#but it’s not the same as killing you know? remorseless killing.

[rodismancave]

The one downside of no longer being at war, and therefore no longer in constant danger, is simply that you are not allowed a violent outlet anymore.

If you keep things locked inside for long enough, eventually they all get to their boiling point— and usually, you’d put the fire out before the pot overflows.

Rodimus’ outlet had been much the same as anyone else’s. He’d killed his entire life, he’d known violence to be a nice way to let things out, and he had never truly expected to live past the point where killing is no longer acceptable.

There had been an attempt at adapting. Rodimus would say he’s good at that, adapting to his surroundings, allowing himself to bend to the mold, or force the mold to bend to him. It’s only due to unfortunate circumstances that Rodimus had never sticked around enough to watch the mold tear apart and break.

Deep breath in, hold, deep breath out. The ceiling to his hab is colored in yellows and oranges and pinks, like a sunset. He had tried to take up painting. He’d enjoyed it. He’d painted every single thing he could, tried to learn everything there was to learn, and when he realized he quite enjoyed the abstract, he tried to paint his whole hab, every time he burned it. There are parts missing to the paint: a cyberbird’s wings he couldn’t remember how they bent, a shape near the Rust Sea that looked too similar to a roommate he’d had in Nyon.

When burnout took him, he found it amazing to tear it all apart. To watch the dry paint crumble when he passed a knife through, to peel it all off with his fingers, to burn it and watch it melt.

Then, when that was done, he’d regret it. He’d curl up and curse, because he’d enjoyed painting this, or because now the memory of the roommate is forever engrained in the walls, Nyon’s buildings are once again burnt to nothing, the bird’s wings will never set flight again. Rodimus will think about Cybertron, and he will think about people who are gone, and of things he never got to see and closure he never quite got to have.

Rodimus will look for his bucket of paint, dig his hands in, and imagine that it is blood.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Private equity rips off its investors, too

I'm coming to DEFCON! TOMORROW (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

It's amazing how many of the scams that have devastated our economy and everyday people owe their success to the fact that we assume that rich people know what they're doing, so if they're doing something, it must be real.

Think of how many people lost everything by gambling on junk bonds, exotic mortgage derivatives, cryptocurrency and web3, because they saw that the largest financial institutions in the world were going all-in on these weird, incomprehensible bets.

Then there are the people who are convinced that online advertising is built around a mind-control ray, because tech companies claim that's what they have ("I am an evil dopamine-loop-hacking wizard and I can sell anything to anyone!"), and because huge, sober blue-chip companies hand billions to these soi dissant svengalis. Sure, online ads are a swamp of clickfraud and garbage, but would these super smart captains of industry spend so much on online advertising if it didn't work super-well?

http://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

From our worms'-eye-view here on the ground, it's easy to assume that rich people and the people who sell them stuff are all on the same side. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," right? If Facebook is tormenting you with surveillance advertising, it must be doing so on behalf of the surveillance advertisers, for whom Mark Zuckerberg has bottomless reservoirs of honest, forthright impulses.

The reality is simultaneously weirder, and obvious in hindsight. The reason Zuck is tormenting you is that he's a remorseless sociopath who doesn't care who he hurts. He rips off everyone he can rip off, and that includes advertisers, who have seen steady price-hikes and lower-fidelity targeting, even as ad-fraud has skyrocketed while Facebook draws down its anti-fraud spending:

https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/

This is not to say that Facebook advertisers have your best interests at heart, that they aren't engaged in active deception in order to better themselves at your expense. Rather, it's to say that there's no honor among thieves, and Zuck is an equal-opportunity predator. Moreover, both Zuck and his advertisers are credulous dolts, so the mere fact that they are pouring money into something (advertisers: FB ads; Zuck: metaverse) it doesn't follow that these are real or important or the coming thing.

For me, the Ur-example of "rich people are dumb, even when it comes to money" is the private equity sector. I've written a lot about PE, and how destructive it is to the real economy, from Toys R Us to pet grooming:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/05/rugged-individuals/#misleading-by-analogy

How they killed Red Lobster:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

And how they actually created the death panels that Sarah Palin warned us about (it's OK, though: these death panels are run by the efficient private sector, not government bureaucrats):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

The devastating effect of private equity on the real economy is increasingly well understood, and a curious side-effect of this is that people assume that if PE is destroying their lives, they must be doing so on behalf of their investors, who are making bank.

But – like Zuck – PE bosses are just as happy to steal from their investors as they are to to steal from the workers and customers of the businesses they acquire on those investors' behalf. They swaddle this theft in performative complexity and specialized jargon, but when you strip all that away, you find more fraud.

All the misery that PE inflicts on workers, communities and customers are just a convincer in a Big Store con, a bid to make the scam seem credible. For a certain kind of investor, any economic activity that destroys communities and workers' livelihoods must be a good bet. This is the dynamic at work in the pitch of AI image-generator companies, who spend tens of billions on technology that there is no substantial market for:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter

AI image generators represent a high-profile, extremely visible example of "a job that AI can do." Nevermind that AI illustration went from a novelty to a tired cliche in less than a year. Even if you think that AI illustrations are a perfect substitute for commercial illustrations, that still won't come anywhere near making AI companies a profit. Add up the entire wage bill for every commercial illustrator in the world, hand it to Open AI, and you're not even gonna cover the kombucha budget for Open AI's staff kitchens.

Hell, all the wages of every commercial illustrator that ever lived won't pay back even a fraction of the money the AI companies spent on image generators. The pauperization of an entire class of creative workers is just a canned demo, a way to fool investors into thinking that there is a whole universe of similarly situated workers whose wages can be diverted to AI companies. This is the logic of small-time spammers, scaled up to the scale of the entire S&P 500. Smalltime spammers looked at AI and thought, "OK, I can generate as much botshit as I want on demand for free. Science fiction magazines pay $0.10/word. So if I generate a billion words, I'll get $100 million." But that's not how any of that works: sf magazines don't buy botshit, and even if they did, the entire market for short fiction adds up to what Sam Altman spends on a single designer t-shirt. The point of destroying these beloved, useful things isn't to make a lot of money by taking their markets – it's to convince dopey, panicked rich people to give you lots of money you can steal, because they think you can do this to every market and they don't want to miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Take "divi recaps": after a private equity firm acquires a company (by borrowing money against its assets), it typically declares a "special dividend," emptying out the company's cash reserves and pocketing them. A "divi recap" is when PE then takes out another massive loan against the company's (remaining) assets and pockets that:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost

All of this happens under an opaque cloud, thanks to the light-to-nonexistent disclosure rules for PE. A public company has to open its books for the SEC, its investors, and the world. PE is private – and so are its finances. It is absolutely routine for PE bosses to put their spouses, kids, and pals on the payroll and hand them millions for doing little to nothing, all at the expense of their investors:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/sec-set-to-lower-massive-boom-on-private-equity-industry.html

PE bosses charge huge fees to their investors – not merely the usual 2-and-20 (2% of the funds under management and 20% of any profits) – but also a wide variety of special one-off fees that pile to the sky. They also dip into their investors' funds to issue themselves massive loans that they use to make side-bets, without telling the investors about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#gary-gensler

PE investors are chickens ripe for the plucking: take "continuation funds," which allow PE bosses to soak the rich people and pension funds who supply them with billions:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/matt-levines-money-stuff-buyout-funds-buy-from-themselves

Remember 2-and-20? 2% of all the money you manage, every year, and 20% of all the profits. You'd think that these would be somewhat zero sum, right? If you use some of your investors' cash to buy a company, and then sell off that company for a profit, you get the 20%, but now the pot of money you're managing has gone down by the amount you used to buy the company, and so your 2% carry goes down, too.

But what if you sell your portfolio companies to yourself, using your investors' own money? When you do that, you continue to hold the company on your PE firm's books, meaning you continue to get the 2% carry, and you can pocket 20% of the sale price as a "profit":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups

This is straight-up fraud, wrapped up in so much jargon that it can successfully masquerade as "financial engineering" ("financial engineering" is really just a euphemism for "fraud"). PE bosses keep coming up with new, exotic ways to steal from their investors. The latest scam is "tax receivable agreements":

https://archive.ph/RczJ9

On its face, this is a tax scam. When a company goes public, early investors generally hold stock in the original partnership or LLC; this company ends up holding a ton of shares in the new, public company. When they sell those non-public shares in the LLC, this creates a (potentially gigantic) tax credit.

A TRA hustle involves tracking down these LLC shareholders and convincing them to sign off on dumping the LLC's shares, which generates a huge tax credit for the public company. The hustler offers to split these credits with the LLC holders.

All of this is especially attractive to PE bosses, who often take a company private, do a bunch of "financial engineering" and then take it public again, leaving the PE firm as the owner of those LLC shares that can be converted to a TRA and a huge windfall – which the PE bosses pocket, because they (not their investors) are holding those credits.

This scam is really doing big numbers. KKR – the monsters who killed Toys R Us – just diverted $650 million in TRA loot, prompting a lawsuit from Steamfitters union pension fund, which had handed these jerks millions of its members' money to gamble with:

https://archive.ph/kqQvI

This highlights another very weird aspect of the PE scam: they are absolutely dependent on pension funds. To add insult to injury, PE funds are notorious union-busters – they use union money to buy companies and destroy their unions:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/05/mr-gotcha/#no-ethical-consumption-under-capitalism

People who try to understand the PE business model often give up, because it seems to make no sense, leading many to assume that they're too unsophisticated to grasp the complex financials here. For example, PE is absolutely dependent on massive loans as a way of looting its businesses, but it also often defaults on those loans. Why do banks and investors keep making huge loans to PE deadbeats? Because – like the PE fund investors – they are credulous dolts.

The reason PE seems like a scam is that it is a scam. It is a fractal scam – every part of it is a scam. You might have heard about the "carried interest" tax loophole that allows PE bosses to avoid billions in taxes on the money they steal from their investors, creditors, workers and customers. Most people assume "carried interest" has something to do with "interest" on a loan. Nope: "carried interest" is a 16th century nautical tax rule designed for mercantalist sea-captains who had an "interest" in the cargo they "carried":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

But rich people and other "sophisticated investors" (like pension fund investment managers) are no smarter than the rest of us. They are herd animals. When they see other rich people piling into some scheme or asset class, they rush to join them, which makes the asset price go up, which makes them think they're smart (until the inevitable rug-pull). When one plute jumps off the Empire State Building, the rest of them jump, too.

Which is why there's more money flooding into PE than at any time in history, $2.62T in "dry powder," handed over to greedy, thieving PE bosses in a poker game where everyone is the sucker at the table:

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2di1vzgjcmzovkcea8f0g/portfolio/private-equitys-dry-powder-mountain-reaches-record-height

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/08/sucker-at-the-table/#clucks-definance

[fantasywater]

These are the reasons Stolas Horseman still gets dragged for his infidelity even though the circus was supposed to FIX THAT.

This is for Stolas's Western Entergy interpretation and for the fans who agree with it:

Stolas is an adulterer.

No one gets to change the definition of a word just because they don't like it being said about their favorite character.

He's a domestic abuse survivor and an adulterer. Both are true. 

The reason Stolas still gets criticism is because of the execution of how it was written and the Octavia factor.

We were introduced to Stolas and Stella's dynamic with her being pissed that her husband of at least seventeen years cheated on her.

That anger is empathy-inducing to a lot of people because being cheated on, or knowing someone who has, is a relatable experience. It also looks extra disgusting on the one who stepped out when a family is involved.

Even her throwing things at him could be excused because of the context in which it was happening.  

There's a reason why temporary insanity is welcome in legal circles because it gives leeway to the perpetrator in that it asks the question would they have done this awful thing if it wasn't for an extreme mental break forcing them to? 

Stolas's infidelity was that mental break.

Trying to kill him can also fall comfortably under temporary insanity. 

Plus having our protagonists kill innocents as a job also takes the bite out of it. 

It also doesn't help that both Stolas and Stella's voice actors gave their own explanations that pretty much stated what I said above.

