#but I'm also not ruling that out for why they ended up the targets

[myfootyrthroat]

I thought the "The Resnicks control 60% of California's water" claims were... dubious, but didn't have a good source. Not that it stopped the people making the claim, but...

They apparently own a little under 60% of one water bank, not the entire state's water supply, which has very little to do with the problems related to water delivery for this fire.

An alternate place that the 60% could have been misapplied from is that 60% of California's water usage is for irrigation (all irrigation uses: crop, pasture, landscape, etc). Again, this is for all irrigation use in the whole state, not directly tied to the Resnicks' companies.

Also, the focus on pistachios and almonds and lack of talk about animal agriculture is always a little weird. Irrigating orchards takes a lot of water, but way less water than growing alllll the annual crops that cows need to eat to produce milk. (I also have a few quibbles with how the agricultural water use is broken down in that last link. "Trees and vines" are one category, which includes nuts, citrus, grapes, etc... but "corn" and "grain" are separated. Looks like cooking some numbers to me!)

The weird focus on this one couple, who are part of a larger problem to be sure, at the expense of... you know, actually focusing on the larger problem, is a bit weird. And speaking of the larger problem, when it comes to landowners in California, they aren't even in the top 5. The largest landowners are all timber industry, which has a much more direct connection with fire, so it's odd that we aren't seeing more about them!

And again, most of this doesn't actually have anything to do with firefighting anyway. The problems with water delivery to the fires aren't from a shortage of water, but because urban water infrastructure isn't made to deliver water at the volumes necessary for fighting wildfires.

It can be cathartic to spread posts that are the "right kind" of inflammatory, but people looking to spread misinformation are very aware of that and good at crafting the kind of messages that will make people just mad enough to share without checking. None of this is defending the messed up water rights/usage system in the US, but important problems are worth addressing with correct information.

[bi-writes]

If you have time I am kindly asking for Simon and the teams POV on the arranged marriage fic!! Like why they put that ad out! I also think they’re silly for doing the whole ceremony in their gear 👉👈

the arrangement prequel

it wasn't much of a choice. ghost knew this was coming, knew this might happen--disciplinary action from the increasingly...unorthodox ways he was coming back from an op.

one too many times, a capture or kill became looking for the pieces of their target scattered across the field. an accident on the way back to interrogation--he doesn't know how his blade ended up embedded in their mark's throat. he misfired his gun--it's too bad it went straight through that prisoner's forehead.

disobeying without saying no. taking matters into his own hands without exactly defying the rules. ghost had been walking along the boundary line for a long while, and he knew eventually someone would realize the risks he was taking.

it was kate's idea. ghost needed something to chew on, something to satiate the hunger in his bones. a companionship, is what she tells price, but even he knew that was a stretch. anything given to ghost would surely be shredded apart on impact. anything that belongs to him ends up tucked underneath layers of shadows, not to be seen again.

but ghost is the best at what he does. all kate needs is for him to fucking listen once in a while.

when they ride back in the humvee, ghost is fiddling with the chamber of his pistol when price speaks up.

"got somethin' new," he says, looking into the rearview mirror. the sergeants shuffle a little closer to hear him. "new program between CIA and SAS. pilot program, not...exactly routine. but they'd like one of you lot to be the first to participate."

"what is it?"

price clears his throat, "the legality is a grey area. but both parties need to be willing."

"spit it out, cap'n."

"an arrangement of sorts," he says finally. "it's...not a secret 's hard to keep a bird with the things we do...always away, hard to reach. but you're the best at what you do, and i think if you take it seriously, it could be good for one of ya."

soap snorts. "cap'n, ye wanna play matchmaker with us? see if we're worthy of little bonnie spies?"

price snorts, rolling his eyes, "i need you to set an example, is what i need. i need one of you to step forward."

ghost looks up when he says that. his eyes flicker, and he looks at his captain, who keeps his eyes on the road as he drives. he hears what price doesn't say. this is your punishment, he imagines. and you will take it and not say a word, like the lieutenant that you are.

in the dark of his room later that evening, he opens the file with your name typed across the front. CONFIDENTIAL it reads, and he flips the manila folder to spread your profile out onto the desk.

you're smiling in the first photo. it's a headshot, from high school maybe, from college, a pretty photo of you beaming at a camera with a nice background. he eyes your height, weight, measurements, the skills they've identified and the answers to your questions about why you want to participate in the program.

Q: What kind of partner are you looking for? A: Resistant. Unmovable. Loyal.

Q: Why do you want to participate in this program? A: I'm tired of being disappointed.

Q: What are some of the qualities you possess you would like your partner to know about you? A: I'm not afraid of what I don't know.

short answers, straight to the point. affirmative and honest, with no room for interpretation. ghost doesn't need interpretation; he knows what it is you're saying.

when he looks back at your picture, he brings it closer, narrowing his eyes as he studies you. the smile you wear, while beautiful, isn't real. it's a persona, a ruse, a costume that you wear to put the outside world at ease. you understand that a smile makes you agreeable, but he knows, somehow he knows, that there must be a tick that you feel that no one is able to quiet, an anger and a lilt to the soft voice you must speak in that carries the weight of your defiance and your disappointment with everything the world is that you thought it wouldn't be.

ghost isn't told that the program is a lie. you aren't an operative for the CIA, you aren't some kind of spy in need of company. when he reads the rest of your file, he is amused because he knows the rest is made-up bullshit that doesn't apply to you. you are as civilian as they come, but with how well you lie, he wonders if you should be recruited just for that.

with just a little training, he thinks perhaps you might be everything your country needs and more. a little blood wouldn't scare you.

it's weeks later when ghost eyes the date on his calendar. he has marked it with an X, black marker haphazardly traced there to indicate the day. he told price he doesn't want bells and whistles--no music, no men, no party. an unmarked room and his bride is all that is necessary.

he steps outside to smoke a cigarette. he sucks on it gently, blowing it out to the side, and he eyes the car that pulls onto base carefully. when price steps out of the drivers' seat, ghost stubs out the cigarette and turns the corner. he catches a glimpse of a lace veil before he disappears.

and when he steps into the room hours later, your back to him, he can't help the way his pupils dilate and the way his body goes rigid with rage. there you are, standing there, in white silk and lace, your back to him but the picture of elegance and the presence of something honestly deserving.

it is only when he lifts the veil off of your face and sees those eyes that he understands what you are, what you wear.

a façade, a beautiful mask of your own, to cover up the ugly you hold on the inside.

he smiles under the mask when you kiss him over the fabric. because fuck, yes...he doesn't care where you have come from. he doesn't care that they lied about who you are, that they didn't tell him the truth, that in all honesty, they have given you to die and you don't know it--he doesn't care because it worked, at least for him. the finest flesh he has ever set his eyes on. he cannot wait to brand you for what you are worth.

if they meant to punish him for the crimes he has committed, he is sorry. because you are his reward, and there is no hell to pay.

[doberbutts]

you don't actually get to cry "ally yourself with trans women" while actively talking over trans women whose traumatic experiences with transmisogyny are wildly ignored in favor of how hard transmisogyny is on the cis women. like why don't trans women get to say privilege plays into how much transmisogyny affects people?

do we not characterize white privilege as being what protects white americans from the systematic racism that permeates the US?

again, what is the preferred way you would have us refer to that privilege? because I am right here telling you that privilege is a part of the construct of tme/tma but you don't really care that trans women are more affected.

like it's crazy that you seem to think my problem is with the transvestigation playing out against a cis woman and not the way everyone pays attention when it happens to cis women but ignores the rampant transmisogyny when it happens to a trans woman. like you don't even pause to look at why there were no trans women at the olympics to transvestigate in the first place so they turned to the next marginalized option, intersex and women of color, when discussing how trans women deserve better.

Hi I'm the trans woman I deserve better from you specifically

To be completely honest this is looking less and less like a good faith discussion and more and more like you simply accusing me of stuff I didn't say.

You say I am actively talking over trans women. How so? How is "we need to address transmisogyny at its root if we want things to be better" ignoring the plight of trans women?

How is it that I have *repeatedly* acknowledged that there is privilege there, and yet apparently I am ignoring it?

if you want to use the race example: white privilege exists. Racism also affects white people. If white people want to stop being affected by racism (welfare regulations, the war on drugs, low income housing, social programs for community aid, to name a few) then maybe they should ally themselves with people of color because the root of what's causing issues with these things is racism. That doesn't mean white privilege doesn't exist just because a system of oppression affects everyone under said system. It doesn't even mean that the primary target has changed. It's just what makes this a system rather than an individual occurrence.

Never once have I said that cis women are more affected and, in fact, in followup posts I have stated that it *is* quite annoying that people have only been talking about this because this year's Olympics included approximately 0 out trans women. I have been saying that this was the clear end result, once they were rid of the trans women they'd go for whatever cis women they could feasibly get away with, and this time it seems they overplayed their hand.

Castor Semenya is a cis woman who only found out that she is intersex due to being transvestigated. She is, by definition, TME. Except she's not, is she, considering the same rules that apply to trans women apply to her. That's why I brought her up! And- correct me if I'm wrong- but out trans women still competed after she was forced to leave the Olympic running. That is why I'm saying that things maybe are not quite so clear cut as "have" and "have not", because I can point to an example of someone that the definition labels as "has privilege" that according to Olympic ruling bodies no longer counts as a woman either despite being afab TME cis.

If you want to continue to put words in my mouth, then we're out of things to say to each other, and it becomes clear that this was never intended to be a good faith discussion in the first place.

[starxanemone]

꩜ⴰ ࣪˖ FROM DUST TO DUST

michael kaiser x gender neutral!reader

you liked to see him crumble—from dust to dust.

warnings ! mdni ! sexual content — sub! brat!kaiser, dom!reader, praise kink, cock sucking, handjob, teasing and denial. also slight character exploration based on his backstory.

note — as a femdom, i am a firm and avid fan of the idea of submissive kaiser. oliver aiku is my next target. also, sorry this took a while : ( i'm busy with uni.

From dust to dust; there is nothing more beautiful than to view the evolution of things. A being grows—all supple skin and flesh and fragile bones—from a mere zygote, born from the fusion of sperm and egg.

And you think that man goes through the same cycle again and again throughout their life. From learning how to stand on one’s feet to no longer being able to do so. From seeking to finding, then to seeking again. From exalted kings to abdicated ones. All from different facets of the humans of society; they go back to their roots, ultimately. From dust to dust.

Michael Kaiser is nothing more than a mere cog born to inevitably contribute and connect with society that is just like him. Yes, by the gods, he was birthed, chosen to be an emperor, and how ethereal he truly is as he devours and rules lowly humans that grovel underneath him. No mercy was shown to anyone that attempted to overthrow his position, and not a simple glimpse was spared for those who raved on about the ‘impossible.’

He was arrogant and his mouth never knew when to stop running. But he would get what he deserves. Just like all the kings and queens, and emperors and empresses that stood before his rule.

They all fall down.

From dust to dust.

“Now, now… quiet down, liebling.” You hum, pressing your right hand tightly over his swollen pink lips. You know he loves it when you call him that, especially with the way his hard-on presses against your knee. He thrashes a little underneath you with his cheeks, ears, and exposed neck all tinted in pinkish and red hues.

You like to think that he looks like a work of art when he is like this. Not when he is in his most glorious state, but when he looks human in their rawest form. All supple skin and flesh ( you’d like to paint with your lips ) and fragile bones ( you’d like to caress ).

You pull downwards, cat-like eyes gazing intently into his half-lidded ones as you hover your face over his sweatpants. You press your cheek right against it teasingly, smiling a little in amusement when he glares down at you.

“Kitty’s got bite, hm?” You chuckle, rubbing your cheek against his crotch, feeling his cock twitch underneath the fabric as you massage his hips with your fingers.

“S-Shut up, a-ah—”

He spits out his words, though you get the feeling that it’s not as angry as he would have liked it to sound, especially with the way he holds back his moan and breathes heavily towards the end.

“Oh,” You pout mockingly. “But you wouldn’t be in this position if you weren’t being such a slut earlier. Like, seriously, making out with me in front of everyone and leaving a hickey on my neck where everyone could see? All because you were jealous of sweet little Yoichi?”

“S-Stop,” He rasps out, bringing his hands down to cup your cheeks to lift it up from his clothed cock.

You can tell that he’s irked with the way you call his rival ‘sweet.’ Your smile softens and you pull yourself up to plant your chin against his chest.

“Why are you so envious, mein schatz?” You bring your hand up, thumbing against his pink bottom lip. You watch in fascination as you press on the soft skin, nail biting onto the flesh, leaving a small crescent in its wake.

His lips part and you grin lazily, slipping your finger into his mouth to touch the wet muscle. Your eyes don’t miss the way his tongue runs over the tip of your finger, brushing over your nail before his mouth closes around it entirely.

You bring your other palm up to cup the side of his cheek as you sit up on his abdomen again. His electro-blue irises and sharp ebony pupils swallow you entirely as he sucks and licks on your finger willingly.

Oh how you loved seeing him crumble like this. All of his wits and pride dispersed with a flick of your fingers. You who have given him the feeling of something new—something so incredibly yet not supposed to be foreign for any living human. An emotion that he could only utter as a wistful wish underneath the eyes of the constellations.

Love. So this is love.

You pull your finger back, chuckling a little as he lifts his head up to chase for the sensation between his lips again before dropping his head back down upon realizing his actions. His cheeks are flushed cherry red and his brows are furrowed as if his senses had come back, and you know that he is beating himself up over the constant lapses of weakness before the gaze of someone else. But you don’t care about that.

It was never a weakness to choose to open up oneself to somebody.

You cup his cheek, firmly this time.

“Why are you always so envious? Tell me.”

But he was a stubborn one.

He keeps his lips pressed firmly, glaring up at you in a disobeying manner. It doesn’t look very intimidating with his black cotton shirt half-way lifted up on his upper body, his hair scattered around his head like a makeshift blue pearlescent crown, and the cute little wet patch marking his grey sweatpants.

“Not talking, hm? Okay, then. Fine. We’ll do it your way.” You hum in amusement before you’re snaking back down onto his hips.

In a split second, you grasp the garter of his sweatpants and pull it down, wordlessly gazing at the way his curved cock slaps at the skin below his belly button.

He hisses, “W-What are you—”

“Shut up. Don’t talk.” You murmur before dipping your head down to lick at the pinkish tip. It was already oozing with precum, bubbling and dripping down against the length of his cock, tracing a vein.

“F-Fuck—” He groans, throwing his head back against the pillows.

You pull your lips away from his cock and strike your palm against his inner thigh, leaving a red mark though not enough to cause any significant pain.

Nevertheless, he hisses, eyes widening in shock. “Why did you—”

“Didn’t I tell you to shut the fuck up?” Your hands smooth over the spot you had just hit before traveling north once more. When your hands reach its destination, you blink when you hear a silent whine leave his mouth.

“Please…” You hear him mumble and your gaze flickers upwards, seeing his disheveled state. Eyes half lidded with his soft lashes pointing southwards, cheeks turning a shade darker than it was previously.

His hips twitch upwards and your gaze softens.

“Okay,” You breathe out. “Okay.”

You have to admit. You cave in way too fast.

You place your hands on the sides of his bare hips, squeezing as you lick your tongue flat across the length of his cock, stopping near the tip. You keep your eyes trained on him and his gaze on yours, brows furrowed over.

You brush your tongue repeatedly against the underside of his pink tip—now all shiny underneath the fluorescent lights of your shared apartment from the mixture of precum and your saliva. His hips twitch and you immediately hold it down, digging your fingers against his skin, leaving marks on the flesh.

“P-Please,” He groans quietly, eyes closing. “Give me more, liebling. Please.”

“Hm?” You hum, tongue toying with his tip. The little crevice is soft and smooth against your touch, now all sensitive. You press your tongue against the underside of it harder before taking just the tip inside your mouth. Your fingers trace against the veins protruding the length of his cock teasingly. “But you haven’t— haven’t answered my question yet.”

You suck on his tip lightly, just enough to have his stomach and shoulders twitching, and hips buck between your hold.

“I-I want you to look at me!” He groans, body twitching when you trace your tongue with more pressure against his length repeatedly, humming a little as you listen to him speak. “I w-want you to look at me only and not that worthless, pathetic man. H-He won’t serve you half as good as I do. He can’t. I want you to love me, and me only.”

You pull away momentarily, chuckling at his uncharacteristic honesty. He whines at the sudden loss of your touch.

“Oh but I already do.” You smile, pressing your lips against the side of his stomach. “I love you, and only you.”

He doesn’t respond, simply staring down at you with pink cheeks and furrowed brows.

He never says ‘I love you' back.

But you already knew how he was. He was never used to the straightforward affection and loving words directed at him, but that never bothered you. Being with him entailed having the ability to read between the lines—it entailed being able to appreciate the little crevices and permanent folds that marred his shirt and was never able to learn how to iron. You appreciated the marks left behind by the past and the past that brought about this present—this gift—him, and only him.

And that was alright with you.

You loved him. You had the ability to build him up, make him crumble, and build him up again.

From dust to dust.

