#cult survivors who have written books

[venniekocsis]

They Assessed Me, and It’s Wild.

Google NotebookLM has a section where their AI will assess your web presence and produce a conversation based on your public work. You feed it links to assess. I searched myself in Google and grabbed the top links, along with my art store, my swag store, and a couple of my YouTube music videos. Listening to this, I thought, “Gosh. AI seemingly knows me better than I know myself!” It made me…

[racefortheironthrone]

What did you think of X-Men Blue Origins?

(I may turn this into a People's History of the Marvel Universe later today, so keep an eye on this space.)

X-Men Blue: Origins and the Power of the Additive Retcon

(WARNING: heavy spoilers under the cut)

Introduction

If you've been a long-time X-Men reader, or you're a listener of Jay & Miles or Cerebrocast or any number of other LGBT+ X-Men podcasts, you probably know the story about how Chris Claremont wrote Mystique and Destiny as a lesbian couple, but had to use obscure verbiage and subtextual coding to get past Jim Shooter's blanket ban on LGBT+ characters in the Marvel Universe.

Likewise, you're probably also familiar with the story that, when Chris Claremont came up with the idea that Raven Darkholme and Kurt Wagner were related (a plot point set up all the way back in Uncanny X-Men #142), he intended that Mystique was Nightcrawler's father, having used her shapeshifting powers to take on a male body and impregnate (her one true love) Irene. This would have moved far beyond subtext - but it proved to be a bridge too far for Marvel editorial, and Claremont was never able to get it past S&P.

This lacuna in the backstories of Kurt and Raven - who was Kurt's father? - would remain one of the enduring mysteries of the X-Men mythos...and if there's one thing that comic writers like, it's filling in these gaps with a retcon.

Enter the Draco

Before I get into the most infamous story in all of X-Men history, I want to talk about retcons a bit. As I've written before:

"As long as there have been comic books, there have been retcons. For all that they have acquired a bad reputation, retcons can be an incredibly useful tool in comics writing and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Done right, retcons can add an enormous amount of depth and breadth to a character, making their worlds far richer than they were before. Instead, I would argue that retcons should be judged on the basis of whether they’re additive (bringing something new to the character by showing us a previously unknown aspect of their lives we never knew existed before) or subtractive (taking away something from the character that had previously been an important part of their identity), and how well those changes suit the character."

For a good example of an additive retcon, I would point to Chris Claremont re-writing Magneto's entire personality by revealing that he was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. As I have argued at some length, this transformed Magneto from a Doctor Doom knockoff into a complex and sympathetic character who could now work as a villain, anti-villain, anti-hero, or hero depending on the needs of the story.

For a good example of a subtractive retcon, I would point to...the Draco. If you're not familiar with this story, the TLDR is that it was revealed that Kurt's father was Azazel - an evil ancient mutant with the same powers and the same appearance (albeit color-shifted) as Kurt, who claims to be the devil and is part of a tribe of demonic-looking mutants who were banished to the Brimstone Dimension, and who fathered Nightcrawler as part of a plot to end this banishment.

I don't want to belabor Chuck Austen, because I think that Connor Goldsmith is right about his run actually being a camp cult classic in retrospect. However, I think we both agree that the Draco was a misfire, because of how the retcon undermined Kurt's entire thematic purpose as established in Giant-Size X-Men that Nightcrawler was actually a noble and arguably saintly man who suffered from unjust prejudice due to the random accident that his mutation made him appear to be a demon, and because of how the retcon undermined the centrality of Mystique and Destiny's relationship.

X-Men Blue Origins

This brings us to the Krakoan era. In HOXPOX and X-Men and Inferno, Jonathan Hickman had made Mystique and Destiny a crucial part of the story in a way that they hadn't been in decades: they were the great nemeses of Moira X, they were the force that threatened to burn Krakoa to the ground by revealing the devil's bargain that Xavier had struck with Sinister (and Moira), they were the lens through which the potential futures of Krakoa were explored, and they ultimately reshaped the Quiet Council and the Five in incredibly consequential ways.

This throughline was furthered after Hickman's departure, with Kieron Gillen exploring the backstories of Mystique and Destiny in Immortal X-Men and Sins of Sinister, and both Gillen and Si Spurrier exploring their relationship with Nightcrawler in AXE Judgement Day, Sins of Sinister, Way of X, Legion of X, Nightcrawlers, and Sons of X. One of the threads that wove through the interconnected fabric of these books was an increasing closeness between Kurt and Irene that needed an explanation. Many long-time readers began to anticipate that a retcon about Kurt's parentage was coming - and then we got X-Men Blue: Origins.

In this one issue, Si Spurrier had the difficult assignment of figuring out a way to "fix" the Draco and restore Claremont's intended backstory in a way that was surgical and elegant, that served the character arcs of Kurt, Raven, and Irene, and that dealt with complicated issues of trans and nonbinary representation, lesbian representation, disability representation, and the protean nature of the mutant metaphor. Thanks to help from Charlie Jane Anders and Steve Foxe, I think Spurrier succeeded tremendously.

I don't want to go through the issue beat-by-beat, because you should all read it, but the major retcon is that Mystique turns out to be a near-Omega level shapeshifter, who can rewrite themselves on a molecular level. Raven transformed into a male body and impregnated Irene, using bits of Azazel and many other men's DNA as her "pigments." In addition to being a deeply felt desire on both their parts to have a family together, this was part of Irene's plan to save them both (and the entire world) from Azazel's schemes, a plan that required them to abandon Kurt as a scapegoat-savior (a la Robert Graves' King Jesus), and to have Xavier wipe both their memories.

Now, I'm not the right person to write about what this story means on a representational level; I'll leave it to my LGBT+ colleagues on the Cerebrocast discord and elsewhere to discuss the personal resonances the story had for them.

What I will say, however, is that I thought this issue threaded the needle of all of these competing imperatives very deftly. It "fixed" the Draco without completely negating it, it really deepened and complicated the characters and relationships of both Raven and Irene (by showing that, in a lot of ways, Destiny is the more ruthless and manipulative of the two), and it honored Kurt's core identity as a man of hope and compassion (even if it did put him in a rather thankless ingénue role for much of the book).

It is the very acme of an additive retcon; nothing was lost, everything was gained.

I still think the baby Nightcrawler is just a bad bit, but then again I don't really vibe with Spurrier's comedic stylings.

[many-but-one]

What's your opinion on this [https://www.tumblr.com/ratinacoat/764250900023951360/no-one-who-says-ramcoa-isnt-real-is-saying-that?source=share] (highlighted for convenience) post? I came across it and felt a little miffed by it. Though I do see where they are coming from, I suppose. I wondered what ya'll's opinion would be... I just don't feel it's an adequate reason for programmed systems to stop using terms that makes them feel seen and comfortable. Thank you for reading this.

Well Wishes,

Pomegranate O.L.

From what I can gather, they are boiling RAMCOA down to “ritual abuse” and “trafficking” but completely disregarding the “MC” part of the acronym. I understand where they are coming from, as the acronym was unfortunately created by people who are antisemitic, but that is hardly the survivor’s faults, imho. It sounds like they are conflating the MC part of the acronym with conspiracy, when MC is not a conspiracy, even though it is unfortunately riddled with people who are conspiracy theorists.

We’ve said it before and we will say it again—MC is not really done by hyper-secret government orgs, they’re done by the church on the corner, they’re done at daycare centers, they’re done by political cults, religious cults, familial units, and trafficking rings. MC is not complicated on the surface, it’s just conditioning taken to an extreme degree. Not everyone who has MC done to them will develop a dissociative disorder, and adults who go through MC who didn’t prior have a dissociative disorder can then develop one after going through MC traumas. This is OSDD-2, in the DSM-V. MC done to children who have the tendency to dissociate and have disorganized attachments to their primary caregivers will most certainly develop DID, and if they do, it’s not terribly difficult for MC abusers/programmers to learn how to negatively or positively trigger out certain alters to do undue harm to them and manipulate them to have certain beliefs about themselves and behaviors that the part will repeat when triggered out.

Those that wrote books about RAMCOA are shitty people who abused their patients and are antisemitic, but that doesn’t mean we should discount everything they learned. Like we have said before, we don’t discount all research in the medical and psychological field just because the studies or the doctors were abusive. Van der Hart was also a POS who abused his patients, yet his book “The Haunted Self” is one of the best written works for people with dissociative disorders and is consistently recommended to dissociative patients. I don’t know why we excuse him, the Axis powers in WWII (Germany and Japan), and all other horrific human experiments done in the name of science, but suddenly draw the line at RAMCOA researchers/therapists. Yeah, they were bad. Yeah, they are antisemitic. I’m not saying we should excuse their behavior. They were right to be removed from their positions. However, what they learned cannot be completely discounted. This shit isn’t black and white.

As an aside, we made a post about how planting false memories in patients is not possible and talked about why the False Memory Foundation and their supporters pushing this narrative is a detriment to survivors everywhere, but especially those who have been through RAMCOA traumas.

In addition, there is a new acronym out there (though it’s not my personal favorite) which is OEA, which means “Organized and Extreme Abuse.” I feel like it doesn’t quite capture what is necessary under that umbrella, but it is a viable replacement term and has a very broad umbrella that covers a lot of things. What terms survivors use is not up to anyone else but the survivor, and pulling the “conspiracy theory” card is getting old as hell. I do sort of understand where OP is coming from in terms of the origins of the acronym, but survivors are not at fault for where it came from and it should be up to the survivor to choose how they want to refer to it for themselves. My therapist uses the terms OEA and RAMCOA interchangeably because they mean the same thing. If antisemitism is the main complaint, then I think it would be beneficial to consider spreading the term OEA and encourage people to use that term instead rather than being angry at people using the term that they have a problem with and saying it’s all a conspiracy theory when it’s not.

I wish people would stop policing what terms other people use and stop conflating MC with conspiracy, though I doubt that wish will come true anytime soon.

[mariacallous]

In the first half century of his career, Robert Jay Lifton published five books based on long-term studies of seemingly vastly different topics. For his first book, “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism,” Lifton interviewed former inmates of Chinese reëducation camps. Trained as both a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, Lifton used the interviews to understand the psychological—rather than the political or ideological—structure of totalitarianism. His next topic was Hiroshima; his 1968 book “Death in Life,” based on extended associative interviews with survivors of the atomic bomb, earned Lifton the National Book Award. He then turned to the psychology of Vietnam War veterans and, soon after, Nazis. In both of the resulting books—“Home from the War” and “The Nazi Doctors”—Lifton strove to understand the capacity of ordinary people to commit atrocities. In his final interview-based book, “Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism,” which was published in 1999, Lifton examined the psychology and ideology of a cult.

Lifton is fascinated by the range and plasticity of the human mind, its ability to contort to the demands of totalitarian control, to find justification for the unimaginable—the Holocaust, war crimes, the atomic bomb—and yet recover, and reconjure hope. In a century when humanity discovered its capacity for mass destruction, Lifton studied the psychology of both the victims and the perpetrators of horror. “We are all survivors of Hiroshima, and, in our imaginations, of future nuclear holocaust,” he wrote at the end of “Death in Life.” How do we live with such knowledge? When does it lead to more atrocities and when does it result in what Lifton called, in a later book, “species-wide agreement”?

