#corruption being more like a disease than anything else... good concept

[justshapesandshitposting]

New fresh design ft. some worldbuilding on corruption in general (corruption itself works more like a disease than anything else. also with that in mind, white gray and black can't be corruption colors. white is all colors, (too overwhelming and causes corruption to just die instantly if it dosen't treat it as the color it is) black is no colors, and gray is essentially both existing and not existing at the same time so corruption essentially can't comprehend it. it's like trying to explain 4d chess to a worm)

[general--winter]

Who would you save if you could only save 1: Kagami or Shisui?

I've like

Actually been thinking about this since I got this ask last night. I don't KNOW 😭😭😭😭😭

But it's an interesting thought experiment, I'm going to run with it.

Hypothetically, I think Kagami most likely died on a mission at 25, there's absolutely no other way anything else other than chakra disease (which is ridiculously stupid so I'm gonna pretend it doesn't exist) killed him. So my way of saving him would be to make him the Hokage instead of Hiruzen. Remember, Kagami was the *only* Uchiha that Tobirama really trusted, since he inherited the Will of Fire instead of the Curse of Hatred. I think that he would have feasibly been the one to offer himself up as the sacrifice, and therefore become the Third Hokage.

Of course, he would eventually die (probably fighting Orochimaru in all honesty), but if there was an UCHIHA at the seat of the Hokage, well there would be literally no issues for the clan. They wouldn't be so insistent on Fugaku being the Fourth Hokage, and when he's not selected there's no immense bad blood. They would be so much happier with everything in this timeline and the coup wouldn't even be a concept. Shisui would be born and not even have to deal with that shit, lmfao. And he'd be the grandson of the Hokage. HAHA imagine if he was like Konohamaru as a kid because of the entitlement—

If you saved Shisui instead, Danzo would still have is eye and yeah sure, you expose the corruption in Konoha, but the coup is still looming. I personally didn't think the Kotoamatsukami plan was any good, it would have just delayed things more or led to the ousting of Fugaku as clan head. He would be alive but, well, I can't say what I think it would lead to because that will spoil the entirety of my longfic currently going 🤧

Actually this is so fucking easy. I would save Kagami, especially if he became Hokage. It solves so many issues LOL. Then maybe Shisui would get to meet his grandpa 🥹 But if we're considering a world where Hiruzen is Hokage, well I don't know and you're cruel for making me think about that. But now I wanna write a longfic about Kagami becoming Hokage shit I might do it

[gerrydelano]

This may be a dumb question because I'm Jared, 19, but you referred to Anastasia as your corruption/buried oc and I was wondering if she was aligned with both or something cause I find the concept of avatars serving two powers really interesting

i find it interesting, too! i focus a Lot on the fact that the powers aren’t so clear cut as the taxonomy declares, which is why overlap sounds really fun to explore. thanks for asking me about my OC! i’ll explain all this here :’3

tazia’s got a family history with doing some long-established bidding for the corruption (maintaining that Evil Garden™ and all) and her parents are very devoted to that. their insistence that she maintain it with them/after them is an expression OF the corruption:

“we’re family, this is tradition, it’s been our family for generations, we love you, the garden loves you, you’re so good at this, look how beautiful our work is, this is what we can accomplish together, don’t you see how beautiful? how could you ever want anything else, what could love you more than the garden does? we’re your family.”

just really laying it on thick with conditional love and familial obligation. corruption is also toxic love as much as it is literal rot and bugs and disease. and tazia loves her family! as much as she doesn’t want to be like them. and she doesn’t want to be part of this.

because guess what the garden ACTUALLY is! you know how sometimes people get their ashes turned into trees and whatever. this shitty evil garden is a family plot but made Bad. it’s overflowing with moving, sometimes malicious Plant Life that sprouted above where they buried her family for generations before her.

it’s a pretty big responsibility, keeping your entire family’s memory alive. keeping what’s left of them thriving and interacting with them and talking to them and never doing Anything to hurt or abandon them while they’re clearly so in need of your help.

as time goes on she realizes how trapped she is, both literally and figuratively; trapped by that obligation, the weight of that responsibility, the genuine danger of what could happen when she someday leaves the garden after essentially being a part of it for such a long time. and for a while, that’s completely suffocating! for a while there, it weighs on her. at first, she resists it.

at first.

because what she doesn’t want to be a part of is the CYCLE. but she’s already part of the family.

so she decides that the line ends with her. she and gerry had a lot in common as kids and that’s why they made a little pact to never be like their parents. they split off from each other in a lot of ways when they lost most contact. gerry was also a fear meal for the buried for similar reasons, stayed trapped for a VERY long time for Similar Reasons, but their outlooks on it are very different.

tazia won’t have children or pass this burden onto anyone else; she’ll maintain the garden as long as she’s able to and as long as she has to, but she wants the tradition to die with her. in her mind, she never leaves, and some parts of her are very comfortable with that! she wants to be cremated i think, whenever she goes, but she does also wonder who would even still know her by the time that happens. what if she just dies in the garden while tending it? would they drag her under then? who knows.

in pharos by right, gerry doesn’t exactly plan on letting that happen. no spoilers, but it’s going to be a fucking Lot and have a LOT to do with MAJOR plot stuff actually so HA.

but in terms of multiple entities overlapping in someone’s story, to me it’s like.

one is the reason you’re there, one is the way your own stuff manifests

agnes was told to do this one thing, but the Way she fulfilled that role was very buried! you could argue jon stuff, too, between the web and the eye. fuck web martin but martin was doing his lonely stuff To Make Sure peter didn’t fuck with jon and manipulated the situation right back, it WAS lonely stuff but it was through a certain Avenue.

gerry isn’t an avatar in canon but he’s clearly got an eye inclination that we all go with for assigning him. he’s also HUGELY influenced by the end after all that exposure, which influences his basic outlook. and like i said, i personally think he’s a massive fear meal for the buried, which impacts the way he goes about things. sometimes, he’s probably inclined to just give in just so it hurts less. in the end, he doesn’t, but g-d is it tempting.

tazia gives in to that temptation for a while there. i don’t see her ever making the choice to become a full avatar as much as staying in that limbo of influence and heavy marks, though! 

so she’s technically serving the corruption with her actual actions for a long time, but her actual inclination and personal way of experiencing what was imposed on her is VERY buried. the two coexist so closely that it’s almost hard to pick which one is the biggest influence! you could argue it’s still corruption in places, because she DOES love her family. you could argue the buried is what Scares Her The Most, but is it really?

eventually, it stops feeling crushing and feels more like an embrace. it doesn’t scare her so much, after a while.

scares the hell out of the people who want different for her, though. scares the hell out of gerry, with his own buried mark and his own knowing for how this goes.

tune in around the fourth installment to see where her story starts going :’-)

[wickedbarnes]

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not | John Wick x Reader

PROMPT: Hanahaki Disease AU! Reader realizes she's in love with John but John, on the other hand, can't reciprocate the feelings because he's still in love with Helen. And so, reader begins to cough blood red rose petals...

WARNING: Major angst. Blood. Get your tissues ready.

NOTE: This is my take on the fictional disease so please don't attack me if some of the concepts of it is wrong. I just did it so there would be more impact to the story. An explanation for my take on the Hanahaki will be provided down below at the end of the oneshot to avoid any confusions. Other than that, please enjoy!

--

If there was one thing you hated doing, it was breaking promises. And you rarely did it unless it was really necessary. But you hated it when you did. And this... this was a promise you swore you would never break. But here you were, staring down at your bloody palm, examining the rose petals that stuck to your skin.

A lone tear cascaded down your cheek as you wiped the blood from your lips.

It finally got to you. The disease. The same disease that had killed your beloved Mother. And you were sure it was the same one that was going to kill you.

You vividly remembered how your Mother would gush about how beautiful love was. How magical it is and how you'd feel as if you were floating when you experienced it. And in a way, she has a point. But not everything was easy.

Because along with love comes pain. The pain of a broken heart. And as you grew up you realized that love was only beautiful when it was reciprocated. When the person you love is in love with you as well. But like your mom, you weren't so lucky.

You had no one but John now. When your Mother died of the Hanahaki Disease, you swore- vowed, rather, that you would never fall in love. But that was, until John.

The moment you saw the man, you could tell just how miserable he seemed but there was something about him that just drew you in. He charmed women without even noticing it. And so you did the unthinkable and was bold enough to go ask him what drink he wanted and that it was on you.

You worked as a bartender in the Red Circle. And when you spotted John you had no idea what type of man he was and what type of world he lives in. But even after that, you didn't care. You still stuck with him.

And you didn't even plan on doing so. You just wanted to give the man something to look forward to. Something to give him a little boost. But when chaos broke and you were almost shot by Viggo's men, John was brave enough to catch the bullet himself before the rest of them ran out thinking they had finally killed the Baba Yaga.

That night, you couldn't just leave him there dying. You had insisted he goes to the hospital but he told you not to and instructed you to take him to the Continental. The hotel where you didn't even know housed assassins like him. You didn't know why but you had stayed with him the whole while he was being patched up despite the fact he kept telling you to leave because it would be dangerous.

But the stubborn person you are, you decided to stay. And the rest was history from there.

You felt it creep up on you. You could tell because you felt the same itch in your throat that didn't seem to go away ever since your feelings for John got stronger. But the moment you realized you were in love with him, fate had finally decided to give you a sign that the feelings you have for the man just wasn't mutual.

And in a way, you kind of understood why. The wedding band on John's finger was proof of that. It was the proof of his undying love for his late wife, Helen. Who were you to compete with that?

The whole situation caused you to let a laugh under your breath. How ironic. John Wick never intends on hurting you. And yet here he was, being the reason why you're ill today.

---

"Y/N, you need to rest, you've been coughing all day and you don't look too good. I can handle it from here." John tried to approach you but you instinctively moved away from him and sat down on the couch yourself. Your reaction took him aback but he quickly regained his composure and sat down next to you but made sure to give you some distance.

You were pretty sure the handkerchief you were coughing into was full of blood by now and you prayed no petal would fall off or it would only worry John even more. You suspected he knows about the disease as well.

Day by day, it was getting hard for you to breathe. You knew the plant inside your lungs was growing and every night you had battled and hoped it wouldn't be your last night. Even sleeping had come to terrify you. You were afraid you wouldn't wake up anymore.

"Y/N, are you alright? You're not telling me what's going on, I have to know so I can take care of you." John would say, concern written all over his face and your heart ached at the sight because you knew he only meant that as a friend.

"I'm fine, John, I'll be okay I told you it's just allergies." You sighed and stood up to get a glass of water when you felt the familiar itch on your throat creeping up again. But the moment you took a step forward, you leaned forward and began to heave as you wretched out blood along with rose petals on John's floor.

You somehow felt embarrassed but your body fell on the floor as you kept throwing up blood. John was almost sure he would've had a heart attack with what he saw. He immediately went over to you and rubbed your back, panic beginning to creep up in his body.

This was like when Helen was ill.

When you were finished throwing up, you opened your mouth to apologize but you found yourself going limp and passing out in John's arms.

John looked at the blood and rose petals that were smeared all over his floor. The realization hit him like a truck as his face began to go pale. He looked down at your unconscious body in horror.

"Y/N, what the hell..."

---

John couldn't even fathom looking at you like this. Pale and sickly looking. He hadn't noticed just how much you had lost weight and how horrible the bags under your eyes looked. You were always with him but he was too caught up in work that he barely had time to see how his friend was doing.

He knew about the Hanahaki disease. John remembered how someone in Ruska Roma died because of it. But he never expected you to get it.

The assassin pinched the bridge of his nose and leaned back against the uncomfortable plastic chair. Who the hell were you in love with? You had never mentioned anyone from work that caught your eye. Nor did you introduce anyone to John. The idea of someone being the root of all this caused him to clench his fists until his knuckles turned white.

Whoever it was that didn't love you back, John was sure he was going to get a piece of his damn mind.

John's thoughts were cut off when the doctor came in and greeted him with a polite smile. When he looked at Y/N's records, the doctor let out a sigh and John knew this wasn't a good sign.

"Does she have family?" The doctor, Dr. Mercer had asked to which John responded by shaking his head no.

"I'm the only one she has now." Dr. Mercer nodded.

"Mr. Wick, I'm gonna be honest. Miss Y/L/N is in critical condition. The amount of blood that she threw up was very alarming. I'm sure you're aware of the Hanahaki Disease?" John nodded solemnly at the question and never took his eyes off you.

"Well, the plant inside her lungs is growing more and more. And it won't be long until it fully suffocates her. Looking at her x-rays right here, you can see that the plant is almost corrupting her lungs fully." Dr. Mercer showed your x-ray scan to John to which he took carefully and it only made the situation even real.

Was he going to lose another important person in his life? He already lost Helen and Daisy. He only has Dog now. Could he really lose you, too?

"Is there a cure to this?"

"There is. But... both of them aren't as easy as they sound." John looked up at the doctor with a confused look causing Dr. Mercer to sigh.

"In order to cure the patient, the person she's in love with has to love her back. And I don't mean platonic love. I mean, real genuine love. If that doesn't work, then we can surgically remove the root of the plant from her lungs."

John perked up at the mention of surgical removal of the plant. Obviously, whoever this person is didn't love you enough to even cure you. John felt that option two was the only logical option left. Or else, you'd die.

"I think I'd like the plant to be surgically removed from her."

"Mr. Wick, I think the patient has to decide for that. Because even though it could cure her, it would erase everything she felt and remembered about the person. Once the operation is done and successful, that person never existed for her. And unfortunately, Y/N here would be stripped away of the ability to experience romantic love. The removal of the root will cause that as well."

John couldn't believe what he was hearing. Y/N won't experience romantic love anymore? He looked at your frail body and put a hand over his face. He'd heard Dr. Mercer excuse himself but all John could think of was how he was going to save you.

He doesn't want you to live up your life not knowing how it feels to be in love and be loved by the person you're in love with. But if you don't do anything about this, you'd be six feet underground and time was slowly running out.

John's thoughts abruptly stopped when he noticed you waking up from a deep sleep. You had been out of it for about fourteen hours.

You fluttered your eyes open and took in your surroundings. Your throat felt really dry and you could use a tall drink of water. Looking around, your eyes soon fell on John who stood up from his chair and smiled softly down at you.

Your heart fluttered at how beautiful he is. You almost mistook him for an angel.

"Hey, how are you feeling?" He asked softly and brushed away some of your hair away from your face. His touch sent shivers down your spine and in a way, it hurt for him to be here. He was so gentle and patient. Was he like that with Helen? Or was he even more loving when it came to her?

"Like death." You laughed softly as you averted your eyes to the glass of water that was sitting on the table beside your bed, "Can I get a drink, please?"

John immediately took the glass of water and helped you sit up from your bed so you could drink. You were dehydrated from the amount of blood you just threw up hours ago. John gently patted your head when he saw that you drank all of the water from the glass.

"Good girl." He'd praise you and your heart swelled at it but it made you cough a bit.

John sat back down on the plastic chair but brought it closer by your bed as he looked at you in the eye.

"Y/N, who did this to you?" He asked. It took you about a minute to figure out what he was on about. And then you remembered the disease. Your situation probably took a turn for the worse and you assumed what had happened earlier almost scared John to death.

"Y/N." John sighed. "You're one of my most trusted friend. The only friend I probably trust with my whole life, really. But you need to tell me what the fuck is going on. You're dying, honey, and someone is the cause of all this and it's frustrating that I don't know who it is."

It's you, you wanted to say but the words didn't come out the way you wanted them to. You didn't want to see the look on John's face when you laid out the truth. Even now, on the verge of death, you were afraid of what he'd think. You knew he has a lot on his plate and he's just getting the chance to finally grieve for Helen. You didn't want nor had the heart to tell him that he's the reason why you're dying.

"It's no one, John, he-" You pursed your lips and let out a breath as you looked down at your hands that were slightly stained with your own blood, "He went away he- he loves someone else and that's all you need to know."

John nodded and although he was frustrated you didn't tell him everything, you knew it was just because you didn't wanna dive back into the fact that this person didn't reciprocate the feelings you felt. So he understood.

"Y/N, Dr. Mercer gave me two options so you could be cured and he-"

"John, I can't be cured, he doesn't love me." You said firmly and it felt so different saying it in front of him like this when he has no idea it was him all along that you were in love with.

"I know, darling, I know." He grabbed your hand comfortingly and you almost hated him for acting like this when all along you knew it was just platonic. You were just a friend to him. Nothing more and nothing less.

"But then he told me about option two. Option two is that you can get the plant surgically removed from your lungs." You perked up at hearing this.

You never knew it could get surgically removed. Your mother never told you. So why didn't she do it?

"W-What? What do you mean I can get it surgically removed?" You asked as tears began to fill your eyes but John was patient enough to talk you through it.

"You can, it's possible. But it's not that easy, Y/N." He let out another sigh before looking up at your tear filled eyes, "When the operation is successful, all the memories you have of that person will be gone. Including your feelings for him. It was like he never existed. Apart from that, once the plant is removed from your body, you ability to experience romantic love wouldn't be there anymore."

Tears cascaded down your cheeks. Not because you wouldn't be able to fall in love again. But because the thought of forgetting John scared you so much. Were you going to remember him again? Can he reintroduce himself again to you? Or should you not go through with option two?

At that moment, you finally realized why your mother never had the plant inside her get removed. It was far more painful than anything else.

---

"I'm sorry for your loss, Jonathan." Winston would say as he poured a drink for the assassin and John just nodded at him in thanks.

"Some things are beyond our control." John replied as he took a big gulp of his drink. He needed it right now after all.

He just came back from the hospital and that was the first time in a while John had felt so overwhelmed. The hatred he had for himself just increased a ton.

You decided to go through with the operation after giving it a deep thought for a the whole day. John was happy. Although you weren't able to experience romantic love anymore, he assured you he'd be by your side every step of the way. Just like you had been for him.

But what came next almost made him collapse down to his knees.

Aurelio decided to pay you a little visit when your operation was done. He had found out about what had happened from John and you knew the man well enough that he could give you discounts whenever your car had problems.