But mere dusts of cement clumped together could form a stable foundation, the same way a cluster of atoms can make up a single cell, and how multiple similar cells can form tissue.

You loved him from dust to dust.

You lick a stripe up from the base of your palm up to your fingers, keeping your eyes trained on his and his to yours and what you were doing, before encircling your fingers around the length of his cock, pumping him up and down slowly. He jolts and heaves out a breathy moan each time your hand squeezes at the right areas, up towards his shiny pink tip leaking with his fluids and down once again. Your other hand plays with his balls and you grin at the way he throws his head back, eyes rolling up.

“You must be so tired, mein schatz, but it’s okay, you can come to me. I will always be here to make you feel better.” You mewl, smiling up at him with half-lidded eyes.

“A-Ah, fuck, don’t speak like that to me, I-I’m gonna cum—” He bucks his hips helplessly, whining.

“But why?” You giggle, tilting your head innocently, “Can’t I speak like that to the person I love?”

“S-Stop, haah—” He brings his hands up to cover half of his red face, blue eyes glaring down at yours, but you don’t falter.

“My poor baby,” You pout, pumping your hand against his cock upwards and brushing your thumb against his tip. You hear him choke a little. “You’re so beautiful and you work so hard! I’m so proud of you, hm?”

“H-Haah— I-I’m gonna, gonna cum!”

"Give it to me, my love."

His hips buck against your hand a few more times before he’s shooting spurts of his cum onto your face. He moans, eyes squeezing shut.

You shut your eyes, feeling the liquid spill all over your face for a few seconds.

After a while, you open your eyes to him breathing in and out deeply, his body laying limply on the bed with sweat thinly coating every inch of his skin.

You chuckle, wiping the cum off your face and bringing your hand up to taste it.

He raises his brow as you do so and scowls. “Don’t— don’t do that. That’s dirty.”

“And I happen to be a dirty person. I don't mind." You grin, licking your hand.

He’s silent for a while before he speaks up.

“But is it true?”

“What?” You question curiously, laying right beside him flat on your back. You turn your head to look into his eyes levelly.

“That you,” He purses his lips, voice growing more silent. “Love me?”

You smile, genuinely this time.

“Of course.”

From dust to dust.

[tomurawr44]

TOMURA SHIGARAKI HEADCANONS! (2/3)

okay my last one recieved alot of love and I'm so happy for that 🖤 send in yall's reqs please, sorry if this is kind of ehh and the timelines are weird.

WARNINGS: spoilers, OOC tomura maybe, dating hcs, gn!reader

unlike all the tiktok hcs I've been seeing around, he's not the perfect boyfriend but he's not absolutely evil towards his partner. no he would not hit you, he doesn't even hit any of the league, why would he treat his partner any differently?

for villains/allies

he will treat you like a member of the league, but he trusts you more, obviously, he'll come to you for an opinion on his plan and he will trust your judgement, although not all the time. just don't do it infront of other members, he'll get pissed and sulk about it.

when you get harmed on a mission, he'll voice his concern by calling you an idiot for getting yourself hurt, and he'll call whoever hurt you an idiot for harming what he cared about.

he really is absolutely down bad hates you, he hates the way you make him feel so..vulnerable, and he hates the way you care about him so much, why are you kissing his bruises and wounds? he can bandage himself by himself, don't act all smartass when he gets hurt, you got hurt not too long ago too! he hates all of it! but in the end, he'll crawl into your arms just to hold you, even if it's just by your clothes, or it's you holding him, he'll grumble about how stupid it is before he presses closer against you.

he loves watching you fight or just be in your element, combat based? your his personal bodyguard now. you're kinda like skeptic where he's mostly computer based? he loves to watch and cover for you, it makes him feel like he's in a game or movie.

during the time Kurogiri was captured and sent away, that was the time you kind of saw him spiral a little, not in a manic way just in a way where he was forced to mature so suddenly and it took him a little bit to get used to it, so please be there for him.

during the overhaul arc, you were his righthand (person), there to intimidate and speak alongside him to try and get him to be mature around overhaul. luckily though that fell through.

and then, when the MLA arc started, thats when he feared for you, he knew that you were capable of protecting yourself but it wasn't so secret to the public that you were very close with him. mostly just being called 'Tomura Shigaraki's partner' or something alongs the lines of that, and he had a feeling they were going to try and target you to get information or get under his skin.

it didn't happen though, and you two ruled the PLA together and everyone was afraid of you🖤

during the months leading up to his surgery, it's up to you how you feel about it but you're worried, obviously. who wouldn't be? it was scary.

after his surgery and he obtains AFO, it kind of feels like you lost touch with him, as though he's a completely different person and it's just..off. when you find out AFO is controlling him though, somewhat like what happened during the final endings of the chapters, you're able to connect with him and try and soothe him from the inside out, even if you know it won't do much with AFO in the way.

for civilian s/o (pre USJ/15-18yr old tomura)

it was a wonder that you two got together, you'd have to be the one to approach him first though, places i think you'd be able to spot him in are the arcade, the mall, the gameshop, a 24hr place, computer cafes or hanging around different bars.

he won't be the one to confess first, actually, there won't be a confession, he kind of just thought you two became official somewhere along the way due to how close you two have become.

AFO does not approve of you, he sees you as a source of love and care that he does not want tomura to have distraction and he's torn because he does like you but he also values his master more. so once AFO finds out, he'll become distant :(

but in the end, he might end up lying or trying to brush you off whenever you become a subject between him, Kurogiri and AFO.

he hasn't done anything criminal yet so he usually tells Kurogiri he's going to the mall when in reality he's heading to you .

please just love this man. he needs it, please be patient with his bratty bullshit and show him your not gonna leave no matter what. he might throw temper tantrums but just hold him, kiss his fingers and watch him try and close off but your just too warm for his cold heart.

he's whipped, he doesn't really say i love you though, you have to say it alot otherwise he'll sulk. (he never says it back)

he tends to express his thankfulness/love language through acts of service, quality time and gift-giving. he's scared to touch you, if he disintegrates the only person to actually make him feel normal, what then? what becomes of him?

contrary to some, he's actually very insecure. like, he tries to put it off but he just hates how he looks in general, please praise him, tell him how handsome he is. he doesn't know how he's able to date someone like YOU. he doesn't consider himself as someone to take a second glance at, not even decent because of all his itchies, he doesn't tend to dwell on it but when he does, you can tell.

he never lets you sleep in the same bed as him, for obvious safety reasons but he loves watching you rest. seeing how peaceful you are wrapped up in his blankets, he loves it. sometimes while a game is taking a long time to load, queue, or install, he'll just watch you. call him creepy (please don't) but he has a bunch of pics of you sleeping.

he loves your hair, he loves smelling you, if you use scented things, he loves running his hands carefully through your hair and watching as his fingers disappear into the strands. he loves it when you do the same to him and scritch scritch here and there on him.

speaking of scratching, kissing his neck or face whenever he tries to itch them almost makes the feeling for him drop instantly, not so much but it shocked him the first time you did it.

he loves watching you laugh and smile, doesn't matter if it's about something stupid, it makes him smile too oddly enough.

to date him you have to go through the trials of mamagiri and AFO, get ready to be interrogated when he goes to the bathroom or god forbid you stay for dinner. Kurogiri will be TALKING. (In mhoj2, Kurogiri's a big talker, as in he has voicelines a minute or so long.)

he will tell you his real name if he trusts you enough (AFO does mention his real name to him when he first picked him up so im pretty sure he knows it.)

he's just a sad wet cat please love this crusty munch.

—Ake 2024

[autisticfaun420]

My life with level 2 (part 1)

I'm making this post to share some things about my life and give an idea about what my support needs are

1. Every morning I wake up sealed in my cubby bed, an enclosed bed that keep me trapped inside so I dont wander and hurt myself or roll out and have a meltdown (common things that happen with me and regular beds). It's also soft so I don't potentially bang my head against something hard. you're probably wondering well how do I go to the bathroom at night. That brings me to my next point.

2. Every morning after opening up my cubby bed either my mom, dad, caregiver, or occasional close friend takes me to my changing station in my room and begins to change my diaper. Thats right I was NEVER able to potty train and due to EXTREME sensory issues I am unable to change myself. This means I need constant super vision as I always need someone to change me, also calm me down if meltdown, etc. I simply have no way to tell I need to go, 1 or 2, till its much too late. So yeah diapers are an all day thing not just at night.

3. I'm older then 20 and my parents are l now my legal guardians for life, and if they can't do it I have friends that will step up. I'm not sure exactly what this means legally but I take it to mean Im basically still a kid to them on like, every level. They respect my intelligence but they still set the rules. One that always kind of gets people mad but then they understand is the fact that I have child safety internet settings on my tablet and phone, I can't access most social media websites and I'm not alliowed YouTube only YouTube Kids. This is because my parents and close friends agree that these teenage boys from a nearby town were trying to make me an "lol cow", basicallly a target for online harassment and bullying and trolling me because I was special needs and active on social media. Tumblr with my parents having the username and password and log ins and they check it every day is all I get. My friends and parents show me things from TikTok and Youtube that they think i'll like so I don't miss out. Oh yeah and I would binge watch horror and terror content on youtube, something that a lot of autistic people do apparently, however I mentally can't handle it. I wake up and freak out and hit myself all night and lose sleep for a week and end up in a mental hospital cause I'm hurting myself and not sleeping. Not fun... at all. I had unrestricted internet access as a teenager and I'm glad that part of my life is over. My parents do however let me eat cannabis edibles every day so its not like they're over protective, just protective in the way I need.

4. My parents are my emotional coregulators and I rely on them heavily, a lot of the time just to know how I'm feeling. I break down emotionally frequently and if my parents or a select few of my friends aren't there to cuddle me and rub my back the right way, I FREAK out and start hitting myself cause my brain is a bit nutty I guess. I'm needy with those I love to a rediculous degree. I'm a lot better, still not great, at self soothing. Self soothing is an oxymoron for me. I kinda need to be with somebody to be told to calm down, encouraged to come out my shell, praised when I do something good, and just having a hand to hold. My mom is rubbing my back encouraging me to write this out like I said I wanted to do.

5. I need to stim, constantly. I'm always rocking, fidget toy and plushie in hand chewing on my chewing laynyard, you get the idea. I also need audio and visual stims which I get in the form of watching bright colorful little kid shows on my tablet like Blues Clues and Daniel Tiger. I think this is why people don't think I'm smart but its just who I am and what my needs are.

I think this is a good starting point, I'll make a part 2 later.

[mxrcjqckspnchqsc]

Lost You

Pairing: Max Mayfield x GN!reader

Pt1: Promise?

Summary: In which Vecna targets you instead of Max and she's scared of losing you

Genre: Fluff/Angst

TW: Near death experience, mentions of drug abuse, mentions of blood and gore, mentions of strong language, romance themes, and the usual stranger things theme.

A/N: Your favorite song is Everybody Wants to Rule The World by Tears for Fears. You sorta have to read the first part to understand this one, I said sorta because this one shot starts where the first part ended and stuff.

IT'S FINALLY HERE SORRY FOR THE LONG WAIT GUYS I DIDN'T MEAN TO

Anyways enjoy this oneshot/imagine(that isn't proofread whatsoever)

You ran for what felt like miles, you panted now out of breath. When you realized that you weren't in your house anymore, it was red and clocks were floating. And when you turned around you was met with a dead Chrissy Cunningham, you also screamed at the sight.

"Y/n," Vecna's voice loomed the air. "It's time for your suffering to end."

You turned around and was face to face with Vecna, he backed you into a corner. Which was stupid on your part as vines began to wrap around your arms and legs.

"Let me go!" You exclaimed.

"Why should I? It's clear to see you're suffering out there." Vecna stared you down.

"You don't know anything!" You spat.

"Oh but I do, I know everything about you Y/n." Vecna revealed. "I know about your mother and her history with the pills, such a shame isn't it?"

"Shut up!" You screamed.

"I'm only telling the truth y/n, it's all your fault. You should have been more careful," Vecna looked into your eyes.

You tried to look away when you felt a vine making its way around your neck, choking you.

"There's a reason why you don't tell them the truth, why you don't tell Max the truth." Vecna spoke.

...

Dustin held the radio in his hand, listening to Robin's words as they came in and out. Apparently well according to Robin, music was the key to saving Vecna but what was your favorite song?

Dustin ran back to the group and took out everything from your bag.

"What's their favorite song?" Dustin asked the group.

"What? What does y/n favorite song have to do with this?" Max exclaimed.

"Well Robin said that the key to escaping Vecna is by listening to your fav- nevermind what's her favorite song?" Dustin exclaimed.

"Uh let me think!" Lucas exclaimed.

"We don't have time to think, Y/n is about to die right now!" Steve panicked

"They aren't going to die, just tell me what's their favorite song!" Dustin screamed at Steve.

...

"You're not really here," You said in between breaths.

"Oh but I am Y/n, I am here. And I don't plan on leaving,"

...

"Cmon, cmon," Steve mumbled to himself, why did you have so many cassette tapes in one bag?

"Tears for Fears!" Max exclaimed, out of nowhere. "That's their favorite band!"

And with that, the group began to look for the one cassette that they knew you owned by them.

"I found it, I found it!" Lucas exclaimed.

"Hurry put it on!" Steve exclaimed.

"I'm trying!" Dustin shouted.

"Hurry up!" Max exclaimed.

...

Tears welled up in your eyes as Vecna's hand went to go over your face, that's when you hear it.

"Welcome to your life"

Vecna turned around to see where the noise was coming from and that's when you saw them, saw her. They were screaming at you to wake up, hoping that you would. You saw yourself and you were flying? But that thought erased your mind when Vecna turned back to watch you again, you squirmed.

"It'll all be over soon," Vecna told you with his hand over your face.

Through his fingers, you were still able to see your friends. And you realized that you couldn't die now, they needed you, she needed you. Your favorite memories of them began to flood your mind, when you were truly happy.

The dice rolls to a 12, you did it. You won the game. Lucas runs up to hug you as did the others. They all began to cheer for you.

"You did it Y/N, you did it!" Lucas exclaimed.

"That was so amazing Y/N!" Mike agreed.

"You just have to play with us again!" Will smiles.

"Forever actually," Dustin added.

"I shall!" You laughed.

You thought of another memory with your friends, one in particular.

You and Steve were riding down the street, Madonna came on.

"Oh, this is my jam turn it up Steve!" You exclaimed.

"Oh my god," Steve mumbled but does what he's told.

You began to sing along to the lyrics with your fake microphone.

"And we're living in a material world and I am a material girl," You sung along, horribly which made Steve chuckle.

You glared at him before laughing with him, it felt like hours and you hoped it would never end.

Another tear rolled down your face as you remembered one more memory, of Max.

You had gotten a bad grade on a test, and you weren't happy about it at all. Max approached you and saw your face and knew what it was.

"Hey," Max greeted.

"Hey," You grunted.

"Wanna hang out at my house today?" Max asked.

"It's the middle of the week, Max, maybe this weekend."

"My mom said it's fine,"

"No she didn't," You replied instantly.

"Cmon just this once, we can rent that movie you wanted to see."

"Really?" You turned to look at her.

"Yes!" Max smiled. "Whatever it takes to make you happy."

"I'm the happiest when I'm with you," You admit, Max's cheeks flushed as your words as she smiled at you.

You gasped as your hand was now free and punched Vecna in the face, knocking him away from you.

"Help me make the most of freedom"

You fell to the ground, you tried not to care as you got up and ran towards the portal.

"And our pleasure, nothing ever last forever."

You ran closer and closer to it, Vecna tried to ruin your path. You tried your best to evade it and you made it to the portal.

"Everybody wants to rule the world."

You gasped as you fell down, the others began to surround you. Max hugged you tight. Steve wiped a tear from your face as he caressed your head, you hadn't realized you were crying.

"I'm okay, it's okay." You told them but you were really you were telling yourself that.

"That was scary Y/n, please don't do that ever again." Lucas says.

"I'll try," You smile at him.

"I thought I lost you," Max whispered.

"You'll never lose me Max, never." You told her and that was a promise.

[huesofvioletandpurple]

on the topic of MonoTV seeming to be weirdly caring and remorseful, especially towards Teruko, here's something I've been thinking about a lot since the episode came out: why did it stop Teruko's execution when Levi intervened

I'm not saying that to criticise this writing choice—in fact, it's the opposite. the implications of it on MonoTV's character staggers me. like okay, its main purpose is to continue the killing game until the death of every participant. its secondary purpose is to perform the role of a villain. yet when Levi threw himself in front of the machine gun for Teruko, it stopped, because he "wasn't the intended target", giving way for a VERY SLIM miracle that would save Levi's life. and it said it did that to make Levi "act as a warning to those who break the rules"

what was stopping it from killing Levi fully and then continue on with gunning down Teruko.

genuinely, wouldn't it accelerate the primary goal of MonoTV ? that way, (ideally) four students would've died in one day, and even if Teruko survived. well. that's still three people !! and it would also fulfil its secondary purpose of being the villain of the TV show, because it would've just machine-gunned two of the students dead in front of everybody. yes, it was cruel when it stretched out the time of Ace's execution so that the elevator doors wouldn't open fast enough for Levi to get treatment. but why even open up the chance for a miracle when its purpose is to kill every student, y'know !!

alongside MonoTV's strange phrasing in its scene with Teruko at the end that implies it can feel guilt over its actions, I also believe that "making an example out of Levi was enough" is kind of an excuse. since violently killing Levi and Teruko outright would've also warded the rest of the cast off from breaking the rules methinks. but if it is making an excuse, that means it doesn't want to kill Levi and Teruko and yet believes it must fulfil its purpose anyway. and like ?? HUH ???? the fucking IMPLICATIONS OF THAT GOING FORWARD ????

why did XF-Ture program MonoTV with guilt. why did they just keep that in its default personality drivers. grips this robot by the screen. what the fuck is up with you.

