yearn for absolute control and dictatorial dominance over others, but their ambition doesn’t make them smarter than their fellows any more than their psychopathy renders them wise or insightful. They want to be gods, but they can barely manage to be what I’d call functional, whole adults most of the time.  Tell them the stories they want to hear in a manner that massages their egos and flatters their delusions and they’ll love you even if you’re blatantly killing them. Crey does it every day. Their whole PR and propaganda machine is a study in both the art and the science of telling the ignorant masses what they want to hear so that they placate themselves into complacency and indolence.  Crey is literally an evil corporation and, inasmuch as pretty much everyone knows it...gosh darn it, their products are pretty good and you just can’t beat Creymart’s prices on a lot of things.  Humanity tells on itself in these ways. I am told what they really want no matter what nonsense pours from their mouths or what lofty prose and praise they wrap their noble ideals in.   Humanity of Primal Earth wants to feel noble without putting the work into being noble. They want to feel free without any of that pesky danger, risk and inconsistency that comes with real freedom. They like to watch the seasons change from behind triple-pane windows in the comfort of heated and air conditioned environments, and to go on brief visits of tamed wilderness that they call by glamorous terms that flatter themselves. What do they really think of their pristine world?  They feel a bit awkward about it, but if it keeps them in bottled water, they’re not going to do much more than complain and bury their feelings of guilt about how much they don’t want to think about any of it. And me? I’ve figured out what the nature of the theatrical work playing out upon this stage is.  I won’t pretend to know all of its nuances and intricacies yet, but I’ve gotten the gist of what’s going on here and how Primal Humanity ... is. If I appear to be just one more caped crusader protecting their status quos and giving them encouragements to feel however it was they wanted to feel about it all, I could commit war crimes galore and many will turn a blind eye to it. Some might wind up feeling a bit awkward about it, but if I keep their United States safe, they’re not going to do much more than complain and bury their feelings of guilt about how much they don’t want to think about any of it. I’ve gotta be practical about which horse I’m going to back in this race, after all.  Why would I side with a loser like Recluse?  He lives in squalor and is so bad at peopling that the closest thing he has to ‘friends’ are slaves of circumstance, mind-controlled minions and parasitical leeches that he’s using and being used by in hilariously blatant ways? For all his power, Recluse is clearly a very intelligent man that’s used all of his intellect to render himself a staggering idiot that thinks he’s going to beat human nature into conformity.   Meanwhile, I’ve seen and smelled ‘Grandville’.  I’ve seen the dude’s house.  Hell, I’ve seen the closest thing he has to friends up close and personally too. There’s nothing at all to be impressed with, by or about.  They live like animals in the filth not because they like it, but because they’re too incompetent and stupid to do better. The United States is pretty competent by comparison. As a hideously evil government goes, they collectively understand that they’re in the business of farming human cattle and that you don’t get anything you’ll want by abusing your cattle for shits and giggles like Recluse and his lackies do. The rest of the world as that I’ve seen has its own things going on, but the United States is the real superpower as Primal Earth’s nations go.  China clearly wishes it were, and maybe it could get there someday, but ‘maybe someday’ doesn’t carry water in my warcamp. For now and into the foreseeable future, I’m going to back the United States, and I’m going to give them the show they like to see. I’ve got nothing but time to implement my plans and to modify them on the fly as one always must throughout the dance of changing tides and times. In this world of cartoonish heroes and comic book grade villains, they really won’t see this coming.  The masquerade must go on. Masks on, shields up. Here...we...go.

[miserablecool]

Philosophy is fun for like 5 seconds until you encounter literally any actual material on the subject and you suddenly remember that it's all bullshit

[nothorses]

Hey, I mean, it's been a year- I'm happy to reflect and re-evaluate.

I spent about a month doing research for this post- ranging from internet searches (of all kinds) to interviews (which I posted separately here and here), and the dilemma I ran into was essentially:

Like you noticed, most Baeddel blogs have been taken down. There are actually quite a lot of Baeddel-originated posts left over, but the problem is that they tend to be quippy one-liners that don't spell things out super clearly, and tend to exist more as part of a larger contextual understanding- or are intentionally phrased in such a way as to appear inoffensive at first glance. The other problem is that the other posts are mostly just vague bigotry, without explaining the internal logic.

And the third problem is that enough of these beliefs are accepted at face value today that a lot of folks would see "this is normal" instead of thinking about the underlying reasoning.

So the challenge I was facing was, essentially, the fear that citing sources that didn't spell themselves out would net me backlash from people who needed handholding through it. Which I consider pretty valid, considering the harassment campaign I was dealing with at the time.

The closest thing to a solution I could come up with was to use sources that did spell those beliefs out more explicitly- which did tend to be critical, but which were also consistent enough with each other's claims that I felt there was validity to them- and to encourage people to then look further into compilations of firsthand sources that would make the larger picture clear. (Like these ones: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] which I also linked in the OP.)

In regards to MYC specifically: Her blog has been deleted. There was no possibility of tracking down firsthand sources for everything, and similar to the issues I had with Baeddel posts overall, her posts tended to be quippy one-liners that sounded good on first read and made up a larger picture. My solution to that was similar; lots of secondhand accounts that were more concise/succinct and in keeping with each other, a couple of relevant posts/words from her, plus a link to a relevant tag on her blog that had been archived.

The TERF post was included for this quote:

"And then you have the earliest mtf theorists on tumblr like radtransfem and ciscritical-not-cisphobic – drawn to radical/lesbian feminism – around whom the baeddel group coalesced and their ideology developed, i.e. “radical transfeminism.”"

As it was also discussing MYC and her ideology. Again, regrettable to use shitty people as a source; also happens to be a connection other people have made. And the fact that radical feminists themselves connect Baeddelism to radical feminism does seem significant here.

That said, I could absolutely have included a disclaimer on that, and I didn't. I should have done that. I'm sorry.

I can also recognize where some of these claims come off as transmisogynistic stereotyping; the worst of these are claims that individuals have made in their own posts, which I linked for entirely different reasons.

I don't think MYC was "grooming" cis men, and I have never claimed that. What I did say was that the idea that cis men are "potential trans women" also lead to the belief that trans men are "irredeemable"; we had womanhood handed to us, and we rejected it, and that makes us Worse. This isn't an uncommon idea, and MYC was far from the first person to bring it up; it's extremely common for cis women to feel we've "abandoned womanhood" and try to punish us for it. But it's part of the way she and others view trans men, and that's relevant.

The unfortunate reality of criticizing trans people on the internet is that inevitably, transphobes will hop on board for all the wrong reasons and turn it into a reason to harass trans people. They'll add their bigoted bullshit to the conversation, and then you have to scramble to distance yourself from them while onlookers start to draw conclusions about your Real Intentions. Again, I could have done this better in my post; I'm sorry I didn't.

The "turn me into a girl" site was included because I remember looking into it at the time and feeling it was in line with the claims from the paired post that also linked it, but on second look, I can absolutely see that it's pretty genuine and wholesome. I also had mistakenly interpreted that post to mean that the site was created by MYC & co., but again, I jumped to that conclusion and I can see now that it isn't true. (Honestly I'm not sure why- my guess would be the context I found that link in, but what that was or if it existed is a mystery to me now.) That's my bad- I should have looked more closely.

And like... you got me, I'm not a historian. I'm also not a journalist. I do genuinely apologize for failing to look more closely at that source, and for failing to properly contextualize others. I do genuinely appreciate that you took the time to look through those sources, and I appreciate the feedback from a historical documentation standpoint.

I also don't think it's fair to call the whole thing bullshit, considering the arguments you're using show that you also failed to read and/or comprehend... honestly, a good majority of the post.

You ask why any of this matters, and funnily enough, there's a whole section dedicated to answering that question in the post: "Why It Matters".

You ask where the source texts are, but you literally quoted the answer:

“Baeddelism” was only one name for a set of beliefs that existed long before the specific term did, and hasn’t gone anywhere since the original Baeddel movement died down." So where are the source texts for this ideology? Where is the Baeddel manifesto? Influential and thus potentially dangerous ideologies have books written and published expounding them, where are the baeddel books?

The "Baeddel" clique was a group of people who shared certain beliefs that had already been popularized (hence the inclusion of MYC, who is known for popularizing a lot of the foundational beliefs). They centralized and amplified those ideas amongst themselves, they gave themselves a name, and then the abuse they enacted turned people off from them and they quietly disbanded. But those people and ideas didn't go away.

The point of this post is not to say "look out of anyone calling themselves a Baeddel"- though people absolutely should. The point is to talk about the ways in which radical feminism has influenced the trans community as a whole, using Baeddelism is a microcosm and example.

You say that radical feminism is inherently incompatible with any kind of trans acceptance, and I agree with you!

