#but like a comic where we take a version of ourself through this kind of transition would inevitably have to touch on relationships to food

[reticent-fate]

part 11/26ish

anyone remember those scales with the springs in 'em? all i ever see these days are digital scales but those things made the best noises. i think i've seen some kitchen scales that still use spring mechanisms, but it's been a while.

technology is weird.

from the beginning

[noah-moth-cursed-chaos]

Museums and Abstract Paintings: A quinnby fic, chapter four

Quick disclaimer: Chris’ amnesia is not modeled after any real world type of amnesia, please don’t base any understanding of real world amnesia off of it. Tw for mentions of murder and implied mentions of murder, along with guilt and anxiety.

Trilby didn’t quite know how to take what he’d learned on his mission with Chris. He’d noticed the ministry was always short staffed. He hadn’t before recognized the constant influx of new faces, or how there was usually no explanation to what happened to the old ones. They were all just hear to get tossed into the fire in the fruitless attempt to protect a few civilians. There was a better chance of ending up dead or insane than making it through their job. Why did so many people stay? Did everyone come in the way he did? Wanted by the law and under threat of imprisonment if they didn’t work for the government? He sighed as he got up from his desk, his report wasn’t as detailed as his usual work but it was good enough. Time to turn it in.

Despite the small staff there was no lack of the normal office gossip in the ministry building, usually about the results of another agent’s mission. Trilby overheard a snippet of this as he walked past.

“Yeah, came in covered in blood, again, think most of it was his this time.”

“Good grief, Chris really is trying to cost the carpet cleaners a fortune isn’t he?”

“Is he okay?” Trilby had stopped, glancing at his two coworkers.

“Not sure, he’s in the infirmary. But he’s always bounced back before so I’m sure he’s doin’ fine.” One of them said.

“Starting to doubt he *can* die he’s done this so many times.” The other said.

Trilby changed his route after that, heading up to the floor the infirmary was on, the report could wait.

Chris hated when he had to get stitches. Oh well. He was alive, a bit worse for wear, but alive.

“In no point did it cross your mind to, I dunno, *run*? There’s no shame in not coming in here a bloody mess after every other job, y’know, plenty of agents manage it quite well.” Claire walked in, an expression of concern and exasperation on her face.

“Not demonslayers.” Chris said, “Besides, it’s not *that* bad.” He shrugged.

“You have too much pride in your mission record, you can fail one mission.” She shot at him.

Chris could’ve laughed, he couldn’t give less sh^ts about his mission record, “It isn’t about that. With some of the jobs other people here have, if they slip up someone else comes in and it’s fine, if I slip up people could get hurt, good people.”

“You already saved the world once y’know, it can be someone else’s problem now.” Claire sighed, “... but I guess I get where you’re coming from.”

“Saved the world?” The two turned to the doorway to see Trilby, who looked thoroughly confused with what he just heard.

“Yeah I saved the world from a henweigh.”

“.. a henweigh?” Trilby asked.

“Yeah.”

The thief paused, clearly having expected clarification, “And what’s a henweigh?”

“‘Bout ten pounds.” Chris smirked. Claire chuckled and rolled her eyes.

“You know one day someone’s gonna ask about it who’s already heard that joke.” She pointed out.

“So you didn’t actually save the world?” Trilby asked.

“Who knows.” Chris smirked at the other’s annoyance, “Maybe I did maybe I didn’t.”

“You can just say you don’t want to answer.”

“I know, but it’s funny to watch you get annoyed. I do think I’m gonna leave you in the dark though, mate.”

“Well, at least you’re alive to do that, heard you ruined the carpet coming in.” The ex thief leaned against the wall, Chris couldn’t help but laugh.

Trilby had tried to brush off what he heard in the infirmary, maybe they were just joking around. Really, Chris saving the world? Sounded about as likely as a beaver running for parliament. But he also barely really knew anything about Chris. Just that he took more dangerous assignments and was known for being reckless and unpredictable. But for some reason he couldn’t shake his intrigue. Couldn’t hurt to ask around.