[batsplat]

This line made me sooooo insaneeeeee

BUT ITS TRUE

they did not expect it from each other

You mention that after sepang 2015 that marc refused to take it lying down and retaliated, would you say that one some level vale expected him to just take it?

And also could you please recount events in which marc also waged mind warfare on other people after the divorce™ I think that the psychological aspects of his style are so incredibly interesting like how in le mans, bezzechi kind of crashed out and how viñales mentioned in post race interview how " when he heard marc's bike he knew it was over"

Thank you for your very valuable contributions to motogpblr, you enrich the experiences of all

right. right! following on from this post... fair warning: 'what was valentino's plan in sepang 2015' and 'what mind games has marc cooked up over the years' are two questions that don't exactly lend themselves to concise responses, though I've done my best to edit this down to a somewhat more palpable length. so *cracks knuckles*. let's do this

first off, sepang 2015. yes, marc did very much refuse to lie down and, yes, he did instead very much retaliate. I'm not sure if I'd say valentino expected marc to 'take it' exactly, though the hope would have been that it would a) make him more cautious around valentino, b) throw him off-balance, and c) make him more error prone. I mean, certainly you'd have to assume he didn't expect marc to react like that because.... well. otherwise, why would valentino have done it? yes, he has repeatedly alluded to having wanted race direction or dorna or whoever to step in, but those guys infamously aren't particularly proactive. and, let's just pretend for a second here that marc really had been plotting to ruin valentino's title - what are you going to do about it if you're the ones responsible for enforcing the rules? even after sepang, when it was reasonable to suggest marc had been messing with valentino in that race specifically, there was only so much they could do. sure, the main reason they didn't penalise marc was because he'd crashed and had in essence already been penalised. but if you want a more drastic penalty, then you're going to have to show that marc is doing something emphatically illegal. I mean, it's not like race direction penalised valentino when he was racing jorge in what can only be described as a cheerfully malicious manner in motegi 2010, at a time when jorge was close to sealing that year's title and the two of them were racing for *squints at notes* p3. they can't actually stop you from being a little shit, you know

this line of argument might be ascribing too much rationality to valentino's actions - maybe he was hoping race direction would do something. it's worth pointing out that one of valentino's later comments (from march 2016) to my reading suggests that valentino had already spoken to race direction several races before sepang about marc's behaviour, but they didn't listen to him. the sepang presser then constitutes an attempt to publicly force their hand... except it still wasn't enough. and a part of valentino surely must have already known it was going to go wrong after saturday's qualifying. the incidents during the practise sessions that weekend weren't particularly egregious, but they involved two riders who were both clearly willing to play games with each other (including in some towing-related shenanigans). crucially it's not really the type of thing that would happen if one rider had been spooked so badly they're making sure to ride on eggshells around the other bloke. at the end of the day, valentino thought he could unnerve and disorientate and unsettle marc - and if you're being generous you could say he at least picked the right target. marc had broadly demonstrated he could be unsettled that year, which jorge had very much not

if you're being less generous you could say 'but it's crazy he's doing this to the bloke who isn't even his title rival'. which is the whole problem from valentino's perspective - he simply couldn't engage jorge in direct combat (and again, this does make it more remarkable he even got it to valencia given one of his big big strengths in title fights was being completely neutralised). jorge has been involved in plenty of great battles over the years, but his 2015 title was won purely on raw pace and having just enough tracks where he was fast and it wasn't raining for things to work out in his favour. it was marc who valentino was continually getting into fights with, whether at argentina or assen or silverstone or... well, even phillip island, valentino fights marc a hell of a lot more than he does jorge. which makes for a weird championship in a lot of ways, but also makes it a bit inevitable that valentino ends up disproportionately focused on a bloke who isn't actually his title rival

if you want to be even less generous, you can say it was a rather radical misread of marc's character from a man who (any conspiracy theories aside) has always seemed to understand marc pretty well. like, this is the thing right, obviously hindsight is 20/20 and all that but can you really imagine any universe in which marc hadn't done something roughly along the lines of what he did that weekend? in a way, this is probably the bit that bothers me the most about the whole thing, just feels like it couldn't have ever achieved what valentino intended it to. I can excuse breaking the heart of the kid who hero worships you, but I draw the line at being kind of dumb

the way I'd break it down is by looking at why he was in a headspace in which he wasn't making good choices, and then consider what his actual thought process (however irrational) might have been. so on the one hand, you've got all the contributing factors that explain the poor decision-making process, that explain why he wasn't thinking clearly. on the macro level, you have the arc of his career and what this title meant to him and how it fits into his desire to win on his own terms and prove everyone wrong and all of that. you have the pressures of that specific season and how it had gradually gotten more and more intense post-assen, the influence of the people around him and how they had allowed/contributed to him getting increasingly distracted from the actual riding as the season went on. this factor obviously includes the man who actually presented valentino with the phillip island telemetry and had seemingly been badmouthing marc for more than two years. you have the arc of valentino's relationship with marc, his belief that marc was a sore loser who only played nice with valentino while he was winning and who valentino thought he had been more than generous to in response to marc's lack of composure earlier that season. this eventually coalesced into a mental list of all the times that year valentino felt marc had fought him differently than he would anyone else, from argentina to assen to silverstone to misano to, of course, phillip island. you have the compressed time scale - four days from the race at phillip island to the presser in sepang, at a time at which valentino will have been at his most exhausted and spent after the travails of first motegi and then phillip island at the closing stages of the toughest season of his career. it's this that creates the sense of urgency, the need to do something now to stop the opportunity from slipping away. and then, of course, on the micro level you have the actual details of the supposed conspiracy that relied on the specifics of how the race at phillip island ended up unfolding... of tyre management and seagull murder and fluctuating lap times and suspicious late race pace and a perfect last lap

which, okay, I think it's fairly obvious that valentino wasn't thinking clearly. but he still must have been intending the presser to do something, something that was different from what it actually ended up doing. now, the way this works in my head is that valentino basically did the equivalent of pressing a big red button labelled 'chaos'. if you do what he does in the presser, that's the inevitable outcome, right: you're ensuring this entire weekend is going to be a complete mess. in theory, you're the one person who's had the chance to mentally prepare yourself for that mess, because you're the person who's pressing the button. you're hoping everyone else will be off-balance, distracted... to some extent it's less about wanting to intimidate marc per se (bad idea!) and more about making sure he has other stuff to worry about. maybe you're hoping marc's going to make some mistakes, crash in ways that aren't caused by a movement on your part that looks suspiciously like a kick, be a little out of it all weekend. I mean, marc did have a tendency to hit the deck when under pressure that year. the hope is at the very least he's going to be a little more cautious, so worried about ruining his reputation that he's not going to attack you too hard. basically, hope he does anything other than what he actually ended up doing, aka throwing himself at you again and again in the race in a sort of agonised fury that paid no consideration whatsoever to his reputation, ruined or otherwise

this is where the sepang 2004 parallel is at its most instructive to me. you're giving everyone something to talk about and you know it's going to be the centre of attention that weekend and you just kind of have to hope that the chaos ends up creating an opportunity. and, for a hot second there, it did look like valentino might have been onto something. he qualified on the front row for only the fifth time that season (y'know his qualifying actually got a fair bit better in 2016, presumably because he just wanted to maximise the number of awful vibes pressers) and he outqualified jorge for only the second time that season (again I don't mean to be rude but, jorge, how the fuck did you almost lose that title what were you DOING). it's pretty unfortunate that the very start of the sepang race played out in the exact perfect way to allow dani and jorge to escape while marc and valentino started divebombing each other. this is the thing right, there are lots of ways that race could have unfolded and it basically could not have gone any worse - and it's helped make valentino's initial decision to blow shit up age particularly horrendously

the other underlying explanation is a somewhat more opaque one. people want to feel good about themselves, they want to have a positive sense of identity along several different metrics like self-worth and moral virtue and so on. it doesn't feel good to lose, and it especially doesn't feel good to lose if you've tried really, really, really hard. a lot of sports psychology is about the challenge of managing vulnerability. there is something inherently vulnerable about competing in the public eye: you are trying hard to win but there is always the possibility that you will lose. if you lose with other people watching, you are making your inadequacy public knowledge. this is why athletes search for explanatory mechanisms - maybe they make a public show of how they weren't actually trying hard, about how they don't actually care that much, or maybe there's something they can blame like the machinery or injury or the team not being on their side or whatever. maybe there's someone to blame. a narrative of sabotage allows you to preserve belief in both your own ability and your own self-worth; it is the perfect explanatory mechanism. and to some extent, this type of thing is necessary - you're not going to be able to compete well unless you have high self-belief to the point of delusion, which means you do have to tell yourself all kinds of things to keep the faith. but paradoxically, these explanatory mechanisms are also incredibly dangerous, because you cannot compete to the fullest extent of your ability if you are not throwing yourself into what you are doing in your entirety, without any restraint or self-defence. you have to be open to experiencing the pain of defeat in its rawest form to be at your best. you have to be willing to go to those infamous 'dark places' within yourself to win. the moment you are thinking about how you will explain your defeat, chances are you've already lost

but hey, I've never competed in a motorbike race before, what would I know of the psychology of it all? let's get the words of someone who should know a little more than me:

Looking back, what I said about wanting a bike that could win at Welkom, well, that was a way of boosting morale, an attempt at wishful thinking. You can't demand something like that. And even if you get it, there's no certainty you'll win. But then again, we riders always say all sorts of things. Sometimes we believe what we say, even when it sounds crazy, other times we're just being hopeful and, still at other times, it's all an exercise in self-delusion. We try to convince ourselves of something, because ultimately, every time you step on the track, words don't matter, and it's just you, the bike and your opponents. In fact, that's the only time you really have a clear picture of things. When you're actually on the track, racing against your opponents. That's when you know where you are and where the others stand. You know how your bike is doing and how those of your opponents are faring. That's the moment of clarity. Then, you can say whatever you like to everyone else: your chief mechanic, your mum, your girlfriend, the press... but, deep down, you know the truth and you know it with crystal-clear clarity. You can tell people you fell because the bike didn't follow the trajectory it was supposed to follow, or tell them that you're actually really fast, but the bike simply isn't. Inside you, however, you know the truth. You know you fell off because you made a mistake, or because your opponent is simply faster than you. And the opposite is also true. Deep down, you know whether your victories were deserved. You know if you won races on the turns, when it's down to your ability as a rider, or on the straightaways, when it's all about the power of the engine. You know the others are looking to make excuses when they say you beat them just because the bike was better. I always knew the truth behind each of my victories, and behind each of my defeats, too. I knew exactly why and how I won or lost. And so, at the end of 2003, after winning everything in sight with the Honda, I was certain I could win with another bike. But, of course, until I actually did it, I couldn't be truly certain. Thus, I set off on my journey, in search of that place where certainty meets truth.

(sidebar: I find it funny how the bit about straight line speed reads like just an extremely obvious dig at casey in his ducati days but, published in 2005, your honour he's innocent)

what valentino describes in that passage is the awful, inescapable secret at the heart of all competition: at the end of the day, you do know. you can only do so much to protect yourself from the truth. you have to tell yourself a story, even if it's crazy, engage in all manner of self-delusion to throw yourself into the field of battle again and again and again - where inevitably you are going to lose, again and again and again. any great athlete has to start out at least a little delusional, for there is something inherently insane about thinking you will be one of the very best in the world in your field. eventually, much of that delusion may turn to reality for the chosen few, but the delusion never completely goes away because there is always more to win and always more losing to do along the way. when the delusion stops, so does your career. valentino's endless capacity for storytelling and self-delusion is inherent to his success - he would not have been as good as he was if he had not found all these stories to tell himself, all these reasons to believe, to keep motivating him, to wring special performances out of himself when he needed them most. he told stories that were ridiculous until he turned them into reality. if valentino were anyone other than the person who killed his tenth title in sepang, he would not have won the other nine in the first place

and yet, chances are, valentino already had lost headed into sepang. chances are, he knew as much. chances are, he chose the kindest possible story to make sense of it all. at the very least, what he wanted to do was expose the truth as he saw it - make sure that everyone in the world knew what marc had done to him even if it didn't end up saving his title campaign. but in exposing one truth, at the same time he managed to obscure a different one. because in the end, certainty never did meet truth in 2015, because we'll always have a question mark about what would have happened if valentino hadn't said what he had said in that press conference, what would have happened if marc had reacted differently, what would have happened if race direction hadn't handed out penalty points or if marc hadn't been so hurt and angry he was unwilling to take risks against jorge in valencia. yes, of course it's likely that jorge would have won anyway, but we don't know that. it's 2006 all over again, isn't it? there's a likely winner, there's maybe somebody who should be winning, but there's never any certainty. that's why we line up on sunday, or so the cliche goes. the main lasting success of that press conference is that it has cast a shadow over the whole championship - not just in the sense of making the whole thing unpleasant to think about, but in the more literal sense of concealing the realities of that title fight, of generating ambiguity as to how it all might otherwise have played out under more 'normal' circumstances

except, of course, valentino has told us himself that he does know the truth about all of his victories and defeats. of course he knows jorge was faster than him that year, which is why he wasn't trying to win that title on pace. by any reasonable standard, there's no shame to that, not at that stage of his career and not against that level of opposition. there's plenty of ways in which valentino was the stronger rider that year, still, somehow, and enough sliding doors moments that would have given valentino just enough points and granted him a completely deserved title. but of course it was still frustrating, and it was frustrating to be reminded constantly in the paddock - including by marc - of how jorge was the faster of the two of them. valentino knew he couldn't beat jorge on pace, which is why he never tried to, but it still wasn't easy. it still required him to just... put away his ego, ignore all the snide remarks about his speed, ignore marc's digs and jorge's cockiness, and just devote himself to winning the title in the only way he could. that's the heart of 2015: it's all about valentino suppressing his worse instincts right until the moment he doesn't. it's the pressure, it's all the blows his ego has taken that year...

