#but that was literally me voluntarily disassociating

[the-red-means-i-love-you]

well crap now i’m feeling things, put them back put them back

[incarnateirony]

Here's the thing, I was around this crazy bitch long enough I, too, like I'm certain Mark and others are in the state of, let her absolutely fuck my head up for a while falling into her shit under good faith, "everything's equal and valid", whatever the fuck.

I KNOW by now she's said some shit that doesn't add up, she can't fucking help herself, but they'll keep putting bandaids on it to repair the narrative and make excuses for why The Great God Hermes can't see SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT.

When I left that house I literally had to fucking recalibrate my shit because she got me all knocked off center, I basically had to re-teach myself some shit while processing out, yeah, I too let her pull me into some ritual madness to comply with her whims. She did, indeed, get me deep in enough that for a year or so there I thought she could Boop the god Pan into my head because of our working connection, and I'd act all feral and feel like someone different, but it's just a disassociative personality state, which is why I cut her off on her "practicing" and RP, and then these motherfuckers all come in and join the crazy bus voluntarily, and here we are, 3 years later, with her still riding my dick in every way imaginable.

Like i truly had to process this bitch's Toxic Crazy off of me like an alchemical fucking event. Letting her wave around a sage stick and feel like she chased out Casper wasn't hurting anyone, but at this point we are so far past one flew over the cuckoo's nest.

The great god hermes couldn't even tell her I personally wasn't in independence when she tried to shitpost to be a smartass. I'm in Blue Springs, you dumb ho. I set your dumb ass up saying independence like a year ago. Someone else was waiting for you there. He even was telling you to call the doctor, you were going to the doctor. And you know, it's who you were looking for, it's just they don't conveniently look like my face. Yeah Shea, why DID it look like Silent Hill until the day your spider died at the domestic spider equivalent of 40 years old, right when you were told don't fight it, it's coming for you, the walls can't stop us now, everything you ever wanted was right in front of you, this was where you want to be, pokemon battle initiated, he's about to be knocked out cold. [insert Izanami fog joke of refusing to look at the truth and ultimately dying as the price]

Real weird that Kansas City Metro area had the densest fog coverage in the nationwide fogout same day my camera was shitting foggy bricks and stopped when the fog hit you bitching. You know, the densest coverage, except exactly where I fucking was, for a few mile radius, with no fog. Real fuckin weird. Notice these are all like, real events, that aren't just coming from inside my head, and at best you could argue I'm interpreting the events but there's a fucking difference here, try to spot it.

Then go watch percy jackson and get hilariously mowed down by the timing of every single fucking hermes element dropping a timeless, gift wrapped deuce on your head, somewhere between Persona 3 posting you can't escape time, only for it to early ship, only for it to also dump on your head, and a P5 leak, all when I was messaging you those songs before the leaks, and now after. All dropping titanic shits on you idiots. TO THE DUMB KIDS. GET BODIED. He's outside of space and time kids, why do you think they put him in charge of the mail--OH WAIT [pops in early Persona copy] OH LOOK AT THAT OPENING SHITTING ON YOUR FACES TOO. WONDER WHO ESCAPED TIME TO MANAGE THAT ONE, HUH ATLUS??

YOU KIDS KNOW HOW TO PLAY CRAPS???? DO NOT COME. DAMNIT YOU CUMMED, AND NOW THE FICTIONAL HERMES DEMIGOD LUKE ON TV HAS TO EXPLAIN WHY YOUR SPIDER IS DEAD, BASICALLY. LOTUS LOTUS LOTUSJUICE. BEETLEFUCKINJUICE COMING ONLY THIS MOTHERFUCKIN SEPTEMBER

Call it fucking "magic". Call it a fucking "god". It is what it is, but it certainly isn't my fucking face, and you refuse to engage it properly, just play until people pay the penalty for you fucking around.

You want to learn this shit shea, you think you do, but no, you want to play in the madness, not the reason. It's the collective subconscious, not a fucking punk rock mazda driver, but congratulations, the whole planet subconsciously knows you're nuts and kind of wants you in the dirt.

Goddamn you used to recommend Thenea, and deadass her interview with Hermes has him calling people stupid for calling him for what one calls classic magic. "Am I good at it? I mean, yeah, but [crochet story about being left or right handed] But my magic isn't right. It works for ME. Hekate is a goddess of magic that mortals can actually USE. I'll never understand why they call me instead of her. I can't teach you, go learn from a righty."

Cuz I'm gonna give you a big fuckin guess what his "magic" is. And we're gonna go right back to dragging your ass to a fucking shrink and having a Come To Jung moment here.