Even our first episode was about a cheated-on woman going to extremes, but she was shown in a sympathetic light despite it. 

Yet the very next episode shows the same issue, but because Stolas is a main character we are supposed to fall in line that the adulterer is whose side we should be on. 

Octavia having a mental breakdown(twice now) because of Stolas's infidelity is also not endearing him to the audience.

What he is doing to his child is the biggest reason why his remorseless, continuous, infidelity is not a take-back-my-power move.

The inciting incident for both Stella's recurrent violent anger and death "threats", as well as Octavia's mental breaks, is Stolas's cheating. Therefore what is happening to him now is a consequence of his own actions.

The writing in the problem. We were introduced to a wife and daughter showing anger in different ways because a spouse and father betrayed their family, and yet Viv still expects us to feel sympathetic to Stolas.

In reality, Stolas is the antagonist of Stella, Octavia, and Blitz.

That role was especially blatant in Loolooland.

As for Stella Viv tried to course correct by being heavy-handed in showing her as a cartoonish monster in The Circus. 

However, because of the initial execution of writing her as a scorned wife due to her remorseless, repeatedly cheating husband for a whole season, she has forever poisoned the well for Stolas and she has no one to blame for that but herself.

She is the one who wrote one of her supposedly sympathetic main characters doing Sexual Extortion(Blitz), Adultery(Stella), Mental Break/Child Neglect(Octavia), but then seems to have an issue when a nice chunk of the fandom still thinks only his victims deserve sympathy.

Nevertheless, since the Circus is in the canon now does Stolas owe Stella loyalty and remorse? No. 

However, Stolas is not just a husband. Octavia exists.

Therefore Octavia will always be the reason why his (continuous) infidelity was a selfish and vile act. 

That's also why what's going to happen to him in the leaks is on him.

His karma warranty is up.

The problem is that the karma Viv gives is an illusion because she still wants you to feel sorry for Stolas. That's why there's always a sturdy flavor of demonization in the narrative toward anyone he's harmed to facilitate that.

However, considering the nature of his crimes his comeuppance is deserved, but she still writes like it's not and expects the audience to fall in line.

She also did the same thing with Blitz's issues with him.

So it's a pattern, and it exists because a fujoshi is writing this story. 

It's a failure in the execution when the author's intent and the audience's takeaway is this broken.

[thegoldencontracts]

He Is...

Summary: In another universe, your boyfriend is a bit... Odd, to say the least? Why do you stay with him? U-uh, because canon said so (ortho is just platonic ofc)!

Notes: Pure crack based off of popular fanon things that I honestly don't find accurate. No hate, just a bit of joking. Minor spoilers. Also, if you're touchy about popular fanon headcanons you have, you might want to avoid this post. I have no hateful intentions, but I understand it may be take that way. As always, I am open to constructive critiquing and discourse.

Riddle is going to collar you if you so much as breathe wrong. He does absolutely nothing nice for you. But then when you want to leave him, he breaks down crying...? Weird.

Trey is disturbingly obsessed with teeth, but he's completely perfect other than that. Literally perfect. No, really.

Deuce is incredibly dumb and well-intentioned. He's never done anything wrong in his life! Biker gang? What biker gang? You're just hallucinating.

Ace is an absolute asshole. He's never apologized for anything in his life. Just- a complete douche, somehow.

Cater is incapable of speaking on anything other than pure slang. You tell him you're going to break up with him, and he just says "yikes". Who does that?

Leona is literally the worst person you have ever met. Depression? What depression? He's just lazy! But yeah, he's the scum of the Earth. Trust. At least he respects women?

Ruggie is communist. You don't know where it came from, but he is. But he's also a scammer. Yeah, good luck.

Jack is a tsundere... You thought there was something else? No, that's it. He's a tsundere. He's cute, though.

Azul is a little baby boy. He's just that same little octopus he was. Scams, contracts, business? What are you talking about? He's just your little baby boy who'll break down crying if you don't tell him you love him every five seconds!

Floyd is a serial killer. What do you mean he's only seventeen? He's a serial killer! He kills people. That's right, he kills them. He's a merciless, remorseless killer.

Jade is completely sick and twisted. He'd kill you for a single corn chip, and he's never felt any emotion other than schadenfreude in his life. He's not seventeen, he's, uh- he's been lying to you! He's actually a demon who thrives off of souls (and being one hell of a butler).

Kalim is nice. He's also an idiot. That's right, this man has literally never had a critical thought in his life! Can you believe it? He's never had any hardships, either. Poisoning attempts? What poisoning attempts? There's nothing to see here!

Jamil is an asshole. There's no justification for it. His life was so amazing, it's not like he was basically a slave or anything. Why couldn't he just talk to Kalim before going through with his plans? It's literally that easy!

Vil is a mean girl. That's right. He's selfish, manipulative, and lazy! What do you mean 'he wants people to work and be the most beautiful they can be'? He's just a mean girl, guys. Nothing more to it. And I can't believe he ruined Rook! It isn't like Rook chose to move into Pomefiore or anything!

Rook is creepy, and a stalker, and an irredeemable piece of shit. You see, he used to be a shining beacon of perfection in Savannaclaw, but then the EVIL Vil had to RUIN him! The horror! He was so happy there, too! Everyone knows that dull, lifeless eyes are the number-one sign of happiness!

Epel is a perfect, dainty little boy who can do no wrong. He's just- a shining beacon of dainty and perfect ideals. So fragile. So perfect. So helpless. He has absolutely no autonomy. Trust me on that. Just a perfect little angel boy.

Idia is an unhygenic, depressed softie. He's never showered in his life! It's not like STYX had a lot of focus on systematic hygiene that Idia's used to or anything! And he's never looked down on others in his life! You can trust me on that!

Ortho is a kind, soft little robo-boy who can do no wrong. That time he tried to fire a laser beam on the school? Ignore that, he's just a little baby!

Malleus is sooo in love with you. No, he's not acting oddly due to being unused to friendship, he's in love, damnit! He's in love! He's making this an otome!

Lilia is a dad. And he thinks you should get together with Malleus. Really, he's just there to set you up with the dragon man!

Silver is the perfect, most noble and well-liked gentleman. Awkward? Unused to people wanting to hang out with him? Nope, none of that. Just perfection here!

Sebek is the scum of the Earth. Why, you may ask? Simple! He's loud and arrogant. I don't know why he hates humans so much, really, it's not like he's dealing with internalized species-ism or anything...

[rottenpumpkin13]

what if sephiroth had a child? maybe because hojo wanted to test if sephiroth's modified genes would pass on to the child. and what do you think would happen to the child after nibelheim?

Sephiroth's reaction to the revelation that he has involuntarily fathered a child is one of visceral rage. The sheer audacity of Hojo's brazen manipulation of his autonomy ignites a fury that is both immediate and uncontainable. This anger is not just for himself but also for his child that's now trapped in a lab, a mere specimen bred by Hojo for unspeakable purposes just as he once was. The thought of his child, his family, enduring the same remorseless torment he faced as a child is intolerable.

This moment rewires Sephiroth's brain entirely, causing all his previous convictions to crumble and for his priorities to shift. He makes a bold decision for the good of the small family unit he has now and leaves Shinra behind, fleeing with his child. Only Angeal and Genesis know where they are, and Sephiroth outright refuses their help.

Sephiroth is a dedicated parent and determined to offer his child a better life than the one Hojo gave him, despite him not having any experience with raising children. He does his research, has his moments where he's unsure if he's even capable of being a competent parent, but ultimately gives his child the unconditional love and support that he never had.

But the events surrounding Genesis and Angeal unfold whether Sephiroth is there or not. Genesis' degradation continues, leading him to desert, while Angeal meets his tragic end just as he would have. Sephiroth is no part of this, and while he mourns Angeal and wishes he could help Genesis, he focuses on his family.

Eventually Sephiroth decides to move to Nibelheim, because fate is persistent. He has no idea that this is the place he was born, nor did he know that he'd meet Zack once again during one if his missions. He hadn't even expected to see Genesis again, and feels guilty when he sees how the degradation has taken its toll on him.

Sephiroth would be more than willing to help, but Genesis' poor phrasing coupled with the way he drops a bomb on Sephiroth makes it so that Sephiroth never wants to see him again.

He drops his child off with Zack, finds the library, and the rest proceeds as it would, with the Nibelheim fire and Sephiroth's death. Except, years later when Zack breaks himself and Cloud out of Hojo's lab, he can't leave Sephiroth's kid behind, not with Hojo.

So Zack flees with Cloud and Sephiroth's child. Their escape is, regrettably, short-lived as Zack is ultimately killed. And now all Sephiroth's child has in this world is Cloud. Just the two of them.

Cloud stumbles into Midgar just as he would have if the fates had remained unchanged, except in this AU he has Sephiroth's kid clinging to his hand, placing all their trust in him.

Neither of them know that death rejected Sephiroth, who's watching them and intends to have his child back.

[therainscene]

Since The First Shadow has folks talking about Henry’s queerness (or lack thereof), I wanted to share my take on it as someone who tends to interpret him as gay.

I’m not going to be talking about his relationship with Patty, though -- I can’t afford to see the play and don’t want to rely on secondary sources for this, so I simply can’t comment on it. (I’m sure they’re lovely together, though.)

To me, Henry’s queer-coding isn’t a question of whether he’s literally gay -- it’s a question of what role his villainy plays in the story.

The biggest non-Patty-related criticism against queer interpretations of Henry is that it would carry an uncomfortably homophobic implication: that queers are dangerous predators.

This was a common belief in the 80s, and the show references it by having Troy chuckle at the idea of Will getting "killed by some other queer" -- a prediction that comes symbolically and unpleasantly true when Joyce finds him with one of Vecna’s vines literally shoved down his throat.

It's tempting to try and solve this problem by interpreting Henry as straight -- the homophobic implications of his child-assaulting villainy will disappear if he's not queer, right?

Well... in my opinion, no.

A key aspect of Henry's character is that he's different. Whether you interpret that difference as queerness, neurodivergence, or simply that he has powers -- the fact remains that he is fundamentally the sort of person whom society looks down upon with fear and suspicion.

If he’s not a predatory queer, then he's a remorseless psychopath. If he's not a remorseless psychopath, then he's a vessel for an evil alien. There's no way to escape the implication that he’s dangerous because he’s different.

Eddie’s character resonates with this principle too. Indeed, our introduction to him is a monologue in which he complains about being treated with suspicion just because he’s different.

Given their similarities in this regard, I think it’s interesting that the show endears us to Eddie in the same breath it makes us fear Vecna. It almost feels like a test--

We know you’ll sympathize with a weirdo who sells drugs to troubled minors when you get to see things from his perspective, but can you sympathize with a weirdo who hurts troubled minors when you don’t get to see things from his perspective? Will you jump to unfair conclusions about Henry in the same way the town jumps to unfair conclusions about Eddie?

My point here isn’t that Henry did nothing wrong or that his villainy is justified -- I’m pretty sure he did commit the murders Eddie was scapegoated for and I’m pretty sure that’s a bad thing -- but he’s always held at arm’s length from the audience. The show plays the role of Jason, encouraging us to blindly hate him on gut instinct instead of giving him a fair trial.

It’s an easy test to fail, because it does seem like we get to see Henry’s perspective -- he has a whole villain speech, after all.

But the trouble is, this speech takes place within NINA. What we’re watching is footage that has been curated by his abuser and shown through the eyes of a traumatized girl who barely understands what happened -- secondary sources who are invested in viewing him as a threat.

Consider that Henry’s hairstyle mysteriously changes during the massacre. It’s one of those subtle costuming choices that isn’t meant to be consciously picked up on, but which registers at the back of our minds and leaves us feeling unsettled -- this Henry isn’t like the Henry we were looking at before.

The obvious way of interpreting this is that the mask has finally slipped -- the “nice” Henry was fake, and now we see him for who he “really” is. But I’m not inclined to interpret it that way, because of all the hairstyles they could have chosen... they just so happened to opt for one that resembles Brenner. (Pun intended.)

