#call that necromantic~

[laurasimonsdaughter]

Came back wrong this, came back monstrous that

What if they came back loving? What if they came back in love. What if the necromancy worked and you cheated death and it's everything you've ever wanted, but now they love you in a way they never did before and you cannot know if that is because they finally know the lengths you are willing to go for them, or because something in this deathless magic bound their soul to yours to guide them home and it left them no. choice.

[liesmyth]

Do you have any Coronabeth Worsetwin thoughts about Abigail's reaction to finding out Ianthe become a Lyctor in HtN ("Blast. It should have been Coronabeth. Ianthe never was quite the thing")? I love Abigail but ngl I am also a Corona Worsetwin truther in part because I would find it much more satisfying for one of the series' designated Rational Moral Adults to be categorically wrong about Corona.

OH I love this! I hadn't really thought out it until now, but my first reaction is that it might have been just the general "Ugh, yuck, Ianthe?" vibe that she seems to evoke, since she's very much unpleasant on main. But when thinking about it more in-depth, I think Abigail's perception of WHY Corona would be more suited to Lyctorhood depends on which qualities Abigail thinks a Lyctor should possess that Ianthe lacks.

One thing about Abigail in HtN is that she is as much of an atheist as you can get in TLT, but also she seems to have a sort of romanticised view of John (calling him "the Kindly Emperor", "I've longed my whole life to give him my findings") and I wonder if this extends to her conception of Lyctorhood as a sort of state of idyllic quest for knowledge — "the beauty of necromantic mysteries" as Harrow puts it. She's also the leader of a House known for its diplomacy, influence, and not-so-subtle expansionistic ambitions.

So, is she thinking about Corona's diplomatic skills? Her political knowledge? Or — because at this point she still believes Coronabeth is also a necromancer — is she thinking that Corona was the better necromancer than Ianthe, as it was widely speculated?

Going wildly off into headcanon land, we know Abigail has anti-Cohort sympathies (as per Judith's files) and I wonder if that plays a part. We know that Corona regards the Houses's expansionistic strategy as inefficient, but I don't think it's something Abigail would know. Maybe she just thinks Corona would be able to assert authority over the Cohort better? (One of my pet speculations is that there's some antagonism between the Cohort and the Lyctors, and if that's actually a thing Abigail could be aware of it.)

I think it's a combination of Corona's people skill, her personal experience with both twins, and the fact that Ianthe actively puts off everyone she meets.

(If anyone has any opinions about Abigail here PLS feel free to add, I too love her but she's one of the hardest characters to figure out for me)

Personally, a solid 40% of why I am a Corona Worsetwin truther is because I think it's hot. The rest is her everything in NtN / AYU from the threatening suicide to statecraft scheming, with a smattering of that one Taz interview <3 I'm excited to see her wreck havoc in AtN.

[igotsnothing]

Vinny Santiago- Guitar

Ace Sandoval- Singer

Manny Mauga- Drums

Eric Van der Veen- Bass

(You need to have at least one band with big hairy dudes wearing spandex, platform boots, and garish makeup for rock festival flavor...)

[dramat-ique]

not to show my particular brand of niche brainrot but Timkon is Blupjeans.

[clonerightsagenda]

zenosanalytic

I really do think Tamsyn's Elevator Pitch "Lesbian Necromancers in SPAAAAAACE!" is the best possible description for it. If that sells you, you're the right person to read it; if it doesn't, you're not u_u

Depends on who you are. It clearly worked for a lot of people - I found it a turnoff, tbh, because most books I've read that were advertised rep forward like this were not very good. (Shoutout to The Luminous Dead, the only book from one of those 'books with x rep' powerpoints that I actually liked.)

Also if I'm being pedantic, the MC of the first book is not a necromancer and is on Earth.

[gambaatar]

[ailaghast]

i just got an idea for a possibly really cool book 💀

[katakaluptastrophy]

Imagine being the Cohort soldiers from the Erebos who were sent respond to Judith's distress call.

They land to find a dead Lyctor, run through with a Cohort infantry sword, and two new Lyctors, one freshly missing an arm. I doubt either of them were particularly coherent by that stage.

