#exactly how i'm feeling today | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

butchsophiewalten · 1 year ago

Note

Man this is so random but this theory is stuck in my head and I wanna see how other people feel about it because I don't see people talk about it a lot (I have no clue if the link will go through properly since I've never put a link in a ask box)

https://www.tumblr.com/art-w0rm/667910993425350656/theory-time

Oh god not this theory again. I really truly try not to be mean to people for no good reason on this blog, but this theory is literally one of the stupidest fucking things I've ever seen in my entire life. I don't talk about this theory because to me it's like the walten files theory equivalent of that tubby custard mechanically separated chicken post.

Most of the time I genuinely don't even consider it worthy of my time, because it's nonsense, but this is a very nicely worded ask, and I really don't mean to dedicate any of the vitriol I hold towards this theory to You, poor anonymous person, so I will deconstruct it. I will go through the theory point-by-point and deconstruct why I disagree with it.

First up, this:

Showbear is not a character in The Walten Files anymore. Showbear was fully retconned and is never going to appear in the series again. He was effectively just a cameo of ThunderingStatic's (one of Martin's friends) OC, but when The Walten Files blew up and people started assuming Showbear was Martin's character, Static decided to withdraw his character from the series and focus putting him in other projects.

Martin talked about this on Twitter forever ago, but I wouldn't be able to find that tweet now. But here's a bit from the interview he did with KnowYourMeme back in 2021 where he talks about it:

Now this:

This is just stupid to me? Like a complete logical incongruity? I barely even know how describe what is dumb about this because I can't even fathom how anyone draws this conclusion from this information. How is it strange for a man to say 'if my wife isn't home by the time she said she was going to be, let me know, in case something happened.'????? Why would Rosemary be out cheating on her husband with her fucking daughter with her??? If Rosemary was cheating on her husband why would her whole life collapse when he went missing? If Rosemary was cheating on her husband why would she show up at the restaurant every day after he disappeared asking if anyone had seen him and hoping to find him alive??? Why would she make paintings of herself and him together after he disappeared????? What the fuck are you talking about?

Ok now this:

Whatever. This is maybe the most coherent part of the theory, to me. I definitely agree that Sha evokes a 'wolf in sheep's clothing' sort of aesthetic, but I do remember Martin saying something in a Twitter Q&A at one point about how that wasn't actually intentional, and that Bon was the character he actually meant to seem unusually predatory. I looked for a while and couldn't find a screenshot of that, but I did find this one where he says the thing about Bon:

So whatever. take that with a grain of salt.

I don't even know what to say. here. Whatever. sure she was rolling in the hay

yeah Rosemary is asking if she's still beautiful because she cheated on her husband and not because she was chopped up and stuffed inside a big animatronic sheep. I think this is correct and is the True Deep Lore.of the walten files. I'm sure this doesn't have anything to do with the recurring motif of the double-meaning behind the word Beautiful either.

I don't know why it's weird that the lost lingering spirit of a mother would be calling out to her only living child. I Don't know why that needs additional explanation involving this batshit infidelity conspiracy theory.

Sha's chest is also ripped out

So is Banny's, honestly? Just a little less?

ok now this:

I guess I can't disprove this except that I think this is dumb. I think this is a really incredibly stupid logical leap to make. Y'know I really meant to go into this levelheadedly and very calmly go through every point and talk about why I think it's Decisively Disagreeable or whatever but I can't. I really can't. I just cannot keep my patience with this sort of thing.

You'd think if there was an infidelity aspect here it would've been lampshaded in some respect, at all, in the old /sophiewalten findjackwalten page text. Where it's literally Sophie talking to Jenny about what she remembers about her family.

