#ego discussion

[mathematical-apprentice]

I think it's sort of understandable why Bachura seems to have become a lot more low key in the Neo Egoist League. Isagi's Ego is more focused towards becoming the best striker in the world, hence the focus on scoring goals further down the line.

Bachira, however, doesn't seem too focused on that. He seems to be searching for a higher play.

[critter-wizard]

ep 43 had me tearing up in a fucking shopping centre ‼️‼️

b+w alt version that I truly couldn't decide if I liked it more . Also I included a lot of thoughts in the tags but they're somewhat incoherent<3

[stari-hun]

I’d have so much more sympathy for Kakania if she wasn’t a therapist or overestimated herself so badly. Like I get she’s just a girl to the highest degree but also. So , so many of the problems stemmed from the fact that she decided that she wanted to treat mental health issues while not wanting to be certified. The biggest step in any new field or a new study is setting up your own ethos. Hell, it’s HALF of what Windsong’s character story was about. The lack of credibility and her entire degree and study being ripped from under her led to a total inability to be published or taken seriously. Even if Kakania had succeeded in helping Isolde gain control over her mental health (which she couldn’t have without hypnotism or sealing off her arcanum because the possession is a massive factor in her mental decline), what then? Sure people will have come to her and Kakania would get more patients. But she’s also have to deal with countless people coming to her then giving up immediately because they couldn’t fix her immediately or soothe them. The medical community surely wouldn’t give them any hope. They’d look at Isolde’s case or similar ones and simply call it a result of community support at best or a midwife’s cure at worst. They’d tear apart all of the flaws in her results that Kakania would inevitably have from her total lack of experience in a formal environment and completely discredit her. Kakania’s incident in the start of Book 6 showed that sexism is still very much alive, so on top of being an arcanist when even having arcane blood can lead to immediate disapproval from some, she’d have to deal with doubts purely based on her sex.

In any other field or state of life, you’re 100% the victim even if you accidentally encourage a person’s obsession when you don’t want it. Accidentally exasperating someone’s issues when it isn’t your intention and becoming a victim is never the victims fault. Unless you’re a therapist encouraging a patient to be dependent on you. If Kakania was certified the first thing she’d learn is to be aware of dependency issues because it would be something researchers have seen show physically: people getting dependent on substances or other people to alleviate mental struggles. Also the fact that the Freud study, while from- well from Freud, it would’ve had other people interested as well. The question of if the mind is separate from the brain and self has been going on for years. Is a person their brain? Are you the neurons firing in your head? Are you your thoughts and is your sense of self you? Does your body and physical form also count as apart of oneself? The theories Freud posed that the mind can be ill in more than a physical way would undoubtedly peak the interest of research groups. Even if they hadn’t, I’d Kakania had fought to become certified instead, then she could’ve gone on to start one.

[amxthystiine]

OH MY FUCKING GOD GREGOR FANS WEVE NEVER BEEN SO BACK????

I,,,,, AAAAAA!!!!!!!!

HOLY FUCK IM SO INSANE RN CHAT !!!! THIS IS LITERALLY MY DREAM PAIRING MY FAV SINNER + FAV EGO WHAT THW FUCK?????

[caitlynmeow]

Daniela: There's not one bad picture of Cass.

Bela: Even her mugshots were cute...

Cass is just built different 😭😭😭

[gilgil-machine]

You know, I kind of hate to see people treat Cas!Gil as if he was any less arrogant than his Archer counterpart, when in reality, he just learned that there is a time and place for everything, including arrogance

Same here, and like I kinda understand where those people are coming from since they got used to Saber having a bunch of different versions or alter egos or like Sakura too and some others more. And sure Gilgamesh too has different versions of him like his alter ego that we'll about to see in new volume of fsf or we have proto Gilgamesh or Nebuchadnezzar (well this guy is just Gilface and not actually Gilgamesh but you get the point).

But still you can't treat archer Gil and caster Gil situation as like saber Artoria and caster Artoria because it's a completely different thing and there's a lot of proofs that show that they are one and the same person.