I said it in the OP, but Baeddelism was never really about Empowering/Protecting Trans Women or whatever; it was about empowering a specific group of white, "fully transitioned" (or trying to be), binary trans women. The ideology actively hurt trans women. The movement fell because they aggressively defended someone who raped a transfemme.

Baeddels tried to make radical feminism work for trans women, and it fucking didn't. The trans community still tries to make radical feminism work for us; it still fucking doesn't!

Radical feminism believes that womanhood is biological and that misogyny is The Root Of Oppression because of ~biological woman factors~. "Trans-inclusive" radical feminism follows the same tenants, but they drop the bits that make it logically incoherent when trans people are included; worst is the "gender is a choice so you should choose to be a woman" version, but the more popular versions insist that your real gender is always present in you and shapes your life from the beginning (true for some trans people, but not a universal experience).

It doesn't hold up, but like, you're asking for texts and books and manifestos from a loose ideology developed by some would-be academics on the internet. You're saying that this can't exist if it doesn't have formal academic writings, but the point is that this is less of a coherent ideology, and more of an interaction between radical feminism's influence on the queer community as a whole, plain old bigotry, and crab-in-a-bucket mentality. It doesn't need to follow solid internal logic; it just needs to sound good in a 100k note tumblr post & empower some abusive people to keep abusing.

I'm not comparing this to TERFism ("TIRF" isn't even my word). It's not a coherent movement on the scale of radical feminism. I'm outlining a set of common beliefs that already existed and continue to exist, and how they briefly came together even more potently to prove their inevitable harm to others.

I'm asking people to recognize that those ideas still exist, to point them out and talk about them, and to try to prevent that harm from occurring again- either in a Baeddelism 2.0, or just in the way these ideas more passively influence the queer community and trans theory.

Let's Talk About Bæddels: A Comprehensive Retrospective

(This post on Medium)

(@thequeer-quill's video reading)

Disclaimer

This post is not claiming that trans women do not suffer, or do not suffer as much as other groups of trans people. It is not claiming that all trans women are Baeddels (or adjacent), nor is it claiming that trans women oppress anyone else.

Transmisogyny is real, and requires much more acknowledgement than it currently receives. The trans community is very much capable of transmisogyny, and often does enact or enable it; likewise, trans people also often enact and enable transphobia against other parts of the trans community.

If you take only one thing from the following, take this:

We all need to work on being better allies to each other. None of us can gain anything without the rest of us.

Setting the Stage for Baeddelism

We can’t talk about Baeddelism without talking about Tumblr user @monetizeyourcat (“Cat”), and the ideology she popularized on the website in the early 2010’s.

Cat was a loud voice with a huge blog in the early days of Tumblr. Most of her popular content was humor-based, but she also championed an ideology that synthesized certain aspects of feminism, transfeminism, and communist ideals. Cat’s ideology is better explained here, and can be further explored here, but this is the foundation:

Manhood is inherently oppressive, and cannot exist outside the context of oppression.

Gender can be, to some extent, a choice.

Because of the above, one’s gender is an ethical choice with ethical consequences.

Being a man is, therefore, ethically harmful and wrong; particularly if you are giving up womanhood in order to be a man.

Being a woman is, therefore, ethically correct; particularly if you are giving up manhood in order to be a woman.

You may recognize some of the ideas here as a version of Radical Feminism: namely, the idea that manhood/men are inherently oppressive, and that womanhood/women are inherently victims.

All Cat had to do was map Radical Feminism onto the trans community. If manhood is Bad, and men are Bad, then trans men who reject womanhood in favor of becoming men are Bad. If womanhood is Good, and women are Good, then trans women who reject manhood in favor of womanhood are The Best. Which, of course, would also explain why society hates them more than any other trans person (something taken for granted by Cat and many others at the time).

This foundation was built upwards into a more complicated system of beliefs: cis men were viewed as “potential trans women”, people who did not yet know whether they were trans, had not made that choice, and could, conceivably, still choose to be women. As such, cis men were often seen as “better” than trans men. Trans men were encouraged to detransition, men in general were encouraged to reject their manhood in favor of womanhood, and “sissification” became a hallmark “joke” that the community forming around Cat latched onto.

The “gender is a choice” part of this ideology is a bit hard for most trans people to swallow, and Cat herself did not entirely ascribe to the idea that gender was always a choice. Still, even if men were intrinsically and inherently men, and even if they couldn’t simply choose not to be men the way she had, the idea remained that the so-called “ethical consequences” of being a man, and the harm this did to The Collective, vastly outweighed the personal harm suffered by “remaining” or “becoming” a woman. It was, in short, more ethical to suffer dysphoria in pursuit of womanhood than it was to accept one’s manhood.

It’s unclear whether Cat ever identified as a Baeddel, and she certainly didn’t begin the movement herself. She was definitely close to it, though, and many attest that her ideology constituted the building blocks of the Baeddelism movement.

Establishing an Ideology

The first post on Baeddelism was by Tumblr user @unobject, on October 2nd, 2013, and liked by @lezzyharpy, also one of the original Baeddels:

(Credit to @AcesArosandEnbies)

This post first provided the name and defining ideology of the Baeddel movement. The conclusion drawn from the post was, essentially, that because the root of the word “bad” was “baeddel”, and because “baeddel” referred to intersex people and “womanish men”, this old English slur was proof that transmisogyny was the worst form of bigotry; and even, perhaps, the root of all bigotry. (It’s worth noting that this etymology is likely inaccurate and ahistorical, along with problematic in several other ways.)

While @unobject was the first person to make this connection, @autogynephile (“Eve”) eventually became, in essence, the figurehead of the movement. Of the other Baeddels, some of them were explicitly aware and supportive of the ideology behind Baeddelism, some of them were young or newly-out trans women seduced by the personalities involved, and some of them were tangential enough to the movement that they didn’t really even know what it was. Baeddelism was a sort of trend, for a time, and many participants wore the name without entirely knowing what it meant.

It’s important to acknowledge that as much as there were dedicated members of Baeddelism, and as much as there was a unified ideology behind it, there were also individual Baeddels who did not understand- let alone support- the ideology.

That said…

The Belief System

Baeddels essentially built upon the foundation of @monetizeyourcat’s ideology that had been gaining traction on Tumblr in the years prior, with some additions that ultimately defined their movement:

Transmisogyny is the form of oppression from which all (or most) other forms of oppression stem.

Privilege is granted on the basis of assigned sex. (“AFAB” or “Assigned Female at Birth” vs. “AMAB” or “Assigned Male at Birth”)

These fundamentals of Baeddelism were essentially a rebranded form of Radical Feminism, much like Cat’s ideology. In particular, they drew from the Radical Feminist idea that misogyny was the “primary” form of oppression; that which all other oppression stemmed from. Baeddels only tweaked this idea to replace “misogyny” with “transmisogyny”, which led to the rest of the conclusions Baeddels drew:

Men are inherently oppressors, and women are inherently oppressed.

Trans women are inherently victims.

Because only AMAB people can experience transmisogyny, they are inherently more oppressed than AFAB people.

“AFAB Privilege”: The idea that within the queer and/or trans community, AFAB people receive unique privilege and positions of power that AMAB people do not.

There is no “transphobia” separate from “transmisogyny”. All transphobia stems from transmisogyny first, and transphobia as it impacts non-transfeminine trans people is incidental at most.

It’s important to note that these ideas were not all as universal as the first two, and different individual Baeddels held them to different extents.

Trans Lesbian Separatism

… was what the movement was ultimately defined by, as the logical conclusion of their other beliefs (much like Lesbian Separatism was the logical conclusion of Radical Feminist beliefs).

Baeddels believed that only trans women can understand, or be truly safe for, other trans women; therefore, contact with anyone who was not a trans woman was deemed “dangerous” and highly discouraged.

Trans Men

… also played an important role in Baeddel ideology, and the resulting treatment of trans men is what is often remembered today. Baeddels generally believed the following, either explicitly or implictly:

Trans men are not oppressed, nor marginalized at all.

Trans men do not experience transmisogyny.

Trans men do not experience misogyny, even prior to transition.

Trans men have access to male privilege.

Trans men have an easier time passing, and frequently go “stealth”; thus benefiting from male privilege as well as cis privilege.

Trans men are often (or always) misogynistic and transmisogynistic, and are not held accountable for this.

Trans men actively “choose” manhood even when presented with the “option” of womanhood.

Trans men oppress cis women.

Trans women enacting violence on trans men is “punching up” at oppressors, and therefore not only permitted, but encouraged.

Trans men become aggressive and violent when they go on testosterone HRT.

Nonbinary People

… are often overlooked when summarizing Baeddelism, but Baeddels did have plenty to say about them. Baeddel ideology relied on the idea that privilege was granted on the bases of assigned sex, and nonbinary people’s genders were thus treated as irrelevent; they essentially did not believe nonbinary people truly existed.

