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infiniteglitterfall · 8 months ago

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Like. Uggghhh

First of all, do not exit the bubble on social media. Just fucking don't.

If you have managed to avoid i/p discourse this far -- and the ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE firehose of misinformation it comes with -- you should be telling the rest of us how you do it.

My usual experience with posts about it on Tumblr often goes like.... There are TWO (2) posts on Tumblr saying that Israel has blockaded baby formula from entering Gaza and that babies are starving because of it. Each one had 15k-20k notes when I last saw them.

There is zero evidence, anywhere, suggesting that Israel has blocked baby formula from entering Gaza.

The posts both link to some article about the risk of famine in Gaza. The article does not say baby formula is blockaded. It quotes some mother as saying that baby formula is hard to find and is too expensive and she can't afford it.

Humanitarian aid is free. That is the point of humanitarian aid. If it's too expensive, that means people are paying for it. Which means it's on the black market because someone has stolen the aid.

People in Gaza have been all over Twitter for months saying that Hamas steals aid and sells what it doesn't want on the black market. And, sometimes, that there are also armed gangs stealing aid.

Israel has said that Hamas steals 60-70% of the aid entering Gaza. Hamas was caught stealing an UNRWA aid truck just the other day, AND shut down one of the crossings where most aid enters by firing rockets at it and damaging it.

These things are not of importance to the folks in the "pro-Palestinian" movement, because they do not demonize Israel. Hamas is free to steal all the aid, shut down all the crossings, and invade Israel again through them, as far as the movement goes.

Largely because the movement is driven by Students for Justice in Palestine. Which, it's turning out, is heavily funded by Hamas-led orgs in the U.S., and which has been a steady stream of Hamas propaganda for many years regardless.

Okay, I was going to list how I learn shit about the war, but I've already Gone Off, I Guess.

If you really feel you must:

1. Just ask me anything you want to know about, and I can give you the 5,000 sources I probably have about it.

2. Here's how I learned shit:

I fact-checked the hell out of everything I heard, no matter who it was from.

I still do.

For me, that means I Google it and I check what different "sides" say. Real news outlets fact-check things and tell you where they are getting their information. They may still spin things a certain way.

For example, one article might say that 500 aid trucks used to enter Gaza daily, while another one specifies that not all those trucks carried food. Eventually, you might find a Reddit post citing and linking to a U.N. study that says about 20% of the trucks carried food, giving you a more accurate sense of how much more or less is currently coming in.

Yeah, that's a real example. Sigh.

One thing I see a lot is the news media just dropping an issue. Like, if I go to Google's "news" results in my phone right now and sort by date, all the articles it gives me about ceasefire negotiations are from almost a week ago, saying that Hamas accepted a ceasefire and the U.S. is reviewing the terms while Israel proceeds in Rafah.

Only going directly to the Jerusalem Post breaking news section told me that Biden just said that there could have been a ceasefire yesterday (or Friday, by now) if Hamas had just agreed to release women, children, and the elderly hostages.

I'm so tired of this shit.

If someone posts something and the only sources mentioning it are what I would consider to be extremist sites that are not fact-checking their shit, I am assuming it's fake.

Exception: if it's an eyewitness account from someone IN Gaza who posted it on social media.

Exception to the exception: There are also fake videos and fake photos. There are a fair number of Twitter accounts dedicated to debunking these. There are also selectively edited videos. Always ask yourself what you're not seeing. What happened before they started recording? What's happening outside the frame and after they turn it off? How do you know?

I do a reverse image search of pretty much every goddamn one. I'll screenshot the photo or the thumbnail of the video and throw it into my Google Lens app.

If something is only showing up with snarky extremist pro-Israeli OR anti-Israel commentary, I'm dismissing it. If it's real, it'll end up coming up in some other way eventually.

If I'm not familiar with a source, I'll throw it into Media Bias Fact Check and look at how reliable it is.

This site is NOT a good source for whether an outlet has a left or right wing bias, because Hamas has been deliberately cloaking itself in liberal/progressive language for decades.

Wikipedia's page on reliable sources is also a good place to find out whether a media outlet is considered A Huge Fucking Mess or not.

It used to be considered flat-out conservative to support Hamas and its parent group, the Muslim Brotherhood; now it's an astroturfed progressive cause. Fuck Hamas.

Off the top of my head, some sites that I consider to be absolute propaganda that it's not worth even clicking on: Mondoweiss. The Electronic Intifada, which has some really extremist stuff and also is not a journalistic outlet. The New Arab is basically Al Jazeera, which is owned by the Qatari monarchy and has never fact-checked or corrected itself in its life. The Daily Mail can eat shit. And there was some damn article on here, I can't remember where, that literally redirected to Hamas's website. Oh, and Al Mayadeen, which is a "Lebanese Pan-Arabist news site" that's aligned with the fascist dictatorship of Iran.

Oh, and Jewish Currents is on fucking thin ice with me. I don't usually use it anyway because anything it covers will be covered better and more thoroughly somewhere else. But last week my friend kept urging me to read this article of theirs about how people use false claims of antisemitism to blah blah blah. In response to me posting a list of stuff happening at our local school district, like kids saying "Kill all Zionists," "Kill Jews," "Jews are dumb," etc. So like, fuck both of them tbqh.

Things that probably have decent info, but still need to be cross-checked: Haaretz. NBC. New York Times. Washington Post. The Guardian. CNN. I mean, pretty much anyone.

Honestly, the Jerusalem Post is surprisingly good. It consistently just lists the facts of what's going on, it tracks everything that happens in the war, it tells you everything the IDF and Hamas are saying is happening and shows you when those things conflict with each other, it is unflinching in publishing criticism of the government, it's published stuff from Palestinians in Gaza who write to it, etc.

"You didn't say you fact-check it!" Yeah, well, usually when I end up there, it's because I'm using it to fact-check something else. The exceptions are when I go to it for updates that nobody else is publishing. Like, only a large local paper is going to put in the effort to be all, "A missile hit an apartment building in Ashkelon and wounded three people."

Algemeiner is more of a blog, but it's very good when it comes to reporting on antisemitic incidents. Still needs to be fact-checked, but it generally has a lot more detail and analysis than other sites. Ditto The Atlantic.

Bassem Eid is a lifelong Palestinian human rights activist who is very vocal about the war and about Hamas, and has debunked things like the "flour massacre." He's on a lot of social media as @realbassemeid, but not on Tumblr!

The "flour massacre" is when people ran at the IDF, wouldn't stop, the IDF shot at the ground in front of them and then at their legs bc they still would not stop. And meanwhile, Hamas shot people who were trying to get aid while it looted the trucks; and then the truck drivers panicked and tried to flee and literally ran over like 70 more people. This gets retold on social media as "the flour massacre where Israel killed hundreds of people just trying to get aid."

If you do want to get your news on social media, get it from people in and from Palestine. Bassem Eid is in the West Bank. Hamza Howidy fled Gaza last August after Hamas brutally crushed anti-Hamas protests; he still knows a ton of people in Gaza and has been a good source of info.

Following Palestinian human rights activists, and regular everyday Palestinians who hate Hamas (which is... a lot of them), has given me a lot of hope during the past seven months of Westerners sounding exactly like Hamas. Here are a few I enjoy:

Yasmine Mohammed's father grew up in Gaza, and hated Hamas. She recently wrote, 'help them to get out from under the tyranny of Hamas. Share the voices of peace-loving Palestinians such as activist Bassem Eid. Elevate the words of secular politicians who do not use religion to sow division and encourage hate of the other."

Since the start of the war I've kind of lived in a bubble I've created for myself. I knew generally what was going on, but not really. I guess it was just my way to cope.

Recently, I've started to try to dismantle the bubble I've created for myself. I've tried researching on my own, but I don't know which sources are credible enough.

Could you give me a list of credible places to start researching?

(I'd you've answered) Thanks for listening, I hope your day wasn't too miserable.

sorry, it says in my pinned post that I'm basically in the exact same situation, I'm not a credible source of information, everything I post on my blog that doesn't have its own source is an opinion.

@spot-the-antisemitism do you have any?

#nermal #you are not immune to propaganda and so forth #fact checking #media bias #wall of words

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maverick-werewolf · 4 years ago

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Vampire Fact #6 - Weaknesses

It’s time for a big one: let’s discuss what was and wasn’t a weakness for folkloric vampires.

(I mean look I might use a lot of Lestat gifs in these posts, okay?)

Please note that this post will not include every vampire weakness as found in folklore and pop culture, as that would be absolutely massive; it will cover the most common ones. I’ll save the full list for when I publish my own book on vampires in folklore.

So, like I did in my post on werewolf weaknesses, let’s break them down.

Appeared in folklore

Stake - The trusty stake, the old standby. Yes, vampires were very often staked in folklore to finally end their nightly rampages.

Needles - Less common than the stake concept, but still a thing: pin a vampire’s body to a coffin using needles and you won’t have a vampire problem anymore. Sometimes it was through the heart, sometimes through the palms or fingers, sometimes various other places and sometimes lots or sometimes just one or two.

Obsessive counting - Kind of funny that this makes Sesame Street fairly folklore-accurate: a lot of vampires in legend were obsessed with counting. Spill a bag of beans behind you as you run away from a vampire, and that vampire will just have to stop and count those beans. Can’t resist.

Garlic - Yes, garlic - along with various other types of herbs and some types of wood - warded off vampires. This wasn’t a pop culture creation. It was, however, often the garlic flowers that warded them off.

Holy symbols - Although some modern media backs off this one, but it was definitely a thing in folklore. You can ward a vampire off with a holy symbol. The symbol in question was, generally, a cross, as many of the stories from which we draw our primary vampire concepts are Christian.

Holy water - Also a thing.

Running water - Vampires, whether we count them as spirits or not, have something in common with a lot of different kinds of spirits in that they cannot cross running water. This appeared in several stories.

Invitation - Can vampires really not cross the threshold without being invited in? Yes, that did actually appear in some folklore.

And under “not really a weakness but was still a thing,” I will file...

Fire - I wouldn’t really consider this a vampire weakness, seeing as how - more often than not - it isn’t actually used against vampires that are currently up and about feeding on people, at least as far as folklore is concerned. However, it is used to burn parts of immobile vampires, such as to burn their corpses/bodies and to burn their heart, after it’s removed from the body, so it does work in that capacity, of course. It’s often important to dispose of the ashes properly, as well.

Mirrors/Lack of reflection - Vampires in a lot of folklore had no reflection at all, and mirrors are of course the most obvious way of showing that. It was a way of revealing a vampire, and vampires often tried to avoid mirrors as a result. This has nothing to do with any quality of the mirrors themselves. They just have no reflection, because they have no soul (i.e., they are often demons, in folklore).

Wine - Corpses and corpse parts, such as bones, were often washed in wine to cleanse them of evil and protect them from curses. Wine often had holy connotations and purification abilities in various cultures and religions, including but not at all limited to Christianity.

May or may not have appeared in folklore, but probably didn’t

Any water (varied by vampire legend) - This varies a lot. Some vampires are burned by all water, really, as if it’s acid. Others, not so much. Others only care if it’s running water. Some actually live in swamps and will drown people. So this is very much a variable thing.

Decapitation - The most commonly seen method for finally destroying a vampire and making sure they don’t come back isn’t decapitation, though we see that occasionally - but it is almost always accompanied by cutting out and destroying the vampire’s heart, which is more important than anything related to their head.

Did NOT appear in folklore

Sunlight - I covered this one in much more depth in this post here, but nope, it wasn’t a weakness for vampires in folklore.

Corpse blood - Vampires in folklore never really encountered problems with drinking blood from corpses, as their solution was simple: they didn’t do that. This is a modern pop culture vampire hunter thing about somebody tricking a vampire into drinking old blood somehow, and it didn’t really come up in folklore. It is, of course, implied in folklore - obviously - that a vampire has to drink living blood, but we don’t see vampires being defeated by corpse blood somehow.

Silver - I’m not convinced this one appeared in folklore until someone actually shows me the source for it, because I can’t find one. Werewolves, of course, are not sensitive to silver in folklore and that comes from Hollywood. It seems to me that this was put on vampires because of the weird often-muddied nature of werewolves and vampires in some media. Now, some people say vampires are associated with Judas Iscariot and that silver is associated with said vampires because of the silver coins he was given to betray Jesus, but I can’t really find much about that other than people mentioning it, so where exactly are the legends where vampires are associated with Judas? Until I find some definitive primary sources about this, I’m going to leave silver on the “no” list, especially because it feels like such a product of pop culture.

So there you have it! As I mentioned, this obviously isn’t every single potential weakness in everything ever, but this covers most of the major/more common ones you see around.

(If you like my blog, be sure to check out my other stuff! And please consider supporting me on Patreon - not only will you help me keep this blog running, but you get access to cool stuff in return!)

Patreon --- Vampire Fact Masterlist --- Wulfgard --- Werewolf Fact Masterlist --- Twitter

#vampire #vampires #vampire friday #vampire fact #folklore #folklore fact #mythology #folklore facts #vampire facts #vampirism #monsters

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babaleshy · 3 years ago

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I'm Autistic

Because this will likely be a lengthy, wordy post about my self-diagnosis as Autistic as well as all of my experiences regarding Autistic traits, I'm going to leave a "read more" link so that you're not scrolling for ages just to catch up on your feed.

Ah, I see you've clicked "keep reading" or "read more" or whatever this site has it labeled as, now. You don't get to be mad at how long this is or how much of a waste of time reading this may be to you because you consciously clicked on the link. Therefore, I am exempt from taking responsibilities of eating up any bit of your time, including the time you've wasted reading this disclaimer.