This isn’t Henry with his mask off -- this is Henry as Brenner wants him to be.

Fear-mongering over the existence of queer people has long been a useful tool for those in power -- in the 80s, fear of AIDS did the job nicely -- and so too has Brenner forged Henry into a tool to further his own goals, no regard given to the harm he causes in the process.

Like the “predatory queer”, Henry is defined on his oppressor’s terms, and like Eddie, it makes him a useful scapegoat. He only became what he did because of an unethical institution, and treating him as the problem is just as short-sighted as blaming gay men for the AIDS crisis.

That isn’t to say Vecna hasn’t become a genuine threat, though. Will makes a prediction as to how S5 is going to end--

--and while I’m not expecting things to end as violently as Will implies here -- that’s not Will’s thing -- I do believe that Vecna is going to be defeated by his hand. As tragic as Vecna’s origin was, he still made his own choices once he was free from Brenner, and he’s likely too far gone at this point to be capable of earning his happy ending.

But that’s what makes it so important that Will gets his happy ending.

Queer characters have been exclusively cast as villains or tragic sadbois for so long that I can completely sympathize with people’s hesitance to embrace Henry as a tragic queer villain.

But villains only exist within the context of the heroes who challenge them... and in a show about a queer-coded villain who personifies the anger and despair of being abused for what you are, a loving gay boy who breaks the cycle of abuse by learning that he has the right to be the hero of his own story is the perfect foil for him.

[nerdy-the-artist]

Batta, the Culture of the Zebesian Space Pirates

The Metroid Prime series has introduced the internal workings of the Space Pirates and expanded on it in subsequent entries. However, it is largely agreed upon by groups with the Metroid community (myself included) that the Space Pirates are a faction made up of many species. After all, the biology of the different enemy types in the Prime series alone is wildly different from game to game, aside from a bipedal, hunched posture. It can be assumed, therefore, that any discrepancies from game to game when describing the inner workings of the Space Pirates to simply be the culture of those individual species. For instance, the Urtraghians have far more brutal forms of punishment than the forces seen on Tallon IV. Now that then begs the question.

What about the culture of the Zebesians?

This exploration will, admittedly, be full of conjecture and fanons that I enjoy, but I hope you will enjoy either way.

The name Zebesian seems a bit strange to those who know the inner workings of Metroid lore, specifically about the Chozo, who were the residents of planet Zebes before the Space Pirates stormed the planet. The two big schools of thought as to the name from a Watsonian perspective are either that the Zebesians were driven off of Zebes in years past during the Chozo’s warlike past or that the name comes from their settlement upon Zebes that essentially became the way most of the Galaxy thought about the planet.

While I prefer the latter explanation, the former explanation does have some basis to it. Some of Dread’s many murals depict Mawkin soldiers coming into conflict with the Zebesian Space Pirates and defeating them. It is certainly possible that this is how the Chozo first settled the world. There was once a time when the Thoha Chozo were on good terms with the Mawkin.

Still, from both a Watsonian and Doylist perspective, I prefer that the Zebesian name comes from their takeover of Zebes, likely the latest conquest of many. From throughout the series, the Chozo are not seen to have been particularly active in galactic politics during the age of the Galactic Federation, mostly being relegated to advising more public figures. They are rarely mentioned after their demise, outside of their ruins. Therefor, with the Chozo mostly being dead and buried, their world conquered by the feared Space Pirates, the limelight would then be cast onto that world as the source of the Metroid threat, thus leading people to call them the rulers of that world. It’s not exactly how I will be situating things in my own rewrite of the manga, but it does fit better from a purely canonical perspective. Furthermore, from a Doylist perspective, there is evidence to posit this same position. (Special thanks to @sepublic for pointing this out) The internal data for the Zebesian sprite refers to them as Batta, the Japanese word for grasshopper/locust. While this can be attributed to their hopping behavior, it also fits to see them surrounding a planet, consuming its resources, and leaving barren rock behind, with Zebes being their latest, and most successful, operation. The manga displays them descending onto worlds, massacring populations, and enslaving the survivors. The origin of Samus Aran’s adoption into the Chozo comes from them massacring the population of a colony in order to steal its main export wholesale.

The individuals we see in the manga are spiteful, remorseless, and cruel, happy to kill a child for fun. They also show fear and cowardice in the face of armed resistance from Federation officials, and Mother Brain describes them as inclined to capitulate to the highest power present. This cruel, despotic leadership style appears to be an inherent trait to Zebesian culture. Furthermore, the Space Pirates are displayed as having genetically altered themselves to withstand Zebes’s environment very soon after securing the world, suggesting an avid fascination with genetic manipulation, a trait that gets taken to the N’th degree in the Prime series, along with a fascination of mechanical augmentation. From Meta and Proteus Ridley, to the grafted metal implants of the Tallon IV pirates, to the exoskeleton apparatus used by the Urtraghians, the Space Pirates as a whole seem to love cybernetically augmenting themselves and their underlings.

One of my favorite fan interpretations of the Zebesians comes from @dappercritter and the fanfiction piece “No Other”. Quite frankly, I have to include the paragraph wherein the description of the Zebesian race lies.

“The chimeric splice-junkies who had the nerve to call themselves ‘Zebesians’ she wasn’t surprised by. Those ‘settler colonists’-a term which they use to feign altruism and keep the GDF from assaulting their new base, had always been a thorn in Samus’s side since they tried to take her and the Chozo’s old home by force. Of course, they’d come back for more at some point, even if they deserved every other beatdown.”

The Zebesians are described as “chimeric splice-junkies”, a term which I absolutely love for its descriptiveness and color. These guys love to juice themselves up on whatever science team has cooked up. They love genetic modifications, cybernetic implants, and anything to make themselves stronger and give them an edge in combat. The main villain of this story, Ganzer, is the apotheosis of a Zebesian. He has replaced his lobster claws with metal claws, he has wings on his back, chainsaw blades grafted to his arms, a shoulder mounted cannon, a visor in place of his eyes, extra armor over his exoskeleton, and even a reptilian tail. Additionally, there is an explanation here for the name of these Zebesians. These galactic jerks are not just genocidal maniacs, they are something far worse: lawyers. They have lawyered their way into exploiting the Federation’s rules of engagement. After all, orbital bombardment on a colony is illegal. So, as any good lawyer would do, they have designated their most valuable planet as their residential colony world. Doesn’t matter that they breed Metroids, produce weapons, and store their fleets there, cuz that’s where the children grow up, at least on paper.

Furhermore, given their distinctly crustacean design, I can imagine that their “splice-junky” lifestyle comes into play during a specific recurring period of their life; molting. When a crustacean molts, the new shell is soft and malleable for a time, in which time they are extremely vulnerable. Defensive claws and stingers are effectively useless, leaving them defenseless until their body hardens. This time could be perfect for Zebesians to how in the infusion tank to get ‘roided up on whatever DNA infusions they choose/have chosen for them, or to have cybernetic implants grafted into them, where the shell will then solidify and seal the implant on. You can just imagine some excited Zebesian chittering about how they ordered the new model of targeting armature, lamenting that they have to wait until the next molt to get it installed. It honestly opens up some room for a bit of downtime in their culture which I think could be explored further some time.

Hope you all enjoyed this one! I may make a similar post for some of the other Space Pirate varieties. I do have some unique fanons for the Urtraghians that could be cool to share. Let me know if you have any suggestions or fanons of your own!

[distort-opia]

hey tort, what you didn't like about Batman caped crusader new design? And apparently with what I seen of the news, Joker was left out of this one hahaha

Mm, well... there's some stuff I like the sound of:

"A cold, remorseless avenger of evil, seemingly more machine than man." It's funny to me he's talking about this as if it's that new of a take, Bruce has been weaponizing Alfred and Alfred's been enabling him in the comics for a while. But I am excited about an intentional approach to Bruce as a dark spooky offputting freak. Timm has been talking elsewhere about how he wants to depict a Bruce who's not very heroic and much darker, who's wearing a "person suit" over his true self which is Batman, and I think that could be quite interesting.

Meanwhile, Harley Quinn is now a serious psychiatrist who only fakes being bubbly... and actually a serial killer going after the rich of Gotham? The more you read about the changes, the more she's just a whole ass new character. I do get wanting to reinterpret things or bringing novel elements, but going "let's make everything about her the opposite" doesn't really land you in the realm of interpretation. Harley now sounds like a new person, with the only things in common she has with actual Harley Quinn being the name, profession and the harlequin-themed suit... which isn't even red, black and white.

And well. While the description of Selina isn't too flattering, I can't say she hasn't been depicted this way before. I just don't really like it:

Making her a rich person who's stealing because she wants to keep being rich... [sigh] I prefer the Selina who grew up impoverished, and who's got much more complex motivations to her being Catwoman.

Alas, Harley might be hard to recognize, but then there's Harvey:

The "let's take character traits and turn them opposite" approach strikes again! And once more, it makes the character very different, because Harvey being disfigured by acid after trying so hard to be good and save Gotham, and the disfigurement bringing Two-Face to the surface... it's such a core tenet of him.

I know some people might prefer these extreme changes over how the original characters were written, or even argue that they've gone through so many different origins and versions-- this is just another one of those. And I agree that this is just how things go, when a story that's almost a century old gets readapted, again and again. But well, especially when it comes to Harley and Harvey, I personally feel that if you're changing the core traits so much... at least don't call them by the same name, dammit. I'd feel similarly if they made a show about Batman and then went "oh we put a whole new spin on him by making everything the opposite!" and you find out he doesn't give a shit about his parents' murder and he kills people.

But who knows! The show isn't out yet. Maybe it'll be super well written, or these things have been blown out of proportion in interviews, and so on. We can only really tell once the show is out, so I'm waiting until then to truly form an opinion. And to be honest, I'm not that upset they left out Joker; DC has been overusing him for a while, and Joker fatigue is sadly not that hard to understand. Plus, keeping in mind all these major changes... they'd probably give us a Joker we can barely recognize, too.

[thescarletkiller]

Introduction 🩸🔪

Ordinary milkman by day, cold-hearted killer at night.🔪

As you all can tell, this is an ask/RP blog for Serial Killer Francis. Feel free to ask SK Francis anything as long as it doesn’t break any of the guidelines for this blog. You can also ask the mod questions about headcanons and more lore about the SK Francis AU.

Remember, this Francis is part of an AU. He’s not gonna be like how regular Francis is usually depicted. Try not to take this seriously and have fun.

Obviously, this version of Francis is NOT a good person AT ALL. He’s very unassuming on the outside but once he’s free to kill, he’s cold hearted, cruel, violent, manipulative, sadistic, remorseless and mentally insane misantrope. So please expect him to say the most morbid crap possible.

This Francis is very quiet and secretive so he won’t reveal a lot about himself to you.

Keep in mind that the mod is over 20 years old so it’s best to keep everything SFW but mentions of gore, violence and disturbing topics are fine.

Francis has a life outside of this blog such as his milkman job and murdering people so he won’t have all the time to respond to your questions. The same goes with the mod, who also has a life outside of tumblr so try to be patient and don’t spam.

For roleplay purposes, I would love to play with horror, angst, fluff, romance (especially dark romance) and gore. OC and canon character interactions are allowed, including Nacha.

What I wouldn’t allow are underaged roleplays (yuck), rape, any form of bigotry (racism, homophobia, transphobia,etc), pedophilia, beastiality and necrophilia. If I see any asks related to those, they’ll be deleted and YOU WILL BE BLOCKED.

Hate asks will also be blocked.

Anons will be treated platonically (I say this loosely because Francis hates everyone). When it comes to romance roleplays however, let’s just say Francis tends to get… obsessive.

Francis’s whole lore will be explained here.

All the sketches I’ll make about the AU will be here.