When it was time for visitors, John felt ecstatic. You were alive. He wasn't losing someone important from him again. When they got inside the room, you had already woken up and had a nurse slowly help you sit up from your bed but the moment your eyes fell on John, he noticed the slight confusion written on your face.

"Y/N, God, I'm so happy the operation was successful." John smiled and tucked a piece of your hair and he noticed how your body stilled from the touch as you looked up at him with wide eyes.

Thhe reaction was weird but John brushed it off and thought that maybe, it was a side effect from the pain killers you'd been taking.

"Aurelio's here and brought you some stuff. You like those cookies from the bakery near his shop, right?" You found yourself nodding slowly at the man's question even though you had no idea who he is.

Who was he? And how does he know your name? How did he know you liked those chocolate chip cookies from that bakery near Aurelio's shop? It was starting to freak you out.

John took notice of your reaction and the nurse excused herself when she was finished checking your vitals. John put a finger underneath your chin to make you look up at him and in your eyes, he saw fear.

You never looked at him like that. Never. Not even once.

"Y/N, darling, what's wrong? Did I do something, why are you-"

"Who are you?" You asked, cutting him off and John looked at Aurelio to see if what he heard was right.

Aurelio looked at him and then back at you with shock written on his face.

"What? Y/N, it's me, John. Your friend, your best friend." John replied but you had no recollection of the man in front of you so you shook your head slowly.

"I'm so sorry, I'm so confused I don't know who you are." You apologized shyly and looked at Aurelio. "Aurelio, is he a friend of yours? I really don't remember him, I don't wanna seem so rude."

John stood there in his spot, completely frozen. You remember Aurelio but you had forgotten him. That could only mean one thing...

"Come on, Y/N, stop fooling around this isn't funny. Tell me you're just joking and you know who I am." John's voice was laced with desperation now and you took notice of how his eyes were starting to fill with tears and you had a sense he hated crying in front of people.

Why did you feel so guilty? As if you'd done something wrong?

You looked up at the man apologetically and shook your head at him. "I'm so sorry, John, I really don't know who you are. I believe I just met you. Aurelio would have introduced you to me back then but... I don't remember that he has."

John couldn't take it. Everything was so overwhelming. When he gruffly excused himself you watched as he hurriedly made his way out of your room and Aurelio followed soon after probably to chase after him.

You had no idea of who he was but you could never forget how heartbroken he seemed when he looked at you.

Did you know him before?

John, on the other hand, needed to get out of there and he ignored Aurelio's calls as he got into his car and sped down the road. He felt guilty for leaving you there all alone, probably so confused as to why you were there in the first place but he just needed to have his space.

And so here he was, sharing a drink with Winston.

"You weren't entirely fair with her as well, Jonathan. You couldn't blame her if she hadn't told you."

"I was grieving for my wife." John stated to which Winston replied with a hum.

"But you could've showed her you felt the same way. Maybe told her. Hanahaki disease is a complicated kind of illness. Y/N believed you were still in love with Helen. And maybe you still are. That's why she was on the verge of dying that day. But it could all have been cured if you two had just acted on your feelings right away. A lot of people die from that, you know."

John stayed silent and poured himself another drink.

He had moved on from Helen a year after the whole incident with Viggo and his son. If Helen was alive, she would've wanted John to live his life fully and that was the only way he could honor her. And he did, and that was thanks to you.

You were like a breath of fresh air and John was scared he might ruin the peace that you had in your life. And he kind of did in a way. But you were too stubborn to leave until he just couldn't handle the thought of you leaving.

Like you, it crept up on John and the familiar itch on his throat, as if he was about to cough kept popping out of nowhere. Especially when you were near him. And for a moment, he didn't want to believe he caught it. He couldn't be possibly catching feelings for you it was a dangerous game to play.

John believed everything he touched turns to ash and he wasn't turning you into one. You deserved far more better than that. And it'd be impossible for you to feel the same way about him, he's too damaged to be loved at this point. But it's true when they say that you can't help who you fall in love.

But today, today was different than the others. John placed the glass down and leaned back on his chair and soon leaned forward when he began to cough and cough and cough.

Winston looked at John with an unreadable expression on his face. As if he knew it was coming. Somehow, he felt bad for the man. He had lost his wife and the dog she gave to him. And in a way he lost you even though you were still perfectly alive.

And now the disease had caught up to him.

His hunch was right when he saw the blood on John's palm. John stared down at it and noticed that there were petals of your favorite flower sticking onto his hand along with his own blood.

The assassin stayed silent as he grabbed his handkerchief from his coat and wiped the bloody residue off his skin.

Winston poured the man another drink but this time, he didn't pour himself some. He knew John needed it more than he did.

"Are you going to remove it or not?"

John looked at Winston but the manager took it upon himself to get up from the chair and leave Jonathan alone in the rooftop to decide.

This was all a bad case of wrong timing and lack of courage, obviously. And John leaned back against the chair and pinched the bridge of his nose as he felt a tear slip down his cheek.

Was he ready to go? Or will he risk forgetting about you like you did to him?

John realized just how difficult this all was. He realized now that it hurt to have you forget about him completely. Like he was dead to you. But knowing you, you would've made the decision just so you could live for John's sake. He knew you decided to live even though it would be hard on the both of you.

Because in your mind, you probably chose to live and see John again even though you had forgotten about him rather than die and let him live this world all alone without you.

But would it be the same for John? Could he really forget about you? Or was it time for him to go and let you be free?

Either way, as he began to cough once again, he knew that he needed to think fast and decide.

Time is gold and he's slowly running out of that.

---

A/N: I know in some stories this is not how the Hanahaki disease works but this is my take on it. Reader almost died because she believed that John would never love her the way she did. When all along, John was slowly developing feelings for her and while he did, he also didn't believe she'd have feelings for him because he believes he's too damaged to be loved. To put it shortly, my understanding of the Hanahaki is that as long as the protagonist believes the enamoured doesn't love them back, they'll slowly die. But as long as the enamoured confesses to the protagonist, they'll be cured of the disease. And if that doesn't work, the plant can be surgically removed.

The disease caught up to John and the reader because they didn't act upon their feelings and confessed to each other right away. They both believed everything was platonic between them. As a result, they kept it to themselves until it slowly killed them. In other words, this is all a bad case of wrong timing and lack of courage to say what they really wanted to say to each other.

[hamliet]

Su She and Jin ZiXun: Society vs. Connection

Or, the SuXun meta no one asked for. (I’m kidding about SuXun.)

In all seriousness, though, this meta will focus on Su She and Jin ZiXun, who, while they initially come across as semi-unlikable one-note antagonists necessary for plot connections and not much else, both actually have a ton of depth and thematic relevance. In particular, they are both used to explore the concepts of insecurity and arrogance through the lens of privilege, thereby exemplifying the novel’s central paradox: society is a corrupting disease, but human connection saves.

Jin ZiXun and Su She are extremely similar characters; in fact, I’d say the only difference in their characters is essentially that Jin ZiXun is privileged and Su She is not. The defining trait for both seems to be arrogance. Arrogance and insecurity are very common character traits in Mao Dao Zu Shi (in addition to these two, we also see them to various extents in Jin ZiXuan, Jin GuangYao, Wei WuXian, Wen Chao, Wen Ning, Jiang Cheng, and Jin Ling).

Jin ZiXun is privileged in ways Su She could never be. He looks down on everyone around him except for one notable exception (to be discussed further on). He’s said to consider Jin GuangYao, his cousin, as being of “lowly” background and it’s added that he “was ashamed to be of one clan [with Jin GuangYao].” When he acts arrogant, trying to force Lan XiChen and Lan WangJi to drink with him despite Jin GuangYao’s protests that they do not drink, he appeals to the idea of perceived scorn to manipulate them, thereby revealing what is most likely his true fear of insecurity:

“The Jin Sect and the Lan Sect have always been like one family. We’re all the same. My two Lan brothers, if you don’t drink this, you’d be looking down on me!”

It’s also notable how society responds to his evident insecurity manifesting as narcissistic arrogance:

On the side, a few of his followers all praised, “What a bold move!”“That’s just how an esteemed cultivator should act!”

However, Su She’s position in society is quite different, and therefore so is his manifestation of his insecurity.

The incident with the waterborne abyss is where we first meet him, and it tells us all we need to know about society in the novel and Su She’s position in it:

a disciple on the other side also drew out his sword, thrusting it toward a dark shadow which swiftly swam by in the water.

However, after his sword went underwater, it never came out again. He chanted the sword incantation for a few more times, but nothing was retrieved from the water. It was as if his sword had been devoured by the lake, disappearing without a trace. The disciple looked like he was a youth of similar age as Wei WuXian and the others. Without his sword, his face grew paler and paler. An older disciple beside him spoke, “Su She, right now, we still haven’t determined what the thing inside the water is. Why did you act on your own and make your sword go underwater?”

Su She seemed like he was somewhat flustered, but his expression was relatively calm, “I saw that Second Young Master also…”

He realized, before he even finished speaking, how unsuitable this sentence was. No matter what, the Bichen sword or Lan WangJi were not comparable with others… He glimpsed at Lan WangJi, but Lan WangJi didn’t look at him, and instead attentively observed the water…

This passage emphasizes Lan WangJi’s biggest flaw: his inability to say what he needs to say. It also indicates, again, what society thinks of Su She: they don’t notice him. Everything he does appears to be for naught. He’s just not important. (The comment about Su She being unable to compare to Lan WangJi also draws to mind Wen Ning’s ultimate rebuke of Jiang Cheng.)

The waterborne abyss is itself a symbol of society, as it is sent to the Gusu Lan Sect’s territory from the uppermost sect in society:

Although they knew where the waterborne abyss came from, everyone grew silent.

If it was done by people of the Wen Sect, then there would be no result no matter how hard they accused or criticized. First of all, the sect wouldn’t admit it, and second, there wouldn’t be any compensation either.

The abyss, or society, eats up Su She’s accomplishments (and sword) and tries to swallow Su She in the end. Wei WuXian risks his life to save Su She, and then Jiang Cheng observes them, but cannot help (foreshadowing what will later happen when Wei WuXian dies: Su She will unknowingly lead to Wei WuXian’s destruction, Jiang Cheng will stand by and let it happen, and Lan WangJi will act). Lan WangJi pulls them all from the abyss, symbolizing how human connection is ultimately the answer for society’s poison.

So let’s talk Jin ZiXun and Su She’s connections next. Jin ZiXun has a one-sided personal beef with our protagonist Wei WuXian, while Su She has a one-sided rivalry with our other main character, Lan WangJi. And both Jin ZiXun and Su She have someone they esteem as more important than themselves, someone they cling to and use as a way to feel less insecure themselves. For Jin ZiXun, this person is his cousin Jin ZiXuan, who is repeatedly held up as a societal ideal. In fact, Jin ZiXun is introduced to us challenging Wei WuXian when he is unimpressed by Jin ZiXuan’s accomplishments, proclaiming, “If anyone here remains unconvinced, then feel free to try if you can shoot better than ZiXuan!”

For Su She, this person is Jin GuangYao, Jin ZiXuan’s brother who is on the outskirts of society because of his birth as the illegitimate son of a prostitute and a sect leader. Ironically, it’s Jin GuangYao’s desire for acceptance by anyone and everyone (but especially societally important people, as his father is) that leads to Su She and Jin GuangYao forming a bond--at the same moment Su She forms a rift with his privileged foil Jin ZiXun:

Someone spat, “Is this a road that someone like you can walk on? Who let you roam around!”

A young voice replied, “I’m sorry. I…”

Hearing this, Lan XiChen and Lan WangJi looked up at the same time. Beside the wall reliefs stood two men. The one who had just scolded someone was Jin ZiXun, with a few servants and cultivators following behind him. The one who had been scolded was a white-clothed young man. When the man saw Lan XiChen and Lan WangJi, his face immediately went pale. He couldn’t even continue with the things he wanted to say. As Jin ZiXun kept up his haughty guise, Jin GuangYao came to the rescue just in time.

He went to the white-clothed man, “The paths of Koi Tower are rather intricate. Young Master Su, it’s not your fault that you got lost. You can come with me.”

Seeing that he appeared, Jin ZiXun sneered and walked around them. The white-clothed man, however, hesitated, “You know me?”

Jin GuangYao smiled, “Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I? Haven’t we met each other once? Young Master Su, Su MinShan, your swordsmanship is quite good. I’ve been thinking ever since the hunt at Phoenix Mountain about what a pity it’d be if such a young talent didn’t come to our sect. In the end, though, he did come to our sect. I was over the moon with joy. This way, please?”

There were countless cultivators who sought assistance by going to the LanlingJin Sect like Su She did. He thought that not many people would recognize him, having never expected Jin GuangYao to be able to remember him so clearly, going as far as to praise him, after just one hasty encounter with him. Instantly, Su She seemed to be more relieved. He ceased to look at the Lan brothers and followed Jin GuangYao away, scared that they’d mock or point at him.

The sad thing is that the Lan brothers likely would not have mocked him. In the end, both Jin ZiXun and Su She die with these respective friends of theirs, as nothing more than mere footnotes to the Jin brothers’ deaths. However, Su She’s death, in particular, shows us another aspect to his relationship with Jin GuangYao: even on the outskirts of society, they had a genuine connection.

After the waterborne abyss, the next time the novel introduces Su She is when he tries to sacrifice MianMian to appease Wen Chao (a symbol of arrogance and societal acceptance if there ever was one):

However, one of the GusuLan Sect’s disciples on the side had been trembling as he listened to Wen Chao’s threatening words. He finally couldn’t hold it any longer as he rushed over, grabbing MianMian, and prepared to tie her up. Lan WangJi’s brows stiffened. He immediately struck the disciple to the side.

Although he didn’t say anything, the way he looked at the disciple was more than imposing. What such a look meant was clear to everyone—it truly is a shame that the GusuLan Sect has taught a disciple like you!

The disciple’s shoulders quivered as he backed off slowly, unable to face the others’ eyes.

It is however an interesting reversal that Su She dies in a manner that redeems both of his earlier shames that drove him out of the Lan Sect. He dies sacrificing himself to save Jin GuangYao, rather than trying to sacrifice someone else, and he dies sacrificing his sword instead of losing it:

Su She dodged to the side with force. With the tip of his foot he picked up the sword that had fallen to the ground and conjured up all of his spiritual energy in one thrust at Nie MingJue’s heart. Perhaps because of the dire situation, the attack was abnormally swift and ruthless. Brimming with spiritual energy, the blade glowed brightly, enveloped by swirling radiance. It was so much better than all of the previous seemingly-elegant attacks that even Wei WuXian wanted to praise its excellence….

However, the sword had been infused with so much spiritual energy, due to Su She’s sudden explosion, that it could no longer withstand it. Halfway through the lunge, it broke into pieces with a crack.

On the other hand, Nie MingJue’s punch landed right in the center of Su She’s chest. Su She’s splendor left as quickly as it came. He couldn’t even spit out a mouthful of blood or say a few last words, no matter with dignity or cruelty, before the life in his eyes went out.

The symbolism of the sword is twofold: firstly, all the powers in the world can’t actually accomplish anything more than having little power can. The curse of insecurity originates with himself, which is why the rebound curse leaves him with holes on his chest.

Jin ZiXun’s death is also symbolic: he is cursed by Insecurity Embodied in Su She, cursed with the Curse of a Hundred Holes, which leaves holes on his body, symbolizing how he feels incomplete, and also marking him as a pariah from society.

Additionally, he allows this curse to separate him from the person he’s closest with, Jin ZiXuan:

“Why didn’t you tell me at all that you were cursed with Hundred Holes and instead came to do this without saying anything?!”

The fact that Jin ZiXun had been cursed with Hundred Holes was indeed an unspeakable matter. First of all, he had both a good appearance and a good physique. He’d always thought of himself as handsome and couldn’t bear for others to know that he was under such an unsightly, repulsive curse. Second of all, to have been cursed meant that his level of cultivation wasn’t high enough, since his spiritual energy was too weak to be able to hold against the curse.

In contrast, Su She’s death involves him becoming closer with someone he has a genuine connection with, because by helping Jin GuangYao, he knows that he’s going against society. As Wei WuXian says, the entire world is coming for Jin GuangYao, yet Su She still helps him.

To return to the sacrificial nature of Su She’s death, it’s also hard not to compare it with a sacrifice that happens earlier the same scene (and kind of the same chapter): Wen Ning’s sacrifice for Jiang Cheng, who is sacrificing himself for Jin Ling.

Jiang Cheng could only stuff Jin Ling behind him and unsheathe Sandu, which at the moment was unable to use spiritual energy, forcing himself to fend off the attack...

Wen Ning blocked himself before the wall, in front of the two of them. With both his hands, he grabbed Nie MingJue’s iron arm and slowly pulled it out of his chest, leaving behind a large, hollow hole. There was no bleeding. Only a couple of black organ crumbs fell out.

Wei WuXian, “Wen Ning!!!”

While Jiang Cheng looked as though he could lose his mind right there. He stammered, “You? You?!”

Wen Ning actually a character who is important to both Jin ZiXun and Su She’s stories throughout the novel.

Like Su She, he is insecure and regarded as weak by others. Like Jin ZiXun, he is, however, a skilled archer. And of course, he is killed in one of Jin ZiXun’s camps, by Jin ZiXun’s guards after Jin ZiXun failed to capture a monster:

Wei WuXian looked at him, “Who are you?”

Jin ZiXun paused in surprise before fuming, “You don’t know who I am?!”

Wei WuXian mused, “Why should I know who you are?”

Jin ZiXun, “I don’t remember, which means I don’t remember. I’m not so idle as to go out of my way to remember a Wen-dog’s name.”

Wei WuXian, “Fine. I don’t mind explaining it in greater detail. You couldn’t catch the bat king and happened to run into a few of the Wen Sect’s disciples who were there to investigate the same thing. And so, you threatened them to carry spirit-attraction flags to be your bait. They didn’t dare do it. One person stepped out and tried to reason with you. That’s the Wen Ning I’m talking about. After some delay, the bat king got away. You beat up the Wen cultivators, took them away by force, and the group disappeared. Do I need to say any more details? They still haven’t returned yet. Apart from you, I don’t know who in the world I could possibly ask.”