So... Yes. I am. And it's a self-diagnosis right now.

You're probably thinking that I saw a Tik Tok clip, checked out a page on WebMD, and decided that I'm Autistic (this is in reference to a Tik Tok I saw last night that nearly made me spit out my drink because of how painfully accurate the "what people think self-diagnosis is vs reality" clip was). That is, of course, not the case.

A few years ago (likely 2018), I don't recall what it was I read online, but it made me go, "Oh wow, that makes so much sense to me," in regards to a neurodivergent trait. However, this was then I thought I had ADHD. My husband has ADHD, was diagnosed with it as a child, and because his dad forced the doctor (this was like, in the late 90s, early 2000s I think) to put him on Adderall and Ritalin, my husband does not remember 3 years of his life because he was a drooling, zombified mess. Why did his dad do this? Because his grades were bad. Did this help with his grades? No. Did his dad take him off the meds because he didn't get the desired result? Also no. My husband wasn't even informed on what ADHD was. He was simply told he had it and to take these pills. It wasn't until he (my husband) read the label saying that it could increase the risk of heart issues that he cussed his dad out and flushed all the pills down the toilet. Up until very recently, he wasn't sure if he actually had ADHD until he saw a YouTuber who was actually diagnosed with it display the exact traits he had.

But he didn't see this YouTuber when I thought I had ADHD, so my husband couldn't exactly relate, plus I didn't want to trigger anything with him on the subject.

But the more I researched, the more I realized I could be on the spectrum. It wasn't until 2019 that I was printing out articles, trait lists, etc. to highlight and put into a folder (which is thick and nearly bursting with what I've printed out to have a hardcopy of records highlighting the traits that I have, including traits my husband and my mom see in me) that I realized "I could have Asperger's."

Of course, I no longer use that term after finding out it was named after a n*zi, and I began to embrace the term "Autistic" instead.

But the thing that triggered me into going, "Wait, so it's not ADHD that I think I have, it's Asperger's?" was, like my husband, seeing a YouTuber talk about their traits and experiences. I had identical struggles, myself. (Through this same YouTuber, I also found out I'm greysexual, too! There's a name to describe my experience with sexual attraction! Yay!)

There are a lot of VERY SPECIFIC TRAITS Autistic people experience that aren't mentioned by the YouTuber or in anything that I've printed out and highlighted that I have found through various Tik Toks that I have personally experienced that simply further solidifies the fact that I'm definitely on the spectrum. When I showed the Tik Tok I mentioned earlier (I don't remember their name) to my husband last night, he was wide-eyed because the description of how that individual self-diagnosed themselves WAS EXACTLY WHAT I DID WORD FOR WORD HOLY SHIT.

I was already convinced I am Autistic, but each time I read Twitter threads of people's experiences with their Autistic traits, each time I watch Tik Toks or certain YouTubers share their experiences, it further solidifies that yep, I'm Autistic.

What's amazing is that my husband is very supportive. I'm extremely lucky to have married him. I've been a terrible masker but he loves me anyways. He never gave me shit for my meltdowns and tried to help me out, thinking I was just horribly overly stressed. Now that he knows why I've had the few outwardly noticeable meltdowns that I've had throughout our years together, he knows how to help me more, now. And while he's figured out my traits and what issues I have, knowing that I'm on the spectrum helps him make sense of why I'm like this, and he can help me accordingly whether it's to prepare for something in advance, help me calm down, etc.

(I should also add here real quick that there's a high chance I have OCD as well, but less of the compulsive actions and more of the obsessive thoughts, but I'm not entirely sure just yet if this is the case. I'm actually hoping to see someone about this but with the pandemic, I don't know when that will be.)

Now... onto the traits and experiences.

My Traits (that stand out with neon lights)(Will copy word-for-word a trait my mom or husband see in me and it will be typed in a different color.)

Having a folder that has all of my research I've obsessively looked up, printed out, highlighted what I saw in myself with one color (yellow) while highlighting what my mom and my husband see with another color (pink). I'm also using this folder to make this list as a reference because I sometimes forget certain traits I do have are because I'm Autistic. (I'm 32 as I write this, so when so much of what you think, do, and experience that you see is normal for you turns out to be an Autistic trait, it takes a while to get used to it and thus remember that because you haven't had a label for it your whole life.)

Despite being goth/punk, I dress as comfortably as I can. Textures aren't a very big issue for me, but what feels like strangulation of my body tends to be a problem. I cannot handle having the cross seams of pants feeling like I have a chopstick slowly impaling my vulva, or I can't stand how tight some shorts are that they pinch my hip joints.

I've NEVER spent much time grooming my own hair. It's either tiring, I"m impatient and want it done NOW, or both. This is why I have a Tank Girl haircut (all buzzed except for bangs), where I can basically "wash and go." (Husband does my haircuts and dyes and he's kickass at it.)

Eccentric personality; may be reflected in appearance.

Is youthful for age, in looks, dress, behavior, and tastes.

Usually a little more expressive in the face and gesture than male counterparts.

"May not have strong sense of identity and can be very chameleon like before diagnosis." (This resonates with me in the form that I never saw myself in ANY fictional character other than Tank Girl. My husband agrees with this opinion, but he also says he also sees a lot of me in Caulifla from Dragonball Super.)

I enjoy reading and films as a retreat, often sci-fi, fantasy, children's (sometimes), can have favorites which are a refuge.

Uses control as a stress management (like routines, rules, rigid certain habits, etc.)

Usually happiest at home or in other controlled environment.

I've been seen as "sensitive" by some, and mocked for crying a lot by others.

I struggled with social aspects of college and have 2 partial degrees.

Often have trouble holding a job and finds employment very daunting.

Slow at comprehending at times due to sensory and cognitive processing issues.

DOES NOT DO WELL WITH VERBAL INSTRUCTIONS; MUST BE WRITTEN DOWN

Special interests (I'll get into these later).

Emotionally immature and emotionally sensitive.

Anxiety and fear are predominant emotions (some of which might be due to possible OCD).

I do have some sensory issues such as visual processing issues at times, certain sounds, certain smells, food I think, and issues with sunlight and my goddamn retinas.

Moody and prone to bouts of depression. Both of my parents as well as my husband have described my personality as reminding them of a cat.

Mild to severe gastro-intestinal difficulties (some of which could be due to endometriosis, btw).

I stim a little such as leg-bouncing, foot-waggling, some hand-flapping, some bouncing, the "spine-shimmy," joint-cracking, or playing with my ears.

Prone to temper or crying meltdowns, sometimes over seemingly small things due to sensory or emotional overload.

Hates injustice and hates being misunderstood, which incites anger and rage.

Prone to mutism when stressed or upset, especially after a meltdown, likely to stutter and may have a raspy voice.

Words and actions often misunderstood by others.

Perceived to be cold-natured and self-centered; unfriendly.

Very outspoken at times, may get very fired up when talking about passionate/obsessive interests.

Will shutdown in social situations once overloaded but generally better at socializing in small doses. May even give the appearance of skilled, but it is a "performance."

Doesn't go out much; will prefer to go out with partner only (aka my husband).

Will not do "girly" things like shopping.

Takes relationships seriously.

There's a bit on this chart (some of you probably already know by know what chart I'm using here) that says due to sensory issues, one would either really enjoy sex or strongly dislike it. I'm in the former camp complete with a pretty high libido.

Often prefers the company of animals.

So there are the traits that REALLY stick out like a sore thumb. These come from a site regarding female Asperger traits or however it's labeled as. I have plenty more from two other articles I printed out with lots of highlighting, but the chart actually sums a lot of the definitive shit quite nicely. At some point in this list, I could tell I went "fuck it" and copied many things word for word anyways since I'll be talking about experiences later in this post.

But it was this chart that I'd discovered that I started to realize that I really am on the spectrum, and to triple check, I asked my mom and my husband if they saw any of this in me. The traits typed in green are ones I wasn't sure of and had to ask them if they saw it. I'm not always aware of how I am, who I am at times, etc. I also didn't want to lie about it, so I had to get second and third opinions.

Despite all of this, only very few people that know me IRL know about me being Autistic. This is because I was heavily bullied growing up and since I haven't exactly left my hometown, I really don't want whoever stayed in the area as well to either have more fuel and re-enter my life that way, or try really hard to relieve their guilty conscience and demand that I forgive them or some shit. I also don't want "Autism Mommies" to come at my ass either asking that I help their kid (I'm not fond of children so that's not happening, plus ableism is what fucks a lot of Autistic people over regarding of age but they won't take that for an answer) or that because they---a neurotypical person---have a child who's Autistic, then that means they know all about it and because I'm not exactly like their child then I can't possibly be Autistic. It's just a whole mountain of shit I don't wanna get into.

This next bit will be split into 2 parts. One will be my special interests, and the other will be my experiences from my past that are prime examples of being Autistic long before anyone in the common public knew what Autism actually was.

My Special Interests (Both Forever & Temporary)

The following list will have my special interests but with indicators in parentheses as to whether they are forever-interests (as in, I never lost interest in the thing) or temporary (meaning, it was short-lived be it by weeks, months, or a few years). This will be in chronological order, meaning: the order of which these have appeared throughout my life.

Barney (temporary; helped me skip preschool and become honor roll student in kindergarten though)

Halloween (forever)

the color orange (forever)

dinosaurs (forever)

Donkey Kong Country esp. for SNES (forever)

animals (forever)

Godzilla movies (forever)

monster movies (forever)

Pokemon (temporary; I still like Pokemon, but it's not as hyperfocused as it used to be)

Digimon (temporary; same situation as with Pokemon)

Dragonball Z (forever)

Sailor Moon (on-and-off)

Ultimate Muscle (Kinnikuman Nisei) (forever)

Freddy vs Jason movie (still like, but the hyperfocus was temporary)

horror movies (forever)

Transformers (temporary)

Dark Knight movie (temporary)

Harley Quinn (temporary)

Lobo (temporary)

X-Men (forever, but only certain universes, mainly the 90s cartoon, and the character is always Hank McCoy)

neon-colored stuff (temporary; kind of some sort of semi-rave/techno phase)

books (forever; this was when I discovered it's "legal" to enjoy books if you "aren't smart"; I may explain this logic I had later in the post)

sex/sexuality/sexology (forever on the first two, temporary on the last one)

BDSM (on-and-off)

feminism (temporary in regards to doing research and educating myself; I still hold the views I've developed as a result, just not obsessively researching this topic anymore)

anarchism (forever)

ecology (forever)

Pleistocene epoch (forever)

goth and punk stuff (forever after discovering what these things are all about for real compared to when I was in high school and had no idea how to ask, who to ask, or where to look this stuff up at in rural Ohio)

Hellblazer (temporary)

Serbian heritage (on-and-off)

bats (temporary)

arachnids (forever)

teratophilia (forever; finally have a word to describe this damn kink)

gardening (current; unsure)

Russian language (current; unsure)

DIY things (forever)

Towards the end, it may not be in the proper order thanks to slowly losing my damn mind being cooped up mostly in my room on this farm since moving back here in 2014. The two that are "current;unsure" are ones I have a hyperfocus in right now, but I don't know if this will be temporary or not. I certainly hope not, especially considering how useful these things will be. And while I have gardening as one of them, I haven't properly begun yet because I get empty promises from my parents where they claim they'd help me, not to worry about it, then get irritated when I ask where the help is and they suddenly can't give me the help when I told them I needed it.

I should also note that I don't exactly have an encyclopedic knowledge in a whole lot of these interests that are forever-interests because I'm normally exhausted just trying to exist with minimal trouble from people. I'm hoping this will change. The things I know I have an almost encyclopedic knowledge in would be Dragonball Z, animals/ecology, and... a-and that's it. That's really it. That's all I've got because Dragonball Z was so profoundly different compared to other cartoons I've watched in the 90s that it was a wonderful escape, and I grew up around animals, taking care of animals, and watching nature documentaries. The stress I went through growing up has caused my memory of some of that wonderful animal knowledge to be lost and what could be re-gained may be easily forgotten again, hence why I need to narrow my focus for what I'd like to be an ecologist for. While I love paleontology, I want to help the living world's ecosystems and environments, too. I'd love to go back to school for this stuff now that I'm more informed of who I am and what I want in life (as opposed to being forced to pick a college major while still in high school while I'm just trying to survive the concept of existence).

In terms of collecting things pertaining to my interests, a common pattern you'll see me have is a very slowly growing Hank McCoy collection. This is largely because there isn't too much stuff made regarding this character. (There also isn't much stuff I can find that involves Piccolo, Cyndaquil, Donkey Kong, giant ground sloths, etc. that isn't already snatched up by other fans.)

Now, I'm going to get into the list of experiences. Some of which will talk about my special interests, but I also really want to talk about my struggles, too.

Experiences That Screamed "I'm Autistic"

In gradeschool, I was friends with someone who probably wasn't actually a friend and her mom made her hang out with me since I didn't really have any friends. She has told me several times that she didn't want to be my friend anymore with some kind of hostile catty smile, but I just.. I wasn't getting it. Because there was a smile. Why say that with a smile? After all we've been through? Then she's back to being my friend the next week. She really wanted to hang out with the popular girls (yes, there were cliques in 90s American gradeschool) and has done countless things to sabotage our friendship such as telling me Barney is a fake, Donkey Kong was a real gorilla who hung himself, etc. And I believed all this shit, too, in an attempt to still be an acceptable friend. She even told me that I couldn't be a witch because I liked toads so much (toads were the only wildlife I excitedly interacted with in my back yard on a regular basis).