The most obvious one is Babylonia, like there's a lot of moments there that show the connection between caster and archer Gil and it has a huge reference to Gilgamesh's third SG in CCC like I mean.

Also some characters in fgo also mentioning the fact of connection and similarity between archer and caster Gil, like Hakuno for example. She has a line for caster Gilgamesh

AND she uses the same words that archer Gilgamesh mentioned during his third SG speech.

Also in fate samurai remnant there's a lot of archer and caster Gilgamesh references scattered all over his shop. Oh and also this art.

AND there's one official acrylic stand that we have of archer Gil but he wears caster Gil's jewelry.

And caster Gilgamesh can be just as merciless and sharp as archer Gilgamesh

[midnightsslut]

i know swifties are known for appreciating taylor’s lyrics, but i’m starting to wonder if the fandom has grown so large and her music so dense that a lot of people don’t understand what she’s saying at all. add the general trend of media illiteracy, the weird handwringing about whether her lyrics are autobiographical, and the increasingly popular view that you cannot see the author in the work, and a lot of people (largely not on here) are starting to have zero appreciation for the meaning of her lyrics beyond ‘this sounds pretty. that’s such a good metaphor!’ a lot of people are genuinely amazing at analyzing her music and post insightful takes, but the opposite is becoming prevalent as well imo.

[lucabyte]

hello i recently finished isat (and promptly became fixated SO hard)(as one does) and can i just say your Mind. The way you write sifloop & isiloop has me by the throat, you nail the characters so well and their dynamics are so compelling!! (i didnt really have any questions, i just wanted to send you appreciation/kudos bc my friends and i have been losing our minds over your comics!!)

Thank you !!! Glad to hear my merticulous obsession with trying to backwards engineer stuff that feels in character is paying off.

The only reason it feels so easy (to me) is because of the way the characters are just so well communicated in the game. such strong senses of voice that capturing them is just a matter of really observing it. So I'm always v happy to hear that my depictions feel 'accurate' (allowing for some give-or-take for silly shit to make punchlines land, of course, though jokes are always better in character too...) since that's my explicit goal :) i neeed to inflict other people with my extrapolated and synthesised reads of one of the most fucked up polycules of all time

[moonshynecybin]

vale is truly the biggest bad bitch fumbler! imagine almost a decade later the sport you hold so dear that you built your legacy in is like “hey so about that bad bitch you fumbled years ago”. you will never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you old man!!! im not even a petty person but if i were marc i Would Want that sound to follow him. let the knife twist every so often to keep the wound open if you will. maybe over time the amount of hurt will make the scales even! i feel like the idea of evenness/fairness in their relationship is a common thread yk?

i literally love that the motogp press establishment writ large clearly wants them to suck and fuck as much as we do like it does rule

[literallys-illiteracy]

New Zwei West designs

i'm not the biggest fan of the new Zwei West designs, which were revealed yesterday during the PM stream.

I'm aware that they're meant to be inspired by Western mediaevil knights, likely in relation to Don Qui's chapter which releases soon after; I'm not sure if they will be related like Oufi Heathcliff was to the following season or if they will have some plot significance during the Canto, it could go either way.

The main reason i'm not a fan of the new designs is they don't feel very knightly, nor do they feel the most cohesive with the other association designs we've seen so far.

Here is a shittily annotated copy of the Zwei image so there's context behind these ramblings:

As an initial note, i feel like the tiny little ecranche/Police badge things [1] aren't doing it for me, the colour matching with the armour makes it unclear whether its a badge or actual section of the armour, but i really don't like how it looks; if a police badge needs to be incorporated into the design because of Zwei association, even though they have Sigillary of the association on their shoulder [14] and Leg plates [3], then i think that it would work better connected to the utility belt that both designs have [5] [8] (also why is the belt so fucking high up on [8]?)

