#but i will never be as unkind and ungenerous as him

[britneyshakespeare]

I don't like to go around assuming people actually dislike me because I'm smarter than them but in the experience I've had with people who do, their problem is not that they're dumb it's that they are rude. However intelligent I may seem, I am never pretentious or disagreeable and I do not make a point of seeming to be better than anyone. In fact I often go to great lengths to disclaim my own talents. And people who view others through the eyes of envy and malice give me no charity in any regard and think it no ill to mistreat me.

[utilitycaster]

oh PLEASE elaborate on your thoughts about why people say Brenann's hogging the spotlight after you're back from work 👀

This is actually a very long answer, because morning me is someone with the bright sun shining behind her and a full cup or four of coffee who does not think of the consequences of her actions, so it's below a cut.

I think the first reason is something best described as cultural but in a very specific way. Like...the bulk of actual players we talk about are people who have, just by default, spent a lot of time in a handful of cities in the US where there's a significant entertainment industry presence, and for D20 they've specifically been comedians. I say this to set a particular scene: I almost never get it when people think the cast of an actual play show is angry at each other, or that people are being too pushy or that the humor is off. I suspect this might be cultural; I am from the urban Northeastern US and my mom grew up in Los Angeles and I have three siblings, and so a lot of what people clock as aggression or unkindness reads to me as simply banter or straightforwardness or decisiveness, all of which I see as very positive things. I mean obviously there is a such thing as inappropriate humor, bigotry and jokes at the expense of other groups and so forth, but most of what I see in actual play I watch/listen to is just, as NADDPod puts it, taking your friends to the raspberry patch. It's good-humored teasing. Anyway I think Brennan is very willing to engage with that banter and that decisiveness (and like, he spent a lot of formative time in New York City which I'm sure is an influence) and I think that reads to people who are uncomfortable with it as aggression.

Someone who took more linguistic anthropology or sociology than I could probably explain this better but it's just like...as a person I find the rapid-fire and heated but good natured heckling on D20, or Sam's satirical ad reads, or bold moves in any D&D game, or the arguments on NADDPod D&D court to be very normal and enjoyable, and I find hesitation and hedging and uncertainty and "are you sure?" and endless check-ins to be very negative and anxiety-inducing and draining.

With that said I don't think Brennan is particularly egregious (Evan Kelmp is the one case where I think this is a valid criticism, but even then I didn't find him an ungenerous player, merely one who by design was going to occupy a certain position) so I think that brings me to the really delicate part of this conversation.

I've mentioned this in the past but I think a lot of the actual play fandom on Tumblr suffers pretty severely from what's been labeled "the soft bigotry of low expectations." I've been vocal quite specifically when it comes to misogyny and how the agency of the women of the cast is treated as true only when convenient, because I feel that as a woman I'm able to actually speak on those terms, but I think it's true across the board. Essentially, this means that the bar is (often unconsciously) set lower, or people overly applaud, to a perhaps even condescending degree, people from minority or underrepresented groups. It is not, to be clear, having DEI programs or helping people be in something (in this case...popular actual play) in the first place and acknowledging structural inequalities that might make the path more difficult; it's instead assuming that once they get there they'll never be quite as good, or being surprised when they are. I think the most classic example is the overuse of the word "eloquent" to describe Black speakers, as it often comes with this connotation that being well-spoken is something the person providing the compliment didn't expect. You know, if you're an adult with no significant cognitive or physical disabilities and someone compliments you for tying your shoes, it's pretty fucking insulting. That's what we're talking about here.

The way this manifests in the fandom is that there's really no room to provide criticisms that are not motivated by bigotry. I'm a critic by nature, and there's a general veneer of obnoxious insistence on positivity across the board in this and many fandoms, but, as I've said many times before (and to be fair it's getting better) the pushback people receive for completely valid criticisms of Marisha is intense. I've mentioned that I've had issues with story pacing for Brennan, Matt, and Aabria as DMs at different points, and the backlash for Aabria was the strongest even though the criticism was by no means the harshest. There is a certain degree of nonstop fawning that at times occurs that doesn't actually permit engaging with characters or discussing the actual strengths of the actors, and which often wraps around into something insulting; see the "Emily, breaker of DMs" nonsense that's finally getting called out. Because it's not a compliment! Part of why Emily is such a good player is that she is immensely collaborative and makes characters who will help with party composition, and she self-identifies as a big fan of DMs, and treating her (or like, anyone) as a perfect force of nature rather than a thinking person who makes decisions, some of which are good and some of which are bad, is not praise! It's not praise to exclude someone from valid criticism; it's treating them as lesser, to do so.