I love Halloween for many reasons, but one of them (aside from my favorite color being involved) was the fact that it was acceptable to wear a mask. I love (and still do) the idea of covering my face because I feel less "naked" to the world. So this pandemic had a small plus for me in the form of mask-wearing outside of Halloween has become somewhat more acceptable.

In 5th grade, another classmate who had more obvious Autistic traits and was diagnosed with Asperger's at the time was an asshole to me. They would constantly give me shit and bully me for whatever reason. When I finally took a stand, the teachers on duty at recess called me to the bottom of the hill, forcing me to look at them WITHOUT allowing me to have my hands up to block the sunlight that hurt my eyes, and were able to manipulate me into "admitting picking on so-and-so for no reason" because I chased them around the playground where a group of girls (the same cliquey assholes the former "friend" wanted to mingle with) had to group-carry me away. They're the ones who snitched and they gave me those same hostile smiles. That's when I learned that not all smiles meant good things. I was 10.

I sometimes "lose the ability" to ask for help long before the "help" I ever got in any circumstance was just me being met with frustration by whoever is trying to "help" me or I'm met with "sorry, can't help you there. (The former being with homework or school work, the latter being with going to authorities about bullies.)

Growing up, I was never girly (or girly enough) and I've tried to, but I failed miserably. My special interests would roar through and because it was too odd or different or annoying, it gave other girls fuel for bullying me with.

Regarding the lack of being girly enough, I was at a pool party with the former "friend" mentioned earlier and she started this "game" where she and the other girls would leap into the pool saying, "I love you, Leonardo!" This was in 4th grade and in reference to the Titanic movie, which at that point, I'd never heard of, because I was too pumped for the latest Land Before Time sequel. So when I leapt into the pool, I said, "I love you, Raphael." All the girls were confused, asked who that was. I then asked, "Aren't we playing Ninja Turtles?" Because the only Leonardo I knew of was a fucking Ninja Turtle, goddamnit. Who let you brats watch that shitty romance film anyways? Boring as fuck.

Aside from the occasional weekend visits or sleepovers at the former "friend's" house, I didn't get to socialize much, so I would spend most of my days (especially in the summer) watching what was on TV or watching from our very large VHS collection. During which I would make mental notes on how certain characters acted or what they said and try to remember that to mimic them in a social setting, which would be out of place because I'd be so focused on mainly the dialogue that once it prompts me to say the thing, they don't respond how I expect them to and then I'm at a loss.

I was very ignorant of music and didn't even know the concept of independent or underground bands existed. Plus, rural Ohio is a cultural wasteland. Otherwise, I would've gotten into metal, goth, and punk way earlier in life. So I thought that bands that existed were because television said so.

Speaking of an odd logic... If it was taboo or bad to talk about, I thought it was illegal. Thus, I thought any knowledge about sex was illegal and that it was supposed to happen "naturally."

I also thought that, because I wasn't considered as smart by my peers, some teachers, and even as such in the form of an insult from my parents from time to time (despite what they claim NOW), that also meant I wasn't allowed to enjoy books, because only smart people are allowed to enjoy reading. So therefore, it would be illegal for me, a not-smart person, to enjoy reading a book. So I had to focus on the pictures because if I enjoyed reading, somehow everyone would know and then I'd get into trouble.

I also thought it was illegal to talk about periods.

I socially struggled BADLY when I got to middle school because my brain was like... 4 years behind? How the fuck do people know all these bigger words? Or complex issues? This was also when I had to start suppressing ALL urges to cry because at that age, I'm not "supposed" to cry over everything. So I still, to this day, suppress it to the point of guaranteeing inducing a headache. Because I've always caught shit for crying.

Middle school was when I met an oppressive "friend" who was obsessed with me because she had a crush on me and was rather controlling of who I could and couldn't talk to and got pissy if I got close to making a new friend. Because I was desperate for a friend that wasn't like the former "friend," I allowed this abuse into my life.

High school was me just trying to survive. By the time I got home, I was too mentally exhausted to enjoy anything short of watching TV or whatever was rented from Blockbuster.

My brain was still feeling like it was years behind, and I struggled to keep up with whatever was supposed to be something I knew about, including the concept of masturbation.

Like I said earlier, anything sex-related might've been illegal to talk about, and because masturbation was still kinda taboo, I feared I'd get in trouble, but my teenage hormones compelled me to do it a LOT. It consumed my free time almost like an escape, a form of stimming, but I was shameful of it to the point of suicidal thoughts.

The former bullet was due to being raised in a christian household. My parents didn't have such views on sex like this, but I was afraid of being in trouble for asking, took to the internet, and caught some misinfo about how immoral it was. I mourned I'd be going to hell.

Speaking of religion, I thought it was illegal to change your religious beliefs, and there was only Judiasm, Muslim, and Buddhism outside of christianity (I'm Pagan, now).

While I was excited to get away from my parents presumably for good after high school, college was a new form of hell. The sudden, dramatic change in environment and lack of ANY preparation for living like an adult on my own caused me to mentally/socially/emotionally malfunction. I had outbursts I desperately tried to suppress, I felt stupid because everybody sounded smarter than me, I didn't actually want to go to art school but wasn't smart enough for anything else and never really bothered to better my artistic skills and thus felt like I shouldn't be there anyways, I struggled to fit in better, I had no idea how to function that certain habits such as neglect of my own dishes on my desk developed because I LITERALLY COULD NOT SEE MY OWN MESSES DUE TO THE STRESS I WAS EXPERIENCING. This was 3 or 4 long YEARS of this.

Attending art classes mostly run by very demanding (and demeaning) teachers while my art skills weren't up to par added to this stress on top of me not actually wanting to be THERE in the first place, just away from my parents.

I nearly ruined a friendship with a roommate because of my struggles. I'm not even sure if she is aware of my Autism because I'm afraid to approach her about it for some reason.

Plenty of times throughout my life where I'm loud and don't even realize it.

I've info-dumped on my parents, but right now they half or completely ignore me.

I've tried making eye contact, but it's like staring in the sun not in the sense of pain, but in the sense of by natural reaction looking away. When I force myself to make eye contact, I'm spending so much focus and effort into doing that to the point where I am unable to pay attention to what the person is saying. Instead, I stare at the mouth so I make sure I hear correctly the words they're telling me.

Each time someone is mad at me and gives me the silent treatment, and I inquire what I did to piss them off, they get madder because I'm somehow supposed to immediately know when I fucking don't. Then, half the time, they continue not telling me and I have to hear it from someone else. This further confuses me as to why they don't just simply fucking tell me.

I've annoyed people to listening to the same one or few songs over and over again. A lot (currently obsessed with the Sunset Overdrive and Tank Girl movie soundtracks).

I can "smell" the heat outside on a summer day.

I can smell other people's unique scents sometimes (especially when in someone's house; also experienced this in other people's dorms).

I can't remember what grade this was, but in high school, we went to some kind of space camp facility thing, and our class was split into two groups: one group was the group who was on Mars and ready to come home, the other was on Earth and can't wait to go to Mars. I was in the former group. My job in this little fun display interactive room thing was to examine the isotopes and report... uh.. I can't remember.. Report something that was off. Everyone else was dicking around with what they're supposed to do, and I was actually doing my job, and then said something, like I was supposed to, if I found something that was off (I don't remember the specifics). When the scientist who worked at the facility praised me on "saving the crew," I caught this look from the entire class a look I can't quite describe other than they didn't seem to like the fact that I did a good thing and was being praised for it instead of any of them (or they were shocked that a "dumb girl" like me could achieve this and get praise for it, I don't know.. hard to tell). This was a science class field trip, but despite this, I didn't have an interest in space, and still didn't feel I was smart. (Come to think of it, I think this was actually an 8th grade field trip, I can't remember.)

Just discovered this today: I'm actually very easily overwhelmed that could trigger a meltdown when I wake up. I don't know for how long until that point passes, either. But this could also be explained with how I've reacted to certain alarm clocks (the ones with the bells just induce pure rage in me). Either I will be on the verge of a meltdown or I'll have a fucking headache all day. Normally, I just wanna drink my coffee and either read or practice a little on Duolingo.

I don't always have enough room for a lot of info in my head for things that I like, so I have to carefully narrow shit down. Right now, I'm trying to figure out what to do about my urge to get my hands on some monster movies while making sure nothing else I've retained info for wanes. Not sure if this is due to stress or what. But apparently I have designated compartments for certain categories in my brain. If I get into monster movies, continue to work on my knwoledge on ecology and paleontology, and gain more knowledge about arachnids, that shouldn't impede on the "language" category, so whatever I learn in Russian will remain safe.

Interest "Webs."

I have what I'd like to call an "interest web." My special interests in one thing can lead me to having an interest in another. I care about nature, and I also care about paleontology. Paleoecology is something I'd like to dip my toes into. But because this all involves nature, I have an interest in botany (though it's still intimidating so I'm sticking with local native trees) and arachnids (after conquering my fears and learning more about them). So the web stops at arachnids there (no pun intended).

Back to ecology and paleoecology...

I have a major interest in the Pleistocene because it was just before we humans started writing shit down. Hints of that era echoes within our current environment, from the pronghorn being "unnecessarily" fast (due to miracynonyx, the "American cheetah," which is now an extinct cat) to avocados not seeding like they should without human assistance as well as the yucca trees (Joshua trees) going into retreat thanks to the absence of giant ground sloths.

But the planet is warming, and we could use all the help from plants that we get, especially when it comes to making sure that permafrost stays frozen. So there's this "Pleistocene Park" project taking place in Russia, and one day, if I get into the field of paleontology, I may want to chat with those involved in that project, but one can't expect every other country to know English.

There's also FROZEN PLEISTOCENE MEGAFAUNA CARCASSES BEING FOUND IN PERMAFROST, too.

On top of all of this, Russia's northern lands will become habitable for humans if shit hits the fan and the planet's mostly fucked, so it's still nice to know the language.

See how all of these interests intertwine? (It also helps that since I am of Serbian heritage but can't find accessible resources to learn the language and I wanna know a Slavic language that Russian is kind of accessible. It also seems to be the only Slavic language "commonly" found in colleges when it comes to foreign language courses.) This is why I call them "interest webs." Not sure if other Autistic people have them, but it's something that I have.

The second one could simply involve Halloween, punk, goth, monsters, and teratophilia with Halloween being the gateway because my favorite color is orange.

Just thought this would be a fun thing to touch on real quick.

My Sensory Traits

I do experience some sensory traits, but they're not intense like some people would assume (unless I'm simply not noticing how intense they can be).

I can "smell" the summer heat, which was something I thought everybody else experienced but I'm wrong.

My retinas hurt in bright sunlight despite not looking anywhere near the sun, which I also thought everybody else experienced.

Drinks taste different or off in some way if they're not in a particular mug, glass, etc. that the drink is supposed to be in. (I have certain mugs that I enjoy my coffee in, but the other mugs? They taste off. I can't explain why. I have ONLY TWO acceptable little tumbler glasses for orange juice.)

Breakfast food does not taste like breakfast food unless it's on this one specific plate from my childhood.

Dinner can be iffy on certain plates, but the safest go-to is the knock-off blue willow plates.

Lunch is acceptable on anything, but if I'm having simply a sandwich, it must be on a small plate.

I have specific forks I'd prefer to use because of how they feel in my hand, how the food-part feels in my mouth, and how the fork itself tastes.

Gotta have cinnamon in my coffee. I just do. It's not coffee without it.

I cannot fucking handle hair snippets of any size for any reason on my body. This is why there is a rigid procedure to where my husband must buzz my hair over a paper-towel-covered sink (to avoid clogging the drain) while wearing a particular tanktop Harley Quinn night shirt, and then I must shower immediately afterwards. During the haircut, my skin itches like mad like I'm being poked by the hairs directly even in places where hair snippets have never, ever gone.

I'm overly sensitive to the cold to the point of pain, especially in my fingers and toes.

Also cannot brush teeth with cold water because it's so painful (this was LONG before I had dental issues and persists to this day). Even my tongue hurts from it.

I'm picky as fuck with candy. Trick-or-treating was sometimes difficult because all I cared about was either orange-flavored stuff, or chocolate. Only specific chocolates, too (Krackle, Mr. Goodbar, Crunch, Butterfinger, Reese's, that was it.) Skittles were okay, but a lot of the baggies I got had a LOT the red ones and the red ones suck. Can't stand the other candies. (But my tastes have changed since then, and I opt for European chocolate from Aldi's as they are far superior, especially Moser Roth's 70% dark chocolate and Choceur's coffee and cream chocolate.)

Speaking of candy, the Whopper's Robin's Eggs tasted better than regular Whoppers and I will never be able to explain why.

Despite loving orange flavored stuff, I have trust issues when I see an unlabeled orange candy because there's the dangerous chance it could be fucking peach flavored. *gag* (I like real peaches, but the artificial flavored ones suck balls.) Due to my dental situation, I cannot enjoy very much in a way of candy, and the only artificial orange flavoring I CAN enjoy is through Vitamin D gummies... And even then, EVEN THEN I have to worry about the fucking peach flavors if I have to go with a different brand because we can't get our hands on a bottle from Simple Truth.

Artificial cherry flavoring is death.

The ONLY flavored medicine that was acceptable to me was orange (of course) and those dissolving strips that were grape-flavored that they don't fucking make anymore because fuck me that's why. Everything else was peer-pressured to do shots kiddie edition.

The different colored coatings on M&M's taste different from one another and I cannot explain why. It's very subtle, hardly noticeable, BUT I CAN TELL.

Peanutbutter is fucking amazing.

The smell of peanutbutter is fucking not.