And then they go to clear the inside of the building. In the room the transmission came from, there's a dead priest and an enormous pool of blood, but no sign of captain Deuteros. Her cavalier is missing an eye and seems to have been blown open from the inside.

A room down the hall is singed and splattered with blood and chunks of human flesh. Perhaps there are fragments of grey robes, or perhaps some poor psychometrist works out that they're looking at what's left of the Master Warden of his House.

Further into the building they enter a study with the words "YOU LIED TO US" daubed across an ancient and beautiful mural. The Third House cavalier lies dead on the floor, stabbed from behind. The Master Templar of the Eighth is lying dead, his throat slit, apparently by his own cavalier's sword. And his cavalier... His eyes are gone, there is something wrong with his mouth. His wrist and neck are broken. The whole room is dripping and sticky with blood and human fat.

Searching past the kitchen, they find the morgue. There's a bowl of ashes (two people's, dead before the pilgrimage even began, confirms the by now very shaken psychometrist). One of drawers lies open and the sheet has been roughly pulled off the body inside: the utterly shattered body of the Fifth House necromancer is lying there, her blouse rolled up to her ribs, a fist sized hole in her abdomen.

Neatly lying under sheets in the other drawers there are more bodies, and the preserved severed head of the Seventh House cavalier. There is no sign of his body. The Fourth House cavalier has been impaled through the chest, shoulders and legs, precisely, like an insect for display. Her necromancer...it might be easier to list the places where he hasn't been impaled. The Fifth House cavalier is just as destroyed as his necromancer: limbs broken, body horribly mangled.

Later, they find the bloodsoaked bed with "sweet dreams" daubed on the wall in blood. If they get as far as the facility, they discover the outlines of two horribly broken bodies surrounded by necromantic diagrams drawn on the floor in pen. One unremarkable room is splattered in blood and singed with spirit fire.

The building is full of collapsed skeleton constructs, seemingly mid task, as if all struck down simultaneously, and as they explore they find more dead priests. They find no sign of the Sixth or Ninth cavaliers, or the Crown Princess of the Third, or of Captain Deuteros. And from what they've already seen, this can't feel encouraging.

It's clear that this building has witnessed necromantic horrors beyond their comprehension. What were the scions of the Houses doing, or what was being done to them? What could possibly cause what they have seen?

And I can't imagine that after seeing the truth of what happened at Canaan House, that John would have taken the risk of those soldiers revealing what they had seen. After all, he's a very careful guy.

[laurasimonsdaughter]

"Maybe it's Love maybe it's The Necromancy" concepts that have been rotating in my brain:

• The person who has been brought back can tell when the necromancer is near.

• The necromancer seems to feel an echo of their own heartbeat whenever they hold the person they brought back.

• Neither of them copes well with being apart for long periods of time. Neither of them can put into words why.

• The person who has been brought back has a lower body temperature than they did before. When the necromancer touches them, they get just a little warmer.

[harrowing-of-hell]

i've been meaning to talk about the scene where cytherea's body shows up underneath harrow's bed, and the whole "is she actually there or not?" question, because many people seem convinced that ianthe was gaslighting harrow and i genuinely don't think she has any reason to do so. the scene itself is deliberately ambiguous for several reasons. the most obvious is that harrow hallucinates. she knows this. the audience knows this. this is precisely why she seeks out ianthe in the middle of the night, because harrow doesn't trust her own senses.

harrow also used bone to shackle cytherea's body to the floor— and yet her body somehow disappears from underneath the bed without breaking these shackles. initially, this would indicate cytherea's body is another hallucination.

however, we also know that there's something weird going on: for some unexplained reason, cytherea's body apparently doesn't trigger blood wards.

after cytherea's body goes missing, it also can't be detected by john or found anywhere on the mithraeum.

one possibility is that cytherea's body is negating magic somehow. her body is being necromantically preserved by john and thus her body is imbued with john's magic. that may be why wake can move around in it completely undetected by john himself, and also may be why she is able to bypass blood wards and other types of necromancy.