Turns out it couldn’t help either. The answers people had just raised more questions. Chris stopped something horrible, nobody knew what it was or how he did it. Some people even suspected it was just some delusion, seeming as apparently he was supposed to be in a mental hospital during the time.

Trilby guessed he wasn’t quite as sneaky about his prying into the matter as he assumed, because Chris did find out eventually, and did confront him.

“Ya know it’s kinda rude to go asking about someone’s personal business behind their back.” Trilby couldn’t tell if the redheaded man who’d walked into his office was upset with him or not.

“... pardon?” The idea of being found out hadn’t crossed his mind, so he wasn’t quite sure what Chris could be talking about.

“You *really* wanna know what Claire was talking about in the infirmary don’t you?” The taller man raised an eyebrow. A younger Trilby likely would’ve turned an impressive shade of red at realizing he’d been caught, or would’ve tried to think up some half baked excuse as to why he’d been snooping. But now Trilby held his composure, despite the slight panic he felt inside.

“Oh, yes I have been looking into that.” Trilby said, turning his attention back to the file he was reading, “Is that a problem?”

There was a short pause before Chris spoke again, “... I guess I could tell you.” He said, “On two conditions.” Trilby couldn’t help but look up, intrigued to hear whatever conditions the taller man wanted met. “You meet me at the museum tonight at 4, and you don’t call me crazy.”

Chris was more than anxious as he waited outside the museum. Why the hell had he agreed to talk about it? Why here? Trilby would just think he was insane or he still belonged in the mental hospital or-

“Quinn?” He was snapped out of his thoughts, finding Trilby standing a small distance away, “Are we going in?”

“Oh uh-yeah.” Chris cleared his throat and got up, “.. how long have you been standing there, by the way?”

“Nearly ten minutes.” Oh. Oh sh^t. He just let him stand there for ten minutes. God Quinn you’re stupid.

“Sh^t, sorry mate.” Chris lead him inside. There weren’t many people here, and those that were seemed caught up enough in their own exploration of the building to pay no mind to the two men. Chris showed Trilby his favorite exhibits, talking about the history behind them and why they caught his eye. Trilby seemed more interested in Chris’ words than the museum itself, but his eyes lingered on more valuable exhibits, and Chris wondered if he was thinking of what it’d be like to have possession of them. Eventually they wondered to a part nobody was in at the moment.

“Why did you want to meet here?” Trilby asked, “Why not your apartment or my office or.. anywhere more secluded?”

“Uh, stupidly enough I figured it would be. Sorta a neutral ground. We’ve both made fools of ourself in front of each other in a place like this.” Chris explained. He walked over to a bench and sat down, “So how much did you find out eventually?”

“Not too much I think. Something happened when you were in a mental hospital, you stopped it somehow. Nobody knows what it was. Well, Claire might, but when I asked her she told me to mind my own business. Hey! Don’t laugh at me!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just-“ Chris managed to calm down, “You sounded so offended.” He said, “Well, I’m uh, not really sure if my version of the story is even the whole thing.” He said, yeah that’s a good way to start Chris, set yourself up as an unreliable narrator. God he probably already thinks you’re nuts.

“What do you mean?”

“I Uh, don’t remember anything really before uh. The night my parents died.” He began, “Sometimes things feel familiar or I think I *should* remember something but I just... don’t. That day I was heading to their home after a book signing. I was stressed and they’d left a voicemail asking me to come over and I just.. I thought maybe seeing them would make things a little better. But they were dead when I got there, murdered. They never found the killer.”

“Oh I’m... sorry.” Trilby didn’t expect the story to start off with dead parents, Chris figured. It sounded like a cliche. He sounded like a sh^tty comic book hero.