I’m Onyx, the admin of this blog and the original creator of the serial killer Francis AU. I won’t only be using this blog as an ask/RP blog for SK Francis, I will also be uploading original content such as headcanons and concept art for my AU if I have the time. I know this AU doesn’t appeal to everyone but I’m just telling a story here and I love writing for SK Francis. If you don’t like it, fine. Just don’t send any hate asks. If you like it, great.

Status: ACTIVE

Ask Box: ALWAYS OPEN

“Mmm? Where are you going? You’re not leaving, are you? You haven’t even bled yet. Let me help you with that.”

[merakiui]

MERARAAA SO LIKE IN SOCIAL SCIENCE EARLIER WE WERE DISCUSSING BOUT COUNSELING and then my teacher mentioned somethin bout "you cant fall in love with ur client" and u also cannot have any relationship with ur co workers and that there are diff types of work settings for counselors and that it also includes bout working in a prison or something like that(my teacher mentioned something bout prison but i dont remember 😭) and that the pay is high BUT LIKE BUT LIKE I SUDDENLY REMEMBERED SK!FLOYD AND SK!JADE LIKE AAHHHHHH IMAGINE ALL THE POTENTIALS1?1???1?1?1?1?1?1??1

AAAAA YES YES!!!!! I've been wanting to discuss an au swap in which Jade is the death row inmate being interviewed by his journalist darling and Floyd is the one obsessed with eating human meat and keeping Reader captive. >:) there truly is an abundance of possibilities. All of the creepy conversations you and Jade have during interviews, where he's so civil and so respectfully charming that it throws you off each time. How could someone so courteous be a brutal, remorseless killer?

Jade takes one look at you and he can already list off which of your limbs he'd want to indulge in first. He can describe all of his murders in such horrifying, clinical detail; it really feels encyclopedic in nature, the way he speaks so calmly about a subject so grotesque. His withdrawal symptoms are probably so terrible as well. Though he's composed on the outside, internally he's salivating over you. It's not the same eating animal meat. It's so upsetting. He can't even eat animal meat without his body feeling as if it should reject it. >_< he sits before you in handcuffs and he digs his nails into his palms to ground himself. He wants to sink his teeth into your jugular so badly... it's truly not fair he's trapped in these cuffs. Were he not confined and muzzled like an animal, he'd lunge across the table and kill you in cold blood. One day he'll snap and that'll get him the straitjacket. But even if he can taste just a drop of your blood, it will have been worth it.

Omg and what if he turns to eating himself.......... :o they've had to stop and restrain him countless times to prevent him from chewing his fingers off, from gnawing at his wrist, from taking chunks of flesh out of his arm just to sate a monstrous craving... meeting with you is good company, but it takes such a toll on Jade because, though you're an entertaining journalist with boundless curiosity, you look like the perfect meal.

As for Floyd, he's reckless and isn't nearly as meticulous as Jade, but he knows how to cover his bases. After all, he has to take care to hide you well so that the authorities won't take you away. Living with sk!Floyd is just as stressful as living with sk!Jade. The only difference is that you never know if Floyd truly meant it when he said he'd keep you alive. He's so mercurial, his tastes always fluctuating, and his mood swings keep you on edge. You fear upsetting him because it could end horribly for you. But Floyd seems to be so happy with you around, and he doesn't treat you too poorly. In fact, he cooks lots of meals for you. For someone who kidnapped you, it feels like he spoils you.

But then you know not to get too comfortable. No matter how optimistic or childish or sweet he may seem, he is still dangerous. It's scary how much you underestimated just how intelligent he can be when the situation calls for it.

[cosmicjoke]

Something else I noticed in "Bad Boy", that I think is important to point out, is what Levi says about Kenny, and what the men attacking him say, too, and what it tells us about the general atmosphere and behavior of the people that Levi was surrounded by growing up.

He tells the man in the glasses, after he asks Levi "You don't want to do that, do you?", meaning to make his mother cry over him killing people, that he doesn't know, but that "Kenny won't let you live.".

We also hear the man that's beating Levi make the excuse that they can't let Levi go because then their reputations as gangsters Underground will be shot. That's clear bullshit. It's just an excuse he's using for his own sadism, the clear pleasure he's taking in assaulting a ten year old boy.

But with what Levi says about Kenny, and what this man says, it tells us just how ruthless the people were, that Levi grew up around.

Clearly, Levi was never given any kind of example or role model of mercy or merciful behavior.

Kenny was a prolific and remorseless killer, someone who took life easily and often, and clearly these men were the same, in that they felt no qualms whatsoever about the prospect of murdering a child and then cutting him into pieces and feeding him to pigs, something they make clear reference to having done before.

Levi telling the man in the glasses that "Kenny won't let you live.", after the man begs pathetically for his life, tells us that Kenny certainly killed in front of Levi, and that Levi had probably witnessed him doing so after whoever he'd killed had also begged for their life. Levi didn't expect Kenny to show mercy or compassion, because Kenny wasn't the sort of person who would do that. After all, we see Kenny kill numerous, innocent people in "AoT", including nearly killing Historia when she was a young girl.

Levi was taught to be ruthless, both by Kenny and by the environment and inhabitants of the Underground, by the general desperation of how and where he grew up.

Again, I think this is important to note because of the remarkable compassionwe see in Levi himself.

Yes, Levi is ruthless toward his enemies. He'll kill without hesitation if he thinks someone is a threat to his or others well being. But Levi isn't a ruthless person. He doesn't kill without good cause, and he doesn't kill out of any sense of enjoyment or self-satisfaction. He kills if he thinks he has to, and that's it. He doesn't see killing as a good thing. Just a necessary thing. Indeed, Levi is truly the opposite of ruthless, as again I remark upon his compassion and his great kindness, something we see from him again and again throughout the series. He always does his best to comfort and protect others. I think a good contrast is between how Levi treats Ramzi vs how Kenny treated Historia, and how these men treated Levi himself.

Nobody taught that compassion or kindness to Levi. Certainly not Kenny, and certainly not the Underground as a whole. And I think Levi's memories of his mother were too vague and fleeting to have learned anything from her, in truth. That fleeting image of kindness from his mother wouldn't have been enough to overcome the years of cruelty, abuse and violence he was subjected to afterward unless Levi himself was already predisposed to being kind. That he clings to and appreciates the single, vague memory of his mother at all is testament to his innate goodness. Most people would have forgotten it completely in the flood of misery that was the rest of his life.

[accirax]

DRDT Secret Swap AU: For Better and Worse

The following is an ask sent to me that, while numerically present in my inbox, is invisible and inaccessible, and thus, I was only able to read it through its corresponding notification email. Tumblr be a functional website challenge; level impossible.

What a great question! Up to this point, I’ve been more of an AU enjoyer than an AU creator (other than the BNHA thing), so this will be an exciting foray into the realm of possibility! The task of creating both the best and worst outcome also provides a lot to think about when it comes to characterization. I’m excited to get talking about this! But first, some rules.

(And the usual CW for DRDT spoilers, as well as mentions of murder, suicide, self harm, eating disorders, and implied homo/transphobia. You know, standard business for DRDT secret discussion.)

To keep things simple, I’m going to be assuming that the true owners of the secrets are as follows:

While I’m by no means asserting that this interpretation of whose secret is whose is 100% accurate, it’s what I see widely agreed upon by the fandom, and what I currently believe myself. Having to factor in a bunch of different permutations of secret distribution seemed terribly complicated, so I decided to avoid it. If anybody disagrees with where I’ve placed any of the secrets, please just consider it as another facet of the alternate universe.

Additionally, I’ve kept up the “rule” that no one is allowed to receive their own secret. I’m also assuming that everything is the same up until when MonoTV hands out the motives, such that Xander and Min are still dead. However, a different distribution of secrets could have changed the details of the Chapter 2 murder, so I kinda have to speak about it in hypotheticals. I was just talking about how I didn’t want to make things needlessly complicated, so I’m not throwing in a bunch of speculation about how the secrets may have factored into the AU killer’s motives when I can’t even say for certain who the canonical killer was.

I also decided to interpret the prompt as “what’s the best/worst overall shuffle” as opposed to “who is the best/worst recipient for each individual secret.” The latter seemed like it might repeat characters too many times, and “the ch2 secrets [getting] swapped in a different way” implied to me that each character was still limited to receiving one secret. Hopefully that’s what you were going for with your ask!

Okay, I think that’s it. Let’s get started with the best case scenario, given that I think that’ll be easier. I’ll go through the characters’ secrets in the order they’re listed in on the board, so that it’ll hopefully be easier to follow along.

The Good Timeline

Eden receives Levi’s secret

If someone was going to have remorse for the remorseless killer, I think it would be Eden. Even if the concept of someone killing in cold blood might frighten Eden, the pair is already off to a good start with the conversation they shared at the beginning of Chapter 2. Eden knows a bit more about Levi’s family situation (which may have been the cause of his callous killing) and how he is trying to be a good person, even if he feels like he might be failing. Compared to others in the cast, I feel like Eden might be more willing to hear Levi out.

Specifically, we know from canon that (under David’s encouragement, at least) Eden planned to share her secret– which was a pretty severe one already– in a closed environment with just her and the secret’s owner. Of course, we haven’t yet seen from canon how Levi would react to getting assigned this secret, so it’s possible he could flip out in a similar manner to how Arturo did when Eden confronted him. However, I think there’s a good chance that he would be more resigned or neutral, which might also give Eden hope that he isn’t a lost cause… again, under the assumption that he isn't. This secret does have a chance of backfiring, but I’m making the choice to have faith in Levi– much like I think Eden would if she saw his secret!

Nico receives David’s secret

Now this is kind of an unconventional one, but, hear me out.

I don’t know if there really is a “good option” for David’s secret in the sense that I think anyone who would choose to reveal the information to the group would be the type to do so in an accusatory, non-constructive way. Similarly, a lot of people who wouldn’t reveal the secret might face problems if it caused them to quietly simmer in their distrust. That suppression of emotions could lead to a big blow up in the future.

Because of that, you might be wondering why I didn’t assign this secret to one of my throwaway slots– namely, Xander, Min, or Rose. Well, it’s because I also wanted to consider what would happen if, even in this good universe, some number of students still needed to attend a Class Trial where the secrets are unknown. Certain secrets, if left unassigned, would lead to paranoia and distrust amongst the students. And, by throwing this secret away, this secret could basically never be confirmed as David’s other than by process of elimination or (highly unlikely) self-assignment. Therefore, all of the students would have to assume that anyone whose secret isn't known has a decent chance of believing that everyone exists to be manipulated. In my opinion, that would make productively discussing a murder really difficult.

So, I decided that the best course of action would be to give this secret to the person who would make the smallest deal out of it, and that turned out to be Nico. Nico already believes that socially interacting with other humans is a complicated and confusing process, the rules of which force you into expressing yourself in a specific, “acceptable” way. Basically, I think that Nico might already see a lot of conversation as manipulation, and themselves as the manipulee. The secret says that David is really good at interpreting those rules and acing the bullet points of “acceptable” conversation? No shit, he’s the Ultimate Inspirational Speaker.

I’m not trying to say that Nico is “dumb” enough to not realize that this secret is generally threatening, but I think that, if word of it were to come out, Nico would present it in a subdued enough manner that it wouldn’t make things worse than they need to be.

Hu receives Ace’s secret

Oh boy, this is a dangerous choice given Ace and Hu’s tumultuous relationship. Although, to be fair, I don’t remember exactly how established that rivalry was prior to the distribution of the canonical secrets. To the extent that they didn’t already hate each other to the point of no return, I chose this one because I think that Hu having the context of Ace’s secret might actually help to mend their relationship.

As I said up top, this AU is predicated on Hu having the “hopeless child” secret. Thus, in this AU, we can say for certain that Hu has a prior history of self harm/self destructive tendencies. If hopeless child Hu does turn out to be canon, it would support the theory that part of the reason why Hu won’t share the “harm yourself for fun” secret is because she knows that mental health is a sensitive subject, and doesn’t want to force someone to open up about it. Given that eating disorders are a form of self harm, we can rest assured that this isn’t a secret Hu would share, no matter how much David suggests that she does.