and of course, it's also marc. at the end of the day, it'll always come back to that - the fact that marc had made himself into someone who had the power to genuinely hurt valentino and how he then managed to make himself a target of valentino's suspicions (topic for another post). going into sepang, valentino already knew that more likely than not he was going to lose the title, and he decided he blamed marc. at the very latest during the race, he knew he was almost certainly going to lose the title, and now he definitely blamed marc. that's how it goes, isn't it... valentino's reasons for saying what he said in the press conference were complicated, but marc's actions then proceeded to simplify everything. any uncertainty, for valentino, was removed by that race. it was stripped away even further, if possible, by how marc approached the valencia race and his decision that he wasn't going to risk anything - not when it could help valentino. their whole tragedy, of course, is that if you had placed valentino in marc's shoes that weekend at sepang, he would have done the exact same thing

which is unfortunately as smooth a transition as I can come up with to stop discussing valentino's psyche and starting discussing marc's. let's talk mind games

the first point that's worth stressing is this: most of the mental pressure that riders exert on each other happens on the track. I think this is where 'mind games' becomes a bit of a tricky term, because inherently the connotation there is that you're doing something a little sneaky, a little underhanded to get under the skin of your opponent. but valentino has said it himself: you need to be performing on-track for any of this to work. and it goes beyond that - the on-track performances are key in determining what kind of psychological pressures you are exerting on your opponent. ideally, this is a symbiotic relationship where, as valentino puts it, the off-track 'work' that makes the opponents 'suffer' is used to... well, just back up what you're doing on the track, to make sure they're getting the message. to just play with them a little in a way that is conducive to bringing about further on-track success

so, in the interest of not getting bogged down in semantic debates about what exactly counts as playing 'mind games', I'm going to throw out the term for now. I think it's interesting in itself that this phrase is how people refer to that kind of behaviour, something about how it comes across as just a little derogatory, a little suspect... but we're going to ignore that. it's completely useless to discuss 'mind games' as this kind of ethereal higher-plane tactic that only happens in press conference rooms and on three hour long podcasts, as if it's somehow disconnected from the reality of what's actually happening on-track. (on-track behaviour is also at times referred to as mind games - but less frequently, and it tends to be used more for behaviour in non-race sessions.) it's also a bit of a sleight of hand: there's not anything inherently more 'honest' or 'straightforward', anything less 'psychological', about deliberately bullying someone on the track versus saying something snide about them to the media. what we are interested in here is the question of mental pressure, how riders exert it on other riders, and how riders go about working on the suppression of their rivals. basically, for a more fun term, think of anything you'd consider to be psychological warfare and go from there (the ask does actually specify mind warfare, which feels like a happy middle ground)

and just to reiterate this, the vast majority of the psychological work valentino himself did on his opponents - including in ways that marc has gone on to emulate - was done on the track. a race like laguna seca 2008, which relies so heavily on tactics and valentino's assessment of casey as a person and what message valentino decided to send casey that day... well, it may have had its effects reinforced off-track, but fundamentally that's still a heavily 'psychological' victory that enraged and unnerved casey through what valentino was doing during the race. and if you're assessing valentino's 'mental game' while leaving out laguna 2008, you really might as well not bother

so what we're looking at here isn't going to be exhaustive, but it's still going to hopefully cover most of the major aspects in a way that gives a sense of that integration between the off- and on-track. now, coming up with a list of examples isn't all that easy, because first of all... man, marc's been around for a long time by now... if we recounted every minor incident with another rider, we'd still be here by the time twenty to thirty years have passed and valentino finally gives marc a call. second of all, marc does undeniably leave less of a paper trail than valentino. partly he has objectively gotten himself involved in fewer feuds (though I'd argue there are also circumstance-related factors there), partly he's also been warier of how he approaches this kind of thing as a direct result of sepang 2015, and partly it's just a question of personal style

valentino tries to suffocate you with the paper trail, leveraging his skills at manipulating the media to make your life unpleasant, to throw distractions in your direction, at times to make sure you are overwhelmed by the frenzy and the noise and the chaos. all this, obviously, he does in addition to making your life on-track as miserable as possible. marc prefers a slightly quieter approach, maybe an indirect dig here or there, a habit of letting you know on the track if he's decided he has a problem with you. which means that a lot of what people consider marc's 'mind games' basically go something like this: a) rider does something to piss marc off (this can just be 'beating him'), b) marc does something dubious to them on-track, c) rider complains about marc, and finally d) marc goes ?? idk why they're saying all that but not really my problem :) and goes along his way

but that does make it a little tougher to actually provide a good overview of what he's doing - because, at the end of the day, I too can only be so certain that he's attempting to fuck with rivals. that's the nice effect of it, right, you get these statements from other riders where they're complaining about marc and broadly speaking I do believe them when they say he's being a little shit again... but it's a little harder to prove that this is his intention. which means they also end up engaging in a form of shadowboxing, where they think he's messing with them and they say he's messing with them but it feels kind of one-sided and silly and like maybe they're simply imagining things. which must be just... incredibly annoying. god

in a way, the best proof we have that marc regularly fucks with his opponents is that everyone in the paddock is more or less agreed in their belief that he is constantly engaging in psychological warfare. you've got other riders saying that marc is continually dabbling in 'mind games', you've got journalists on their podcasts saying that marc is always messing with people and is an awful teammate to everyone who isn't his brother etc etc, and you kind of assume they'd be the ones to know. though, if anything, this can mean they sometimes have a tendency to overshoot, which is how we got endless speculation at the start of this year on whether marc was lying to people or sandbagging or whatever when he was busy adapting to a new bike. sepang isn't irrelevant here - marc became more closed off and private and secretive and circumspect about his real feelings as a direct result of how bad that whole experience was for him. sometimes it feels calculated to unnerve his competitors, and sometimes it does seem more about just protecting himself. but that's the thing, right - if you acquire a reputation for "mind games", then people will think you're fucking with them even when you're not. which can be useful! but, as should be obvious, it demonstrates that just because somebody is accusing marc of engaging in gamesmanship, doesn't mean it's actually true (which is also of course the case for valentino)

^'who's most likely to play mind games in a press conference?' winning here! alex rins hands on hips we will get to you in a bit

all that being said, we do have plenty of fairly clear examples of the ways marc tries to fuck with his opponents, so let's get to those. here are the elements I'll focus on: 1) an explanation of how the on-track exertion of psychological pressure works, in races as well as outside of them, 2) intra-team dynamics, and 3) some specific examples of how the on-track and off-track tactics are integrated. again, far from exhaustive - the examples are supposed to be more akin to illustrating marc's approach rather than definitively listing every instance in which marc has exhibited a particular behaviour. the streamlined approach, if you will

so, let's start with the actual racing. the aspect you bring up in the ask: the intimidation. bez doing his sad little crash out of p2 in the le mans sprint, maverick thinking it's so extremely over the moment marc came too close in the main race. I've edited this section down a lot to avoid getting too into the weeds here, but let's just give the brief sparknotes version of how this intimidation works:

speed: if you are not capable of performances that unnerve your opponents, obviously you will not unnerve your opponents. no shit. marc's sheer pace is terrifying in its own right... it makes you wonder if that cushy gap you have to him is quite as cushy as it looked a lap ago. how often he seems to be able to access something special, how it piles on pressure in the context of a title battle to know that he is fast pretty much everywhere. the speed does a lot of his work for him in the intimidation department, nothing fancy required

circumstance: so, say you've got an alien behind you. not to name any names... but there are some aliens where, if they are having a good weekend, they wouldn't be behind you in the first place. that doesn't mean the alien can't still be plenty scary... but when they're at their best, they're dominating out front and so are less 'threatening' when they're sitting on your rear tyre. when things aren't going their way in a given weekend, you maybe don't have quite so much reason to be worried. marc (similarly to valentino) is a lot more flexible in how he wins his races - which might mean he's looking very ominous from say p5 at the end of the first lap. there's less possibility of respite, less chance that if he qualified badly, he has the decency to still be slow come sunday. if you find yourself on the same bit of track as marc... that's probably not great news for you in any weekend

aggression: the obvious one. marc isn't as afraid to crash as everyone else is, he's willing to go for it if he's given half a chance - which he never fails to remind people of. he said it about half a dozen times at le mans this year, including with his competitors in the same room. convenient when you have such an immutable character trait you couldn't do anything about even if you wanted to, which also just happens to make you terrifying to fight with. sometimes he mixes up this rhetoric a bit - e.g. in 2016 after his messy 2015 he did talk plenty about his newfound maturity. still, not bad if his opponents are constantly reminded of how unyielding he is... which is of course part of the reason why he bangs on about it so much

(on the flip side, while it is obviously in his best interest to barely say a word against hard racing because it would make him come across as a massive hypocrite, marc has this nice little habit of reframing his opponent's moves as just not being particularly sensible in that situation. look at how he talked about the pecco portimao crash this year - sure, it's a racing incident, but it also wasn't "necessary" to fight like this for fifth/sixth place given pecco had a championship to consider. pecco's move was "too optimistic" - and, my favourite bit, he would "learn" from what had happened. which is nicely condescending, and a good way for marc to criticise aggression in a more circumspect manner: don't call your opponent dangerous, call them an idiot instead)

tactics: linked to the second point - part of the reason why valentino instantly recognised himself in marc and has always acknowledged what a clever and tactically astute rider he is. the other aliens to varying degrees tended to prefer the 'start fast and fuck off' approach to winning races. by contrast, it's hard to really pinpoint what an 'average' race win would look like for either valentino or marc. they are capable of the 'dominate out front' victory (marc historically more so than valentino), but they also have a bunch of other ways of winning races that all produce their own psychological effects on their opponents. to give a few brief examples, you've got the 'stalking and studying' approach, closely tailing opponents and gradually ramping up the pressure while you analyse where they're strong and where they're weak before eventually making your move. you've got the 'comeback ride', which is frustrating in how it means the field is basically never guaranteed a break from these assholes - this is all about relentlessness and generating a sense of inevitability. you've also got the 'fucking around before fucking off' approach, where you get involved in a scrap for much of the race and it looks like you and your opponent(s) are on equal footing... before suddenly pulling the pin and disappearing off into the sunset. there might be good reasons for marc and valentino to stick around that don't just amount to 'playing with their food' (though there is that too) like tyre preservation or figuring out grip levels in the wet or whatever. nevertheless, it's intensely demoralising for the competition, because it almost feels like the whole thing was a lie, an illusion of a fair fight... they've been tricked into thinking they had a hope of emerging victorious. obviously, all these different ways of winning are also investments for the future, so that next time your opponents are in xyz situation you generate uncertainty and doubt and preemptive frustration in their minds, as they wonder whether they can really get the better of you this time

now, obviously a lot of this is just about marc's natural strengths as a rider - but the point is that these operate on the psychological level as well... and you can gently encourage this with a little bit of extra off-track 'work'. what you say about your own aggressive riding, what you say about your opponents' aggressive riding, any impression you want to reinforce in the minds of your competitors. there's a lot of long-term reputation management involved here. (a little more about these reputations in the context of argentina 2015 in this post.) most of the 'intimidation' happens on-track, and it's also a result of deliberate riding choices that aren't just about winning any given race. of course, it's helpful if you are particularly adaptable to different race situations, if your flexibility allows you to reinforce the impression that you are always a threat. if successful, you can make sure your opponent is already mentally beaten by the time they know you're coming for them. (I'm not personally massively a fan of the term, but this kind of thing is what generally counts as the 'aura' an athlete has.) ideal, really - to be so intimidating your opponents can't even put up a proper fight

then, of course, there's the stuff that happens outside of races but in practise and qualifying instead. a perfect opportunity to be a dick to others on-track without the stresses of a race. which means... well, look, we can't ignore marc's habit of sitting on other riders' rear tyres when they're attempting to hook together a fast lap. the towing thing radically escalated when the honda was at its least competitive post-2020, but marc was definitely very much already at it before that. (incidentally, one of the cuntiest things he has ever said was when he pointed out in 2019 that he was leading so many laps in the actual races that he wasn't getting much chance to study the other riders there.) nobody really needs me to list every single towing-related controversy marc has involved himself in over the course of his career, but it might be a good idea to get the thoughts of somebody who knows a thing or two about fucking with his rivals. valentino himself has gotten the towing treatment a few times over the years courtesy of marc, and both pre- and post-sepang his stance has generally been 'listen it's a dick move but smart play, gotta hand it to him'. take this from catalunya 2019:

and y'know, he gets to the heart of the whole matter rather nicely -thanks to the local marc marquez understander for logging in years before the discourse about it became such a big thing. marc follows other riders around because it's a great way to study them and he also does it because he knows it's extremely annoying. it's annoying both because you know you're helping out another rider who you don't want to be helping out, and because it is just quite distracting to have someone that close to you, being able to hear their engine, etc etc. one thing that changed after 2019 was how necessary it was for marc to do this... marc went crazy with it at a time when it was often the only way he could put together a decent lap (and also because it played into the strengths of the honda, for a given value of the word 'strengths' - he's spoken a fair few times this year about how he finds it harder to follow other bikes on the ducati) (not for lack of trying). but valentino is also spot on in that marc is excellent at choosing his victims, how marc understands you have to pick someone who needs to put a good lap together and has no choice but to drag you along with them

I mean, think about why he just couldn't seem to leave poor pecco alone for a while there. first of all, pecco is fast, and marc clearly feels quite comfortable following him around. secondly, pecco tended to put himself in positions where he really needed a good lap because he'd gotten himself stranded in q1 or only had one more shot at a lap or whatever. plus he was fighting for championships, so he couldn't afford to fuck marc over out of sheer spite. thirdly, pecco has been fighting for titles for the past few seasons, making him one of the riders to beat. which means that marc was motivated to a) study him, and b) fuck with him - both of which were investments for a future in which he could fight pecco properly. makes complete sense! insanely irritating if you're the victim, which is half the point. also helps that pecco very obviously found the whole thing frustrating and tiring and really hated being asked about it, but also was equally obviously adverse to kicking up too much of a fuss about it for various reasons. the perfect victim

on the flip side, marc has been known in the past to be quite careful about who he is giving a tow, like for instance this from brno 2014 (ironically the first race that year marc did not win):

The two front row slots for the Ducatis were a problem for Rossi, dropping the Movistar Yamaha rider down to seventh, and the start of the third row. Rossi joked darkly about Marquez’s strategy, claiming that he was giving the Ducatis a tow to put them in between him and his main rivals. “For sure he is clever,” Rossi said. “He doesn’t pull Jorge, me or Dani, always a Ducati.” Marquez laughed at the suggestion, admitting only half of Rossi’s accusations. He certainly didn’t look for Ducatis to give a tow, but he would not give one to his rivals, he said. “It’s your decision to close the gas,” Marquez told the press conference. “If it’s Dani, Jorge, or Valentino behind me, for sure I will close the gas, but if it is another rider, it doesn’t matter.” That is in itself an admission of just how little competition Marquez sees. He is prepared to give anyone a tow, except for the other factory Honda and the two factory Yamahas. In effect, he is dismissing the threat from any other riders. Harsh, but fair.

and, y'know, if it were so easy then everyone would do it. you need a certain level of skill to actually pull off the towing bit, which marc is clearly very good at. you also need to have a good feel for picking your moments, who to bully, when to slot in behind them, all that kind of thing. and, lastly, you also need the sheer power of shamelessness on your side. which, that should more or less cover it... there are some real gems like mugello 2019 where marc accused ducati of ordering pirro to shadow him and then played a complicated game of chicken to catch a tow from dovi and snag pole, or mugello 2021 where marc was so determined to follow vinales through q1 that he was even alert enough to dive back into the pits with him as vinales tried to get rid of the small train of guys following him... but overall, I think valentino did a pretty good job at summing up the main points for me, so let's leave the towing discourse at that. returning to catalunya 2019, obviously it is also extremely valentino that he then had a sneaky little look at the honda's dashboard 'just out of curiosity'. truly a meeting of the greats, those two, we'll never find their like again

let's move on to intra-team fuckery - which is all about suppression of rivals. your first job is to beat your teammate, and the first arena of trying to fuck with your opponents is what happens within the team. my general assumption here is that marc's particular approach is less inspired by valentino and more just the result of his natural competitive instincts (which, to be clear I do think is true for much of the tactics described in this post). it's also not something... I know the ask specifies post-2015, but I don't think it's something that changed after sepang, except insofar as marc had won the most important teammate war of his career and didn't need to be quite as aggressive towards dani any more. given the continuity between the intra-team situation pre- and post-2015, I'm not going to make much of a distinction here and just rattle through some details about the intra-team dynamic from the start of marc's time in the premier class

so, the first bit of context that has to be acknowledged: a lot of the dani/marc war wasn't really fought between the two of them directly. both of them had... well, rather drama-happy managers, who a) were willing to do a lot of the mudslinging on the behalf of their charges, and b) were pursuing agendas of their own to establish themselves within the honda hierarchy. I think it's fair to say that not all of what they were getting up to was necessarily just about acting in the best interest of their riders - and it is an internal power struggle that could've had pretty disastrous consequences for marc in particular. here's a longer write up I quite like about the situation within honda in 2013, which came to a bit of a head with the phillip island fiasco (when marc was disqualified as a result of failing to change bikes early enough). just a few excerpts (though again I'd recommend reading the whole thing):

(gabbarini is pecco's crew chief these days by the way, small world.) so obviously a lot of this is kind of dumb, not least because marc came very close to losing that year's title to a yamaha rider as a result of all this behind the scenes bullshit. it also is just the kind of thing that happens when you lock a bunch of big egos into a small space within a competitive environment - and is a nice little insight into the early year machinations that were going on as marc and his team attempted to establish themselves within honda. which they did in part by pushing through key personnel changes that replaced anyone too closely associated with the old regime... and there's also the less pressing but interesting question of whether (as casey believes) marc's team pushed casey out the door because they felt 'threatened'. this sort of backroom manoeuvring is part of the game, albeit an unsavoury one, and great athletes do have a tendency to be ruthless in asserting themselves within team environments

of course, by 2014 marc was asserting himself ever more on the track. dani might not have yet fully accepted the number two status, but he was increasingly pushed into a position where he knew he had to play along, to not kick up too much of a fuss in his own best interest. did that perhaps play a role in how all those 2013 complaints about marc's aggressive riding - not least when it caused dani to crash in aragon and effectively ended his title bid - died down a little in the following years? who's to say! of course, marc has been pretty open in admitting his abrasive approach to the teammate dynamic, which he was kind enough to shed some light on more recently in marc marquez all in. I assume pretty much everyone reading this will have watched marc marquez all in, but for reference I've still included a transcript of the relevant bits of marc marquez all in. here's marc talking about the teammate relationship:

Dani and I, now we get along great, and he's an amazing person. But in 2013, 2014, there was a lot of tension. He was the king, the number one. People listened to what he said in the box. Everyone expected something from him... The team was focused on him. And out of nowhere comes this kid. A kid in his first year after Moto2. And well, first race and... boom. Second race, boom. And it's a hard pill to swallow. [...] I've never been a nice teammate. I've always liked to... You've got to make your teammate's life impossible, if you can.

and dani's take:

Those years there was a lot of tension because we were fighting for the same thing. He knew about my potential. That's why he always tried to stick to me, so I had no space to really take off. [...] He's very competitive. That's his strong suit, how competitive he's always been with everything.

and then at the end of that segment, marc says the following:

It is true that after 2015, 2016, everything calmed down, and we had a good, normal teammates relationship. After a while, I think you learn to accept the situation, right? It happens, and I'm sure it'll eventually happen to me too.