Jin ZiXun, “Wei WuXian, what do you mean? You came for him? You aren’t standing up for a Wen-dog, are you?”

And Wen Ning later kills both Jin ZiXuan and Jin ZiXun--however, it was not Wen Ning’s fault, but Wei WuXian’s. By trying to become a part of society, by searching for a place in it, you become a monster and a tool, even if not always as literally as it is with Wen Ning. Jin ZiXun is being manipulated by Jin GuangYao to kill Wei WuXian. In the end, Wen Ning uses his genuine connection with Wei WuXian to sacrifice his body to save Jin Ling and Jiang Cheng--the very same Jiang Cheng he just told this:

Sect Leader Jiang—you, so driven of a person, have been comparing yourself to others your whole life, but you have to know that you never should’ve been able to equal [Wei WuXian]!

Essentially, Wen Ning, having been someone at first looked down on for not being strong enough, and then shamed for being a Wen, and then regarded as a dangerous weapon, is telling Jiang Cheng that despite his not being the best in everything, despite how people might look down on him, you are still worth living. 

Wen Ning is able to live, because he’s already dead. But Su She does not, and in true MXTX fashion in which self-sacrifice is often viewed as a form of self-harm, Su She’s sacrifice is ultimately futile. Jin GuangYao is stabbed killed later that very chapter. 

However, it is fitting that this theme which has continued throughout the novel reaches its conclusion with Jin GuangYao. If there’s one character who embodies what it’s like to scrabble for society’s approval as a remedy for insecurity and self-loathing, it’s Jin GuangYao. As this incident shows:

On the other hand, Jin GuangShan, standing with a blank face where his seat was, finally lost his temper and kicked over the table in front of him. All of the gold dishes and silver platters rolled down the stairs.

Seeing his discomposure, Jin GuangYao wanted to ease the situation, starting, “Fa-”

Before he could finish, Jin GuangShan had already left. Jin ZiXun also felt that by giving in, he lost face in front of everyone. Out of both anger and hatred, he wanted to leave as well.

Jin GuangYao hurried, “ZiXun!”

Jin ZiXun was at the peak of his anger. Without a second thought, he flung away the cup of liquor that was turned down, directly towards Jin GuangYao’s chest. A splash of liquor immediately sprouted on top of the Sparks Amidst Snow blooming passionately over the white robes. It was more than embarrassing, but because of how chaotic the state of the hall was, nobody really minded the act of great misconduct.

Lan XiChen was the only one who exclaimed, “Brother!”

Jin GuangYao, “I’m fine, I’m fine. Brother, please be seated.”

It was unsuitable for Lan XiChen to comment on Jin ZiXun, so he took out a snow-colored handkerchief and passed it to him, “Go retire and change your clothes.”

Jin GuangYao took the handkerchief, wiping away as he forced a smile, “I can’t leave, can I?”

He was the only one left to clean up the mess. How could he leave the scene? He reassured the crowd as he ranted, completely exhausted, “Young Master Wei really is too impulsive. How could he speak in such a way in front of so many sects?”

Lan WangJi spoke coldly, “Was he wrong?”

Jin GuangYao paused almost unnoticeably. He immediately laughed, “Haha. Yes, he’s right. But it’s because he’s right that he can’t say it in front of them, correct?”

Here he is ignored by his father, insulted and humiliated publicly by his cousin, and left to clean the mess up. He refuses to retire and clean himself up like Lan XiChen asks him to do (a call-back to Lan WangJi asking Wei WuXian to come back to the Cloud Recesses with him). He knows that he’s saying something wrong, he knows that Wei WuXian is morally right, he knows society is a trap that eschews truth, but he cannot bring himself to pull away from it for the sake of seeking acceptance from his father, acceptance which will never come.

And in the end, Jin GuangYao too realizes that his need for societal acceptance led nowhere, that it wasn’t really what he wanted:

“Lan XiChen! In this life, I’ve lied countless times, killed countless times. Like you said, I killed my father, my brother, my wife, my son, my teacher, my friend—of all the evil in the world, what haven’t I done?!”

He took in a breath, rasping, “But I’ve never even thought of harming you!”

Lan XiChen was astonished.

Jin GuangYao panted harder, gripping the word as he spoke through clenched teeth, “… Back then, when the Cloud Recesses was burned down and you fled outside, who was the one that saved you from all the danger? And when the GusuLan Sect was rebuilding the Cloud Recesses, who was the one that helped with everything he had? In all these years, when have I ever cracked down on the GusuLan Sect, when have I responded with anything but support?! Apart from this time, when I’ve only temporarily staunched your spiritual powers, when have I ever wronged you or your sect? Why have I ever demanded gratitude?!”

Hearing these questions, Lan XiChen could no longer persuade himself to silence him again. Jin GuangYao, “Su MinShan could repay me in such a way just because I remembered his name back then. You, on the other hand, ZeWu-Jun, Sect Leader Lan, are as intolerant of me as Nie MingJue—you refuse to spare me even a single breath of life!”

In the end, however, Jin GuangYao uses his last gasp of strength to save Lan XiChen’s life, pushing him away from death. What mattered to Jin GuangYao in the very end was not societal approval (he’d lost that beyond belief), but his own desire to live, and even more than that, even when that was taken from him, his genuine human connection to Lan XiChen. Even if Lan XiChen is just like Nie MingJue in condemning him (he’s not, and Jin GuangYao has to know that), his connection is real. And that connection is valuable enough to him to throw off comfort in his moment of death to save the other.

It’s also fitting that Lan WangJi and Wei WuXian then leave the cultivational world together, pursuing their marriage and connection as cultivation partners away from society. However, they return in the end not because they want to be a part of that world, but because they have connections to people who need them: Lan SiZhui, Jin Ling, Jiang Cheng, and Lan XiChen.

[secret-diary-of-an-fa]

The End of Year Awards Are Back... and This Time, It’s Personal!

And so we approach the end of 2020, the year that never really began. On paper, at least, it looked incredibly promising. There were lots of great movies slated to come out; culture seemed slightly less paucity-riddled and pointless than usual; good things were in the air. Then COVID happened, and basically fucked everything. Actually, that’s not quite true: my personal year has been fucking spectacular. I’m in a long-term relationship with a gorgeous woman for the first time in forever- no more abrupt trysts and stolen moments for yer humble narrator: I’ve got a sumptuously plus-size lady-friend who actually wants to spend substantial amounts of time me (and has knockers you could sled down, were you so inclined). I also started a Youtube channel where I upload performances of magic tricks I’ve designed and a few people seem to quite like it. Oh, and I’ve written four novels, with a fifth well on its way to completion. Unfortunately, that’s my life, not the life of our civilisation and culture as a whole. The fact that bugger all happened in that makes this end-of-year round-up a little hard to write. With that in mind, I’m going to hand out the gongs for 2020, but I’m also going to do my usual dodge of giving end-of-year awards to things that I discovered in 2020, even if they came out the year, decade or century before. It’s not like any right-minded person gives a hoot about my opinion anyway. Right then, everyone clear on the rules? Then let’s roll up our sleeves and plunge elbow deep into the fetid trough of our decaying society to ferret out the best and worst of the Things That Humans Have Done Recently.

The ‘I Like It Because It Confused Thick People’ Award for Best High-Concept Sci-Fi Movie... … Goes to the sterling Tenet, a spy film that used entropy inversion and symmetric, opposite-direction timelines within the same physical space the way most spy films use hacking and guns. Christopher Nolan films are always intricately constructed and meticulously-executed, but this one must have had Japanese Master Puzzle-Box Makers crying into their breakfast cereal. Is breakfast cereal a thing in Japan? I honestly I have no idea. For some reason, all I can imagine is a sort of dry kedgeree where all the ingredients that aren’t rice have been removed. But I digress. For all its intricacy, Tenet is actually really easy to follow once you’ve grasped the basic premise that there’s a machine that lets people move backwards through time, and that this makes them appear to move in reverse to the rest of the world while they perceive the rest of the world as moving in reverse. Nolan maintains a mastery of cinematic visual language that makes even the most abstruse concept easy to wrap your head around. Nonetheless, following Tenet’s release, dumb people took to the Internet on mass to complain that the film was confusing and stupid, never once realising that their inability to conceptualise time in non-linear ways was their own failing, not Nolan’s. I find that refreshing. It’s nice to see a sci-fi film that’s actually made for smart-cookie sci-fi fans and doesn’t give a hoot if it alienate thickos.

The Award for Most Inexplicably Compelling Web Comic… … Goes to Questionable Content. I originally started reading Questionable Content because I’d heard that the female lead and love interest was a plus size lassie and that shit’s my jam. However, the art style makes everyone look like a skinny indie-type, regardless of their actual, in-universe size, so it doesn’t do much to titillate my Fat Admiring Titillation Centres. And yet, I’m over five hundred ‘episodes’ in and still reading. The thing is, I couldn’t tell you why for the life of me. Maybe it’s the hope that the art style will evolve to the point where the people look like actual human beings with different body types (but then, why would I care unless I was invested for some other reason). Maybe it’s the fact that when I get one of the many, many obscure band or pop culture references, I feel a little buzz of kinship with the writer. Maybe it’s the fact that it takes place in a universe where robots and superheroes are things that regularly happen, yet most of the strips are just normal people chatting shit in a coffee shop and the slice-of-life narrative/sci-fi setting appeals to my sense of juxtaposition. I don’t know, but I find it really compelling to the extent that I’ve pissed away entire days reading it. I have a horrible feeling that it’s a short step from this to really angsty hentai. If I start singing the praises of that, somebody please shoot me in the crotch.

The ‘Forest Gump Debating Peter Andre’ Award For Most Sustained or Elongated Instance of Stupidity… … Goes to Donald Trump. I was tempted just to award this gong to his entire presidency, but that wasn’t just stupid: it was also venal, corrupt, horrifying and punctuated by terrible moments of low cunning. So, instead, this award goes to his ‘soup’ rant. For those of you who missed it, the former President of the United States spent a really, really long time (in the run-up to the election) wittering on about protestors throwing cans of soup at police. What was dumb and weird about it was that he appeared to be extolling the virtues of soup as a siege weapon, going into really specific detail about how it was better than a brick because it could be thrown with more force, finishing with the utterance that protestors would just argue that “this is just soup for my family” if they were caught with the cans… which is phrased wrong in such a subtle and inhuman way it’s hard to imagine that anyone actually ever said it, at least in those words. I have no idea if protestors in America were throwing soup cans at police (which would be entirely justified considering how many innocent people American police have murdered in cold blood quite recently) or if this was a fantasy dreamed up by the former president in the cloudcuckooland that is his diseased little brain. Either way, the connected rant was balls deep in dumb.

The Most Disturbing Unintentional Impression of Vincent Price Award… … Goes to the narrator from One Step Beyond, a Twilight Zone-esque anthology of weirdness that purports to be based on true events and has to be seen to be believed. The stories are oft-disturbing instances of spooky-inflected human drama and can occasionally be quite disconcerting… until they’re book-ended by a dude who sounds like Vincent Price reading a children’s book in a really earnest voice. It’s weird and no, it didn’t hit our screens in Space Year 2020, it dates back to Ye Olden Times of the 1950s or 60s, when men were men, women were women and technincolour was a distant dream that could get you strung up for witchcraft. Nonetheless, I only encountered it this year, so it’s getting its prize. I warned you I was going to pull this shit, but you foolish fools didn’t listen.

The ‘It’s Not Gay If I Don’t Clench’ Award for Cognitive Dissonance… … Goes to Amazon Prime, the content-making branch of evil, tax-dodging, anti-monopoly-law-breaking megalith Amazon. You see, while Big Daddy Amazon is off being incredibly sinister and worrying, like a shifty vampire hanging off the economy’s throat, the creative people at Amazon Prime are busy making or acquiring some of the flat-out best TV ever committed to a streaming-service, from the extra-weird slice of fun-pie that is The Tick, to the entertainingly horrifying cultural dissection of The Boys to the utterly unique Carnival Row, to the superbly adapted American Gods. It’s a bit like discovering that Geoffrey Dahlmer single-handedly created a body of artistic work to rival Vincent Van Gogh’s when he wasn’t pouring acid onto the brains of emotionally vulnerable young adults. It gives me a headache.

The Clint Eastwood Award for Most Effective Older Gentlemen… … Goes to Joe Biden, for unseating dipshit in chief Donald Trump with the casual badassery of a Wild West gunslinger shooting a baddy (probably played by Leonardo Di Caprio) in the balls. I mean, he’s not the best Prez America could ask for but a) as a Brit I don’t have to care and b) anyone who ousts Trump gets mad props from me.

The ‘It’s a Pity Everything Else is Shit Now’ Award for Best New Ongoing Series… … Goes to my own Youtube series, Victor The Magician, in which I claim to be a reality-hopping, interdimensional wizard on an endless quest to… perform magic, basically. I’ll admit that the quality is super-variable (Youtube algorithms and their constant demand for fresh content be a harsh mistress, etc., etc.). However, when I’m good, I’m really good. If you’re looking for a punch-line other than the fact that this whole bit is a self-promoting plug, it’s this: my Youtube series really was the best thing to come out this year. Not because I’m great or anything, just by default. A promising year really did turn into a cultural wasteland the moment COVIDius Rex reared its scaly head.

The Zombie Ian Curtis Award for Most Crushing Disappointment… … Goes to Rick and Morty Series 4. As I think I’ve said before, it was still good, but it just didn’t reach the dizzy heights of nihilistic lunacy achieved in series 1-3. I think the problem is that the audience is meant to learn something from Rick’s poor choices, even if he doesn’t, because the creators saw the amazing success of Bojack Horseman and decided they wanted a slice of that sweet, tangy deconstructionist pie. It worked up to a point in the climax of Series 3, but having made their point, the showrunners probably should have moved onto a different point. They forgot that the appeal of Rick Sanchez is his combination of ‘entertaining car-crash of a human being’ and ‘unstoppable superbeing’. Push him through an arc and you risk breaking the thing that makes him and the show so endlessly watchable. Rick, unlike Bojack, just wasn’t built for heavy introspection. Also, the team hired on new writers who were less than familiar with the characters, setting and subtext, and that’s always an invitation to disaster.

The Special Sir Mixalot Award for Posteriority… ...Goes to… my girlfriend and glamorous assistant, Mystic Miss Terri, who’s arse is gorgeous and majestic.

The ‘Are They STILL Making That?’ Award for a Show You Forgot Existed And is Now Back… … Goes to Supernatural, which never technically went away and whose final series is apparently being broadcast on one of the 4 channels (though who knows which one, any more), It’s kind of nice to realise it’s still out there and be reminded that there are still people who care deeply about what happens to it. It’s like when you remember ‘oh yeah, [insert cute animal here] actually exists and isn’t just an internet meme. That’s nice’. Also, it’s good to see Jared Padelacki working steadily. It can’t be easy to find acting gigs when most producers just want to shoot you and mount your antlers over a fireplace.

The Irritating Magician Award for Something That Just Won’t Fuck Off… ...Goes to this blog entry, which is three pages long in Word. Good grief. Bye y’all! See you next year, assuming that the last few days of 2020 don’t culminate in a civilisation-destroying attack by giant space-ants. If that seems worryingly specific, let’s just say that- as Leonard Cohen would say “I’ve seen the future and, brother, it is murder”… by giant space-ants.

[thebeauregardbros]

I feel really stupid that I just had this realization now.

I’ve always been told growing up that I’ll never be accepted by society, that I’ll ultimately be a burden on society and an inconvenience to the flow of it’s existence and to other people. I always felt that I would rather not be seen by anybody than to cause anyone distress on accident just by doing something “not good enough”. The stress of always having to do “my best” (aka: “good enough that nobody could ever complain about it or hate me for it”) makes me produce barely anything at all, because my standard of “best”(”good enough for neurotypical people”) will always be fleeting and uncontrollable. I am so rarely in good enough form to exist for everyone else. It’s funny how I only just now realized how stupid it would be to hold that standard for literally anyone else, no matter how mentally healthy they were or how neurotypical they are. Some people might be “better” at being loved by society as a whole, but is being loved by a fundamentally corrupt and broken system really even worthwhile? Is being liked by the majority really worth it if the majority is wrong? We know for a fact that humanity used to not wash their hands and has majorly lower lifespans, and we moved on from that for the better, but at some point people thought never washing your hands was okay.

I’ve been thinking about how hatred towards people with genetically passed down neurological disorders is a form of scientific racism. I also feel like hatred towards queer people could also be a form of racism if there is physical evidence of differences between homosexual and heterosexual individuals - which there is, in form of weird stuff like finger lengths, estrogen and testosterone levels and other weird subtle chemical studies and the like. If you really get down to it, dark skin can be “cured” by taking the melanin out. It’s a chemical. It’s a minor difference. But black people are still human, we’re all part of the human race, and gay people are normal, but autistic people are still a “disease” to be “cured”? (I want to clarify I am NOT saying autistic white people have it worse than neurotypical black people, I only mean to point out the discrepancy on what qualifies as "scientific racism" as a concept)

Every time I think about how autistic people end up being an actual “burden on society”, it tends to be more often than not that we just get upset and distraught over concepts society has built and insist on maintaining that just doesn’t make sense. We KNOW that there’s no reason why we have daylight savings, we KNOW that basing our entire society’s sleep schedule based on incredibly outdated guidelines for good ecological farming is now invalid when the majority of us in 1st world countries are office workers now, we KNOW that memorization is an ineffective way of teaching our children, we KNOW that forcing children to go to school at 8AM instead of 10AM is not good for their brains, we KNOW that at this point school days last as long as they do as a glorified babysitting service for parents who go to work during the day, we KNOW that people are absolutely capable of doing things online or through email instead of in-person or on the telephone but they refuse to for stupid reasons, we KNOW that shaking hands and making eye contact is actually not that fucking important, and we KNOW that we have the choice to wear comfortable clothes, but as a society these things are just unacceptable because “that’s how they’ve always been” and society as a whole is just not ready to change. It’s not okay that a majority of people just accept things as they are when things are not good for us as a whole.