Given Hu’s history, she might be one of the people in this cast who could best understand Ace’s plight. With this additional context, his quest for power over something in his life might feel more sympathetic, and Hu might be able to muster more concern for him. And, I’m not gonna lie, part of this assignment was granted in the slim hope that the Ultimate Mom Friend Hu would be able to make a big grandma-style meal for Ace to enjoy. They could be an improbably wholesome duo if not for… The Circumstances.

Those circumstances won’t fade anytime soon in canon, but exploring hypotheticals like this are the whole reason why AUs exist!

J receives Eden’s secret

Compared to everyone else, Eden’s secret is a pretty nonthreatening one that, especially among this pretty queer cast, shouldn’t raise a whole lot of issues. The biggest problem I can see arising from it is if someone decided to out Eden, sort of like what happened to Nico. Therefore, I wanted to give Eden’s secret to someone who would be unlikely to share it without Eden giving the okay. And, J seemed to fit that description pretty well.

Obviously, some of J’s canon behavior was spurred on by the fact that Arturo non-consensually revealed her secret (which, spoilers, will not be happening in the blessed half of this AU). But, given J’s preference for privacy, I don’t think J would jump to sharing even a “harmless” secret. We directly saw that J only revealed Charles’ secret once he gave express permission for her to do so, which is what I would ideally want for Eden. Eden’s secret being given to a girl who would presumably be cool with her lesbianism is an added bonus to assuage her fears that (straight) girls who know she’s gay wouldn’t want to be her friend.

Unless, of course, J is also a girlkisser… then maybe the motive secrets could turn into a meet-cute…….. (/j)

Rose receives J’s secret

Finally, our first throwaway slot. After what J’s been through, I think she deserves to have her secret not be a topic of discussion at all– or at least not until all of them are listed out on the board.

There is also some logic behind which secret I gave to Rose as opposed to Xander or Min. We didn’t really see this in canon, but if Whit had let his secret go unclaimed, I could see some people being mad at Rose for inadvertently throwing away valuable information. This sentiment would only increase if Rose’s secret was something more relevant to the case at hand. Like, could you imagine how mad Teruko would have been if Rose had received the “murderer without remorse” secret? They could have had the answer to which person among them was a murderer without remorse, but Rose just carelessly threw it away because she was worried about people’s privacy?!

Therefore, I think the best case scenario for Rose is to receive one of the low-stakes secrets. In the case of J’s secret, it’s possible that someone like Arturo would be able to figure out that it was J’s secret without any confirmation from Rose as long as he had the information that someone in the cast was Mariabella’s daughter. No harm, no foul if Rose throws out the secret only for it to be instantly solvable anyway.

By giving J’s secret to Rose, J gets the blessing of privacy for as long as the secrets don’t become public knowledge, but Rose also doesn’t garner any backlash if they do, for one reason or another.

“Xander” receives Arei’s secret

Just to clarify, there isn’t any meaning behind which secret Xander vs Min got; they both just mean that the secret is un-confirmable.

Arei’s secret is a good one to bury because of how easily it can be misinterpreted. From the phrasing of the secret, nobody would know that Arei’s sisters abused her unless Arei told them herself, and without that context, Arei appears quite villainous. Hell, some people believe that learning of this secret was a reason why Levi would have chosen to kill Arei! If this information about Arei just isn’t out there to be known, then nobody could make that fatal oversight.

Also, Arei already knew what the vague contents of her secret would be, presumably without having seen the actual text. In Ace’s flashback, she quotes David’s secret from memory (because she read it), but when she unveils her own secret, she throws in the detail about reform school which isn’t at all present in the secret’s text. I think it was really important for Arei’s development that she had the agency to reveal her secret at her own pace. By making her secret inaccessible, it removes the possibility that someone else would reveal it before she’s emotionally ready.

Arturo receives Min’s secret

Look at me, pairing Arturo and Min together yet again. What is it about these two that causes me to keep coupling them…? Well, at least this time, they’re paired up because they, like, never talk in canon.

Arturo has proven himself to be a problem when it comes to revealing secrets. Even if he hadn’t been handed Miss Rosales’ dirty laundry, I would believe that he would air out the secrets of whichever nobody he learned about simply due to disrespect. Therefore, I think that giving Arturo a secret that really doesn’t matter is the best course of action. Whether he reveals it on the day the motives were distributed or the day of the Class Trial, most people probably wouldn’t make much of a fuss about an already-dead student’s secret, least of all Arturo. If he doesn’t care about what Min was up to, he wouldn’t stir up any drama by revealing or concealing information.

David receives Xander’s secret

Not gonna lie, I mostly gave this one to David as a form of damage control. I don’t know what he’s going to do with the secret he did canonically receive in the future– whether it belongs to Teruko or someone else, or whether he’s dying immediately or in it for the long haul– but giving David the silver bullet of “the killing game is all your fault” seems like way too much power to hand over. With a dead student’s secret, he doesn’t gain much by telling the truth or have much of a basis to execute a good lie.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that David received Xander’s secret, which is all about the tragically heroic backstory that probably led him to find comfort in David’s speeches in the first place. (And it does paint Xander in a decently positive light– “it wasn’t your fault” erases the possibility that Xander killed his family or whatever.) I imagine that, had David received this secret on the first day, basically a little buffering symbol would appear over his head and he would have to go lie down and stare at the piece of paper for a few hours. Or days.

By distracting David, we can hopefully avoid any of the decidedly negative side effects that him attempting to deduce and reveal everyone else’s secrets caused. While everyone else is growing as a person and whatnot, David can just be… looping the Literature Girl Insane MV in his head, or something. Is that really good for him? Probably not, but these are the heights you can reach when you set out to cause problems.

Arei receives Whit’s secret

Arei already didn’t reveal whose secret she had to anyone, as far as we know. So, if she had the secret belonging to Whit, arguably her closest friend at the start of Chapter 2, I really don’t think she would say anything. That’s good for Whit, because, similar to what I said about Arei herself, I think it’s better for him to have the ability to come forth with his secret when the time is right. Anything else and it might shake up his persona too suddenly and send him fight or flight mode.

I think the biggest potential flaw here is that we don’t know how Arei felt about her mom. Arei is willing to go confront other people about their secrets, so if Arei either really loved or really hated her mom, maybe that would lead her to go confront Whit about what his secret meant. And then, that could lead into him deflecting and looking shady.

That’s not really a huge liability to me, though, so I think this one will be fine.

Veronika receives Charles’ secret

Veronika is a weird case, because whether or not she reveals a secret seems to be based solely on entertainment value. In canon, we’ve seen that she hasn’t yet revealed the “hopeless child” secret because, for whatever reasons, she thinks that’ll make the killing game more interesting. But presumably, if she thought that revealing someone’s secret would make the game more interesting instead, she would have done that.

Because Charles doesn’t remember his brother’s death himself, I don’t think Veronika would see much value in holding it over his head, saving it for a dramatic reaction down the road, or whatever the hell she was trying to accomplish by not revealing Hu’s secret. Therefore, I think Veronika would find it most entertaining to see Charles’ reaction to learning about his amnesia, and tell him pretty quickly.

On the surface, that seems bad. However, I actually think that Charles learning about his secret is… for the best? If you assume that Charles is going to have to learn about this factoid someday, it’s probably better for him if he does it before a Class Trial is called, so that he can be in a more stable mental state. It’s also better for him to do it while he has Whit there to support him, and who knows what could happen between those two in future chapters? Much like Arturo’s assignment, we defuse Veronika’s chaotic power with this one, with the added benefit of potentially helping Charles on his journey to self-understanding.

Levi receives Arturo’s secret

Arturo’s secret was a hard one, because I think most people would react to it pretty negatively, especially with the confirmation that it belongs to Arturo of all people from the start. You could leave it with Eden as someone who seemingly didn’t judge, but given how poorly that situation played out in canon, it felt wrong to leave it in her hands.

Therefore, I gave it to someone who could potentially relate: Levi. He, too, came from a tense family background which he had to leave, and as such, he might better be able to put himself in Arturo’s shoes. While it is possible that Levi could resent Arturo for “ruining” a “good(?)” relationship with his sister (given how Levi struggled to coexist with his siblings), I don’t think it would irk Levi so much that he’d take drastic action against Arturo.

At the very least, we saw that Levi didn’t spill the beans about Arei’s similarly anti-sister secret. By that logic, he probably wouldn’t tell anyone about it, possibly including Arturo. In that case, we avoid Arturo blowing up on whoever was unlucky enough to have to break the news. And, even if Levi did tell Arturo, and Arturo decided to attack, I trust that even an injured Levi could defend himself far better than Eden could.

Ace receives Veronika’s secret

I just don’t think anything particularly bad would happen here. When I imagine Ace receiving this secret, I kinda just think of him going, “what the fuck?!”, and then putting the paper away. As someone who cares immensely about his own safety and image, I can definitely see this secret confusing Ace, but I don’t think to a point where it would really mess him up. It might make him think that Veronika is dangerous and weird, but… well, he already thought that.

Speaking of, especially with this information, Ace is too afraid of Veronika to try to bully her in the same way that he did with Nico. I don’t see any reason why Ace would benefit from revealing this secret, so it would likely remain hidden, which is probably for the best. Honestly, I don’t know if Veronika would care if this secret of hers got out, given that the main reason why people think this is hers is because of the similar sentiments that she already shared with Teruko in a public location. But, regardless, it takes away any ammo Ace might have by making his only target someone who he’s too afraid to take shots at.

Teruko receives Hu’s secret

Completing our little triad of sadness, this is the third instance of me giving a secret involving self harm to someone else who engages in self destructive practices– first Hu with Ace, then Ace with Veronika, and now Teruko with Hu. It obviously sucks that there are so many people in this cast who are struggling with this same issue, but I think it works out well to have them overlap. They’re probably the ones who best grasp the severity of each other’s problems, so they understand the gravity of sharing the information and would take steps to avoid doing that unnecessarily.

But, yeah, there wasn’t much of a reason beyond that for me to assign Teruko here. As a further extrapolation of the above point, though, if Teruko decided to ask Hu about her secret in the same way that she did with Rose, maybe Teruko could provide Hu some comfort about the situation and they could become friends.

Although, thinking about it more, that would actually have a decent chance of backfiring, as Hu might not appreciate having to take on the role of the helped as opposed to the helper, and Teruko might freak out if she felt herself letting her walls down around Hu. But that’s only if Teruko chose to talk to her about it, which is dubious in the first place. I don’t think Teruko would intentionally use this as any sort of weapon against Hu, which is the main criteria I was looking for.

Charles receives Rose’s secret

More unproblematic people being unproblematic. I don’t know if anything weird would happen as Charles’ upper-class upbringing came into contact with Rose’s cash-strapped past, but if it did, it would probably be a positive development for Charles. Y’know, like “realizing that it’s not only wealthy academics who can have talent” or “further learning to recognize his privilege and have sympathy for other people.” Much like what Charles canonically did with Eden’s secret, this one would probably go under the public radar until a Class Trial occurred, at which point Charles would reveal it. And, hey, that’s kind of like Rose’s secret’s canonical fate as well.

I also don’t think that we’d run into any trouble with Teruko possibly learning this one from the note that Charles passed her either, because… again, this was Teruko’s canonical secret, and nothing bad happened. Sometimes no reaction is the sweetest reaction of all.

Whit receives Nico’s secret

Yup, like you implied, Whit receiving Nico’s secret would probably be one of the best options for them. It’s not too much of a surprise. Whit seems to be a pretty securely out bi guy, so he would obviously support of Nico’s identity, and possibly even be someone Nico could look up to for being confident in who they are. On top of that, Whit greatly values privacy, and thus wouldn’t go around immediately shouting, “wow, Nico, it’s so awesome that you’re nonbinary!” He’d only do that if Nico wanted him to, after asking them first. I’m not even sure if Whit would contact Nico about it directly, but even if he didn’t, I feel like Whit would try to find ways to subtly encourage Nico so that they would feel safe coming out themselves. At least, that’s what my bias is telling me.