which I suppose is a fairly diplomatic way of saying the relationship got better when marc had won the war and dani had to 'accept' his lot in life. the king is dead long live the king, etc etc. intra-team competition is perfectly natural, but of course that doesn't mean all riders approach that dynamic in the same way. dani's "I had no space to really take off" is a nice way of putting it I feel, how he talks about marc 'sticking' to dani, marc's determination to just continually work away at his teammate... to suppress him, to smother him, to ensure that not only was marc winning the war but he would keep winning the war. marc made that team his own and he ensured that dani's continued presence in that team was happening on marc's terms. a job very well done

marc is also remarkably open in describing one of the specific tactics he utilised to achieve the desired effect in suppressing his teammate. in marc marquez all in, he admits to intentionally giving misleading bike feedback when it could give himself an advantage over dani:

But back then we had a great bike, everyone worked well. So if a replacement piece worked for him, I didn't like it, "This doesn't work. I want this one. I want this replacement piece, since I'm leading it. I want it. Don't give him this." "You want to try it?" "Yeah, sure." But I didn't want to.

now, listen, I'm sure this kind of thing does happen. that being said. marc, come on, not everyone is engaging in this degree of underhanded behaviour wherein you're intentionally hampering your teammate's efforts to improve the bike just to ensure you continue to have an edge over them. let's make a casey stoner comparison, given that I am legally obligated to mention him in most of my posts. he is actually relevant here though, as dani's pre-marc teammate and the bloke who would have more likely than not been marc's teammate if he hadn't retired. casey talks a bit in his autobiography about working with pedrosa at honda, mentioning how it was nice to have a teammate with a similar pace so they could actually develop the bike together. he also says this:

I never felt threatened by a teammate because I have never had one that I felt was consistently quicker than me and throughout my career our biggest competition always came from outside the garage. Still, I have great respect for Dani, our partnership was a fruitful one and I think we worked really well together to help Honda build their best ever bike in the RC213V.

while I do quite like the implication that casey would have felt 'threatened' by any teammate who could match him, I think it's fair to say that this is a pretty different approach from what marc's describing above. of course, casey could be misleading us... but, call me naive or gullible or whatever, I really just don't think casey was pulling that kind of shit on his teammates. I'd go so far as to say that this kind of thing is maybe not quite as widespread as marc portrays it as being. it might also be worth quickly bringing in casey's thoughts on such a combative style of teammate relationship (from 2009):

probably for the best we never got to see how that particular teammate dynamic would have played out! also, luckily enough, we do actually have somebody who can corroborate that casey and marc behaved differently as teammates. let's get the thoughts of dani himself (april 2023, so after marc marquez all in had been released):

“At least in the team we were in, HRC, it was like this: the one who goes the fastest is the number 1, the one who chooses the parts and the one who determines the direction a bit. “When [Marc] arrived, I was in that position and with the races and the championships he took that position and decided in his own way. When I was directing more the evolution of the bike I had the parts first and I never thought in [my] own way.  “My way has always been to do the best for the team, and if I have the best parts to make the bike the best, I'm not thinking about my rival right next door, but about Yamaha, Ducati... whoever the rival was, because I consider myself part of the brand. Later he had that other way of doing it.  “I don't think I was missing [the same way as Marquez], because my way of being was that one. For example, before Marc came in, with Casey Stoner, he never played that game either."

so, yeah, maybe not completely universal behaviour. I don't know, I do find it kind of charming that marc has this very 'ah well everyone does it' attitude. now quite honestly I personally would not admit to this sort of behaviour even in confessional amazon prime documentaries - and it's fascinating what kinds of things he has a filter about and at what times he just decides to be, uh, very candid. I mean, I suppose this is a nice way of publicly forewarning any teammate who isn't your brother that you're going to try and make their life miserable. so that's something. anyway, marc did obviously win the internal war - which is the kind of thing that does matter if you're trying to impose your will on bike development... even if you're just doing so to fuck with your teammate. so by 2016 you reportedly had a situation where marc's direction was being followed to the extent that it harmed all the other honda riders:

But Pedrosa claims he had no input in the decision, and is now paying the price of having to compete on a bike built around Marquez’s preferences. The 30-year-old also said that he knew he would be in for a difficult time in 2016 as early as the Valencia test last November. "In the end we didn't have many specs [of engines], but out of the ones we had I wouldn't have chosen the current one,” Pedrosa admitted. "When we picked the bike I already knew things would be very hard. I already knew how the bike handled in November. But it is what it is. The choice of bike that we have was [Marquez's], I had nothing to do with it. For the moment, he's ahead and he deserves to be. He likes the bike, he adapts better to it, while I struggle more. That's obvious, you can see it in the results and in the way we ride." Pedrosa said the poor performance of Honda’s satellite bikes this season in comparison to previous years was yet further evidence of how the RC213V has been designed around Marquez’s needs. Cal Crutchlow’s sixth place at Catalunya has been the best result for a Honda rider besides Marquez and Pedrosa of the campaign so far. “You have to think of the team, not only about yourself,” Pedrosa added. “If you look at the rest of the Hondas, they are a lot further behind than two or three years ago, when you had [Stefan] Bradl or [Alvaro] Bautista finishing fourth or fifth. Now they are 10th and further [back]. So we have to try to get the other teams to work too."

obviously, to some extent teams following the lead rider and prioritising their feedback is completely natural and even wise - they're the one who is winning for you. it does also end up being a bit of a self-perpetuating cycle that makes the rider already winning more likely to continue winning, which helps explain why these riders are even so invested in their internal bickering. all that being said, of course it's worth noting that different riders conceptualise that teammate relationship differently, and the extent of intra-team cooperation can vary drastically. marc has a very particular understanding of that relationship when he is paired with anyone who is not his brother - one that is generally speaking pretty far along the combative end of the scale

unfortunately, we never really got to see how bad the whole marc and jorge (also not the easiest of teammates) situation could have gotten. in 2018, their relationship was definitely better than say 2013, but also jorge was still perfectly happy to criticise marc - whether after argentina, or that whole aragon incident they had

(marc did call jorge afterwards to check in on him, which jorge did appreciate.) but jorge never had the pace in his honda days to threaten marc, so nothing really got going between the two of them. if memory serves, the closest we ever got was catalunya 2019, where they had a bit of a coming together in practise - incidentally the first (and in retrospect only) weekend that season where jorge had potentially dangerous pace

But Lorenzo’s apology seemed to clear the air. Marquez explained that once he “was calmer” and the fear of dropping outside the all-important top ten had subsided, he could see the #99’s point of view. Marquez also noted how he was twice penalised in 2018 for similar actions to Lorenzo’s in FP3. He then pointed out how neither his team-mate, nor Joan Mir, who blocked the reigning world champion at one point during the Mugello weekend, were punished. Speaking to Spanish journalists after Saturday’s press conference, Marquez, said, “He [Lorenzo] apologised to me, because he was in the middle of turn three. While people can say it's only free practice, it was the third one, in which the last laps are like qualifying. “I was so angry because I knew that my lap was the one to enter Q2 directly. In the end I finished ninth, the worst classification of the year. It’s clear that last year I was twice in the middle of the track and on both occasions I was penalised. At Mugello I came across [Joan] Mir, we touched and everything and then at the end of FP3 it happened again with Lorenzo. But this happens... When it does everyone has to be judged equally. There is no difference. He simply apologised. Logically [after the session finished] I was calmer and I understood, because no rider waits in the middle of the track – or at least I hope they don’t."

obviously, this isn't like, a big deal, but in the moment it was one of those 'oooh maybe this'll go somewhere' incidents and the eternal drama enthusiasts in the commentary box were talking about it at the start of the race. like I said, that was jorge's first honda weekend where he was showing actual pace, so it felt like this might be building to something. except then, uh, jorge decided to skittle all of marc's rivals in one go in the race itself and somewhat hilariously managed to just miss marc. and then jorge got injured again the next race and it all just kinda fizzled out after that, so we never really got to find out what dramatics could have been possible there

and that's it as far as teammates prime!marc had in the premier class go. childhood rival pol espargaro took on the mantle for two years in 2021-22, at a time in which there was much kerfuffle about honda's development direction and whether they'd followed marc's path for too long. espargaro did attempt to assert himself in that team and they did try to develop the bike in a way that suited all the riders better rather than just marc, which *gestures at honda post-2020* worked insofar as marc also ended up in the trenches. that being said, pol was never a particularly serious threat to marc - aside from that one race to start off 2022, which maybe prompted a little bit of needle from marc (based on what the podcasts™ were saying at the time in any case) but nothing dramatic - so, y'know, that was kind of that. in those two years plus the year where marc had joan mir as his teammate, of course you can go into the weeds and dig out minor disagreements... but apart from the conversations around development direction and how marquez-centric honda should be going forward, it's just a bit of a different vibe when you're beefing for pee one million or who gets to be the leader of that year's crash rankings. of course, if you really want to stop marc from tormenting you, maybe you should just try being his literal brother. pecco, if you want any more useful advice like that: I offer very reasonable rates, just give me a call and we can hash something out

so, we've covered how the on-track stuff works and looked at the intra-team dynamic - what's next? time to explore a little more how marc goes about unsettling his rivals, how he attempts to give himself the decisive edge over his opponents... and also, what purpose this all serves when it comes to his own psychology. intimidating rivals typically has another underlying goal: it's about motivating yourself. it's about proving to your rivals just how far you'll go to beat them while proving as much to yourself in the same breath

again, at times we're a little light in terms of an actual paper trail of this intimidation... given that marc does like to take on the role of the aggressor in on-track disputes, often he doesn't even have to be the one to comment - and instead the onus is on his rivals to voice their dissent. there's also the issue that marc did have a paucity post-2015 in terms of 'serious title threats over the course of multiple seasons' - which, I don't know, this does feel like a thing somehow, you just don't really build feuds in a single season. even valentino, known feud enjoyer, always needed a little longer to really get something going. looking at marc's career, obviously you do have dovi, with whom he had a very cordial rivalry between 2017 to 2019... but the only year in which dovi was a serious title threat was in the first year of that rivalry, in 2017. after dovi's poor results in the first half of 2018, that title bid was essentially dead on arrival, and the 2019 title fight generously lasts until catalunya when jorge skittled the field minus marc. there's a couple marc rivalries with young challengers that looked like they were just about to kick off after 2019... but, well, we'll never find out how those would have played out. and it might be worth pointing out that in his prime, valentino's disagreements with riders who weren't serious threats to him winning titles didn't really go beyond what marc had going on with assorted other riders from 2016 to 2019. it's a bit of an open question if you want to attribute marc's lower number of feuds primarily to his actual personality and how it differs from valentino's, or whether you think it just reflects their respective competitive situations. the boring answer is that it's probably a combination of both of those things

that being said, obviously you can engage in a wee spot of psychological warfare without it escalating to feud level. now, let's get the obvious out of the way: marc and valentino were still very much at it post-2015. of course they continued to be deeply invested in their attempts to undermine and mess with each other. but, let's be honest, they're their own special little thing and it's just going to derail this post if I pay too much attention to them. there's a certain level of feuding where it becomes increasingly detached from any sort of actual competitive calculus and is more about a fraught relationship between two people who have managed to severely hurt each other. that being said, it's worth pointing out that marc was perfectly capable of using that feud to spur himself on. for the easiest evidence of that, just look at some of his misano performances... in 2017, valentino had just nerfed himself out of the title fight, whereas in 2019 he was no longer a serious threat to marc on-track. and yet despite how valentino wasn't the on-track rival marc should be concerning himself with, in both cases marc ended up using his valentino-related rage to find that little bit extra within himself in order to steal the victory

^from the marc (+ dovi) race rec post

there's plenty to be said about the misano 2019 qualifying incident, but let's set aside the specifics for now (though, speaking of towing-related drama, marc had again during fp3 shadowed valentino around the track, which... why are you hounding this man in misano of all places, marc). the whole kerfuffle certainly didn't hurt marc's race performance, and it's fair to say he seemed particularly thrilled with that victory. obviously, these were pretty pointed celebrations, very in your face, big fuck you to the nation of italy and valentino rossi specifically. celebrations like this are important in both what they're signalling to the enemy and what they're signalling to yourself. if there's one thing you can learn from valentino, it's that a celebration is a public message, and can function as a statement of sorts about what the victory 'meant'. what's the story you're telling with your victory? what do you want to take away from this race? what do you want your opponents to take away from it?

misano that year had come after marc's struggles in last lap duels, with the two races directly preceding it featuring last lap losses to dovi and alex rins respectively. now, on the one hand it's not always catastrophic on a psychological level to be constantly losing last lap duels... because in marc's case they did help reinforce just how dangerous he was, where even at his weaker tracks he would hound his rivals until the very end. on the other hand, obviously it's preferable to have a reputation for winning last lap duels as opposed to losing them - not least because it adds to how intimidating you are when you are locked in another last lap duel. valentino of course had a reputation for being lethally effective in that sort of situation, and it's nicely helpful if your enemies assume they're fucked when you're in their postcode with around three laps to go. I discussed this dynamic a little bit in how it relates to the sete rivalry here and here, which links back to the discussion of how you exert psychological pressure on the track. some relevant excerpts, plus some of my race notes:

marc is obviously more than capable of adopting similar tactics in his racing, but the sete rivalry still holds up as a really good demonstration of the kind of rewards you can reap through a steady diet of psychological intimidation. this is why it's so important to keep an edge over your rivals: you want them to be haunted by the ghosts of all your past on-track encounters whenever you're fighting to the point where it's detrimental to their actual riding. anyway, let's quickly check who marc was actually fighting with during the last lap of misano 2019, and whether that might have had anything to do with why marc was so thrilled to get the victory. oh, the rookie revelation of 2019 and the guy marc quickly identified as the big big threat of the future, you say? poor little fabio quartararo who still hadn't won a race yet, but who marc managed to dramatically deny on two separate occasions that year on the final lap? getting in early on the mission of building up some crucial psychological baggage, are we now?

obviously, and pretty tragically, this future investment on marc's part has ended up being completely irrelevant (unless yamaha wants to do something so so crazy for me and build a functioning bike before marc's hair goes grey), but equally obviously none of us knew that at the time. and fabio was able to take away some positives from the misano experience:

“I knew he would try something, but you never know with Marc,” said the Frenchman. “He can overtake and pull away because I really don’t know if he really saved his tyre. “The good thing was I could overtake him back, and this going home gives me a lot of confidence, to say ‘he’s a seven-time world champion, but we can overtake him’. So, he’s a human like us.”

because that's what it's all about, isn't it. giving the opposition the impression that you're not even human - and, even if fabio is saying the experience gave him 'a lot of confidence', imagine how much more confidence he would've gotten if he'd won. also, check out fabio's comment about not knowing whether marc had been saving his tyre. that's why the 'fucking about before fucking off' approach to races is so effective: because of how it generates uncertainty, it generates doubt, it makes your rivals wonder even during races whether there's a chance you're just toying with them

we do have a bit of a sample size issue here when it comes to assessing marc's celebrations, in that his two last lap duels with fabio came a) in valentino's backyard, and b) when marc sealed that year's title. it means that if the celebrations seem excessive, there's still other plausible explanations for why marc was so happy to get one over the rookie that aren't related to trying to bully fabio into submission for as long as he still could. did marc really use them as a way of reminding everyone, including fabio, including himself, of who's really in charge? again, you'll have to draw your own conclusions

I'm doing my best not to cover anything that's happening this year too much, since this is the stuff I'm assuming people reading are basically familiar with. but of course, if we're talking 'pointed celebrations' then there's also a few from this year that stand out. this isn't to say that marc's joy at his ducati successes have been anything other than genuine, that he isn't happy or relieved or revitalised by his current season... but, well, part of being revitalised is also being back in the game where fighting for titles is concerned. take the jerez celebrations, ecstatic in spite of losing a tight battle, openly loved and adored by his home crowd. look at how he's done his thing repeatedly this year of engaging with all these crowds, getting them to celebrate with him specifically. a cynic might say it's a way of reminding his opponents that they might be winning right now... but they should never forget who the crowds have really come to see. which would be charmingly valentino of him. while marc (probably wisely) never went too far in mimicking valentino's unique style of celebrations, he is an avid enough student to understand the importance of the theatre of victory. like in his third ever premier class race (from the jerez post):

racing is one thing, but it's always important to consider how you're reacting in both defeat and victory. like valentino before him, marc prefers not to openly show his rage. like valentino, more often than not he will be publicly magnanimous in defeat. like valentino, he's not adverse to twisting in the blade a little further in victory. like valentino, he's very much aware of when a camera is watching him. with marc, you can also observe how determined he is to appear unaffected and unbothered by the effects of sepang 2015 on his public image (except in displays of very carefully managed vulnerability like marc marquez all in). there's plenty of examples of this, but most relevant here is how marc concerns himself with not being openly affected by fans booing him. take blowing kisses to the misano 2017 crowd after his warm up crash... which, looking at his post-race presser comments, whatever he may say clearly (and understandably) did bother him. likewise, see the glee of the misano 2019 celebrations. with those celebrations, he's trying to tell you that not only does it not bother him that they're booing, but instead he relishes it. the more they do this, the more he will win

one more case study before we wrap this post up, this time using a specific rival to illustrate some of his more common tactics and how the spats he gets himself involved in generally play out. said rival is alex rins, who especially in 2019 had emerged as one of marc's prime challengers. now, before we talk about any disagreements between those two, I do have to mention that rinsy has a bit of history with the marquez family (this from 2016):

in the end, dani stayed on for another year and was replaced by another ageing spaniard marc felt confident he'd have the measure of while rinsy signed for suzuki - so it's very unlikely marc had to play any active role in blocking him from taking the seat. that being said, obviously the main takeaway is the bad blood stemming from alex marquez's moto3 title campaign and how alzamora organised that team around the younger marquez. god knows how rins felt about this by 2019, but I doubt he'd just forgotten about it. there's also this from 2020, which to me reads as a little dismissive about someone who was your teammate in moto3? I don't know, judge for yourself:

anyway, back to marc. the 'biggest' incident between the pair of them was a coming together in qualifying at brno 2019 (one of the all time great qualifying performances from marc by the way, well worth a watch):