Lifton’s big books, though based on rigorous research, were written for popular audiences. He writes, essentially, by lecturing into a Dictaphone, giving even his most ambitious works a distinctive spoken quality. In between his five large studies, Lifton published academic books, papers and essays, and two books of cartoons, “Birds” and “PsychoBirds.” (Every cartoon features two bird heads with dialogue bubbles, such as, “ ‘All of a sudden I had this wonderful feeling: I am me!’ ” “You were wrong.”) Lifton’s impact on the study and treatment of trauma is unparalleled. In a 2020 tribute to Lifton in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, his former colleague Charles Strozier wrote that a chapter in “Death in Life” on the psychology of survivors “has never been surpassed, only repeated many times and frequently diluted in its power. All those working with survivors of trauma, personal or sociohistorical, must immerse themselves in his work.”

Lifton was also a prolific political activist. He opposed the war in Vietnam and spent years working in the anti-nuclear movement. In the past twenty-five years, Lifton wrote a memoir—“Witness to an Extreme Century”—and several books that synthesize his ideas. His most recent book, “Surviving Our Catastrophes,” combines reminiscences with the argument that survivors—whether of wars, nuclear explosions, the ongoing climate emergency, COVID, or other catastrophic events—can lead others on a path to reinvention. If human life is unsustainable as we have become accustomed to living it, it is likely up to survivors—people who have stared into the abyss of catastrophe—to imagine and enact new ways of living.

Lifton grew up in Brooklyn and spent most of his adult life between New York City and Massachusetts. He and his wife, Betty Jean Kirschner, an author of children’s books and an advocate for open adoption, had a house in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, that hosted annual meetings of the Wellfleet Group, which brought together psychoanalysts and other intellectuals to exchange ideas. Kirschner died in 2010. A couple of years later, at a dinner party, Lifton met the political theorist Nancy Rosenblum, who became a Wellfleet Group participant and his partner. In March, 2020, Lifton and Rosenblum left his apartment on the Upper West Side for her house in Truro, Massachusetts, near the very tip of Cape Cod, where Lifton, who is ninety-seven, continues to work every day. In September, days after “Surviving Our Catastrophes” was published, I visited him there. The transcript of our conversations has been edited for length and clarity.

I would like to go through some terms that seem key to your work. I thought I’d start with “totalism.”

O.K. Totalism is an all-or-none commitment to an ideology. It involves an impulse toward action. And it’s a closed state, because a totalist sees the world through his or her ideology. A totalist seeks to own reality.

And when you say “totalist,” do you mean a leader or aspiring leader, or anyone else committed to the ideology?

Can be either. It can be a guru of a cult, or a cult-like arrangement. The Trumpist movement, for instance, is cult-like in many ways. And it is overt in its efforts to own reality, overt in its solipsism.

How is it cult-like?

He forms a certain kind of relationship with followers. Especially his base, as they call it, his most fervent followers, who, in a way, experience high states at his rallies and in relation to what he says or does.

Your definition of totalism seems very similar to Hannah Arendt’s definition of totalitarian ideology. Is the difference that it’s applicable not just to states but also to smaller groups?

It’s like a psychological version of totalitarianism, yes, applicable to various groups. As we see now, there’s a kind of hunger for totalism. It stems mainly from dislocation. There’s something in us as human beings which seeks fixity and definiteness and absoluteness. We’re vulnerable to totalism. But it’s most pronounced during times of stress and dislocation. Certainly Trump and his allies are calling for a totalism. Trump himself doesn’t have the capacity to sustain an actual continuous ideology. But by simply declaring his falsehoods to be true and embracing that version of totalism, he can mesmerize his followers and they can depend upon him for every truth in the world.

You have another great term: “thought-terminating cliché.”

Thought-terminating cliché is being stuck in the language of totalism. So that any idea that one has that is separate from totalism is wrong and has to be terminated.

What would be an example from Trumpism?

The Big Lie. Trump’s promulgation of the Big Lie has surprised everyone with the extent to which it can be accepted and believed if constantly reiterated.

Did it surprise you?

It did. Like others, I was fooled in the sense of expecting him to be so absurd that, for instance, that he wouldn’t be nominated for the Presidency in the first place.

Next on my list is “atrocity-producing situation.”

That’s very important to me. When I looked at the Vietnam War, especially antiwar veterans, I felt they had been placed in an atrocity-producing situation. What I meant by that was a combination of military policies and individual psychology. There was a kind of angry grief. Really all of the My Lai massacre could be seen as a combination of military policy and angry grief. The men had just lost their beloved older sergeant, George Cox, who had been a kind of father figure. He had stepped on a booby trap. The company commander had a ceremony. He said, “There are no innocent civilians in this area.” He gave them carte blanche to kill everyone. The eulogy for Sergeant Cox combined with military policy to unleash the slaughter of My Lai, in which almost five hundred people were killed in one morning.

You’ve written that people who commit atrocities in an atrocity-producing situation would never do it under different circumstances.

People go into an atrocity-producing situation no more violent, or no more moral or immoral, than you or me. Ordinary people commit atrocities.

That brings us to “malignant normality.”

It describes a situation that is harmful and destructive but becomes routinized, becomes the norm, becomes accepted behavior. I came to that by looking at malignant nuclear normality. After the Second World War, the assumption was that we might have to use the weapon again. At Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a group of faculty members wrote a book called “Living with Nuclear Weapons.” There was a book by Joseph Nye called “Nuclear Ethics.” His “nuclear ethics” included using the weapon. Later there was Star Wars, the anti-missile missiles which really encouraged first-strike use. These were examples of malignant nuclear normality. Other examples were the scenarios by people like [the physicists] Edward Teller and Herman Kahn in which we could use the weapons and recover readily from nuclear war. We could win nuclear wars.

And now, according to the Doomsday Clock, we’re closer to possible nuclear disaster than ever before. Yet there doesn’t seem to be the same sense of pervasive dread that there was in the seventies and eighties.

I think in our minds apocalyptic events merge. I see parallels between nuclear and climate threats. Charles Strozier and I did a study of nuclear fear. People spoke of nuclear fear and climate fear in the same sentence. It’s as if the mind has a certain area for apocalyptic events. I speak of “climate swerve,” of growing awareness of climate danger. And nuclear awareness was diminishing. But that doesn’t mean that nuclear fear was gone. It was still there in the Zeitgeist and it’s still very much with us, the combination of nuclear and climate change, and now COVID, of course.

How about “psychic numbing”?

Psychic numbing is a diminished capacity or inclination to feel. One point about psychic numbing, which could otherwise resemble other defense mechanisms, like de-realization or repression: it only is concerned with feeling and nonfeeling. Of course, psychic numbing can also be protective. People in Hiroshima had to numb themselves. People in Auschwitz had to numb themselves quite severely in order to get through that experience. People would say, “I was a different person in Auschwitz.” They would say, “I simply stopped feeling.” Much of life involves keeping the balance between numbing and feeling, given the catastrophes that confront us.

A related concept that you use, which comes from Martin Buber, is “imagining the real.”

It’s attributed to Martin Buber, but as far as I can tell, nobody knows exactly where he used it. It really means the difficulty in taking in what is actual. Imagining the real becomes necessary for imagining our catastrophes and confronting them and for that turn by which the helpless victim becomes the active survivor who promotes renewal and resilience.

How does that relate to another one of your concepts, nuclearism?

Nuclearism is the embrace of nuclear weapons to solve various human problems and the commitment to their use. I speak of a strange early expression of nuclearism between Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr, who was a great mentor of Oppenheimer. Bohr came to Los Alamos. And they would have abstract conversations. They had this idea that nuclear weapons could be both a source of destruction and havoc and a source of good because their use would prevent any wars in the future. And that view has never left us. Oppenheimer never quite renounced it, though, at other times, he said he had blood on his hands—in his famous meeting with Truman.

Have you seen the movie “Oppenheimer”?

Yes. I thought it was a well-made film by a gifted filmmaker. But it missed this issue of nuclearism. It missed the Bohr-Oppenheimer interaction. And worst of all, it said nothing about what happened in Hiroshima. It had just a fleeting image of his thinking about Hiroshima. My view is that his success in making the weapon was the source of his personal catastrophe. He was deeply ambivalent about his legacy. I’m very sensitive to that because that was how I got to my preoccupation with Oppenheimer: through having studied Hiroshima, having lived there for six months, and then asking myself, What happened on the other side of the bomb—the people who made it, the people who used it? They underwent a kind of numbing. It’s also true that Oppenheimer, in relationship to the larger hydrogen bombs, became the most vociferous critic of nuclearism. That’s part of his story. The moral of Oppenheimer’s story is that we need abolition. That’s the only human solution.

By abolition, you mean destruction of all existing weapons?

Yes, and not building any new ones.

Have you been following the war in Ukraine? Do you see Putin as engaging in nuclearism?

I do. He has a constant threat of using nuclear weapons. Some feel that his very threat is all that he can do. But we can’t always be certain. I think he is aware of the danger of nuclear weapons to the human race. He has shown that awareness, and it has been expressed at times by his spokesman. But we can’t ever fully know. His emotions are so otherwise extreme.

There’s a messianic ideology in Russia. And the line used on Russian television is, “If we blow up the world, at least we will go straight to Heaven. And they will just croak.”

There’s always been that idea with nuclearism. One somehow feels that one’s own group will survive and others will die. It’s an illusion, of course, but it’s one of the many that we call forth in relation to nuclear danger.

Are you in touch with any of your former Russian counterparts in the anti-nuclear movement?

I’ve never entirely left the anti-nuclear movements. I’ve been particularly active in Physicians for Social Responsibility. We had meetings—or bombings, as we used to call it—in different cities in the country, describing what would happen if a nuclear war occurred. We had a very simple message: we’re physicians and we’d like to be able to patch you up after this war, but it won’t really be possible because all medical facilities will be destroyed, and probably you’ll be dead, and we’ll be dead. We did the same internationally with the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the Nobel Peace Prize. There’s a part of the movement that’s not appreciated sufficiently. [Yevgeny] Chazov, who was the main Soviet representative, was a friend of Gorbachev’s, and he was feeding Gorbachev this view of common security. And Gorbachev quickly took on the view of nuclear weapons that we had. There used to be a toast: either an American or a Soviet would get up and say, “I toast you and your leaders and your people. And your survival, because if you survive, we survive. And if you die, we die.”

Let’s talk about proteanism.

Proteanism is, of course, named after the notorious shape-shifter Proteus. It suggests a self that is in motion, that is multiple rather than made up of fixed ideas, and changeable and can be transformed. There is an ongoing struggle between proteanism and fixity. Proteanism is no guarantee of achievement or of ridding ourselves of danger. But proteanism has more possibility of taking us toward a species mentality. A species mentality means that we are concerned with the fate of the human species. Whenever we take action for opposing climate change, or COVID, or even the threat to our democratic procedure, we’re expressing ourselves on behalf of the human species. And that species-self and species commitment is crucial to our emergence from these dilemmas.

Next term: “witnessing professional.”

I went to Hiroshima because I was already anti-nuclear. When I got there, I discovered that, seventeen years after the bomb was dropped, there had been no over-all, inclusive study of what happened to that city and to groups of people in it. I wanted to conduct a scientific study, having a protocol and asking everyone similar questions—although I altered my method by encouraging them to associate. But I also realized that I wanted to bear witness to what happened to that city. I wanted to tell the world. I wanted to give a retelling, from my standpoint, as a psychological professional, of what happened to that city. That was how I came to see myself as a witnessing professional. It was to be a form of active witness. There were people in Hiroshima who embodied the struggle to bear witness. One of them was a historian who was at the edge of the city who said, “I looked down and saw that Hiroshima had disappeared.” That image of the city disappearing took hold in my head and became central to my life afterward. And the image that kept reverberating in my mind was, one plane, one bomb, one city. I was making clear—at least to myself at first and then, perhaps, to others,—that bearing witness and taking action was something that we needed from professionals and others.