There are these frozen meals my husband gets for days he doesn't have energy to cook and one of them (all from the same brand) smells like fucking hell.

My husband's Nissan Cup Noodle ramen overpowers my incense despite what other household members say.

I love incense, especially dragonsblood, "coffee time," pumpkin spice, raven, and rain.

All of the autumn scents or scents associated with autumn are orgasmic to me.

The smell of artificial cherry is death.

I would love to have perfume or body spray of Play-Doh.

I can compare smells of some places to others, such as the library branch I frequent smells like my gradeschool, as do SOME of their books' pages, and when my husband and I walked through this hall-like tunnel-like storefront in downtown Pittsburgh, I said it smelled like my grandma's basement, and he thought the same, so we're in aggreeance that all grandma's basements smell the same. Except for my Baba and Deda's. Their basement smelled like they actually still enjoy life and had their shit together.

Speaking of gradeschool smells, my gradeschool had two directions of classrooms, one led towards the gym, but the hall off to the side was carpeted, had some nice colors, and held 2 kindergarten classes and 2 first grade classes. That section of the building had its distinctive smells. The other direction led to the office, the cafeteria, and the hall with the 2 classes of grades 2 through 5 plus the preschool and the art/music class was. The smell was different in all classes EXCEPT for the music/art class, and I never went to preschool so I wouldn't know what that smells like.

ALL PRINCIPLE OFFICES SMELL THE SAME. HOW.

I could smell when my husband accidentally put in cinnamon when he thought he grabbed paprika in a dish that I liked. He was terrified of telling me. That was a happy accident and it became a permanent ingredient. He was mortified and shocked that I could smell his whoopsie in my dinner he made me.

I can also smell the cinnamon they use in Little Caeser's pizza crust. Yes. They use cinnamon. But I was the only one to notice.

Honey is like peanutbutter: it tastes amazing. But holy shit fuck that smell.

Gas stations smell like death, sadness, and questioning life's choices.

No two people's car interiors smell alike.

I can smell when it will rain soon, especially if it's about to storm.

I'm the one who noticed that hairy white oldfield asters smell like cake batter.

Dominant yellow filling my entire vision can be sometimes painful.

I used to be able to "hear" the color yellow in my head so much I thought yellow actually made a noise. It was a particular shade of yellow, and it made this Playskool toy-like clicking bell ringing noise, but really obnoxiously, almost painfully. I don't know how to describe the shade other than "cloudy pastel lemon?" It looked like the fucking lemon-flavored medicine I had to take as a kid.

My parents tried mixing in this cherry flavored death medicine in with my orange soda thinking I wouldn't know the difference but I did, so I dumped it down the drain and opened a new can because that can of Big K orange was fucking ruined.

Orange is wonderful to my eyes. But it's a hard color for me to find when it comes to getting things in a particular color. My back-up colors are red, green, and purple.

The sunlight hurts my retinas, even when I'm not looking at the sky at all, but the pain intensity increases the further I look up on a sunny summer day. This has been like this since childhood. Prescriptive sunglasses shouldn't be fucking expensive and should be covered by healthcare insurance.

I have to try really FUCKING hard not to stare at someone's muscles in person because ugh... Good thing I rarely see anybody who's well-built. (No really, this isn't even really a sexual thing, I'm so fucking fascinated and once I realize "oh, so that particular muscle looks like that from that angle", I get a glimmer of hope that I MIGHT be able to draw something humanoid since I suck at drawing people.)

Orange trees as so pleasing to the eye, and these are much more socially acceptable to stare at, lest I'm in person and the property owner might think I'm plotting to steal some (luckily I've never been anywhere near a place that grows orange trees).

Neon lights are amazing and I want them to come the fuck back. I swear, stores were so much more enjoyable of an environment when they were common. Such lights improve my mood in a way I cannot describe. I'm no longer in a hurry to get home if I am in the presence of neon lights.

Sunny days during winter are painful because the sunlight reflects off the snow. I'm painfully blinded if I look outside or go anywhere.

I cannot handle the sight of someone having boogers/snot hanging from their nose, not the sight of someone vomiting, nor the sight of an syringe needle piercing flesh.

I cannot handle the sound of alarm clock bells. I have woken up in a rage and been in a bad mood I try so hard to suppress for a good portion of the day. If I hear an alarm clock bell now these days, I wanna take it and chuck it across the room regardless the time of day or if I'm already awake. It's not so bad if I hear it from a video. In person? That's starting a war with me.

Children crying or screaming (especially babies) are almost painful to me and triggers my fight-or-flight response.

The reason why I was the loudest mellophone player in marching band was to drown out hearing the fucking trumpets. And I did; I was louder than the trumpets. (I quit marching band my sophomore year but for different reasons.)

Much of the music from the 80s that gave it that sound that definitely said it's from the 80s is very pleasing to my ears.

I love punk music for its messages, lyrics, and energy, but goth always puts me into a headspace where I feel like I'm at home; I'm at peace and want to cuddle the monster under my bed.

However, some punk songs can hit deep or strong and live rent-free in my head, such as Anti-Flag's "Racist," Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl," and Skarpretter's "Nazi Scum."

One particular artist's voice I cannot get over because his is the first voice of any kind that makes me wanna fan myself is Peter Steele of Type O Negative. My favorite song, however, is "All Hallow's Eve" because his voice, the subject, and the lyrical content.

I'm able to hear something off in the oscillating fan my husband likes to use before he notices it.

I'm the one who can hear coyotes at night (doesn't help my mom wants to blast westerns to drown out the world and I'm back here in my room away from that shit though).

I can hear the branches scraping against the house, gently making creepy noises before I realize what the fuck it is, BUT NOBODY ELSE HEARS IT.

I can recognize the call of a robin because we had so many at the house I grew up in, and nobody else in this family fucking noticed.

I tend to notice the sound of the rain over all the house noise first.

I don't like tight clothing, which is why I prefer bralettes because my tits hurt.

If I could, I'd go without the bra because the band can sometimes suddenly feel tighter than it actually is, but because I have large nipples, I kinda need that bra for a bit of protection.

Shorts can be tight around the crotch, hip joins, and lower belly region, and that's a big no-no for me.

I'd prefer baggy pants, honestly.

Can't have tight footwear. No.

The seam at the top of socks or tights hurt my pinky toes if the whole sock/tights shift that way.

I already covered the hair snippet thing so since this is the sense of touch, another body hair thing is I kinda don't wanna shave my pits anymore because they are extremely itchy when they grow back. HAVE to shave my crotch because if I don't it gets horribly itchy, and my thick, fast-growing hair weaves into underwear, gets caught in pads, etc.

Ah yes. Pads. I hate them, but they're far more acceptable than a tampon or a cup because I have vaginismus.

Certain fabric textures are itchy as hell. There's a black shirt I have whose collar and cuffs are gorgeous but I have to wear something underneath to avoid feeling itchy.

Winter is hell for me here in the midwest, as I am very susceptible to the cold to the point of pain, especially in my fingers and toes. I become very slow, too. I feel like I can't get warm enough most of the time.

Air conditioned places in the summer feel almost similar, so I don't always wear shorts if I'm expected to go into, say, a Walmart with my husband to pick up everything. I'll shiver.

(We're gonna get into TMI territory here.) Can't masturbate by hand unless I've got a nitrile glove on because my brain only focuses on what my fingers are touching more than what my cunt feels.

Can't have any sex with my husband without anything brighter than low-light because things can be visually distracting in the room, or lights can suddenly feel way too bright to me. (Halloween string lights or those LED rope lights with adjustable brightness features and colors are excellent for this situation.)

In Conclusion

This is all that I've figured out so far. None of this hit me at once as a realization when I figured out that I'm Autistic. This took a while to realize it, and the realizations were mostly at random times through examples of other people experiencing it on the internet or through me going, "Huh, is that an Autistic trait?"

There may be even more that I'm currently unaware of or have forgotten to type here.

I apologize for how extremely lengthy this was. This took all day to type because of having to get up and do other things that needed to be done. One of the reasons why I really wanted to type this is because it's much easier to organize this on a computer, and I am absolutely shit at organizing files on my computer.

Unfortunately, while my husband is wonderful in supporting me, my parents aren't exactly all that great at it. Especially my dad, who is either vaguely dismissive or outright "forgets" that I'm Autistic (he honestly just... doesn't care, and tries to make things convenient for him at the expense of others most of the time). My mom... I'm not real sure. There are times where she seems to remember and others where she doesn't. I'm honestly wondering if they don't like knowing that I'm Autistic because that means my brother would have been as his traits were far more obvious than mine.

I hope that whoever is questioning whether or not they're Autistic has found this helpful at least in the sense that it would point you in the right direction on where to go next, but I would highly recommend checking out online Autistic communities, as that's where I've discovered that I'm on the spectrum.

#autism #asperger's #adhd #special interests #sensory traits #autistic traits #sorry for how long this is

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skybird13 · 5 years ago

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*sigh* Okay...

I’ve been debating on whether or not to make this post. Not because it doesn’t need to be made, but because I’m not sure I’m emotionally up for it. But at the end of the day, staying quiet is exactly what got us into this mess, and curling into a sad little ball isn’t going to change what happened, and this particular shit needs to be called out and acknowledged.

I was asked to address something posted by Eddy Rivas, one of the writers of RWBY, on Reddit yesterday. It was a shortlived post because apparently he or someone who read it realized what a monumentally bad idea it was, but sadly for him, my fellow cockroach gays are pissed as hell and we have screenshot capabilities. I don’t care that he removed/edited the post. This was still his instinctive response to the absolute pain caused by him and the rest of CRWBY as a result of volume 7 episode 12:

I am so damn tired and so hurt. But I am going to do my best to address this in a civil and reasonable way.

The Problem With Judgment Calls

First of all, to an extent, I understand the predicament Eddy describes. I really do. I get that being on the creative end of a popular web series is very different from being on the fandom end, and conventional wisdom dictates that creators should do their best to make sure the two don’t mix past a certain point. That necessary separation probably does make these kinds of judgment calls difficult.

The problem is that several members of CRWBY (including writers, animators both former and current, social media managers, and the marketing team specifically) violated that boundary more than once long before episode 12 aired. There were so many things that factored into Fair Game gaining traction as quickly as it did, and many of those things came from the deliberate way that many members of CRWBY interacted with the fandom outside of the show itself. From the official RWBY Twitter account to the suggestive tweets made by a former animator, to the Twitter and Tumblr posts made by a current animator, this ship was heavily and unambiguously encouraged and leaned on multiple times over the course of this volume.

Sure, you can make the claim that you can’t control the animators (especially if they no longer work for you), or that the creators and the marketing team are two separate entities and that the actions of one do not necessarily reflect the intentions of the other (both things also stated by Eddy Rivas in a series of Tweets). And perhaps some of that is accurate. It points towards a fundamental lack of oversight and cohesiveness in the organization that is Rooster Teeth, and that should absolutely be addressed moving forward, but quite frankly, in this case, it doesn’t even matter.

The fact of the matter, Mr. Rivas, is that the boundary was violated. Multiple times. On your end. These types of judgment calls are not a one size fits all, and the moment active members of CRWBY took action to encourage something you knew was going to cause pain, it should have been addressed. I’m not putting that on you personally, because as a writer I realize you probably don’t have that type of authority, but someone there should have put a stop to it. There is the matter of the personal responsibility shirked by the two animators who contributed to this mess, and frankly, they should have known better, but this does not excuse CRWBY’s collective silence.

The fact of the matter is that due to the actions taken by CRWBY both in and outside of the show (including the things you could and could not control) you absolutely reached a point where that boundary should have been purposefully crossed in order to mitigate damage. It doesn’t matter what got you or us there. It doesn’t matter whether or not it was intentionally done (it was, let’s not kid ourselves). Things built up, hopes were raised as a direct result of your actions, and you all reached a point where you were morally obligated to say something. Do I suggest a single individual should have taken this on? No. I understand the legal ramifications of that. But CRWBY as a whole and RT as the production studio absolutely should have stepped forward. Would that have fully removed the pain and the disappointment? No. But you wouldn’t be facing the backlash you are right now if you had.

The Problem with One-Size-Fits-All

Closely related to the previous point is the fact that you, Mr. Rivas, seem to be under the impression that a single judgment call policy should and can apply to all situations equally. That’s not the case. We’re not talking about other ships here, hypothetical, canonical, realistic, unrealistic, or otherwise. We’re talking about this ship.

The Fair Game ship was the first and only indication we had in seven volumes of RWBY that a prominent mlm relationship might be coming in to play. You have no other relationships of this nature in the show. You don’t even have other male characters who might be able to qualify as gay or bisexual who play major roles. Add on to that the fact that you planned to have one of these characters die in the most brutal and graphic death scene we have gotten to date in RWBY, and no. I’m sorry. That flimsy defense doesn’t stand. This ship was unique, it appealed to a very underserved segment of your fandom, and it should have been treated with the levity it deserved.

You make the argument that saying something about this ship but not others wasn’t plausible. The issue with that, sir, is one of trust. Up to this point, I and a lot of people I know trusted you, which means you can get away with building up relationships without ever coming out to confirm or deny them offscreen. As long as you understand the narrative promises you’re making as a storyteller to your audience, and understand the importance of fulfilling them through narrative payoff at some point in the story, we’re usually pretty willing to follow you and watch it unfold. This is how writing works. You have to be aware of the promises you’re making and you have to be able to follow through on them in satisfying ways. This goes double if you plan to fulfill them in unexpected ways (note the word fulfilled still applies). If you don’t do that, trust is broken and you have a problem.