Especially if the idea is that Sophie is meant to have been there. You'd think something like that would have come up here. Not 'she was nice and a good mom until my dad disappeared and her mental health started getting worse'

#ask #this theory always feels like someone's pulling a prank on me. like they're trying to see how much stupid bullshit they can say convincingl #before i notice and get mad #i'm sorry i couldn't keep it together for you anon I really dont mean to make anyone feel like an idiot #i just really don't have the patience for something like this today I think.#we haven't seen a lot of rosemary's characterization in the walten files yet #but everything we HAVE seen externally characterizes her as loving and compassionate but also sharply protective of the people she loves #and also so very deeply incredibly in love with her husband #and there's actually a decent bit of positioning her and jack as equals in their relationship which isn't exactly usual for the time #yknow. she has her own car and she has a job (even if its working for her husband's company.)#she's headstrong and ferociously talented and her husband is very supportive of her and of her artistic endeavors #yknow. the tragedy of jack and rose isn't that their relationship was bad #it's that their relationship was great and it was cut short over factors outside of their control #and now it lingers through the hallways of abandoned buildings as a broken facsimile of itself #there was a wonderful family full of people who loved each other intensely and had their whole lives still ahead of them #and it took one summer for all of it to be gone

50 notes · View notes

thedreadvampy · 3 months ago

Text

just for me:

a catalogue:

Tape Guy

He sits on the left shoulder. He isn't exactly part of you but he has a big stack of video tapes of your memories, and those are part of you. He pushes a video into your ear of times you were an idiot, cringe or shitty, and plays it on repeat while indicating that you should draw your own conclusions.

Shoulder Lawyer

We know this one: he is small and he sits on the right shoulder and, as we have discovered, he is a bullshit artist. He cherrypicks the evidence that Tape Guy and the Brain take in and makes the case that you cannot prove the guilt of anyone who hurt you. He says 'it didn't happen, and if it happened it wasn't anyone's fault, and anyway my client is just a sad little birthday boy and you are an unreliable vindictive slag.' it is very important to him to preemptively discredit you in case you say something that might incriminate someone, so he devotes his time 24/7 to establishing your poor character. He is not a real lawyer and he's being paid to do this. He is not part of you at all, he pretends to be an objective third party outsider and he is, of course, Not That, he's a guy who's personally deeply invested in discrediting you. No part of this guy is You.

Brain/Data Centre

this probably isn't a guy. It's a computer, but it's also you - it's a part of a person, not a machine, but it is a calculator not an animal. It takes in data - all data: how you feel, how your body acts, what your first thought is, what the lawyer says, what other people say, how people move and react, emotional input, what's happened in the past, what other people have said - and it uses that to construct theories.

The Brain is very verbal, structured and precise. It moves very fast - often so fast it's absorbed and developed a new theory before it's finished expressing the previous one. So it's precise but it's not clear, it's often interrupting itself or running parallel overlapping processes. What the Brain is trying to do is Make It Make Sense. The Brain is trying to get as close as it can to the truth of something. It understands everything as a useful data point, but it takes all of them as being valid, so it's very susceptible to the suggestions that the Shoulder Lawyer makes because it understands falsehood and misdirection very well, and considers them useful data points, but it doesn't understand the idea that someone within the system would be putting in bad inputs on purpose. It lives in the head, mostly in the front half of the skull cavity, behind the forehead.

The Accountant

The Accountant isn't entirely a separate guy - he's a sort of outpost or partial avatar of the Brain. If he's a person, he is gaunt and full of extremely directed nervous energy. He lives in a very close-to-the-surface thin space between the skull and the skin of the forehead, and he runs the numbers that the Brain has available and tries to balance the books. He makes plans and suggests strategies. He has two motivations; to help you move forwards productively and to balance the costs, which will be many. Part of his job is to assess what you can and can't afford to lose, what will cost more in the long run, and how much you need to keep in reserve for the future in order to keep the system running and have a buffer for emergencies. He thinks in spreadsheets and flowcharts, and he wants the Brain to give him the best possible data picture so he can make the least costly and most profitable decisions. He doesn't decide what profit is, though, that comes from lower down. He is a guy, but he's definitely part of you - he's a guy your brain made to interact with the outside world.

[Gesture towards the chest]/🌄

The Brain tries to interpret it, but because they can't communicate directly, the Brain has to guess by observing how it acts. The Brain constructs a lot of theories based on inputs and outputs, but it can't convert any of its actual [thoughts (?)] into meaningful data because their language is mutually unintelligible. The Accountant and the Brain can't convince it of things, or understand with clarity what it wants, not because it doesn't think but because they can't communicate.