As a side note, I’m still playing with the rule that Arei sees whatever Whit’s secret is over his shoulder, which is actually what gave Nico’s secret the nod here over Eden’s. We saw that Ace, along with some others, were confused about what exactly the text of Nico’s secret meant. Meanwhile, if attached to Eden, her secret is pretty explicitly about her being sexually attracted to women, and therefore homosexual. I’m not at all calling Arei homophobic (in fact, the concept of doing so makes me very uncomfortable, so please don’t joke about it), but given that the two had been fighting beforehand, it’s possible that Arei would have tried to use the content of Eden’s secret against her somehow (but again, not in a homophobic way).

At the very least, Arei would know something about Eden that Eden might not want her to know, which is bad. I’m not sure if Arei would inherently understand Nico’s secret enough to gain anything of use from it, while Whit and his intuition would definitely understand what’s going on.

“Min” receives Teruko’s secret

Here we go; our other throwaway secret! Part of the appeal of leaving this one in the dark is because… well, we don’t know if it’s true. While the secret doesn’t explicitly state that its owner is the mastermind of the killing game, it’s definitely designed to make you think that’s the case. And, uh, I don’t know if Teruko is the mastermind or not. I recently wrote 1000 words about it, which is equal to one picture.

So, let’s explore both avenues. If Teruko isn’t the mastermind, then sharing this secret around is obviously bad. It would cause people to unwarrantedly distrust Teruko, and possibly even cause Teruko to distrust herself. That could impede the progress of Class Trials, if people don’t trust Teruko’s reasoning anymore, and the progress of deducing the actual mastermind. Therefore, by taking this secret out of circulation, we stop the misinformation from spreading.

Alternatively, if Teruko is the (evil) mastermind, then… aren’t I doing a disservice by not allowing the students to encounter this information? Well, yes, and no. I am preventing them from accessing the deus ex machina of David just outright saying, “oh, and by the way, Teruko is the mastermind!”; that much is true. But, by leaving that information out… aren’t I just leaving them in the same position that most killing game casts are in? They know that one of them is the mastermind, they just don’t know who. And, actually, they have a leg up on the other casts because the mastermind’s identity would still be a logically deducible fact that they could basically confirm if they all worked together. I don’t think it’s too much of a blow to the innocent students if we leave this one out, is what I’m saying.

So, that’s the good ending! A quick graphic to show how everything shook out:

(I swear, I didn’t mean to make it look like Whit was laughing at Nico’s identity. I just reused the sprites from my archetype analysis because I was too lazy to go get new ones…)

Now, on to the bad ending. This one was a lot harder to assign. Given that these secrets were meant to sow discord, there are only so many ways that things can play out well. There are lots of ways that things can play out poorly.

But, hopefully I’ve found the aggregate worst answer! Given that this is, you know… the one where things go horribly wrong, things may get pretty dark in this section, so proceed with caution. Nobody’s going to die or anything like that, but know that your faves may not be depicted in the most positive light in this section. Grab something comforting and put on some happy music, or lean hard into the angst, ‘cause we’re about to get started.

The Bad Timeline

Ace receives Levi’s secret

Look. I 100% agree that the whole Ace/Nico situation is a Major Yikes Situation /pos. However, I’m hopeful (in the sense of trying to craft the worst possible outcome) that we could still get a More or Less Yikes Situation even without the pair obtaining each others’ secrets.

Although Ace revealing that he was in possession of Nico’s secret closely preceded Nico’s death threat, that wasn’t actually what specifically led Nico to intimidate Ace. It was Ace’s comment that Nico was such a weakling that they could only solve their problems by getting people like David to help them, as well as the culmination of several days of Ace’s torment beginning in Chapter 1, which led them to do it. What I’m saying is, Ace and Nico were already rivals before the secrets even came out, so even without the direct connection to one another via the motive, it’s possible the high tensions would still cause similar events to unfold.

All that preamble hopefully helps to justify my choice to put Ace on Levi’s secret, because, my god, you can open a whole other can of worms with this one. Ace gaining the knowledge that Levi is a killer without remorse the day after Levi threatened to kill him would freak Ace out like nothing else. Being as loud as he is, I would think that Ace wouldn’t be able to stop himself from sharing this one with the class, starting a conflict right from the start.

While do I think the other students would believe Ace in the end– especially if he showed them the paper on which Levi’s name was printed– I also think that some people might doubt Ace’s words at first, thinking he’s overexaggerating as usual. However, that moment of being Boy Who Cried Wolf-ed by everyone else would also really fuck with Ace. He’s literally right, and has the paperwork to prove it, and yet people are still disinclined to believe him because they see him as a fool. It would draw an even deeper wedge between Ace and his classmates than we saw in canon.

Tying back around to the beginning, I think that this extra layer of powerlessness would just make Ace even more inclined to seek out a feeling of power elsewhere. So, I’m thinking that would still result in Ace bullying Nico, and, assuming he still keeps it up for long enough and calls Nico a weakling, we might be able to loop back around to Nico’s death threat anyway. Major Yikes Situation not averted!

Veronika receives David’s secret

Here’s a chaotic choice. Given how open-ended and accusatory David’s secret is, I definitely think it’s one that Veronika would have chosen not to reveal. However, just because she doesn’t want to reveal it doesn’t mean that the information won’t get out… in a way.

We’ve seen time and time again that Veronika is fascinated with morally questionable people, first with Arturo and later David himself once she knew about his secret. Therefore, if she knew about David’s secret from the start, I don’t think she would be able to stop herself from following him around and making some clever comments here and there. Can you imagine how concerning it would be to watch David try to give hope speeches and guide people while Veronika is peering over his shoulder and grinning at him, refusing to elaborate?

It would definitely be worrying, but I don’t think it would fully stop everyone from listening to him– but in this case, that’s a good thing! David’s tactics wound up causing more harm than good, so it was important for me to give his secret to someone who wouldn’t call him out immediately and stop him from enacting these bad policies. Veronika is a great choice for allowing that to happen, but also causing a lot of stress and doubt speculating as to what exactly Veronika could know about David that would make her act this way. Honestly, it might be the worst for David himself…

Levi receives Ace’s secret

This one isn’t that terrible on its own, but in the context of Ace also having Levi’s secret, I think it gets pretty hairy. I can’t really see any scenario where Levi knowing Ace’s greatest secret goes over well for them. If Ace blows up at Levi right out the gate, there’s a definite possibility that Levi can’t keep his cool and winds up firing off Ace’s secret in front of everyone else as retaliation. Betraying Ace’s trust like that (even if Ace was the one to mouth off first) would make their relationship even more unsalvageable.

Even if Levi did manage to keep his mouth shut, knowing Ace’s secret would just generally make it harder for Levi to talk to Ace when explaining himself or trying to make amends. Like I discussed with Hu in the good timeline, there’s a lot you can learn about Ace in the contents of his secret and the way it’s phrased. I feel like Levi would be able to pick up on some of that knowledge, but he would then find it even harder to interact with Ace without accidentally spilling the beans on some of that newfound understanding. This secret shuffle would make their relationship basically irreparable in my opinion, and the increased frustrations from both boys might make one of their tempers flare and lead them to do something inadvisable.

“Xander” receives Eden’s secret

First of all, giving “Xander” this one means there’s one less problematic person who could draw a relatively harmless secret, which is a pro in this scenario. Leaving this secret unconfirmed could also cause problems in a Class Trial. Given that this secret doesn’t include murder, blackmail, manipulation, etc, it’s a pretty nice secret to claim for yourself, even if it can basically only be claimed by one of the girls. This means that, even if Eden tried to be truthful about her secret, people might believe that she’s lying.

Furthermore, the DRDT cast seems to be a pretty queer group of people overall. 6/15 of the non-Edens are confirmed LGBTQ+ themselves (even if not all of them are out), and everyone has treated Nico and Whit’s identities with respect since learning about them. Canonically, I would say that Eden has nothing to worry about with regards to the other girls treating her differently for being a lesbian.

So, by making Eden’s secret far less accessible, it becomes less likely that she’ll ever get that moment of recognition and affirmation. Instead, as Eden’s secret remains hidden and irrelevant, it becomes easier for her to stick to what she knows is safe. An accepting environment was right there in front of her, but with the convenience of periphery, she might not ever see it.

Arturo receives J’s secret

Yeah, I agree with you on this one– J truly did roll a crit fail. I did consider giving J’s secret to someone else, as long as they would definitely publicly spill the beans, if it meant that Arturo could learn the content of J’s secret while receiving an additional bad secret as well. However, I couldn’t think of anyone who would be so guaranteed to tell everyone about J’s secret that I could be confident Arturo would hear of it, nor could I think of any particularly catastrophic secrets I’d rather give to Arturo. So, this one stays. J really is living in the worst timeline already– like if you cry every time.

Hu receives Arei’s secret

Hu was a tough nut to crack, because I think the ideal bad situation for her is that she gets a secret that’s problematic enough that it would cause major issues if news broke, but not so problematic that she wouldn’t be willing to share it as a part of David’s “let’s tell each other about our secrets” plan. Operating under the logic that the mention of self harm was the reason why she wasn’t willing to share the secret she got in canon, 3/15 options immediately disappear. More options vanish when you start eliminating not-super-problematic secrets like Xander's family, Charles’ brother, or Rose’s debt.

After some consideration, I landed on Arei’s being the best balance of thorny and not. It’s a secret that discusses a serious crime without incorporating murder, and there’s lots of room for public interpretation that could cause things to go really poorly for Arei if folks jump to conclusions. Given that Hu already didn’t super like Arei (I’m basing this off of her chastising Arei for bullying Eden), I could totally see her being willing to share this secret publicly in order to help everyone see that Arei is someone not to be trusted.

Making Arei’s secret publicly aired also removes the very important aspect of Arei’s agency that I wrote on in the good section. If Hu is sharing this secret, it’s probably pretty early in the chapter, which means that Arei might not be prepared whenever the news drops. The context of the secret sharing doesn’t involve Eden at all, so Arei might have a harder time putting two and two together about why she acts the way she does and how she wants to change. Not to mention, if Hu shares the secret in a way that directly agrees with David’s scheme, it automatically pits David against Arei, which means that he can’t offer her any help (to the extent that what he said helped her canonically). It’s just bad all around. But that’s why I’ve come to feel pretty confident in this choice.

Rose receives Min’s secret

Following up on Rose’s last entry, this is not one of the secrets that the rest of the students could either easily deduce or ignore. It would be very easy to assume that the owner of the poison secret was a murderer– possibly a mass murderer, and even one who didn't regret what they did. Even if poison wasn’t used in the Chapter 2 murder, people might suspect this person of being the killer, and/or it could throw suspicion on Charles as the only one (who we know of) who has a poisonous custom weapon.

Now, obviously, this secret did not cause much of a scene in the canonical Chapter 2 trial, but I think at least part of that is because it was Xander’s. Everyone knows that the person who has that secret can only be determined by process of elimination no matter who they ask. The same would be true if it were the secret Rose got, but people might grow upset that Rose threw away such a valuable piece of evidence. And, with Min incapable of claiming her secret, it might appear even more that someone was trying to hide something when nobody spoke up to claim it. It’s not much, but Rose made it difficult to come up with something bad.

Teruko receives Xander’s secret

Funnily enough, the logic behind me giving Xander’s secret to Teruko is quite similar to the logic behind me giving it to David. Much like how David would be taken out of commission by reading this secret, I think that Teruko would act the same– it would just be worse for her and the group as a whole.

Like I said for David, Xander’s secret paints him out as a tragic hero. He loved his family to pieces, and regrets their passing so much that he wishes he could have died with them. Even though it was textually not his fault, Xander still beats himself up every day for not being around to do the right thing and save people when it counted. …What does it mean that the guy with this secret was the one who felt he had to kill Teruko for the greater good?!