For a number of reasons I am a person who is not generally stopped by this, but a lot of people understandably aren't, or are deterred even by that more general need for nothing but praise...except constant praise starts to become meaningless, and more importantly, people sometimes have negative feelings about a show! Maybe a character they liked died, or their predictions didn't come true, or their ship didn't happen, or they're just not very interested in a specific plot. But it's impossible to actually pick apart what isn't working for them, because there's this environment where, if you start asking questions, the answer might be "I don't like the choice a player who is a woman, or nonwhite, or queer, made, and how it weighs upon the story." And so, and this is where I am treading so lightly, I don't think the issue in the fandom or TTRPG is "oh the poor straight white men in D&D", because that's obviously fucking ridiculous, but I do think that if you block off any criticism of anyone else, it lands somewhere, and it's often not actually justified.

The example I actually have in mind more often is Sam Riegel. I've made some pretty harsh criticism of Sam and some of his characters in the past, but it has always been very much about his choices. But every single time I've gotten some weird (and uh...very uncomfortable, frankly) venting about Sam's sense of humor. I have never really focused on his sense of humor as the problem. I like it. I find it extremely relatable. At the risk of using the bigotry script again, Sam is, in fact, of the same ethnicity and region of the US as I am (ie, northeast US Ashkenazi Jewish) and when people act like his humor is discomfiting it's like a neon sign that to me reads "I HAVE NEVER MET SOMEONE FROM YOUR CULTURE," which on the one hand, not necessarily their fault, but on the other, does not feel great to have someone on anon venting to you while this sign is staring you in the face.

But that is a different point - my point is that I feel like there's this...seething magma of discontent sometimes, that has built up because there is an attitude that criticism is to be avoided at nearly all costs. And when it must be vented, there are only a small handful of acceptable targets (ie, the cis straight white men, although among the CR and D20 casts, Taliesin and Zac both get a decent amount of this despite Taliesin not being straight and Zac not being white), so the criticisms that come out are often excessive for the infraction (Brennan, a famously wordy guy playing a literal college of eloquence bard, turns into "Brennan is a spotlight hog" despite him being a player who is enthusiastically yes-anding everyone at the table), flat-out misdirected (my criticisms of Sam's mechanics are treated as an invitation to talk about a dislike of Sam's jokes) or just straight up bile (I am quite frankly never forgetting the somehow popular post that said Travis was too stupid to play a druid; it really was a breaking point where I said oh this positivity is all fake as hell, huh.) And eventually these criticisms become the "safe" and "accepted" ones in the fandom. Which is also bad because like, at this point, those three examples are to me just signals of someone saying "I'm not happy but it might not necessarily be at all related to this." And it is possible that someone might genuinely not enjoy Sam's sense of humor, or think Brennan is hogging the spotlight (though I disagree), but I struggle to believe them because these are just the well-worn codes, devoid of their actual meaning. I also think it's notable these all squarely blame people and not just like, "I don't vibe with this choice and no one is specifically at fault" but that's also a whole other post.

This is of course not to say that there isn't also actual bigotry within the fandom; looking at that person who freaked out about Utkarsh wearing a sweatshirt and not having an encyclopedic knowledge of the divine soul sorcerer class, or the person who called Deni$e unpleasant and abusive in the main tag, rather than simply saying their characters were not for them. Nor does it mean that you can't have criticisms of Brennan, or any of the many white guys in Actual Play, because my point is that thoughtful criticism based on what's onscreen is what I live for, and no one is exempt. But I think most if not all people saying this about Brennan are mad about something else in the Ravening War.

[five-sparrows-two-pennies]

(un)forgiveness & a letter

22 October 2023

Tonight, my mum and I got into an argument - I can't even really remember how it started - and before you knew it, mum was bringing up all the things she was still angry at me about. She told me there were two things she could never forgive me for: 1. An offhand comment I texted her a week ago, a partial joke (though admittedly unkind) which she amplified into an accusation against her character. I apologised then and I apologised again tonight, said I would be more careful with my words, and said that her refusal to forgive would only cause herself pain. I have known her for all 23 years of my life - of course I was bound to hurt her sometimes. If she kept storing up unforgiveness, she would only come to hate me (and anyone else) eventually. 2. An incident from over three years ago when mum first said she wanted a divorce, and like any heartbroken daughter whose world had suddenly come crashing down, I tried to get her to at least think about her decision a little more - and I did this in the form of a letter with a Bible verse reference. I wrote the letter out of love and I gave it to her with a trembling heart. And now three years later, she tells me it is an incident she'll never forgive me for. I think what hurts the most is the realisation that my mum has not understood the gospel. I had always recognised that a great contributing factor to my parents' marriage breakdown was the lack of communication - issues swept under the carpet and never discussed, which led to resentment on mum's part, built-up over many years. I had always suspected that my mum wasn't very good at forgiveness in a marriage, which is absolutely essential. I realise now, with a heavy heart and soaked cheeks, that she hasn't understood the gospel at all, for anybody who knew of their sinfulness, and knew how much God has forgiven them through Jesus - a debt wiped clean, a love that keeps no record of wrongs (1 Cor. 13:5) - could not hold a grudge against anybody else who wronged them. I think I must from now on pray very hard for my mum regarding this issue. It is times like this that I feel it is very difficult living with someone who does not really love God. I know this is no excuse to not do so - in fact, it's a great opportunity to show someone Christ's love - but mum's comments makes me feel like I have to be perfect, because any foul comment or ungenerous facial expression (even if unintended but interpreted that way) seems to leave a permanent stain on who I am in her eyes. "I know what you are like," my mum said in the heat of her anger - a few simple words which, in a matter seconds, wipe away every other good deed you have ever done, a few words which dismiss every effort you've ever made to change, a few words which reduce you to your supposed inherent nature - and fail to see the potential in you to become the person God made you to be, the person He is growing you into every day as you seek Him. This is how Christians ought to see each other. It would be nice living with someone like that.