“It’s fine, nothing that can be done now.. I checked myself into a mental hospital, I’m pretty sure it was a last straw thing for me. I didn’t react the way I thought I should’ve. Figured I should get help.” He was pretty sure the hospital f^cked him up more, but he didn’t say that, “One day I woke up and there was just a guard, dead. I didn’t really know what to do, so I took his gun and went out to investigate. The place was crawling with zombies, which I know sounds insane but it’s true, I recognized some of ‘em, other patients, guards, they smelled like rotting flesh and I remember wondering if I breathed in too close if I’d catch it. At first I didn’t really think about what was going on, I mean what are you supposed to think? I had to get out. That’s what I thought. I had to get out and I had to find out what was causing this and I had to get rid of it because otherwise I’d die. It was kind of a blur until I got shot.” Chris glanced at Trilby, trying to read his face for a reaction to what he’d said so far, he couldn’t find one. The other agent was just.. listening. Chris paused before he continued, “I killed this big lard^rse looking thing and then one of those walking corpses shot me. I woke up in a graveyard, I was one of them but.. somehow I wasn’t. Gone. Not like they were. I went to my parents house to see if there was anything there that might help. I don’t really remember everything I grabbed. I fought my way through the rest of ‘em, I killed it, the evil, the thing that was doing it all, at least I think I did.. I remember the life leaving my body and thinking it was my time.”

“But you’re not dead. Or a zombie.” Trilby now sounded confused, Chris didn’t blame him, this was all so odd he could barely make sense of it half the time. He sometimes wondered if maybe he was just delusional.

“Yeah. That’s what doesn’t make sense. I died a zombie and woke up a human on the side of the road with a bunch of guns and the book of transformations. Everything was normal and nobody knew anything about a zombie apocalypse.” Chris said, “But there were. A lot of people dead. Really quick. A lot of them looked like the zombies I killed. Nobody could figure out what did that to them.”

“I actually remember hearing about that on the news.” Trilby admitted.

“.. sometimes I wonder if there could’ve been a better way. If I’d known I swear I would’ve found one but- but... yeah.” He sighed, why was he saying this? Why had he agreed to talk about it?

Chris looked so uneasy, Trilby wondered if his mind was taking him back to what he went through, or thought he went through. He wondered how to break the tense silence, and silently realized why Chris chose this place to meet. Last time both of them were in a museum was lighthearted and fun and honestly ridiculous. Despite how quickly Trilby left it behind and forgot about it, the few times he had thought about it it was never a *bad* memory. As absurd as what Chris was saying sounded to an observer, to the demonslayer this was a personal hell. A shroud of guilt and uncertainty that he couldn’t shake. “... I’m not going to say I know what that’s like, because I don’t, I don’t think it’s *possible* for someone else to go through something like that. But I do know what it’s like to only realize something you did after it was done.” He didn’t know why he said that, or why Chris talking about the people he’d killed stuck out so much to him.

“.. what do you mean? If you’re okay saying it?” Chris’ voice was soft, quiet.

“There Uh, was a mansion, some things happened... it was my body but.. it wasn’t *me*, I never would’ve done it if I had control.” Trilby elected to keep details sparse, he was sure trying to explain what happened at Defoe Manner wouldn’t do either of them any favors. Besides. Chris had brought him here to share something. This wasn’t show and tell, and he didn’t want it to seem like he was trying to upstage the other.

“.. I don’t think it really counts against you then, you didn’t want to do it.”

“I don’t think what you did is your fault either. You had no clue what would happen.” He paused before adding, “I won’t say a word of what you told me. I swear.”

Chris paused, before grinning a bit, “Hey, maybe this can be a thing, but, less morbid in the future. Museums could be like our Las Vegas.” He had effectively dispersed the tense mood between the two with that.

“What?” Trilby had to hold back a laugh, what the hell was the other saying?

“You know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas? We can hang out in museums and do whatever we want and say whatever we want and when we leave we don’t tell anyone about it.” Trilby had to admit, it was a nice idea, if a bit silly. A place where both of them could be vulnerable yet also maintain complete privacy the moment they left.

“That sounds nice.” Trilby said, “Next time let’s go to an art museum. They’re less boring.”

[autumnblogs]

Companion Piece 3: Dave’s Poem, Crows, Eyes, Living in Another’s Shadow

https://www.homestuck.com/story/444

Dave spends a lot of time staring out of windows and contemplating dead things.