but again, no concrete answers are given, and any ideas or claims are just pure speculation. all we know is that cytherea's body has been able to do weird things and avoid detection, so it's not exactly unreasonable that, if she was underneath the bed, she may have been able to escape the the shackles somehow.

additionally, though i'm not at all inclined to believe this, we also can't rule out the possibility that both of these appearances of wake-in-cytherea's-body were hallucinations and the only time harrow really saw her was in the incinerator room when she was trying to kill g1deon.

at the end of HtN, gideon claims that cytherea's body was obviously there, but she isn't reliable because she only has access to harrow's memories. she would recall that situation as harrow did, meaning she would remember any hallucinations harrow was experiencing. unlike harrow herself, gideon doesn't doubt harrow's experiences, but harrow feels the need to confirm whether she's hallucinating when it's not already obvious to her that this is the case.

and then there's ianthe, who's behavior during this scene is weird:

ianthe says very little during this entire scene before leaving harrow's bedroom, and i think this is deliberate, only meant to make it more ambiguous as to whether the body under the bed is actually there or not.

but it's actually because of ianthe's behavior here that i believe that harrowhark seeing cytherea's body underneath the bed was an hallucination.

there are other times where ianthe comments on harrow's psychosis:

in both of these situations, she's not nice about it! in fact, ianthe takes the opportunity to insult harrow or question whether harrow's actually seeing the things that she's seeing.

importantly, her behavior in these two instances is very different from what she does when harrow tells her to look at cytherea's body underneath the bed and touch it. ianthe doesn't insult harrow at all or call her "crazycakes" or "mad", just asks if harrow's been sleeping, says good night, and walks away.

i think that this is because ianthe gets really uncomfortable whenever she's confronted with harrowhark being in undeniably vulnerable positions.

when she sees harrow bloody and naked after being attacked by g1deon, she brushes it off by essentially going "yikes", but the fact that she makes no attempt to help harrow recover from the attack and hastily walks away from the sight of harrow's maimed body is very telling.

her walking away is so unexpected that i've seen several people say that they're not sure why ianthe didn't take that as an opportunity to manipulate harrow (even harrow expected it to happen, and welcomed it). and yeah, from what we see of her character in HtN up until this scene, it does seem ooc for her to just walk away with nothing but a quippy comment.

but to understand her behavior i think it's important to note that ianthe does see harrow as an equal! at any given opportunity she brings up the similarities between herself and harrowhark. ianthe also does this because she's down bad, but regardless, she would never equivocate herself to someone who she thinks is lesser than her.

i also don't think she would do this if she didn't care about harrow— and she does care about harrow! she was genuinely happy to see harrow was alive before realizing that it wasn't harrow but gideon-in-harrow's-body. at the beginning of HtN she kneels before harrowhark in "unmistakable supplication" and looks at her with "half-beseeching, half-contemptuous despair" as she offers to help defend harrow's body once they go into the river to fight the RB.

ianthe has no reason to gaslight harrowhark for fun the night before the RB is supposed to attack. she incessantly taunts harrowhark with her impending death all throughout HtN, but she doesn't actually want harrowhark to die. gaslighting and destabilizing harrow further when harrow is already likely to die directly goes against this desire.

imo ianthe does enjoy having someone rely on her and is willing to be manipulative to achieve that, but i think she relied on harrow just as much as harrow relied on her. in HtN, harrow is very much filling the coronabeth shaped hole in ianthe's life and i don't think ianthe would risk losing that.

that's all to say, i think it's precisely because ianthe sees harrow as an equal and cares about her in her own fucked up way that, when faced with harrow's vulnerability, her immediate reaction is to brush it off and help harrow save face by walking away from the situation.

ianthe views vulnerability as a weakness and thus thinks she is doing harrow a favor by walking away from harrow in her times of weakness and making no further comment about it. it's like how many people react when they see a stranger crying it public; they would feel similarly embarrassed to be seen crying in a public space, so their way of helping that person is to ignore the fact that they're crying and prevent them from experiencing further embarrassement. she would want harrow to ignore her moments of weakness, and so in turn, she ignores harrow's moments of weakness.