[pollylynn]

Title: Speak WC: 1500

“Something . . . terrible in his childhood?”  — Richard Castle, Hollander’s Woods (7 x 23)

There is a little boy she imagines—a little boy she has no option but to imagine—falling silent. The idea that this little boy has anything at all to do with the man who fills all the empty spaces in her life is almost unthinkable. And it’s heartbreaking in so many different ways. 

The heartbreak begins with the part of the story that wounds her, however unfair, however unkind, however beside the point it might be in this current, terrible moment. It begins with the reality that the boy’s silence has not been absolute. This story, this terrible unfolding of a stark event that is so central in his life, is the key he handed over to his captors—to the people who took him away from her—to bar the door once and for all to the truth about where he had been, what he had done, what had been done to him. She—his partner and his wife—can only imagine this little boy, and yet there are ruthless people who know the deepest secret that traumatized child ever held in his heart. 

It is undeniably a wound, and the cracks in her heart left by the months he was gone—the months she thought she had lost him forever—are healing still. But she knows the value of scars. She knows that they signify resilience, survival, a future forged in a past that has tested them and found them still standing, more sure of one another than ever. She knows all this, and it is that profound love that takes her beyond the ungenerous moment. It is empathy that takes her beyond. 

She thinks of the terror in the eyes of every child she has encountered since she clipped on the badge for the first time. She thinks of the rough treatment she has seen them suffer, even at the hands of the well meaning, because the very procedures exist to protect them wind up too often treating them like adults in miniature. She recalls hanging back—and suffering with it—as more senior officers, detectives, and so on would rattle unthinkingly on through standard interview questions that would double-back, drill down, and sanity check, never registering the building fear each child clearly had of not being believed. 

She imagines him, that terrified little boy, bravely defying the monster from the first. She pictures him battling the silence, sweeping aside the threat—Tell anyone what you’ve seen here today and I’ll find you and kill you—the best way he knew how, because leaving that woman in the woods, leaving the monster roaming free, was never an option for him. She imagines him formulating his battle plans. 

She thinks of the man who fills all the empty spaces in her life and tries to fathom how he found the strength to go against his every instinct, to hold his tongue with his friend, his friend’s parents, with Martha. Her heart aches as she thinks of that resolve, so far beyond his years, born of the certainty that he was doing what he could to keep them all safe. It aches as she envisions that brave little boy running into who knows what kind of disbelief, what kind of rough treatment that would have made his hands tremble, his voice shake on the the other end of that heroic 911 call. 

And to have it end in nothing—to have him fall silent again, this time thinking he’d failed . . . It’s another kind of heartbreak to think of him in those months before the horror faded into something he came to hope had only been a nightmare. It’s another kind of heartbreak to imagine him carrying that weight all those years, when she knows how often he was lonely, how often silence was the only option available to him.

It’s exhausting, this exercise in imagining that little boy—terrified at first, then resolute in spite of the terror, that little boy  growing ever more despondent and ultimately silent. It challenges every notion about him she has ever held in her mind or her heart. It seems impossible to find in this silent, imaginary little boy the seeds of her partner, her husband, the man who fills all the empty spaces in her life. But it seems important that she try. 

He is suffering with this. His knees are buckling under the weight he has been carrying for more than thirty years—under the new and terrible weight of the reality that the woman whose cold body he reached out to touch was one of who knows how many. He is spiraling as the failure he imagines to be his and his alone delivers blow after blow, and it seems vital that she reach back through time and silence to find that little boy. 

This is what he does for her. This is what he has done for her from the very first, when he laid out the story of her life in bold, simple strokes—And you probably could have lived with that, but the person responsible was never caught. 