I have two terms left on my list. One is “survivor.”

There is a distinction I make between the helpless victim and the survivor as agent of change. At the end of my Hiroshima book, I had a very long section describing the survivor. Survivors of large catastrophes are quite special. Because they have doubts about the continuation of the human race. Survivors of painful family loss or the loss of people close to them share the need to give meaning to that survival. People can claim to be survivors if they’re not; survivors themselves may sometimes take out their frustration on people immediately around them. There are all kinds of problems about survivors. Still, survivors have a certain knowledge through what they have experienced that no one else has. Survivors have surprised me by saying such things as “Auschwitz was terrible, but I’m glad that I could have such an experience.” I was amazed to hear such things. Of course, they didn’t really mean that they enjoyed it. But they were trying to say that they realized they had some value and some importance through what they had been through. And that’s what I came to think of as survivor power or survivor wisdom.

Do you have views on contemporary American usage of the words “survivor” and “victim”?

We still struggle with those two terms. The Trumpists come to see themselves as victims rather than survivors. They are victims of what they call “the steal.” In seeing themselves as victims, they take on a kind of righteousness. They can even develop a false survivor mission, of sustaining the Big Lie.

The last term I have on my list is “continuity of life.”

When I finished my first study, I wanted a theory for what I had done, so to speak. [The psychoanalyst] Erik Erikson spoke of identity. I could speak of Chinese Communism as turning the identity of the Chinese filial son into the filial Communist. But when it came to Hiroshima, Erikson didn’t have much to say in his work about the issue of death. I realized I had to come to a different idea set, and it was death and the continuity of life. In Hiroshima, I really was confronted with large-scale death—but also the question of the continuity of life, as victims could transform themselves into survivors.

Like some of your other ideas, this makes me think of Arendt’s writing. Something that was important to her was the idea that every birth is a new beginning, a new political possibility. And, relatedly, what stands between us and the triumph of totalitarianism is “the supreme capacity of man” to invent something new.

I think she’s saying there that it’s the human mind that does all this. The human mind is so many-sided and so surprising. And at times contradictory. It can be open to the wildest claims that it itself can create. That has been a staggering recognition. The human self can take us anywhere and everywhere.

Let me ask you one more Arendt question. Is there a parallel between your concept of “malignant normality” and her “banality of evil”?

There is. When Arendt speaks of the “banality of evil,” I agree—in the sense that evil can be a response to an atrocity-producing situation, it can be performed by ordinary people. But I would modify it a little bit and say that after one has been involved in committing evil, one changes. The person is no longer so banal. Nor is the evil, of course.

Your late wife, B.J., was a member of the Wellfleet Group. Your new partner, Nancy Rosenblum, makes appearances in your new book. Can I ask you to talk about combining your romantic, domestic, and intellectual relationships?

In the case of B.J., she was a kind of co-host with me to the meetings for all those fifty years and she had lots of intellectual ideas of her own, as a reformer in adoption and an authority on the psychology of adoption. And in the case of Nancy Rosenblum, as you know, she’s a very accomplished political theorist. She came to speak at Wellfleet. She gave a very humorous talk called “Activist Envy.” She had always been a very progressive theorist and has taken stands but never considered herself an activist, whereas just about everybody at the Wellfleet meeting combined scholarship and activism.

People have been talking more about love in later life. It’s very real, and it’s a different form of love, because, you know, one is quite formed at that stage of life. And perhaps has a better knowledge of who one is. And what a relationship is and what it can be. But there’s still something called love that has an intensity and a special quality that is beyond the everyday, and it actually has been crucial to me and my work in the last decade or so. And actually, I’ve been helpful to Nancy, too, because we have similar interests, although we come to them from different intellectual perspectives. We talk a lot about things. That’s been a really special part of my life for the last decade. On the other hand, she’s also quite aware of my age and situation. The threat of death—or at least the loss of capacity to function well—hovers over me. You asked me whether I have a fear of death. I’m sure I do. I’m not a religious figure who has transcended all this. For me, part of the longevity is a will to live and a desire to live. To continue working and continue what is a happy situation for me.

You’re about twenty years older than Nancy, right?

Twenty-one years older.

So you are at different stages in your lives.

Very much. It means that she does a lot of things, with me and for me, that enable me to function. It has to do with a lot of details and personal help. I sometimes get concerned about that because it becomes very demanding for her. She’s now working on a book on ungoverning. She needs time and space for that work.

What is your work routine? Are you still seeing patients?

I don’t. Very early on, I found that even having one patient, one has to be interested in that patient and available for that patient. It somehow interrupted my sense of being an intense researcher. So I stopped seeing patients quite a long time ago. I get up in the morning and have breakfast. Not necessarily all that early. I do a lot of good sleeping. Check my e-mails after breakfast. And then pretty much go to work at my desk at nine-thirty or ten. And stay there for a couple of hours or more. Have a late lunch. Nap, at some point. A little bit before lunch and then late in the day as well. I can close my eyes for five minutes and feel restored. I learned that trick from my father, from whom I learned many things. I’m likely to go back to my desk after lunch and to work with an assistant. My method is sort of laborious, but it works for me. I dictate the first few drafts. And then look at it on the computer and correct it, and finally turn it into written work.

I can’t drink anymore, unfortunately. I never drank much, but I used to love a Scotch before dinner or sometimes a vodka tonic. Now I drink mostly water or Pellegrino. We will have that kind of drink at maybe six o’clock and maybe listen to some news. These days, we get tired of the news. But a big part of my routine is to find an alternate universe. And that’s sports. I’m a lover of baseball. I’m still an avid fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, even though they moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957. You’d think that my protean self would let them go. Norman Mailer, who also is from Brooklyn, said, “They moved away. I say, ‘Fuck them.’ ” But there’s a deep sense of loyalty in me. I also like to watch football, which is interesting, because I disapprove of much football. It’s so harmful to its participants. So, it’s a clear-cut, conscious contradiction. It’s also a very interesting game, which has almost a military-like arrangement and shows very special skills and sudden intensity.

Is religion important to you?

I don’t have any formal religion. And I really dislike most religious groups. When I tried to arrange a bar mitzvah for my son, all my progressive friends, rabbis or not, somehow insisted you had to join a temple and participate. I didn’t. I couldn’t do any of those things. He never was bar mitzvah. But in any case, I see religion as a great force in human experience. Like many people, I make a distinction between a certain amount of spirituality and formal religion. One rabbi friend once said to me, “You’re more religious than I am.” That had to do with intense commitments to others. I have a certain respect for what religion can do. We once had a distinguished religious figure come to our study to organize a conference on why religion can be so contradictory. It can serve humankind and their spirit and freedom and it can suppress their freedom. Every religion has both of those possibilities. So, when there is an atheist movement, I don’t join it because it seems to be as intensely anti-religious as the religious people are committed to religion. I’ve been friendly with [the theologian] Harvey Cox, who was brought up as a fundamentalist and always tried to be a progressive fundamentalist, which is a hard thing to do. He would promise me every year that the evangelicals are becoming more progressive, but they never have.

Can you tell me about the Wellfleet Group? How did it function?

The Wellfleet Group has been very central to my life. It lasted for fifty years. It began as an arena for disseminating Erik Erikson’s ideas. When the building of my Wellfleet home was completed, in the mid-sixties, it included a little shack. We put two very large oak tables at the center of it. Erik and I had talked about having meetings, and that was immediately a place to do it. So the next year, in ’66, we began the meetings. I was always the organizer, but Erik always had a kind of veto power. You didn’t want anybody who criticized him in any case. And then it became increasingly an expression of my interests. I presented my Hiroshima work there and my work with veterans and all kinds of studies. Over time, the meetings became more activist. For instance, in 1968, right after the terrible uprising [at the Democratic National Convention] that was so suppressed, Richard Goodwin came and described what happened.

Under my control, the meeting increasingly took up issues of war and peace. And nuclear weapons. I never believed that people with active antipathies should get together until they recognize what they have in common. I don’t think that’s necessarily productive or indicative. I think one does better to surround oneself with people of a general similarity in world view who sustain one another in their originality. The Wellfleet meetings became a mixture of the academic and non-academic in the usual sense of that word. But also a sort of soirée, where all kinds of interesting minds could exchange thoughts. We would meet once a year, at first for a week or so and then for a few days, and they were very intense. And then there was a Wellfleet meeting underground, where, when everybody left the meeting, whatever it was—nine or ten at night—they would drink at local motels, where they stayed, and have further thoughts, though I wasn’t privy to that.

How many people participated?

This shack could hold as many as forty people. We ended them after the fiftieth year. We were all getting older, especially me. But then, even after the meetings ended, we had luncheons in New York, which we called Wellfleet in New York, or luncheons in Wellfleet, which we called Wellfleet in Wellfleet. You asked whether I miss them. I do, in a way. But it’s one of what I call renunciations, not because I want to get rid of them but because a moment in life comes when you must get rid of them, just as I had to stop playing tennis eventually. I played tennis from my twenties through my sixties. Certainly, the memories of them are very important to me. I remember moments from different meetings, but also just the meetings themselves, because, perhaps, the communal idea was as important as any.

Do you find it easy to adjust to your physical environment? This was Nancy’s place?

Yes, this is Nancy’s place. Much more equipped for the Cape winters and just a more solid house. For us to do all the things, including medical things she helps me with, this house was much more suitable. Even the walk between the main house and my study [in Wellfleet] required effort. So we’ve been living here now for about four years. And we’ve enjoyed it. Of course, the view helps. I wake up every morning and look out to kind of take stock. What’s happening? Is it sunny or cloudy? What boats are visible? And then we go on with the day.

In the new book, you praise President Biden and Vice-President Harris for their early efforts to commemorate people who had died of COVID. Do you feel that is an example of the sort of sustained narrative that you say is necessary?

It’s hard to create the collective mourning that COVID requires. Certainly, the Biden Administration, right at its beginning, made a worthwhile attempt to do that, when they lit those lights around the pool near the Lincoln Memorial, four hundred of them, for the four hundred thousand Americans who had died. And then there was another ceremony. And they encouraged people to put candles in their windows or ring bells, to make it participatory. But it’s hard to sustain that. There are proposals for a memorial for COVID. It’s hard to do and yet worth trying.

You observe that the 1918 pandemic is virtually gone from memory.

That’s an amazing thing. Fifty million people. The biggest pandemic anywhere ever. And almost no public commemoration of it. When COVID came along, there wasn’t a model which could have perhaps served as some way of understanding. They used similar forms of masks and distancing. But there was no public remembrance of it.

Some scholars have suggested that it’s because there are no heroes and no villains, no military-style imagery to rely on to create a commemoration.

Well, that’s true. It’s also in a way true of climate. And yet there are survivors of it. And they have been speaking out. They form groups. Groups called Long COVID SOS or Widows of COVID-19 or COVID Survivors for Change. They have names that suggest that they are committed to telling the society about it and improving the society’s treatment of it.

Your book “The Climate Swerve,” published in 2017, seemed very hopeful. You wrote about the beginning of a species-wide agreement. Has this hope been tempered?

I don’t think I’m any less hopeful than I was when I wrote “The Climate Swerve.” In my new book [“Surviving Our Catastrophes”], the hope is still there, but the focus is much more on survivor wisdom and survivor power. In either case, I was never completely optimistic—but hopeful that there are these possibilities.

