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symphonyofthewrite · 4 years ago

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Saw your post, getting stuff off your chest, I just wanted to say that I haven't seen the thing with the kids mentioned by anyone and it really stood out to me, I feel what you mean to some extent, because for me it was a stronger reaction, albeit you probably won't feel the same and that's, obviously, perfectly fine. I have an instant recoil these days whenever a character is around kids for like one second and everyone instantly goes "THEY LITERALLY ADOPTED THEM/THAT'S THEIR CHILD/THEY'RE A PARENT"... genuinely sick of it, and I went white as a sheet when I heard it, I wanted to pluck my eyes out. I don't know if it's an American thing but English speaking fandoms (well, those teeming with fancops that is) seem like they cannot process adult looking characters being in any near proximity to childlike characters without automatically imposing parenthood and family dynamics and it's becoming distressing to me. I feel like Alucard needed to process his trauma and learn to trust and be whole again, he's young himself too, why he needed to be a "father figure" all of a sudden is beyond me.

Thank you so much for the ask!! I don’t get many asks so it makes me happy when I can talk meta with people 💛💛 (Sorry I’m a bit late in answering.)

Funnily enough I actually do agree with you. I didn’t have quite so strong a reaction, but I definitely had a very similar one when I first hear it.

My feelings were and are a bit mixed. I was saying in my other post that I would have preferred that I got to actually see this interaction; see the kids run by him and call him father, and him smile when no ones looking. I still think that would have been a better, more touching way to do the scene, and would have had more chance of me liking it (though I probably still would have felt very weird about it). (I think it especially would have been better because it would show that Alucard himself liked it, not that Greta was forcing the role on him.) I know that it was meant to be something touching, and pretty much everyone seems to like it (and I have seen some cute posts about it), so I just tried to like it too, and focus on the fact that all they were really trying to say was he was having a nice relationship with the kids, and that was indeed sweet.

But yeah, when I heard Greta say “I heard some of them calling you father” for me it was less a reaction of horror, and more a “HUH??!!”moment. When I heard it I was like “Alucard...you agree with this???!! This is how you see yourself??!!” I almost expected Alucard to refute it and say he didn’t see himself as a father to them. Like I seriously do not see Alucard as anything remotely close to a father figure, and it felt weird and wrong to me.

Like when I saw him interacting with the kids the first time, I didn’t think “oh he’s a father figure to them.” I just thought “yay, Alucard’s playing with some kids, and getting out of his bubble!!” I didn’t have any thoughts as to what his relationship role was with them, I just thought that first interaction was lovely.

And if I saw him interacting with the kids again, I still wouldn’t go “father figure” I’d just be like “yay, Alucard’s playing with the kids again, how sweet!!”

Sometimes the relationship doesn’t need a role or a label, ya know?

And I thought it was especially strange because…he literally just met them?? Like how can they possibly start calling him father when he’s played with them once or twice? Regardless of Alucard’s side or things, what group of kids would randomly call a nice man they just met ‘father’? Is...Is this a normal thing??

Anyways, back to Alucard’s side of things, Sypha’s line about Alucard being a teenager trapped an adults body has always been something that stuck with me and shaped how I view Alucard. I definitely view him as internally much younger than he looks. No matter how much I might hate them for what they did to him, I think Sumi and Take are about the age he actually is, and their relationship with him made sense to me. He’s still a kid—or at least young—he still needs his parents in his life, really. (That’s part of why I didn’t like that Drac and Lisa don’t go to him at the end. I personally don’t think Alucard really got closure, and in my mind I think he still very much needed them, and that would have been the perfect ending to his story in my mind, where everything comes full circle; He was forced to lose his parents and grow up too early, and only when he’s started to truly grow up does he get them back.) So yeah, I really don’t see him like a father at all. One of my main focuses in my Castlevania fanfiction is his relationship with Dracula, so I very much see him as the son, not as the dad, even when Drac isn’t around.