Reading Xander’s secret would only pull Teruko deeper into anger, self-hatred, and confusion. She was already pretty off kilter in this Chapter from trying to ignore her mixed emotions regarding Xander, and I think that having to relive her trauma and his betrayal any time someone brought up the mere concept of secrets would basically take her out of commission. I mean, check out how many times I was able to say the word secret in these three paragraphs alone. I don’t imagine Teruko would be able to fare much better in the hellish environment of this terrible swap, which might lead her to hole up in her room all day and grow increasingly bored and bitter.

Now, I’m not saying that Teruko needed to be up and at ‘em in the daily life because her running around and pressing knives to people’s throats was just so helpful. But at least, unlike David, she wasn’t actively making the situation worse. Her presence may have even made potential friends like Eden, Charles, or Rose feel better. At the very least, Teruko learned some key social context in the Chapter 2 daily life prior to the Trial, so removing Teruko from those interactions would make it much harder for her to fully grasp what was going on should she be forced to solve a murder once again.

Charles receives Whit’s secret

I agree with you here as well– Charles acquiring Whit’s secret is probably the worst case scenario for Whit. As one of two people who actually heard Whit talk about his mom in Chapter 1, Charles is one of the only people who would know that Whit doesn’t just “omit that truth” by not talking about his mom, he actively talks about her like she is alive. This would raise a very big question for Charles at a crucial point in their friendship. Charles has just come to start trusting this guy, so what do you mean he was lying about something so odd…?

There’s a chance that the reveal of this concealment of the truth would cause Charles to determine that he couldn’t trust Whit anymore, and it would drive them apart. But, I think that’s pretty unlikely. More likely is the option where Charles (who’s in a fragile state from his meltdown yesterday and only JUST started learning how to be a good friend) tries to question Whit about it, only for Whit to panic. I don’t really think that Whit would try to keep the ruse going, seeing as Charles literally has the answer right in front of him, but he still might be full of deflections, or try to avoid the subject with jokes. (“Huh? No, I totally said that my mom passed away a few years ago! You must’ve just not heard me– did you fling some detergent into your ears with that laundry machine?”)

I’m not sure if this distribution of secrets would fully split them up, but it would definitely cause a rift in their conversation and bonding that might stop Charles and Whit from growing as close as they did. And, all this isn’t even taking into account that–

Whit receives Charles’ secret

Did you ever notice that Whit and Charles’ secrets are both about a hidden dead relative? I didn’t put two and two together until now, but boy does it work out poorly for purposes of this AU.

Much like Levi with Ace’s secret, I don’t think this is an inherently bad draw for Whit, but it kinda sucks in this context. Whit gets placed into a really weird trolley problem: do you tell and comfort Charles about his dead brother when it’ll definitely segue into discussions of your own dead mom, or do you keep it hidden, not helping Charles and leaving yourself open to the possibility of him feeling betrayed later that you kept this secret from him? It’s these kinds of questions that Whit would be forced to ask himself in the moment that Charles first confronts him, and the time needed to process would only throw him off his game and make him appear more suspicious to Charles.

To be fair, a lot of this does depend on how deep in the lie Whit is. Is he usually pretty quick to admit that his mom is dead to anyone who digs deeper into the issue, or has he been lying about his mom’s status to everyone, his father included? If it’s more like the former, then maybe the two of them could actually come to bond over the tragedy of losing someone you care about. But, if it’s more like the latter, then this distribution of secrets could get in the way of one of the (seemingly) most stable and healthy relationships in the killing game.

Arei receives Arturo’s secret

At first, I actually considered giving Arturo’s secret to Arei in the good universe, because I thought that Arei could understand having complicated relationships with your sisters. But then I remembered something critically important. Arei herself is the younger sister. She wouldn’t relate to Arturo; she would relate to Felicity. And then, all hell would break loose.

Arei knows what it’s like to be a younger sister who, even if she never considered it herself, had other people try to pressure her into committing suicide. So, to have a younger sister lucky enough to actually have a big brother she cared about, only for him to leave her alone and cause her death? Arei would be furious. She would absolutely call him out for it immediately, and use all of the bullying tactics she learned to make his life a living hell.

Despite all that I wrote about what Hu would do with Arei’s secret, I don’t actually know if Hu would be more or less likely to share Arei’s secret if Arei was acting this way. Would Hu take it upon herself to join in shaming Arturo for his actions, or feel that Arei was being a hypocrite and want to share Arei’s own truth? Either way, with both of these secrets, I think that the option of Arei’s character growing at all (or becoming friends with Eden) any time soon is pretty much dead.

And then there’s Arturo himself. While we’ve seen that Arturo does genuinely seem remorseful and haunted by Felicity’s death, I doubt Arei would know or care. I also totally think that J would join Arei in absolutely demolishing the man. Having Arei’s offense be backed by the Julia Rosales might just break him. Whether it would be in a victim way or a killer way I’m not sure, but it would definitely be bad for funni beauty standards man. The good news is that it might stop Arei from dying…? Unless Arturo just decided to kill her. There really isn’t a lot of good news.

David receives Veronika’s secret

Alright, back to David and Veronika. This is the third time I’ve had two people just swap their secrets, I guess? And, it’s kinda for the same reasons again. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Since we’ve been through a lot since we last discussed this pair, let’s get a quick recap: Veronika knows that David is a manipulative bastard, but won’t tell anyone that yet because she thinks it’ll be more interesting if she keeps her mouth shut. Thus, everyone is kind of wary of David, and David is definitely wary of Veronika, but not so much that it stops David from doing his information-seeking “let’s all share our secrets” plan.

I think that learning this about Veronika would make David pretty confused, very concerned, and extra conscious of Veronika in a way that would be hard to conceal. He could probably guess from the way Veronika was acting that she had some kind of dirt on him, and therefore conclude that, if he ever tried to share her secret, she might just fire back at him. David does not want that. So, the two of them remain at an uneasy stalemate that would make everyone else increasingly troubled.

Furthermore, I think that Veronika’s secret is a good balance of an unexpected yet potentially relevant piece of information about a living student that David would want to seek more of, while also not being so grim that it would appeal to whatever morals David may have. (Don’t get me wrong, Veronika’s secret is very worrying and tragic, but at least the inclusion of “for fun” makes it less grim than Arturo’s or Hu’s, to me.) David would be inclined to continue on his quest of acquiring the most knowledge-as-power as possible, and Veronika would be thrilled to watch! Both of them would just be giving off… really weird vibes about it.

Nico receives Hu’s secret

(extra suicide TW just in case)

If I say anything offensive or incorrect in this section, I deeply apologize. I don’t mean to portray either of these characters, their issues, or people who relate to them or their issues in a bad light, and I definitely don’t mean to demonize mentally ill people. The reasoning behind why I think it would be bad for Nico to get Hu’s secret is complicated, and may be based on uninformed thoughts or unfounded projections. However, based on what I do “know,” I think it makes sense, so I’ll try to explain myself as best I can.

Basically, I think that receiving Hu’s secret would be bad for Nico because it might make Nico less likely to speak up for themselves when Hu talks over them. If I were Nico, I might be worried about reacting too strongly to what Hu is doing, and accidentally sending her back into the hopeless state of her childhood. Just interacting with Hu in general might lead someone (like David) to start questioning Nico about the secret they received, and cause the information to accidentally leak out. It would make Nico saying anything on how Hu was acting difficult.

Again, I am not trying to villainize Hu, or mandate that you have to walk on eggshells around suicidal people because they’re loose cannons or whatever. I just think that, especially for someone as uncomfortable with socialization with Nico, navigating the sensitive subject of past suicide attempts in this incredibly hostile bad AU environment might prevent them from speaking up for themselves when they’re feeling belittled. And, that would be bad for their personal development.

I wish we could move on to something happier to combat these bad vibes, but unfortunately, we still have a couple more to go.

“Min” receives Rose’s secret

Well, at least we can cool down a little bit with this one. Not a ton going on here; basically just that Rose’s secret is pretty lowkey and I could cause more damage with other secrets elsewhere. I don’t think it would cause a particular stir with either other students becoming paranoid or Rose’s characterization and growth. I suppose that, without the excuse of being able to explain her past, Rose probably wouldn’t have had that chance to vent to Teruko, which was probably a good experience for her? The conflict-avoidant Rose will be suffering enough with all the turmoil going on around her, methinks.

Eden receives Nico’s secret

Make no mistake, this is not a decision made to hurt Nico. It’s meant to hurt Eden. With her compassionate heart and non-judgmental attitude, Eden is a great draw for any secret-holder to have in order to not cause trouble. That’s why I thought that the best move here was to use the secret as an offensive weapon to lessen her impact, as well as preventing a more problematic secret from being absorbed into her positive vibes.

Eden’s greatest secret is that she’s a lesbian, and she fears that people will come to hate her or discriminate against her if they find out about her identity. Therefore, the worst thing to do to her is to affirm those fears by shoving the homophobia someone else suffered in her face. Learning that Nico was mocked for their identity would make Eden less confident in hers, and might dampen her spirit enough that some of the good effects of her optimism are negated. She might become more hesitant to discuss secrets and more fearful of her peers, knowing that one of them probably knows about her identity and could use it against her at any time. Little does she know, it’s actually in the morgue alongside the Ultimate Rebel.

But, the fact that is just further feeds into my idea from Xander’s section. If Eden has just been reminded of how cruel the world can be to LGBTQ+ people, she wouldn’t be jumping at the opportunity to reveal which secret was hers. This would 1) allow another troublemaker to perhaps successfully claim it as their own, 2) make Eden look suspicious as she tries to come up with a solid lie of her own, and 3) postpone or deny (if Eden dies on a short timeframe) Eden’s ability to feel comfortable in herself.

Also (not to say that David forcing Nico to share their secret was a good thing), if Nico’s secret never becomes available to the public, they might have to go through the rest of their time in the killing game getting misgendered. Diversity loss!

J receives Teruko’s secret

J could stay quiet for a lot of things, but I feel like if she knew who the mastermind was (assuming she doesn’t know that she herself is the mastermind), that’s something she wouldn’t stay quiet about. I think that J at least wanted to see Teruko as her friend, given that she approached Teruko on the day she tested out her universal remote and roped Teruko in as part of her plan to get away from Arturo. Teruko double-crossing J by “being the mastermind” would, I think, be enough of a betrayal that J would set out seeking answers. Publicly.

Teruko, having just seen Xander’s secret, is also in a terrible mood, meaning that her ability to defend herself against J’s accusations and keep a cool head would be lessened, and possibly devolve into a screaming match. This would send the students down the incorrect(?) path as to the mastermind’s identity, further encourage Teruko to distance herself from everyone else, and cause J to lose faith in one of the few people she liked just before Arturo starts to get on her ass. Needless to say, the group would be in shambles.

That was rough, but we’re finally done. Let’s take a look at how things shook out.

(Once again, I really didn’t mean to make it look like Whit was laughing at Charles’ dead brother? A little treat for everyone who believes Whit is evil, I suppose.)

Blech. Even though torturing characters can be fun sometimes, speculating about the worst case scenario isn’t usually the kind of energy that I like to bring to this blog. Hopefully I was able to deliver something satisfactorily devastating, though!

As a final note, assigning all these secrets to everyone did get me thinking a little about what would have happened in this chapter if the motive had gone as planned, and everyone had gotten their own secrets. While it obviously wouldn’t have been as good as the good universe, I do think that people learning of their own secrets is a lot better than many of the bad scenarios that could have been created with a shuffle. Charles and Teruko definitely would have been a bit thrown, but at least in Charles’ case, I don’t know if it would have resulted in murder.

In my opinion, I think it’s probably most likely that David or Nico would have killed? David obviously cares a lot about his career and the prospect of his secret being shared with the world, so he could have tried to ride his good social graces and fake “family history of depression” secret to a Class Trial clear. Nico also has a lot to worry about with their secret getting out, and, already facing pressure from Ace’s bullying, it’s possible they would have made the same decision to kill Ace if Ace’s harassment continued. I suppose this is a question I can ask back at ya, Gremlyn, if you feel inclined to answer! :D And, thank you for the ask. Even if it got a little bleak, I had fun with it.