This doesn't have a name, and it can't have a name, because it isn't a person and it doesn't use words. It is very much You and it is highly, highly sentient and conscious, but it is very much not any kind of guy or a comprehensible mind. It is a roiling orange and red glowing thing that is in constant turning fluid motion in the chest cavity.

Where the other parts are anthropomorphic, animal, or very verbal machines, this is a completely alien sort of consciousness. It doesn't really have sensations attached to it, but it moves and swells and makes itself known by pressing against the things near it. As far as you can tell, the ways it pulses, expands or moves faster or slower are how it communicates itself, and it's clearly a complex language, but not one that has any relationship to a verbal one or that's comprehensible to you, the Brain or the Guys.

The Body

I mean all of this is happening in your body. But The Body lives in the belly, under the diaphragm and above the hips, and if you ask what the body is doing, your attention first goes there then branches out to everywhere else.

The Body is animal, it's meat and biological mechanisms. It includes all physical reactions from crying to sore knees. What the body wants is the mechanisms of survival - it isn't really a thinking thing, it's a very wet and alive machine which can go wrong or function differently in response to stimuli.

Because the Body sits right up against the chest cavity, and because it just responds to stimuli rather than trying to understand things, the Body is the most likely to react to 🌄. The movement of 🌄 presses down into the Body and triggers impulses (like nausea or crying) which are the main way the Brain can collect data on the movements of 🌄 and make assessments about what it's thinking.

The Body is purely reactive. It doesn't have any motives of its own other than to keep functioning. It throws up flags or sets off alarms when something happens that might impede it, but it isn't sentient - it's only alive. It 'wants' me to sit down like a car 'wants' me to fill it up. It doesn't respond to the Brain, the Brain observes it and the Accountant suggests appropriate changes to your behaviour to adjust the inputs you're giving the Body.

The Guard

This is either a guy or a muscle group. He lives in the back of the oesophagus and the surrounding muscles, and his job is to stop the constant rising movement of 🌄 from getting out into the throat and mouth. I think his job might originally have been to connect the 🌄 to the Brain but now he's full-time committed to tamping down the 🌄 in case it floods or erupts.

He alerts you about high motion and agitation of the 🌄, and, if the tide gets too high, he clamps the gap shut and and clings on for dear life. He's also the guy who keeps you calm and together in a crisis - he holds you steady and keeps you breathing while the Accountant works.

The Ineffable Exhortation

This isn't a new voice but it's reaching through. Initially you didn't think it had a physical place in the body and it was just You, but now you've located it in the lower back of the head, just behind the soft palette, nestled in deep. This is absolutely part of you. It says things like 'you should touch a tree' or 'you want to talk to this specific person right now' or 'that's not right'

It doesn't necessarily explain its reasoning, although I think it has reasons. It talks sometimes, but mostly it works quietly, and the only evidence it's working is that it occasionally asks for food or rest or makes specific requests.

It only speaks in order to tell you what to do, which is ok because what it asks you to do is basically always a good idea (or completely neutral, like 'touch a tree' or 'sit on the floor'). It doesn't boss you, it just says quietly, calmly, and with considered certainty 'you need to...'

Kind of like the Body, it's asking for things it needs to run its processes. Sometimes those things are obvious ('you need to have X conversation') and sometimes they're extremely esoteric and seemingly random ('you need to rearrange these boxes'), but I trust that they're ingredients it needs to run itself.

Unlike the Body, which is a purely reactive system, the Ineffable Exhortation is all sentience. Like the Brain, it is devoted to processing; unlike the Brain, it doesn't loop you in most of the time. It's capable of speech, but it chooses to keep quiet unless it has something specific to request.

I am reasonably sure that the Ineffable Exhortation is the only part of you that can speak both verbal language and the language of the 🌄 with equal fluency. It knows directly, from the horse's mouth, what the 🌄 wants, and it also knows what the Brain wants and keeps an eye on the Body. It works very hard to translate all three into instructions, but it only speaks when they're all in agreement, and because the Brain and 🌄 can't communicate directly, it is doing a whole lot of mediation and translation to get even one thought together.

The Guard gets in the way of the Ineffable Exhortation a lot, and historically has been quite hostile to the Ineffable Exhortation, not because he dislikes it, but because it agitates the 🌄. This both prevents the Exhortation hearing from 🌄, and prevents the Brain from hearing from the Exhortation, because the Guard is often standing between the Exhortation and the Brain and refusing to let them talk in case it upsets the balance.