Death and the Past in Homestuck, as in real life, are intrinsically linked together. When a person dies, we can no longer get a lens into what’s happening to their mind, and all that’s left of the person from the perspective of information we can gather about them as a complete person is in our memories. Memories and Dreams are the real ghosts haunting us.

EDIT: I wrote this while I was a little buzzed on some bourbon, so it’s a bit more pretentious than things I usually write.

Dave’s first thoughts as he stares out the window link Time, Death, and Entropy together. As the present rushes forward, eating up the future and shitting out the past, it transforms the living into the dead, and transforms the dead back into the component particles that make them up so that the universe can use them once more to build new things. We leave numberless ghosts of ourselves in the past, memories haunting our present living selves - we can interact in real time with our own death, as we consider the people that we used to be, versions of ourselves who aren’t alive anymore - we can watch ourselves dying in real time every second of every day.

Crows become a motif in Dave’s dreams, albeit dreams that we personally won’t get to see which he’ll talk about in the future - he watches himself through the eyes of crows, dying repeatedly as he watches himself from the perspective of other selves, switching to the viewpoint of another crow every time he dies.

Dave is fascinated with his own death. Does he have a considerably greater degree of Death Anxiety than the other characters in the comic? I’m not sure if he does, but the fact that he dreams about dying repeatedly, and the fact that out of all of the characters he tends to freeze up the most around dead things - his Doomed Selves, the Crow, and so on and so on - he’s certainly preoccupied with it. It’s a pretty huge deal when, in [S] Game Over: Dave is prepared to die to protect Jade, and he does so heroically. It‘s not the only time when Dave is prepared to die alongside someone he loves for no other reason than that he loves them - he chases Rose on her suicide mission to explode the tumor in the Furthest Ring.

I like Dave Strider. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, he doesn’t have an insincere bone body, even though he tortures himself by pretending to be the same kind of irony ninja as his brother. He knows what he loves, he knows where he draws lines, he lives for what he loves, and he’s prepared to die for it too.

Dave’s preoccupation with his own death manifests in his preoccupation with the Daves who live not literally in the physical coordinates of Paradox Space, but inside of other people. There is a Dave Strider who lives inside of Rose Lalonde. There’s a Dave Strider who lives inside of John Egbert. There’s a Dave Strider who lives inside of Jade Harley. There’s a Dave Strider who lives inside of Bro Strider. And so on and so on.

None of these Daves is the same Dave as the Dave who lives inside of Dave Strider, and nobody will ever get to meet him. Even the Dave Strider who walks around in Bro’s apartment doing things is not the same as the Dave Strider who lives inside him. While heroes of Heart have to struggle with this aspect more than most, everybody in Homestuck - and I think, everybody in real life, too - has to struggle with the distributed self. We are all a disintegrated intricate dispositional complex, the heart, the mind, the loins, the glands, all wrestling each other for dominance over ourself, as we wrestle with the reputation that we build by taking action in our lives.

If Homestuck is Evangelion, Dave is Shinji Ikari, a title I bestow upon him with nothing but the warmest regards. A reluctant hero living in his father figure’s shadow, intensely anxious about the way he is perceived by other people, Dave’s struggle with himself - what actions he wants to define him, the conflicts he chooses to engage with, the conflicts he chooses not to engage with, his sexuality - are central to one of Homestuck’s major themes - Homestuck as a story about personal reproduction, cultural hegemony, and the repression of the self to try to conform to other peoples’ expectations. Once Dave finishes strifing his Bro, probably later today, I’m finally going to start talking about that a bit more.

Dave is constantly being watched by other eyes, and Eye imagery surrounds him at all times - he directly compares the Sun here to an Eye, albeit the eye of a needle, not a literal eye, and he spends a lot of the story feeling like he’s under the scrutiny of other characters. He wears sunglasses implicitly because he’s self-conscious about his own eyes. He doesn’t like to be watched. While Dave is surrounded by the trappings of a slasher film, thinking about the discomfort he experiences being observed by other people, as they create another Dave inside of themselves, another Doomed Self to haunt him, reminds me of a line from a 2000s Coming of Age Story, because of Winn Dixie. The lead character’s mother is long since dead, and now she only lives in other peoples’ memories of her. A line that stuck with me is the lead’s Dad recounting how she hated being a preacher’s wife.