Face the goddamn music you obsessed bitch, you built a whole temple cult to humping my face because you couldn't delineate reality from fantasy. That's why you still had the psychotic compulsive energy to invest seven months blowing furries in a server just to try to harass my business partner three goddamn years after I left your ass and tried to forget you exist, but you won't fucking let me. You're fucking angry that I, he, whatever you perceive of it, fucking left you, and doesn't want you, and no amount of ripping out your hair or roleplaying is filling that fucking void, so you get angrier, and more obsessed, and now you're just fat, crazy, and bald, and you're just gonna keep on keeping on with your octopus jibberish instead of seeing a shrink. What you are experiencing is consequences of your actions and the stark realization that after 20 years of deluding yourself, you can't narratively replace real people, and it's not coming back.

LET US GO.

[leejihoonownsmyheart]

i realized i never wished you a happy new year so happy new year queen! i wish all the prosperity and good energy for you this year and i hope you get to accomplish many of your goals this year, like i’m so genuinely serious.

like its kinda insane how i’ve made a connection on tumblr with a random person that happens to be my favorite fanfiction author of my favorite kpop group, and we have managed to connect and talk about such NICHE topics. like i disassociated for a moment thinking about this LMFAO. sending positive vibes that’s all 😛😛😛

-the yapper

HELLO!! HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU AS WELL!! I WISH YOU ALL THE SAME!!! I really hope this year is great for literally all of us

No it really is so insane!! Anyone that I voluntarily associate with outside of work now is solely people i meet through this blog and I am so lucky to meet any of you through doing something that I really enjoy doing. I am so genuinely grateful for you and all the messages that you send me thank you so much

[coffin-upalung]

Vent post, TW mental illness, hospitalization, being fucking poor, speculation of symptoms

So I have a problem with disorganized speech, right? I kind of noticed it a few months ago but now it's impossibly to ignore. Or I'll just stop talking when i thought i already made my point but i actually only said half a sentence? I don't have health care, so I can't figure out right now if it's a mental illness symptom or a physical illness symptom, both of which I have several diagnosed.

But I also developed a stutter? Which makes me think it's gotta be mental illness. But also I've had like a good 10 concussions in my life, 4 of them were in 2019, so maybe just got a bruised melon.

And I've found myself fencesitting between reality and delusion. And I've caught myself hallucinating. Birds, music, people taking muffled outside my window where I can't make out any of the words, bugs in my food and spiders in my shower.

And I want so fucking bad to just voluntarily admit myself. I'm not a DANGER to myself, but I just can't function. I can't hold down a job, I spiral and bounce between panic attacks to disassociation. I feel fractured, like multiple people are living my life, like half the day is a dream or I'm in the passenger seat of my life.

I've been on antipsychotics since I was like 13 or 14, but I haven't had healthcare in years. And I just want to take a month or two and admit myself to get everything fixed. And it sucks that for YEARS I was repeatedly 5150'd and got thrown in residential for 4 months as a kid against my will but now I actually want the help and I can't AFFORD IT?!?!?!?!?!?!?! Like I'm not suicidal in the slightest. My husband and I are happy and living a good life, we never fight and it genuinely feels like a sleepover with my best friend every night-- depression is near non-existant. But I just want to not be crazy anymore so I can take a shower without thinking I can talk to the ghosts in the walls!!!!!

I literally just want the hallucinations to stop and the delusions and the rabbit holing to stop. I want to be able to think straight and speak clearly. I want to stop having episodes where I'm laughing and crying and pulling my hair out. And it's for no reason. The trigger will be like "thought about that one embarrassing thing you said" and I just can't breathe and then I'm gone. Like it's someone else and I can't think and then like I'm in the shower and I've calmed down and im singing to music that's playing on my phone.

Like how am I supposed to tackle this in weekly therapy. It's gotten bad enough I'm BEGGING to go back on meds.

Do you know how long this fucking took me to write? I feel so small and incapable of simple tasks like writing a paragraph-- things I used to do for fun with fanfiction and random essays on topics I'll never post. But I keep misspelling and starting with one sentence and writing the ending of another. I kept misspelling symptoms as mysomptms and that's the clearest example of how jumbled things get. Like everything is there it's just a mess. It's not like a typo, it's genuinely my brain tells me every letter at once and I can't remember what comes first. I'll tell a story about my day and I'll tell the middle then the first then the last, or in reverse and I know it's mixed up but I can't remember what came first. And my grammar is so absolutely fucked. Like I almost majored in English and my essays were the ONLY reason I got into some colleges because I absolutely bombed my SATs because I had just gotten out of the hospital. Not my point, but demonstrates that I used to have such a tight grasp of the English language and its mechanics and now for months it's felt like I'm struggling in a 3rd or 4th language, buffering and lagging like a 2006 Dell.