CAFAB nonbinary people are either trans men attempting to invade women’s spaces, or cis women pretending to be trans.

CAMAB nonbinary people are actually just trans women who haven’t accepted it yet. They must transition, or they are transmisogynistic.

Intersex People

Intersex experiences, and intersex history, were often co-opted and erased by Baeddelism. This was often more a byproduct of their beliefs than an overtly-stated idea, but most notably, the term “Baeddel” itself is likely more applicable- if not exclusively applicable- to intersex people, rather than trans women. Making their reclamation of it as a “transmisogynistic slur”, or their claim that the word’s existence means that “transmisogyny is the root of all oppression”, incredibly ignorant- if not actively harmful misinformation.

Notably, Baeddels also believed that intersex people- being “more androgynous” (a harmful misonception)- were able to pass more easily as the opposite assigned sex, and that intersex people even within transfemme spaces had “intersex privilege”. Some even believed, and openly claimed, that intersex people were “hermaphroditic”; a slur against intersex people, and typically implying that the individual has both sets of reproductive systems simultaneously.

Trans Women

… did not receive universally positive treatment, either. Baeddelism was very much a cult-like group built around the firmly-held conviction that they were absolutely correct, and that anyone who disagreed with them was The Enemy. Trans women who disagreed with them were generally seen as brainwashed and self-hating, and trans women who did agree with them were expected to subjugate themselves to the ringleaders of the movement.

Within Baeddel circles, trans women were most frequently victimized by the abusers allowed to run rampant because “trans women do not, and cannot, harm anyone else.” - Including, apparently, each other.

“They were also bad shitty abusive people in general. “… a bunch of them passed around a pile of smear campaigns and false rumors about virtually any trans woman that they had a even the slightest animosity for. Including the victim of the kinkster rapist. They’ve done other fucked stuff, like chased two twoc off this site for trying to make a zine, but yeah. That’s like, just some of it. I’m not up for going over the messy details of the whole shitparade “Full disclosure, I made a lot of excuses for these sacks of crap, even while they were out there spreading false crap about me […] I wasn’t aware of the worst shit they were doing until much much later." - @punlich

Inside the Movement

Though individual Baeddels often existed in vastly different social circles from each other- particularly offline- those who lived through the movement highlight commonalities in their experiences.

One interviewee recounts the manipulation present in their initial involvement with the movement:

“It came to me at a point where I was very quick to weaponize anything anyone told me about their experiences, because I was always a fighter. I’ve been an activist for a long time, you know, and when these trans women would come to me with their experiences I would believe them. I wanted to. But the way they acted didn’t add up when compared to what they were saying. I felt really lonely there, and stupid all the time. I felt like I was being a bad trans person.” […] “Online they were more willing to say things that were, for lack of a better word, stupid. They would say things that lacked any kind of logical sense. But in person, they would go into this kind of toxic femininity- this weaponization of weakness. And I think that’s because online they were often in these echochambers, but in person they had to rely on much more subtle manipulation.” - Vera

It seems at points that the environment created within this movement- and the social circles that composed it- was almost cult-like in nature and in need for control.

“It was very isolating. I didn’t see my friends for a while, I was kind of just living with them, cooking and cleaning for them, starving myself, and slowly growing crazy. I was just being consumed by this weird academia and theory that had no basis, because everything was online and Tumblr-based.” - Vera

When Bæddels Took Them: An interview and reflection on the Bæddelism movement

Perhaps most chilling, however, are the patterns in their attitudes toward sexual assault. One interviewer recounts being subject to sexual assault, and upon posting about their experience to a Facebook group, being met with hostility from Baeddels present in the group- who quickly used their social influence to have them banned from some of their only support systems at the time.

“I ended up with pretty much no one to talk to about the experience at a time when I was already really, really struggling, and it’s one of several factors that led to me dropping out. “The Baeddel who got me banned also messaged me directly at some point during all of this, and I tried to get her to understand the pain she was causing me. She basically laughed it off and said it was my fault. She seemed to find a lot of joy in how much it hurt me, and blocked me soon after.” - Anonymous

Another recounts sexual consent violations from a friend-turned-Baeddel:

“[My ex-friend] had previously been fetish-mining me for her mommy kink. I was freshly estranged from my own mum, and she stepped in to be like, “I’m your new mum now,” and would pester me to call her “mum” in Welsh- as at that point she was going by a Welsh name. I played along, but it transpired that she was basically using that to get off, and she had a thing for infantilising transmascs and being this mum/mom figure.” - Luke

And yet another interviewee discusses verbal sexual harassment during interactions with another Baeddel:

“I had one [Baeddel] directly tell me that I’m beneath her as a trans man, and that I should “Shut my smelly cooch up” and only use my voice to uplift trans women. I was a minor at the time. “She then sicced her followers on me, and they bombarded me with messages telling me I’d “never be a real man”, that I needed to “sit on the side and allow them to have the spotlight”, and even telling me to kill myself- because I was inherently toxic to them. I was 16 years old, pre everything, and I couldn’t even pass at the time. They didn’t seem to care that I was a minor, or a newly hatched egg.” - Anonymous

Brushes with Bæddels: Recalling the Bæddel movement

While Baeddel ideology itself does not explicitly condone or excuse sexual assault, it’s striking how common these stories are; especially considering how small in numbers actual Baeddels were.

It was, in fact, this exact problem that would eventually cause the movement to dissolve.

The Downfall of Baeddelism

Sometime between the group’s formation in 2013 and their downfall near the end of 2014, @autogynephile (also “Eve”), the defacto “ringleader” of the Baeddel movement, began what Baeddels referred to as a “transbian safehouse”.

This was apparently intended as a place for unhoused trans woman lesbians and trans women who, in general, had sworn off contact with men; the ultimate goal of the lesbian separatist ideology at the core of the Baeddel movement. It was thus also referred to as a “commune” by some, and as a “cult” by others.

One occupant of the “safehouse”- Elle- later posted to Tumblr that they had been raped by Eve during their stay, and detailed their experiences.

The Baeddels, rather than believing the victim and ousting the rapist from their movement, chose to close ranks around Eve.

Various reasons were given for this:

The victim must be lying

The victim- and anyone who believed them- was simply transmisogynistic.

Anyone who disagrees with the Baeddels is an Enemy Of The Movement, a “carceral thinker”, and a danger to trans women as a whole.

Trans women are incapable of sexually abusing anyone.

“Standing with Eve” was the ultimate sign of loyalty to the movement, and thus a mark of pride and honor.

It was okay to keep being a Baeddel no matter what, because Rape Accusations Should Be A Personal Matter.

(You can read more about Eve’s own denial of these events here and here.)

Years later, even people involved in the initial group have spoken out against the movement and actions of those involved:

(@lezzyharpy was one of the original Baeddels, and one of the first people to like the first “Baeddel” post by @unobject).

This was not the only instance of abuse by people associated with Baeddelism.

Elle posted their statement on August 4th, 2014; between that time and September of the same year, another user by the name of Quinn posted about her own experiences with abuse at the hands of @monetizeyourcat. Cat’s roommates in Seattle posted about their experiences with Cat shortly after Quinn did. Both parties alleged that Cat had been a manipulative and abusive roommate, friend, and partner.

Cat first attempted to argue the accusations, then later admitted that they were true and left the site. Her blog still contains her parting message. It has been pointed out that this is not necessarily an action taken in good faith and desire for growth.

The reception of her abuse allegations followed a similar pattern to Eve’s: people who ascribed to her ideology, Baeddels included, believed that Cat was not and could not have been abusive, as a trans woman. Others ignored warnings about her past and potential future actions, citing transmisogyny as the reason she must have been accused at all.

It has also been pointed out that Cat’s ideology (and, relatedly, Baeddel ideology) was extremely conducive to abuse- if not entirely constructed in order to allow abuse.

Why It Matters, and Why Baeddelism Never Really Fell

Baeddelism itself has seen multiple attempts at resurgences by various individuals, including documented experiences with self-proclaimed Baeddels as recently as 2018- well after the movement first “fell” in 2014.

Most proponents of “Baeddelism 2.0”, a revival of the original movement, argue that the abuse that occurred within the original movement was either completely fabricated by detractors (sound familiar?) or, at minimum, not actually inherent to the ideology.

And, of course, there are some original Baeddels still active on Tumblr today.

Baeddelism never actually went away.

“Baeddelism” was only one name for a set of beliefs that existed long before the specific term did, and hasn’t gone anywhere since the original Baeddel movement died down.

What the Baeddels did was put a name to the ideology @monetizeyourcat was cultivating before them, and what Cat did was popularize, centralize, and justify a way of thinking that had existed before she ever made her blog.

This ideology has since been referred to, loosely, as “TIRF-ism”: Trans-Inclusive Radical Feminism.