Fair Game is unique in that you knew from the beginning that trust was going to not only be violated but brutally so. CRWBY made promises with Clover and Qrow that they never intended to keep, and that is one of the core issues here. If you want to cling to the excuse that it was all unintentional (again, one I do not buy), that only means you absolutely should have said something to that effect long before we ever got to this point. It would have given nothing about the plot away to let us know that wasn’t the intended direction and it would have calmed down the excitement that built up so quickly around the ship. It certainly would have prevented a lot of people from being emotionally and psychologically damaged as a result of having that trust destroyed.

Not saying something about relationships that may or may not happen is VERY different from not saying something about a ship that you know is not going to happen because you plan to brutalize and murder one of the characters on screen in spite of the narrative promises made. Particularly when the ship in question would have offered rep to people who thus far in the show ( when we’re over halfway through the series) still have none.

No rep to be found here...

I’m not sure I should even have to address this but apparently, it needs to be said. It will be short because it’s a pretty damn simple answer.

You want to know “how well [saying no rep to be found here would] have gone over?” A hell of a lot better than the queerbaiting fest you have victimized us all to for the last three months. Would you still have had disappointed fans on your hands? Absolutely. But the psychological and emotional damage you all caused in episode 12 could have been so easily avoided, and that should have taken precedence over whatever tension you wanted to maintain between these characters in the show.

This should not have been a difficult decision, and quite frankly, the fact that you don’t understand this is a little alarming.

We Are Not a Shopping Montage

Alright. Here is where my civility is going to deteriorate noticeably, so fair warning.

You had the audacity to compare the emotional trauma of hundreds of LGBTQ fans to the disappointment of not getting a fucking shopping montage??? You even acknowledge that on an emotional level these two things are nowhere near being the same thing, and you still tried to justify your actions and the actions of CRWBY with it? That emotional fallout is the thing that matters here.

But there’s even more to it than that.

The hopes for a shopping montage came from a single Tweet from the official RWBY Twitter (if I remember right) about a montage scene being in volume 7. That was it. That was all fans had to go off of. This absolutely was a case of imaginations running wild and people hoping for a scene that, quite frankly, in light of the show’s trajectory since volume 3, wasn’t a reasonable expectation to begin with. CRWBY was in no way complicit in or responsible for this expectation that I know of, and even if you were.... It. Was. A. Shopping. Montage.

And you dare to compare that with the intentional queer coding of Qrow and Clover’s relationship in the writing, the animation choices, the character design for Clover, and the behavior of CRWBY on social media, only for Clover to die horrifically and for Qrow to be absolutely destroyed emotionally and mentally on-screen??? You dare to relate the disappointment of people who didn’t get a pointless shopping scene with the trauma of watching a loved character’s murder and another loved character’s emotional/mental destruction??? Really? That seemed like an appropriate thing to say?

I don’t even know what else to say to this except absolute world-shattering shame on you, sir. How dare you?

And then to top all of this off, instead of apologizing, instead of showing some contrition, you tried to delete this post and pretend you never said it. Did you hope we wouldn’t notice? That we wouldn’t react if you tried to take it down? Were you even the one who realized what you said or did you need it pointed out to you?

You should not be a writer, sir. You sure as hell should not be a creator of content that engages with people on an emotional level because you clearly have no respect for it and no understanding of the responsibility you bear because of it.

What is wrong with you?

Tagging @fairgame-is-endgame who asked me to say something on this absolute bullshit.

#fair game #crwby #wtf crwby #rwby #rwby7 #rwby7 spoilers #rwby spoilers #qrow branwen #clover ebi #eddy rivas

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lillupon · 4 years ago

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So, I've got a very long rant/opinion here and Idk really know how to say this without coming off kinda bad but I'm gonna say it anyways. I agree with the fact that the seventeen tag has been kinda dry lately on most fanfic places, but it's really only in the smut area. It's the sane way with other groups too I feel like. All of the nice little innocent tags are boomin to this day and thats completely fine. I think the smut tag is dry tho bc lately I feel like a few social issues (like sexualizing people and disrespecting them and their identity) have crossed over into kpop and have been ?blown out of proportion? Lately there's been a rampage of people who like to say that writing smut about someone is disgusting and is dehumanizing because people want to assume that it would make the idols uncomfortable which could equate to some morality issues on how you are reducing someone only to their body without their consent and a bunch of stuff like that. It kind of pisses me off bc this is fiction. About grown adults. Clamping down on horny people who simp over hot asian men isn't going to solve the issues we face in real life. I think a shit ton is wrong with the world we currently live in, and deciding to come after something that isn't even real bothers me. Like what does that actually accomplish. But yeah, I think thats a reason why smut has been dying down. I mean, on youtube almost every video about unpopular opinions, or things they dont like about kpop will include something about shipping idols in fanfics. And then everyone in the comment section will talk about how its all fine and dandy in moderation, but once people start writing smut it's crossing the idols personal boundaries. It's something I've been seeing a lot more often and I think people who are interested in writing smut are being turned away from it bc we've gotten to a point where people are being called disgusting for having fantasies.

Hi Anon, thank you for sending in this Ask.

I want to preface this by saying: when I write or talk about Mingyu and Wonwoo fucking on my blog, it is a fantasy. I am not speculating about what the real Mingyu and Wonwoo might be like in bed. I am imagining the versions of Mingyu and Wonwoo that I have created in my head, that exist only in my stories. None of it is real. I understand that this can be a blurry boundary for some people. But for me, the separation between fantasy and reality is well-defined. Now, on to your Ask!

You’ve hit the nail on the head with this one. You’ve also touched on many of the issues I have been struggling with myself as of late. It’s difficult to argue about morals since everyone has a different set of values, as well as different comfort levels. Some people think real person fiction (RPF) is a gross invasion of privacy. Others are fine with it. And others don’t care one way or another. There is no single answer; I can only offer my answer. Which means, of course, people are welcome to disagree with it, or parts of it.

In this essay (LOL But forreal: this is an essay), I will be sharing my experience in the k-pop fanfic community from 2014 to present, the etiquette I personally abide by as a reader and writer of RPF, as well as my stance on RPF in general.

I started reading and posting fanfics back in 2014/2015 on a website called AsianFanfics (AFF). Obviously, no one on that site had a problem with RPF, since AFF is a platform made specifically for sharing stories about Asian celebrities. For many years, I read and enjoyed RPF with zero guilt. I scribbled away by myself in my own corner of fandom and curated my own content. I didn’t interact much with other fans, readers, or writers. I didn’t have a Twitter, and I only used tumblr to reblog memes. As a result, I’ve been able to avoid a lot of anti-shipping discourse, as well as purity and cancel culture. I had no idea there were so many negative opinions about RPF. It wasn’t until I became active on the subreddit r/Fanfiction last year that I learned about all the discourse surrounding RPF.

This newfound ‘awareness’ does make me feel guilty at times—but only because after mulling this over, I still don’t think this is something to feel guilty about.

Here’s what I remember, first and foremost, when I create and consume RPF: fanfics and my favourite ships are fictional, and fiction is fantasy. This is basic etiquette when it comes to RPF, and most people in the k-pop fandom understand this. Delusional fans exist, of course, but they are not representative of the entire k-pop community.

Another point of etiquette is to keep fanfics within fandom spaces. I would never push my fics into celebrities’ faces, or go around claiming that my fanfics are accurate representations of a k-idol’s life or personality, in any way, shape, or form. I would also discourage directing ship-related questions to official accounts, or bringing them up during fansigns or other face-to-face interactions; I believe that in these instances, shipping does have the potential to strain real-life relationships.

So with basic etiquette out of the way, let me share my approach to RPF in general.

As much as we like to think we know our favourite celebrities, we really don’t. All we see is their public persona. And this public persona is intentionally controlled, managed, and curated by a team of people: directors, tabloids, editors, makeup artists, publicists, etc. How “real” are these celebrities? We are so distanced from them that they may as well be fictional.

I draw from the public persona that idols project, and I work them into my own writing. But at the end of the day, these personalities are my own interpretation. My interpretation is probably nothing like an idol’s actual personality. I just use the “public persona/character” that idols portray as inspiration for my own stories, which are set in wildly different universes.

More than anything, I think of k-pop idols as “actors” in my fic. You know how when you write an original novel, you scroll through Google images, looking for the perfect person to portray your original character? RPF is literally that, except you might build upon pre-existing dynamics and personalities.

When it comes to explicit fanfiction, two main concerns are prevalent: one of consent, and one of sexualisation.

If we argue against explicit RPF due to lack of consent, we should be willing to apply the same lens to all explicit works. How do we know that the creator of a movie, book, series, etc., is okay with us using their characters in our stories, explicit or not? We don’t. Perhaps some creators encourage fanfiction, but don’t want their lovingly crafted characters engaging in sexual acts or experiencing trauma. We just don’t know. I feel this line is even more blurred when we talk about characters from movies or TV series.

Let’s take Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, as portrayed by Chris Evans and Sebastian Stan, from the Captain America movies as an example. I am willing to bet that when people consume and create explicit fanfiction about Steve and Bucky, they are imagining Chris Evans and Sebastian Stan in their heads. I doubt many people are imagining the 2D cartoon versions of Steve and Bucky, even though they’re technically the exact same characters. Why? Well, it could be because movies are more readily and easily consumed than comics, and so people are unfamiliar with comic book Steve and Bucky. But it might also be because fans find Chris Evans and Sebastian Stan attractive. Is this really any different from RPF, where fic authors make up everything about a celebrity’s life?

When readers and writers of fanfic talk about how hot Steve Rogers or Bucky Barnes is, those comments are about Chris Evans and Sebastian Stan’s bodies. When reading explicit stories, fans are going to picture Chris and Sebastian’s bodies in their head, doing sexual things. Can we say, “Well, it’s not really you, Chris/Sebastian”, when in a way, it is?

The reality is, people are going to thirst over celebrities, regardless of whether or not explicit fanfiction exists. They’re going to post thirst tweets on Twitter. They’re going to talk to friends and strangers online about how hot [insert celebrity name here] is. They’re going to fantasize about dating and having sex with their favourite celebrity. Or, as it is in my case, they’re going to make up stories in their heads about their favourite idols dating and banging each other. People are going to do all of this without ‘getting consent’ from the celebrity. Cracking down upon and shaming writers of RPF isn’t going to change any of that.

To be honest, I’m not sure why people think it is disgusting to imagine sexual scenarios about real people. It is okay and normal to have these kinds of fantasies. I suppose the alternative is to fantasise about having sex with cartoon characters instead? It’s a very binary way of thinking to say that if you imagine/write real people in explicit scenarios, you are immediately sexualising, dehumanising, or objectifying them. There is more to dehumanisation than writing smut about our favourite celebrities. For one thing, you can love someone and appreciate all parts of them, and still want to fuck their brains out. And generally, fanfics come from a place of love—love that is not only sexual in nature.

Is it the sharing aspect inherent to fanfiction? The possibility that a celebrity might stumble upon explicit works about them? The chances are very low, I think, of the k-pop idols I enjoy writing about coming across my English fics. But I also believe in curating your own content, and that applies to celebrities too. Perhaps a celebrity should not go searching for fanfics about themselves. And of course, people should not show celebrities their fanfics, unless invited.

Another argument I hear against (explicit) RPF is, “How would you feel if someone wrote fanfiction about you?” First off, I don’t like this argument because there’s a difference between someone who decides to be a public figure versus someone who decides to remain a regular private citizen. Celebrities should and do know what they’re getting into when they choose their occupation. (This is not to say, “They are celebrities; sexualise them all you want because that’s what they signed up for.” Here, I am only acknowledging that people might have sexual fantasies about celebrities they are attracted to. Presumably, celebrities are cognizant of this.)

If someone (whose existence I am not even aware of, mind you) decides they want to write explicit fanfiction of me in some tiny corner of the Internet, I wouldn’t care so long as: (1) they don’t shove it into my face, and (2) they don’t harass me and ask invasive questions about my personal life and relationships. It’s not hurting me or negatively affecting my life, so it wouldn’t even register as a blip on my radar. When fanfiction remains within its appropriate spaces, it is largely harmless.

Now, if a k-pop idol were to ask their fans to stop writing fanfiction about them, would I? Yes, I would. However, I can’t imagine that happening. Judging by the number of ‘sexy’ concepts, fanservice moments, and variety shows such as ‘We Got Married’, I am certain that k-pop idols realise they are the stars of many fantasies—some of which are explicit in nature. Considering the prevalence of shipping in the k-pop industry, I would argue that shipping is subtly encouraged.

It’s sad that so many talented writers are shamed out of fandom, or feel that k-pop cannot be the medium through which they tell their stories, or explore their sexuality, or cope with trauma, or simply have fun. Professional works and Hollywood love their RPF—readers and writers of fanfics should be able to, as well.

As you said Anon, “clamping down on horny people who simp over hot asian men isn't going to solve the issues we face in real life” (this is a lovely sentence, by the way). The kind of person who dehumanises another and reduces them to a sexual object will do so some other way, if not via fanfiction. I don’t think the issue of fetishisation can be fixed simply by telling people not to write explicit RPF. In my experience, people who read and write RPF are more respectful and thoughtful about these things than the general public. We’ve all seen the general public say highly sexual things about celebrities in the media and to their faces, or tag celebrities in their thirst tweets. Are these things less invasive than fanfiction? Personally, I don’t think so. And in my opinion, there are more pressing and damaging issues in stan culture than fanfic.