And im AWARE that none of this makes sense, I've got pinball brain and im trying to say too much with too few words but this is an exercise to at least push through and get as much as I can out. At least to document. I feel like I have to apologize for how hard it is to understand me. This feels like such a burden to everyone around me and that makes it harder to think and speak. I hate this and I just want to get better.

Idk just had to get this out, hopefully I'll be able tks how a doctor when I'm able to get help. This makes me feel so stupid. I can fucking write, I'm an articulate fucking human being. I've got so much going for me, why does my first language feel like I'm only conversational? I can't communicate, I've lost half my vocabulary and I used to pride myself on my intelligence. I was always the smart friend, the one who's good at everything and would write your papers and give advice and I was going to do great things. And now I'm just a college dropout lunatic housewife that needs help with everything.

And im not... sad? It's just anxiety and then a detachment of reality. And I've tried to write this more like I would say it, it feels like either my brain goes too fast for my mouth or fingers or that it's so slow I cant think there is no in-between.

[fatwithoutkatsudon]

some angst red hood steph hcs (take 2 since tumblr crashed on me while writing the first time)

- cass and steph’s friendship is super strained for a good bit even post redemption bc steph knew how cass felt about killing but knowingly chose to kill people anyway AND hurt cass’s siblings

- steph doesn’t voluntarily tell her mom that she’s alive for a long time because of a combination of self loathing and semi self awareness

- Steph as the red hood is super disassociated a lot

- not feeling respected is a big part of steph’s issues with the batfamily since pre her death she felt like she was not only disrespected but constantly compared to damian and cass by bruce and to make matters worse cass and damian unintentionally made steph not feel respected as well via stuff like cass’ canon actions of nerve striking steph to prevent her from getting into a dangerous situation or being like canon tim and bruce and constantly calling her by her civillain name out in the field and just casually telling strangers like Connor hawke

- so Steph probably gets super pissed if someone calls her by her civillain name and/or spoiler/robin

- steph’s turning point is probably when she goes too far with a criminal and ends up frightening the kid she was supposed to be rescuing to the point where someone else has to come pick them up. bonus angst points if they were a spoiler, red hood and/or Steph robin fan

- not an angst hc but Steph realizes she’s nonbinary because she literally gives 0 shits about what people refer to her as/with unless they’re being bigoted. As a matter of fact she often gets gender euphoria from people’s confusion and struggling to pin her gender identity down

- Steph suffers constant chest pains and hand pains post reassurection

- Steph getting poisoned w the black mercy is probably a lot more angst over in this au

- Steph often wonders about what her daughter would think of her if she saw her know and thinks that it was definitely good she gave her up for adoption because well, just look where she is now.

- Steph often thinks about how often pre her death she had nightmares about becoming her dad and here she is now, a wanted criminal working with other criminals

Ahhh! These are so gooooood! I had a post about the Robins being reversed but the other Batkids (Cass, Duke, Babs) are in the usual order but the Steph and Cass drama has me wanting to go full reverse. It would just be so much more complicated and angst, I love it.

I had like eight hcs for Steph and her mom and couldn’t settle on one. One where her mom died while she was dead, one very similar to yours where there’s a bit of angst can I go home, one where she straight up just goes back to living with her mom (her mom was married to a supervillain, I’m sure she would be fine with housing her supervillain daughter), one where she sorta haunts her mom until her mom catches her, a few more that aren’t really as good as all those. I agree the self-loathing/can’t go home is definitely the most angst, though. So A+ there.

I hadn’t even thought of the angst with her daughter she gave up. That is choice.

Al of these are amazing. Love them.

Please everyone keep the Red Hood Stephanie hcs coming! I love these.

[team-cap-for-the-win]

Allow me😌 *clears throat*

I was feeling a bit angsty today (when do I not? Would be a better question), so, Steve's perfect memory. He can recall memories like they're actually happening again if he focuses well enough. You know that feel when you zone out completely, almost disassociating? And when you drag yourself back it's suddenly ten minutes later?

Sometimes, Steve zones out. He remembers something from his past and starts thinking about it more. And then more. And more. He completely zones out. Then, someone shakes him, and he "wakes up". His friends look at him worriedly. It's been 25 minutes, and he hasn't moved, spoken, he hasn't even blinked.

"You okay?" They ask.

"Just thinking," he answers, forcing himself to smile.

It can be a bad memory but it can also be something random. He just gets really quiet and still, and more often worries the people around him. He can't really help it, it just happens.

I FEEL THIS SO BAD OMG??