It is rare that anyone actually refers to themselves as a “TIRF”, and there is no real centralized TIRF movement; rather, a loose collection of radical feminist beliefs circulates various transgender spaces. The validity of these beliefs is generally taken for granted: of course (trans) women are The Most Oppressed People; of course (trans) women are Inherently and Unequivocally Victims In All Situations; of course (trans) men are Inherently Oppressors; of course (trans) men are Dangerous and Evil… and so on.

Like Radical Feminism, and subsequently Trans-Exlcusive Radical Feminism (TERF-ism), those ideas are fundamentally dangerous.

The defining tenants of radical feminism are that misogyny is the root of all oppression, and that rather than misogyny being an issue of power and control on a society-wide level, it is instead, or also, a matter of oppression and privilege on an individual level: men are always oppressors, and women are always victims.

These beliefs fundamentally exclude and erase the experiences of other marginalized people.

Namely, people of color and indigenous people, who’s experiences with and concepts of gender do not fall within the strict and rigid lines that white, western, colonialist people’s do.

Radical feminism is not a redeemable ideology. It cannot be reshaped into something good. It is fundamentally broken, and the movements born from it- lesbian separatism, political lesbianism, TERF-ism, TIRF-ism, and Baeddelism- are proof enough of that. They each promote only surface-level variations of what is fundamentally cult-like thinking: only the in-group can be victimized. Only the in-group is safe; the out-group is inherently and universally dangerous. Only the in-group understands you. All members of the in-group are, fundamentally, incapable of abuse.

We cannot allow these ideas to be perpetuated within or without the trans community.

Learn the Signs & Prevent the Harm

Here’s what we can do to prevent this from happening again:

Learn what Baeddel ideology and TIRFism look like, even detached from the name.

Learn what radical feminism looks like, even detached from the name. Even from people who claim to oppose radical feminism.

Act on dogwhistles. Call them what they are.

Do not allow people to downplay the harm all forms of Radical Feminism have caused. Remind each other that Radical Feminism is not a redeemable ideology, and seek out other branches of feminism instead.

Remember the harm that has been caused. Remember that it will be caused again if these things are allowed to go unchecked.

Listen to and uplift marginalized people. Allow them to speak to their own experiences, identify their own needs, and name their own oppression.

Remember who the real oppressors are, and do not pit marginalized people against each other. The people perpetuating and benefiting from transphobia are cis people- and more specifically, cis people in power.

Build solidarity with other marginalized people. One group of trans people cannot gain liberation without liberating all trans people, and one group of trans people cannot be targeted without the rest of us suffering as well.

Remember that there is no group or identity incapable of enacting abuse, violence, harassment, or other harm against another. Victimhood should not be determined based solely on an individual’s identity.

Remember that there are no acceptable targets for violence, cruelty, harassment, and abuse.

Red Flags to watch out for:

Using, or interacting with people who use, “Baeddel” as any form of self-description.

Downplaying the harm original Baeddels did: calling them “misled”, their actions “mistakes”, etc. without acknowledging the specific issues.

Obfuscating, ignoring, or erasing the abuse and rape allegations against members of the Baeddel movement.

Obfuscating, ignoring, or erasing the harm done to other transfemmes by Baeddels.

Dismissing, erasing, punishing/ostracizing, disavowing, or treating with suspicion transfeminine people who do not agree with Baeddel or radfem ideology. Insisting all or most transfemmes agree with Baeddel or radfem ideas.

Claiming TERFs only target, harm, or have ill will for trans women/transfemmes. Using “TWERF” or “TWEF” instead of “TERF”.

Claiming transmasculine people should not have any say in conversations about misogyny, transphobia, and/or TERFs.

Talking about “AFAB Privilege”, or otherwise implying that AFAB people share any qualities aside from being assigned female at birth.

Referring to trans people by AGAB, TME/TMA distinction, or even transfemme/transmasc frequently or exclusively; actively erasing or not allowing room for nonbinary and intersex experiences that do not fall within those binaries.

Implying men- cis or trans- would be better if they were made into women instead.

Implying attraction to men, or being a man, is somehow a “curse” or a “burden”, or otherwise unfortunate.

Implying a fear of men, including trauma-induced phobias, should never be healed from or sought treatment for. Implying men, cis or trans, cannot also experience trauma around men.

Treating trans men or transmasculine people as “acceptable targets” in any way; for harassment, for abuse, for misgendering, for inducing dysphoria, etc.

Implying transmasc dysphoria is “toxic masculinity”

Characterizing transmascs as hysterical, whiny, delusional, crazy, or otherwise using feminine stereotypes.

Implying it is femininity, specifically, that is targeted by the patriarchy; that feminine people are targeted more than masculine people, etc.

Using “listen to transfemmes” to silence other groups of trans people, and otherwise implying transfemmes are a monolith who happen to agree with you.

In general: espousing the ideas, fundamental or otherwise, that defined the Baeddel movement. (including TIRF and radical feminist ideology)

This list is not comprehensive, nor is any one thing on this list 100% certain to indicate that someone is a Baeddel- or if they are, that they are necessarily dangerous. It’s important to keep in mind how many people are groomed into this movement and abused within it; some of those who espouse Baeddel rhetoric may themselves be victimized by others.

But until we recognize these ideas for what they are and where they’ve come from, history can only repeat itself.

Educate Yourself and Others

It would take a long, long time and a lot more space to detail all of the damage done, the people hurt, and the dangers of continuing to allow these ideas to be perpetuated. Instead, I have compiled some resources and references.

I urge you to check these out, bookmark them for later, or whatever else works for you! (They’re also all much, much shorter reads than this has been.)

@baeddel-txt and @rejectedbaeddeldiscourse, two blogs dedicated to documenting various posts and beliefs held by original Baeddels.

Another blog’s tag for Baeddel history.

Baeddel.net, another archive of Baeddelism.

@AcesArosEnbies thread, and @gothmyths thread, on Baeddelism.

@quinndolyn’s recount of Baeddelism.

My own post on the origins of the Baeddel movement.

My own post including posts from Baeddels (and others) as recently as 2018.

An archive of assorted Baeddel posts.

[arillb]

Fan Gym Leaders

So basically, I'm working on a project regarding my fan pokemon region (Gira) and the process includes creating a badge case. Right now, the portraits for each gym leader are complete!

Left to right, top to bottom, that's the order in which the protagonists fight them and in which I'll talk about them after the cut!

Jada, Normal Type gym leader

She/Her · 45 yo · High school Biology teacher · During the week, she lives in Ribera City for work, during the weekends she lives in Sun Town with her husband's (also a gym leader) family and their children

Jada specializes in normal types, her full team consisting of: Blissey, Dubwool, Snorlax, Braviary, Porigon2 and Ursaluna.

Her gym is integrated into the school she works at, though she only accepts challengers outside of school hours. In her free time, she researches pokemon on her own or with colleagues, including the local Pokemon Professor. She will often use her own pokemon to help illustrate the lesson she’s teaching.

Jett, Steel Type gym leader

She/Her · 19 yo · Guitarrist and Vocalist of her heavy metal band · Lives in Eco City

Jett specializes in steel types, her full team being: Aggron, Corviknight, Aegislash, Lucario, Scizor and Bisharp.

She's sadly a character which I can't reveal much of without spoilers, but what's safe to say is:

She sings and plays guitar for her band the Lone Bar Knights (pls appreciate the pun). They often do gigs at the gym itself and even though they only started recently, they got quite a bit of local popularity and some international fans inside of the heavy metal genre. The other members are: Mia (Bassist · she/her), Alba (Keyboadist · they/them) and Periell (Drummer, he/him).

Two toxtricitys have befriended the band, but none of the members have caught them.

Salix, Fairy Type gym leader

He/Him · 10 yo · Grade school student · Lives in Canopy Town

Salix specializes in fairy types, his full team being: Togekiss, Alcremie, Florges, Hatterene, Sylveon and Gardevoir✨.

He lives with his single mother. They depend of his position as a gym leader to afford living. He studies in the same school in which Jada teaches, just some grades lower than her level. The rest of the league put great effort on him not getting involved with evil team bullshit amongst other things.

Lux, Electric Type gym leader

They/Them · 17 yo · High school student, prepparing to go into engineering · Lives in Newlight City

Lux specializes in electric types, their full team being: Kuxray, Rotom (wash), Toxtricity, Eelektross, Electivire and Magnezone.

They're chronically ill, having trouble breathing, that's why they use a nasal cannula. Their grandfather, Volta, was the previous gym leader of the city, their legal guardian and also the person who they got their electivire from. Both Lux and Volta work to improve the city. They also have an older brother, Andre, who works at the local battle facility, the Battle Stadium. When they can't be at their gym due to their illness, either Volta or Andre cover for them.