There’s something else I’d like to mention that’s happened in my old age. I’ve had a long interaction with psychoanalysis. Erik Erikson taught me how to be ambivalent about psychoanalysis. It was a bigger problem for him, in a way, because he came from it completely and yet turned against its fixity when it was overly traditionalized. In my case, I knew it was important, but I also knew it could be harmful because it was so traditionalized. I feared that my eccentric way of life might be seen as neurotic. But now, in my older age, the analysts want me. A couple of them approached me a few years ago to give the keynote talk at a meeting on my work. I was surprised but very happy to do it. They were extremely warm as though they were itching to, in need of, bringing psychoanalysis into society, and recognizing more of the issues that I was concerned with, having to do with totalism and fixity. Since then, they’ve invited me to publish in their journal. It’s satisfying, because psychoanalysis has been so important for my formation.

What was it about your life style that you thought your analyst would be critical of?

I feared that they would see that somebody who went out into the world and interviewed Chinese students and intellectuals or Western European teachers and diplomats and scholars was a little bit eccentric, or even neurotic.

The fact that you were interviewing people instead of doing pure academic research?

Yes, that’s right. A more “normal” life might have been to open up an office on the Upper West Side to see psychoanalytical, psychotherapeutic patients. And to work regularly with the psychoanalytic movement. I found myself seeking a different kind of life.

Tell me about the moment when you decided to seek a different kind of life.

In 1954, my wife and I had been living in Hong Kong for just three months, and I’d been interviewing Chinese students and intellectuals, and Western scholars and diplomats, and China-watchers and Westerners who had been in China and imprisoned. I was fascinated by thought reform because it was a coercive effort at change based on self-criticism and confession. I wanted to stay there, but at that time, I had done nothing. I hadn’t had my psychiatric residency and I hadn’t entered psychoanalytic training. Also, my money was running out. My wife, B.J., was O.K. either way. I walked through the streets thinking about it and wondering, and I came back after a long walk through Hong Kong and said, “Look, we just can’t stay. I don’t see any way we can.” But the next day, I was asking her to help type up an application for a local research grant that would enable me to stay. It was a crucial decision because it was the beginning of my identity as a psychiatrist in the world.

You have been professionally active for seventy-five years. This allows you to do something almost no one else on the planet can do: connect and compare events such as the Second World War, the Korean War, the nuclear race, the climate crisis, and the COVID pandemic. It’s a particularly remarkable feat during this ahistorical moment.

Absolutely. But in a certain sense, there’s no such thing as an ahistorical time. Americans can seem ahistorical, but history is always in us. It helps create us. That’s what the psychohistorical approach is all about. For me to have that long flow of history, yes, I felt, gave me a perspective.

You called the twentieth century “an extreme century.” What are your thoughts on the twenty-first?

The twentieth century brought us Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The twenty-first, I guess, brought us Trump. And a whole newly intensified right wing. Some call it populism. But it’s right-wing fanaticism and violence. We still have the catastrophic threats. And they are now sustained threats. There have been some writers who speak of all that we achieved over the course of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century. And that’s true. There are achievements in the way of having overcome slavery and torture—for the most part, by no means entirely, but seeing it as bad. Having created institutions that serve individuals. But our so-called better angels are in many ways defeated by right-wing fanaticism.

If you could still go out and conduct interviews, what would you want to study?

I might want to study people who are combating fanaticism and their role in institutions. And I might also want to study people who are attracted to potential violence—not with the hope of winning them over but of further grasping their views. That was the kind of perspective from which I studied Nazi doctors. I’ve interviewed people both of a kind I was deeply sympathetic to and of a kind I was deeply antagonistic toward.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you about?

I would say something on this idea of hope and possibility. My temperament is in the direction of hopefulness. Sometimes, when Nancy and I have discussions, she’s more pessimistic and I more hopeful with the same material at hand. I have a temperament toward hopefulness. But for me to sustain that hopefulness, I require evidence. And I seek that evidence in my work. 

[cant-really-remember]

This all started with an already complicated meta and I felt like mine was getting lost at the bottom (it is a lot to read). I feel like mine, even though it references the original posts, can stand on its own. I also want to put it out again because I am still fleshing this all out and want to write more about cult/abuse survivorship and GO.

I want to add so much to this from the perspective of a cult survivor (born in).

Important things to know about cults, cult survivorship. (In this, Aziraphale = she, Crowley = he)

Cults:

A system that organizes people around a doctrine, a charismatic leader, or both. Akin to fascism, complete obedience is expected - as well as complete honesty (or at least you have to be honest about when you “stray”).

There is a theory about the psychology of cults, by Janja Lalich, that is called bounded choice (also the name of her book). This theory proposes that the insidious cult system can, essentially, hijack personal choice or “freedom” by requiring members to make decisions in a wildly skewed reality where there is no choice that would be good for the individual and is often harmful to them. From the outside, these choices can seem irrational, dangerous, or just plain awful - but within the confines of the cult, which is controlling the narrative and truths of the world for members, these choices are aligned with the “highest power”, “greatest purpose”, or whatever the doctrine is built around.

(So much more under the cut)

Cults are often highly organized and incredibly insidious, with hierarchies that maintain the status quo and power, with written texts that shape the way members see the world, with directions for how everyone should think about everything. You are not allowed to come to your own conclusions and, actually, doing that can actually be downright dangerous.

It’s really important to understand that the cult mechanism of being in complete control of the narrative causes people to build their ENTIRE identities around this cult narrative. Any threat to this narrative (someone showing you the hypocrisy of the group, the potential fall of the cult or leader, tangible proof that the world is different than you’ve been told) is FIRST met with denial and thought stopping. “I can’t think like this.” At this point, the member can circle back and strengthen the cult narrative they carry by dismissing/fighting what they just saw. Or they can let it in. They can take it into consideration.

But this, this consideration, can literally feel like pulling out foundation stones of your house. The cult worldview is the foundation on which the member has built their ENTIRE IDENTITY. You think, oh great, the cult member can leave and join the world and be so much happier. But imagine, you are a member of a cult who tells you that the air on earth is unbreathable for “good” people. The only people who can just walk around and breathe the air are terrible, immoral people - so you have to carry around a tank of oxygen with you everywhere to maintain your “goodness”. One day, your oxygen tank falls down the subway steps and rolls on to the track and gets obliterated by an incoming train. You are standing there and you TRULY ABSOLUTELY believe that if you breathe the air you will become a terrible, immoral person and even beyond that, since you are now a terrible and immoral person, you will lose everything you had ever known. You won’t belong in your community anymore. Do you breathe? Can you breathe? Will you die? Will you lose everything?

This obviously seems irrational and absurd — we all know the air doesn’t turn you into a terrible, immoral person — but that cult member believes it with every fiber of their being. So when you present them with evidence or proof of the cult narrative being wrong or hypocritical, this is what they are experiencing. You trying to take away their oxygen tank.

Cult survivorship:

Getting out of a cult is basically getting out of an abusive relationship. But you are in relationship with an entire community and a narrative of the world. If you know anything about abusive relationships, what is most important in leaving successfully is finding your “you” again. The “you” before the relationship and the abuse.

If you are born into a cult, there is no “you” from before. This abusive, twisted, often sadistic and violent narrative of….well, everything is all you have ever known. You don’t know what it feels like to be a “human”. You have little knowledge of the “real world”.

Leaving a cult you were born into is like going to a different planet. You don’t understand how things work, what people are talking about, how relationships function, or how (real and healthy) communication is important. You definitely don’t have any opinions about anything. You can scarcely figure out what to have for breakfast, imagine trying to make huge complicated emotional decisions. And realizing those emotional decisions are meant to be made on the basis of what good for YOU. You have never considered yourself first, you don’t know what that feels like and in the past it has usually brought pain or isolation or loss.

Framework

I want to set the framework that in my analysis Crowley is a born in cult survivor who was kicked out of the cult, then goes on to do the very natural thing called “cult hopping” - where you leave a cult just to fall into another one immediately - his new cult is less powerful, less organized, and less scary. Aziraphale is still very, very much in the cult she was born into. She is still a “true believer”. They are both grasping at “the world” to leave their authoritarian cults.

The absolute MOST DANGEROUS relationship for a true believer to have is one with a defected or discarded member. This is the case for multiple reasons:

- The out person can provide a different perspective (NOT allowed in a cult) and can often see the hypocrisy, abuse, and control.

- Cults often have their own “language”, this may mean in a literal sense of having made up words but usually it means that words have double meaning. An out person knows this language and can have an much easier time getting through to an in person because of this.

- The out person is a living, breathing example that you can have a life outside the cult.

- The cult will have spent an extraordinary amount of time undercutting the “goodness”, value, and morality of the out person. If the out person shows any kindness or humanity, this can serve to undermine the cult teachings and control.

- And the obvious reason that “fraternizing” with the enemy can lead to shunning, violence, or even death.

In terms of the 1967 scene:

If you read the OPs, there is discussion of who knows what and when. The first, and I feel, most important thing to know is that emotions are complex, layered, and always evolving and devolving - especially if you have the CPTSD of cult survivorship. CPTSD often creates a firewall between the victim and their feelings. Simply, they don’t know what they feel.

Within this framework, Aziraphale firmly believes that he “can’t” love Crowley. Like it isn’t physically possible. Within the narrative she lives in, this is not even a remotest of possibilities, it’s against the laws of Heaven and physics. And every time Crowley shows her the hypocrisy of Heaven, we see the denial as she is desperately clinging to her sense of “self”. But we also see the cracks in the foundation.

Over 6000 years, the cracks have been widening and widening and Aziraphale’s self is beginning to be defined by humanity and Crowley. She is trying to leave the cult for “the world” because she is realizing that in THAT world her love for Crowley IS actually possible. Not just from the surveillance/meddling standpoint, but from the realization that the physics of “the world” allow for an angel and a demon to be in love.

All the while, she is struggling — and I mean STRUGGLING— to chose something for herself. She doesn’t understand what it even means to put herself first. Like again, I mean she cannot conceptualize it. Choosing yourself doesn’t obey the laws of physics in the upside down cult narrative.

Soooooo, as the OP says - the holy water incident is the first time Aziraphale does something against the narrative she has been brainwashed to believe WITHOUT some type of plausible deniability. She is doing it because maybe, just maybe she can begin to even consider that it could even be possible that she could have feelings for Crowley. She is very far from knowing she is in love. Here’s where the complexity comes in - I do think she is very in love with Crowley at this point, but she will not let himself even consider it because letting it in could topple her house of cards.

—“we can dine at the Ritz”

Another important thing to know about people in cults is they are, by necessity, very romantic and optimistic people. You have to believe in all kinds of crazy shit and make invisible connections and make meaning out of nothing. So her romantic “dine at the Ritz” is not only a “I’m really trying to get out but I can’t see a way out now but I really am trying” but it’s also such a “true believer” thing to do…she has probably spent so much time fantasizing about the perfect date in her disassociative daydreams.

She is planning the perfect escape but keeps putting it off because she believes she can game the system or fix the cult or find a way to quietly slip out the back door. None of these things are possible in a cult. You cannot chose yourself and the cult at the same time.

—“I’ll give you a lift. Anywhere you want to go.”

Crowley, like always, is saying “GET OUT. Just RUN. I’ll run with you. I know it’s scary and painful and devastating, but I promise that it will be ok. I want to leave my cult, too, but honestly that would probably mean I would see you less or maybe die. So let’s do this together.”