I do this to a point where my friend has to wave a hand in front of my face at lunch sometimes. She's a little concerned but I assured her I'm just deep in my thoughts lol

Aaah Steve would! A couple years ago I learnt that people have varying degrees of visualising things in their mind. The inability to create mental images is called aphantasia and I really can't imagine what that would be like. The opposite is called hyperphantasia - and I believe Steve would have that post-serum.

It's described as "as vivid as real seeing" so... It wouldn't be much of a stretch to imagine just how lost in his memories Steve could become! Combined with his perfect memory he could literally replay those moments like a movie and that must be really painful since it's... not actually real. It just looks real, but it's long gone.

And you know how once you start thinking about something, and try not to think about it, it just doesn't work? That doesn't bode well for him either.

He'll randomly recall something from his past, but it won't go away... and before he knows it, he's replaying that memory in his mind, and it's impossible to let go of it, because it's something he either loves or hates, and he can be tranced in his own mind for a long while... It will linger until someone disrupts his thought process.

And he'll smile tightly and says he's okay when he's... really not.

I like to think eventually he'll talk to someone on the team about it. Maybe Bruce, since I think he'd know what's up, and he did study the serum excessively so that's a bonus. And talking about it helps - it pulls Steve out of thinking too much. He's not stuck in his head anymore. And maybe he even learns how to end the trance voluntarily, how to let go of the memory.

Excuse while I enter my own trance to think about this thank you

Shoot me an ask guys!

[jilytho]

will you accept this rose ch 2

Read below or on AO3

The Bachelor was the last reality competition show Lily had ever envisioned herself going on. Wipeout? Sure. Love it or List It? You bet. Survivor? 1000%. But The Bachelor? Never.

She watched it almost every season, of course. It was her sister Petunias favorite show so she’d grown up watching it and had started to like it. She was more into The Bachelorette but even after moving out of her childhood home and into her campus apartment with Marlene and Mary, she found herself putting it on weekly voluntarily. It became their little tradition. Monday nights, it didn’t matter what was happening in school or work or with significant others, they were to meet on the couch with large bottles of red wine and order takeaway.

They knew it was all staged and fake, of course. There was no way half of what happened wasn’t completely orchestrated by producers but that didn’t mean it wasn’t entertaining. They’d offer up their opinions, place bets on the winner, predict each cringey line, and most importantly, how they’d react to each date and situation.

You find out one of the other contestants is making up lies about another, do you tell the Bachelor, confront the liar, or stay out of it? You’re told to stick to a two drink limit per cocktail party, do you follow that, not drink at all, or sneak shots in when nobody is looking?

They treat the show like a video game, what would you do if you were orchestrating the actions, how would you act from a producer's side, from the Bachelor view, and of course, as a contestant. How would you respond when he tells you he wants someone who will stay home with their children all day. Would kissing with eyes open be a dealbreaker? Or something you can work on together. It became an interactive game show almost, and it became very easy to disassociate the contestants into characters on a scripted show instead of real people, just like them.

Their little game collapsed when Petunia came to visit one week. It was her moms idea. Have Petunia stay over at Lilys for just a night, let them go out on the town and talk Petunia wedding prep, watch The Bachelor together and bond like the old days.

She arrived at noon on Monday, an hour earlier than she was supposed to, which Lily had of course predicted. Petunia apologized profusely and insincerely for not giving Lily enough time to shower and properly clean her apartment, despite the fact that Lily had been up till 4am the previous night scrubbing the kitchen and permanently burning off skin cells with bleach.

They’d gone shopping, each dressing room filled with thinly veiled insults on Lily's figure, her hair, her style. Lunch was spent condescendingly discussing how the red meat in a burger was going to inevitably lead to Lily’s death and didn’t she know that no man liked a girl who could eat as much as they could?

Lily had sent 18 SOS texts and red wine emojis to Mary and Marlene in their group chat by the time the bill came. By the time they got home, Mary and Marlene were both waiting, wine poured and discussion topics ready to take the focus off of Lily.

They passed time as a group, chatting while Lily played a silent drinking game that Marlene had quickly caught on to. Drink at every condescending comment Lily was the focus of, drink everytime Petunia talked about how well Vernons job paid, drink everytime Petunia said Lily drank too much, drink everytime Petunia suggested no man would really care about an advanced degree. The advanced degree comments were crossing lines because Petunia knew that it wasn’t just Lily getting her masters, but all three of them. Insult her all night, fine, but insulting her friends right to their face was too much. Lily almost lashed out and kicked her out right then and there but Mary handled it gracefully by reminding Petunia that she doesn't “quite care if any men were interested, as long as women are”.

Petunia stayed silent for an amazing fifteen minutes after that.