"She couldn't stand having the ladies at church judge what she was wearing and what she was cooking and how she was singing. She said it made her feel like a bug under a microscope." Dave is in exactly this situation, but instead of being a preacher’s wife, he’s the little Bro of the coolest coolguy on the planet. Under the intense heat of other people’s perception, Dave squirms like a bug under a microscope.

Dave lives in Bro’s Shadow. Every action Dave takes, he takes in some way in relation to the overpowering ego of Bro Strider, who acts as Homestuck’s avatar of the badass. The Cult of the Badass is a fixture of American Culture, which I think troll society also examines holistically as it parodies Classical Sparta. Bro Strider is both a Hero and a Coolguy and Dave spends a lot of time trying to win his approval by patterning himself after him. But Dave’s character arc is about escaping from Bro’s shadow, and coming to a place where he stops being compared against other people - stops being compared against Bro, stops being compared against other Daves.

He doesn’t want to be the Dave inside of John, or the Dave inside of Jade, or the Dave inside of Rose, or the Dave inside of Bro - and he most certainly does not want to be the Dave inside of Skaia, the Knight of Time, a Coolguy, or a Hero.

Dave just wants to be the Dave of Guy. Is that a wish he can have granted? Is that a wish anybody can have granted?

[gothamdetected-a]

an idiot’s guide to ra’s al ghul. 

ok so at this point im really gna say fuck dc canon, and go completely off piste and write my own.

dc really don't know how to write this man a backstory and he literally has one of the least developed and simultaneously confusing origins of any batman rogue. so here, lemme fix that.

ra's al ghul is a moniker, a title that is passed down. anyone who leads the league of assassins/shadows, becomes ra's al ghul (roughly translated to the demon's head). this explains how a White Man, henri ducard was able to become ra's al ghul in batman begins. at the passing of the head of the league, the next in line, by order of physical and mental prowess, becomes the next ra's. bruce himself is, at one point, supposed to pick up the mantle - the current ra's considers him his only worthy successor (a la arkham city & some of the comics from the 80s/90s), the man who will replace him and exceed him. however bruce, due to his unwavering morals and refusal to kill in order to bring "justice" ends up spurning the league, and is disowned by ra's in a very effective way - he tries to kill bruce. ra's still holds some sort of belief that bruce will return to him, despite all of this. he uses talia and then damian as a pawn in this game, to draw bruce back to the league and have him become the next demon's head.

so who is "ra's", or at least the goateed, green pant suited, scimitar wielding ninja who is most commonly seen as THE "ra's"? well, dc couldn't really make up their minds, so i'll do my best to patch it together from the 8 different versions, and compile something that agrees with most of it.

ra's was born approximately 600 years ago, to a man known as the Sensei (an asian martial artist) and an unknown mother of arabic descent, somewhere in the middle east. little is known about his early years, other than he was obsessed with the sciences, and became a physician with a wife named Sora. he made many discoveries ahead of time - understanding microscopic pathogens, how to cure diseases such as cholera and typhoid, although his greatest discovery was the Lazarus Pits - a natural phenomenon containing a mysterious green liquid with immense restorative properties. ( this is not to be confused with the fountain of youth at shangri-la, which his father, the Sensei, used). ra's uses the pit on the son of a local sultan who is dying, but when the boy returns, he is not all there. the empathy is gone, and he gets pretty funky about killing people, including ra's wife, sora. it is important to note, at this point, ra's is not called ra's, but dc have never given him a name so idek what to call him. so we don't know his real name, age, or what his chilhood was like. lets keep it that way, we stan an air of mystery.