Crowley knows that Aziraphale can’t fix it or get out peacefully. He is begging her to just pull the damn bandaid off. Crowley also knows the soul-crushing feeling of your entire life and world and everything you believe being shattered to dust. So he is endlessly patient and empathetic with the pain Aziraphale is going through.

—pause, “you go go fast for me, Crowley”

Baby girl can see what he is asking her to do. And it gives her so much hope. She can see him holding his hand out to pull her through the door. But she is still not ready. She cannot, yet, do the work and processing of her identity being built on lies and hypocrisy. She wants to continue to believe in good — and by proxy, evil.

I don’t think “you go to fast for me” is about Crowley’s lifestyle or that it’s getting too hot-n-heavy. I think it’s that he is (im)patiently waiting outside her door for her to leave her cult. Aziraphale knows that he is asking her to do, but she can’t even fathom it yet. She has to extricate her identity from Heaven (the cult) before she can leave.

Crowley wasn’t able to take his time and slowly turn away from Heaven - he was ripped from her bosom and left to rebuild himself year by year. His different hairstyles and fashions are not only about fitting in to humanity (which he adores) but he is practicing his new found personal freedom (limited by Hell) and rebuilding his identity on a new foundation. This is definitely a normal cult survivor response.

Where we are now

Instead of jumping into a idling car and flooring it, Aziraphale is trying to find her identity while still having the comfort of the cult. This is also a very normal cult survivor response. Trying to build herself and her outside relationships up so that when she leaves she has a soft place to land. But this is a very dangerous option…as we saw with the end of S2. You can eat food, listen to music, do all kinds of worldly things but if you aren’t truly rebuilding your identity on different foundations and without the cult influences, you can be drawn back in VERY EASILY. The deal with the Metatron is perfectly crafted to suck her back in.

The last 15 minutes of S2E6 is so familiar to me. It’s called hoovering. They suck you back in like a vacuum. They can do it expeditiously because they know EXACTLY where your buttons are, your hopes and dreams, what lies you will believe, what fears you have BECAUSE THEY PUT THEM THERE. If you don’t rewrite your cult identity, then you are still operating on the script you were given by the cult and they can write a new exciting scene that fits in ever so perfectly with your disassociative daydreams. They know you because they controlled the shape of your world and then observed you in it for your whole life. They didn’t allow you your own thoughts or to ask questions and now they have the “perfect situation” for you that will seemingly assuage both your cult identity and your outside influences. They can tell you EXACTLY what you want to hear.

And you fall for it, because the relief is enormous. Being in the good graces of the cult while also thinking you can do the things you want to do is literally the “perfect” situation. It looks like the painless path that will let you stay in denial but also feel like you have some semblance of choice. But, surprise, it’s a trick.

I think the moment outside the elevator when the Metatron admits to the second coming is the absolute “oh shit, I fucked up” moment for Aziraphale. She really thought she would get it all but again the cult lied and manipulated her and sucked her back in. At that moment, you hear a miracle sound. For the longest time I thought it was the Metatron putting some “spell” on Aziraphale, but I have come to be convinced that she is putting Nightingales on the radio for Crowley as a way of communicating.

Aziraphale is not the type to impulsively turn and run back to Crowley — but I think she realized she needed to tell him that everything he had said finally caught up with her in that moment and that she finally understands what the hell he was saying before the kiss. So she sends the song to the Bentley (it is already established that she has a strong connection with the Bentley and the Bentley can be felt/controlled from miles away by those with a connection) and then gives Crowley a glance that says “You were right. You were right. I was wrong. You were right.” and gets in that elevator gathering courage resulting in a smile that, to me, says “murder hornet in the beehive.”

Thank you @paperbunny and @zionworkzs for spurring this diatribe.

[canadianno]

Hello! What kind of characterization do you give the Lamb, yours specifically, and what is their eldritch form? Drink water. Very nice art

Oh man. Oh man hold on I'm gonna ramble.

Tldr; The lamb is a survivor above all else, with very complicated emotions and morals towards the bishops. I haven't decided on their eldritch form yet!

Tw for: mentions of violence/murder, mentions of genocide, general unpleasant themes

OKAY OKAY to answer this I have to give a little ramble about TCOLC. It's yet to be written, but I'm working on it slowly!!! It'll be on AO3 as soon as I get an account. Promise 🙏

TCOLC is my cotl au, The Cult of Lost Crowns !!

I don't want to spoil too much of the actual book plotline, but one of the things I've added on in my au is INSANE lamb backstory!

The lamb was born in Concolor, the domain of the God Narinder. Narinder was of course long chained by this point. Concolor was the native range of the lamb people, being a land of tall mountains and cold weather. The domain had been slowly being taken over for a while by the other 4 bishops. When Lambert was young, the bishops decided to completely close off the gateway into Concolor, leaving anyone inside trapped.

Lambs' mother insisted they needed to leave and sneak apst the guards at the gate disguised, Lambs father stood his ground and insisted they stay. Lambs father won in the end, by way of violence. Lambert escaped the house with only a gunshot wound in the back of the arm to show for it. They had taken their mom's idea to heart, and started the long but hasty journey to the gateway of Concolor. They joined in many groups of hiding and fleeing sheep along the way, but in the end, as we know, they were the only one left.

The lamb has very complex emotions towards the bishops, all 5 of them. Narinder is who they lived their life silently worshipping, and of course he gave them a second chance after their execution. But, as many people in the fandom like to touch on, Narinder asks them to sacrifice themselves a second time, for him. In my au, they refuse. The lamb is a survivor at heart.

The other bishops killed them and their entire race of people, but the lamb can't help but feel sorry for them. Injured beyond mortal repair, betrayed by a member of their own family (not unsimilarly to how Lambert themselves were betrayed by their father)...

I cant go too much else into it without spoilers!!! I hope you enjoyed my ramble :]

I will drink water, I swear. Thank you for the compliment, it means alot <333

[iamdispleased]

Found Some More Hatchetfield Lore!

tldr; at bottom

I remembered that one of the Lang brothers said that Wiggly is based off of Cthulhu, so I decided to do something digging on a piece of shit author, H.P. Lovecraft and y’all… Okay, I don’t know if it counts as lore, but Hatchetfield is right under our noses.

CW: H.P. Lovecraft’s writing is full of bigotry, and if you plan on reading it, prepare yourself. For example, there is an evil entity named Shub-Niggurath. Yeah.

I don’t like H.P. Lovecraft, nor do I enjoy his writing in general, so here are some things that people should look up if you want to find out Hatchetfield’s inspiration. More thoughts on why I cannot write about him are at the bottom.

Also! I do not look down or dislike people who enjoy H.P. Lovecraft’s writing and his creations, and would really love for people to continue to look into things I cannot. I hope my little notes help!

(I’ve linked the stories in pink!)

SPOILERS: Hatchetfield? I guess? The Cthulhu Mythos & The Dream Cycle.

Cthulhu Mythos:

Just read ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. Everything makes sense.

Miss Holloway is based off of a character named Horvath Blayne from the anthology series The Trail to Cthulhu by August Derleth. Here’s one of them. ‘The Black Island, Being the Narrative of Horvath Blayne’.

Duke Keane is also taken from The Trail to Cthulhu.

The narrator of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ is named Francis Wayland Thurston.

Professor Hidgens is based off of an art student named Henry who is known for being eccentric and living in solitude. (The Call of Cthulhu)

Emma Perkins is named after a ship called the Emma. The crew got into a battle with Cthulhu’s cult members, which resulted in the Emma having one survivor. (The Call of Cthulhu)

John MacNamara is based off of the police officer John Legrasse. (The Call of Cthulhu)

Willabella Muckwab resembles Lavinia Whateley, from ‘The Dunwich Horror’. She has a son, Wilbur Whateley (Wilbur Cross), whose father is the cosmic entity Yog-Sothoth (Wiggog Y’rath). Lavinia went missing on Halloween, and the assumption is that Wilbur killed her.

The Black Book is the Necremonium.

There’s always professors somewhere.

The Dream Cycle:

LOL. The Dream Cycle is a collection of short stories surrounding dream cities. I honestly haven’t read anything about this other than brief stuff from the Wiki, but the connections are painfully obvious.

The word ‘oblivion’ is written in the Black Book. H.P. Lovecraft has a poem titled Ex Oblivione. The narrator sees a gate in his dreams and wants to get past it, but he can’t access it. He eventually does, though. Yikes. Read this post, picture Willabella Muckwab as the narrator for Ex Oblivione, and enjoy.

Bonus: Some of the covers of the magazine that published H.P. Lovecraft’s work (Weird Tales) are sprinkled throughout Hatchetfield.

“Pete, get behind me! I’ve got a gun.”

“Steph… it’s a ghost. I don’t think that’s gonna do any good.”

Rosary? Killer Track, much? Also, the art style for the Black Book kind of resembles this… huh.

-

Note: I had planned to read all of H.P. Lovecraft and the associated work, but the racism is too much for me. I can’t “separate the art from the artists”, especially when everything evil is so obviously and horrendously based on Black people, as well as other races. Again— Shub-Niggurath. Like, seriously?

It’s a huge bummer, because I have so many thoughts— like the implications behind Willabella Muckwab associated with Lavinia Whateley, and Wilbur Cross also being associated with Wilbur Whateley. So much is at our finger tips.

I’m still going to be writing other things, though!

I have more of the Black Book deciphered, so that’s exciting, especially since I actually got some stuff right in my first post. (It was looked at through a more religious lenses rather than an H.P. Lovecraft lenses, though.) BUT STILL. MY EYES HURTING FROM INTENSE SQUINTING SESSIONS WAS NOT FOR NAUGHT! And I know I state some of these things as if they’re facts, but they’re ‘probably based on’ stuff.

Alright. I’m off to read about physics, the concept of nothingness, and the æther in the name of theatre kid.

tldr; the Lang bros made a the TTRPG Call of Cthulhu homebrew and turned it into musicals.

[sixofravens-reads]

re: 2023 new releases. hope you're ready for a long message because there were a lot.

hot new releases/things that were relatively popular

He Who Drowned The World, Shelley Parker Chan (Chinese mythological historical, very gay, very stabby a la Baru Cormorant. Book 2 of 2. A particular favorite of mine from this year)

Witch King, Martha Wells (New fantasy book by author of murderbot fame. I didn't actually click with this one but I'd be remiss to leave it off)

House With Good Bones, T Kingfisher (Southern gothic rose horror by the very talented Ursula Vernon)

Translation State, Ann Leckie (high sf alien horror regency romance. Wheeeeee. I had a lot of fun reading this. You can read it as a standalone, but you get deeper context if you've read the ancillary justice series, also highly recommended)

Will of the Many, James Islington (futuristic roman empire aesthetic rigged murder school. Not precisely good but appallingly catchy, I read all six hundred pages in pretty much one sitting. If you liked red rising you'll like this, if you hated red rising you will Not)

OH YEAH THE ACTUAL NEW MURDEBOT NOVEL (System Collapse)

A Power Unbound, Freya Marske (book 3 of 3, magic alt edwardian romances with murder. This is more romance proper but it's about equal with the action plot and Marske is very good. I don't think you've read these so you'd have to start at book 1)

Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh (The book that absolutely knocked my socks off, my pick for the best sff release of the year. I forget if I've already told you about this one)

Starling House, Alix Harrow (Southern gothic house drama. Similar feel to Ninth House or The Book of Night)

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, Shannon Chakraborty (Divorced lady pirate adventure-drama a la Arabian Nights.)

Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, Heather Fawcett (Charming, heavily fairy tale trope themed, vaguely reminiscent of the Lady Trent books)

more obscure new releases from this year that I thought were cool, but not in the Hot New Reads You Can't Miss Because Everyone's Read Them category

Under Fortunate Stars, Ren Hutchings (sf timey wimey space shenanigans with aliens. Immensely cool premise.)

Small Miracles, Olivia Atwater (fallen angel sent to tempt a too good mortal. Extremely charming)

The King Is Dead, Naomi Libicki (vaguely persian flavored fealty romance, very heavy to the fealty. Original, thorny, and intriguing)

The Deep Sky, Yume Kitasei (What if we terribly traumatized everyone going on a generation ship by making them go to viciously competitive boarding school together and then act surprised when a murder mystery occurs. Heads up that it's more interested in the human drama than the SF worldbuilding)

The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera (early modern fantasy world anti-imperialism fever dream narrated by a cult survivor. Brilliantly written, spectacularly original, one of the best books I read this year)

Things for 2024, content warning for being (obviously) things I haven't read and thus without quality control

The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Katherine Arden

The Familiar, Leigh Bardugo

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, P Djeli Clark

Long Live Evil, Sarah Rees Brennan

Goddess of the River, Vaishnavi Patel

The Woods All Black, Lee Mandelo

Exordia, Seth Dickinson

A Sorceress Comes To Call, T Kingfisher

Running Close To The Wind, Alexandra Rowland

Wow tumblr just lets me keep writing words. I didn't think they let me have this many in asks. Oh, and pro tip-- keep an eye out for tordotcom's most anticipated upcoming books for the first six months of 2024. They should be publishing it within the next week or so and I always add masses of books to my tbr from there.

oh holy crap, thanks!! I'll have to check these out!

thoughts on a few of em:

He Who Drowned The World - still have to read She Who Became the Sun lol but hopefully I'll get to em next year!

Witch King - Martha Wells has been recced by like All my sci-fi mutuals now lmao I REALLY gotta get into her!

House With Good Bones - THIS ONE IS ACTUALLY ON MY SHELF!! I just didn't fucking read it this year whoops. Very excited for new Kingfisher

Starling House - I was on the fence about this one since I really didn't like Once and Future Witches, but those comparisons give me hope! I'll add it to the library list!

Some Desperate Glory and Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries are 2/3 of the books published in 2023 that I actually managed to read (the 3rd is The Woman in Me lmao), I can't remember if you recc'd Some Desperate Glory, but it was SOOOOOOOO GOOD OMFG

Small Miracles - my aunt has been trying to convince me to read Atwater for quite a while, I'll have to give this one a try!

The Saint of Bright Doors - I have this one on hold!! Saw a post for it a week or so ago and it sounds absolutely delightful!

The Familiar - SO SO EXCITED for this one! I hope Bardugo is maybe...slowly....extricating herself from the Grishaverse and going to write more books not related to it... (not that they're all bad, I loved the Six of Crows duology, I'm just not into it anymore and I reeeealllly like her adult books lol)

Running Close To The Wind - oh yay new Rowland! I still haven't read her last book (the one with the guy on the cover who looked EXACTLY like my boss to the point where it became an Office Meme that [Boss] Is A Gay Romance Cover Model, still meaning to get a UK version of it but haven't yet) but I'll have to look this one up!

[thornsent]

On RAMCOA, Satanic Panic, and the dangers of conspiracy theory

Lately I've seen a term gaining usage in online DID/OSDD communities, and I would like to talk about its origins and implications.

I want to establish right away that while I do not believe in RAMCOA or SRA, I do believe that these people are genuinely traumatized.

This is not written with the intent to invalidate anyone, rather I am legitimately concerned about the negative impact this is having on survivors of severe trauma as well as marginalized people targeted by conspiracy theories.

Let's begin with what RAMCOA is, and where the term comes from.

RAMCOA stands for ritual abuse, mind control, organized abuse. The term has its origins in the ISSTD, with the creation of their special interest group (SIG) dedicated to the topic. The ISSTD, which began in 1982, has a long history of controversy and is in no small part responsible for the beginnings of the Satanic Panic.

Multiple significant parties of the ISSTD have made claims of transgenerational Satanic cults dating back to two thousand years.

Michael Salter, who would eventually become the chair of the RAMCOA SIG in 2018, claimed in 2008 that there were secret tunnels and chambers beneath the school to facilitate the abuse. This claim was not only disproven, but it is reminiscent of both the Satanic Panic and Pizzagate-era allegations, both of which have also repeatedly been disproven.

Michael has continued to assert his claim as recently as 2019. In 2023, Michael Salter would become president of the ISSTD.

But Michael isn't the only sketchy person involved in the ISSTD. Founding member and former president George Greaves would lose his license for engaging in sexual activity with his patient in 1994.

Bennet Braun, the founder and another former president, has faced multiple malpractice lawsuits due to misleading his patients, resulting in distorted memories and more harm done to an already vulnerable person. Braun’s license would be revoked in 2023.

Also accused of malpractice by multiple patients is Colin Ross, president of the ISSTD From 1993-94. Ross is also known for his claim that he can shoot energy beams from his eyes. This, unsurprisingly, was disproven.

In 2020, the RAMCOA SIG was renamed to the Organized and Extreme Abuse SIG due to the optics of the term no longer suiting the organization.

We have established that the ISSTD was founded and consistently led by conspiracy theorists and abusive psychologists who have since had their licenses revoked. Let's dig a bit into the Satanic Panic and SRA.

The Satanic Panic is a moral panic that began in the 80s and still goes on today. In recent years there has been a resurgence of the same rhetoric taking new forms, but it all has roots in allegations of Satanic Ritual Abuse. The Panic of the 80s properly began with the publication of the book Michelle Remembers, written by Lawrence Pazder and his patient-turned-wife, Michelle Smith.

The text contains an account of SRA recovered through the pseudoscientific modality of recovered-memory therapy. The claims in this book have no substantial evidence and are generally regarded as a work of fiction influenced by social morality and pop culture at the time.

Over 12,000 claims of SRA were given during the height of the Satanic Panic, but even after the FBI launched an investigation no evidence of the legitimacy of SRA could be found.

The stories offered by SRA survivors are shocking: Multigenerational cults, sometimes stretching worldwide, going on for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years, in which children were bred as sacrifices and/or as slaves to “the elites of our society.”

That phrase should give you pause, because it's an antisemitic dogwhistle, and a loud one at that. The Satanic Panic’s roots go deep into history, back to the burning of so-called witches and back to the antisemitic conspiracy of blood libel.

Blood Libel is an accusation that Jews use the blood of Christians (typically children or infants) in the making of Passover bread and other religious practices. Such claims have resulted in the murder of countless Jews.

These accusations against the Jewish people have continued into modern times, seeing a resurgence within conspiracies such as Qanon’s claim that “Hollywood elites” are harvesting adrenochromes by enacting SRA upon children.

You cannot separate the concept of blood libel from the concept of Satanic Ritual Abuse and the Satanic Panic, and subsequently, you cannot separate conspiratorial thought from SRA and associated terminology.

Abuse that is orchestrated by multiple individuals is real. Conditioning is real. Religious and spiritual trauma is real. Cults, too, are real-- But Ritual Abuse, Mind Control, and Organized Abuse is not. Using these terms promotes conspiracy theories that put Jewish people and systems both at risk of harm.

Let's talk about programming now. The idea that a system can be programmed purposefully into a child is unrealistic pseudoscience.

The sheer amount of knowledge and effort an individual would need in order to maintain a constructed system like that is impossible, and this also assumes a much more widespread knowledge of DID and OSDD than is actually present.

While it is technically possible that an abuser (or abusers) may pick up on their victim's ‘quirks’, while it is technically possible that an abuser may realize doing X action leads to Z desired result for them, this is not programming. This is conditioning.

It is still a horrible abuse to inflict upon another person, but the concept of programming and mind control has its roots in yet another disproven conspiracy theory: Project Monarch.

Project Monarch was alleged to be a subset of Project MKUltra. It was said to be a project which trafficked children, using torture-based mind control to force them into becoming sex slaves for international trafficking rings, drug barons, Satanic cults, and “elites”.

These claims originate from Cathy O’Brien, who claims she uncovered repressed memories of this abuse under hypnosis, similar to Michelle Smith. She claims that this abuse led her to develop Dissociative Identity Disorder. This is echoed in the concept of programming as we see it today.

While we are on the subject of DID directly, I'd like to talk about HC-DID.

HC-DID is a community term meaning Highly Complex Dissociative Identity Disorder, which was coined to specifically describe DID caused by RAMCOA/SRA.

Other than the specific claim of origin, HC-DID is virtually indistinguishable from C-DID, otherwise known as polyfragmentation. This is a term with professional research and backing behind it, unlike HC-DID which is a term coined by someone within the RAMCOA community.

In my opinion there is no need for this term when there is already a well-known, scientifically-backed term to describe the same cluster of symptoms, and it is also well known that DID is already a highly complicated disorder with presentation varying widely from system to system. Usage of this term seems at best an alternative description for something which already exists, and at worst a way to further isolate an already vulnerable population.

To be clear, I don't for a second believe that the RAMCOA community has a secret agenda to isolate survivors or anything of the sort. I think the community as it currently stands is full of deeply traumatized, lonely, isolated, and younger plurals who are grappling for language to describe the horrific things they suffered.

I also believe that it has become a dangerous echo chamber that not only distorts people's memory, but may further traumatize and isolate them.

The RAMCOA community does not use plain language to discuss their experiences. Frequently they speak in a code, using esoteric community terms when they do not outright refuse to discuss what RAMCOA may be like whatsoever.

That is not to say that we are entitled to the stories of trauma survivors, rather that this language and how guarded the community is regarding information on RAMCOA results in a very insular community where discussing the subject with outsiders becomes difficult due to this inaccessibility of information. And this leads to these survivors feeling all the more cut off from the outside world, left with only the language coined by conspiracy theorists to describe the indescribable.

This inadvertently pushes the narrative of these dangerous conspiracies I've spoken about throughout this post. To once again make myself clear, I believe these victims in as far as I believe they went through something unspeakably traumatic at a very young age.

But with the volume of RAMCOA claims ever-increasing, yet substantiation of those claims ever-lacking, I cannot logically believe that the intense claims purported are completely and factually true given the evidence in front of me.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/136592NCJRS.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiigJ75pNuIAxX8LtAFHfjvIdUQFnoECBAQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1rF29SeYdt2ZljtHvnOLqI

https://greyfaction.org/isstd-exposed-a-culture-of-conspiracy/

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/10/us/hypnosis-may-cause-false-memories.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9531675/

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/blood-libel

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/satanic-panic-film-movie-michelle-smith-memoir-b2300716.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20131014102812/http://www.process.org/discept/2010/02/08/dr-colin-a-ross-psychiatry-the-supernatural-and-malpractice-most-foul/

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/abuse-innocence-mcmartin-preschool-trial

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-mar-07-mn-14693-story.html

https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/colin-ross-has-an-eyebeam-of-energy-hed-like-you-to-hear-7121325

https://web.archive.org/web/20240119125127/

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2004-02-13-0402130313-story.html

https://rentry.co/ssct_satanic-ritual-abuse https://scholar.google.com/scholar? hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C24&q=programmed+dissociative+identity+disorder&oq=programmed+diss#d=gs_qabs&t=1715683073093&u=%23p%3Dc6utAUJfID0J

https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/jscp.1997.16.2.112

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/r476y63t603wc9p7kpzoh/ALUZm1JXJ--kDpn34rXCSwg?rlkey=vkkkqm8w28fi11741hak63y55&e=1&st=drvkpis9

https://archive.org/details/ozian-u-w-chainless-slaves-trauma-programming/page/n210/mode/1up?q=illuminati

https://rentry.co/xy7zpu83

https://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/2022/12/dutch-commission-finds-no-evidence-for-satanic-ritual-abuse/

[creature-wizard]

Satan's Underground, written by Laurel Rose Willson, was another influential book on the Satanic Panic. According to the Cornerstone Magazine article, the book was instrumental in convincing a number of people that they'd experienced satanic ritual abuse, or SRA.