They were able to fill the time leading up until the episode began with discussing the season thus far, the relationships and chemistry, or lack thereof. The wine was ridiculously useful in aiding her shoulders dropping and time began to pass at an acceptable rate. As soon as the episode began, Lily was able to mostly forget Petunia was there, easily falling back into her game with Mary and Marlene.

“You know that’s not how I’d handle someone like Victoria. I feel like with a person like her you really just have to-”

“Lily, would you shut up? The rest of us are actually trying to watch the show.” Petunia snapped at her, neck flipping obnoxiously to glare at her from the opposite couch.

“Actually, Petunia,” Marlene interrupted icily, “I was really interested in Lily’s thoughts. In the future, I’d prefer you not speak for me.”

“Why is she acting like she’d ever be in that situation?” Petniuan shot back, “it's not like she’d ever be on the show, she’s clearly not up to their standards.” Petunia took an obnoxious gulp of her wine, sneering over the lip of the glass.

“Any bachelor of any season would be lucky and grateful to have Lily on the show and if you think anything else you should probably just go.”

“Even if you somehow got onto the show, there is literally no man on earth that would give you a rose over any of these women.”

“Well, we’ll just see about that, won’t we, Pet?” Lily drained her rather full glass and immediately unlocked her phone, googling the application process for the following season.

She didn’t know who the Bachelor was going to be, and she didn’t care, the wine mixed with Petunia's attitude was plenty of motivation and before the next commercial break Lily had already completed and submitted her application, without any proofreading.

XXX

She’d almost forgotten ever applying. She fought hard to forget every second of her time with Petunia over that visit and applying to the Bachelor seemed to be part of that.

When she’d received the email that her application had been accepted and that she’d be moving on to the next round of the interview process, she almost deleted it. They’d included a photo of who the next Bachelor was in the email, however, and something about his eyes made her hesitate. Warm and hazel, sharp jawline, deeply tanned skin, drop dead gorgeous, exactly her type. Regardless of the way her mouth dropped, and regardless of how intelligent and beautiful most of the women on the show were, she was not the kind to compete with 30 other women for one man's attention.

Her finger hovered over the trash button but she couldn't bring herself to do it, instead closing out her inbox and moving on with her day, the knowledge that it was still sitting there, waiting for her, sat in the back of her mind all day.

She was probably just going to ignore it. All day while she worked on her thesis, it taunted her, but she couldn’t bring herself to delete it and she certainly couldn’t bring herself to respond so instead it just sat.

Until she opened the mail. And right there, right on top, was Lily’s invite to Petunia's wedding. Enclosed was a note, “Lily, as you can see on your invitation, we have chosen to not give you a plus one. Since you are not currently in a serious relationship, or the relationship type, we’d much prefer to not have some stranger at our wedding who we’d have to cut out of the photos or spend money on dinner for a friend. See you then.”

That was the deciding factor. “I’ll show you relationship type,” she whispered to herself angrily as she pulled up the email again, flitting past James’s face to the response button and booking herself an interview.

Marlene and Mary both died laughing when they figured out what she had done. She’d come home, popped open a bottle of tequila, poured three shots into a juice glass and threw it back before the entire story came pouring out of her.

[schraubd]

The Good Place: Final Thoughts

*MAJOR SPOILERS*

At the conclusion of season three, I registered my prediction of how The Good Place would end:

The abolition of the afterlife in its entirety (no more good or bad places); a re-emphasis on doing as best you can when it matters (i.e., during one's actual life); the core quartet is sent back to Earth to live out the rest of their natural lives as friends.