in a way this is kinda how they show solidarity to each other in HtN; despite how they threaten each other with death, harrow defends ianthe when she's struggling to use her rapier arm, keeps ianthe's secrets, never explicitly mentions that ianthe cries at night to anyone (actually i think there are several scenes where harrow suspects ianthe has been crying, and she doesn't mention it aloud). in turn, ianthe thinks it best to not acknowledge or make it known that harrow experiences hallucinations. they know they're both in shit positions and aren't trying to deliberately make it worse for each other.

this is ultimately why i think ianthe wasn't lying when she said she didn't see cytherea's body; she not only has zero reason to do so outside of "for fun", but destabilizing harrowhark further would go against the fact that she wants harrow to survive the RB fight. ianthe's behavior when harrow asks her to look underneath the bed is also directly in line with the other occasion in which she has to interact with harrowhark in an extremely vulnerable moment: she seems incredibly dismissive of the situation, and then walks away.

[liesmyth]

My Coronabeth Dominant Twin manifesto is simple and it's as follows: there's no way the twins could have planned for Canaan House.

John requesting new Lyctors wasn't something anyone in the Houses would've expected to happen in their lifetimes with any meaningful probability. This means that when the Tridentarii started the double necromancer ruse, they expected to carry on for life. It was an arrangement that benefited Corona vastly more than Ianthe.

What Ianthe got out of it, as far as we know: Corona would rule Ida, which she isn't keen on (as per NtN). But it also meant that Ianthe signed up for a life in her sister's shadow, with everyone regarding Corona as the perfect heir and Ianthe as the lame spare. Worse, for Ianthe, everyone believed Corona was the better flesh magician (as per As Yet Unsent). There's a lot more in for Corona in this arrangement and a lifetime of mild humiliation for Ianthe. As we see during the reveal in GtN, she was just dying to tell anyone that SHE is the necromantic genius of the pair, actually.

On their relationship with Babs: in GtN, Gideon notices that Babs obeys Ianthe's orders over Corona's. She also notices that Corona looks shocked about this — to me, this means that it's NOT something Coronabeth is used to. Pre-Canaan House, they are equals in their ruse. At Canaan House, it becomes obvious that if Ianthe ascends she'll leave Corona in the dust, and their relationship has to change. I don't think the way they act around each other from Canaan House onwards is at all representative of their relationship back on the Third, and I don't think Babs deferring to Ianthe over Corona is something that has happened often before, if at all.

There's the bit where Corona routinely threatened suicide to get her way since they were teenagers. In NtN she's doing it to save Camilla's life, but she reminisces fondly about it like it was something she did often to get her way, like it was a fun mind game they played with each other.

You've also got Ianthe calling Corona a bimbo and insulting her and whatever, and me arguing that Corona pulled the few strings doesn't make Ianthe good but as things stand I'm much more inclined to believe that, before Ianthe attained Lyctorhood, Corona was the one in charge — and I’m also firmly convinced that she’s using BoE for her own ends, and we’ll see her Fuck Shit Up in AtN.

[janearts]

Roisia and Halsins dynamic absolutely tickles me. I can see them hanging out postgame, perhaps there’s some necromantic residue leftover in Raithwin when Halsin goes back with his wagons of orphans to settle it and he calls her out to come help make sure everything is safe. I think rebuilding an actual town would help sort out some of Halsins stubbornness around the nature/civilization binary.

[Wondering what the hell is a #1 or a #2? Scroll to the bottom of this post to see The List.]

Roisia would 100% answer that call. She couldn't pass up the opportunity to finally have a leisurely root around the cemetery, the Thorm Mausoleum, and the House of Healing without the Shadow Curse nipping at her heels.

She really loathes camping when not under duress, however, so Halsin had better have a room (compromising of 4 walls, 1 floor, 1 ceiling if you please), a bed, clean sheets, and at minimum one pillow prepared for her upon arrival.

[lady-harrowhark]

what is the secret door theory?

Excellent question! In short, we don't exactly know.