One little problem with this book, though: it's all baloney.

Cornerstone Magazine investigated her claims, and discovered that - just like Mike Warnke before her - it was all a bunch of crap. Willson had been a troubled young woman with a habit of making things up, and when the Satanic Panic arose, she got aboard with a story of her own.

When Willson was exposed as a fraud, and she didn't have the decency to apologize for lying or even just fade into the background. Oh, no. She reinvented herself as a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and claimed that she'd been personally experimented on by Doctor Josef Mengele. The self-harm scars that she'd initially blamed on the alleged Satanic cult, she now claimed were inflicted by the Nazi scientist. In her SRA survivor days she claimed that Satanists had forced her to have children for infant sacrifices; in her Jewish Holocaust survivor days she claimed that Mengele had sterilized her.

In short, this woman was an absolute ghoul who would exploit any tragedy, real or imagined, for personal gain. Keep this in mind going forward.

Her book, Satan's Underground, begins with a foreword by Johanna Michaelson, basically challenging people to believe her claims and kinda... insinuates that they're weenies if they don't. Also, if you don't believe what this book says, you're letting the Satanists win! The foreword basically offers up apologetics for allegations made in the McMartin preschool case. Investigators couldn't find the bodies of the sacrificed animals? Oh well that's because the cultists dug them up later. (Never mind that there would still be disturbed soil.) There wasn't time to fly the children from X location to Y location? That's because they were really flown somewhere much closer. No tunnels could be found? That's because the "tunnels" were obviously some sort of guided imagery.

For anyone who's never looked into the McMartin preschool case, the whole thing was an entire clusterfuck of mismanagement. Children were asked leading questions by adults, effectively coaching them in what to say. Children were also rewarded for giving the kind of answers interviewers wanted to hear. One former student, Kyle Zirpolo, came out and admitted that he'd started telling adults whatever he thought they wanted to hear out of a combination of wanting to fit in with the other kids and wanting adult approval. Zirpolo noted that when his made-up stories didn't match reality, the adults would simply rationalize it away.

Ultimately, there was no evidence that the McMartin daycare was any sort of front any sort of abusive activities, and trying to rationalize the the nonsensical, unsubstantiated claims into something readers might find more plausible is ghoulish. This story needs the McMartin preschool case to be justified in order to sustain its narrative.

[pers-books]

Coming soon - a Doctor Who murder mystery with Bonnie Langford

BBC Books to publish Doctor Who murder mystery with national treasure Bonnie Langford

A band of killers. Survivors with a secret. A death-defying murder mystery in space.

Pre-order DOCTOR WHO: DEATH IN THE STARS ahead of its release on hardback and audiobook on 22nd August 2024 here.

When young Mel’s business partner, Sabalom Glitz embarks on yet another “get rich quick” scheme, it marks the start of an epic, death-defying murder-mystery in space. After barely escaping the snares of a murderous galactic cult, Mel searches for fellow survivors in a nearby spaceship graveyard – while Glitz looks to fill his pockets. But the discovery of a spaceship with its crew in suspended animation and incredible secrets on board leaves the duo stranded with no way off. Mel revives the crew – and then the murders start. Murders that cannot possibly have been committed by any of the crewmembers. In fact, there are only two realistic suspects – Glitz and Mel themselves…

Bonnie Langford is a beloved British actor, and well-known for her role playing Melanie Bush in Doctor Who, companion to the Sixth and Seventh Doctors. Bonnie returned to Doctor Who as Melanie during 2023’s 60th anniversary specials and will return for Season 1 which hits screens in 2024. She also starred in numerous West End productions, and played Carmel Kazemi in EASTENDERS. This is her first novel.

DOCTOR WHO: DEATH IN THE STARS is written by Bonnie Langford with Jacqueline Rayner, and will be release on hardback and audiobook on 22nd August 2024.

Pre-order DOCTOR WHO: DEATH IN THE STARS here.

[crashandswirl]

MUSE INFO

Name: Jill Valentine

This Jill comes from the 2004 film Resident Evil: Apocalypse, also appearing in Resident Evil: Afterlife and Resident Evil: Retribution. Some influence from the Resident Evil games and the 1998 novel Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy. When interacting with her, there might be violence, blood, gore, death, and body horror. Except for violence, all of these things will be tagged as cw: [subject] when applicable.

Eyes: Blue

Hair:

Brown

Blonde (Afterlife through The Final Chapter)

Face claim: Sienna Guillory

Pronouns: She/her

Age: Dependent on the verse.

In the Anderson flicks, twenty-three at the time of the Mansion Incident and Raccoon City Incident in 2002.

Also in the Anderson flicks, her late twenties to early thirties in Extinction through to The Final Chapter, which ends in 2012.

Height: 5'6"/167 cm

Sexual/Romantic orientation: Bisexual/biromantic

Occupation:

Former thief.

Former S.T.A.R.S. (Special Tactics and Rescue Service) officer.

In Apocalypse to some point before Extinction, working to aid survivors and give Umbrella hell.

At some point before Extinction through to Retribution, a security chief for the Umbrella Corporation. Not a choice.

If she survives The Final Chapter, back to aiding survivors.

Personality: Brave of heart, selfless, and a fighter until her last breath, most consider Jill a badass. She's a hard worker who dedicates herself wholly to the fight.

She doesn't present herself as much of an open book and can have a somewhat prickly exterior at times. Her attitude often leans toward "Fine, I'll do it myself." She doesn't sugarcoat much and is no-nonsense in many ways. If she perceives you as being in her way, you'll either get shoved aside or shut out.

If Jill can try to save a life, she is almost always guaranteed to try. Those she's lost have left her with a heavy sense of guilt that will always stick with her. If she had been faster, done better, she thinks, things could have turned out differently.

Jill was raised by her father, Dick Valentine, a notorious thief. He brought her up to be in the same business as him and taught her everything he knew. When she turned twenty, her father was finally put behind bars. He had a moment of clarity and told Jill that having one Valentine behind bars was too many, eventually convincing her to find a different line of work. She moved to Raccoon City and joined S.T.A.R.S. She worked hard and dedicated herself to the position, earning some minor acclaim in the process. One day, she was sent up to the Arklay Mountains with her fellow officers to investigate the lack of response to the Bravo team, who were looking into what was perceived as cannibalistic cult killings at the time. After seeking refuge in a mansion from a pack of zombie dogs, Jill uncovered a lab belonging to the Umbrella Corporation. They were making bioweapons, many of which killed her comrades before she escaped. Jill tried to expose Umbrella, but the Chief of Police secretly had a deal with the corporation. She was written off as making far-fetched claims, things were covered up, and she was placed on suspension.

Verses:

We walked into a nightmare. (Pre-Resident Evil film) – Either follows Jill during her time in S.T.A.R.S. or the Mansion Incident. Can be shifted to the game universe.

Where it really went to shit. (Apocalypse) – Takes place during the Raccoon City Incident. Jill has to get out of town before it's blown sky-high. Can be shifted to the game universe.

I never pictured the world like this. (Post-Apocalypse + Extinction) – Following the death of Angela Ashford, the survivors of RC split apart. Jill travels North America as the T-virus ravages the world, aiding others when she can.

My body wasn't my own. (Afterlife + Retribution) – Begins a few years prior to Afterlife and also encompasses the Umbrella Prime Incident in Retribution. Jill has been captured by Umbrella, equipped with a P-30 Scarab Injector to augment her strength and keep her complacent, and retinal implants that feed her direct orders from the Red Queen, her AI superior. She acts as the security chief of Umbrella Prime and occasionally goes out to fulfill capture orders.

This ends here. (The Final Chapter) – Jill survives the explosion in the White House and sticks with Alice. It seems like they're the only people left alive not affiliated with Umbrella, but then they end up in the remains of Raccoon City, finding a group of survivors there. They all travel down to the Hive to try and release the antivirus.

Maybe I am a bleeding heart. (Crossovers) – A generic verse for crossovers.

Other:

She learned her lockpicking skills from her father, the only biological family member she's ever known.

Because this Jill is closely tied to the movie's timeline, I won't do any interactions with her in the games that take place after Raccoon City.

The movie version of Chris Redfield was never in S.T.A.R.S. and never met Jill, so the two aren't close friends. I'm willing to change that for threads, but I'll still always keep the existence of her best friend in the movies, Sgt. Peyton Wells, too.

[valtsv]

hi re: hell followed with us i read it a couple of months ago and came to the same conclusion u seem to be at so far, i liked the writing style a lot in that i thought it was descriptive and beautiful and i LOVED the scenes w the graces however the plot and story itself felt a bit amateur and needed quite a bit of work. sorry for the out of the blue ask i just needed to discuss this w someone else who has also read/is reading the book lmao

no don't apologize, i'm glad you gave me an opportunity to discuss it more! i agree, and i know that it's a YA novel so i definitely wasn't expecting something life changing, but i was very excited by the premise (trans cult survivor who has angelic monster powers escapes his abusers and joins a group of rebels; lots of good body horror and, in the summary's own words "embracing the monster within and unleashing its power against your oppressors") and then the actual novel itself has turned out to be a bit disappointing to me. although it presents a lot of very creative and compelling ideas, concepts, and imagery, the body horror is very well written - definitely one of the book's strengths - and the core themes and messages the author is trying to convey are very clearly communicated, the writing feels a bit like it it's rushing past things and just trying to check off boxes as quickly as possible at times. the story just doesn't grip me; i can't get fully immersed in the world it's showing me because sometimes it just doesn't feel real enough. the best books i've read have always managed to convince me to suspend my disbelief and dive into the universe they're showing me, which this one does sometimes, but not consistently. there are areas in the worldbuilding and relationship developments between characters that need more attention to reach their full potential. it comes across very surface level and repetitive at times (especially the descriptions of gore? there seems to be a lot of repetitive imagery about broken ribs, red and/or black blood and rot, and bodies being turned inside out by transformation and/or violence, and it doesn't feel more impactful or like it's exploring and developing the concepts each time, it just feels overused). i'm glad the story exists and that the author wrote it, i think it's a perfectly solid book and that he has a promising future in a career as an author, and i know it's his debut novel so there's always room for improvement and probably will be. but unfortunately as a lover of monster angels, queer fiction, and stories about what it means to be monstrous and balancing personal satisfaction and empowerment with justice and helping others, who should have been absolutely consumed by this book based on the summaries and reviews of it, it just isn't doing what i hoped it would for me.

[lightdancer1]

I will also note re: Tara and her darker side:

First, we do have Amber Benson herself writing a Tara who'd fit comfortably in a Warhammer Fantasy fluff. The sorceress who reads the wrong book, gets corrupted and possessed by those words, and is casually using her world's Willow as a power battery...while being about as hammy as the Wicked Witch of the West. I do love Benson's voice performance in that, and I enjoy using that version not least because given Amber Benson's protectiveness of said character that she wrote the first new media with her featuring an actually legitimately evil version says something.