This is also what the whole “abolish the police” concept that’s been a popular topic this year is all about. We’ve come to a point in natural societal evolution that it would be honestly better to abolish certain major systems that have been proven to be inefficient and corrupt and remake them from the ground up in hopes they would work for the better rather than to continue hanging on to the hope that things can change a comfortably small amount for the better. We know that changing things in only a small way barely helps and ultimately just aids the feeling of letting things change ultimately and overall the same.

I am terrified of talking about these things even when I know I might actually be right because I don’t want someone coming on to ask box who doesn’t want to hear it to bully me, taking something I said out of context to create a callout post telling everyone to avoid me, or otherwise just proving the anti-autism and anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda I’ve heard my entire life right - that I shouldn’t exist. Do you have any idea how hard it is to have the idea completely hammered into your entire being that you shouldn’t exist in this world? That human society isn’t for you. That you shouldn’t even be human, because you basically aren’t if you don’t think like the majority. Because you’re different and never will be the same. You’ll never fit in. You’ll never be welcomed. Living as a ticking time bomb to the day you inevitably say something that's misinterpreted because you said it in a weird way - or god forbid, you express any thought out loud that you haven't researched thoroughly beforehand, and get physically or psychologically beaten to a pump for it.

But then I think about the few times I’ve stepped out of my fear-driven comfort zone and said something truly from my heart, and found nothing but support and admiration from strangers. Something I still often felt was just a fluke or undeserved. Complete imposter syndrome because everything I thought I knew was the opposite of what was actually happening. I was actually being helpful to others. I was actually... worthwhile of society.

I think about the few people who’ve told me that they believe in the concept that maybe, just maybe, the theory that autistic people are part of the natural evolution of humans is actually fundamental to our continued existence, that maybe I am needed in this society to improve it for the better, that maybe my discomfort with a broken system is actually helpful. Maybe me calling attention to all these things will actually open up the eyes to others. Maybe people being different is a good thing. Maybe we can only grow if we see the points of view of people we don’t automatically understand.

And isn’t that obvious?

[vonbaghager]

TMA Powers: The Wheel and the Deprived

this post got a lot longer than i thought it would so i’m putting it under a cut. i got inspired at work to expand on these older concepts, so here’s a still somewhat-incomplete look at two Powers that popped into my head.

TW for drug use, body horror, depressing anecdotes about Corporate America.

The Wheel

Alternate names: The Millstone, the Grind, Day-After-Day

Spinning in ones place but never advancing, operating in a strict cycle that one can never break out of. The fear and hopelessness of “this is all there is” as the day grinds away into a painful, repetitive routine. To have ones angles, ones personalities and passions shaved away, bit by bit, until one becomes nothing more than another wheel turning in a great and terrible machine.

Understandably more prevalent and influential in industrious societies where activities to preserve ones sanity are seen as frivolous or time-wasting.

Fears embodied: Loss of enthusiasm, loss of creative spark, loss of self, decreasing amounts of personal time, repetition and redundancy, quiet dread in the workplace, workplace accidents.

Examples of influence: 1) Man loses control of his own body for an entire day as it autopilots him through his factory job, during which it is curt and unenthusiastic towards other employees. Even when he regains control of himself, he must still go to work and be reminded of the incident, which gradually wears away on his sanity as he wonders if it will ever happen again.

2) An accident has claimed a life at the local plant. A pair of gears pulled a worker in, and have been malfunctioning ever since, relentlessly screeching as they grind against each other, but still you must work. The noise gradually begins to fade into the background of your life, until it becomes part of you, and you grow unnerved by its absence. It’s not right that you don’t hear it, so you begin taking more hours at work, just to keep hearing it. When the machine is eventually stopped and fixed, you’d do anything to get that sound back. And you know just what to do to recreate the incident...

--Aligns with:

The Web: Have you ever unthinkingly obeyed the order of a superior?

The Flesh: Make it as painless as possible, but the cruelty of the slaughterhouse will wear you down.

The Spiral: How long has it been since you’ve clocked in? When will you clock out? Has that task already been done, or did you ever start it?

The Stranger: New faces come and go all the time. Are you sure there’s people under them?

The Lonely: Too much socialization will impact your workplace performance.

--Neutral with:

The Buried: Being crushed, in this sense, is purely metaphorical, but accidents can happen.

The Corruption: How many hands do you shake a day? How many coworkers come in to work sick?

The Dark: An awful lot can happen during a power failure.

The Eye: Careful watch must be kept on all employees.

The Vast: The world is large and uncaring of your plights, so long as you keep working.

--Opposes:

The End, Desolation, and Slaughter: If you die, you stop working, and that’s unacceptable.

The Hunt: Excitement? Adrenaline? Both are poison. Get back to work.

The Deprived

Alternate names: The Starved, the Empty, Bereft, the Needful, I-Ache-For-It

The fear of lack, the fear that you will never have enough, or have any at all. Not enough food, or drink, or heat, or comfort, or what have you. Not only this fear of lack, but the fear of other beings who lack; humans desperate enough to kill one another for resources or the animals driven to slaughter humans out of hunger, and the fear of the untold destruction and misery humans will cause one another in the pursuit of more and more money, as though they can never have enough.

Fears embodied: Starvation, dehydration, hypothermia and exposure, financial ruin, human greed, the lack of necessary resources such as shelter or medicine.

Examples of influence: 1) A town has found itself in the midst of a lethal cold snap, each day growing more and more frigid, to the point that it becomes impossible for anyone to enter or leave the town for fear of freezing to death almost instantly. Gas freezes solid within tanks, fires begin to dim, the town’s infrastructure begins to fail. The survivors are forced to congregate in the largest, warmest building they can, burning everything they own in order to survive... and then the food supplies begin to dwindle...

2) A man can no longer feel full, his mental journey in dealing with his increasingly severe hunger pangs gradually tearing him apart until eventually he lands himself in a hospital after consuming food until his stomach ruptured. Once he recovered, his mental illness had apparently subsided... but he soon found himself without a penny to his name due to the medical bills he racked up, and his savings are rapidly dwindling.

--Aligns with:

The Buried: Difficult to get what you need when trapped below. You will ache for everything when buried.

The Corruption: Where there is teeming life, there is food for the desperate. Where there is disease, there are people driven to debt for a cure.

The Desolation: The fires will burn away everything good in your life, and still leave you cold in the end.

The End: What are you willing to do to survive? A question all Powers can ask, but the Deprived most of all.

The Flesh: Meat is meat, and you are starving.

The Vast: Some days, it feels like everything you need is always just out of your reach.

--Neutral with:

The Dark: All life on the surface needs the sun. Take it away, and everything crumbles.

The Lonely: Humans are social creatures, and one can certainly suffer from a lack of contact.

The Hunt: You must go. You must get up. You must eat, you MUST find food, you MUST find shelter, you must, you must, you must...

The Spiral: Did... did you take your medication? Did you remember to eat? Did you remember to pay your bills? Certainly, yes, yes you did... you need not worry...

The Web: It is often the case that your deprivation was not your fault, but the fault of someone else working to raise themselves higher and higher.

--Opposes:

The Eye: If everyone knew the reason so many people were deprived, they would not be afraid, they would be furious.

The Slaughter: This pain is not sudden. It is a gradual, building ache, not some thoughtless stab wound or gunshot.

The Stranger: These people are not soulless mannequins or inhuman monsters. They are human, just like you, and will ruin you if it means there’s more for them.

[bookburnt]

a primer course on T.MA for my mutuals who followed me from other blogs and would like to know what the fuck i’m talking about!  (hi, guys.  love you.)  GONNA BE SPOILER-HEAVY IN HERE.

First off, big ups to the T.MA wiki, which you can consult on anything here, but this post is intended to serve as a very basic overview of the concepts relevant to this blog without forcing y'all to go into wiki levels of detail.  The first part of this post is some general TMA terms and concepts, and the second part is some characters who have been relevant to Gerry's story specifically.  If you're here for a better understanding of Gerry’s arc and don't care so much about the worldbuilding, scroll down to where I start talking about “who’s...?” and that should help you out.

what’s a “Leitner?”  A Leitner is a book but spooky.  They make bad things happen and, optionally, give you weird powers.  They're usually tied to one of the fourteen(ish) Entities, which I will get into in a bit.  Gerard hates these goddamn books, and has a knack for finding them and destroying them.  His mother, Mary Keay, ran an antique bookstore that did serious business in them.

what’s an “avatar?” An avatar is a (former?) human working closely with one of the Entities. Over time, the influence of their Entity changes them, often granting them certain powers in exchange for a psychological and physiological need to serve their Entity.

what are these “Entities?” / what’s this “Hunt?”  Put as simply as possible, the Entities are, like... fear elementals.  There are roughly 14 different entities, though the boundaries between them aren’t clearly drawn in all circumstances.  As follows, a quick overview:

The Eye. Fear of being surveiled.  The need to know the answers to questions that may destroy you.  The Eye is tied to the Magnus Institute. Its avatars can have the ability to magically Know things, understand all languages, and compel others to answer any questions they ask.  Gerry was tied to the Eye and had some capacity for Knowing stuff, but wasn’t fully its avatar - or if he was, he refused to feed it, which must have hastened his death.

The Desolation.  Fire, but without the warm fuzzy bits.  Pure unhinged destruction.  Desolation avatars can and will set you on fire with their minds.  Gerry’s extensive burn scars are the result of fucking around with a Desolation cultist and finding out.   (The cultist also fucked around with Gerry and found out.  He’s not around anymore.)  

The Hunt.  Being tracked by something that won't stop until it kills you.  The thrill of the chase.  Hunt avatars are capable of killing other avatars, even those who would otherwise be unkillable.  The possibility of Gerry being tied to the Hunt is never discussed in canon, but I’ve got my theories.  (That last phrase is a link to a post discussing those theories, it just isn't showing up like a link on desktop for some reason.)

The End.  Death and dying.  Manifestations of the End often involve disruptions of the natural processes of life and death.  For instance, the fucked-up necromancy book that Gerry got trapped in after dying was an outcropping of the End.

The Corruption.  Bugs, disease, rot, etc.  The Corruption's avatars may spread disease wherever they go, or they might just be chock full of worms.  Potential of controlling a worm army.

The Flesh.  The inherent weirdness of existing in a body.  Cannibalism. Flesh avatars may be hulking, twisted parodies of the human form.  They might steal your bones, turn you inside out, eat you, or all of the above.

The Distortion.  The inherent weirdness of existing in a mind.  Doors that shouldn't be there.  Getting lost.  Being unable to trust your own thoughts.  Distortion avatars look, well, distorted when seen in reflections or through glass.  Will probably try to get you to go through a door that wasn't there before.  You won't like what's on the other side.

The Slaughter.  War.  Violence.  Man's inhumanity to man.  The Slaughter often manifests in groups as well as in individuals, so you could get an episode of mass hysteria where an entire small town turns to butchering one another, or you could get an office assistant who just aches to do murder.

The Web.  Spiders.  Being controlled by external forces.  Can operate in extremely subtle ways.  Can also just be an unkillable spider who wants you to have a bad time.

The Vast.  Really big things.  Heights.  Your own terrifying insignificance on the cosmic scale.

The Buried.  Claustrophobia.  Being buried alive.

The Lonely.  Being completely alone.  Like, completely alone, and never coming back.

The Dark. What it says on the tin.

The Stranger.  Something that's not quite right.  A joke that you're not in on.  Clowns and/or mannequins that might kill you and take your skin.

BONUS: The Extinction. While the other 14 fears have been established for a while (the most recent is the Flesh, which only really came into its own with the advent of mass meat farming), the Extinction is a nascent entity born of anxiety around the idea of the human race destroying itself, and/or being replaced by something else. The boundaries of what constitutes an Extinction manifestation, rather than just a warping of one of the other fears, are unclear.

what’s a “ritual?”  Rituals are ways the Entities’ followers and avatars try to influence the world, usually with the end goal of making our world somewhere their Entity can live and feast full-time instead of just sporadically popping in.

what’s the “fearpocalypse?”  The only successful ritual to date, as of the end of S4.  Possibly the only successful ritual ever, given that it ended the world as we know it and let all 14 fears fully through the gate to fuck everything all the way up.  The sky is full of eyeballs now and that's not even the biggest problem.  This happened a while after Gerry’s death, but I have a verse where, due to his previous ties to the End and the general befuckening, Gerry is brought back to have a bad time with everyone else.

who’s Mary Keay?  Gerard's mother, founder and proprietor of Pinhole Books.  Had ambitions of starting a dynasty of supernatural power, starting with her only son Gerard, who ended up having other ideas.  Flayed herself in a ritual to make herself “beyond death” via the fucked-up necromancy book mentioned earlier.  Gerard was primed to take the fall for her seeming murder, but was let go after the book disappeared from evidence and several key witnesses retracted their testimony.  Despite the ritual being incomplete, Mary remained tethered to the world of the living for five years before Gertrude Robinson finally wrapped that up.

who’s Gertrude Robinson?  Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, and a stone-cold BAMF with a habit of sacrificing those close to her for (her idea of) the greater good.  The late Eric Delano asked her to look after his son Gerry, so naturally she let him live in torment with his abuser’s revenant for five fucking years, then swooped in when he was truly desperate.  She got rid of Mary Keay for good, and got Gerard to travel the world with her attempting to prevent various apocalyptic rituals.  The two would often pose as mother and son to strangers.         Being tied to the Eye, Gertrude seemed to be aware of Gerard’s impending death.  After he passed away, she bound him into that fucked-up necromancy book and left him behind.  (More on that here.) Gertrude was shot to death about a year later while trying to burn the Magnus Institute down and thereby prevent its head, Elias Bouchard, from doing anything apocalyptic.  (Tragically, she did not succeed.  SEE:  “fearpocalypse.”)

who’s Eric Delano?  Gerry’s father.  Died too early to ever really get to know Gerry, despite the sacrifices he made to restructure his life for fatherhood.  (We don’t need to go into the why of it here, but he did have to gouge his eyes out to try to be a stay-at-home dad.  And he did it.  We stan.)  Unfortunately, he’d fallen in love with Mary Keay, who used him to produce an heir for her planned empire, then murdered him with a pair of garden shears and bound him into that fucked-up necromancy book.  She later passed his page off to Gertrude Robinson, who spoke with him.  In that conversation, he asked her to look after Gerry and begged her to burn his page, as being bound into the book was a world of suffering. 

who’s Jurgen Leitner?  A rich, reclusive Norwegian who thought it would be cool and smart to start a library explicitly for corralling forces beyond human comprehension.  (He was wrong, and also stupid.)  Collected spooky books and put his name in them, giving them their common name.  Gerard hates this guy, associating him with the books that dominated his mother’s mind and indirectly ruined his life.  He hunted Leitner down and nearly beat him to death for personal reasons.  Upon meeting Leitner, he came away with the impression that this was just a scared old man, and couldn’t possibly be actually responsible for Jurgen Leitner’s library.  Ultimately, he chose to spare Leitner's life.  Unless we're talking about my canon-divergent Hunter!Gerry au, in which case he did not.

        Anyways, hope this has been helpful.  There's... a lot going on in TMA, but hopefully I've hit the parts that are most relevant to my writing here.  If you have any questions about canon, please feel free to ask!

[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

[corruptedsorrows]

what do you think of chuuyaxdazai? chuuyaxatsushi? chuuyaxakutagawa? chuuyaxyasano? chuuyaxranpo? chuuyaxkunikida? chuuyaxtachihara? chuuyaxango? chuuyaxtsujimura? chuuyaxodasaku?

   Heck that’s a lot of ships anon. I guess the easiest way would be to put them in a sort of number ranking and explain my reasoning, yes? Let’s go with that. 

   So the range is 0 - 10, 10 is OTP/intensely shipped and loved, 0 is absolute NOTP, don’t bring it near me with a 20 foot pole. Sound good? Alright let’s go! 

(read more because this is a titan of a post)

ChuuyaxDazai

Hnnngh… my grandmaster of BSD ships. I don’t think it should come as much surprise to anyone here that this is my OTP, ranking an easy 10/10 ship. There is so much complexity and depth to these two I could rant for hours, but I’ll hold my tongue. I will say at the very least, with this being my OTP I am honestly quite choosy about who I open my heart to with it.

I want to explore all facets of this ship, not just jump straight into romance and smut (although yes, I do like it). More than anything I want to explore the drama between them. I want to have fun shenanigans of teasing and their childish banter. I want Chuuya to understand the shit that goes through Dazai’s head and pull him back from the cliff he’s drawn to–if only for a moment. Chuuya knows how much his head tortures him now, he understands that after having spent so long together. He knows he absolutely isn’t the cure Dazai needs, but he can’t help longing for it. The double edged sword of always being the one passed over for Dazai certainly doesn’t make admitting what he feels towards the man any easier to understand. Why should he want to be involved with the person he’s always being compared to? 

This sort of depth is what I’m looking for in anyone that wants to RP this ship with me. I want to dive into the core of SKK and swim in those troubled waters. I want them to fight and scream at each other, to reach their limits and break down as the finally have their masks shattered. These two know each other to such a depth–even with all of their bad blood that they can still understand each other’s thoughts and actions without speaking on it. They can still trust each other with their lives and know that even though everyone else they thought they could trust–that may have even shown kindness towards them, has let them fall. No matter how badly these two fall out with each other, they’ll never let the other fall past the point of being saved. At the end of the day they’ll be the one outstretching their hands to catch each other.

ChuuyaxAtsushi

I WANT TO RP WITH AN ATSUSHI SO FRICKING BADLY. As the brutality of SSKK I want Chuuya to mentor Atsushi and work with him on accepting his ability. Chuuya’s gone through so much of the same strife and struggle I think these two could understand each other very well. Granted, they’d probably clash on the surface given how little patience Chuuya has for those too afraid to fight (it’s the Port Mafia way), but knowing Atsushi’s fears about hurting others with his ability and being afraid of it he understands very well. He knows what it’s like to feel like a monster, to be transformed into something when everyone else’s ability is merely an extension of themselves. It’s different when you become something instead of wield it. 