I really think that the Dress suit-collars [4] Sticking out from under the armour, the idea of them showing up to their office in the same Suit and ties as the regular Zwei fixers before getting into these suits of armour is too silly for my taste: i'm not opposed to designs which involve combat suits, i like the original Zwei designs, as well as the butlers and Ensemble, but the clash between these two visual designs really irks me.

now the first part that i really really hate. What the fuck are the plates on their robes [3]? we can see that they're clearly metal, due to seams between sections and bolts fixing them there, but these serve less than no purpose; Having lightly armoured/unarmoured legs is fairly common for mobility reasons, leather or cloth pants be unarmoured on ground troops is common. I'm stretching my suspension of disbelief for the robes/coat (for this section) [11] [12] itself, as they are fairly common in fantasy, just to note there are of course risks of tripping/having the cloth caught on something, but that passes the rule of cool.

The metal plates [3] on these robes are actively detrimental to combat; as these plates are only supported on the fabric they will weight down on the user, heavily limiting movement, which nulls the entire point of not wearing full plate; as the cloth is loose and hanging, these armour plates wont do much at all to disperse the force of blows, as the impact will be transferred through the metal, into the cloth: this isn't practical, though it may stop the occasional slashing/piercing attack, it will still transfer the energy into the leg beneath, unless there is padding or a gambeson underneath covering the legs, which once again nulls the point of the coat's armour as a whole. The plate on the belt of the leftmost design [10] isn't much better, even though its supported by the belt (presumably on both sides to make it stable), its still going to kill you back and weigh you down, not to mention that the plate goes down almost to the knee, which limits mobility even more, whilst not protecting the most vital sections.

before i continue, i want to consider what happens to the plating on the second's chest [7] if (when, if i have anything to say about it) he bends over, because that's going right into his stomach. This section was added just for the note about him being hot, that's all.

Its kind of disappointing that the Germanic-European mediaevil knight based Zwei fixers don't have a ZWEIhander when the regular fixers do, even though its a perfect fit for these ones; Instead they use a giant sword [6] with a random glowing orange spot. I've never been a fan of the classic "massive fucking sword" design trope and this is no exception at all, i would much prefer that they all use some sort of historical European weapon, especially a crossbow or bill book/Halberd. i do acknowledge that there are people who like the M.F.S design, its just not for me.

i want to note that the two designs shown here use different arm-guards, While [9] is more akin to a Gauntlet connected to a bracer of some sort, only covering the top half of the forearm, while [2] covers the entire forearm akin to a vambrace. For simplicity these two armour sets will be called the Light and Heavy sets respectively

Neither armour set uses a Couter (elbow piece), which is fine for both designs, the vambrace of the heavy suit covering a section of the elbow, and the light set likely focusing on more mobility than raw defence.... for the most part:

There is another major difference between the two sets of armour, the breastplates: While the light set wears something akin to a plackart [4] (below the collar), covering the entire torso and stomach, the Heavy set wears something akin to a crop top which seems to stop right after his tits and before the belt [8], taking the word "breastplate" very literally. because of this, im no longer referring to these different suits as Light and Heavy because neither seems to be one more than the other one is; In order to match this, they will now be referred to as the Hight and Leavy armour sets. im starting to understand his plating at [7] because his stomach is completely exposed by the looks of it.

And my final point unless i decide to write more, in which case there will be a paragraph underneath this section, is the Robes worn by he Hight set: the robes marked under [11] are nice, i like these as a design, they don't drop too low, they looks fairly thick but still mobile and i really have no problems with these. the cloak in [12] does not get any compliments, it serves no purpose and can act as a way for opponents to trip you or for you to get caught on during battle; the reason that the coats at [3] get a pass (only on accounts of tripping hazard, not the plates) is because those are short enough and weighed down enough that they are somewhat realisatic, similar to [11], as it seems that the robe is an undercoat while wearing the armour (even though they have suits).

I'm not the biggest fan of these, no there will not be an analysis of the Devyat association because i don't have any/as many problems with their design from what we've seen (although their magic bag looks like a boombox, also its giving Yuna from dawn office?)

also while writing the tags to finish this off i realised i never talked about the boots [13], oopsie, 7/10, not terrible cavalry boots

[vimbry]

jesus these accusations and bitter posts Mocking the way people are asking for help are evil. "um, suspicious much how every ask sounds like it's copy pasted and is worded desperately, like a scammer would do" are you expecting what, level-headed bespoke messages from people trying to survive genocide, use your goddamn common sense.