In conclusion, I don’t think there is anything wrong with creating and consuming RPF, both explicit and non-explicit so long as we:

Remember we are writing fiction

Keep RPF within its appropriate space, and

Do not harass celebrities about their personal lives and relationships

RPF is not for everyone. There may be people who enjoy RPF, but draw the line at explicit stories. This is fine. Everyone has their own personal preferences. What is not fine, however, is attacking people for creating things you don’t like. I’m not sure what kind of moral crusade people are on and what they hope to achieve by shaming writers of RPF, explicit or otherwise. Ultimately, fic authors are writing a fantasy. It’s not real; no one is being hurt. I think it’s important for people to curate their own content, and AO3 makes it very easy to filter out explicit works and unwanted tags.

Maybe this is me trying to justify my own participation in explicit RPF—I don’t know. What I do know is that I love k-pop, and fandom is an important part of my media and entertainment experience. I adore the k-pop idols I write about, and I just want to imagine them being happy and getting lots of love and orgasms. Let a bitch be horny, goddamn…

Some bonus fun facts!

At the time I am writing this, on AO3:

26.2% of Stray Kids fanfics are rated M or E

26.3% of Seventeen fanfics are rated M or E

29.0% of Merlin fanfics are rated M or E

34.9% of Captain America (Movies) fanfics are rated M or E

40.1% of BTS fanfics are rated M or E ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Coincidentally, I saw this post on Reddit this morning: Can we have a RPF positivity post?

#asks #my writing #fic & fandom #I keep coming back to fiddle and add things to this answer #but I think I've said all I wanted to now...

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knuxfan24 · 5 years ago

Text

Sonic ‘06 - Greenflower Zone Mod Technical Write Up

On April 27th of 2020 I released the Version 1.1 update for my Greenflower Zone mod for Sonic ‘06, a few days before release, I got the idea to do a technical write up on the process that I went through making this mod, as it is a strange one that has morphed over the span of almost a year, evolving and growing with the ‘06 Modding Scene itself.

Original Proof of Concept

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Back in May of 2019, I started toying around with some old Sonic ‘06 tools, thanks to my interest in modding the game rising following improvements in Xenia which made the game more playable within it. As I’d previously done Greenflower Zone Act 1 for Shadow The Hedgehog in February of the same year, I decided to use it as an experiment for importing stage terrain into ‘06; as I already knew the rough process for converting a model to an XNO thanks to me trying to put one of my Sonic Forces Avatars over Sonic. However, we didn’t have a way to do collision at this point, so my initial plan was to use the common_stopplayercollision object to kind of fake the collision so I would at least be able to walk around it. Unfortunately, the character doesn’t treat that object as ground, so they just float above it. Yet I still decided to place some objects around by manually typing in coordinates based off the object placements I’d previously done for the Shadow port.

Initial Collision Experiments

Shortly afterwards, Melpontro offered to convert a collision mesh for me, while we didn’t have surface tags on it, it was a good enough job to let me experiment more with the stage, which I did by continuing to copy and paste object coordinates from the Shadow port, again, all in plain text XML files. As a result, objects weren’t rotated correctly due to Quaternion Rotation being literal satan and I would have to check an object in game to even see if it was close to being correct.

SonicGLVL

At some point, I hit upon the idea of using SonicGLVL (the Sonic Generations Level Editor) to visualise the object placements. This mostly came about due to me remembering that object rotations in Generations SET Files are also Quaternions, so I could copy and paste their values to get the rotations correct. While I was still hand typing everything, this made it easier to determine object placements, especially considering Shadow The Hedgehog could spawn multiple Rings from one Ring object, a feature ‘06 lacks, as a result, I had to guess the right coordinates for the other Rings with no way to visually check it without booting up the game.

Surface Properties and Sticky Walls

A few days after I’d done more SET work, I sent Melpontro a version of the collision with various meshes tagged by type, allowing him to create collision with various Surface Properties, resulting in proper footstep sounds for surfaces. However, this also led to an issue caused by ‘06′s unusual tagging system for collision meshes.

Walls in ‘06 need to be tagged as such, resulting in quite a bit of trial and error until we got it mostly working. With Act 1 done to a good enough state for a proper work in progress, it was time to move on to Act 2.

WinForms and HedgeLib

Around the time of working on Act 2, I decided to start cobbling together various small C# programs using HedgeLib to try and help me with the process, while I was roughly familiar with bits and pieces of the ‘06 SET Format thanks to my previous work on the Sonic ‘06 Randomiser there was still a lot of things I didn’t know.

One of the first things I wrote was something that would load a SET File and allow me to see all the parameter values of the objects within the SET. This allowed me to document what I thought the parameters for certain objects do (while also discovering a frustrating quirk in HedgeLib). As time passed, work continued on Act 2, while I also started creating an original layout for Shadow, designed under the mindset of playing the stage backwards. Before I got sidetracked working on something else.

The Mod Manager’s early beginnings

Over time, I gradually became frustrated with having multiple copies of ‘06 and accidentally cross contaminating them with various mods thanks to me copying them to the wrong install. While Hyper had a GitHub page for a Sonic ‘06 Mod Manager, it didn’t actually work, leading to me to write a small C# Command Line application to copy and remove the Greenflower files for me. This eventually led to me creating a small GUI for it with the ability to load multiple mods together, which would soon be expanded upon.

Around the same time, I also experimented with Melpontro’s old Emerald Coast stage mod, managing to get it running on Xenia, while also figuring out how ‘06 handles volume objects such as camera volumes. I also brought back a joke Sonic Forces mod at this point, Chair The Sonic, which would evolve into Furniture Adventure 3 before I killed the joke thanks to it going far enough to become unfunny.

Greenflower did take a backseat at this point, only really being used to test Vertex Colours for underwater colouring, as well as experimentation with the game’s dynamic lighting system. Though it would soon be used as a testing ground for something.

The GLVL Converter

On the 2nd of June, I posted this image to my Twitter, based on the wording of my tweet, it sounded like I already had a system in place to convert Generations objects to ‘06. However, I would have still had to do all the parameters manually in an XML. This process seeked to change that, with me manually creating GLVL Templates for objects as I needed them and writing code to auto convert them (shamelessly ripping off the GensToForcesSETConverter in the process). At a future point, I wrote a tool that would autogenerate the templates for me, although the object parameters were just labelled as Parameter1, Parameter2 and so on.

Throughout the process of experimenting with and understanding objects, Greenflower was used as my test bed, as I was too lazy to make a proper test stage for myself at the time and didn’t really have easy access to the unused test level recreations.

The Mod Manager and Tropical Jungle Extra

While working on the SET Conversion experiments, I continued to work on my Mod Manager alongside it before creating a new experiment to mess around with the DLC system and the converter. I started creating a layout for the third section of Tropical Jungle for Sonic, as he does not normally visit that segment of the stage.

Greenflower took a massive backseat at this point, as most of the focus went into Tropical Jungle Extra, before me and Hyper teamed up to create a better Mod Manager out of both of our work. After releasing Tropical Jungle Extra, I worked on a similar concept for Silver and the first section of Dusty Desert, although this never saw the light of day, nor did my short lived attempt at creating a DLC episode for Knuckles.

Lost in Translation and Camera Experiments

At some point in July, I started tinkering with Greenflower again, rebuilding the SET files from the ground up with our new templates and the GLVL Converter, while also experimenting with using dynamic cameras for some parts, at some point I also inserted the music thanks to our XMA workarounds. However, thanks to me having no ability to experiment with the collision, I drifted away from it again and started working on a new project, messing around with Google Translate’s API. This project became Sonic The Hedgehog: Lost in Translation.

I was still working on the Randomiser at this point, so my attention was very divided, with Greenflower slipping down the priority list. At this point, I was also aware of SRB2 2.2′s intent to redesign the zone from the ground up, which pushed it even further down while I waited for it.

The Collision Converter

Towards the end of the month, I remembered Sajid’s previous attempt to write a Collision Converter for me using LibS06, after requesting that code, Skyth provided me with the line to make it work, which I tested on a shoddy import of the Sonic Adventure 2 version of Green Hill Zone Act 1.

With a Collision Converter in hand, I started experimenting with other stages, creating a version of Westopolis for ‘06, as well as some other experiments that didn’t go very far. Before eventually jumping back into and finishing Lost in Translation.

At this point, Greenflower was still on the backburner, with me only really using it to see how the Sonic Adventure HUD mod would look with it and also putting it into the ‘06 demo for the hell of it.

More focus was placed into the Mod Manager around this time, with us rewriting it (leading to the creation of the Aldi Mod Manager jokes).

Mortar Canyon

For some silly reason, I started messing around with Mortar Canyon from Sonic Forces, there isn’t really much to say about it, other than the fact that I needed to use the Switch terrain, as the PC terrain behaved unusually.

SRB2 Version 2.2

Following the release of Sonic Robo Blast 2 Version 2.2, I tested opening and exporting the Greenflower Act 1 terrain for it from Zone Builder to see if it still worked, and it did. As a result, I started messing with it again, although my priority at the time was on my Tropical Jungle mod for Sonic Forces. Issues with the Zone Builder export also lowered my motivation to work on it, although I continued to experiment in the background, trying to find fixes.

About a week later, I toyed around with the Zone Builder source code, finally managing to correct the issue, which was caused by Zone Builder’s OBJ exporter “optimising” the exported terrain by throwing out certain vertices.

With the source for Zone Builder, I also experimented with having 100% accurate object placement, writing a small hack to export the Thing Placement into a text file which I could then use to write into a SET file with HedgeLib. However, object heights are handled incorrectly in Zone Builder, requiring me to fix certain objects manually.

As I finished up work on Tropical Jungle for Forces, I started working more on Greenflower in the background, while also experimenting with some dumb jokes. However, I soon hit another motivational block, The water and grass edges...

Nonami the Material God

Thanks to poor documentation of the XNO format, we had no clue how to make transparent objects look good or how to make translucent objects at all. As a result, I kinda trailed off for a while. However, on the 2nd of March, Nonami showed an image on the Lost Legacy Discord server of translucent water in their Emerald Coast mod and also told us the byte to hex edit to enable it. A quick test later, and I had translucent water

I soon moved the level over to the Kingdom Valley slot, as I wanted to use the breakable wall object that stage has, which meant I needed that slot for the sound, before following up with creating Vertex Colours for the underwater terrain.

Hyper later took over some work on the Skybox and Grass Edges, experimenting with hex edits and texture upscaling to help smooth out the transparent edges while I worked on creating the SET files for the other characters He also worked on fixing up the fence collision for me, as the way it exported from Zone Builder caused Sonic to be able to fairly easily clip through them.

Eventually, I decided (with very little thought behind it) to make various elements of the stage grindable, before following it up with (incredibly tedious to make) Light Dash splines. Eventually, me and Hyper screwed around with it in Multiplayer late into the night, giving us the inspiration to start trying to create a Prop Hunt gamemode for ‘06 too.

With most of the motivational stumbles out of the way, I decided to tackle the flowers and trees by recycling models from Sonic Lost World and Sonic Generations, a process which proved extremely tedious, as the XNO Converter we use only allows for one model at a time. A fact which didn’t help when I needed to export every single flower and tree one by one.

The Act 1 Release

On the 18th of March 2020, I decided to FINALLY release a version of Greenflower, with it soon being updated to correct a few small issues I’d overlooked. After a small break, I started working on Act 2. Thanks to my workflow developed for Act 1, Act 2 went fairly smoothly at first, as I already knew what I needed to do to make the grass edges and water look good. I could also copy the Skybox from Act 1 with no problems, which was nice.

The Act 2 Retargeting Whack-a-Mole

When it comes to level layouts for ‘06, easily the biggest annoyance comes from objects such as Springs. In ‘06, Springs can target other objects by their IDs, which is a really nice feature. However, if the object IDs get changed around, then the target will no longer match up, as a result, I had multiple points where I had to comb over the act to make sure every Spring still targeted the correct object. This was an issue that was much more pronounced in Act 2, due to there being many more Springs in it.

To make matters worse, the object IDs shown in SonicGLVL seem random, so to get the ID of the object I wanted to target, I’d have to convert the SET and look for the object there to get the correct ID. Towards the end of development, I hacked something together that would make the GLVL IDs match the converted ones, making it much easier to handle, if still tedious. My insistence on deleting unneeded objects in the various other character SETs is the primary reason for this headache.

Another problem I noticed a lot in Act 2 were seams in the terrain where Zone Builder didn’t export the terrain correctly, while these were (mostly) easy to fix, it was tedious every time. As it involved the following process.

-Remove the Skin Modifer -Edit the affected meshes so they’d join up correctly -Reapply the Skin Modifier -Export the edited meshes -Import them one at a time -Edit the collision -Export the collision -Convert the collision

Not hard, just tedious, as with a lot of the work that needed to be done on this project.

Specular Mapping

At some point, I toyed with the idea of adding a small specular map on the windows and roofs of the various houses scattered around the zone. After multiple attempts which blew up in my face, Nonami pointed me to a shader that would do what I wanted, creating this nice, actually fairly subtle effect which was also added to Act 1 for consistencies sake.

However, attempting to add this trick to the water did not go well at all...

Developer Time Trial

At some point when working on Version 1.0 of Greenflower, I changed the text for the Hard Mode selection on the stage select to Not This One. Thanks to me not bothering to make a Hard Mode SET thanks to me finding them to be a waste of time.

In Version 1.01, I did sneak a small SET in that would be loaded if you selected the option, but it otherwise served no purpose.

While messing with the Town Mission timer for Prop Hunt, I realised I could use it to create a Developer Time Trial mode, by simply recording my best time and setting it as the Timer’s value. Originally I intended to record runs for all nine characters, but a limitation of the DLC system prevented me from neatly adding them for the amigo characters, so it was cut down to just Sonic, Shadow and Silver.