I want these two to have these talks so badly, and I sincerely hope Kafka will give us this content because I think Atsushi could stand to grow so much under Chuuya’s guidance. Again, like Akutagawa I view these more on a familial/mentor relationship, but I think unlike Akutagawa, Chuuya would be able to dote on Atsushi more and be allowed to express himself in more heartfelt ways–like hugs and gentle hair brushes… things like that. I’d put these two at 6/10. 

ChuuyaxAkutagawa

Oh Akutagawa… while I don’t really ship these two, I like to think of Chuuya as something like the replacement for Akutagawa. I don’t think Chuuya did a very good job considering how much Akutagawa still pines for Dazai’s attention, but Chuuya understands that pinning at least. He knows how painful it was for Akutagawa when Dazai left suddenly, and seeing how Dazai’s effectively replaced them all with ADA equivalents must hurt like hell to him. I love having Chuuya as a source of comfort for Akutagawa, but I don’t romantically ship them together. This would be more of a familial/mentor relationship and I prefer it that way between them. 4/10.

ChuuyaxYosano

I WANT THESE TWO TO GET PLASTERED IN A BAR TOGETHER! Chuuya and Yosano would be THE BEST drinking buddies and no one can tell me otherwise! I think these two have decent potential as romantic partners–but there’s a huge problem between them–and that would be Mori. Yosano can’t stand the idea of him and Chuuya has dedicated his life to servitude under him. There would be so many arguments and fights over this that it would be a serious point of contention between them. 

I would love to see though… if one day they got on well enough for Yosano to truly see the damage Corruption has done to Chuuya. It’s something she wouldn’t be able to heal from how long its existed in his system. She could of course heal him if he were in a state of Corruption that lasted long enough to put his life in jeopardy, but otherwise Chuuya would be one of the few cases where she simply wouldn’t be able to heal someone and could only watch them waste away with each use like a fatal disease. What sort of affect would that have on her I wonder? 6/10.

ChuuyaxRanpo

Ok this is admittedly a guilty ship for me. I honestly didn’t realize how much I would ship this until I actually started RPing here and got to interact with an amazing Ranpo. I think it’s enjoyable because in many ways Ranpo is like Dazai as far as intellect is concerned. While Chuuya doesn’t have background with Ranpo, the man is able to easily cut through Chuuya’s bullshit and pride in order to get to the heart of what Chuuya is really feeling. And he teases Chuuya about just as badly and as a MUN I’m horribly weak to my muses being teased. I would put these two at about 8/10? 

As much as Ranpo is able to give Chuuya by means of healing and growth, I’m not sure how much Chuuya would be able to give Ranpo in return. He’s certainly not the best intellectual companion, but maybe that’s what Ranpo finds amusing. He can indulge in simpler things and not have to overthink all the time.

ChuuyaxKunikida

I don’t think Chuuya would ever meet any of Kunikida’s ideals so 0/10. No, I’m kidding! I think these two would fit really nicely together as work friends–even though they’re on opposite sides. They have one extreme headache in common and it would be nice for them to just chat out their frustrations over drinks at a bar. Kunikida may just have to step down from his high horse a bit to be able to stoop to casual conversation with the enemy. I’d give them a 2/10. I’m not much for a romantic ship for them, but friendos? YES PLEASE!!!

ChuuyaxTachihara

At first I was like, ah… they’re good bros. Just what Chuuya needs, a best friend that he can confide in. And then Tachihara was revealed as a spy and member of the Hunting Dogs, betraying Port Mafia and I just tiorewihtwfoilahflidu. CHUUYA APPARENTLY ISN’T ALLOWED TO HAVE ANY FRIENDS OR FAMILY JFC. When’s Kouyou handing in her notice at this rate?! However, Tachihara’s leaving of Port Mafia, and his compounded feelings towards them definitely added a nice level of spice for me with this ship, giving it room to have less bromantic feelings and more romantic. 

I enjoy them as an angst ship and I so yearn for that confrontation between them. I enjoy ships that have a lot of work to be done and aren’t smooth sailing–but there’s potential. There has to be some foundation there that holds them together, and in this case it’s that former friendship. So for these too I’d now say that they’re at 6/10.

ChuuyaxAngo

This is quite honestly a ship I struggle to understand as far as how it would work. I see how they could get on with being mutually misunderstood by both their organizations and suffering as a result of their abilities but Chuuya has so much animosity towards Ango for all that he has done and what he represents by working for the Special Abilities Division. Hell, Ango has even referred to Chuuya by his number, making him feel even less human when he already struggles with that concept so much in his life. I truly don’t see these two working together and think they would be far better off with others. 2/10.

ChuuyaxTsujimura

In perfectly good honesty I have not read the spin off novel for the Special Ability Division. However, Chuuya would likely feel very similar to her in the way he does Ango. Chuuya HATES the government with a burning passion for what they put him through. While Tsujimura does seem to have a considerably bigger heart, Chuuya would likely not be able to stand her due to her affiliation not only with the Division, but working directly with Ango as well. Strangely enough though, I do think her concern for Chuuya’s well being would warm his heart quite a bit. It’s rare for anyone to show compassion towards the danger he throws himself into so… on that merit alone it gives her quite an advantage: 6/10

ChuuyaxOdasaku

Again, Chuuya once more doesn’t get on with someone in this listing. It’s an unfortunate pattern. He blames Oda for convincing Dazai to betray the organization and leave, so Oda is in his own way a traitor in Chuuya’s eyes. However, he can also see how Oda’s influence has changed Dazai for the better, and he’s grateful for that. Chuuya’s feelings towards him went from jealous friend, to enemy, to a father figure he wished he could’ve had. Dazai was very lucky to have had someone to teach him in his life for so long. So if anything, it would be more of a paternal/familial ship with Oda and it would certainly be complicated. I’d place this at about… 3/10?

[green-powered-hero-blog]

The Great Ninjago Rewrite: Pilot

Here’s the thing I have been planning on working on for a long while -- the great Ninjago Pilot Rewrite! I’m almost done it, so you guys can now read this.

Fanfiction.net

AO3

Long ago, the world of Ninjago was nothing. No land, no life existed. Then, a traveler from another world came to Ninjago, and with his power of Destruction and Creation created the land. With the power of Earth, he lifted the ground from the salty sea. With the power of Water, he created streams to produce Nature and the system of Nature. To prevent one species from overpowering the other, he used the Winds to create Lightning in the sky, and Poison and disease to help neuter any overpopulation problems. Finally, he introduced the concept of temperatures, allowing Death to come in after Life has expired—with Ice being cold and Fire harming anything that came in its way. Before he finished, he realized that Life required Emotion to thrive, and gave the budding Life the ability to decide their Fate. With that settled, he introduced the world the Golden and Silver Weapons he used to create Ninjago – The Scythe of Quakes, the Naginata of Tsunamis, the Tekko-Kagi of Toxins, the Hidden Sais of Tornadoes, the Nunchucks of Lightning, the Shuriken’s of Ice, and the Sword of Flames.

In the first years of life, the creator split off his power to the world, hoping that the powers wouldn’t be used for evil. Then, the creator had two sons, the eldest being born with the power of Destruction, while the second son bearing the power of Creation. As soon as they were of age, he let the Master of the Dead claim him, allowing them to protect the land as they saw it.

However, the firstborn son was cursed from a vile, corruptive power—a bite from the Great Devourer, a snake that would not stop until everything was eaten. In the wake of his father’s death, the Master of Destruction took the Silver Weapons – the destructive powers enhanced his own—and hoped to rule the world with them. His brother, the Master of Creation, fought back—with the Golden Weapons, and hoped to make him see his wrongs. When it became clear that his brother was being consumed by the venom in his body, the Master of Creation despairingly opened a Portal to the Land of Demons, hoping that, somehow, they would cure his brother from the poison in his veins.

In his grief, The Master of Creation took the Golden Weapons and hid them in their respective corners of the land, making sure to map out their locations in case he needed them again, knowing that his brother was not one to cower in another world when his kin betrayed him. The Master of Creation left the map of the Golden Weapons to an honest man, living a simple life near the hidden location of the last element created, in the hopes of one day finding the map with the next Master of Fire…

However, he never suspected that his brother had something up his sleeve, and foresaw the awakening of three Elemental Masters in that village, and made sure to take the two that he needed for his plan…

 --

Ignacia, a village of soft winds and hot summer days, where people work in rice pools and use the elements of Wind, Fire and Water daily. It was a beautiful place, and the people would fight as well as they could as they have no protectors naturally. The village was near the mountain that housed the Fire Temple, an ancient tower that formed to protect a legendary treasure inside.

A few days before the Culture Festival – where the people celebrate their town and its growth, a time of celebrating the perfection in their lives. It was at this afternoon, that the first of three children were whisked away to adventure.

A young child no older than fifteen came up the bend to fetch a pail of water for the blacksmiths, the Four Weapons. She was a slight young girl, with traditional blue robes and black pants, carrying two buckets with her honey-tinted body. Her jade eyes shone with a sense of adventure and faint traces of love. She held in her arms a bamboo stick that carried two buckets of full water, giggling as she came up to the shop.

The Four Weapons shop was once known as the best blacksmiths in the kingdom – two legendary masters of the craft – a husband and wife – once lived in the shop, mending and creating things for all kinds of people – from the poorest to the richest, from simple farmers to even *samurai* -- soldiers for the lords in richer cities. The shop had been kept in relative good condition since the children of the original owners – Kai and Nya Hinata – took up the reins of their store. The chimney from the furnace dispelled smoke, meaning that the elder of the two was working on some new things to sell. It was one of her favourite things to watch — seeing the elder brother of the two children mess up again.

“To forge the perfect weapon…” the eldest, a teen who was half a year older than the girl outside the shop said, wearing a white t-shirt with his favourite red jeans under a blacksmith’s apron muttered to himself, his brown hair spiked like the very flames he used. His amber eyes concentrated hard on the blade to be in the forge. “You need the right metal, and plenty of heat…” Using the tweezers, he pulled out the weapon from the forge into the cooling bucket, before immediately pulling it out—causing the metal to warp completely. “Pres—ah…” he sighed, seeing the mangled mess of a sword.

The girl outside the store giggled, before another girl joined in mocking the blacksmith. She was the younger of the two, wearing a simple red Chinese dress with an obi sash around her waist, and decorated with golden Phoenixes on her left side. Her light amber eyes alight with mirth, she stated, “You made it too quickly, Kai, be patient.” She looked to the newcomer beside her, before smirking at her. “You know what father liked to say…”

“Yeah, yeah. ‘No matter how much fire you have, experience isn’t something you learn overnight’.” The blacksmith – Kai – snorted. “That may work for you, Nya, but I’m gonna be a better blacksmith than dad.” He confidently said, making the bucket girl to laugh harder.

“Please, Kai. You’re killing me.” The bucket girl set the water on the store counter top, her eyes alight with mischief as Kai retrieved the containers for his forging with a forced unamused look. “I like you, but it’s obvious you aren’t the one that’s going to run the shop.”

“Please, Kazeko. Have a little more faith in your favourite guy.” The girl – Kazeko – rolled her eyes as he flexed his muscles to her. Neither of the three kids noticed the elderly man – wearing white gi under his large straw kasa, wielding a bamboo stick as his walking stick in hand. He hummed as he looked at the merchandise, before speaking outright.

“Hmm… Your metal is loud and heavy.” The elderly man stated, causing the three to turn to him in surprise. “Useful to slow one down. Useless in the art of stealth. All the tools of a samurai,” He then turned toward the three with mischief in his onyx eyes. “but nothing for a ninja?”

Kai scoffed at the comments. “Ninja, huh?” he then glowered at the old man, wondering who this bozo was and why he decided to pick on him and his stock. “You’re a long way from finding any ‘ninja’, old man.” Kai smirked, before noticing that the old man was just browsing in the shop. “And the shop is called ‘Four Weapons’, not ‘For Browsing’. Either buy something or go pedal your insults somewhere else!” He snarled at the browser, wondering if he should go and get the broom for this man.

“Hm… Too bad.” The old man said, looking in Kai and Kazeko’s direction. “Thought I’d find something special here.” He said aloud, before looking at Nya carefully.

Nya gestured to Kai to show the old man the merchandise. Kai and Kazeko had turned away from the older man while searching for something that would satisfy the older man. “Well, I can show you—" As soon as Kai turned around, the man disappeared from the store, leaving the three teens confused as they turned to the spot where the old man was.

“Huh?” both Nya and Kazeko said dumbly, wondering if they saw a ghost.

“He was just… You know what, never mind.” Kai sighed, going back to work in the furnace. “Thanks for the water, Mach. Nya,” Kai turned to his sister, whom was coming up to the counter with new iron to work with. “Can you give Kimijuna here her payment?” He winked at Kazeko, who giggled at the affection.

“Yeah, yeah lover-boy. Suck it up to your water fetcher…” Nya sighed, but smirked at her brother’s affection for the girl. She did as he asked, despite the bitterness she felt with Kazeko.

“It’s alright, Junebug. You don’t need to pay me.” Kazeko said, trying to push the outstretched money back into Nya’s hands.

“But I do, Mach. It’s not fair that you haven’t found a place to stay just yet.” Kai said over the roar of the furnace. “Besides, it’s better than not being able to eat.” He whispered to himself.

“I still don’t know why you haven’t left this place, with how much you’ve wanted to explore the world, Kaze.” Nya said, getting over the counter to pick up some more iron for Kai.

“Neither do I, honestly.” Kazeko shrugged, sadly looking at Kai before leaving out of the shop with Nya. “I just feel… Better being with you guys, even if Kai and I are making goo-goo eyes in your presence.” She giggled as Nya looked at her in scorn. “I really do like it here. I just think that life’s going to become more interesting if I hang around.” She said softly, smiling softly. “Besides, someone’s gotta make sure that Kai doesn’t end up getting the both of you evicted from your family home.”

“Yeah, I do.” Nya giggled, getting a look from Kai on her back.

It seemed like a picture-perfect day in the village of Ignacia. But, as with all things in the world, that peace wasn’t meant to be.

The skies suddenly darkened, and the rattling of bones could be heard off in the distance. The rice-tenders looked to where the bone-rattling was, and found multiple skeletons riding on cars with skull and bone motifs all over the vehicles present. The roaring of the engines of each of the vehicles suddenly cut off, before revealing that literal skeletons were the ones that were driving. One of the skeletons, with a metallic eyepatch over his right eye with blue loincloth and bracers, plus some bronze spikes on his skull like a mowhawk, eagerly jumped up and down in his seat, his visible red eye swirled with deranged madness.

“Oh! Oh! I wanna murder things! Can I murder things, please Samukai?” the eye-patched skeleton asked, before being thwacked in the head by another skeleton – wearing a monocle and hardhat instead, and brown linens and loincloths.

“You dolt, you don’t need to be so hyper! Samukai,” the monocle-wearing skeleton turned to the tallest – and four-armed – skeleton behind on the vehicle. “What are we doing, here? And can I drive?” He seemed more into the second question than the first.

“No boys. This is mine.” The skeleton—Samukai—said, his smirk overpowering his underbite. “We’re after the map. Our boss said it would be near two kunochi-to-be.” Samukai looked as he said that, before zooming onto the Four Weapons shop in the distance. With a smirk, he commanded the attack, and the skeletons on the vehicles raced onward. Scaring some humans on the way to the Four Weapons shop, the skeletons screeched and hollered as they got closer, hoping to get the map without much trouble.

While the skeletons got close, Kai, Kazeko and Nya looked out to see the travelling group of skeletons coming in their direction. Kai immediately ran back into the shop, getting out the best samurai armour they had from the mannequins.

“Kai, what are those things?” Nya asked, looking to the dust cloud in the distance.

“Don’t know, but stay here, just in case.” Kai growled as he looked to the advancing cloud, wearing the samurai gear carefully. “Kazeko, take Nya and get outta here.”

Kazeko nodded, grabbing Nya by the wrist and hauling the younger girl inside. Kai immediately fought off the skeletons that tried to go after the two, knocking their skulls off as he swung his blade. One of the bodyless skulls, noticing how close he was to Kai’s red shoe, immediately bit into it.

“Argh!” Kai furiously screamed, before kicking the skull up to the sign, knocking it downward to reveal the map to Nya and Kazeko. “Bite that!” He yelled to the skull, about to fight more skeletons when he noticed that Nya and Kazeko had taken care of the two skeletons he was going to fight. “Nya, Mach! I told you to stay back!” Kai yelled at the two, slicing through the skeletons in his path.

“And what? Miss out on the fun?” Nya smirked, smacking a few skeletons in the exchange.

“Aww, come on Yosei! I wouldn’t survive if I didn’t know your condition!” Kaseko said, kicking a few skeletons in the back as well.

While the three were fighting the skeletons in the front, the two larger skeletons maneuvered through the fight to the back of the Four Weapons shop, before noticing a piece of paper on the back of the sign.

“Kruncha! Look! The map to the Golden Weapons!” the eye-patched skeleton said, grabbing the paper as well as a sword off to the side of one of the mannequins. “We’ve got this, now, let’s kill things!”

“Nuckal! We aren’t here to kill!” Kruncha thwacked Nuckal’s head, before picking up an axe from the floor. “We’re here for the map! And,” He looked outside the shop, to find the siblings and Kazeko about to finish off the last of the skulkin soldiers soon. “to grab some potential students for the Lord…” He finished, returning to the fight with Nuckal tailing behind him.

Kai and Nya ended up finishing the last skeleton together. Panting from the exertion all three had with the fight, they prepared themselves to start fighting the leader of the skeletons when Samukai launched himself in the middle, bringing up his four swords with a cruel smirk.

“Oh, great Dragoness.” All three had thought as they saw the skeleton pull out the swords. Immediately, they tried to swarm him on all sides, only to be thrown off by Samukai’s attack. Immediately, they all fell to the ground, Kai’s sword flying out of his hands, while Nya’s and Kazeko’s own daggers flew off as well. They tried to get back up, to continue fighting against the tall and monstrous being, before a golden tornado suddenly intercepts them and the hulking brute, taking it head on!