(Sidenote, come to think of it, I think this is another reason why Greta x Alucard is a nope from me. She’s very much an adult, so I just see a discrepancy between them that makes me feel weird about them being in a romantic relationship. If we need a label I feel like she fits as an older sister for him, guiding him and giving him support. Him unloading all his problems on her within just meeting her makes more sense if he’s like a younger brother who needs to cry to his sister. I felt weird about it in a romantic context when it was so fast. I mean I know he was desperate to talk to someone, and I probably would have done the same, but still).

“I feel like Alucard needed to process his trauma and learn to trust and be whole again, he's young himself too, why he needed to be a "father figure" all of a sudden is beyond me”

^^ THIS. EXACTLY THIS.

I was honestly really hoping they’d go in depth into him dealing with his trauma, and how he’s still hurting from the wounds of it, and how he needs to heal. I thought that’s what his S4 arc would be about. I don’t think they gave him the chance to really process and work through everything that happened. (Again, I don’t think him just unloading all his problems on a nice stranger is truly working through his trauma. I would have much rather watched him struggle to trust her, and him telling her about his trauma happen later, and be difficult for him, and a deep, heartfelt moment).

Like I was saying in my other post, I think if they framed his arc in how he dealt with the town collectively, I think that would have fit better, and been more touching and satisfying. I would have liked to see him struggling to trust humans, and then see as time progressed how several different people in the town liked him and meant him no harm, and how he realized he could trust them, and that he liked them too. It wasn’t that he had a bad romantic partner and needed a new one. He believed he needed to be punished for killing his father, and in his deep loneliness he let these kids into his house and heart, and they turned on him because he was half vampire. That’s something pretty deeply ingrained, and not something a new romance just fixes by existing. He needed to work through that in a much deeper way.

I know this is gonna be a very unpopular opinion, and it's totally cool if you disagree, but in a weird way... I sort of disliked Alucard’s ending. Don’t get me wrong, Im glad he’s happy, and I’d certainly prefer it to him just getting more trauma like last season (*shudders*), and I don’t think him opening up his castle (and his heart) to humanity is a bad way to end his story, certainly not. I think that fits. And my heart did melt a bit at the "I'm weirdly happy" scene. But, where everyone else is like “*sobbing* happy endings for all our faves” ...I see the creators of the show trying to wrap everything up in a neat little bow, and while that’s certainly not all bad, I don’t love every aspect of that. Theres a time and place for that, but a show based on video games, for which there’s more content in these storylines isn’t one of them in my mind.

Sometimes some of the sadness needs to linger. At the very least, let it linger at the beginning of the season so you can work through it in a powerful way, you know? It may have been tough to see Alucard be more closed off, but I think it would have been more satisfying to see him open up his heart and go back to his old self if we saw his trauma leave lingering effects at the beginning.

To me it didn’t feel like a satisfying arc, it felt like the fairytale ending of “oh look he’s not apprehensive about humanity even after what happened! Oh look he got the girl! And the Castle’s a happy place now! Look he’s not sad anymore! He’s even a father figure to these kids! He’s totally moved on!” And all those things can be awesome when done properly, and when they have depth to them. But they didn’t work through the trauma to get there, so it felt surface level to me, and too fast. I really liked that first episode, and how we saw the two sides of him—one that's become more closed off, and the other that still buries the human despite his comments—and I also really liked the first interaction with the kids, and thought that was one of the few interactions that had depth to it and fit with his arc well. Having it go beyond “they’re helping him learn to like and trust humanity again, and displaying who he really is inside” ended up detracting from the power of his relationship with them in my mind.