I would say that, like most religions, I got about 5% right. The afterlife, as we knew it, is abolished. And the series does end with all of the human characters passing on. But in between, The Good Place takes a much more audacious swing: a genuine attempt to reform the afterlife. And -- and I think this is perhaps even more profound -- an essential acknowledgment that this attempt fell short. A perfect paradise was not created, and in fact the final conclusion of The Good Place seems to be that such a paradise is impossible even in concept. After all, cut away the underbrush and the heroes' solution to the problem afflicting The Good Place was to offer the choice of suicide. And while the penultimate episode suggests that perhaps just having the option will suffice to stave off the ennui of eternal bliss, the finale refuses to accept that out. Every human character, eventually, kills themselves. Their happy ending is that they are content to die. The best possible paradise is one where people can and do eventually choose to erase themselves from existence. Skip over the beatific forest setting and the stipulation of emotional contentment, and that's a rather melancholic, if not outright grim, conclusion. It's easy to draw a parallel between the last episode and the need for fans to accept the voluntarily-chosen end of a great show like The Good Place (it's even easier to draw it to the need to accept our own mortality). But another recurrent theme in The Good Place is the failure of systems. Over and over again, the systems the characters find themselves in are revealed to be either malfunctioning or outright designed to immiserate them. From the very beginning, Eleanor and Chidi confront the brutal harshness of the points system, which results in nearly all people being horrifically tortured for eternity (incidentally, that Chidi isn't immediately repelled by -- and suspicious of -- this set-up is a rare miscue in terms of characterization, if not plotting). They resolve to try and improve Eleanor, only to find out that they're actually in a perpetual torture chamber which will literally reset every time they come close to escaping it. At this point, the series becomes a repeated effort to find ever-higher levers in the celestial bureaucracy that can be appealed to. They find a judge, who is at best indifferent to their predicament and not particularly interested in helping them. Upon returning to earth, they discover first that they can't ever improve enough to enter The Good Place (because -- knowing the stakes -- their motivations are corrupt) and then that nobody can successfully enter The Good Place because existence has become too interwoven and morally interdependent for anyone to satisfy the standard of admission. They meet the actual Good Place committee, who are worse than useless and content to let everyone suffer forever because taking any concrete action risks violating some procedural norm. And when they finally enter The Good Place, they discover it's as dysfunctional as everywhere else -- gradually sucking the life out of its residents who, given eternity, eventually tire of everything. All the systems fail. All of them are doomed to fail. They can't not. Hence, the suicide gate (and sidenote: If The Good Place ever has a spin-off series -- and lord knows it shouldn't -- it should definitely involve exploring the first murder in the Good Place when someone gets involuntarily shoved through that archway). By the time it reaches its conclusion, The Good Place is one of the few depictions of the afterlife to take the concept of eternity seriously. Some other venues glance in this direction. Agent Smith in The Matrix tells Neo that humans reject a simulation of paradise -- the implication is because we're diseased, but perhaps also indicating that perfect, eternal happiness ... isn't. Maya Rudolph's other afterlife vehicle, Forever, certainly touches on this theme. The Order of the Stick has an afterlife where people can eat all the food and have all the sex and otherwise satisfy all the "messed-up urges you people have leftover after having your soul stuck in a glorified sausage all your life". But this is only the "first tier" of heaven: once you're bored, you can "climb the mountain" to search for a higher level of spiritual satisfaction. And while what this entails is left vague, it is not death -- those who ascend can, if they wish, descend back down to the lowlier pleasures (OOTS also introduces the very neat concept of "Postmortum Time Disassociation Disorder"). But the story which provides perhaps the most powerful foil to The Good Place's view of eternity and immortality is (and of the approximately 143,000 Good Place retrospectives being written right now, I bet I'm the only one to make this comparison) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. The ultimate adversary in HPMOR is not Snape, or Malfoy, or Voldemort. It is death, and Harry is committed to the "absolute rejection of death as the natural order." The message on the Potters' gravestone is, after all, "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" (and it's a sign of my cloistered Jewish upbringing that I thought this was a Rowling original -- it is in fact a quote from I Corinthians). Harry Potter wants people to live forever. And the story anticipates the objection, placed in the mouth of Dumbledore, "What would you do with eternity, Harry?"

Harry took a deep breath. "Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I'm a lot more hopeful now that I've discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines."

The last few episodes of The Good Place are, in a sense, a calling of this bluff. Even if you play out the string all the way to extinguishment of the sun or the heat death of the universe -- well, forever is a long time. It can wait. Harry argues that the only reason we accept death is because we're used to it, and if you took someone who lived in a world where there was no death and asked them if they'd prefer to live in a universe where eventually people ceased to exist, they'd look at you like you're crazy. The Good Place provocatively argues the precise opposite -- that if death didn't exist, people would have to invent it. Or they would go crazy, with infinite time on their hands. And so we are, perhaps, back to where we started. The paradise the heroes create is certainly better than that which they replaced. But it still is deeply, tragically flawed -- and The Good Place seems to believe that these flaws are fundamentally inescapable. The suicide option is the clearest manifestation of how cracked paradise must be, but there is another issue that the show alludes to: paradise depends on other people, and on their choices. Way back in the first season, "Real Eleanor" raises this precise point: if her soulmate doesn't love her, "this will never truly be my Good Place." Sure it's actually a contrivance to torture Chidi, but it's easy to imagine it as real. What if your paradise is to live blissfully with a certain special someone and ... that person doesn't love you back? Both Simone and Tahani seem okay with Chidi and Jason respectively choosing someone other than them (Eleanor and Janet). But that's in harmony with the audience's happy ending. It's not hard to imagine a different world where they were less sanguine about it. Or take a far more direct problem: If paradise comes with a suicide option, what happens if your loved one takes it? Harry's excited declaration of all the things he'd do with infinite time is not fundamentally, the reason why he desires immortality. When push comes to shove, he's motivated by a far more basic yearning: to make it so "people won't have to say goodbye any more." Eleanor's utter panic at the thought of losing Chidi forever was, for me at least, the most visceral emotional gut-punch of the entire series -- even more than the finale of season three (at least there, we could be reasonably assured their separation was temporary). She eventually comes to terms with it. But sit on it a little more: imagine a "paradise" where your soulmate has left you forever. People fantasize about heaven to be reunited with their loved ones, yet we end up looping right back into eternal separation. What kind of paradise is this, where people still have to say goodbye? So we have two problems that seem to threaten even the conceptual coherency of a paradise:

First, if paradise is forever, eventually everything will become tired. That suicide is presented as a good solution to this problem shows just how serious it is (and, for what it's worth, I'm not sure the suicide "option" would necessarily bring relief. It could easily generate crippling anxiety -- a sense of trappedness between the irrevocable permanence of death and the unbearable ennui of existence). 

Second, if paradise depends on the choices other people make, how can we be sure they'll make choices compatible with your happy ending?

The Good Place presents the first problem as unavoidable and skates past the second entirely. But could they be overcome? Maybe. In the penultimate episode of The Good Place, one solution proposed to the problem of eternal ennui is to reset people's memories, so the things that bored them become fresh again. This is swiftly rejected as a repetition of how the quartet was tortured in The Bad Place. Too swiftly, in my view. Neighborhoods were also used to torture -- should those be jettisoned too? The problem with eternity is that eventually, everything gets repetitive. Go-Kart Racing against monkeys may be a blast the first time, but it loses its luster after a million reiterations. The wistfulness comes from wishing one could go back to that initial burst of discovery and experience -- before one had the memory of doing it all over again. This was my immediate solution to the ennui problem -- not that some demon should periodically reset you, but that you should be able to choose when, where, and how to reset yourself. It's not just about going back in time. It's reoccupying any memory state you've ever possessed. Go back to before you ever raced against monkeys -- then zoom forward to when you've already experienced all the monkey-races you could handle. It's like a load/save system for your mind. Hell, you can even adjust the "difficulty" level. It's true that, for many, a "paradise" where one simply automatically gets whatever one wants will feel unsatisfying. But one needn't set the parameters of paradise to guarantee success. It can be as hard or easy as one wants; people can be as pliant or obstinate as one likes (not for nothing is one of the afterlife attractions in OOTS -- a fantasy roleplaying-based setting -- "The Dungeon of Monsters That Are Just Strong Enough to Really Challenge You"). Or dream bigger. If one has infinite ability to reverse and remake memory as one wishes, then one could at any point adapt any set of memories one ever could have had. Don't just live a different life, remember a different life. Then jump forward and remember all the different lives you lived -- each of which (when you lived them) you had erased the memories of all the others. Every single possible timeline is lived -- and can be relived in all its glory, as many times as one wants. For me, at least, this dissolves the problem of others' choices as well. If anyone can make not just any possible choice, but live through any possible timeline, what does it mean to ask which one is "real"? If your paradise involves loving and being loved by a particular someone, will in your paradise, the person you need to love you, loves you, and stays with you as long as you need. In their paradise, they might love someone else. You enjoy a timeline where people choose exactly the choices that would make you most happy; they live in a timeline which is the same for them. Of course, the sorts of philosophical questions that would raise (among others: What does it mean for the "same" person to simultaneously exist across multiple timelines? Who, exactly, is "choosing" which version they occupy? And if the one that does choose doesn't choose a timeline that involves them loving you back, is the version that does love you really "them"?) are even more esoteric and less accessible to a network audience than the moral philosophy questions The Good Place did try to introduce. So I don't blame them for skipping by it.

* * *

The last enemy to be defeated may not, after all, be death. It may be time.  Time ruins all things. Eventually you run out of it. And even if you never ran out of it -- you had infinite time -- it would defeat you in a different way: via boredom, repetition, and ennui. We can, perhaps, imagine a world where we vanquish death. But can we imagine one where (forgot about possibility, and just think conceptually) we defeat time? I can. Barely, but I can. Of course, it's in many ways a moot point, since I'm profoundly skeptical that humanity ever will master time in this way -- or even if it's practically possible (that it won't happen in my lifetime is actually less material, given that if it ever did happen we'd probably be at Omega Point anyway). But at least it holds out the possibility of an actual happy ending -- where the last enemy is truly vanquished, and nobody has to say goodbye. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2GK19Yo

[incarnateirony]

I truly never thought I'd have to do this kind of craft work on a human, but I think that's it, I don't see her as that anymore and she voluntarily signed on, against my consent, so now we're here.