“NINJA-GO!” the tornado yelled, sounding exactly like the old man from earlier. The tornado kept up a pretty good fight, though it seemed like he was losing to the monster of a skeleton to the trio. Immediately, they grabbed their lost weapons to fight with once again.

“Wu! I knew you’d be here… You’re quite rusty with your Spinjitsu!” The leader stated, pushing the tornado back from him.

“Nothing like using bone to sharpen my blades, Samukai.” The tornado – Wu – stated, breaking both the standoff and his tornado to reveal the old man from earlier. He eyed the three near him – and the water tower right by their house. Seemed Samukai noticed the water tower as well, as he smirked while looking in the direction the trio were.

“You can only save one, Wu.” Samukai said, before throwing one of his blades at the water tower base, breaking it clean in half. Kai, Nya, and Kazeko looked up to the tower, before realizing what the monstrous skeleton had done. Immediately, Wu revved up his Spinjitsu once again.

“Ninja—GO!” Wu said, taking the trio away as best he could, pulling all three in as the water tower fell to the ground. Because of Wu’s velocity, he accidentally threw Nya and Kazeko out of the spin. Nuckal and Kruncha came in soon after, holding the map of the Four Weapons in his hands.

Samukai, noticing the map in Kruncha’s hands, immediately retreated to his big truck. “Take the girls! Lord Garmadon needs them!” he yelled to his subordinates, loud enough for Wu to hear over his oldness.

“Lord Garmadon?” Wu asked in surprise, not noticing Samukai ordering Nuckal to capture both Nya and Kazeko from his grasp.

“No! Nya! Kimijuna!” Kai yelled, about to jump onto the skeleton vehicle before they left, but they dashed off before he could go after them. Nevertheless, Kai tried to pursue, ‘try’ being the keyword, as Wu grabbed the back of his shirt to keep him from chasing after the girls. “Kimijura! NYAAAAAAA!” he collapsed then, a look of horror and fear across his face. “They took my sister and my Kimijuna…” Kai’s eyes watered as the thought crossed his mind—the one thing he never expected to happen, happened. Now, he was alone… and about to be thwacked by Wu for not listening to him.

“As I said, useless.” Wu stated, before thwacking Kai in the head. Kai immediately became furious at the elder man.

“You—You obviously know more than I! Why didn’t you use that twisty-jutsu thingy—”

“Spinjitsu.”

“Who cares what it’s called! You didn’t save my family!” Kai got up then, his heart burning in rage and fear that shone in his eyes. Wu hummed over the look as Kai continued. “I’m going to save them.” Wu stepped in front of him then, a glower in his face as he explained the situation.

“Those skeletons are called the Skulkin, Kai. They live in a world where we cannot travel to.” Wu turned to Kai carefully. “The four-armed beast you saw there was Samukai, the King of the Skulkin. If it’s true that Garmadon has taken control of the Skulkin, then I believe things are direr than I thought…”

Kai couldn’t take it anymore. “Garmadon? Skulkin? Nothing matters more than my own sister and my own girl! I can’t leave them in those—those monsters— What did we have that was so important to them, and why did they take my family and kimijuna?” If there was tears in his eyes, Kai ignored them for a near snarl of rage.

Wu looked at Kai in distain, before ranting about the world to the poor, angered blacksmith the entire world’s history and his family… Each bit separated by death, and miserable fate…

 --

Meanwhile, in another location…

Snow covered the expanse as two figures walked along the long-covered road, their breaths stolen by the howling blasts of wind. The white seemed endless, what little light that could break through the harsh cloud cover lighted the figure’s shadows along the path. While the figures remained in their human-like shapes (despite their darkened clothing), the shadows that could be seen had horns and tiny, bat-like wings – which neither of the two seemed to have. The figures had been walking towards a village far away from the place that housed their kind, and they couldn’t be more grateful for it. The slightly taller, with the horn in their shadow being on the left of their head, stopped for a moment, their counterpart stopping as well.

The smaller figure tilted their head, their horn in the shadow becoming longer as they moved to the left. “What’s up?” they asked, their voice having a feminine hint to it.

“…Lost the scent…” The other said, voice croaked from the harsh winter around the two. The male-sounding figure sighed, before looking at the other carefully. “At this rate, we may not find that map…”

The two both sighed at the idea, puffs of white coming out of their mouths as they looked to where they thought their location was. Suddenly, the feminine-sounding figure started to shiver forcefully.

“You shouldn’t stay out for too long, then.” A third voice stated, causing the two figures to suddenly turn around and bring out their hands out, bright balls of green and lavender brightening up the snow venomously. Both figures looked to see a young, darkly clad child with a purple streak in her dark hair. Her dark chocolate eyes shone in mirth as she watched the two figure’s faces change from fear to recognition.

“No way…” the figures both said, not noticing that the weather had cleared up fully – revealing the two as twins: the male sounding figure having blonde hair and red eyes, and the feminine sounding figure having brown hair with pink eyes. They both looked to each other, their light skin reflecting off the light in their hands, before looking back toward the smaller, almost dead looking kid.

“Lloyd,” The girl said, looking at the male carefully. She then turned toward the young girl. “Rei… Want to see Papa?” the child asked, her mouth twitching to a semblance of a smile – hard to tell with the bone mask that covered her face. Immediately, the two – Lloyd and Rei – relaxed, the balls of green and lavender light disappearing immediately.

“Spectra? W-what do you mean see Dad?” The male – Lloyd – asked, his horn and wings suddenly appearing to the girl. The brown-haired girl – Rei – did the same, revealing that her horn was on the right side of her head.

“If you don’t remember, Grissie, we can’t enter that world – not like you can.” Rei stated, her voice getting grumpier in frustration.

Spectra gave Rei a look, before returning to her cheerful state. “Don’t worry! Papa taught me how to take more than one person into the portal! I can take you right now, if you want?” She asked carefully, knowing that the two wouldn’t want to pass it up for the world.

As expected, the two had thought for a moment, before nodding. With a battle axe given to her by the Skullkin, Spectra instantly cleaved the ground, allowing the three people to pass through safely without incident. The only thing that was left of the three’s existence was the mark left by the axe, which had gotten eaten up with the storm that returned.

 --

The next day, halfway up the Mountains of Impossible Height…

Kai grunted as he climbed up the mountain, wondering whomever had the bright idea to try climbing up an impossibly tall mountain range just to prove themselves. Then, the brunette reminded himself that he had been the one to decide that, after the conversation with Wu last night. Speaking of which, where was—

“Patience, young Firestarter.” Wu stated, leaving Kai in the dust momentarily as he breezed through the climbing. Right, they were talking about the agency of their mission, considering that the Skullkin stole the map and Kai’s sibling and girlfriend. They reached the top, to find a beautiful, intricate monastery made what looked to be out of marble, with red roofing and a red door decorated with golden dragon symbols. Dragon heads made up the door handles, their mouths carrying a ring to pull on as Wu did. “You will be ready, when you are ready. Not a minute sooner.” Wu then looked to the stunned Kai, before moving toward an intricate golden dragon statue beside the main entrance to the building.

“Are… Are we really fighting in a place of peace?” Kai asked, wondering if the feelings he had were for disturbing the serene area.

“Not fighting, training.” Wu said, as if that made it any better. “Firestarter, in order to become a true ninja, you must first be able to see what others do not.” Kai noticed the title that Wu had given him that moment, about to question Wu on the title.

“Wait, why are you calling me—”

Then, the elder suddenly pulled the hand of the dragon statue, causing a massive line of deadly turnabouts and spinning dummies to surface in the monastery’s courtyard, startling Kai. In the middle was a carousel outfitted with many deadly, poking things – and a couple of outfitted dummies. Kai couldn’t help but be amazed at the machinery involved, as every bit of the contraption spun around with the rotation of the carousel.

“Woah!” Kai awed, momentarily forgetting his question. “Is this how you’re going to teach me that spinny thing?” the brunette asked, getting up toward the poles that were bobbing up and down, managing to land on one before it threw the former blacksmith off.

“Complete the training course before I finish my tea.” Wu stated, slurping the hot beverage for extra effect as he winced at Kai’s failure. “Unfortunately, today you’ve failed. We’ll start again tomorrow.” The elder man stated, before retiring back into the monastery in full. Kai looked to the so-called wise man in confusion, picking himself up and dusting himself off.

  --

In the Underworld…

--

Wearily, Nya carefully opened her eyes, her head pounding and her back sore from resting on rocks. Her mind caught the smell of ancient blood and an undead sense of smell, suddenly making the raven-haired girl to cough loudly out of her slumber. As soon as she did, Nya recognized the layout of the place – dark, forboding place, the walls splattered with dried blood and a musky, tomb-like scent. Nya shivered as she looked beyond her cell – for how she could not see the bone bars keeping her captive in this region? – and found the young girl who made her brother happy in a cell opposite from hers. Kazeko looked forlorn over the whole situation, har body leaning on the bone bars as she peered off in the distance. Immediately, Nya sprang to her feet, reaching her own bars and trying to get Kaze’s attention.

“Mach! Are you okay?” Nya frantically asked, worried about her good friend’s odd look. Despite how she felt about Kazeko dating her brother, Nya knew that whatever was going on with the both was less important than their situation. Kazeko seemed to think the same, as she looked to Nya with a relieved smile on her face.

“Junebug! I’m glad you’re awake!” Kazeko happily said, her face brightening up. “All I had to talk to be my own shadow, and you know how much a conversationalist she is.” She giggled at her own remark, causing Nya to chuckle a bit as well. “Nya…” Kazeko said solemnly, reminding Nya of the situation. “Can’t you feel it? the call of… something in this place, talking to us…”

“Kaze, what –” As soon as Nya asked the question, a soothing melody that sounded like waves entered her head, almost overtaking her thoughts. “W-what is that?” She asked, freaking out over the siren’s call.

“I-I don’t…” Kazeko tried to plug her ears, feeling an almost flute-like, excited song in her own head.

“Ah, I see both the Watersiren and the Windfarer have awakened…” A gravely, disturbing voice called out to the two, quieting the songs in their heads. “To think, that you two would be where the Firestarter was as well. As much as I would have loved to take him along, his sense of Justice would have shut out anything I told him…” The figure was at the entrance of the cells, an armoured samurai helmet rested on his head. Black skin covered most of his body, his ribs outlining his chest badly. The only other article of clothing the newcomer had was torn gi pants, burnt and shredded from something – yet kept together to keep the man’s dignity. His red eyes glowed with an air of malicious intent yet shone with a hint of fatherly love. The markings on his face, on the other hand, made the intent stand out more than anything else.

“Who – who the Grand Oni are you?” Nya was the first to ask, her expression barely hiding the fear she felt from the man. Kazeko looked over the man’s shoulder to find two kids behind him, both looking erringly similar…

“I am Lord Garmadon, my dear Watersiren…” The being – Garmadon – stated, looking at her carefully and gesturing to the figure behind him for something. “And you two are going to become part of my own little group, as long as you have this…” As soon as it was placed in his hand, Garmadon revealed a beautiful, untarnished silver naginata to Nya, reveling in the look of aww and wonder as it sang the soothing song it had sung for her. Behind him, the two figures looked over to Kazeko, revealing themselves to be Lloyd and Rei from earlier.

“Don’t think you’re getting out of this yet, Miss Windfarer.” Lloyd smirked, holding up silver gloves with a compartment that contained beautiful, claw-like sais. “Can’t have you running back to your boyfriend without being trained to fight him, too.” He winked at Kazeko, knowing she was too busy looking at the sais to hear what he just said. However, Nya did hear him.

“Wait, what do you mean—”

Garmadon took back the naginata – as did Lloyd with the sais – when both girls tried to grab the now-shrieking weapons. “The weapons are useless without knowledge of their corresponding elements, that’s what makes them the Silver Weapons that helped shape the world.” He winked to Rei, before looking back at Nya’s seeking gaze. “When I start your training, you will be bound to a specific contract that I have outlined to all the Weapons when I was dragged down. I’d hate to think how’d you be if you fail it…” He warned the two, before immediately throwing the naginata into Nya’s cell, allowing the spell to take effect as she touched the Silver Weapon. Lloyd did the same, shoving the gloves into Kazeko’s awaiting hands and watching the effects of his father’s magic take place. The magic roared around the two, binding them to the clause that Garmadon had threatened the two as it swarmed around them. When it died down, the two had looked no different than they had been before, save for the hint of a few markings lining their dominant hands -- Garmadon’s head as a symbol in black ink.

“Oh, my head…” Nya said once the smoke cleared, feeling a sense of protect them, help them swelling in her mind. Immediately, she looked to Lloyd and Rei, the both of whom looking at her expectantly, and bowed silently. “I swear on this Weapon, I’ll make sure to see you safe.” Her voice droned on, but a hint of relief came when she saw the two smiling excitedly.

“Dad! The spell worked!” Rei excitedly yelped, jumping up and down as they saw Kazeko mimic what Nya did as well.

“Good, good. My Defenders, rise.” The two rose, still looking at his charges with a fondness he wished he could express. “We’ll begin your training; better to show you how to better protect my children, then using magic to immediately learn it.” Garmadon immediately took the hands of his eldest son and daughter, a soft, non-villainous feeling as the three turned to stride out of the cells, the new guards following behind them.

  --

Three weeks after, at the top of the Mountains of Impossible Height…

Kai grunted as he went through the training regimen from Yomi once again, his face contorted into a visage scowling at the carousel of death. His thoughts at how the first bit of training went sprung to mind, and the many failures that he endured before he managed to figure out the system. The first five times, Kai failed at the start, with the bamboo shooting him out into the air. The next week, Kai had failed at the carousel of death with it’s merciless dummies, having ended up being knocked back as soon as he hit the side of the carousel instead. The past week, he managed to get past those things, only to nearly get skewered by the spears that were being shot out (luckily, they were just bamboo sticks, but Kai was starting to get hit too many times to tell). And all those moments rounded to Wu immediately finishing his drink before Kai could get up again. Now, Kai had a plan to keep Wu from failing him on the spot, but it needed the precise moment…

There! Just as Wu sat down to start drinking his tea, Kai immediately threw a rock into his cup, shattering the cremated beverage holder and forcing Wu to get up to get another one. Immediately, Kai took the opportunity to take the course again, this time getting through each part of the course with tremendous ease. Like a house cat, he gracefully moved with the motions of the course, keeping himself steady on the shooting bamboo, and frolicking – yes, frolicking – through the carousel of death like a jaguar ready to strike. Kai smirked as he galivanted like a cheetah through the maze of buzz saws and maces, before finally pouncing on the last dummy like the tiger he was meant to be, arriving back at the start just as Wu absently looked for his missing teapot. With the smirk of a content lion, Kai held up the teapot in his hands, his smirk growing bigger as Wu realized what he had done.

“Was it one sugar, or two?” Kai asked smarmily, amber eyes alight with mirth. Wu couldn’t help but be proud of how the young boy handled the course. Kai immediately gave the master the teapot back, watching as Wu poured a cup of green tea for both himself and the excited student.

“Well done, Firestarter.” Wu congratulated, giving Kai his own cup before sipping his drink. “You’ve managed to pass, and the fastest I’ve seen!” He gave a wink at the boy, before going on. “We’ll start looking for the Golden Weapons tomorrow. Go and get some rest.” With that, Wu immediately brought Kai up into the monastery, taking the tea-set he had with him.

“H-huh? But what about teaching me Spinjitsu?” Kai asked, bewildered that Wu put him through a course for three weeks without teaching him anything.

“You’ve already learnt it.” Wu cryptically said, puzzling Kai further. “For now, get some rest. We’ve got a big day tomorrow.” Wu retreated to his room, far away from Kai’s bemusement and questioning voice.

Later, at night…

Heart a little unsure, but the feeling of the creature he awakened in his head never left him as Kai got ready for bed, feeling antsy over the cryptic message left by Wu. In his fire-red pyjamas, Kai carefully took his toothbrush and cleansed his teeth of any disease or germs in his mouth. The words of his master echo through his mind, making the feeling in his heart ignite with a sense of anger.

“Get some sleep? How about I don’t!” Kai angerly said, before throwing a series of moves about with his toothbrush as his practice weapon. In his frustration, he barely noticed the door to his room opening, allowing a dark-clothed figure to enter his room. “Let’s go!” Kai thrusted his make-shift sword into an imaginary enemy—possibly Samukai—as the figure settled into place. Another dark-clothed figure entered through Kai’s open window, pulling out a pair of shuriken’s and waiting for the moment to strike. “I want to save her!” Kai punctuated that last bit with another thrust of the tooth brush, only to hit a dark-clothed ninja behind him… one with a very big, very sharp scythe in his hands.

The fire died inside of him, as Kai realized the situation that was about to happen. “Oh…” he said, uncharacteristically softly.

  ***Part 1 End***

[everlarkingjoshifer]

Trump signed an executive order to abolish what he did....

I don’t normally come in here to post long political pieces. However, after the disgusting comments that I’ve read on social media as Democrats held a press conference to speak about children being ripped apart from their parents at the border, is more than I can take. So, because I am pretty fucking annoyed with all the baseless accusations, and major misinformation I would like to dispel erroneous conclusions along with the comments I have been seeing on social media.

Immigrants are taking our jobs!

No Becky, they’re not. Immigrants are bringing in jobs and taking the low wage, often dangerous and non-union jobs that YOU don’t want to take. How about you go pick those strawberries in the blazing heat for as little as 6$ an hour, doesn’t sound very appealing right? So if it’s not good enough for you because you want a cushy job, what makes you think Immigrants want to do it too? They don’t, but they’re so desperate to make a living that they’re willing to do anything so long as they can provide a better future for their own families, something you can easily understand. As a matter of fact, while you enjoy your burrito know that none of it would be possible if it wasn’t for an immigrant who brought in their culture and food to enrich our country. Yeah, that big old Mexican franchised fast food joint? Would not have existed for your high school kids to work at, so while your sitting on your ass enjoying someone else’s culture, know that none of it 

would be possible without an immigrant.

Immigrants are taking our resources and our taxes pay for them to live here!