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These also use slightly modified SETs, mostly to remove the Bronze Medals, Starposts and Voice Triggers.

Bronze Medals

When initially importing the SETs, I decided it would be a cute idea to replace the Emblem and Emerald Tokens in SRB2 with the very underused Bronze Medals. As it turns out, ‘06 actually has a counter for these medals that goes unused in the final game, activating the counter was a simple as adding OpenMedal(_ARG_0_, 15) to the main event in the stage’s Lua file. While the medals serve no purpose in Greenflower, I felt like enabling the counter just to show an unused piece of ‘06 off while also encouraging exploration in the form of Medal Hunting.

Closing Words

While it may not seem like too much on the surface, I personally am actually quite happy with how Greenflower has turned out. Its long development time and various restarts have given it the chance to fully take advantage of our advancements in the Sonic ‘06 modding scene. While there is still a lot left for us to learn, I’m content with this project’s release state and am ready to move on to something new in the future.

Greenflower for ‘06 has being nearly a year in the making, and I’m glad to have been able to see it through. A special thanks goes to the people who helped me in this mod’s creation, it wouldn’t look as good as it does without Nonami’s XNO research and it may not even have gotten finished if Hyper hadn’t helped me test it and thrown some ideas my way.

Here’s hoping we can do some more quality ‘06 mods in the future and realise some of the potential this game never got to show (and maybe do some silly stuff along the way too!).

#the knux rambles #technical write up #modding #sonic '06 #development notes

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tsaomengde · 6 years ago

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Difficulty vs. Accessibility: Sekiro and Dragon Age

[cross-posting to several media platforms, so I explain the terminology more than would be called for on the subreddit. unmarked spoilers below the cut]

Since From Software’s Sekiro was released a few weeks ago, there has been a great deal of online hullabaloo about its lack of difficulty settings – well, they actually are there, but only in the sense that there are in-game options to make things harder rather than easier. The centerpiece of the debate has been this article:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2019/03/28/sekiro-shadows-dies-twice-needs-to-respect-its-players-and-add-an-easy-mode/#362a8dc91639

Here’s the thing: in the past, I’ve said games should absolutely offer an easy mode, or ways to speed up progression, for those without the time/ability/inclination to play “as intended” – that is, to play the game the way the developers intended for it to be played. But I’ve mainly had this conversation as regards games like Dragon Age and the newer Deus Exes, which have in fact included these difficulty options.

The crux of the argument about Dragon Age was a developer’s assertion that she would like to see a mode included where combat is either removed or automatically resolved. She was, of course, sent the usual array of death threats and other excreta from the Twitter Brigade, mostly for the crime of being a woman on the Internet with an opinion, but those with an actual bone to pick said basically: “If you take the combat out of the game, there is no game left. There is only a visual novel.”

The reason why I think difficulty settings, and indeed even a way to remove combat altogether, work/would work in Dragon Age is simple. Visual novels are great! Choose-your-own-adventure stories are fun! The heart of the Dragon Age experience is interacting with your companions, exploring the world, learning the lore, making decisions that shape the way the story plays out, and so forth. Do you drink from the Well of Knowledge yourself, or let your morally-ambiguous and rather-too-eager mage advisor do it? Do you stand by while your friend’s mercenary company dies in pursuit of a larger political goal, or do you sacrifice the possibility of an alliance with a foreign power in deference to your friend’s well-being and feelings? Absent the combat, these choices have weight. They have consequences.

The combat, frankly, is the tax you pay to get to experience these things. I like Dragon Age combat just fine, particularly Inquisition’s, to the point where I’ve finished the game on Nightmare. But to my wife, it’s precisely what I said it is: a tax you pay to get to the good bits. On our joint playthroughs, she handles exploration and dialogue, I kill things. She’s 100% capable of killing things just as efficiently as I am, but she doesn’t get the same joy from it. If there were an option to remove the combat and just explore and hang out with your friends, she might be happy at the option to use it.

Here is why, in my estimation, the same argument doesn’t apply to Sekiro.

In Dragon Age, there are two kinds of entities: players, and enemies. Players have a ton of abilities, specializations, equipment, weapons, they have skill combos they can do with their allies, etc. Enemies are big walking chunks of hit points with the ability to make you die unless you use your abilities. Most of the rules you need to follow, like stamina/mana management, cooldowns, positioning AoEs, trying to make your potion supply last from point A to point B, don’t apply to them. They are there to get in your way and make you consume x% of your resources. The combat gameplay does not inform the world, the lore, or the characters, beyond each party member being assigned a specialization that supposedly relates to their character (like Cassandra being given the Templar spec, which is… not accurate). Your mages never have to worry about demonic possession, one of the main story elements driving class warfare in the setting, because that’s not the gameplay experience the devs are trying to sell you.

In Sekiro, you and your enemies are, by and large, the same. You both have health and a Posture meter that gets closer to a guard break as you block more attacks. You can both Deflect enemy attacks to inflict extra Posture damage and avoid taking it yourself. While you have a wide array of skills and techniques, enemies do too. Common enemies do not wander around with the goal of making you consume x% of your resources; they patrol specific routes, on the lookout, with the intent and capability of killing you stone dead if you screw up more than once or twice.

Combat gameplay absolutely informs the world, the lore, and the characters. Sekiro can learn a multitude of special combat techniques, but unlike in Dragon Age, where the different abilities are just buttons you press to do different things for different kinds of damage or effects, these techniques have a presence in the world. The Ashina-style Ichimonji, a powerful downward swing that restores your Posture, and the Ashina Cross, a sword-drawing technique, are both available to you and your enemies who practice Ashina swordsmanship. You can counter enemy thrust attacks with a shinobi technique called the Mikiri Counter, where you step on an enemy blade as it’s thrust at you. So when you fight your shinobi father Owl, who taught you everything you know, and you try a thrust attack on him… well, he hits you with his own Mikiri Counter. He also knows your Chasing Slice follow-up attack to a shuriken throw, the Shadowfall thrust technique you can learn… the list goes on.

If the game wasn’t difficult, wasn’t punishing, if you could just tap R1 through every fight and occasionally dodge the really dangerous attacks, you wouldn’t recognize these things. The difficulty of the game also encourages you to use stealth attacks, throw dirt in people’s eyes, kill from a distance with shuriken, use firecrackers to interrupt enemy attacks… In other words, you are forced by the exigency of your situation to really adopt a shinobi mindset. Once you really know the game, your moveset, and your tools, you can run into a crowd of three or four guys and come out on top, and it feels awesome, but not at first. And even at the very end of the game, normal enemies are still totally capable of murdering you, to say nothing of the bosses, so you can never let your guard down.

So much of the story, the lore, of Sekiro, is communicated in this way, through your learned experiences and your struggles to master the systems of the world. Watching someone play through the game is thrilling when they demonstrate skill, but it’s not the same as doing it yourself. So the question is: how do you make such a difficult, tailored experience accessible?

I’ve thought a lot about it, and the answer I keep coming to is that you don’t. You do everything you can to make it actually accessible – Sekiro already has completely remappable controls, multiple spoken language tracks for people who don’t want to or can’t deal with subtitles, adjustable gore levels – but at the end of the day, you can’t compromise the core of the experience. I’ve read accounts from multiple people with disabilities on the Sekiro subreddit who, in point of fact, decry the call for “accessibility” and the use of the disabled community as a talking point. They don’t want to be pandered to; they want to play the game as it was intended, same as everyone else, regardless of any additional complications. Speaking as a person on the spectrum, if someone handed me a visual novel that had been tweaked to be more “accessible” to me, and they had tweaked it by taking out characters’ emotional ambiguity because we Aspies sure are bad with those Feelings, I would feel… well. Not great, not at all! I would rather play the actual visual novel and take the risk of not 100% grokking what was happening on the first run.

Another argument: at this point, we can all agree that Games Can Be Art. Yes? Good. The purpose of art is to create emotion. So we have to ask: what is the vehicle the art uses to deliver that emotion? In Dragon Age, the vehicle is your interactions with the other characters, the choices you make, and the ways in which the story changes depending on those choices. These elements are present in Sekiro, but a fundamental part of its vehicle is the experience of being in the world.

Confronting Genichiro, the man who cut off your arm, in the middle of a lightning storm on top of a castle which you have spent the past hour scaling, fighting off enemy shinobi the entire way, and barely scraping out a victory by redirecting his own lightning attacks back at him – there is a raw edge of desperation that feeds back in to a tremendously powerful feeling of victory and satisfaction. The analogous situation in Dragon Age, the big battle against Corypheus, does not create the same feelings because the situation is manufactured. He supplies the battlefield, drops you into it, and then you have a little fight. Your emotions about him and the situation come from the events leading up to it and their impact on you and your allies. The cathartic element present in Sekiro is absent here, and the difference in the execution of gameplay-as-story is at the center of this contrast.

To sum up, the difficulty of Sekiro is directly tied to the player’s experiences in and understanding of the world, and thus it is an essential component of the game qua art. Changing any element of it to make it less demanding and punishing would change the essence of the art form. This is in contrast to Dragon Age, whose gameplay does not directly inform story and as a result can change the nature of that gameplay without compromising its essential player experience.

#sekiro #dragon age #difficulty #accessibility #long post #spoilers

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mentalcurls · 6 years ago

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11. Una scelta stupida

Episode 11! The end of S1! I almost can’t believe I made it, I’m emotional. So this is I think the longest of all my analysis/ramblings posts of season 1 (almost 6 pages on GDoc) so good luck to any all brave souls who read this! Hopefully you’ll find interesting my opinions on trophy husbands, pregnancy scares, new and old headcanons on Elia and Edoardo and boys seldom facing the same consequences girls do for their actions. And of course at the end you can find the results for the Bechdel test!

look how cute the girls look in Eva’s pjs!

ok, so Eva’s parents are not home and she has the house to herself… except she hesitated quite a bit the night before to tell the girls she was available to take Silvia (and the rest of them) in; that’s not Eva-like tbh, the only reason I can see to do that is if her parents had somehow found out about Edoardo and Silvia’s rendezvous and had forbidden Eva to have anyone over

Eva’s mom has such a cool job, from the way Eva tells it she’s a textile buyer or seller (aka the dream for me): she’s one of the people who decide a couple of years before we see the runways what will trend in fashion as far as materials and print go

Giorgio Brighi is a trophy husband and he knows it and enjoys the perks

Sana being the icon she is and not drinking coffee, but tea

Federica. Fede. Girl. You had a perfectly good cutting board to put the oranges you already squeezed on. Why didn’t you??

btw, ok, I get it, orange juice is breakfast-y, but it’s JUNE which is not exactly prime orange season. Why force it? Put Fede to prepare toast with jam, she can make a mess of crumbs

if I’d just woken up all disoriented like Silvia, Eleonora crossing her arms at me would have scared me like shit

still, bless Eleonora Sava and her no-nonsense approach to the following conversation: Silvia can’t not eat, nothing special happened the night before, there’s a question they need to ask, how sure is she, ok so they’ll go to the free clinic this week, all without paraphrasing or being vague or judging Silvia; that is definitely the best way she could have handled it

and it is of course so important that the two people who talk to Silvia the most are Eleonora and Sana, the one who she had the most problems with, the ones she’s the most convinced will hate her

look at her! Silvia apologizing for being unwell and throwing up because she made a fuss! She was not low maintenance, she was actually so high maintenance she couldn’t anything by herself, she inconvenienced all the girls and forced them to take care of her and she made a scene! She doesn’t really know, but of course she imagines she made a scene at the party, arriving drunk at the party and making a spectacle of herself, fainting, making people worry about her. It is the very worst thing for her because she simultaneously acted not at all like a proper, refined girl and was super high maintenance: the stuff of nightmares for her

and if this scene isn’t a mirror of the very first scene of the series, where Gio and Marti mocked Eva for her mark in the history test and Gio “tried” to cheer her up saying that she was good at other things (I’d link to my post about ep.1 for my thoughts on that, but Tumblr would disappear my post from tags so 🤷‍♀️): except here the girls tell Silvia she’s good at something that genuinely is hard work and she actually is good at and worked to be good at and makes her proud of herself, even though the atmosphere is still silly and light and there are still jokes to make her laugh

I so empathize with the girls all looking at one another when it’s time to ask Silvia is she’s pregnant cause none of them wants to say it

Silvia can’t find her voice to answer them verbally 💔

Sana putting her mug down and exhaling, Fede inhaling sharply, opening her mouth like she wants to say something but can’t find the words

Eva is the one to think to ask, albeit indirectly, if Silvia took a test and she’s the one who reads the test and recognizes what it means: so she is pretty familiar with pregnancy scares and all that goes with them apparently, but wait a minute, why, exactly? Eva??

and really, I’d like to take a minute and appreciate Eleonora Sava here, because for all that she insisted on Silvia having safe sex, on taking her to the free clinic the first time around, for all she was pretty pissed when Silvia told them she and Edo didn’t use a condom, now that she could say “I told you so” in a multitude of ways from the most direct to the most subtle, she says nothing and offers Silvia an actionable plan for the near future to make her feel supported and comfortable 👏👏👏

honestly, Eleonora being able to just say entire sentences backwards is cool yet slightly creepy

yeeees the theatre kids are back! I missed them 💖 (they’re so passionate and they don’t care what people think of them and they reach out to people! Fucking role models)

theatre girl keeps sneaking looks at Ele, is there some unrequited crushing going on here???