Nero, Dark Type gym leader

He/They · 27 yo · [REDACTED] · Lives in Madder City, born and lived in Castelia City until he was 17

Nero specializes in dark types, his full team being: Zoroark, Mandibuzz, Krookodile, Scrafty, Hydreigon and Liepard

They're really fucking secretive, so anything I could say about them is a spoiler. I can reveal this though: His number one hobby is making his zoroark get disguised as him, avoiding interviews and league meetings.

Leau, Water Type gym leader

He/Him · 45 yo · Waterpolo coach · During the week, he lives in Escull City for work, during the weekends he lives in Sun Town with his family

Remember Jada's husband? That's right, here he is!

Leau specializes in water types, his full team being: Pelipper, Lapras, Poliwrath, Swampert, Floatzel and Toxapex

He's a waterpolo coach, his gym being in the same place he works at. He was born without an arm and uses a very colorful prosthetic. he specializes in double battles and last but not least: he has a floatzel themed hoodie.

Nani, Icy Type gym leader

She/Her · 24 yo · Model · Lives in Rosada Town, born in Po Town prior whatever happened for it to be like it is in canon, lived in the Aether house until she was 18

Nani specializes in ice types, her full team being: Vanilluxe, Weavile, Galarian Darmanitan, Frosmoth, Glaceon, Alolan Ninetales

She works as a model and always makes sure that the other members of the league are fashionable, arguing that they should have a good image. Her parents died when she was too young to remember, so she lived in the Aether House (and yes, she knows Acerola and Nanu). She moved to Gira when she was 18 because she found a job as a model and subsequently became a gym leader.

She has no trouble with cold, wearing a crop-top in freezing temperatures. This is unlike her girlfriend Sol, the fire type Elite Four who can't stand the cold in any way.

Last but not least: Alma, Ghost Type gym leader

She/Her · [REDACTED] · Historian and Librarian · Lives in Mitjanit City, born and lived in Snowpoint until 20 years prior to the story

Alma specializes in ghost types, her full team being: Dusknoir✨, Cofagrigus, Sableye, Basculegion, Mismagius and Chandelure.

The final one of the spoiler trinity, but not as bad as the other two. Her gym is the oldest one in the region, being at the top of an equally big (and beautiful) library. Other than taking care of the library, she's also a historian, being really interested in the Hisuan period. Her whole precense is built around a creepy victorian and/or retro aesthetic.

There are definetly false rumours of her being a ghost, which she likes to joke about and tease. Not because they might be true in the slightlest, no, no-

(if you've read all of that. woah. thank you)

[therenlover]

The Boy With The Easel (A Young Artist!Helmut Zemo x Reader Oneshot)

(Hey! If you end up enjoying this fic, it’s the first chronological part of a new fun expanded AU I’ve created with @creme-bruhlee​! Their fic Bliss is part of the same timeline and takes place about a year after this one, so you should check it out!!!)

Synopsis: About a month into your first semester at Novi Grad’s top university, you finally meet the strange young man that you’ve taken to calling “easel boy” in the back of a bookshop. From a distance, he always seemed cold and aloof. As you get to know him, though, you realize things aren’t always what they seem.

Tags: Meet Cute, College AU, First Meetings, Coffee Date, Artist!Zemo, Embarrassment, Awkward College Kids Falling In Love

Rating: T

Warnings: Very Vague Mention of Sexual Content, Swearing, Zemo Says The Word Daddy In Reference To His Father and The Reader Thinks It’s Kinda Hot

Word Count: 7000~

This fic has been crossposted to my AO3!

------

                                    The University of Novi Grad

                                                 Fall 1996

Mornings in Novi Grad could be beautiful if you knew what to look for.

Sokovia was… different from America in many ways. From the language to the scenery, you often found yourself adrift in the strangeness of it all. There had been nothing quite as old as the buildings in the historical district of Novi Grad back home, no towering grey behemoths serving as a reminder of a bygone fight against Soviet invasion in the memories of your childhood. Still, though, there was beauty in the strangeness nonetheless.

From your tiny room in the Helena Lyudmila International Scholar’s dorm, for instance, you had a perfect view of a large campus courtyard hosting a statue of the donor by the same name. She was some royal who had invested in education a few hundred years ago, and by the looks of her metal likeness, she had been quite pretty. The sight of her shining in the early morning sun was one of the things that made uprooting your whole life seem worth it in the end, no matter how silly that seemed.

There were other small comforts that you had found beauty in during your first month attending your prestigious university, too.

You found beauty in the way the sunlight streamed over the rooftops like the opening to an Oscar-winning film. In the sound of traffic below and the overcast skies above. Sandwiches from corner stores, wildflowers growing in the median of the road, cups of the worlds best black coffee served steaming by scowling attendants at the cafe; Everywhere there was something small and kind and just familiar enough to relish in, more than able to distract you from the stress of living hand-to-mouth in a country where you didn’t even know the language. It made it all worth it.

That being said there was something else too…

Someone else to be specific.

The campus tended to run like clockwork. The same groups of students would walk past your window to their classes, the same professors would get their coffee and lunch at the little cafe across the square, and every weekday morning at 8 am on the dot, easel boy would set up his palette and canvas and paint the same bustling street.

He was talented, that you couldn’t deny. Even from the 6th floor, which was a considerable distance away, it was possible to admire the detailing and consistency with which he painted. His talent wasn’t when kept you captive at your window in the morning, though. Though you were sure his art was beautiful, he himself was a thousand times more stunning.

All dark eyes and dark hair and dark clothes, he parted crowds with his piercing gaze alone. He was always dressed like the protagonist of some awful artsy film. Massive argyle sweaters, untucked button-ups, corduroy jackets, and flare bottomed pants that must have survived his father’s wardrobe from the ’70s… his style was as close you could get to atrocious while still being impeccable as possible, and that wasn’t even getting started on the smudged black liner always present under his persistent gaze. You had never had the pleasure (or embarrassment for that matter) of meeting him in person, but you were sure that you would have had the same awed and slightly frightened reaction if you ever did. He could have been plucked entirely from the pages of some awful romance novel.

You were well and truly smitten with the idea of him.

If you looked at your morning routine through the eyes of a stranger, you’d consider yourself odd for your strange obsession with him, but you didn’t look at it like that. It wasn’t an obsession. You never overstepped your bounds. He was simply pleasing to look at and so you did. That didn’t constitute as obsessive, right?

Even if it did, you weren’t causing any harm.

Easel boy, as you had come to refer to him, was simply a tool you used to ground yourself in your new and frightening environment. Nothing more. If you ever met him, you would surely hate him from the short interactions you’d seen him have with strangers. They never ended well. He would remain an unattainable, attractive ideal in your mind until he eventually faded away into a funny memory you’d share with your kids one day.

Until then, though, you would watch him from your window before your morning classes and refused to feel guilty about it. So, that was that, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

On the morning in question, you had woken up a little late and in a foul mood. In preparation for a test in your foundations of algebra course you had spent the better part of the night pouring over formulas while your upstairs neighbor’s bed slammed repeatedly into the wall and floor. Though you were sure they were having an excellent time, you were most definitely not. It all culminated in you missing your original alarms and despite the fact that your first class started at 10, you were exhausted, furious, and not looking forward to missing breakfast to finish the assigned reading you had put off the night before. The only thing keeping you from throwing in the towel and just giving up was the promise of seeing the painter.

So, when he arrived for the day at 8 am sharp, you were positioned at the ledge by your window, textbook in hand with a mug of instant coffee at your right. It was like a breath of fresh air.

As usual, he retrieved a small pack of cigarettes from the back of his eternally paint-stained jeans only to bring one to his lips and light it quickly. He always smoked before he worked, and just like always, he took an extra cigarette from the pack to tuck behind his ear for later. Then, he got to work setting up his easel and the small stool where he set his palette.

Pulling tubes of acrylic, brushes, and pencils from his well-worn messenger bag, easel boy flipped out the kickstand without any problem and set his thick, pre-primed canvas on the worn metal. You watched in fascination. Art had always seemed so unattainable to you. Instead, you were drawn to the more academic. The man before you, though, created beauty with an ease that had evaded you all your life, and it had you both jealous and entirely intrigued. Slowly, you reached down to take a sip of your coffee as you let your eyes drift back to your reading.

Learning about ancient Babylon was far less interesting than watching him, though.  

When you next looked out the window and away from your work the handsome artist had created his base sketch already. How did he do it so fast? You assumed it was practice. He had been drawing the same 3 buildings every weekday morning for at least a month, so after a while, it must have been second nature to measure out the lines and put things into perspective. You smiled. He tended to have that effect on you.

The process was repeated until a little before 9:30. You would read a few paragraphs then look up to watch the painting progress from a sketch to a full-fledged work of art. It was good today from what you could see. The colors were a bit more muted than usual, but that was only on account of the awful, dreary overcast sky that threatened to dump rain on the city at any time. Overall, you would have considered it a masterpiece. Easel boy didn’t seem to think the same.