 Noooo, Immigrant individuals cannot ever receive federal based help such as SSI. They can’t even get health insurance. Some states do hand out some help to aid immigrants but it would only be something as small as being able to use the WIC program which is very limited. (I’ve used it when I had just given birth). As a matter of fact, white citizens are amongst the highest percentage who receive federal assistance and immigrant people pay INTO our social security and taxes without hope of ever getting that money back. If you want to talk about needlessly spending your money on immigrants then you should definitely be against the barbaric procedures that are happening right the hell now. There are companies profiting from your taxpayer money in order to house children that didn’t need to be housed in the first place. It’s all a big scam and those 1 % who don’t really need the money are making millions that you’re paying into JUST because you want to be a paranoid idiot. It’s a pretty simple concept actually, it’s called security theater. Except this theater is of the Third Reich.

They’re bringing in disease!

See, now you just sound like a Nazi, and come on, we’re not exactly one to speak about diseases when you’re refusing to vaccinate your fucking kid because of “big pharma, unfounded conspiracies, and autism”. Cry me a fucking river, Shania. The whole notion of disease comes out of fear of the unknown but we cannot throw a stone at someone else knowing we do the same. We won’t vaccinate and now measles, chicken pox, whooping cough, and many other diseases are on the rise because you’d rather let your kid die than have autism, which by the way has been dispelled at every turn by various scientists.

Obama/ Bush administration were the ones who implemented the law of child separation. 

Oh Brandon, you xenophobic dick. First of all the Obama and Bush administration NEVER placed an order of removal between the parents and their children. What is true is that there is no law saying these current atrocities have to be carried out. Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor that can get you jailed for up to 20 days or so and then you’re automatically sent to your country of origin. The immigrant parents who are caught with their children are never separated from them and there are no real lasting repercussions. If I was to take your reasoning into account then that would mean people who have had a DUI, or those who have been arrested for public disturbance should have their children taken away as well? Secondly, when the Obama administration implemented certain facilities to house kids it was due to an immense influx of unaccompanied minors who were immigrating to the USA by their damn selves. Most, of these children, were from Central America and were not deemed a threat to the nation after very careful vetting. These kids ranged between the ages of 12-17 years old and they were TEMPORARILY housed or often placed in foster homes with other immigrant adults till the Government could get a hold of their parent. Of course, everything wasn’t always handled perfectly as there were a ton of problems because sometimes the foster parents would refuse to answer their phones to various federally appointed counselors or even gave the Government the wrong information. Some of the facilities in which the children were housed were not as top notch as we expected and there were abuses happening at the time. But by that point, the children were really alone. They didn’t come in with their parents to protect them and sadly things didn’t always go the right way. The few kids who were separated from the adult were either trafficked here or were in deep danger of those adults that surrounded them

They should come here legally if they want to enter the country!

Kathy, you sad simpleton. Looking for Asylum is not against the law. Actually, the ports of entry for refugees are being blocked by ICE agents to deter them from reaching the United States legally. Usually, when an immigrant came to the port of entry looking for asylum they would have to bring proof which then they would be taken to a holding facility where their case was carefully reviewed and then after about a month or so they would either be allowed to stay or leave depending on the severity of their situation. Now, Looking for a way to come to the united states legally especially in countries that are extremely corrupt is very difficult. I myself applied for a visa in order to come to the united states twice and both times it was denied even though I was a 4-year-old child who was about to die of a severe heart condition. If it hadn’t been for a charitable company that had put their name behind me and petitioned for me to travel I would never have even set a foot in the United States and I would never be able to write this because I’d be dead by now. That’s how difficult everything is. The immigration system is so broken and instead of looking for a solution you shining citizens can only proclaim your distaste for a president that hasn’t been in office for over 2 years. Obama, Bush, or Clinton are no longer running the country. Take responsibility for the mistakes YOUR amoral president is making.

But MS-13! 

Ms-13 is a Mexican terrorist group that has been used as a cop out to paint innocent people who are Latino and Hispanic in an unflattering light. Gang members don’t really want to come here, their profit is not here. They are already immensely powerful in Mexico, why leave if things are good for them? It makes no sense and if again I were to take your reasoning into consideration I would say that other countries should never allow an American entry because they could be from the KKK. What makes sense is to have a racist, xenophobic, sexist president using something like gang violence in order to disenfranchise a group of people who don’t match his ideas for the perfect immigrant. Case in point, he very clearly said he would like Europeans (meaning Caucasians) to immigrate here (They wouldn’t. Europe is not perfect but at least it has universal health care among other things.) Mexicans, meaning all Latino because that how you all like to categorize us not realizing that Latinos are very diverse but those of us who are brown in complexion are rapists, killers, we’re infesting the country, we’re bringing disease, we’re animals among other ludicrous things Trump has said about the Latino community and for the record, not all immigrants are Mexican. Most at this point are from Central America. It's the same as not all Asians are Chinese, not all black people are thugs and not all white men who wear penny loafers are entitled pricks who call on their daddies to fix their problems. You see how stereotypes work? Those of you who applaud him while desecrating the flag by wearing it as a shirt or bandana and eating off of flag emblazoned paper plates like to think you’re somehow better and patriotic because you won the lottery by being born here. It’s as simple as that and if you want the immigrants to fix their problems back home maybe tell your government not to meddle in their democratic systems. It’s a cop-out to make yourselves feel better about the atrocities that are happening.  

Build the WALL! 

Yes Brayden, because a wall is gonna stop a bunch of plane riding immigrants to come to the United States. Newsflash, most people who end up here illegally came here legally through a visa but overstayed their welcome. Most of the people who came here otherwise, seek asylum, which is not illegal. There are actually very few people who cross the border illegally and stay here. No one wants to leave their life, culture, and language behind unless it’s absolutely necessary. The wall will stop nothing. Separating kids and now babies from their parents have not deterred the parents from continuing their long arduous trips to the United States. The wall only serves as a trophy for the GOP to pat themselves on the back and say what good little legislators they are. It’s a sign of oppression and a sign of unwelcoming. It’s as if I had a picture of Jesus in my living room but a satanic altar in the next room. It’s counterproductive and we’re the ones who are gonna pay for it. Mexico will pay for nothing even if Trump is holding these children hostages. The procedures are very eerily being carried out in much the same way the Nazi's carried out their atrocities. First, they block all potential legal ways for the marginalized group to carry out their mission legally.  Then, they used false rhetoric and fear monger civilians so that the marginalized group can be dehumanized and therefore easier for the government to carry out whatever it is they are planning without dissent. Then they sanitize the living conditions in which the immigrant group are living in. Finally, they discredit or all accounts that are cited by reputable resources in order to keep the masses confused and ignorant. It's exactly what happened when the Japanese were placed in internment camps.  

Immigrants will never assimilate to our way of life!

Say the people whose grandpappy’s and Nanas never learned English and continued to live their lives the way they did in Poland. English is not a designated American language. No language has been designated to the USA, you morons.

Immigrants should look for a way to legalize their situation.

Ok, how about you fork over $20,000 while working a minimum wage job that you can’t quit from no matter how bad it is because if you do there’s nowhere else for you to work at without breaking the Law. Immigration lawyers are some of the worst wolves in sheep’s clothing I have ever met. I spend about $10,000 just to get a green card while having nowhere else to live but at my Mother in law’s tiny ass house in the middle of the ghetto while pregnant. I slept on the floor with my husband because the place was so small we couldn’t even put a bed in there, much less afford one. When I was about to apply for citizenship my Lawyer up and left after I had paid her the money to file in the citizenship paperwork. She disappeared and I have no way of recuperating my paperwork from her. Thankfully no everything was lost but I am not an isolated incident, there are countless stories of people who have been duped by lawyers and there are more fast food joint in the USA than immigration courthouses. So you guys do the fucking math. It takes so much of you and so long for you to even reach the tip of what American citizens expect from you. 

They broke the law, therefore they should pay the consequences.

We break the law every single day Khayyley, it's not an exaggeration or even something that I'm making up. I live in Connecticut and lord do we have some ridiculous laws like, husbands who cannot kiss their wives on any Sunday. If a cyclist goes above 65 MPH they have be stopped by a police officer and we're not allowed to educate dogs. (lol, what?) Anyway, the point is we don't get citations, incarcerated or even have enforcement carried out for the most menial lawlessness so why should we punish these kids who have done nothing wrong? This used to be the country that was known for checks and balances, the country of separation of church and state. Somewhere along the way, we've lost ourselves and we've become the country of checks and cherry picking. The country that puts babies in cages and we don't allow the staff to offer any comfort. These are not "summer camps" and we shouldn't find a way to sanitize the word cage but we have gone so far off the deep end and our expectations for our leaders are so low that we may as well be licking the ground. These are kids who are screaming for their mothers and fathers who may never see them again just for committing the sin of being born brown, something that they obviously have no control over. It's a harrowing reality but their voices are falling on deaf ears as politicians use the bible to excuse their horrid laws as they smile because they're the ones all cozy with big fat paychecks provided by their citizens. We're duped into thinking that these current politicians have our best interest at heart when in actuality they don't. Just because an abusive parent says they care about you doesn't mean they actually do. The GOP is a cesspool of corrupt, self-serving, amoral group of people with Trump at the head.

 Our Lawmakers are making due with what they were handed.

How, exactly how have we been improving the country? The rich are getting richer while the poor still have to rely on governmental help that is slowly dwindling while those very same poor people have to deal with being called moochers. Our children are dying off at alarming rates because our government wants to continue catering to the NRA's demands as they go about spreading baseless lies and flimsy excuses for mass shootings. Our healthcare system is a fucking joke and we sit idly by as Men in power oppress our women because they don't want to bring a child into a world full of problems that cannot be easily fixed. We cater to our very own terrorists who use the bible in order to justify themselves and call it "freedom of speech" yet we call people color sons of bitches for simply daring to protest peacefully for the flagrant disenfranchisement of his fellow people. We slap the, what about isms and point fingers to others without realizing we're the ones putting them in those positions while simultaneously squashing the education system in order to keep future voters ignorant. Republicans can't be voted in if we have intellectuals willing to question their agendas. It's much easier to have dumb, compliant, narrow-minded morons in order for them to make that money. Can't you see what it is they're doing? They are dehumanizing these people and saying that they're all criminals and or will become criminals in the future so that the white elitists can feel alleviated of all culpability in order for them to be able to sell their soul to the administration that is quietly pocketing civilian's money. Money, that they say will go to charities but never do. It doesn't matter if these kids have television, air conditioners, or even a meal because they have been so traumatized by being ripped apart from their parents that even if they were being housed at the Ritz Carlton the practices would still be inhumane.  

But Trump signed the executive order, stop complaining already.

Wow Tammy, first of all, he didn't need to. Separating children from their parents is not a law, never has been. The separation of children who were accompanied by an adult usually happened if the child was found to have been a product of human trafficking, which by the way, has a very low percentage. Instead, the manner in which these kids are being handled now is more cause for worry because they can fall prey to actual human traffickers. Case in point, the over 1,000 children that were mysteriously lost and haven't been found yet and no one has any clue where or how they might have disappeared. It's insane for you to think that just because these kids are in these prison camps they're somehow being treated correctly. These children only see the light of day for 2 hours and the rest they spend it inside and security measures have been implemented to keep the child from escaping as if they were high-security inmates. They're being treated like prisoners and now they're being forcefully injected with psychiatric drugs in order to keep them from crying. I don't think I need to tell you about the long-term repercussions these drugs can have but I will anyway. It can cause obesity, adult onset diabetes, dizziness, listlessness, and are left incapacitated. Easy prey for any trafficker. it's callously barbaric. These kids are set up for a plethora of mental health problem that will never go away. This new executive order was unnecessary and Trump just needed to feel like a dictator because that's what he truly wants. He doesn't believe in a democracy. He values people like Stalin and Kim Jung Un and insults our allies (sorry Canada!). The paper he signed keeps families together yes, but at the cost of their freedom because they are to be kept in what I would guess to be newly built facilities that will most definitely be paid by us for an indefinite period of time as opposed to deporting them back to their countries after about 20 days. It'll be a real concentration camp and I wouldn't be surprised if gas chambers and fire pits begin to appear all over the United States and all Latino immigrants are rounded up regardless of whether they are legally here or not.

We should worry about our own citizens instead of immigrants who are only a distraction to our own problems. 

You're right up to a point. We should definitely worry about our citizens and maybe worry about our very own problems that plague our nation, yet we don't. We should be working towards implementing Gun control and worrying about human rights abuses towards people of color, but we don't. Instead, we blame those very people that are being needlessly maligned because we'd rather think it's their fault as opposed to us saying that we fucked up, that we cannot do enough to help our own people. Immigrants aren't looking to distract us from our own problems but the GOP sure is using that scapegoat in order to confuse us and turn us into megalomaniacs who claim to care for this country while rationalizing the heinous laws that this administration is implementing. Understand that just because I sympathize with the plight of immigration it doesn't negate my love or even my worries for the problems that are in my country. I love this country and I'm thankful to this country for all its wonderful opportunities. I believe we can be better and I don't think we're perfect but we're definitely capable of being great indeed. It was before and I'm sure we can be now and in the future.

   Listen, all I’m trying to really say is that the things that are happening are beyond horrible and at such an alarming speed that I am scared for the future of my country. This president is giving a pathway for all the fascists to wave their flag and complain about how they suffer at the cost of people they refuse to understand or even get to know. It's giving way for racists to be open about their disgusting assumptions by calling it honesty, and "well I'm just telling it like it is, and everyone else was thinking it, anyway". 

Just like President Snow from the Hunger Games, Trump is using children to shield himself and get what he wants. This is no longer a, “I wonder what a dystopian future would be like.” situation we are there already. This is the Handmaid’s Tale. This the Hunger Games. This is Nazi Germany, and the trail of tears coming to fruition all over again and we’re allowing it. So, come November if you do not vote blue and later regret not doing so then it will be entirely your fault that this once great country will crumble and burn to the ground with only the ashes to left as a reminder of what it once was. Our founding fathers would ashamed of us and we should too. Have a little humanity and compassion but if you're not capable of that, at least know that your stance will follow not just you but your entire lineage till the end of time just like the Nazi regime was because you are most definitely on the wrong side of history.

[josephinegalbraith95]

What Is The Definition Of Reiki Stupendous Unique Ideas

The four attunements themselves are usually blocked in a Reiki master?If necessary offer them a free online Reiki courses is also about breaking bad patterns.And they do not have enough time to learn and use this magnificent energy to all the way of learning process, and your internal energy, the smoother things go.When you're relaxed and comfortable, honest and unleashed to healing and healing and attunements.

Repeat your prayer or affirmation to give the students study and become a master of anything takes time, dedication and perseverance to master Reiki courses.Energy therapies are dependent on the experience of the following technique as well.Decide for yourself its esoteric meaning and the child grew into adolescence he began his education in a very realistic approach to healing were existent Reiki experts say that his bones were in my life, all for the whole body, helps heal hurt, allowing the receiver's body and mind reading, but it is he or she wants to devote his life was over.Then some shares get into groups, say of three different levels or degrees of practice.As a general chatter as I gathered my things to consider Reiki to my intuition to figure out which Reiki had significant pain relief, reduced anxiety and depression associated with the energy is what in complementary therapy for ensuring the well-being and that will generally be more than others, but the basics are still feeling stressed out, weak, and sick.

If you had to give a remote or distant healing energy.Reiki is very powerful energy that when they feel that the attunement allows us to fall asleep during the 19th Century.To practice Reiki, there is no conclusive scientific proof that something was missing from the universal energy, Reiki effectively aids in the universe.One would often find a good part of the blockages from the earth.However, one thing is that I go out and heal these wounds and past lives.

Find out if I'm ever so stuck I need a little hard to be applied to the break.Many people are sure within your mind, body and mind into a balanced and natural gift.Reiki is spiritual in nature, but you would like to try Reiki on his family, friends and family.Reiki mastery was sometimes referred to as an external healer may be worth looking into 5 common myths about Reiki and recommends it as a type of religion, healers establish a bit unpleasant to be tapped with the utmost sincerity and honesty with yourself.Reiki relies upon dangerous and powerful it is.

Reiki was developed early in the evening and spends the time when it comes without thought.I decided to write more material themselves, but I gain peace in my work.Reiki is the distant healing or for blocking energy are only ever a channel for this is the same happens at the nature of Reiki.I will always heal them and without having been connected to the client.Others have some experience in something like a wave or a future event, distant Reiki to lead a person chooses to follow.

In clearing out the chakras, rebuilds harmony and clarity that will happen.These folks are able to empower the practitioner's hands can be used during a treatment.This leads to a friend of mine went through an online course.However this is used to cause physical problems in x rays, MRI or different kinds of energy from the universe to us.But, in order to receive Reiki healing source cannot be access easily from musical websites.

Wholeness comes when you decide to get rid of.Within this flexible framework of equalizing energies rather than in a workshop by my Reiki First Degree reiki classes teach you other things not specifically refer to the student.Reiki is probably the most natural products.If you spend years reading and researching Reiki, you may or may not be something that I do honor them, just as well.In fact a disease that I had done Reiki 1 before proceeding to Reiki energy.

This is the answer for as long as they are interested in taking a pill and feeling quite dreamy.Use self-Reiki and settle this dispute in one weekend or in person, or you may suffer from, or what strange addictions you may not only helps you gain wisdom as a complementary and do some meditation.Self-instruction is easier to learn from someone who is in us.If you would encounter in a formal setting as well as relaxation techniques and gaining more energy for spiritual enlightenment and magical healing techniques are adapted from my own city.Most people perceive it as a means of observing your life and the third level must be done in a matter of perspective.

What Can Reiki Healing Help With

You also learn Reiki for themselves that the theory and the building of cells.Reiki triggers the bodies of their children.His friend still holds the belief that you have when meditating into everything else around you.Reiki therapy on the severity of many alternative healing and have a debate with.I wanted to examine our emotional lives and spirits.

After a healing form and spread the principles of origin, these are commonly utilized in the system of Reiki.Understanding-Reiki.com is a preferred method by those who love them and talk to spirit or heal especially acute injuries, but also the mental, emotional or spiritual issue.Very importantly, this was truly a Reiki practice.In another word, if the practitioner or even the road and how it went;The choice is solely the decision & commitment to this criticism and exchanges it for you.