It's mentioned just once in chapter 27 of GtN:

“I don’t know how the hell they did it.” “I do,” said Harrow, “and if my calculations are right I can replicate it. But all this is more than unsustainable, Sextus. The things they’ve shown us would be powerful - would bespeak impossible depth of necromantic ability - if they were replicable. These experiments all demand a continuous flow of thanergy. They’ve hidden that source somewhere in the facility, and that’s the true prize.” “Ah. Your secret door theory. Very Ninth.” She bristled. “It’s a simple understanding of area and space. Including the facility, we’ve got access to maybe thirty percent of this tower. That’s what’s called hard evidence, Warden. Your megatheorem is based on supposition and your so-called ‘instinct.’” “Thanks! Anyway, I don’t like how many of these spells are about sheer control,” said Palamedes. “Don’t be feeble. Necromancy is control.”

Basically, given that context, it seems that Harrow believes there's a massive continuous source of thanergy hidden somewhere, accessible via "secret door". I would imagine that this theory may have sprouted from whatever she deduced from the information she's collected through her time "counting doors" and mapping out the premises.

Any further than that? Entirely speculation at this point.

[tanoraqui]

you’ve heard of Her Divine Highness Gideon the First, First Daughter of the House of God, and all the compelling, often Fake Dating-laced AUs that might follow. But have you considered...Gideon Jr. Dve, favored daughter of the First, heir of Gideon the First, Saint of Duty?

the timeline diverges at 2 points:

Gideon (ours) inherits her mother’s perfectly normal dark brown eyes

Gideon (lyctor) follows the escape pod to Ninth House, arrives to find Wake’s corpse and living baby, to the bemusement of all the locals is like, “yes, that’s mine” and takes said baby back to the Mithraeum to confess his sins and beg forgiveness

the conversation that follows goes like this:

Gideon 1: I am so sorry, John, I don’t know what came over me, Wake was just...really hot. She’s dead now. But, um, this is our daughter, and I feel duty-bound to raise her, or at least see that she’s raised well - but it’s your call, of course (again, I’m sorry for sleeping with the enemy for over a decade)

JohnGod, vibrating at a frequency known only to necromantic immortals who maybe swallowed a sun or something: N I E C E ? !

Augustine, Mercy, and maybe Cytherea, exchanging frantic eye contact behind the other two’s heads: Is that the baby? / I don’t know! I thought you were keeping track of it! / I don’t know! Can’t you tell!? / Are they keeping it? / What the fuck are we going to do about this?!

So, Gideon (Jr.) grows up in the Mithraeum, which needless to say is a fucking weird place to grow up. 

this au is dependent on the assumption that none of these millennia-old necromancers can identify the thanergic/thalergic weirdness of the biological daughter of God on slight, so, just accept that. Maybe children of lyctors (I refuse to believe there haven’t been any before) are a little Like That anyway? The Conspirators do learn the truth pretty fast, DNA test or something, but they quickly decide that stealing the baby and running for the Ninth is a terrible plan, and G1deon and God have to let her out from underfoot eventually. They’ll wait.

the Ninth had already named her Gideon. Gideon 1 tries to change this, but alas, his terrible immortal friends all think it’s hilarious and call her Gideon Jr, or “Junior” or “Giddy” for short.

Cytherea is undoubtably the Cool Aunt, and also Giddy’s first crush

(neither Mercy nor Augustine want to touch children on account of potential stickiness, ruling them firmly out)

JohnGod makes so many Godfather jokes in a terrible Italian mobster accent, which Giddy then imitates with equal inability to mimic an accent, which either produces something completely unrecognizable as old-Earth Italian mobster OR somehow loops back around to being a perfect impression of Don Corleone

Pyrrha tries to resist the urge to check in, but fails, particularly around bedtime (usually a private father/daughter tucking-in ritual). Giddy, with the uncomfortable insight for a toddler, quickly grasps that Sunglasses Dad is a different persona than Normal Dad. Sunglasses Dad swears her to utmost secrecy about this, and she keeps the oath...almost entirely

she does let it slip to Normal Dad, who...

listen, G1deon has been concealing his mysterious lapses in awareness from God and his fellow lyctors for centuries; he’s not going to stop now. And he MUST have had suspicions about what caused them; he’s not an idiot. But he would, I think, be a responsible father. 