The Brain values the Ineffable Exhortation, which gives it another very clear sets of data points to triangulate with, and helps it guess what the 🌄 is doing. But the Guard gets in the way of the Brain hearing from the Ineffable Exhortation.

The Accountant is neutral towards the Exhortation, except inasmuch as part of his risk analysis involves weighing up the costs and benefits of obeying the Ineffable Exhortations. He does weigh his calculations towards the Exhortation, though, because past experience suggests it's likely to have unexpected benefits.

The Shoulder Lawyer fucking hates the Exhortation. This is because the Shoulder Lawyer's whole job is to cast doubt on the reliability and certainty of you as a whole system, and the Exhortation is utterly certain. There is not a glimmer of self-doubt in the Exhortation. You can deny its requests because the Accountant says despite his best efforts to square the sums, they're impractical or impossible at the moment, but you cannot disbelieve in the rightness of them, or think they're the Wrong Call.

The Exhortation only says things it is 100% sure of, beyond a shadow of doubt. Unless it knows them to be the correct thing, it keeps them to itself and continues processing; once it is 100% sure what needs to happen to move the process forward, it will tell you, gently but insistently. If the Exhortation's demand fades, you don't have to do it - it's found another route forwards. If it persists, it's because you need to do it.

The Lawyer hates the Exhortation because the Exhortation is immune to the Lawyer. The Exhortation can't be convinced by an argument and it can't be called upon to doubt itself.

The Exhortation isn't in charge. It isn't God or a boss or a pilot. The Exhortation just processes everything that the Brain and the 🌄 (which are the fundamental thinking parts that are entirely You) have to say, and coalesces it into meaning.

It provides action, but in a different way to the Accountant. The Accountant is receiving instructions about what you aim to achieve and translating those into individual steps and checks; the Exhortation is what produces the aims. It doesn't always explain what they are or what they have to do with each other (although the Brain tries to connect those dots, because that's what it does), it just combs through all the complexity and mess and overlapping information that the Brain, Body and 🌄 are working with, and coalesces them to the core.

(this is the bit that says 'this is holy' or 'this is a moral good' and it's also the bit that says 'you should eat a burger' and 'you want to stay on the sofa'. All its statements are delivered in the same certain, factual tone, without more or less weight, but the Accountant is running numbers that say 'a burger costs too much and you can get 90% of the same benefit with any protein' or 'it will cost a lot to die on this hill but it will break the system to ignore it, so we have to do it'

The Guard keeps you thinking straight in a crisis, but it's the Exhortation that allows you to stay the course. The Exhortation knows that this is all going somewhere, and it can tell the difference between a discomfort that is just doing you harm, and the kind of pain which is happening as a side effect of change. It says 'hunker down' or 'guard yourself' when it's a storm to survive and get out of and it says 'this needs to happen' when the storm is the only way to get where you're going.

You do not think the Exhortation is the voice of God. It is definitely part of You, and it isn't delivering instructions from on high, it's reporting out the aggregate results of the calculations and inputs that the rest of You are working on. However, you do think that the Exhortation could be mistaken for the voice of God, and that it has a lot to do with That of God. But it's important to know that the Exhortation is coming entirely from You. There's no outside force involved.

The Exhortation can probably be wrong, but maybe not? It could easily be wrong if it ever made statements about the world outside You, but it doesn't - it says what You need, and it is the best placed of anything in Yourself or in the world to know that.

#red said #i have referred to a lot of things by gesturing to my head and my chest #and sometimes my throat. and i know which shoulder which intrusive negative thoughts sit on #and today my therapist asked me where the voice that tells me 'you need to do this thing' was and i said #idk nowhere? I'm pretty sure it's just in me generally?#but then when i was walking home i realised that was not true and i know exactly where i feel those thoughts #i just can't gesture to it because it's SUPER specific and internal #bc how do i gesture specifically to the point halfway between the soft palette and the base of the skull????#anyway that's what this is. this is a map of where i feel like parts of my thought processes are and what they do #nobody except me cares about this but that's ok i can write it anyway for me

4 notes · View notes