Stay safe and happy out there, everyone, and make sure your deepest, darkest secret doesn’t get handed to your worst enemy. Or really, just try to avoid entering a killing game at all. Until next time~

[onekindredspirit]

Family Recipes - *Plum Upside Down Cake* I had a message from my older brother. "Hey Bro, How's it going? I'd enjoy a catch up soon." It was 6pm. I decided to call him the next day. I knew by now he would be drunk and I hate to see any Uber Sapien lower themselves that way, as if a sound mind had no value at all. When I was a child Plum Upside Down Cake was baked with peaches, and for children, that is the perfect topping. But we grow up. The transition from peaches to plums happened around the same time I stopped flinching whenever I heard my childhood name. Preheat your over to 180 Celsius (350 F). Take a 20 cm (8 inch) circular baking tin and in that melt 4 tablespoons of butter. Once melted blend in 1/2 to 3/4 cup of brown sugar. The aim is to incorporate all the butter resulting in a smooth, not stiff base. Spread evenly in the bottom of the pan. Lay canned plum halves over the entire butter and brown sugar mix. In a separate bowl cream together 1/4 cup butter, 1/2 cup white sugar and 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla essence. Add 1 unbeaten egg and beat until the mix is light and fluffy. Add 1 cup flour and 1 and 1/2 tsp baking powder (blended) alternating with 3/8 cup of milk. Beat lightly and pour over the plum halves. Bake. Once the top of your batter begins to brown, cover loosely with tinfoil for the remaining time. Bake until your knife comes out clean. Perhaps 30 to 45 minutes. I called my brother the next day but later than I had hoped for and by 3pm he was already slurring drunk. Me: How's it going? Older Brother: Well, I've decided. Me: What have you decided? Older Brother: I've decided to drink myself to death. Me: Why would you do that? Of course I knew the answer. I would have killed myself too, long ago, if I had been him but I'm not and he wouldn't. Older Brother: I've got nothing to live for ... I don't need a detailed list of all the people who have deserted him to save themselves. Or the employers who found ways to get rid of him. Nor the social clubs that banned him for life or his children who don't want to know him. My brother has an anti-social personality disorder. I spent the first 14 years of my life under the rule of this violent and remorseless narcissist. In my 14th year, and already 7 years into what would turn out to be a 25 year stretch of PTSD, my own sense of personal survival finally kicked in. Under threat of another violent encounter I drew my 20 cm hunting knife and I went for him. The kitchens here on Rikers Island are considered the best in the American penal system and I am proud to be speaking to you from the cake division. Okay, I'm not on Rikers Island but perhaps somewhere in a parallel universe I am. But in this timeline, my brother ran and locked himself in the bathroom and that was the last time he threatened me. Recipes evolve. So do people and I consider myself lucky to have a personal evolution. I no longer flinch when I hear my childhood name and I bake cakes with plums instead of peaches. But some people never evolve, like my brother, trapped for an eternity in the hell of a malignant self. I didn't speak to him for 20 years but as Tom Ripley said in the movie Ripley's Game "... we are constantly being born," So, I will call my brother again when I know he'll be sober. I'll suggest we have lunch together and I'll make sure that, for an hour or two at least, he believes he is human and that he is loved. Take your cake straight from the oven, lay a large platter over the top and invert. Carefully lift the baking tin off to reveal the glory of your Plum Upside Down Cake. Let it cool a bit but don't wait too long. Now is the time to decide. Do you want a piece of the cake? Well then, just draw your blade and take it. One Kindred Spirit

[cosmica-galaxy]

Yan!Phobos x a madman!reader who always gets around of his rules just to get back at him with a smile or laugh in their face.

Tw: Soft Yandere -- Why are you always so FRUSTRATING?! No matter what the Director tries to do to keep you well behaved, you always seem to find SOME loophole somewhere in his rules! It has been driving him nuts for the past few attempts. No matter what type of guideline he tries to get you to follow, it always seems to come back and bite him in the ass! In all honesty, if he didn't love you like he does now, you would've been killed off at the first sign of insubordination. That...and the fact that you are a total wack-job. He's not surprised with your current insanity, since you did work with dissonance before your eventual erosion into madness, but you still seem to have some form of understanding about your surroundings and the world. Even himself! Since you tend to recognize him through your maddened-influenced haze. Yet, despite this, you always take the opportunity to get under his skin. Knowingly leveraging his feelings for you to get away with something or to work around his guidelines. It's one of the most bothersome things about you. Oh...but everything else he can't help but adore. Your insane cackle...your remorseless ferocity...your disregard for orders...and when you come back to the Nexus Tower covered in the blood of your adversaries, Phobos finds himself swooning for you all over again. He can't help the warmth that fills his being when when sees you tear apart a victim and slather their blood all over the room you're in. You're a heartthrob in his eye and that's what makes you so special to him. He would even argue that you became BETTER once you became afflicted with insanity. You just seem so much more lively and alluring than you did before and he can't help himself but to wonder why. Any grunt worth their salt in his tower knows better than to talk about sending you to the asylum. The last grunt that suggested such an idea was violently beheaded by the Director himself. Hm. Maybe you and him weren't so different after all. He would be a top tier hypocrite if he didn't admit that he was no longer following the orders of the employer's charter, as he too was defying orders. So maybe that's why he finds you endearing, even when you defy his orders. You both are just merely defying those around you and you both seem to have your own sense of judgement and insanity. That just makes Phobos fall for you even harder. You both are pretty much the same brand of horrible grunts. And Phobos loves it more than anything.

[paragonrobits]

yknow something occured to me; the part of Star Wars fandom, or at least casual watchers, that really want the Dark Side to be shown as caring for their loved ones despite canon repeatedly enforcing that the Dark Side is about destructive selfishness that kills their loved ones and the Light Side is all about compassion, is that its sort of the logical extreme of the mentality of the fandom that interprets any positive dynamic as Found Family that you should settle down with and leave all other connections behind

reading into what they say and think, there's this clear idea of valuing the people you know and loving them and taking care of each other no matter what, but there's a definite complete silence when it comes to people OUTSIDE that found family, except in the most abstract sense. There's a lot of criticism when it comes to characters who value their principles or duty above all other things, and you see a LOT of this with the Jedi and characters in general who leave a found family because they have something else going on

there's this emphasis on 'the people around you are the most important thing, and its inhuman to want anything else', and its basically... well, selfish. There's a very strong hint that the people who say these things, whether they're consciously aware of it or not only care about the people in the found family/friend group, and everyone else is mostly irrelevant. Its the people who cannot conceive of the idea 'personal isn't the same as important' and they sound a lot like they think that personal is the ONLY important thing

so we get the fandom depictions of the Dark Side; intensely passionate people whom, to these fans, are a moral alternative to the presumably dogmatic Jedi, who are fueled by passion and Love, with the Jedi's lack of a specific family dynamic and forbidding of marriage or romantic love as being a sign of them being cold and unspeakably Bad people, and that's very interesting given that the iconic example in Star Wars of a character defined by romance is Darth Vader

who not only became the remorseless enforcer of the dread sith Emperor Palpatine and slaughtered every man, woman, and child he was asked to, who slaughtered all the children within the Jedi Order without much hesitation, but also murdered the woman he loved so much in a fit of rage. Because that's how the Dark Side works; selfishness taken to the logical extreme, leaving you with nothing but pain and misery that feeds on itself to make you stronger.

[sidabro]

Once again I saw some really in-depth thoughts that just kill me by how theyre built on misunderstandings. Its a pain and embarrasing for me to have such a very very strong oppinnion on something ultimatelly meaningless, but its the truth which i wont deny to myself on my own blog...... This is going to be about hetalia so beautiful sophisticated mutuals please scroll by ...

Gilbert. The teuton. Prussia. It unbelievably unbelievably annoys me when he is headcanoned as being a converted baltic prussian. I think its an incredibly dense, and bordering on offensive, and just.. stupid of a theory.. I think its stupid as fuck. There are FAIR interpretations of it, that warp the mangacanon and build a very elaborate meta on how these immortal nationpeople come around, sure. I can grit my teeth in silence and respect the work, yet still it makes me chew my skin and roll my eyes to look back into my own skull ..

To start with my favouritest history, the genocide (!) of the baltic prussians, as they were fucking hated the teutons. And those (FEW! INCREDIBLY FEW!) who chose to convert/surrender were all, in the end, betrayed and germanified by that same ordin, shunned by the rest of the baltic prussians, who considered them traitors and didnt accept them returning. We know this. its not historical fiction, its chronicles and letters between germans poles lithuanians, its direct sources that say this. Children stolen and christianised more often than not still were seen as "feral", "mutts", "wild and foreign" by the germans, and very often ran away or rebelled or acted out in ways that doomed them to not ever integrate. There is a very famous and strong sentiment of "those forcibly baptised will not ever forget what was taken from them", rooted in reality and absolutely magnified in legend and story. For the biggest example, that some people also use somehow missing the entire point, is Herkus Monte- a baltic prussian child who was taken and christened, who was brought up as an exemplatory german, so much so that he was sent back to Prussia to help the knights and bishops, and then betrayed them almost imediatelly, uniting the tribes and fighting to his last strenghts to drive the teutonic hordes out.

Gilbert is an incredibly, incredibly bloodtbirsty man, as per canon portrayal. He is remorseless, and he is very close to christianity; for his acting out and "telling the Pope to piss off", it is still historically accurate to how the teutons believed themselves to be True and Correct harbringers of Deus Vult, God's Will, and the Pope who didnt endorse their ways a fraud. Gilbert is an imperialist, it bleeds perfectly into making him the man he is later. Gilbert sees his enemies - Lithuania, Tolys, and Poland, Feliks, as totally stupid and reasonless. He doesnt once think deeper about what he does- he dashes to kill them with a smile on his face and opportunistically, ambitiously he spoke of his correctness in every instance- for example, the battle on lake Peipus chapter! Gilbert is forefirst a teuton, and a german second, at that point of the story. He is a christian, he is a knight of divinity.

I just simply dont think an origin as a baltic prussian is fit for the man he is! Even if you say, "he is totally brainwashed and being raised like this since childhood erased anything else", it.. adds nothing! Its tragedy for sake of tragedy!

And my second historical gripe, is that the teutonic order didnt start with the northern crusades. They started with Jerusalem, and then aided Hungary; WHICH, IN THE MANGA CANON, GILBERT DOES! Gilbert's knightly adventures start in Hungary, before the order was kicked out of there in 1225! For reference,a wholy diffrent group of crusaders had already built a capital city in modernday Latvia and pillaging the locals since 1201, and the polish mosurians hadnt yet had the brilliant idea of asking the Pope for assistance in the war with baltic prussians.

To portray him as baltic is ahistorical, it to me geniuenly seems offensive (to give the personification of the enemy the background of of the genocided victims is something people were massivelly getting yelled at when they did it to Alfred, Matthew back so recently as in 2017..),but perhaps more convincingly just notttt canon to the source material. If Gilbert was a baltic prussian, he wouldntve met Erszébet when he does in canon; if Gilbert was a baltic prussian, then he is unfit to be the personification/leader/symbol of/idealised/adored by the knights. Which if he wasnt, he would not be a knight himself at all! Why give a positition of such importance when he isnt even really a german?

Its fucking bonkers! I bite my thumb at thee, I do! I know all best I can do is be polite (i want to believe that i am) and just not look at the content (I try not to, pretending it doesnt exist is bliss) , and yet. Its such a blood boiling idea in me. Its my own cycle of plague. Its an idea so pervasive in western fandom (trully, the russian and japanese side imagine him as an ostrogoth or a feral child of Germania himself if they do something about his pre-teutonic life, which imo is so much more based and cool and creative but ill disgress(<- lying)), why but of why is this popular. Keep your pruliet keep your pruspol i cant care about that anymore but make Gilbert a north german veteran of getting his ass beat in Jerusalem and Hungary... AAAAAAAAA