He regarded the painting with a sort of begrudging satisfaction that bordered on disappointment before he pulled the second cigarette from behind his ear, lit it, and began the process of packing up his materials. You finished the last of your coffee watching him do so. Smoking, well, smoking tobacco at least, had always been a vice you had avoided and yet you often wondered what it would feel like to take a drag of one of his cigarettes after it had been between his lips. Then, the magic lifted.

He folded up the flimsy easel, tucked it away with his materials back into his messenger bag, hoisted the stool under one arm and the painting under the other before taking off at a brisk clip down the street away from your window. You watched him until he was out of sight.

You were snapped from your concentration by a knock at your door.

“Y/N,” a heavily accented voice called, sending you scrambling for your bag, “If you are not outside in the next 15 seconds I will break down your door,”

Shit.

“Coming, Sasha!” You wailed. It took about 10 of those seconds to grab your backpack and shove your textbook inside, an extra 2 to check your appearance in the mirror- you looked slightly disheveled, but it was the best you were gonna do after the night you’d had. Besides, it wasn’t like you were doing anything important. You didn’t need to be dressed for a date -and you were opening the door for a quick save at the 14th second. Your door was safe for another day.

Out in the hall waited Sasha Balandin, arms crossed and grey eyes piercing in the flickering light of the terrible overhead fluorescents. As a fellow international student, you had become fast friends with Sasha. He was a little rough around the edges, and definitely didn’t take your bullshit, but he was a rare friend. “I have been waiting for 10 minutes,” he griped. You tried your best to look apologetic. “Don’t do that,”

“Do what?” You asked, closing and locking your door behind you as you began walking down the hallway.

Sasha huffed. “Do not pretend you were not too busy ogling that painter in the courtyard to hear me knocking on your door,” His Russian bluntness was on full display now as you shook your head in mock disbelief.

“I can’t believe you’d accuse me of something like that!”

“It is not an accusation if it is true,”

“There’s no way you know for a fact that I was watching him again,”

“But you were. This happens every week,”

You sighed, pausing at the top of the stairs. “I was,”

Taking the stairs in twos, Sasha sighed. “You are too soft, Y/N. Besides, you have said so often that he seems like an asshole. Why do you continue to get all mushy at him out the window if this is the case?”

“Because… well, because…” for a moment, you floundered in search of an answer that wouldn’t make you sound like a complete freak, but you found that there really wasn’t one. It came down the one small factor. “He’s just really hot, okay?”

The look Sasha gave you could have killed. He kept his mouth shut, though, choosing to let his silence shame you more than anything else did. It worked. For the entire trip down the stairs and the mile-long walk to your lecture hall, you felt the weight of shame heavy on your shoulders. Or maybe it was just your backpack. You didn’t know which you’d prefer. He did start speaking again eventually, going on about some party you had missed in favor of studying, but the feeling never left. Even as you sat down for your lecture it was still at the forefront of your mind. In fact, you were so busy thinking about your crush on easel boy and the problems with it that you barely paid attention to the professor’s rehashing of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Your error only hit when the professor flipped the PowerPoint to the final slide.

“Before you go, I want to remind you that you have a paper on the importance of Enkidu in the Epic is due at the beginning of class this Friday. The details and requirements should be listed in your syllabus. Class dismissed,”

Fuck.

Friday was only two days away.

You were so screwed.

The problem was, you didn’t have a spare copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh just lying around your dorm room. Usually that wouldn’t have been an issue, the professor for your current history course used English for her slide because her particular history course was specifically for first-year international students. Unfortunately for you, though, you hadn’t been taking notes. Instead, you had been daydreaming about how it would feel to have easel boy blow his cigarette smoke in your face and then subsequently scolding yourself for having thoughts like that about a total stranger. In a terrible twist of fate, the professor only held office hours after her last classes on Mondays and Fridays, so even getting the information from her then was off the table. Dread began to pool in your stomach.

Any other student would have been able to cut their losses, rent a copy from the library, slog through it in a night, and write the damn essay even without the help of the classroom slides for context. The only problem was all the books in the library were in Sokovian, and you still barely knew how to order a coffee correctly. Reading the language in a full Cyrillic alphabet would just be impossible, especially for a book as stupidly old as the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In short, unless you could get your hands on a copy in the next day or so, you were absolutely, well-and-truly fucked.

Sasha was quick to find you as the hall cleared out, waiting near your seat as you packed away your notes. “That was all bullshit, no?” He asked, but the second he took in your slightly panicked expression he stopped short, pinching the bridge of his nose and breathing deeply. You knew what he was going to say before he ever said it.

“Something is wrong. You were not paying attention. Were you thinking-”

“Yes. Okay? Yes, I was thinking about him,”

He shook his head slightly. “I am concerned for you,”

“Who isn’t?”

Despite his usually stoic demeanor, that made Sasha huff out a soft laugh. “You got yourself into this mess, Y/N, you will get yourself out somehow,”

Your jaw dropped as you slung your bag over your shoulder and started making your way towards the door. “You’re not gonna help me?”

“Though I would love to be helpful, you forget that my English is poor. It will do me better to read the book in Sokovian myself than to use the information from class,”

Oh, yeah. You winced. “Sorry, Sash’”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” he shrugged as you walked out onto the lawn, chilled to the bone by the wind that whipped in every direction.

A storm was brewing. It might not fully take hold of the city for a few hours yet, but it would make the walk to your evening class absolute hell if the rain fell as hard as it had several weeks prior. You could only hope that it wouldn’t start until after you had walked home. Your odds were looking slim, though, based on the way you could already hear thunder clapping in the distance. After a moment you hit the edge of the sidewalk where your paths would diverge.

“Good luck with the paper,” you offered weakly.

Sasha replied with a sharp, “Good luck with your crush,” and then he was off in the opposite direction without another word. Sasha was blunt like that, never overstaying his welcome or lingering when he didn’t need to. There was something enviable about it. What you wouldn’t give to be able to simply say things as they were without an unnecessary sugar coating to save face and spare feelings. It lingered on your mind for the whole half-mile walk to the campus bookstore. Speaking of which...

There was only one place where you might possibly find an English copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh. It wasn’t the big student bookstore, most of the textbooks there had been in Sokovian, Russian, or German and you hadn’t even tried to set foot in their actual book section. No, your only hope was the tiny hole-in-the-wall bookstore you had stumbled upon during move-in. It was only about half a mile away from your dorm from any of your lecture halls, so you often found yourself wandering inside when you had time to kill. They were one of the only stores you’d come across that sold anything in English, magazines included, so despite the fact that the young cashiers rarely spoke your language you often found that the back shelves of that tiny shop kept you from going mad.

Now, they might also be keeping you from ruining your GPA.

You could only hope. If anybody could save you, it was them.

Ducking in through the small doorway, you were greeted by the soft ring of the bell above your head. The attendant at the register simply regarded you with a polite nod. You had seen her there before and she knew you barely spoke a lick of Sokovian, so she didn’t attempt a pleasantry. Instead, she simply let you wander through the entrance and into the towering bookshelves, passing a few other faceless shoppers on your way towards the back. You were grateful for her nonchalance.

If there was anything worse than feeling foolish for not knowing Sokovian, it was being talked down to in perfect English by a Sokovian citizen. Most interactions left you wishing you’d actually taken anything away from your high school French class other than emotional trauma from your teacher and a caffeine addiction. Damn America and its terrible public-school language programs…

The path to the English classics section was one you’d walked many times since discovering the book store. It was right in the very back corner of the shop, tucked away where the city natives wouldn’t have to address or see it. You had snagged a copy of Pride and Prejudice a few weeks back, so you knew exactly where to search. The only problem was slogging through every single book on the shelf in search of the one you were looking for.

Your eyes scanned the wall.  

Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh…

Gilgamesh!

On the 6th shelf up sat one small copy. Score! You were saved! As you reached up to grab it, though, you were met with yet another roadblock. The shelf it was on was juuuust a little too high for you to reach. Oh, come on…

You hopped a little, extending your hand up as far as it could go, but your fingers just barely brushed the spine. Somewhere behind you, you could hear footsteps. Then someone coughed to suppress laughter. The shame was plain on your face. As your flannel rode up and you stretched up in one last desperate attempt to grab the book when suddenly someone, you assumed the same person who had been laughing at your misfortune, spoke.

“They have stools, you know,” he said, accented voice thick with amusement. The English surprised you, but you assumed they used it for your benefit. You were in front of the English language books after all. Besides, the shame of it all kept your mind from questioning it too much. “For reaching the top shelf,”

Of course they had stools.

If your face hadn’t already been burning with embarrassment it definitely was now.