Second, if we go with the idea that Tara's power draws from the Earth, there are two relevant points here. Assuming Gaia has connections to Greek myth when Osiris is both real and punked by Willow in one of her darker and more awesome moments equally, this is the Gaia who casually spat out monsters to kill the Gods because she was a murderous wrathful entity. Gaia is anything but a kindly maternal figure, she's more Kali-Durga. Second, at a purely scientific level tsunamis, volcanism, landslides, and the like are all things the Earth does.

Like any other kind of magic it has its more destructive sides and tapping into this is not technically Dark Magic, but it is the shadow-side of Earth magic, and it is one area where Tara is and will always be the 'always someone better' to Willow because Willow is a generalist who can do everything somewhat well, and Tara a very specialized focus in one set of magic in the long term. A lot of fanfics make her equal in power and the canon is very blunt that she is not. Not being equal to the most powerful sorcerer on Earth, or according to the comics, the entire universe of the Buffyverse Earth, does not mean that she is weak.

It only means that she comes short next to the magical equivalent of Silver Age Superman and there are huge gulfs in that. Still further, even when there are mitigating reasons Tara in canon sabotaged demon-location spells in the middle of the search for Adam and almost killed the entire Scooby gang in that one day when all her collective traumas bricked her in the face.

The canon character is by no means an infallible moral figure, and that I think is one of the few areas where the broad sketches of the Season 6 arc still work, Tara made smaller-scale mistakes and more importantly learned from them and learned how not to do it again. Willow makes much grander ones in pursuit of control over her life and a power trip from no longer being the side-kick and coming into vast amounts of power without real means to control it. Dark Lord Rosenberg vs. the traumatized cult survivor who more than most would see Mall Goth Sauron exactly for what she is and take the logical protective root of scooting and doing so too fast to warn the Scoobies of the time bomb in their midst.

Things with her and Willow work better when she is not, in fact, always right and when her behavior which on the whole is the best relationship in anything Whedon wrote (and when I continue this is still true and it tells you about all the others he's written) is one of largely picking fights and dealing with insecurities poorly and in a very human fashion until Dark Willow more than justifies the things she did more retroactively than at the time....is subject to the reminder that she is both abuse survivor, cult victim, internalized her view of herself as a demon and is not in fact always right on major things as she never quite accepted that she wasn't one.

She is not always right, her advice to Willow being a train wreck works better because it's well-meaning, from the POV of someone who sees a problem happening, does what little she can to stop it and when it fails secures herself rather than being forced to always think of others. Equally her growth arc and that of Willow very much complement each other. The neglect victim and the cult victim find their own self-worth and that in each other, and each brings out both the other's good traits and at particular times and in particular ways, their bad ones.

Tara's background is also, as things like the Quiverfull movement and other modern cults show something that can work just as well in a non-supernatural AU. After all that she is NOT a demon is precisely the point, and 'simplifying' things to 'mere' physical and emotional abuse also neglects that cult survivors and the intersections of religions and in particular Christianity in its Protestant (more than Catholic, the Maclays really read like the boondocks of Roll Tide country rather than Catholic) sense with misogyny work in a purely 'normal' world. People raised in insular cults encountering the wider world and escaping them does happen.

Some of them are gay.

That and I also tend to oppose pedestals even or perhaps especially with fictional characters where there are minimal real-world consequences. Allowing people to be truly human, flawed, and the world to be better for the flaws is better than a saintly figure who can do no wrong.

Because what, after all, shows best the growth of an increasingly megalomaniacal and controlling mentality that leads someone to flee for a good reason than someone most equipped of anyone to recognize it for what it is and to refuse to put herself back in the world she fought so hard to escape from? And that in turn spawning out of whether or not it's a metaphor for queerness or heroin that Buffyverse magic is reality-warping with spellbooks and that the power to say to stones 'become bread' and then you have freshly baked loafs of the finest quality is something that would, invariably turn people down dark and destructive paths because there are few people who would be granted such power suddenly and handle it well.

So, ultimately, I think that Tara works best less as an unrealistic saintly good plot device and more as an abuse survivor and cult victim whose greatest arc is both learning to stand up for herself and grow into who she is and what she is, and that it is those same jagged flaws and blind spots that stand her so well with the equally jaggedly flawed and blind in critical places Willow, because their flaws both coarsen and complement each other in equal measure. They are never better than with each other, and there is nothing but the two of them to potentially bring out the very worst traits that can and would lead Tara to almost kill off her family of choice in a blunder that to that point was more potentially lethal than anything Willow did in her entirety of bungled reality warping 'fix my life and oh shit I fucked up other people's stuff bad me, cookie time' stuff up to that point in each other as well. And of course Willow's most destructive acts were all out of the fear of doing the very thing they brought on and motivated by her loss and the suicidal grief she was plunged into from it.

And let's not forget, if we say they're soulmates, that the other soulmate duo in this universe is Buffy and Angel. Is that *really* a recommendation that soulmates and one true loves work well for either person involved here?

[livingfictionsystem]

A story about menopause, the sense of self, reincarnation, ghosts, a cult, and a serial killer. This was exceedingly well-written, first of all. It's so immersive that I actually kept making the mistake of Googling the characters and locations as if I could run by a historical document or photos of the massacre. Mary's POV is intriguing, as well. I was altogether not able to relate to her on a literal sense, but I felt so deep in her mind that I empathized with her through most of this. She's probably no one I'd be friends with in real life, but she was such a multi-dimensional person come to life by the prose. Mary is also realistically inconsistent. Sometimes meek, quiet, shy. Sometimes brutal and vicious. Many times, snarky and almost giggling through her own mental breakdowns and pointing how ridiculous her circumstances are. Throughout the book, she also becomes jaded, which I love in a horror character. She's fed up with her own existential crisis and even at one point, thinks, 'Wait, what happened to that child I supposedly killed? Eh, who gives a shit.' Which made me almost choke o my tea. Nat Cassidy is an exceptional writer for this. It also stayed in the mind enough that one of the people I was reading this book with found themself drunkeningly rambling about it to their friend one night in a McDonald's drive-thru, so, again, very well-done. I definitely recommend reading the author's Forward and Afterword because this is, as he points out, the story of menopause, told from the POV of a 50-year old woman, written by a cis guy. (He actually does specify cis, too, which I thought was refreshingly inclusive. There's no declaration like 'No man has gone through menopause!')

I will say, the feminism, though appreciated in some respects, really hits you over the head. It was almost funny how, in a scene with ghosts and gore, there'd be a narrative ramble about how women are overlooked. Like yes, that's nice, Mary, but that man's head was just cleaved in two by Ghostie Claws over there, a little focus please. Also, this book features a cult. As a cult survivor, I found the depiction unrealistic. There was no incentive, no threats of punishment or exile, no deprivation, to keep the members there and they all seemed to be just hardwired into being zealots that are just fine and dandy about human sacrifice. I do think the revelation about Damon Cross' journal was outright hilarious, though. No one is all that likable, but you don't need to be invested in anyone here. In fact, it's probably best not to be. Aunt Nadine was a bombshell of a character, vulgar, stubborn, and cantankerous, was a riot in nearly every scene she was in, but I definitely wouldn't want to be in the same room with her. I'd pay to see her on a reality show, though. She'd fit right in on Jerry Springer. It was also strange how much of the characters who insulted or berated Mary seemed to echo her own thoughts about herself---same verbiage and everything, 80% sexism. Nat Cassidy did try to bring in mythology and demons that didn't really fit and I'm left wondering what the point was. TW's for almost everything but SA. (A horror book that doesn't have a graphic SA scene? It Does happen!) There's substantial gore that is described very explicitly. And yes, the dog does die. (Possibly two?)

Oh, and if you can, get the audiobook. Susan Bennett did Such an amazing job.

SPOILER BEYOND THIS POINT.

The entire thing being pinned on Nancy was out of nowhere. Especially since it tried to hint towards Mary being caught in the excepts of the FBI agent's book. What was she even doing at the scene? Where did she even come from? It was sort of almost funny that the FBI's book boasted that he danced with the devil and took out some random hospital worker, but I wish there had been more lead-up.

-Xhaxhollari Icarus 🕊

[scifimagpie]

first lines meme!

The delightful @omokers tagged me, so I'm going to oblige with as many lines from my published works as I can. I put the first set in chronological order for the sake of ease.

And the Stars Will Sing - book 1 of The Meaning Wars. This short, friendly novella tells the story of a young wormhole engineer's first foray into deep space, clashes with her coworkers - and the escalating danger that descends on the ship.

Dear Sarah, So, I find myself preparing for my first job, and I should be excited, but I'm really just dithering. I hope you don't mind if I ramble at you.

2. The Stolen: Two Short Stories - book 2 of The Meaning Wars; this features a collection of short stories (though the old edition had only two) set through different periods of the Human Conglomerate, including one from before it all went wrong. The opening comes from "The Fields," the first story in the (now multi-story) collection.

It was a dry spring - that was one of my last memories before the reformatory. As I recall it now, it plays like one of the old films from the beginning of Earth cinema. Dry yellow-green fields, dusty roads whirring past.

3. The Meaning Wars - book 3 of the same series; this is a soft reboot that picks up a little while after book 2's ending. Crystal and Sarah finally catch up after a few years apart!

Crystal wiped her mouth and straightened. Space-sick again. It was one of the things she hated about small craft like these.

4. Poe's Outlaws - book 4 of The Meaning Wars, and the beach episode book.

As he leaned against Paulo's side, trying to get a good hold on his arms, Toby's face was turning red. Paulo twisted away, writhing with more agility than she expected from such a large man.

5. A Jade's Trick - book 5 of The Meaning Wars, the last one in the series; this sees Sarah, Crystal, Toby, Paulo, and Patience bring the fight against the Human Conglomerate back to the Solar System.

"We have a problem," said Paulo grimly, leaning against the ladder-side wall up to his loft bed. His glowing irises stood out sharply from his ceramic white sclera, but there was nothing unnatural about the scowl he was giving all of them.

6. The Underlighters - book 1 of the Nightmare Cycle, is told through journal entries written by Janelle, a scrappy young electrician living in Underlighter City - a bastion of civilization after the fall of the mysterious Dust killed much of humanity and forced the survivors deep underground. Janelle is starting to see things, and if that wasn't bad enough, her relationship with her girlfriend is on the rocks. And then the children start going missing...

The conversation went like this. "You seem tired, kiddo. And...uh, what happened to your shirt?" "Uh...I killed a dragon on my way home from work."

7. After the Garden - book 1 of the Memory Bearers Saga. Set in the same world as The Underlighters, though quite a bit later, this features the adventures of Ember - a young woman who's erased her own memory and left her secretive home village to search for the truth of her mysterious memories. Fortunately, she runs into some people like her along the way. Unfortunately, she also runs into a vicious cult that hunts those same people - Memory Bearers, individuals gifted (or cursed) with fragmented recollections of people from The Time Before the world broke.

The girl paused on the hill, shading her eyes from the sun. It had been a long journey, and she was getting tired of it - especially with the sun blazing down. Too exposed.

8. Bad Things That Happen to Girls - this standalone novella is a dive into literary fiction, featuring the disintegration of a family, fairy tale themes, and a queer awakening.

The day my sister fell in love was a gorgeous, sunny Tuesday afternoon in March. We were sitting on the roof of the shed behind our house when she told me about what had happened in school that day.

I'm not sure if there's a theme, but I'm tagging @pinkchaosart @dyrewrites @ventela1 @the-chiefster @jpohlmanwriting @the-chaotic-writer @careful-fear @thechaoscryptid and @palebdot anyway!