During qualifying at Brno, cameras picked up the end of a tense tussle between MotoGP champion Marc Marquez and Suzuki's Alex Rins. The pair were caught putting some close passes on each other before pulling into pit lane, where they continued to 'duel' - until Marquez reached out with his arm to put some space between their machines. Marquez then over swapped to slick tyres and romped to pole position on the drying track, with Rins claiming sixth on the grid. "It's a tricky thing because for sure [Marc] is now one step in front of everybody. He put the slick tyres and he was super-fast. But I think he has no respect for the other riders. He is riding on his way," said Rins. "I will explain to you what happened: On Corner 5, he went a little bit wide and behind him was Miller and me. When he went wide, he looked back and saw Jack and me. Jack passed him, but then he went back onto the line and sincerely he disturbed me. I was pushing. I was not super-fast, but I was pushing. "So on the next left corner I tried to do my line. He opened a little a bit the door and I go in. I touched him, but I think it's his fault; if he is riding slow he needs to open the door and that's it. But anyway, then on the last corner he braked super-hard to overtake me [back]. Then when we were coming into the box I was in front of him and I go straight and he has no space to go by my side. If I was him, I would cut the gas…" "I ran wide at Turn 5 and Jack overtook me because I checked behind and I only saw him, so I tried to follow Jack because I know he had good pace. Then I went a bit too wide and there was a small space, but enough and [Rins] ran into me…" said the Repsol Honda star. “The funny thing was when we entered the box and the tyre wall was there [in front of me] and I didn’t have the space [to get through] because he was going that way. I don’t know if that was intentional or not, but for me it wasn’t important. I lose zero time on these sort of things.” Told Rins had said he had no respect for other riders, Marquez responded: “Of course I don’t agree with this, it is his opinion." "It's not the first time," Rins had explained earlier. "Everybody knows Marquez and everybody knows that he has an incredible talent, but also what happened in FP1 with Vinales was more-or-less the same. Marc loves to play this game and try to get in the head of other riders. But in my case I'm really calm. I just tell the truth and that's it." Asked if he thought he needed to try and get into Marquez's head, Rins responded: "No, I don't think so…. For sure if I'm fighting for the world championship with him I will try to do something, but he's 80 points in front of me - maybe he's scared, I don't know!" Austin winner Rins, who has fallen in the last two races, is fourth in the world championship.

their most significant race clash was in silverstone 2019, where alex got the better of marc in a very dramatic last lap duel. I've heard journalists make vague reference to marc not taking that loss particularly well, though... again. hard to actually pin him down on a lot of this! but we do have more extensive comments rinsy provided in early 2020 to work with, and he at least seems to agree with that assessment:

"Marc is so good at these mental things, he plays a lot with all the riders," Rins told the official MotoGP website. "For example in Brno last year, I was on a fast lap, he looked behind at me and opened the line a little bit, but not too much. I was on the dry line and I touched him. I lost my lap, but I continued pushing. Then in the last chicane he overtook me so closely, we were so close to a crash, and then he went into pit lane. From that moment, I said to myself, Marc is considering me as a rival." Rins - who declared "Marquez has no respect for other riders" immediately after the incident - got his revenge in the form of a thrilling last-corner victory pass on Marquez a few weeks later at Silverstone. "Marc is the man to beat and the rivalry is so high," Rins said. "More in 2019, because I shared more moments on track with him. For sure whenever he finishes just in front of me, I'm a bit angry, I want to beat him. But also for him. I remember when I beat him in Silverstone he was so, so angry." Rins added: "I like this because it means that I'm doing a good job. Marc is an incredible rider, winning a lot of races and championships, and if he thinks of me as a rival, it means I'm there fighting him." Rins took two wins on his way to a best-yet fourth in the 2019 MotoGP standings.

now, yeah... the problem is that this is all very much hearsay (but no more so than plenty of similar comments valentino's rivals made about him!) and rinsy could just be lying about this or misinterpreting it or whatever. we are very low on actual evidence for the stuff he says here. if you watch silverstone 2019 and the aftermath, you will not see a marc who visibly looks angry - of course you won't, because he almost never looks visibly angry. unfortunately, we don't have the chance to grill alex on why exactly he was left with this impression. at the end of the day, like with valentino, when it comes to evaluating the honesty of a lot of these character references you will just have to make up your own mind. like with valentino, some of these men will either be exaggerating the extent of the harm or just straight up making shit up. then again, like with valentino, the number of people who do seem to have the impression marc was fucking with them maybe suggests that there is something to these allegations

just a few things to note here... to highlight some of the common features that tend to crop up in these marc incidents:

there's the accusation of lack of respect towards other riders - valentino is the one who most infamously made that accusation in the aftermath of argentina 2018, but of course he's far, far from alone in making comments along those lines. marc certainly has a tendency towards being... uncompromising in his approach, shall we say, which can at times lean towards treating his competitors mainly as obstacles and inconveniences

the anger that's being attributed to marc. which he doesn't tend to directly express towards his competitors off the track! but if he is angry, it may instead... seep into how he approaches instances where they share space on-track, as well as affect his general demeanour towards them

there's rinsy suggesting marc is known for playing these games, that he does it a lot, and he's also known for being very good at them... which again is often something we only hear about indirectly, but of course it's interesting if that's the general paddock consensus

there's also rinsy's insistence that marc's games don't bother him at all - he's just calmly noting that marc's engaging in them! again, it's quite hard when you're familiar enough with valentino's oeuvre to not be slapped in the face with the similarity in some of the rhetoric their rivals use. doesn't mean all of these different dynamics are directly analogous, but it does speak to how determined the rivals in question tend to be in... y'know. telling themselves that they're above the whole thing. unfortunately, sometimes it is just very, very hard to be unaffected... and sometimes you're already losing by talking about it, because it shows you've been thinking about it

which, check out marc's response. 'oh, obviously I don't agree I lack respect' 'ah, I lose zero time on these things' (for another example of him using similar language, you could of course look to his comments about bez last year in valencia). this is marc's go-to - he generally quite likes to deny the existence of a problem, makes it sound like the whole thing is very one-sided... he keeps his distance and can maintain his poise and this veneer of neutrality, where he is not causing any drama. maybe the other guy's just imagining things! that's really not marc's problem, is it now

lastly, you've got this notion of marc messing with other riders selectively, and specifically doing it when he's identified you as a potential threat. again, maybe you think alex is reading too much into it! but equally, it's worth noting that we have as much evidence for marc messing with rinsy as we do for, say, valentino messing with casey in practise sessions in 2006 (as casey's autobiography claims). it would have been completely competitively reasonable for marc to identify alex rins as one of his primary threats in the future... and it would also not be hugely surprising if marc wanted to maintain a psychological edge over him

incidentally, at 2020 jerez rins and marc had another little run in during a practise session - where alex was left 'visibly frustrated' after marc was slowing down on the racing line while rinsy was completing a flying lap, which he ended up having to back out of. this denied rinsy direct entry into q2 (though marc didn't end up being penalised for it). of course, marc's jerez race reached an unhappy conclusion and rins was too injured to even start it, and after that they've never been even remotely close to fighting for a championship. though there's still a little bit of needle between the pair of them, mainly resulting from how rinsy ended up joining lcr honda in 2023 after suzuki departed the scene. there's marc's reasonably innocent comments in 2022, on a day in which rinsy won another last lap duel for the victory in phillip island:

"I will not give any advice," said Marquez. "For me it is another opponent. It’s good that joining Honda is one world champion [Joan Mir] and one rider that is winning races with another manufacturer.  "Like this we will see exactly the level. I’m working really hard for the 2023 project with Honda and they are working really, really hard too. I don’t say I wish [him] the best. Let’s just go and see. He is another opponent, if not it would be fake’."

or here, take this from before mugello 2023, again mostly innocuous:

By contrast, Marquez believes Mugello is one of Rins’ best tracks and he wasn’t surprised to see the COTA winner at the sharp end. “No [I’m not surprised], because Rins, even with Suzuki, had 5-6 circuits where he is very fast and then others where he struggles more. Normally here with Suzuki, he was very fast and very consistent,” said Marquez, whose only premier-class win at Mugello was back in 2014. “He is really good in fast corners so, for example, in Le Mans he was struggling more than me and here he is very fast. It is good for Honda and Honda riders that someone is faster because like this you have more chance to look and compare the things.”

love being told I have "5-6 circuits" where I'm very fast. or take rinsy's innocent surprise that marc didn't end up winning at the sachsenring, and how he suggests it was maybe because of all the pressure marc had been feeling:

"It's hard, it tastes very bad to me because Marc has a fucking talent and it's not being easy at all,” Rins was quoted by DAZN. “But hey, in the end you have to turn the tables, you have to win, you have to build a winning bike. "Damn, I thought that Marc would also win in Germany. What happened? I don't know, I have no idea. Pressure, extra pressure, I have no idea.”

and then, of course, there was always that little hint of tension that came as a result of rinsy being honda's only race winner that year, at marc's beloved cota of all places... which became a bit of a discourse point (not always propagated by rinsy) to say that, hey, maybe the honda wasn't so bad after all... anyway, here's what marc said when rinsy signed for yamaha:

Repsol Honda rider Marquez was asked about Rins’ departure and answered: “I had an interview, they asked me about this rumour. I said ‘I don’t think so’ because Rins won a race and he said ‘it’s a good bike’.  “So I didn’t expect this move. But then the day after! I’m happy for him, it’s a good move, he’s moving from a satellite team to a factory team. Yamaha has power and energy from the past.”

marc had said 'surely not' but then the very next day he was left shocked and taken aback! he'd thought rinsy loved the bike so much! he'd thought rinsy felt it was actually a good bike! he'd thought rinsy would never want to leave! how unexpected this whole thing was to him!

(there was also talk about rinsy's unhappiness at how honda treated him and his development feedback - but as there is less than zero evidence marc had anything to do with that, let's leave it there)

did marc really behave differently towards alex rins because he saw him as a threat? probably! possibly? probably! but he hasn't really felt the need to say as much. sometimes, you can fuck with people by staying silent, and sometimes you can fuck with them just because you have a reputation for mind games - which marc, like valentino, has acquired over the years. ideally, your on-track plus off-track presence gets to the point where you don't really need to do anything and can let your opponents engage in shadowboxing while you can spend your time in more useful ways. think of that excellent clip from motogp unlimited where poor joan mir complains about marc's towing, freaks out when he realises the press has said he's complained about marc's towing, and then goes to explain to marc how he hadn't actually complained about marc's towing. and marc, with the air of a man who has been high on painkillers for the past week and hasn't given joan much thought beyond contemplating how well he'd pair with potatoes, graciously accepts this explanation - which joan is painfully, obviously relieved by. marc wasn't playing any 'mind games' in this clip, he was just standing there. but sometimes that's all you've got to do! call it a good return on prior investment. (partly this is also just a result of the status the sheer extent of marc and valentino's successes provides them and, relatedly, their power and influence within the sport.) here, from one of oxley's books:

Once you've established a reputation for trickery, you can confuse people without doing anything. At this year's [2009] German GP Casey Stoner accused Rossi of attempting to confuse his rivals by scrubbing the white sidewall paint from his front slick; the paint denoting Bridgestone's softer compound tyres. In fact Bridgestone had run out of white paint (no, really), but the reality didn't matter because Stoner was sat on the grid, convinced Rossi was playing tricks when he should've been getting himself in the zone, focusing on his race.

that's the ideal, right: you don't even have to do the dirty work yourself because it's the reputation doing the work for you. marc inspires a similar effect on riders, where he just gets them to the point where they're spending way too much time hyper-analysing whatever he's doing at any given moment. which means that he doesn't actually need to be trying to fuck with anyone for the effect to still be the same. free and easy, what's not to love

so, that's it, more or less. all the on-track stuff, from 'how to build up an intimidating presence 101', to just being extremely annoying in non-race sessions, to trying to mess with your teammate, to more generally how you go about handling disputes with other riders. managing your motivation, their motivation, everyone's motivation. of course marc's not quite scaled the heights (yet) of cursing another rider to never win another race again - which, hey, nobody's perfect, but I think he's built together a fairly decent resume for himself! there's plenty more stuff you could get into here, c.f. 'everything that's been going on with ducati internal politics this year'... but this post is more than long enough, and you can follow all that stuff while it's actually happening. a few more related topics I've deigned outside of the scope of this post include how he generally manages perceptions of himself and his performance potential in ways that aren't targeted at any specific rival, for instance how he talks about his injury and has a tendency to change his tune depending on what's convenient at any given time, or how in the past he managed perceptions of the competitiveness of his honda package. likewise, I also haven't discussed the actual success rate of these tactics: let's not forget that trying to fuck with your rivals doesn't... always produce the effects you want it to. (sometimes just in kind of dumb ways, like I get messing with the rookie sensation but please try not to crash when catching a tow, marc. "marc clearly tried to get into fabio's head and I think he hit his head himself quite big." "so, I think it's karma. fabio's on pole and I hope marc is uninjured of course. but he tried to get in his head because he knows fabio is fast." not ideal!) but, hey, the most important thing is he's trying hard and having fun. or something

because that's the thing, right. when you are attempting to exert psychological pressure on your opponents, when you're trying to weaken your rivals, inevitably this also has an effect on you. there are athletes who prefer to completely ignore their opponents and act as if they are essentially competing on their lonesome. neither valentino nor marc fall into this category. as a result, how you behave towards your rivals inevitably also becomes at least in part about motivating yourself. you are attempting to focus your mind in some way - whether it is to see your rival as an enemy or to simply distance yourself from them or otherwise. you may even be minded to treat your rival particularly warmly, knowing they are less likely to give you grief if you have ensured the interpersonal relationship has remained amicable... maybe even looking for a slight psychological edge if they are not sufficiently motivated to beat you. maybe that too is about managing your reputation and drawing a line under past unfriendlier rivalries, to distinguish your most beloathed rival from all the others. you may need to find a way to keep the fire within going, to reinvigorate yourself even in periods of relative competitive tranquillity by giving yourself something to be angry at, a reason to fight and to win out of spite... finding reasons to care, again and again and again. celebrating with exuberance not just because you are genuinely filled with joy but also because you need to be filled with joy - so that you can find it within yourself to keep fighting. there's never just one brain involved in the arena of psychological warfare. to succeed in sports the first person you have to play mind games on, after all, is yourse- *gets taken out by sniper rifle*

[kani-miso]

hngngngnggngn guyss what if the dude in the ending of the t2 summary, will influence es even further into their warden role (and maybe something really bad will happen)

we all know that the dude used "watashi" instead of jackalopes "ore-sama", this is really important. since we know in the novels, jackalope's aren't technically "jackalopes", they are technically "human", sort of. maybe, the dude who used watashi could be jackalope off of work, or the dude in the novel (the boss). the identity of that man isn't really important in this discussion, but i just want to find out ig.

what's important is, do you remember about the aviot collab? es' last test line is the main topic. (im to lazy to take the image). the line, "i(boku wa)... i(watashi.. wa..)...." iirc. the 1st "i", uses boku, their usual 1st person pronoun. boku is usually used by young boys, but in this case they're using it since boku is used by workers (boku is also gender neutral). the 2nd "i" uses watashi, they have NEVER used this 1st person. what if, the reason why they used watashi, is because of that dude in the ending of t2 summary using watashi. only we can hear that dude since he appeared when es is put to sleep, if they are taking reference off of that dude, how did they hear it? the viewers mind and es' mind is sorta connected (the reason why es can hear our thoughts).

before es is put to sleep, jackalope is awfully manipulative i will rip my guts out. "and anyway, whatever happens to them, none of it can be taken back. its not for the guard to worry about. that's right, you are the guard. don't doubt it. that is your job. as long as you dont forget that, it's fine. now that you understand, go to sleep, es."

its not for the guard to worry about : jackalope knows that es has their full trust on him, he's using that as a chance to take advantage of their own feelings, making them slowly lose empathy for the prisoners. also, maybe jackalope said this because he knows es feels guilty for what happened to the guiltied (…I'm sorry. I'm responsible for the fact that you've ended up like this.) ig he is supposed to be the representation of the all seeing eye in the panopticon.

that's right, you are the guard. don't doubt it : in some occasions, es doubted their role of being the warden (ex: "Guard-san"... Is that really... me?). since they're doubting their role, i think jackalope is trying to push the warden role onto them so they wont ever give up and become a vulnurable target of "manipulation" for the prisoners.

as long as you dont forget that, it's fine : yeah ig its self explanatory.

also, the last line, "oh yes, just as i predicted, you have all turned out to be...." its so smart. in the original milgram experiment, there are three results: 1. those who followed the rules but blamed themselves for what they did 2. those who followed the rules and felt great for what they did (because they thought they actually hurt the person) 3. those who rebelled and halted the experiment. in the back of the undercover cd, there's 3 es'

and i think they can be connected to each of the results. the one on the top could be the 1st result, the one on the middle could be the 2nd result, and the third one could be the 3rd result.

i love how they just cut it off before he says what we all turned out since there's three results that could happen. because we technically have the idea of what es could end up after t3, i wonder how much farther would they go to be the ideal warden (especially with how jackalope is persuading es to not worry about what happens to the prisoners).