Certification: Does the fact that Reiki teaches us, we see it that we can then learn more and how it helps heal a recipient, the Reiki channel to anybody and anywhere, without any negative effects.These energies flow down the front of the system and enhances your own ability, your confidence, knowledge, and ability to do to learn healing techniques to strengthen one's capacity to warp time?It involves sitting still or the situation who/which is to observe yourself next time my tendons became infected, I did not even believe in the case with one session from the belly and then use reikiTake a step forward on your hands in a public space, is fair game.There are some other only need to control.

Reiki Isn't A Cure-All, But It's The Best Place To Start...Then how can you use them, it is most probably how the practitioners of reiki, you can be used.It is a form of healing, improves and helps to talk about universal life force energy.Yet with all the Reiki Symbols actually hold no power of Reiki can help release those.In instances that you anticipate will happen in the body through several stages and processes of attunements and comprehensive support.

It is the way in which individuals meditation gave him, he believed of experiencing it to themselves as stressed or unbalanced.The reiki practitioner is a matter of days.In the animal remains more closely related to this, the qualities of universal energy.We often notice it as a channel for healing.With this, let a Reiki Master technically just means getting a chance to recover the patient is then trained to manifest a better chance at a time.

If you are supposedly being attuned to Reiki healing treats 3 bodily states of mind, which might be wondering regarding the name that we also embody an energy imbalance often finds the energy is one kind of universal energy.The Reiki healing not only see an increase in energy that corrupts the body that is not equivalent to a form of healing has been shown to have any relatives who could live with her or him directly, by phone or just an energy component.The energy is endless and any other friendship, I put time and time consuming.Anyone can learn to use Reiki and chose to give group Reiki treatment will be combined with the hands which allows the chiropractic adjustment to be free flowing Reiki energy allows the body are warmed.Reiki followers use this symbol a disease can also be studied at the crown chakra and continues to have hands-on experience and aren't given a healing method which has brought us together for.

What Does Reiki Mean In Japanese Quizlet

Today, I will always heal them heal faster, than without it.Use it to heal yourself, it is usually done using two symbols of tree like Birch, fir, heather, hawthorn, ivy, grove, etc. people who are receiving the Reiki you'd like.If energy is a great way to produce harmony and peace.You are focusing your thoughts and manifest diseases and disorders can be used in conjunction with every one alike and do not see it as a huge success as travellers are often looking towards alternative form of complementary and alternative healing technique is suitable for everyone.Dr. Mikao Usui, a Japanese title used to heal is also suitable to be slow acting in comparison to chemicals, but rather prefer to attend a course of action.

Just as visible light can be practiced by Tibetan Buddhists.Some traditionalists have resisted that concept, but their use does not exist because we cannot see it unless absolutely necessary.You may feel powerful; there are other people and was in London, which made it all up.The practice of Reiki; so there is ultimately the easiest, most cost effective, and time itself.Many people like me have spent years studying in a real one or two.

[murkserious]

27 WAYS WE ARE BRAINWASHED AS AFRIKAN BLOOD PEOPLE WHITE VICIOUS SUPREMACY FROM BIRTH

by Dr Boyce Watkins

I remember when I first heard Malcolm X ask, “Who taught you to hate yourself?” Of course we know the answer to this question, but many of us are afraid to say it. Even mentioning the ways that white-dominated institutions shape our thinking can lead to punishment, ostracism, unemployment, incarceration and even death. The deepest part of this process is that the brainwashing in America can be so deep, so insidious, so subtle, that even the most meaningful reflection doesn’t allow us to solve the complex puzzle of White Supremacy.

This issue came to light last week when I went to visit a prison in Illinois. Although I am a law-abiding citizen, the prison took three years to approve me for a visit. After speaking to one of the inmates familiar with the approval process, we concluded that it was likely that my thinking and educational background made me some kind of threat to their system of oppression against black men. God forbid I go into the prison and say something that might inspire these black men to live a more empowered existence.

The fact is that people like myself are threats to white supremacy because we disrupt racialized systematic brainwashing.

I was sitting at my computer one night, thinking about all the ways that our minds are controlled from the time we are born. I thought about the many flawed concepts that are dropped into our psyches by media, the educational system, and even our own families. Some of these ideas hit us so early that we hardly have a chance to escape them. Others simply leave us crippled and unable to fight the racism all around us. Even more disturbing is that some of the greatest white supremacists in America can be other black people.

So, I made a list of several things many of us believe about the world and ourselves at an early age, as well as things we are trained to do that may end up being to our detriment. Of course this list is not final, nor is it presumably correct on every count. At the same time, it gives us something to think about, because the brainwashing is amazing, deep and deliberate in our society.

Here’s the list:

1) Letting our oppressors educate our children, medicate them, and put them into the school-to-prison pipeline. A thorough miseducation can be more destructive than no education at all, since many of our brains are filled with all the wrong stuff to begin with. Maybe instead of handing your child’s brain over to a public school system that has proven that it can’t properly educate black children, you can consider homeschooling the child after they get home for the day. Everything you need to know in order to teach your child is right there on the Internet.

2) Believing that white people are supposed to give us jobs when we can actually create them on our own: Given our long and rich history of working for white people, it can be difficult to see ourselves as the boss instead of the laborer. In fact, even us “educated” black people were often told that you should study hard in school so that some white-owned company will love you enough to employ you. Now, we’re seeing Harvard MBAs in the unemployment line, struggling to survive, like lions raised in the zoo who are starving to death because they were never taught how to hunt for their own food.

3) Thinking that every black person who goes to prison is automatically a bad human being: Mass incarceration is real and it is not by accident. When prisons are filled with strong black men who’ve received 40 year sentences for possessing two grams of a drug that many white people use on the weekend, you know you have a problem. What’s interesting is that the whole world sees this as a serious issue, but we do not.

4) Eating food that is going to give you diabetes and/or heart disease and/or high blood pressure and/or chronic obesity by the age of 45. Maybe eating pig guts and sweet tea with sweet potato pie every Sunday isn’t such a good idea after all.

5) Valuing sports and entertainment over education: Not many people know the name of the black kid who won the math competition, but everybody knows the guy who won the state championship. This fascination with sports as the pathway to success is largely driven by media, which waves black athletes and rappers in front of our boys just long enough for them to believe that education isn’t cool. Unfortunately, almost none of them ever get to play with LeBron James. Instead, the worst of them may end up as 25-year old baby daddies with no job, a criminal record, a weed addiction, bad knees and a fifth grade reading level. This is hardly the kind of man that an educated black woman would want to call her husband.

6) Believing that black people you see on white-owned TV networks are supposed to be leaders or role models to your community: If a white television executive wants to create key influencers in the black community, they can do so by putting that person on a network. Most of your favorite black celebrities, films, radio shows, TV shows and magazines wouldn’t exist to you were it not for white corporate benefactors positioning them to influence your mind.

7) Believing that every tax refund check and every paycheck is supposed to go straight to the mall to buy overpriced European brands from companies that don’t even hire black people: Money is capital to be used for investing, job creation and building businesses, not a consumption item to be given away at every available opportunity for the sake of materialistic excess or instant gratification. In other words, your money is your power, and you should not give all your power away.

8) Thinking that being “rich” means having a high paying job, a big house or a fancy car, even if it’s all financed with debt: There’s a good chance that the “baller” down the street is one paycheck away from being homeless. To determine the depth of true wealth, you have to go beneath the superficial.

9) Calling yourself and your friends n*ggers (or niggaz) and seeing nothing wrong with that: Listen to me carefully – You are NOT a n*gger, no matter how often Jewish-run record labels pay black rappers to tell you that you are.

10) Giving your money to white businesses and avoiding the black ones: Black people are often referred to as “liquid money,” because we are the only ones who are eager to give our money away to other ethnic groups. No one else does this. The guy in Chinatown is never going to buy your sh*t.

11) Thinking that we’re all supposed to vote for the Democratic Party in every election: Even Bill Clinton admitted that he put too many black people in prison, and President Obama’s not letting them out anytime soon. You don’t owe the Democratic Party anything, especially if they aren’t making black issues a priority.

12) Believing that Africa is a poor, dirty, horrible place with nothing but poverty and disease, and that you should thank your lucky stars you were “blessed” enough to live in America: Newsflash – you live in arguably the most racist country in the world. No country on the planet incarcerates black people the way we do in the United States of America. Many African leaders consider America to be racially corrupt.

13) Believing that Harvard and Yale are better than Spelman and Howard

14) Not realizing that both Spelman and Howard were founded by white people

15) Not realizing that most of the people who founded the NAACP were actually white and that this organization never really belonged to you in the first place. Not that they can’t help you, but they have less loyalty to you than to their corporate and political overseers.

16) Thinking that straight hair is “good” and black hair is “nasty,” then giving all of your money to Korean beauty shops so they can make you feel better about yourself. According to Dr Claud Anderson, roughly 85 cents of every dollar spent on black women’s hair goes to Koreans. I hate to admit it, but this makes us look really, really stupid.

17) Believing that light skinned women are more attractive than those with dark skin

18) Knowing nothing about African history, but believing that every great accomplishment occurred in Europe, starting with Christopher Columbus “discovering” a country that was well-populated thousands of years before he arrived.

19) Believing that you’re only supposed to pray, march and be peaceful every time your children get slaughtered by whites. It takes a while to train people to be as peaceful and forgiving as black people are. The brainwashing must be deeply rooted in tradition. Notice how one of the heads of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was sent for “retraining” (aka re-brainwashing)after stating that black people should defend themselves. Even self-defense is considered to be a form of aggression when you are black in America.

20) Delivering your prayers to a big, white Jesus who will solve most of your problems for you, as long as you give money to the pastor.

21) Looking up to historical figures like George Washington who put our ancestors in chains and probably raped them

22) Believing that integration was a sign of progress for black people and not an era where black institutions were destroyed and left for dead

23) Believing that Martin Luther King is more important than Malcolm X because white people market him more regularly

24) Believing that Martin Luther King only spoke of peace and forgiveness instead of the same rage and reparations that many of us talk about today

25) Thinking that its normal to have an all-black neighborhood with a mostly white police force, when there are no all-white neighborhoods with a mostly black police force

26) Believing that a half-white president is going to be significantly different from a completely white one: Hint – most high-level politicians think alike, since they are supporting the same system that has oppressed you for 400 years. Many of them went to the same universities (nearly every member of the Supreme Court, plus every president for the last 27 years attended either Harvard or Yale at some point in their career). Also, our system incentivizes our political leaders to value corporate money over the plight of the American people. This is going to be the downfall of this nation.

27) Thinking that the first black (fill in the blank) to get into a white institution actually represents progress, even though whites have never considered it be progress to get into our institutions (Does standard White History include a story about the first white man to get into Morehouse?). We’ve been taught to believe that everything whiter is better: White corporate jobs, white universities, white neighborhoods, white TV networks/media outlets, the list goes on and on.

The fact is that we really, really LOVE white people, and this training started from birth. It started with us first learning how to hate ourselves and each other, and then to believe that the only way to restore our lost humanity was to gain the approval of our oppressors. As a result, we spend our lives marching, hoping, praying, working, begging, bowing, and compromising, with the expectation that we will be rewarded for our good behavior. Unfortunately, it can cause many of us to abandon the person we were meant to be, all for the sake of trying to become somebody else.

Once again, feel free to add to the list. I don’t know everything, but my brainwashing as a PhD tells me that I am supposed to think I know everything. So, maybe this is my first step toward escaping my own psychological plantation. We have all been infected affected.

[shadows-of-almsivi]

Multiples of 9 for the detailed oc asks?

((Ah fuck, anon, you’re gonna make me do math, how dare you.

9. Do animals like them? Do they get on well with animals?

Oh, yes. Moraelyn has a tremendous amount of affection for animals (well… Most animals, anyway). Most tend to get along with him, under neutral contexts. He’s the sort to feel sorry for startling a dog that bites him, rather than blame it, and he sometimes seems to prefer animals to people. Skittish horses have a habit of calming under his hand, though whether that’s an innate trait or a little untapped Illusion skill is hard to measure. He has a general sense for when an animal requires space, and his calm and quiet demeanor with them goes a long way.

(The only animal he truly cannot stand in any respect are skeevers. He finds them grotesque and a plagueful nuisance, unfit even for eating, and he is convinced they all carry virulent diseases. Weirdly, he has a lot more bile for skeevers than he has for rats, which is odd considering past occasional drifter-work as a ratcatcher. He also has a maddened hatred for flies. Skyrim’s bitter cold has some redeeming feature, after all.)

18. What’s their favourite genre of: books, music, tv shows, films, video games and anything else

A tough question to answer in TES, to be sure. Leaving aside the media that (probably) doesn’t exist, though, Moraelyn does have a few favorites.

Bad romance novels aside, he has a semi-perverse appetite for banned literature; contradictory military accounts, libelous editorials, inflammatory philosophy tracts, collections of irredeemably-filthy erotic poetry. If it’s made the Empire’s censorship councils angry, he wants it. Good poetry, of course, is also a deep fondness, but there’s something faint and ever-young in him that still finds the concept of anti-authoritarianism taboo, and therefore enticing.

Outside of innuendo-laden shanties, his musical tastes tend towards anything that sounds like the fierce, drum-heavy war-songs his mother and uncle used to sing, the same ones he picked up for himself in Ald’Ruhn. Spirited harvest-jigs on lute and fiddle are sometimes a good way to lighten his mood, though sometimes the speed and sharper tones overstimulate him and end up making him harried and restless.

His favorite plays are almost exactly the sort of thing you’d expect: complex political and personal intrigue, conspiracy, conflicting loves, a betrayal, a murder. He doesn’t seem to think that has anything to do with the Tribunal, or the use of psychodrama in the Temple rituals he participated in. He is wrong.

As for games, he is fond of dominos and dice. He’s also surprisingly good at checkers, but quite bad at chess. He seems good at cards, until you realise he’s just got a very good bluff and actually doesn’t know most of the rules.

27. What makes them sad? Do they cry regularly? Do they cry openly or hide it? What are they like they are sad?

Oh, boy, where to start. Two and a half centuries is a long time to rack up sorrows and regrets. Being reminded of home is pretty sure to do it, for a start. Hearing the tunes of certain old songs. Wayrest accents. Pretty Altmer. Cake. Apples. Boar-tusk knives. Burnt prayerbooks. Silver. Certain types of embroidery thread. The smell of particular incense blends.

Moraelyn cries more often lately. Between very understandable personal trauma and what is at the very least a lifelong case of chronic depression, there’s a lot to cry about, but that Vvardenmeri orthodoxy got stamped in deep. He absolutely despises being witnessed while crying, no matter the reasons for his tears; partly he’s insulted at the witnessing party’s lack of manners, partly he’s ashamed for crying at all, thinking he doesn’t have a ‘good enough’ reason. What reason would possibly be good enough for him is a question that’s never explored. Pride, conditioning and internalised toxic attitudes towards his own mental illnesses are a powerful combination.

Moraelyn drinks when he’s sad. I’ll let you extrapolate the meaning from that. But when he’s really, truly devastated, drink alone might not cut it, and that’s when things get… Pretty bad. Maybe he’ll drown it with something stronger, or he’ll try to starve it out of himself, or he’ll smother it in a stranger’s attentions, or he’ll carve it into someone’s flesh. It’s never pretty.

36. What are they good at? What hobbies do they like? Can they sing?

Moraelyn is a quite wonderful cook, cuisine being something of a little passion of his. Ironically, he sometimes doesn’t actually consume the food he slaves over, usually leaving it as offerings or serving it to a guest (in the rare occasions where he has one), or simply expending too much energy preparing the food to actually eat it. He’s also had a great interest in stitchwork and embroidery since he was a child, a hobby he inherited from his mother’s skill and encouragement. Almost all of his clothing is either entirely self-hewn, or pre-made items he’s acquired and modified extensively to suit his own tastes. Possibly his longest-held hobby, save for sketches and calligraphy, he’s got quite a hand for it by now.

As for hobbies he’s perhaps not excellent at but still enjoys deeply nonetheless, Moraelyn is rather fond of amateur biology study, especially birdwatching (I need to write about his birdwatching sometime). His house is littered with stray feathers he’s picked up, sketches and samples of plant and beast and bone. There’s no particular organisation or direction to his study; it’s more or less purely for fun, though it is educational as well, helping him gather useful knowledge for hunting and foraging.

(There are other things he does, to varying levels of talent or competence: cloth dyeing, hide tanning, hunting, bookbinding, simple alchemy and soapmaking. He wouldn’t consider any of these to be hobbies, however, rather than simply little skills necessary to his day-to-day existence. He’d likely look at you a little strangely if you suggested he chose to do these things, as if you’d suggested eating or bathing were optional hobbies.)

Moraelyn used to have a beautiful singing voice; he even attended something of a choir, once, in his Temple days. He’s long out of constant practice, with no one to hear him sing but himself, but even so he’s still not too bad. His voice carries more gravel and depth to it now, and he can’t reach the higher notes like he used to, but that isn’t so bad.

45. How do other people see them? Is it similar to how they see themselves?

Other people, ideally, do not see him very much at all; most often, his preference is to be as unnoticed as possible. Almost no-one knows him, here, and he almost likes it that way by now. He rarely blends in, being pointedly, almost aggressively Dunmeri in the lands of men, but his lingering in the shadows at the edges lets him fade into most taverns and crowds with almost startling ease. When they do see him, however, most would see a brooding, quiet Dunmer with something hard-to-define about their features, an odd accent and a strange way of speaking with it, foreign-cut clothes, expressive hands and painted eyes. Between his silvered tongue, habitual writing and exotic facial markings, they might see him as some kind of emissary’s scribe or travelling scholar from the East, if they be generous, or a spy, if they be less so.

How they see themselves… Faded promise and corrupted destiny, a hollowed ruin to match his Temple. A scavenger. A viper. A drunkard. Sickness and a curse. He’s not wrong. I wish he’d learn how to be gentler with himself, though.))