Yeah, lady, the world itself looks really weird, every screen name is a triplicate joke, the audience barks when I tell them to just like you do, and you're being mined, and the universe is returning it back to you in reflections while you get hollowed out and replaced by whatever the fuck I put in there since you refuse to stop. And there's literally millions of us and them now. And you're stuck until you make the only intelligent choice, and I think you're too far gone for that.

Welcome to how a real Magician does battle. But spit on a crystal for me. That'll save you from me successfully warping reality to end you slowly and miserably, sure.

Ability restrictions temporarily lifted until the enemy is rendered Silent.

Print me out another warning sign that's meant for you.

Humanity is all one giant Soul, Shealyn, and so is he, formless and partless, and humanity, and you refused to ever get to know him through yourself, and you repress and deny and run from anything of your own, and try to steal the identities of others, so like, the You, that is an Identity with some Real Estate on the World Soul? Sis there ain't much there. And with most of it being you strapping my identity over you, I'd win even without you signing to me like an octopus jibberish spewing dumbass.

Like, it's just gonna get worse. It's very much an unbroken circle. Several actually. Your material is mined, and either given to me, distributed to the focus of others and dissolving into the universe, and then the universe trades that in the current timeline for the same information being displayed, and now glitchtrap turned the pizza plex into the sewers of the dark hour, and multiple Tartari are hitting to reinforce this focus, and more games and queues are already locked and loaded. 100 million eyes right into conceptual Tartarus, atop the 30M I already had banging around in there that pointed out to the others that it was fuckin Tartarus, thanks. Yeah, figure it out, sweetheart, you're FUCKED.

Even your own interests, what few are actually yours, soon will not even be safe to engage with anymore. Time to climb Tartarus hunters, on Supernatural Sundays.

It doesn't miss me that, through all of this nonsense, you've seen me as Loki, or Anubis, or Eros, or the Reaper, or whatever the fuck, depending on what I'm using to skin your grey matter at the time, but in all of this, you never even once appealed to your fake voice of hermes you claim to be a priestess of, which is incredibly odd. Maybe because you know how quickly you'd get embarrassed, and instead choose to embarrass yourself with this other shit.

You said you didn't want anyone who wouldn't defend you. Where the fuck is he? Oh right, not defending at you. Helping me slap possessed cat memes and christmas in the pit jokes on the backbrains of the internet backrooms while you wander around lost amidst the dancing shrimp of everyone knowing your shit subconsciously. Fuck me running. Neverminding you just deadass letting your grampa get basically nuked. Not my fuckin fault, side effect of your OWN choice to sacrifice him, how this shit works, the beacon and everything set up. Sorry, he got shredded. You coulda just stopped but now I think he's part of the deadpool reaper or what the fuck ever that became.

Catch a clue bitch, even if I don't call it magic, what I'M doing is "magic". What you're doing is regressive coping with some roleplay elements. It's not the same thing.

The gods are not your stuffed bunnies, your comfort pals, they're not in love with you, you do not have nightly couch parties across seven pantheons where they make sure your delirious ass feeds fluffy because you're such a pretty special princess that doesn't have to do anything. You are a schizoid with disassociative habits that has manipulated and deleted real narratives through life to make it by, and conned everyone around you including yourself, and built an altar to my face to speak divine octopus jibberish, because you can't let go. And now, the couch party of gods in your head is all me poking you when I find it funny, because you are only possessed by two things: your obsession with me and inability to let go, and by proxy of pissing me off this bad by me myself now.

Did you think I was kidding when I said I'd End this one way or another now that your titanically stupid ass set off the acme trap? Release Coyote, goddamn. Let me go. I'm sorry I wasn't able to guide you and I'm sorry I or even he didn't know how to help you find yourself, we tried to give advice and you always went the other way, even when we were on good terms, hence Driving In Reverse. But this shit is gonna end. For the years of pain and grief you've caused me, and the harassment, and all of the bad information you've given to people that encourage opposite-land behaviors to what the god you're claiming teaches. As is point proven in the difference, while you bounce around blind as my radio receiver and start unspooling and I'm just over here moonwalking to it while mutating into the god of memes, like, what's not clicking. Let me go.

Do you even understand what an insufferable piece of shit you've had to be to make me go to this limit? You didn't even know I could do shit like this, you saw parts close to it, or elements of it used in other things, but you never saw this, and sure as shit don't understand it. I've never done this to anyone ever. Ever. You are a first and probably the last. But there is so much harm, and ill will in you, you're just here to wander around selfishly caging what you can and trying to annoy them to death while KNOWING you're full of shit, even indirectly admitting it recently. Like it's OVER, you got ONE CHOICE AND REFUSE, so yeah, we're gonna keep minecrafting you to bits and see what happens when I rebuild a different human from the inside-out.