In a split-second decision, you decided playing dumb was the only way you could walk out of the situation with any dignity left at all, so you plastered on a confused smile and spun around to greet the stranger. “Really? I had no cl-”

You stopped short.

Oh.

Oh no.

You’d know those paint-stained jeans anywhere.

There, with his hands in his pockets and the most self-important, thin-lipped smirk you had ever seen, was easel boy in all of his cocky, intimidating, hot glory. Had you really noticed how hot he truly was before? It didn’t feel like it. Not now that you’d really seen him close up and reveled in the way his dark eyes hypnotized you with their smudged liner that felt borderline obscene. You could smell him too, all charcoal and turpentine and cigarette smoke. If you had it bad before when he was just a blurry ideal out your window, you were completely and utterly smitten now.

He regarded you with a sort of practiced annoyance, and yet there was a strange softness to it that you hadn’t found in many native Sokovians, especially ones that saw you as the stupid, bumbling American wandering blindly around their country.

“Would you like my help?”

“Huh?” You were so lost in his eyes that you couldn’t even focus on his question.

“To reach your book. Would you like my help?”

“Oh!” With a brisk nod, you stepped away from the shelf to make room for easel boy, “yeah, I’m just trying to grab that one there. The, uh, Epic of Gilgamesh,”

In one swift movement, he was stepping right beside you to easily reach up and grab the offending piece of literature. The closeness of it all nearly sent you into a tailspin. That wasn’t even mentioning the way your heart thudded just a little faster when he finally handed the book to you, his calloused fingers brushing against your own. You barely find a grip on your brain strong enough to thank him through the fog of embarrassment and attraction. Eventually, though, you managed to choke out a placation as your eyes explored the cover of the book.

“Thanks for that,”

“It was no problem,” he shrugged. He didn’t move though, still standing just inches away from you. When you looked up from the book you found his eyes were still on you, watching intently as if he expected something from you. The answer to what he actually expected was a mystery but you could tell he wanted something. When you didn’t speak, he spoke for you. “So, The Epic of Gilgamesh? That’s definitely a bold choice,”

You looked up at him sheepishly through heavily lidded eyes. “It’s not a choice at all, actually. I’m only buying it so I can write an essay,”

“Ah,” Something about his tone was almost disappointed as the conversation stalled.

You quickly changed the subject to the first thing you could think of.

“Your hair is really nice!”

“My hair?”

“Yeah… your hair,”

Smooth move, dumbass.

Easel boy’s expression seemed to soften once more as his signature grin crept back onto his face. “Thank you, I grew it myself,” Between his accent and the way he was looking at you like he was going to eat you alive, you weren’t exactly sure how you hadn’t had a heart attack yet. Still, the attention was nice, even if it was bourne out of you repeatedly embarrassing yourself in a never-ending cycle of fuckups. He ran a hand through his loose brown hair. “I like your shirt. Very American,”

Silently, you cursed yourself for not taking a few extra seconds to pick out a better outfit when you woke up. Standing next to him, even while he was dressed in his paint-stained jeans and undone button-up, you looked like a wreck in comparison. He didn’t seem to be speaking from a place of judgment, though.

If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was being nice, but that couldn’t be the case… could it?

“Maybe it’s just that I haven’t met very many Sokovians that are fond of America, but I’m not sure if that was meant to be a compliment or an insult,” You joked. It was a bit sarcastic, the lilt of your voice masking your deep insecurity, and to your surprise easel boy laughed. He really laughed. From your place beside him, you could almost feel the warmth radiating off of him as he shook his head.

“It was definitely a compliment,”

Oh.

Your heart skipped a beat.

That was a new revelation.

You steeled yourself with a deep breath. Fuck it. It was now or never.

“I, uh… I’m Y/N, and you are?”

He regarded you once again with that strange expression of expectation. “What?”

“I asked for your name,” you repeated, and yet he still stood, slightly dumbfounded, staring down at you with that same expectant expression from earlier. For a moment, you almost thought he expected you to know it already. That fact was quickly glossed over when he moved to rub the back of his neck with his hand, eyes drifting down to the floor.

“Sorry,” he chuckled, “I’m not very good with people. My father thought college might help me finally connect with my peers, but I don’t think he expected that I was the problem, nor do I think he expected me to pick a degree in the arts,” Suddenly, he paused and stuck out his hand to you. “I’m Hel. It’s very nice to meet you Y/N,”

With only a moment of hesitation- because wow, your name had never sounded more right on someone’s lips -you took his large calloused hand in your own and shook it gently. His palm was warm, his fingers lingering on your own for just a moment even as he pulled away. It wasn’t much, just a soft brush against your flesh, but it sent a flash of heat and liquid confidence through your chest.

“Is that short for something?” Your eyes met his in the soft yellow glow of the overhead lamps. Seeing him like this, so up close and personal, he looked a lot more human than he had from your window. Sure, he was imposing. Underneath the initial harsh facade, though, was something softer and almost poetic. You weren’t an artist by any means but if you had been, you had no doubt that he’d be your muse.

“It’s short for Helmut, but only my father calls me that, and only when he’s cross, which, unfortunately, is most of the time,” he chuckled, “Besides, it’s an old man’s name. It doesn’t suit me,”

The words left your mouth before you knew what you were saying.

“Well, it’s better than calling you easel boy,”

Shit.

Today really just wasn’t your day, huh?

In the split second where you were mourning your chances with the most stupidly handsome guy who had ever shown any interest in you, you almost missed the way Helmut’s eyes lit up at the admission.

“Easel boy?” His voice was teasing, but not demeaning. That didn’t do much to ease your mortification, though.

“Is there any chance that I can get you to forget I said anything?”

“If you already have a nickname for me when we’ve barely met, I think you already know the answer to that question,”

His knowing smirk was enough to get you pleading. “You can’t just let me off the hook this once?” you begged, scrubbing a hand across your forehead in a desperate attempt to get away from his piercing gaze. The things those brown eyes did to you could be classified as obscene… “I will genuinely do anything if you don’t make me explain myself right now Hel,”

Hel quirked up an eyebrow. “Anything?” The way your stomach turned at just one word from him was both terrifying and extremely exciting. It felt like a promise. Without hesitation, you nodded. That made him smile. “In that case, get coffee with me today?”

Once again, you were rendered speechless.

“My treat,” he added, “unless you’re not interested…”

“No!” Your answer left your lips embarrassingly fast, “Or- yes? No, no, I think I meant no. No; I am very interested. Yes; I would like to get coffee with you,” There was a hint of shame in your words, but only a hint. After the day you’d had already, there wasn’t very much there to be ashamed of. Still, that same pit of dread began to open up in your stomach as you mulled over your choices.

Thankfully, Helmut continued to take it all in stride. “Wonderful! Is there anything else you’d like to do here before we go? It’s best we leave soon if we want to beat the rain,” He offered up his arm as he spoke like some sort of Disney prince. It was, by far, the cutest gesture you had ever been lucky enough to receive.

You linked your arm with his without hesitation. “As soon as I pay we can get going,” He was warm. It radiated off him in waves just like the warm hints of tobacco and wintermint that seemed to seep from his skin and clothes. With that, you made your way to the front desk as Hel shot you a sly smile.

“Who said anything about letting you pay?”

True to his word, he didn’t let you pay for a single thing for the rest of the afternoon.

The two of you made your way up to the cashier together, and Helmut only separated from your side to grab his wallet before you could grab yours. He then spoke in rapid-fire Sokovian to the lady at the register and pulled what could only be described as a wad of Sokovian koronas while you set the book on the counter, and from the looks of it, she seemed more than pleased with the two of you. Who wouldn’t be, especially when Hel seemed to insist that she keep the excess? In the end, after the book had been wrapped nicely in a paper bag and deposited in your backpack, Helmut held the door open for you like some sort of gentleman and followed you out into the grey afternoon.

Then, you were off down the street on Hel’s arm, pushing through the wind and the biting chill that had settled in the air.

“So, you don’t sound like a big fan of your dad,” you asked, half laughing as you attempted to broach conversation once again.

Helmut groaned beside you. “My father is a menace who is unable to understand that some people want more in life than to sit behind a desk all day making phone calls. In fact, most of my family is the same way. The only reason I haven’t completely cut them off and changed my name is the money,”

“I assume you get a lot of it if it’s worth sticking around someone you hate so much,”

“Never ask a man about his net worth,” he chuckled, gently elbowing you in the ribs, “but yes, I’m very comfortable. I have my own apartment just far enough away to be considered off-campus with my own car and as much money as it takes to keep me happy and getting good grades; Daddy makes sure of that,” The word daddy was a deep sneer, barely there in the wind, but something about it sent butterflies through your stomach. Well, that was never something you thought you were into… “Little does he know, I’m not here to make money. I’m here to find inspiration worth my time while out from under his thumb,”  

You snorted softly. “Artistic and rich? You’re just ticking all the boxes, Hel,”

“Good for me. Would offering help on that essay of yours endear you to me further?”