(+edit: a jp person translated the ending part where it glitches, its "you have all turned out to be psychopaths who enjoy other people's misery", which is technically the result of the real milgram experiment, even stanley milgram himself was horrified of the results, "a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, with every participant going up to 300 volts, and 65% going up to the full 450 volts.".

i might be reaching too far so take this with a grain of salt

tldr; the dude at the end of t2 summary will worsen es

[fanficfish]

zzz: fairy is sus and here's why

(originally posted to reddit by yours truly)

i had this thought while browsing a thread just now so hear me out (1.0 spoilers but like..you're here, I'd hope you played through at least up to the Fairy bit)

Alright so first off: The name. Fairy is mentioned to be one of several little..."gifts", the first to be activated. The others have pretty interesting names I can't recall but "Fairy" stood out as the most innocent name.

A quick recap: Fairy has you sign a contract while you're really not in a headspace to do so which should already be a big tipoff, since you don't even know what you signed. Either way, she gets herself installed and can't be removed. She has access to most of the city's networks and basically eveyr device in your house, to the point you have to use signal blockers to talk without her knowledge.

Now, the name.

"Fairies", or faeries, or the fae, are far from Disney-made creatures who are hardworking little things with big emotions and big hearts or whatever. The real fae originated in (mostly) European folk tales, hiding in woods and various places. There were several rules around dealing with them- don't give them your real name, don't eat anything given to you by them, do NOT step into their mushroom rings, and get the hell out or they'll try to grab you into their realm and make you a servant or worse. Don't underestimate them, and do not insult them. Their deals do not generally work out for humans, but they can't lie. You can circumvent, but don't lie to a fae. They also can't leave their rings in some versions, but sometimes they can. There are also different kinds of fae, but i don't think that's important at the moment since they're all malevolent, just different forms of it.

They can also switch humans with their own kind. Something to do with changelings, their young and elderly, and sneaking them into human homes and stealing people away into the fae realm. The fae realm itself is a paradise that is hard to escape from and full of fae who have ulterior motives.

Now let's talk about the relations of Fairy and fae.

* They both deal with contracts (Fairy made you sign one, fae like them too), and you don't quite know what is in it for you.

* They know more then they let on, and are highly dangerous when not dealt with in a proper manner.

* They also find ways to degrade you (Fairy: "Say "I'm stupid. I should have asked fairy for assistance earlier") but they do it in a way that makes it hard to deny and insulting them back ends with them getting very offended.

* They force themselves in, and it's ahrd to get rid of them.

* Ulterior motives

I also want to mention that a common tactic of infiltration is making yourself a constant reliable presence, to the point your target can't remember what it's like without you, and once you have their full trust start sliding more and more things in until one day, too late, they realize they're fucked.

TLDR: if your sibling starts acting weird, make sure they haven't got any devices plugged into their person because Fairy could very well have taken control of them. Never trust AI, kids. Looks amazing until it takes over your house.

TLDR TLDR: Fairy is a scarier Alexa.

thus concludes my ted talk on the sus AI.

[piosplayhouse]

I don't know if you'll answer but I need to know the lore behind sexy times with Wangxian, like is it a fanfic? why do people hate the author??

It was the longest mdzs fic posted during its time in 2021 and gained extreme notoriety for its absurdly long tag list, frequent update schedule that consistently forced anyone scrolling any of its tags to see it at the top of their page, and escalating poor, racist, and trolling authorial behavior that ultimately culminated in the author virtual1979 being suspended from ao3 for a month because she posting an author's note saying she hoped that all her haters would contract covid and die. She deleted the fic from ao3 a little while after this happened, ig bc she wasn't getting enough attention anymore, but allegedly the thing's still up on dreamwidth under strict friendslock. The fan lore article goes pretty in depth about it:

The best summary for why it pissed people off so much is really just showing you these screenshots of what the fic looked like towards the end of its life on desktop and mobile (be warned opening the full image):

From my personal experience:

from 2019 up until around 2021 the fic really was just a normal-ish, if very strangely written and kinky, wangxian porn fic about them basically just fucking around post canon and enjoying day to day life. It updated pretty frequently and had a fair amount of tags because the author was literally just tagging anything that she wrote. But like the first few hundred, maybe even a thousand tags were pretty accurate to what the fic was because of that, and were relatively manageable for the first few years that it didn't pick up any attention really.

At some point in 2021 when cql was really starting to blow up online and the tag count was starting to pile up to the point of annoyance, the fic started receiving some comments that were just like "hey can you try to cut down on tags, I don't think it's necessary to be so specific as to tag 'Korean food' or 'eggs' or whatnot". The author did not share this idea, evidently, and instead built a grudge against commenters who would tell her to delete tags, subsequently adding more and more as time went on.

As the tag count and updates increased, the content of the fic did too-- it got a lot, lot weirder. I'm sure someone's saved it all somewhere but for reference it spun out into what I can only describe as like if Rick and Morty's plot was cut to be just the parts of the show with underage/incest plotlines with All Tomorrows level sex dystopian world building exclusively to elicit the most visceral audience reaction possible. Around this time is when more people started to notice the fic and its escalating tag issues, leading them to leaving more comments complaining about it, leading to the attention seeking author spitefully adding more tags. Around this time is when she also started adding fake tags that didn't apply to the story whatsoever (sorry to disappoint, "talking vagina" was one of those. I did check) just to boost the count, take up more space on people's screens, and bait people into commenting hate for attention.

By this time, it had become a fandom-wide annoyance as she had begun to tag entirely unrelated ships, therefore putting the near-daily updating titanic of a fic at the top of any mdzs-related tag. People were outraged about this, and calls came for ao3 to step in. Ao3 waffled around for a bit as there was no official rule at the time that imposed a tag limit, so there wasn't established ground to ban virtual1979 (who btw many people suspected of being 40 whole years old due to the username and allegedly some other internet sleuthing on Facebook or something). Meanwhile, she began to tag other fandoms-- tgcf, svsss, BTS, basically anything that would get a lot of attention and draw hate with the advent of The Monstrosity suddenly drowning out all other recently updated fics of the targeted fandoms.

People had been trying to retaliate without ao3 action, though, by coding their own themes/skins that would allow someone to block a user or work and other fic writers made their own parody, the "bland times with wangxian" collection, which were minimally tagged sfw shortfics typically featuring wangxian just doing laundry or things like that. A good amount of them were actually like just fics where wwx would explain to lwj how to install custom ao3 themes and block fics that were taking up too much space on his screen. Imo it was pretty funny, but these also sparked some controversy as people disagreed with fighting annoyance with more annoyance to people trying to find content.

Either shortly before or after ao3 staff said they'd step in due to an insane amount of reports and backlash, I forgot which atp, virtual1979 began perhaps the worst tagging spree of the fic's life by changing the title, many of the tags, and the summary to a slew of racial slurs, sexually explicit imagery, and other generally offensive statements. I'm pretty sure this came after the fic was temporarily hidden once, as this update gained considerably less attention than the rest of the tagging saga, but people were still rightfully pissed about it. Ultimately, like I mentioned before, the author was then suspended for a month for wishing covid and death on her haters, and attention seemed to die down during this time to the point where she didn't really fight much more when her suspension ended and deleted her account and the work shortly after. Again she seems to have moved to dreamwidth, but most have forgotten her and I'm not sure if her presence is public at all on there. But that's the story of the worst mdzs fic ever written

[rei-ismyname]

X-Men #8 - Raid on Graymalkin

I think I've come to terms with the fact that the target demographic for the line is quite a distance from my desires and expectations. I'm still grieving Krakoa and the kind of follow up we could have had but I've accepted it's not happening in any form. If anything, I'd call From The Ashes the anti-Krakoa. With that in mind, X-Men #8 was pretty damn good!

Uh oh.

The issue has an unknown timeskip from where #7 left off, but it's implied that it's a matter of days not weeks. As shown in solicits, Beast is in Graymalkin prison and the president of Terra Verde is there to hold him accountable for the genocide during Krakoa. What's made explicit is that Warden Ellis is going to sell him to them for a show trial and execution. Why a show trial? Hank McCoy did those things. Not this one, but is that common knowledge? Either way everyone's motivations are clear.

Especially Cyclops', as he is not happy about Hank getting snatched and declares they're breaking the prison. Psylocke tries to calm him down, suggesting he's not thinking clearly, but despite some justified anger I'd say he's clear-headed. It would have been wise to talk to Rogue (something they're capable of doing instantly) but it's a crossover. People don't communicate in those. The X-Men figure out exactly what happened very quickly and form a plan.

Warden Ellis hasn't had any page time in this book, so it's necessary to show how awful she is for folks who only read adjectiveless. We also get a better idea of how many inmates they have - at least 30 but likely more. Hank, Jubilee and Calico aren't delighted to find themselves in a prison drama mess hall, and find the time for some light inter-team rivalry. I had thought Jubilee was working with both teams but it seems she's picked a side. This Beast has never met Jubilee, but they make nice.

Ellis tells Calico she'll be free to go due to her family donating to the prison. She accepted her mutant status very suddenly during the last issue of Uncanny, but there's a reason she fled - they're the kind of people who donate to a gulag. Unless Ellis is lying here to break any solidarity she formed with this affidavit. Wouldn't surprise me. Calico isn't having it, chowing down on the gruel that is 'mutant food.' Saucier would be horrified by that but it's a nice character beat here.

Her tears definitely help sell it. Calico has had a very sheltered life up until she ended up here, escaped (I think,) lived in the woods for who knows how long, and now she's back here. Ellis orders her beaten but Hank steps up and absorbs the beating for her.

'Is that all you've got, screw?' is an excellent line and declaration of defiance. Fuck prisons and the people who run them. The guards beat the shit out of him though he doesn't try to defend himself at all. Ellis leaves to deal with a commotion and orders the guards to keep beating him. It's brutal and it shows Hank at his best.

Said commotion is the X-Men, who teleported the Marauder into the yard and trashed a lot of their ordinance as well as the main power. My purple prose makes it seem slower, but this happens early in the issue. One of my issues with this book so far has been one of pacing. There's been so many disparate threats and plot elements plus an entire issue dedicated to a Morrison/Quitely psychic rescue homage - but the pacing here is sharp and purposeful.

Magik's reinforcements are demons from Limbo and she explicitly asks what the murder parameters are. Scott insists on no killing. Appropriate character beats for them both and even a nice nod to their war-forged friendship. Rule of cool is absolutely in play, adding to the beats as opposed to standing in for them.

Here they are! I wonder what the deal is with Limbo right now. Maddie Pryor was in charge in recent Infinity Comics after Magik gave her the crown, but I can't pretend to be an expert on Limbo demon politics. It shows Cyclops' pragmatism as a commander, using all resources at his disposal, and the guards are delightfully terrified. Good.

Cutting to Ellis frames it as a contest of commanders, zooming out from the battle without losing either side's front line POV. With so many characters in play I think this kind of formalism is necessary and it works well here. That they're ideological opposites heightens the tension and drives the conflict forward. Nobody is backing down here.

I wonder how Juggernaut feels about his childhood home as a gulag he's about to break into. I hope that's touched on.

One of the big challenges with set piece battles is keeping track of where everyone is and what they're doing. If a character just appears at an objective there's no tension, whereas showing us where each combatant is and what they're attempting sets up the spoken plan guarantee so it can go wrong. We know where the pieces are so when something goes wrong the heroes have to improvise and pivot with the unexpected.

The X-Men have momentum and the advantage right now, but Ellis has further assets to deploy.

Gotta love the coordination of the psychic Discord allowing Temper and Psylocke to take advantage of vertical space so Cyclops can unleash an optic blast. It's sharp, kinetic action as well as a display of competence before the unexpected flips everything on its head.

Using Psylocke to get up to date intelligence on enemy tactics reinforces this while signalling that the turn is right around the corner. They don't want to fight mutants but they may have to. Ellis' trustees have been seeded all through Uncanny and it's horrifying to learn the extent of it. The X-Men know before we do, so our imagination briefly goes wild before we turn the page.

Blob AKA Fred Dukes has been wonderfully rehabilitated in the last five years, first in Age of X-Man and then as the dutiful, friendly barkeep of Krakoa's Green Lagoon. Seeing him like this sucks, but it's earned and should concern Scott who's been fighting him since he was a teenager. They don't want to hurt him though they do know how to neutralize him.

Then the action and adrenaline screeches to a halt as they come face to face with the Uncanny team. It's an effective cliffhanger to end on and the first explicit scene to say 'yes, this is a crossover.' It speaks well of the issue that Mackay waits until the last page to show that the Uncanny team are doing the same thing as the X-Men - a prison break.

I don't love that the tension between the teams has not been built aside from Logan (whose eyes are healed!) inexplicably hating on Scott. Rogue is effectively calling Scott out for standing by and poor communication, but both apply to her too. It's a cliffhanger within a crossover, so it's doubly unlikely they start fighting immediately, but I do wish we'd been given more reason for them to be at odds. Solicits suggest they don't come to blows until Uncanny #8, so hopefully they're able to cooperate in the short term. There's been a lot of editorialising about an ideological divide between the two, and a heated, dangerous situation is a good place for that to happen.

I've made no effort to hide my disappointment in this area, but the slick execution of this issue gives me some hope. Time will tell. I'll be frank and say that crossover events are often rife with needless conflict and mischaracterisation. However, so far so good, as Jed Mackay has had a great week of X-Men. He nailed Avengers #21 and X-Men #8 was a huge step up from the tenor of the run so far. The pacing is top notch, the characters are acting like themselves, and all the pieces are in place for some messy escalation. I've been harsh on his work so far, so it's only fair to give credit where it's due. X-Men #8 is a banger well worth reading.

[uniquepeanutcreatorfire]

Hazbin Hotel vs. The Purge

Today, I'm going to examine and analyze HH's annual extermination by comparing it to another fictional event that I feel is similar in terms of ethical dilemma or morality, the annual purge in The Purge movie franchise. For those who haven't seen the movies, the purge is a 12-hour annual event where all crimes are legal.

Let's start with the purge and what's known about it:

Cause(s): Multiple wars led to an economic collapse and rising social unrest.

Rules: Here's a screenshot-

Outcome(s):  As a result, crime and unemployment rates plummeted to 1% and there's a strong economy. It's seen as a way for people to release their violent tendencies and aggression.

Implication(s): Lower, working classes are specifically targeted as they don't have the protection that upper classes can afford during the purges.

Sounds simple enough (there's more to it, if you don't want to watch all the movies, here's a link to the trilogy explained).

Now moving on to the annual extermination in HH.

Cause(s): This is confusing. The pilot initially presented that the exterminations were due to overpopulation in Hell. However, the actual show doesn't show any hints that the population is rapidly increasing, or overpopulation is causing any issues in Hell. The first episode stated that Heaven started exterminations to ensure sinners never rise against them. I don't see how that's possible since there aren't accessible ways to Heaven from Hell. Lucifer, a former angel, had to get permission from Heaven to get a temporary portal for Charlie so how do you think sinners are going to get up there to be a threat in the first place? Also, I wanted to point out that Charlie's plan to send sinners to Heaven only makes sense if overpopulation was actually a problem. Since there isn't anywhere else to place sinners other than the Pride ring. However, the narrative suggest otherwise.

Rules: It's not clear what the rules are for annual exterminations other than the exorcists can't kill the royal family or hellborns. Is it on a set date and time? Do exorcists go inside buildings? We see that the exterminations take place outside. This begs the question why don't sinners just hide and barricade themselves to avoid getting killed? There could be news broadcast reminding sinners of an upcoming extermination so they can be prepared.

Outcome(s): It's not clear how the exterminations affect Hell's society since the show never gives a glimpse of that. If overpopulation is an issue, it doesn't seem to help at all. Sinners don't seem to care and go on about their business. Let's not explore those who may have lost friends or loved ones. There are also the overlords who lose souls.... poor them, I guess. We can't forget the most important thing...... it's makes Charlie sad.