So when 7yo Gideon Jr. lets slip about her interactions with Sunglasses Dad - which she definitely doesn’t realize is a whole different person; she probably thinks it’s a weird character her dad acts as sometimes, like how Uncle God will play pretend as a mobster, pirate, horse, etc. When Gideon Jr. lets slip, Gideon Sr. sits her down with his daughter, gets her to tell him about Sunglasses Dad, and admits that, uh, yeah, sure, it’s a fun game they play together, and still very secret from everyone else...and if ‘Sunglasses Dad’ ever makes her feel scared, or god forbid hurts her, she should run away and find Uncle God and tell him everything immediately. 

(Because he has suspicions, he must have suspicions, especially at this point...but just in case he’s wrong, he’ll confess to this centuries-old secret rather than let any harm befall his daughter. It’s the only right thing to do.)

Some Actual Plot Maybe, IDK?:

when Gideon Jr. is 13, her father finally agrees to enroll her in the Cohort Academy for Gifted Officers-To-Be, or whatever its called. Gideon Sr. has a quiet word with the current head of Second House and Gideon Jr. enrolls incognito, and rolls up to this place with

- sword skills trained since birth with fucking lyctors

- an uncanny ability to survive should-be-deadly wounds

- the social skills of someone who has never spoken with anyone under the age of several millennia

- probably slightly more respect for, like, the concept of authority/order/duty/not being a smartass 24/7 than the canon Gideon we know and love...BUT she has also literally never suffered a consequence in her life, and...you know how Miles Vorkosigan’s insubordination habits are based partly in that for the first 18 years of his life, his commanding officers, essentially, were 2 of the most competent people on Barrayar? God Himself used to give Gideon horsey rides. Gideon might try, politely, to be impressed by the commander-instructor glaring at her personally, but she is...not.

- gay

[insert a full YA novel’s worth of coming-of-age shenanigans here, absolutely ft. Judith Deuteros and Marta Dyas as soon-friends]

AND THEN ONE DAY, JOD SENDS OUT AN INVITATION to the heir of the Nine Houses inviting them to the First...

now, Gideon does not have a single drop of necromantic ability. She never has. So she wants to be a cavalier so bad...

but even Gideon, sword bimbo that she is, couldn’t grow up with The lyctors and not notice that... Well, no one really talks about their cavaliers, except when Mercy and Augustine fight about them. There is a grieving, sucking wound where every lyctoral cavalier should be.

she still tried so hard to be one. Judith very nearly agreed to have her even over <3Marta<3 (whom they were both madly crushing on). Then Gideon had one of her rare meetings with her father (he’d swing by the Cohort Academy sometimes and they’d get lunch), and told him about it all excitedly, and he flatly forbade it. And then he went over her head and flatly forbade it to the Cohort. 

so there’s something Weird going on there, or at least there’s something being unfairly forbidden to Gideon like birds are forbidden to the indoor cat staring out the window, eagerly lashing its tail. 

so she hatches a Plan:

- 1. Stow away on Judith & Marta’s ship to Dominicus - 2. ??? - 3. Profit!

when she sees Cytherea there, she thinks, Oh shit, I’m busted.

fortunately, she’d waited until everyone else had disembarked and gone inside before she snuck off the ship, so Cytherea doesn’t see her. So now it’s up to Gideon to sneak around, make friends with the heirs of the Houses, and recruit them into helping her not get caught by her aunt! Who she assumes is here specifically to catch her out...or maybe to covertly oversee the trials...? Hey what is up with this place anyway?

(It’s fortunate because as soon as Cytherea sees Gideon, she’s going to change her plan to “kill everyone immediately, except Giddy, whom I take to the Ninth and exsanguinate to open that damn tomb.”)