the death of his wife and the overpowering grief leads to a fixation with revenge - ra's trains furiously to master martial arts and eventually kills the sultan, his son and razes their city to the ground. at this point he becomes "the demon's head" and founds the league, with the aim of eradicating evil from the world, mostly through assassination and genocide. which, you know. isn't great. this is also the period in which ra's begins to use the lazarus pit on himself, in order to prolong his life. he seeks more pits throughout the world, travelling extensively, and finds three more: one in switzerland, one in what will later become gotham, and one on infinity island, making a grand total of four. dc can go fuck themselves there is literally only four, you can't just keep making more when it's convenient. ra's intends to only use the pits until a worthy successor can be found for the league, but two problems occur; one) he starts going a bit nuts from over using the pits, and it does become like an addiction and two) he never finds someone he considers worthy.

so, skip through a bunch of wars he fought in, the league becoming globally established, and the industrial revolution. ra's doesn't like that. bad machines, destroying the earth, coating the skies with pollution and leading to greater inequality. so ra's decides it's time to purge humanity, and leave only the people he deems worthy behind, in a fresh clean world (in a real james bond villain move.). he builds wonder city, beneath gotham and around the gotham lazarus pit, but the city is never used because ra's does something mad stupid and falls in love. so much for eco terrorism, he's now off having babies with a woman named melisande. or one particular baby - talia. due to ra's having been using the pits for centuries before boning this poor woman, talia comes out with slowed aging abilities. ra's eventually murders melisande when she gets antsy about him training their kid to be a master assassin. he does a very similar thing with a russian lady to produce talia's half sister, nyssa. so by now the 20th century is in full swing, ra's has a cute lil murder family and the league has become a smaller part of a huge underground organisation called The Demon, at which ra's sits at the head. he still hasn't found a successor though, and he's getting Old. the lazarus pits are no longer bringing him back 100% - he loses more and more of his sanity with each ressurection. and then. wow. bruce wayne appears. and ra's sees a huge amount of himself in this kid, the loss, the anger. boom, we got ourself a successor.

we all know how that wound up.

so ra's is now Personally Mad at batman, and we get the Contagion storyline. back to his old, eco-terrorism ways, ra's unleashes the clench, a really nasty virus that's definitely worse than your average cold. batman eventually finds and disperses a cure, but gotham is Mad Fucked. damian wayne is born, trained by his mama and gramps, and then abandoned at 10 on bruce's doorstep. there's a brief interlude where bane also goes to train under ra's in the hopes of being the worthy successor and marrying talia instead, but then everyone realises he's one sandwich short of a picnic and ra's kicks him out in his ass once batman beats him in another fight. there's also some funky moments where ra's

• tries to resurrect thomas and martha wayne. it goes about as well as you'd expect.

• pisses off both of his daughters who start to work against him. talia half teams up with supes. wild.

• lets his guard down and most of the lazarus pits are destroyed, leaving only the one beneath gotham.

• tries to body swap with his grandson (i literally hate dc)

• watches batman accidentally kill his old dad the Sensei, by dragging him into a lazarus pit which destroys the nasty man's corrupted soul and heals bruce tf up which is how dc get away with him looking permenantly 30

• has another, estranged child, who becomes the White Ghost

• helps tim find bruce after he "died" but then becomes a lil bitch over it and tries to do a ninja take over of gotham and destroy anything about wayne. he fist fights tim, and dick, and then lo and behold it was all a test or some shit, which is the dc version of "he woke up and it was all a dream".

• makes superhumans in whale wombs which honestly, when i read the issues, i wanted to Die. literally straight up end me.

there's a bunch more stuff but im not a masochist enough to keep going. the point is, he's an old naughty man, kind of bruce's father in law, definitely insane, and dc will probably drag this mans back at some point. but i like to go with the arkham knight ending, where bruce chooses to cut a half-resurrected ra's off from the last of the lazarus pit, and drops his dying body off at the gcpd to an indeterminate fate, while nyssa becomes the new demon's head. its a good ending. makes sense. works well with everything. gives him a solid out. but honestly they won't leave him alone and he'll be back soon i'm sure, being pesky and owning really freaking cool swords.

so yeah, that's a rough and ready guide to ra's al ghul, because dc really can't manage this themselves and i'm made to pick up the slack.