He has, for seven years now, spent his days and nights summoning up the little girl she was, the disaffected teen, the whipsawing young woman who was trying to find a way to rebel against parents who were so eminently sensible, reasonable, approachable. He has never accepted her silence on any matter of the head, of the heart, of the past. He has annoyed her half to death with it, but he has also helped her in countless ways to make sense of her memories, her tendencies, her mind and her heart. He has always celebrated the force for good that her mother’s death has made of her, but he has never settled for—he has never let her settle for—the idea of herself as some kind of reassembled ruin.

It seems vital now that she return the favor, but she is at a loss. She thinks of her own failures in this regard, and that’s another kind of heartbreak. She thinks of Damien Westlake and Robert Weldon—she thinks even of his father, though it sets her teeth on edge. She thinks of the times she has held up his enduring faith in people, his kindness and deep desire to find the good as sentiment, as weakness, as childishness. She thinks of the fang of doubt she let Meredith lodge in her heart. She sees how easy it would seem to be, even now, to shift blame for his silences solely on to his shoulders.

She is at a loss. She falters when he falters. When Van Holtzman is dead and his victims are brought finally, slowly, painfully into the light, she expects him—childishly expects him—to come bounding back, blazing bright with belief, charity, optimism. But instead there is silence, growing ever more painful with each passing moment. Instead there is the aching, complicated reality that with resolution finally at hand, he finds himself deeply uncertain. He finds himself wondering about the road he has traveled to this moment—wondering if his life, his happiness, his entire being has come at the cost of the lives of these women, just coming to light. With the monster slain, he is shaken, rather than reassured, and she is at a loss for how to tend to the terrified heart of the little boy she can only imagine, the wounded soul of the man who fills all the empty spaces in her life. 

She wishes, of all things, that she could give him the gift of her mother. She wishes she could reach back through time and nudge her mother into that imagined little boy’s life at just the right moment. She would like to put the two of them on a park bench, in a subway car, atop the highest peak of the Cyclone at Coney Island. 

The story would spill out of him. She knows this, just as surely as she knows her mother would have had the perfect words to tell him that he had done the very best he could—that no one, least of all a child, should have had to endure such an experience. She knows her mother would have had the perfect words to tell him that this terrible thing would not define him, that he should never settle for being something reassembled from its ruins. 

Something comes over her as the wish pulses through her, heart and soul. He never has, never will make a believer in the mystical out of her, but something comes over her. There is a  moment that is stillness, rather than silence, a moment in which she is suffused with her mother’s love, with his love. She finds—or maybe becomes—a more perfect version of herself, the Kate that the two of them have always seen. She finds—or maybe becomes—the grace he needs.

Babe, we’re not here because of him . . .

A/N: Oh, look. That is not 151 things! It’s a little bit bananas, but this is the end again. I thank you all. Once again, I’m at a loss for what I will do with myself overnight without these stories to write. In the short term, I’ll probably toss them up at AO3. Again, thank you all for putting up with my silliness. 

images via homeofthenutty

[yeslordmyking]

July, 5 (Evening) Devotion

“Trust ye in the Lord forever: for in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength.”

Isaiah 26:4

Seeing that we have such a God to trust to, let us rest upon him with all our weight; let us resolutely drive out all unbelief, and endeavour to get rid of doubts and fears, which so much mar our comfort; since there is no excuse for fear where God is the foundation of our trust. A loving parent would be sorely grieved if his child could not trust him; and how ungenerous, how unkind is our conduct when we put so little confidence in our heavenly Father who has never failed us, and who never will. It were well if doubting were banished from the household of God; but it is to be feared that old Unbelief is as nimble nowadays as when the psalmist asked, “Is his mercy clean gone forever? Will he be favourable no more?” David had not made any very lengthy trial of the mighty sword of the giant Goliath, and yet he said, “There is none like it.” He had tried it once in the hour of his youthful victory, and it had proved itself to be of the right metal, and therefore he praised it ever afterwards; even so should we speak well of our God, there is none like unto him in the heaven above or the earth beneath; “To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal? saith the Holy One.” There is no rock like unto the rock of Jacob, our enemies themselves being judges. So far from suffering doubts to live in our hearts, we will take the whole detestable crew, as Elijah did the prophets of Baal, and slay them over the brook; and for a stream to kill them at, we will select the sacred torrent which wells forth from our Saviour’s wounded side. We have been in many trials, but we have never yet been cast where we could not find in our God all that we needed. Let us then be encouraged to trust in the Lord forever, assured that his ever lasting strength will be, as it has been, our succour and stay.

Daily Bible and Devotional for Women - http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=daily.bible.for.woman