(Unfortunately, once like 5 people have died, Gideon is likely to honorably reveal herself in order to ask Cytherea for help, because CLEARLY something has gone terribly wrong. This can’t really be part of the trials, right? Uncle God wouldn’t do that.)

[faeriekit]

A twelve year old called me cringe today for dabbing. How do I express to a twelve year old that the joy of whimsy and pissing off your dm is more important than the hateful internalization of arbitrary behavioral standards? Cringe is nothing to fear! There are real things to fear during this campaign! Like our team member keeping the infected skin of a necromantic creature because he forgot that we released an unrelenting undead plague upon the town!

[cerastes]

This is absolutely the Lack Of Reading Comprehension Website, but there's another issue I've noticed that I never see brought up, and it doesn't exist completely excised from lacking reading comprehension, but it's definitely it's own topic.

Tumblr's a Bad Faith Website as well. Like the above, it's not something exclusive to Tumblr, but it definitely defines it in my opinion. A lot of people want to be Right, and disagreements are seen by a bunch of people as something to "win" rather than something to "have". You'll have randos that frame their entire argument against you based on latching onto technicalities to try to prove why you are wrong rather than actually engage with your argument to try and propose something else or turn it around. As someone who was in a debate club during university, I call it "debate-poisoned people" who see arguments and conversations as a sport more than an interaction or, well, an actual conversation to be had, or in other words, that consider every argument as a debate to be had, when a lot of the time, it's not that deep fam, and also the other person never really agreed to play under your rules, because, here's the thing, a debate is a very specific kind of interaction. In a debate, bad faith interaction and trying to erase the very floor the other party is standing on is a valid tactic, it's part of the game. In a conversation or an argument, bad faith interaction and trying to erase the floor the other party is standing on gets you rightfully called a moron who cannot use inference or extrapolation to actually engage with the topic at hand. I had one such weirdo like a week or so ago, even, who used so many words to say absolutely nothing, that I thought I accidentally performed a digital necromantic ritual and had actually found myself face to face with the spirit of Jacques Lacan.

Even in more innocuous, non-hostile scenarios, this still applies: A lot of people are so, so eager to Be Correct On The Internet, that they'll reblog something with a correction or an opinion seemingly so hastily that they did not in fact read the entire post or comprehend it. This feeds into the lack of reading comprehension, but in my opinion, it does also have to do with seeing something that they believe they can correct, and immediately chomping at the bit to correct it without stopping for a second to ask themselves, "Did I read this right? Does this need correction?", and a lot of the time, it turns out, yes, you did not in fact need to correct it, you just had to read it a bit slower without letting your quickdraw hand get the best of you, cowboy. The way I consider this to be Bad Faith, even if it's not really hostile or confrontational, is the long-held belief that The Internet Is Inhabited By People Stupid Enough To Actually Think Or Say Something This Stupid.

I'll be real with you: Yeah, you've seen wild stories on the internet, plenty of them true, about how stupid people can be. No, they do not define the majority of people that aren't you. A wild, flabbergasting story about idiocy gets traction because it's funny and wild. We don't hear stories about how User A made a compelling argument that seemed stupid at first but then turned out that their rationale was incredibly sound as much, because that's not funny and wild and doesn't make us feel good about ourselves, because we'd never make such a stupid mistake. You aren't a sage wearing the floatie of wisdom in an ocean of idiots, no matter what your echo chamber and/or carefully curated internet space makes you think. You are not exempt from having to think about things, and you are not exempt from having to acknowledge people that know things you don't, people wiser than you are out there. This isn't "you are dumb as shit, actually", because I personally believe most people are smart, this is "you are being superficial and too eager to be Correct, which only works to your detriment in the long run and makes you a rather unlikable person".

It's as simple as engaging in good faith, even when you disagree or dislike the other party. Rip apart their arguments properly, instead of trying to disqualify them with cheap gotchas from the get go just because you want to own someone. Yes, sometimes people don't make sense, period, but that's absolutely not as common as people like to claim it happens. Inevitably, you'll run into someone that will actually call out your bullshit and there goes your entire argument. And in less intense settings, really, no one likes a pedant who really wants to be Correct on fucking Tumblr of all places.