Ele’s thumbs up cracks me up

bless him, theatre guy really wants people to believe there are almost no spots left, he’s so cute

I just realized who theatre guy goes to harass after Eva and Eleonora: he yells “Santini!” and while that is a pretty common surname, I know deep in my heart of hearts that he’s talking to Elia, so Elia used to be in the theatre group too when his, Eva’s, Gio’s and Marti’s class was in Succursale NEW HEADCANON ACCEPTED you can now pry it from my cold dead hands

so Edo has been texting Ele for a couple of weeks and she hasn’t answered any of his texts and, still, he waited at least ten days before trying to talk to her again: my headcanon that he thinks he’s some sort of mysterious romance novel guy a là Edward Cullen gets stronger and stronger (honestly, check out Brooding YA Hero on Twitter, half of the tweets are Edo, the other half are Nico when he’s trying to impress Marti. Honestly: these guys)

and again with that stupid “Eduardo” when they could have gone with gems such as Eriberto

his “Buongiorno, eh” that implies that she should have been the one to greet him first and she ignored him instead, even though he was standing behind her, find his perfect match in Ele’s “Wow” which shows exactly how impressed she is that he finally had the balls to at least actually talk to her face to face again

OMG the way he says her full name like he expects to get a prize or something for discovering it, like he expects her to be impressed and for that to woo her into his arms, instead of sounding borderline stalkerish

in fact, Eva is supremely unimpressed throughout the conversation

backwards compliments will get you nowhere Edo: if you tell her she’s smart, you don’t say she doesn’t show it the next minute (but again, this is a typical Brooding YA Hero move)

that “Everytime you say no to me, I only want you more” is straight out of some clichè romance novel like GOD, can you be more obvious Edo?

Ele’s unimpressed raised eyebrow gives me life

and when nothing else works, like any good asshole, Edoardo goes goes for simple shock value, goes for the thing that will make Ele look stupid and uptight and a jerk if she gets mad about it, goes for words she can’t have a rebuttal for, goes for fake vulnerability and kindness (as proven by the way he smiles smug like he knows exactly what he is doing), goes for physical attractiveness which can imply objectification and sexualization (especially when you think about the fact Edo complimented her intelligence but immediately backtracked a couple of line earlier)

Eva saved you there, Edoardo. Ele might have been taken aback for a second, but when she saw you smirking, she started gearing up for one hell of a roast and I honestly struggled to think how you would have survived another one

the girls just march into the doctor’s office unannounced???

Sana’s eyebrow raise at the doctor’s “Salam aleikum” is 💯💯💯

for realsies though, how sarcastic is that “Benissimo” from the doctor?? Like, she spent what I expect was an excruciating amount of time teaching Silvia how to put on a condom (based on how scared Silvia was of the fake dick she would have had to practice on) and now it seems she didn’t even use it? She’s over it

oh, but Ele and Sana have both been thinking bout this, they’ve planned how things will go for Silvia: in Ele’s mind how she’ll have to have an abortion, she doesn’t even need her parents permission since she’s 16 but at the same time she’s just 16 and the father is not in the picture as well as an asshole, she has the maturità next year and she can’t really handle a pregnancy and a newborn baby at the same time as school and her exams and the psychological aspects, and she has the beginning of an ED on top of all of that; Sana on the other hand is planning for Silvia keeping the baby, influenced by her being religious, but she’s a practical girl nonetheless and thinking of adoption I expect, then of how Silvia will have to face the music at home and at school and the girls will have to support her, but also of how a pregnancy might be in some ways good for her because it will make her have a completely different relationship with her body and food and boys and even with her family

and Silvia doesn’t speak. Silvia doesn’t have an opinion in this. She tried to “kill Edoardo’s baby” the previous week, but here she doesn’t speak, even when it is her body and potentially her baby on the line

the only thing she’s insistent about is that she took a test, even when the doctor is prescribing some actual medical tests (not saying pharmacy bought pregnancy tests aren’t accurate, but they can sometimes be wrong)

she’s just so resigned

Silvia and the other girls don’t seem to know what an ovulation test is?? But they were so well informed about contraceptives in ep.5! Fall of a myth

Silvia’s poor cousin who wants to have a baby but can’t check if she’s fertile so she can have sex at the right moment 😕

the relief on the other girls faces when the doctor says Silvia’s not pregnant

and the doctor is good, she saw right through Silvia and understood immediately what was the actual problem, but I’m kind of mad she didn’t say anything more than “You can’t live on love and air” to Silvia about eating better, she’s a doctor ffs

woman-on-a-mission-Eva is back and walking towards Marti, I’d be scared if I were you bby, she even wore the heavy boots to kick your ass better

aaand he tries to act like nothing’s wrong; Marti, did you really think you’d get away with it??

Eva is so impressed Marti called her to talk and all he talks about is Gio and not telling Gio about how he knew of Eva cheating and the mess he made

and I can’t even imagine how betrayed Eva feels right now: not only she finds out about more lies Gio told, but it is also confirmed that someone she relied on, someone she thought was on her side, at least back then, was not, ever

and I said it before, but Gio and Marti would happily take a bullet for one another, Eva was a bit naive there thinking Martino would side with her; sure, it turns out he didn’t exactly side with Gio for the last part of this story, acting in a self-serving way, but he sure as hell never really spared much thought to Eva

just so you know, I’m torn: half of me is like “he did all of that and now he has the nerve to CRY?” and wants to grab him and shake him out of stupid; the other half is going “my baby! my poor baby! OMG, this is breaking my heart make it stop” (S2 I blame you)

“un po’ un’infamata”/”a bit of a shitty thing” UN PO’? UN PO’???? (imagine me pulling a full Captain Raymond Holt reacting to Agent Rosa Diaz telling him he and his husband need to “bone”)

everytime Eva turns to Marti, then turns away, she gets more disbelieving and a piece of her heart breaks a bit more

and all the pieces fall into place, finally, so Eva finally feels like she has the full picture of when and how her life fell apart: she takes a step back while listening to Marti, look at it attentively, and she can’t help but pinpoint one specific moment as the one where it all went to hell

yes, great choice telling a kid with a mentally ill mother he’s a “psycho”

“It’ll sound absurd, but I never wanted to hurt you” YES IT DOES SOUND ABSURD AND I DON’T NEED PERMISSION FROM YOU TO THINK THAT MARTINO ALSO GO TO HELL

also, look who’s been taking lesson from bodice-ripper-clichès-spouter extraordinaire Edoardo Incanti *drumroll* Martino, and the pupil is already better than the master cause he’s far more convincing

and I can’t really begin to pretend to understand what goes through Eva’s head here, why she decides to joke and forgive Marti this quickly: is it because she’s seen the big picture and come to her decision and has decided thing would have come to this one way or another anyways? Is it because she’s gotten attached to the idea of Marti being into her and she’s planning to give him a chance, like she obviously does at the end of the year party? Is it honestly because she feels like it’s karma/the universe paying her back for how she hurt Laura? Is it because her and Marti were really close even before she dated Gio? (which makes only half sense to me since they’ve only known one another four year tops, and yeah, okay, it’s four years, but it’s also just four years)

that shot where Eva leans her head on Marti’s shoulder though. Poetic cinema.

and WHAT ARE THE ODDS? Gio is there

and like, why’s Gio so worried about justifying who he’s with, when he and Eva are on a pause??

also he’s in red again here with his brother. But he’s in dark green at Eva’s the next day, which is in his normal palette of cold colors

“There was a very real possibility you would’ve rejected me or that a mess would have happened.” and that’s it. The possibility of a mess never actually happened in Gio’s view of things, because he never really face much consequences of his cheating on his girlfriend: Laura dumped him, sure, but she made her peace with him, he still goes to her house even; his friends are still his friends and support his new relationship (Marti wanting to break them up is not because of the cheating, is because of his own reasons so it doesn’t count rn), no one really holds a grudge against him, he doesn’t have a bad reputation, he doesn’t feel insecure at all, actually going from girl to girl like that probably boosted his self esteemed and raised the opinion his friends have of him

and while with Canegallo Eva didn’t actually kiss him first, so at least she had that; with Gio she did, she kissed him first, so she probably feels like she deserved all the shit that happened to her

and really, these kids waiting for signs from the universe through playlists on shuffle, who do they think they are, Romeo and Juliet? (They probably do.) (They should have seen the break up coming then, though, cause Romeo and Juliet don’t really have a “ and they lived happily ever after”)

and finally Eva lies it all out on the table for him, all the thing he never fully understood she had to go through because of him, of them

and maybe this hurt him, but as Eva says, she’s been hurting for a whole year and he never got that, he never hurt, he never tried to really understand and support her, he was just same old Gio and a good boyfriend by his own standards, but I doubt he ever stopped to ask Eva what she really needed (and like, it’s fine. He is 16 years old, he’ a kid, he’s allowed to make mistakes, but he needs to be put face to face with them to see them and grow, and I love him so much anyways, he’s my favorite always)

on a less profound note, those shoes. They really look like a perfect Tumblr aesthetic pic when they hug and their feet are close, the Eva gets on her tiptoes

and I’d kind of forgotten how they show of the sex scene? again, like I said in ep.2, 7.6 Due ore and the red room scene in 8.5 Tu non sei di Milano are perfect and I love them and I wouldn’t change a thing, but it objectively true Evanni sex scenes are more “graphic” than Nicotino sex scenes

confirmed that staring contests are Evanni’s version of post sex-cuddles

Maria Sorgato is back! Look at her being a queen and rocking that black Gucci-esque top and playing MC

oh, God, Canegallo sounds like one of the guys who run the rides at local fairs and hypes up 13-year-olds to take those 5-for-the-price-of-4 deals on ride tickets

now, I’m Italian, I went to 4 end of the year parties during my 5 years of high school and we never, not once, did something so cheesy as this, nor did a 1995 song ever play at such a party, nor any Renato Zero song, and definitely not “I migliori anni della nostra vita” (which I’ve read someone call “somewhat of a hymn for Italian teenagers” and I was like W H A T? Where? When?) so I can say for sure this is terrible representation of Italian culture, but a cute-ish scene on its own

Alice waving to Eva, awww 💕

Gio waving to Eva, double awww 💕 + bonus Elia and Peccio hugging like there’s no tomorrow next to Gio 💕

Eva lately doesn’t have much time or patience for niceties with Marti, she goes straight to the point

woah, such enthusiasm from Marti at the news Eva is finally single!

awww but it’s because he’s a good friend, he’s worried about how she feels, if she’s hurting! (Ok this is me being bitter, he actually is a cutie about this)

what is Marti looking at when Ele is checking her phone? What draws him to the bar as fast as possible? Gio??

YASSS for surprise hugs and amends! Good for you Laura, you’re looking like a nicer person already without all those grudges

oh, Silvia’s dress is so cute, except why does it fit so poorly? The neckline is all skewed and the armhole gapes! It’s her Revenge dress™! She’s been planning her look for 3 weeks! It should be tailored for the gods!

on the other hand, look at Silvia walking out of the woods, both the real-but-fake ones that are part of the decor and the metaphorical ones of the last few months

and in fact, look, they make light of the incident at Alice’s friends party!

except then the monsters of months past (Edo) come visit and start looming over Silvia

Edoardo jumping over that fence thing to go talk to Silvia is 100% Olio Cuore romance novel clichè

Silvia actually takes a few step backwards as he get closer to talk to her, she’s honest to God scared of what he wants to tell her, she fully expects him to be there to make fun and humiliate her again

and then he kisses her on the cheek! Why? Dude, I went off William og in my previous discussions of your behaviour towards Silvia and that means you don’t want Silvia around you because she’s too clingy and you don’t want her to believe you have feelings for her: why kiss her on the cheek then? You apologized, you were nice, you could have just said “See you around at school next year” and be done with it, leave her without any delusions; instead you went for the one act that might give her hope she has some of your affection. Why? Is is your inner Harlequin hero taking control of your body? Is it just that you secretly enjoy having a harem of girls pining for you? (oh, soz, you do enjoy that, I’d forgotten)

look how excited Silvia is! She was expecting the worst and she got almost the best instead! Of course she’s enamoured with Edo all over again, he’s not even a monster anymore!

at least he says bye to Eva too

this party has been pretty amazing for Eva up till now, whereas it must have been so fucking stressful for poor Ele?! She has to manage Edoardo, both making sure he fulfills his promise and keeping him at bay re: their date, she has to find fricking Silvia and on top of that she finds gay porn on Marti’s phone

btw, how did that happen? Ok it’s in his favorites, but you don’t exactly see browser favorites from the phone app 🤔 girl you wanna tell me something? Were you planning some nasty surprise for him cause Eva told you he was the one who triggered the fight, the school-wide rumors, the whole mess with Gio? (Look at Ele hitting back for her girl, cause sure she’s into Eva but she also just wants her to be happy and Marti made her definitely not happy 😡 also Evanora always on my mind)

and then 30 seconds straight (lol) of Eva being baffled and confused and just generally shook

Bechdel test: this episode passes the test! The conversations that make it pass are the two conversations at Eva’s house in the morning, despite a brief mention of her dad and the almost-ever present ghost of Edoardo over Silvia, and the conversation at the free clinic with the doctor.

Thank you so much for sticking with me through this!

This post is part of my complete series of meta about Skam Italia season 1. If you’d like to read more of my thoughts about the other episodes, you can find the mastepost linked in the top bar on my blog under SKAMIT: EVA. Cheers!

#skam italia #eva brighi #skamit s1 #skamit meta #giovanni garau #martino rametta #silvia mirabella #eleonora sava #sana allagui #elia santini #federica cacciotti #edoardo incanti #federico canegallo #alice (skam italia)#skamit #a. writes #1x11 una scelta stupida

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