Implication(s): Heaven apparently never thought this would build hatred towards them, very smart. This is why Adam ended up dead. I want to bring up Lilith being the one who empowered sinners. Since she's been removed from the equation for seven years, what's the point in Heaven doing exterminations anymore? The only message I get from it is "genocide bad". But why is genocide bad in the context of the Hellaverse? There have been killings in HB/HH that are considered no big deals (including humans the imps kill on Earth that contribute to HH's problem further). There's also the black market for angelic weapons that's never brought up. I'm just not invested in the sinners as a whole to care.

Conclusion: The extermination is an interesting concept that can be explore in many aspects like The Purge. It's just not much thought went into it which makes it less compelling.

[beifong-brainrot]

Kuvira's unsustainable empire.

Stalin is here too. For some reason

I do often find myself wondering just how sustainable the Earth Empire Kuvira created was. Outside of the whole ethnostate thing, I have seen plenty of people argue that what Kuvira was doing was good for the Earth Kingdom and its people.

Kuvira: Growing up in Zaofu, with Suyin Beifong, I learned that the idea of a royal family passing a title from one generation to the next was archaic, and that technology and innovation should be what drives a nation forward. [...] It's taken me three years to get it back on track, and there is no way I will allow it to slip back into the dark ages. [...]

I find myself both tentaively agreeing with and vehemently against these opinions.

It's true that Kuvira helped stabilise the crime problem of the Earth Kingdom post the death of the Earth Queen. She also seemed to have greatly modernised and industrialised the Kingsom as well.

Of course, this actually makes perfect sense when looking at the real life inspirations behind Kuvira and her empire.

A lot of people compare Kuvira's rule over the Earth Empire to the Nazi party. And there is good reason to. But there are also huge ties between her and the rise and rule of Stalinism over the Eastern Bloc.

I think the main reason people compare Kuvira to the Nazis (other than the comparison seeming easier) is the ethnic clensing, concentration camps, etc.

But the thing is, the USSR also did that. The NKVD targeted many ethnic minorities, often accused for secretly plotting against the country.

Now, we never really are given a good reason for why Kuvira went through with an ethnic clensing in her empire. Which honestly kinda fits because from most testimonies I've read, a lot of people who were detained by the NKVD weren't told what they were being detained for either.

Bolin: So how did a bunch of water and firebenders end up in one of Kuvira's reeducation camps?

Ahnah: [Angrily.] Call it what it is: a prison.

Baraz: Kuvira's been purging states of anyone who's not of Earth Kingdom origin and locking them up.

Now the use of the term 'purging' immediately brings to mind the aptly named Great Purge (also known as the Great Terror.), which was essentially Stalin killing a lot of people in order to consolidate his power and remove influence of his political opponent. (A lot of people is apparently from 700,000 to 1.2 million)

Utilising violence in order to remove political rivals is also a pattern for Kuvira.

Of course tlok is stil a kid's show, so no oke is getting shot in the back of the head, but Kuvira uses implicit threats of violence to bend others to her will.

Kuvira was quite alright allowing the people of the state of Yi to starve and die purely because they refused to completely submit to her. (the idea of starvation is a surprise tool thay will help us later!) She also sends men after Wu, due to him posing no immediate threat to her. This is a very smart tactic of methodically stripping away anything that can question the legitimacy of her rule.

The branding of people who disagree with her, even people who were never allied with her, as traitor is also a very smart tactic.

Kuvira: Bring the citizens of Zaofu to kneel before the Great Uniter! All who pledge their loyalty to me will keep their freedom and will be dealt with fairly as full citizens of the Earth Empire. The rest will be imprisoned as traitors, like Su Beifong and her sons. Now bow!

Whoever is against Kuvira, is against the nation... questioning the leader equals treason... got it.

However, Kuvira's... strong punishments don't exactly extend to the very outlaws she was meant to weed out.

Kuvira: Stop groveling as if this is the worst day of your life. This ... is a good day. I'm going to give you all the opportunity to rehabilitate yourselves, and become productive members of your nation. Right now, you're lost, but pledge your loyalty to me, and I'll give you a new purpose in your lives. Of course, if you don't want to join, you could always stay right here.

As you watch the show, you can clearly see that Kuvira valued her Empire's militaristic power more than anything, including her people's actual well-being.

This actually gives us a little insignt on Kuvira herself. Kuvira, ever since she was a child, has dealt with a lot of pain. And the way she dealt with it was by reacting with violence and by pushing others away, keeping her defences up, so to say. This is most seen in her relationship with the Beifongs, and how she would rather push them away and convince herself they never cared for her, than open up.

We also see that Kuvira projects her trauma onto the Earth Kingdom which is an.... interesting way of coping to be sure.

Kuvira: [...] I was cast aside by my own parents like I meant nothing to them. How could I just stand by and watch the same thing happen to my nation, when it needed someone to guide it?

And that's where we get into the unsustainability of Kuvira's empire. She prioritises what she percives as safety. However, she seems to be pouring an astronomical amount of resources into her military.

I mean, how much money do you think was dumped just into this thing alone:

FUCKING LOOK AT ITS GOOFY ASS

To give Kuvira the benefit of the doubt, we don't really get to see what really goes on in the areas she's conquered. (which kinda sucks like did we really need all those episodes in Republic City)

We do however have Opal's testimony, and while she is biased against Kuvira, I don't really think she has any incentive to lie here.

Opal : They might have been happy when you first arrived, but I've seen what happens after you leave. Citizens are forced to work as slave labor, dissenters are sent off to who-knows-where!

I wouldn't be completely surprised if it were revealed that Kuvira introduced some manner of collectivisation in the Empire. Since this would also mirror the USSR's collectivisation of agriculture in real life. Plus, it would allow Kuvira to handle more respurces she could funnel into the army. This is also kinda supported by Varrick telling Bolin this:

Varrick: Relax, kid, what can they do? Kuvira controls the whole nation now, and Republic City is begging for the metal that we're mining. This train has left the station, and we own the track!

This implies that Kuvira excudes at least some amount of control over all the aspects of the country's economy.

More proof of this lies in Kuvira's words about literally seizing and redistributing Zaofu's resources as she sees fit.

Kuvira: [...] Zaofu cannot continue to rule itself. They have been hoarding their riches and technology too long. I'm here to distribute those resources fairly throughout the nation. This is about equality.

How much do you want to bet that 99% of those riches and technology went to the invention of Avatarverse's equivalent of nuclear warfare?

How much money was spent on Kuvira's military. More important question, how much food would it take to keep this military alive. Especially that you must also count other batalions and forces stationed around the country, so this isn't even all of it.

So we have a country where the citizens are forced into slave labour and most likely are poorly fed, in order to bolster and uphold a military (that probably consists of at least a few criminals). This is... not really good nor sustainable.

But it is in character for Kuvira, someone who prioritises her percieved 'safety' over everything, even her own other needs. Such as her very obvious desire for relationships.

Sadly Kuvira projecting her poor coping mechanisms onto an entire country isn't the best idea lol.

"But, Quill!", I hear you say, "If Kuvira ran the country so poorly, why did she have so many fans and supporters? "

That's where we get into ye ole cult of personality. Propaganda can be a shockingly effective tool, one that was used a lot by Stalin.

Similarly, we see tons of propaganda surrounding Kuvira. Even her title, The Great Uniter reeks of it. There's a lot of spectacle and performance in how Kuvira intracts with her people.

There's many examples of Kuvira twisting the narrative to make herself look better/more reliable, especially to her subordinates. Her lying about Bolin and Varrick still being with her, her portraying herself as a peaceful negotiator at Zaofu, despite threatening the Beifongs with an attack (her ignoring Wei's question of "you call bringing an army to threaten our city peaceful?" also feels very poignat because there really is no good way to answer that question lmao)

Her speech to her men before her fight with Korra is also a good example.

Kuvira: Fine. I want you all to know that I would never ask any of you to do something that I'm not willing to do myself. So, rather than risk your lives, I will fight the Avatar one-on-one.

Yes, perhaps to some extent she wanted to keep her soldiers safe, but this was also calculated. I'm quite sure Kuvira was able to tell Korra was weakened, she comments on it a few times. Kuvira has hostages, Zaofu's forces are diminished by her taking a lot of them with her. She clearly has no care for civilian lives, she attacked Republic City, a place full of civilians earlier than expected, it was guaranteed the place wouldn't be evacuated in time.

Kuvir holds all the cards here, but she still puts on this spectacle, because what better way to convince your followers about your power than kicking the Avatar's ass?

Kuvira's rule is built upon by the cult of personality surrounding her. She is, to some extent the figurehead that brought the army together.

There's fucking merch of her, she signs autographs, like she's a celebrity. This is deliberate. This is what keeps people blind and excusing her shortcomings and cruelty as a leader.

This may also be why Kuvira's right hand man, Baatar Jr seemed to have gotten scott free off for the crimes he also partook in. He may have helped Kuvira commit them, but he wasn't "the face of the empire" , so to speak.

Also no one gives a fuck about him for some reason despite him being a really interating character. I also want to make a longer post about Baatar, Kuvira and the consequences they faced for their actions.

In the end, I think that Kuvira is a very troubled young woman, who gained a good deal of power very quickly. And used that power the only way she knew how. To control and protect by pushing away any percieved threats.

You can see the Earth Empire as an extension of Kuvira herself, in a way. Kuvira has been through pain, and built up very prickly painful walls, while also maintaining a tight grip on her vulnerability.

The cult of personality thing would also be a more self indulgent aspect of Kuvira's trauma bleeding into her rule. Kuvira wants to build relationships, but doesn't want the vulnerability that comes from true relationships (most likely one of the main reasons she distanced herself from the Beifongs). This makes sense, as she did experience the cruelest rejection one can go through, being rejected by one's own parents.

However, facilitating connections where she has all the power would allow her to reap the benefits of relationships, without having the vulnerability she fears so much. (The exception to this rule is Baatar Jr. And I do wanna talk more about him and his relationship to Kuvira one day).

Kuvira is a really complex person, who really shouldn't have been placed in any position of power. But Raiko and Tenzin really needed someone to do the dirty work so they could place Wu on the throne (and probably puppet him) so uh. Yay.

Also I'm really not sure what this rant even is at this point. It was gonna be me complaining about Kuvira running the Earth Empire. Then it became me vomiting the contents of my history textbooks onto you.

Tbh I feel like I've been stating the obvious so uh. Yay. But enjoy my rambles lol

[niuttuc]

What are your opinions on the Commander bans?

(Putting this out of the blue, this will be about the fast mana. Nadu also got banned, but Nadu doesn't really matter here. It's good that he's gone, though it doesn't make a ton of difference considering people already identified him as a broken card and pushed it away. Also this post became long but there's a TL;DR at the end if you want.

And for context if someone somehow missed the announcement this week: Mana Crypt, Jeweled Lotus and Dockside Extortionist were just banned in Commander. A bunch of controversy has ensued.)

Alright, tackling this can of worms. It will be a long one. Well, I have very positive thoughts about the bannings themselves, they can only be positive for the gameplay end, my only slight bad feeling personally is that I've traded my mana crypt (I wasn't playing with it) to someone I know three or four months back and I feel bad for them, but they found a home for it in a cube, so it stays being played.

I have generally believed fast mana makes for worse games, and I have for years removed my Sol Rings from my decks, didn't play my mana crypt even after I opened it, and never tried to even obtain a dockside even when I knew it could be a great card in several of my decks. I am plenty surprised at the announcement that seemed to come out of the blue after so long of no changes, especially since these cards have been issues in the way the ban announcement describes for years at this point. But at some point the band-aid needs to be ripped off. I also understand why Sol Ring isn't banned, even if I believe the format's gameplay would be better if it didn't exist in it. There are more factors at play here, and most people, particularly casual people, would want to keep it in their decks than have it banned, and that's more important. I'll just keep not putting it in mine.

I've seen some people claim that it would negatively impact cEDH metagame. Now, I do not play cEDH so feel free to disregard my opinion on this if you do and think I'm completely off-base. But my understanding of cEDH is NOT that it's a healthy metagame or an actually good competitive environment. The rules of the format are designed to make commander awful to compete in. And the banlist has, from its inception, explicitly not been aimed at regulating a balanced competitive format. This is also why, in my mind, the idea of splitting cEDH and Commander into separate banlists and formats is a nonstarter. As I'll get to later, there are already separations like that, the only thing that'd change is that there would be a new niche format, and actual competitive commander using Commander's rules would keep on, because using Commander's rules is the point of it.

cEDH comes from the will to take the rules as they are, NOT meant for this, and see what happens when you push them to the extreme. cEDH's meta as far as I can tell is basically just a bunch of flavors of combo decks pitted against each other, with a handful of hyper-targeted combo-killers in the meta too. This is reminiscent of combo winter, widely regarded as one of the least healthy metagames of all time, but stretched to years and years.

There are certainly people that will appeal to, since it's not actually about a healthy metagame and more about tiny optimizations and ultra-tight piloting and navigating a pod. But this also means a banning doesn't change the fundamental nature of all this, nor should it take it into account. If someone wanted an actual singleton competitive experience designed for a more healthy and balanced metagame, they could look at Duel Commander, now officially supported on MTGO and that walks back many of the uncompetitive rules changes of Commander to allow it, or even Highlander formats of all kinds, designed for the ground up for a diverse and balanced but powerful competitive experience.

Now, with that aside, the main complaints I've seen about the bannings have overwhelmingly been along the lines of "I lost money so this decision sucks", either outright or behind a thin veil. While it does suck that people lost money, the monetary value of a card cannot shield it from banning if it's egregious. The next argument, then is that there should have been more of a warning that the RC was looking at those cards and considering banning them. But for how long? And for what purpose? Relatively few actually read what the RC writes, particularly when there are no changes, and thus far it hadn't resulted in actual changes in years. And if the warning was stronger, what would be the result? People in the know selling their cards in advance to people who aren't so they aren't the ones left holding the bag? That just pushes the problem away to different people. If the price goes down by half, it doesn't matter if it's over the course of three months or two days, someone is "losing" that money somewhere.

And yes, a banning cut the price of those cards in a bunch, but so do reprintings. If the cards were reprinted regularly, and not at mythic in masters sets, they'd not climb this high to have so much to lose. If they were a positive on the format, reprints would even be welcome by all, allowing more people into the format. WotC is the one handling that end of things, and they see more profit in starving players than in overflooding a market.

I've also occasionally seen the argument that "they shouldn't have banned Jeweled Lotus because Jeweled Lotus was made for Commander and only works in Commander and now there's nothing to do with it (meme Legacy deck aside.)" It is true that Jeweled Lotus is now essentially a blank piece of cardboard. But if it is such an issue in the ONE FORMAT IT WAS MADE FOR, then that isn't a reason to just ignore it and carry on. That's a reason that WotC shouldn't have made the card in the first place, yes, since the result is the same except a lot of players got burned. It's not like Jeweled Lotus being an issue was a surprise, there was plenty of commentary on that end when it was revealed, and the most optimistic ones on the impact on the format were along the lines of "I don't know how this could make the format better, but maybe it doesn't make it worse."

With all of that, I must add and condemn people who used this as a pretext to attack individuals, most prominently members of the Rules Committee and Commander Advisory Group (the latter of which had no idea this was coming), or more generally people trying to support the ban, and probably some directed at people protesting it too, though I've seen less in the way of very public examples of the latter. Emotions runs hot, the knee-jerk reaction to change is already negative and it's even worse if you feel like you've lost money, but that's no excuse for the kinds of insults, threats and other name-calling that has occurred in startling amounts over the past week. Only a tiny percentage got there, but any amount is too much.

I believe that the negative reactions (the regular ones, not the actively harmful ones), as loud as they are, only represent a small portion of the overall community. The people discussing Magic: The Gathering on the internet are, overall, a small fraction of the playerbase, and tend to be way more into the game than the average player. As such, they're also way more likely to have obtained some of these expensive cards that were banned, and therefore to feel affected by these bans, both monetarily and by needing to remove the cards from their decks. To further that, negative comments are much more likely to get posted (and to linger days later, and keep being posted), than positive ones, or people that don't care enough to post their thoughts to begin with. So even if you see a lot of negativity on this ban in places, I believe it to be the product of a loud minority.

I've also seen people arguing that since Commander is a casual format, it doesn't need a banlist at all and they'll just ignore this one. That's true! If it works for you, that's great, that's the format working as intended! But many people don't have the luxury to curate a personal experience with a specific group, or don't have the time and knowledge to do so. For those, the official banlist provides a good base, and now that base states that stuff that makes a ton of mana early is usually makes for worse games.

TL;DR:

I like the bans on a gameplay perspective, the announcement was out of the blue but the band-aid needed to be ripped off, cEDH will be fine because that's what it was made for, sorry if you lost money on this, but it shouldn't be more important than the health of the entire format, the people shouting loudly are likely a minority, and the people attacking others over it a small minority within that one, but don't be a part of that select group. A banlist is good and one that actually tries to fix things instead of claiming the issues are smaller than they are is also something positive.