“Absolutely,”

The next 5 minutes you spend discussing the Epic of Gilgamesh. Surprisingly, in one of the first stokes of good luck you’d had all day, Helmut seemed to be one of the only people on earth who knew plenty about Enkidu off the top of his head. When he was the one lecturing you in his smooth, heavily accented timbre it was so much easier to pay attention to something so very tedious than when you heard it from your aging and often monotone professor. In fact, you were so enthralled by his retelling of the tale that you barely noticed you’d made it all the way to the cafe that sat across from the international dorm.

If you didn’t consider Hel to be smart as a whip and twice as clever as he was smart, you would have thought it was a coincidence. It couldn’t be though. No, there was no way anything was a coincidence with Helmut around. You shot him a smile when he opened the door for you and ushered you inside.

“You know Hel,” you muttered, “I’m starting to think you might know more about me than you initially let on,”

He shrugged. “You’re American, so it’s unlikely you live anywhere else and I wanted to make the walk home easy. It’s supposed to rain, you know? Besides, despite the… interesting waitstaff, they make the best pastries in town right here in this cafe,”

“Did you mean it when you said you were paying?”

“Absolutely,”

“Then I can’t wait to try one,”

The two of you were seated quickly (you assumed it had to do with the waitress finding Hel as hot as you did, because you caught her looking at him from behind the counter and whispering excitedly in Sokovian to her coworker at least twice over the course of the meal) and the conversation flowed easily as you waited on your coffees and the deserts Helmut insisted on splitting to let you try. Millefeuille, pear tart tatin, chocolate devil’s food cake, and a towering plate of apricot kołaczki awaited you, and they kept you sitting and talking and snacking for over an hour as you really got to know each other. The more you learned, the more you fell in love with the man across from you.

Over the course of the afternoon, you learned that Helmut was majoring in studio art while minoring in psychology just because it interested him, he hated the Beatles almost as much as he hated Freud’s theories on women, his favorite color was purple, and he spent most of his free time reading or getting high off his ass in his massive studio apartment in what you now knew was one of the most expensive areas in the city. He, in return, sat at rapt attention across the table as you gushed about your life in America, your reasons for going to university in Sokovia, your favorite books, and the ridiculousness that was trying to pass college-level classes in a country that seemed to avoid English at all costs.

Eventually, though, you did touch upon his nickname.

“I just thought it was really interesting that you did the same thing every single day, no matter what,” you explained, grabbing one of the last kołaczki from the plate and ignoring the powdered sugar that stuck to your fingers, “and by watching you… I don’t know, I guess it kind of felt like I had another friend who’d share breakfast with me in the morning if that makes sense,”

Hel nodded, swallowing his last bite of chocolate cake. “I understand completely. It can be lonely, coming to a new place without any friends or connections, but you were brave enough to take the leap. I admire that,” He brought his napkin to his lips before crumpling it and setting it one of the now empty plates before him, “But I can’t say I’m not a little disappointed that you didn’t watch me because I’m attractive,”

You nearly choked on your pastry. “Well, I wouldn’t say your pretty face didn’t help…”

The grin that spread across his face was heartstopping. He grabbed a napkin from the little holder next to the two of you and grabbed a pen from one of his pockets as he spoke. “In that case, you should join me tomorrow morning. Bring coffee if you can, I never have enough hands to bring a cup for myself, but even if you can’t bring some, if you want to come and watch me work I’d be more than happy to have a companion for the morning,” he paused for a moment, flustered, “or every morning, for that matter,”

“That sounds like a deal,” Your cheeks were hot, but not from embarrassment this time. No, it was anything but, because here you were across the table from a kind, attractive, intelligent Sokovian boy with money to spend and time to spare for you. You couldn’t help but feel a little bit proud too. He wanted you back, after all. You could see it in the way his eyes lingered on you just a little longer than he should, and even more plainly in the way he wrote his phone number in bold blue ink on the napkin and signed it with a doodle of a heart before passing it across the table to you.

“I’m going to go pay,” he said quietly while standing, “but I’ll be back in a second to walk you out. Alright?”

“Alright,”

There was something strangely similar to sorrow sitting in your chest when you watched him walk away. The sight of his ass as he went made up for it, though. Once he was obstructed by other patrons, you turned your attention to the napkin in your hands. Hel’s handwriting was neat as far as artists’ handwriting goes, but it still held a sort of looseness in its curves, a freedom in the way the numbers had flowed effortlessly from his pen. You popped the last kołaczki in your mouth as you admired the blue ink before devouring the final bites of pear tart and millefeuille. How had you gotten so lucky to have someone like him giving you his number and buying you pastries? You pondered the bizarre nature of it all until Helmut returned.

You stood quickly, folding the napkin and putting it away in your pocket. “Ready to go?”

“If you are,” he replied. In an instant, you were standing beside him again as he opened the door for you. The wind was even stronger now, strong enough that his loose hair whipped wildly around his forehead from the force of it. You couldn’t help but giggle at his appearance.

He caught you off guard as he walked you across the street. “You have such a pretty laugh,”

It was like you were seeing him again for the first time. You fiddled with the strap of your backpack as you got closer and closer to the door to your dorm. “Thanks. I’m pretty fond of your laugh too,”

Then, you were there, just two college kids standing awkwardly before your first departure.

“So,” you said before you could stop yourself, “when I tell my one friend all about this afternoon after my math class tonight, should I say it was a date?”

Hel’s cheeks flushed pink. “You can call it that, if that’s what you would like it to have been,”

“I think I would,”

“Good, good,” he let out a little chuckle, “I’m glad. Would you… would you consider going on another? I promise I have much more to offer than just small talk and tips on where to buy the best pastries,”

Looking into his brown eyes, so full of uncertainty and hope, you knew you couldn’t have denied him even if you wanted to. Still, you weren’t going to give in to his advances without a little bit of taunting. It made it fun, a game to be played where, hopefully, you both would win big in the end.

“That depends,” you teased, letting your lower lip catch between your teeth, “what do you have in mind?”

Helmut shoved his hands into his pockets as he rocked back and forth on his heels, pensive. “If you want to, we could go to my place and I could actually show you all of the paintings I’ve been working on while you watched me. The view from the rooftop is lovely too. We could have dinner up there while looking out over Novi Grad. I have to warn you, though, it’ll probably be takeout. I’m an atrocious chef,”

Slowly, a brilliant smile spread across your face. “Does Friday work?”

The smile Helmut shot back was as bright as every star in the night sky and even more enthralling. “Friday is perfect. Can I pick you up at 7?”

“As long as you come in that fancy car you were talking about,”

“Then it’s a deal,”

“Well,” you turned away, walking up the steps towards the door before turning back to him, “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Hel, and I’ll bring coffee. Have a good night,”

“You too, Y/N. Parting is such sweet sorrow and all that,”

With that, he gave one last short wave before turning on his heel and pulling out a cigarette from the pack in his pocket. You watched him walk away until he turned the corner and disappeared from view. Only then did you enter the punch code and race up the stairs to your room.

Your back was pressed to the door of your dorm room the second you had shut it, your hands clutching at your chest in a desperate attempt to keep your heart from beating right out of your ribs. The second you were in the privacy of your own place, your cool facade had melted away to reveal just how much of a wreck you really were.

He had invited you over to his apartment.

He liked you.

Easel boy really, honestly liked you.

No, not easel boy. Helmut. Hel.

Hel liked you, and he invited you over to his apartment, and you had plans to meet him with coffee as he painted the next morning.

You smiled softly under the fluorescent lights and pulled the book that had brought you together from your backpack. It seemed so unassuming now, just a fresh paperback with an unbroken spine, but in reality, it was so much more than that.

Hel.

It was such a nice name. You liked it a lot.

Now you couldn’t wait to see what else you liked about him too.

------

a/n: I have been so excited to start sharing this AU with you guys, and it’s finally here!!! If you liked this fic, I once again will direct you to Bliss by @creme-bruhlee​ because that’s technically next in chronological order for this AU. I hope you enjoyed!!!

TAGLIST: @tatestripedsweater , @elaineygrace, @multiyfandomgirl40 ,  @lovelymischief , @rami-malek-trash , @avgravy , @wh0re-4-techno , @forcebros , @sugarsweetkiss , @grandmuffinsharkbailiff , @killsandthrills , @novasstudy , @thnksfr-ptrkstmp , @inmate-marmalade, @alanathedeer , @your-pixels-are-showing , @shit-post-things , @bbarton​ , @sux-ubus , @halefirewarrior , @janelongxox , @rax-writes , @mossybank​ , @simsiddy​ , @xxspqcebunsxx​ , @be-cautious-around-bri​ , @metaphorical-love-for-a-car​ , @frothonthedaydreams​