[compacflt]

I just wanted to say as someone who has stumbled across your blog and has read your Wednesday wips and posts about anything topgun related that your thought process and consideration of mav and ice, specifically their political beliefs and relationships with their own identities, is honestly so impressive and cool. You have brought such realism and life to these characters which is just so refreshing to see. idk i just wanted to express how cool and awesome i think that is

Because of the thought into these characters does it make it difficult to like them or understand them if you have differing opinions from them? for me personally i feel like if i were to ever actually have a convo with ice or mav regarding identity politics i would actually start to lose my mind (like how one feels when your dad or fun uncle talks for too long at thanksgiving dinner). If it does make them difficult to like, does that make it difficult for you to write them sometimes?

oh yeah! i think, my ice i really empathize with & really love & really could get along with, once he grows out of the sexism of his teens & twenties, but my maverick drives me crazy. someone sent in an ask a while ago that was like “WHY is cyclone simpson your one true love??” And it’s because i too would absolutely hate maverick & hate working with him lol. people who are overly cocky & un-self-aware & a bit self-centered make me CRAZY. (narrator voice: compacflt is a hypocrite as all these things also apply to compacflt.)

Politically… It’s difficult to say. no one really wants to hear the intricacies of one person’s political journey, which is why i won’t give you mine, but suffice to say—since the start of the russian invasion of Ukraine, and my semi-concerted effort to learn more about the political landscape of modern warfare, my own personal beliefs have shifted a whole bunch. definitely aided in that shift by my top gun fic project that specifically aims to understand the conservative straight-passing male mindset as it relates to military matters… there are many end goals to a project like mine, but one end product is a filter you can take away and hold up in front of your eyes and see the world through it. When writing from the eyes of a conservative straight (passing) white man, your priorities totally shift. I had to write from the perspective of someone who doesn’t care about identity politics. Because they don’t! A core tenet of conservatism is very proudly not caring about that stuff, and being very annoyed when people (usually left-of-centers) make that stuff very visible and want you to care about it! “Don’t shove it in my face,” etc., etc. Don’t force me to care about this taboo, private thing I really don’t care about. It violates my freedoms, or whatever, to be forced to care—or even bear witness to—stuff that i don’t care about. Etc. And then, to be nominally a part of that community that you really, really don’t care about, and then to be told that you have to care about it because of your publicity… people asking you to be proud of something that has had a negative connotation for much of your entire life… that’s not a transformation that happens easily.

Jesus, I could write an essay about this. I have, several times by now in responses to asks over my blog. But there is so much that I could talk about. I think… I really worry that some of my writing falls into the first of the below categories:

I really try not to romanticize conservatism in my writing—I tried to show that ice and mav’s happiness is the price they pay for their conservatism. They’re actively choosing to be unhappy—but because they prioritize their honor over everything, due to EXTERNAL PRESSURES they cannot control, and which I think are often ignored in the fandom space for one reason or another. The fact of the matter is, in 99% of IPs, characters prioritize something other than their sexualities. It’s never Maverick’s personal identity that is at stake in either Top Gun or Top Gun: Maverick, because he has built himself so impermeably masculine that there are no grounds upon which to question his personal identity. He just isn’t thinking about it. He’s thinking about how to get into Charlie’s pants, how to win the Top Gun trophy, how to uphold his promise to Goose, et cetera. If he’s fucking guys on the side, it’s because he wants to and because hes maverick and he does what he wants without thinking about it—that’s the whole point of his character, from a story-construction standpoint. That’s his archetype. He’s a renegade maverick superstar who is both thoughtlessly brilliant and thoughtlessly dangerous. He’s thoughtless. His priorities are to survive and to look cool doing it, and that’s it. He is a savant in the Naval Air Force, where honor is your lifeblood, who feels he has been dishonored by his own family name, and who willingly joined the conservative post-Vietnam Navy right when/after Ronald Reagan was elected President, and who wears cowboy boots and who disrespects women to their faces, and who is eager to get into altercations with Soviet-Chinese-DPRK-X-second-world-country-coded-but-EXPLICITLY-Soviet-manufactured-Mikoyan-Gurevich-MiG-28s(-F-5s-painted-black)… I’m sorry. In my opinion, the conservatism is baked into him as a character. I find it extremely difficult to separate him from his conservatism, because in some ways his patriotic conservatism is his raison d’etre. IMO if you take that away from him, he ceases to exist.

Same thing with Ice and his unwillingness to openly rebel or go against the grain. That is his whole reason to exist in the story at all. I know that I’m saying this in a fandom space where the whole point is to change characters & put them in different situations (fanfic) but… in kind of a perverse self aware way, as in I know I sound ridiculous and pretentious, i guess i don’t really understand an impulse to change the core tenets of a character irreparably in fanworks. We are shown that ice always goes by the books in TG. Then we are shown that he achieves the fruits of that labor (four stars) in TGM. So he is rewarded for never rebelling, whereas Maverick, who always rebels (but NEVER in a way that challenges his personal identity), has stagnated in the ranks at full-bird O-6. And that’s Ice’s character. That’s what he’s there for in the story—he’s a tool to show us the value system of rank and prestige you earn by following the rules of the Navy. Why take that away from him? That’s his priority! Canonically, that’s his priority and reason for existence! And historically the way to achieve that priority is through conservatism.

And you ask me if it’s hard to like my ice and mav. Yes, but that’s not my choice. The movie already did that for me. They are not, I’m sorry, likable people. I am not a straight white conservative male writing about straight white conservative men to validate my own beliefs—I’m a queer AFAB person of color writing about straight white conservative men because I want to understand the limits of their conservatism. What they do and do not care about, and what it takes to make them care. And from what we are shown in TG… ice and mav would not care about ME. At all. And they would not want to be forced to care about me. Ice’s casual careless dismissiveness… “the plaque for the alternates is down in the ladies’ room…” mav following Charlie into the bathroom… turning the key in the ignition and driving away while pretending not to hear her… “what?? i can’t hear you! 🙉” … they do not care. They have no desire to care.

Again. Maybe I subscribe to a very very old-school and labored and pretentious ideology when it comes to writing… I know a lot of people write just to have fun. I do not. I wish i could, but I don’t. And when you’re not writing to have fun, you don’t have to like the characters you’re writing about. They’re nothing more than tools at your disposal to get your point across more effectively. No, I don’t like them! Of course not! My ice is cruel and cowardly and careless and hypocritical and subservient and weak, and my mav is demanding and dangerous and dismissive and oblivious and so, so, so unbelievably bitter.

And that’s what my story needed, to get my point across. So, shrug. My point was my priority. I don’t care too much about the characters themselves.

Re: icemav & identity politics. Part of hopefully selling this story is the attempt at empathy for the conservative male, to bring this discussion back to the top. Why write fiction at all if you’re not going to write about people different from you, and why write about people different from you if you don’t want to understand them? So… part of trying to understand them was to understand and have empathy for this shift in priorities. Conservative guys do not want to care about labels, or sexual orientations, or, God forbid, discussion of their gender identities. I can kind of see Ice tolerating it by the end… but, there are limits. Again, it’s supposed to be private. I think he’d chafe against getting labeled gay—he wouldn’t want to be called the first gay compacflt, or SECNAV, etc. He can’t say, “i slept with like a hundred fifty women before I even MET the ONLY man ive ever slept with,” because that’s like intensely private personal information!! No one deserves that information, but people still want to call him gay, even though in his head he really is not!!!! Again—from the conservative perspective, it’s a public imposition of left-wing, overly sexualized, too-neat labels and politics onto an area of life that has typically been kept private and respectable—I don’t agree with the conservatism, but I can at least empathize with it. Pre-Maverick’s death (pre-coming to terms with it), it would’ve been shameful & embarrassing to him; but even after coming to terms with it, it’s still not something he “takes pride” in. I think he thinks of it like this—most people aren’t proud of being straight. Like, it’s weird if you are. Same thing with being proud of being white, etc. Why be excessively proud of things you have no control over? Why not take pride in your ACTIONS—for instance, his career that he has actively sacrificed so much of his pride for? I can really empathize with that thought. I don’t necessarily agree, but I get it, especially in his professional circumstances, where he has so much to be professionally proud of, and yet people keep wanting him to publicly care about this private part of him he has no control over and can’t change.

Maverick though. I think he’d be actively hostile about talking about it in public. He Does Not Care. he does not want to care. It’s all an insult. They call him the first openly gay Ace cause he’s married to another man— “okay, but, like, I’m not. Stop calling me that. Neither of us are. Oh my god we have slept with so many women. Stop calling us that.” Ok then what do you want us, the press corps, to call you? First openly bisexual Ace? “No that’s worse!! That’s a word some teenager made up and doesn’t mean anything!! I’m sixty years old stop asking me to talk about this stuff im too old.” What do you have to say to LGBT kids who want to go into the navy? “😎👍 there’s a place for you etc etc. Let’s go back to talking about all the planes I shot down.” Maverick does what he wants without thinking about it. That’s the core tenet of his character. Very conservative. Don’t ask him to care too much.

Idk. No I don’t like them. But I understand them, if that makes sense. Like their conservative anti-label logic does make emotional sense to me. So that’s part of what I took away from this project, for better or worse… probably worse: I understand why conservatives don’t like the modern over-publicity of sexuality. They don’t care and they don’t want to care. And because they are small-C conservative, my ice and mav still don’t care lol. So, yeah. It doesn’t make them hard to write, because thats why I wanted to write them in the first place.

[kalcifers-blog]

MY IDEAS REGARDING ANTISEPTICEYE!!

Okay straight off the bat- I think Anti has never been human, I think whatever Anti is predates any human currently alive and possibly any human being that existed before then too. Whatever Anti is, it has existed for far longer than any human being could ever feasibly comprehend. But

I don't think they're a "God" or a "Demon" either. I think any terms humans have come up with in the past would only diminish the true scale of whatever Anti truly is. And to truly appreciate what Anti is, is to accept that you'll never fully understand. Whatever goal he might have is quite frankly incomprehensible to humans- it's like an Ant trying to figure out why a human would be mowing a lawn or what a lawnmower even is. All the Ant sees is the violent, gigantic machine beyond anything it's ever seen, tearing apart its home and its colony.

I feel like that's the point of Anti, we all love to theorize and draw meaning to things all the time, because it's human nature to want to know- I think Anti going against that very instinct is what makes him so terrifying. Anti needs us to pay attention, to keep feeding into him to continue to watch to see what he does next- it's like he's trying to get us to find a solution to the problem, knowing that we'll never find it because there never was one to begin with.

I feel as though Anti sticks in like an embedded thorn. One that's dug in so deep under the skin that the top layer has healed over- but the thorn is still there, maddeningly scratching away at your insides as you desperately try to figure out what's wrong. Figuring out the solution to your problem is to tear it out of you.

That's how I imagine Anti is to Chase. A thorn deep inside a long healed wound, only there to twist and pry into him, a sick reminder of the wound long after it's healed.

In my mind- the only real way to stop Antisepticeye realistically within The IRIS Project, is to accept that you never will.

[pfaugh]

finally, a recording of my singing voice that I like - only took............... nine years. okay. yeah. fuck me.

[rouge-the-bat]

in the past when i first started posting about bi lesbian stuff and seeing next to nothing looking up stuff for it on tumblr besides my own posts, to then mostly seeing hate when i looked it up, to NOW seeing mostly positivity and arguments in support of it makes me so happy. seeing that even if im not posting about it as much, theres still so many others out there that are going on to spread love for me and my fellow mspec lesbians/gays and other related complex identities. that theres plenty of people out there i can surround myself with without worrying if theyre gonna suddenly turn on me just for my identity. even if theres still a lot of hateful exclusionists, im really glad the situation has progressed to a point where more people have heard of us and choose to let their voices of support be known.

[hongluboobs]

new egos killed me dead btw. im so excited but also projmoon Why