Having played SOTN, I think an ingrained loneliness and sadness are, in a way, a key part of Alucard’s character. That sounds really sad and awful out loud but…there are some people that just have a sadness or a loneliness to them, and that's not entirely bad. Here’s the thing…it can make them that much more beautiful. The fact that they still fight for good, even when they see all the dark, those moments when they find true friends, despite how alone they are, those moments when they are happy, are so much more powerful. They just are always a bit…separate from other people. One of my favorite lines in anything is the line "We are connected by our darkness, not by our light" in Pandora Hearts. I think it's a line that fits Alucard well, and it’s always something that’s drawn me personally to him. Don't get me wrong, I don’t think Alucard’s all dark and sad and lonely, he’s definitely got a bright side to him too, of course he does. But I also don't think he ever is able to fully accept the vampire side of himself, and I find that interesting, and worth exploring. Personally I was honestly hoping for the show makers to come up with a bittersweet reason for why he went to sleep for 300 years, (and I thought that's why they set things up with Sumi and Taka that he’d have something against his vampire nature). Personally it felt like they were trying to say “oh he’s all better now, he’ll never be sad or lonely again” and while that’s nice I suppose…for me it sort of…stops feeling like Alucard, in a way? I don't know if I'm explaining it right, or if that sounds terrible...😅

Anyways, back to the topic at hand. I do agree that’s very common of fandom that people are like “boom! Just add water! Instant father figure!” and I don’t love it either. Sometimes it can be cute if it truly fits, but it doesn’t fit every relationship between an adult-looking character and a kid character, and shouldn't be the first place people go to. In the same way every relationship doesn’t have to be romantic, not every relationship has to be parental/familial either. Sometimes it feels like fandom culture isn't really okay to have some characters just be good friends. A good friendship can be more wonderful than a romance sometimes.

If we have to put a label on it, I think he seemed like a nice older brother figure to them? I think that fits who he is in my mind. But father? Nope. Not for me. And again, I don’t think it needs a label.

Thanks again for sending me this ask!! It was nice to get the chance to work through some more of my feelings here too. Sorry if I went too overboard. And I hope I don’t sound too terribly negative, it really was a great season, and I definitely liked some parts of his arc, just not all of it.

If you or anyone else reading would like to discuss with me more, be my guest!! 💕

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rootiebaga · 4 years ago

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im also sorry for uploading this twice-

sorry for not doing much

B U T- i have ideas for abnormality ocs, these are mostly related to nursery rhymes and stories i remember,

these might not be original ideas so,, bear with me

(tiny tw for: murder, death, comas and mass disappearances,)

just a reminder i dont know what these guys risk classes would be, so bear with me on this one

so lets start off with the story one, more specifically, the pied piper

so i read an article of its disturbing truth and its said that the piper is the personification of death, you know what that means?

i make the piper a gentleman with a wife and 2 sons who are twins (isabel and gregory, see? their important) named mori (”i apologize to my sons that i couldn’t control myself, i hope you two are doing well,”)

mori’s life before his death basically played out like the pied piper, but it took a much different turn

he decided to put the rats who were infesting the town into an abandoned clock tower, before they all starved and died, some of the rats, with all the strength they had left, formed 2 rat kings that were both merged together, (fun fact: this is another abnormality i thought of thats well- a clock filled with undead and decomposing mice, you probably know where im going with this)

what happened to the children? (except for his two sons) he murdered them and he went insane and murdered himself aswell, the police found the children and also his body many months later, and he moves on as a restless spirit, if any children have been bad a snake-like spirit with an angler fish’s face will rise up from their bodies, these guys dont do much harm, (theres a 30% chance that a plague (i thought inner demon was kinda cliche so uh) will rise from an employee’s body after they were killed) (tiny little thing i wanna add but i may not, if there are 5 plagues then they’ll merge with mori, making him even more dangerous) (also off topic to the story but mori himself wasn’t diagnosed with anything before he died, he didn’t have any mental trauma, in fact, he was generally a nice person to talk to, but rumour has it the flute might’ve caused this murders to happen)

he was basically locked in the cabin for well- months, until someone (isabel who was training to be a flute player) played the song his father usually plays on his flute every new year

that was.. a bit dark, holy shit-

heres the next one for this post

you know the nursery rhyme hey diddle diddle?

well i thought of 4 different abnormalities for this one, that usually switch randomly from one abnormality to another every day, reset, or if you had them first in one of the departments, every memory repository

the least harmful (dammit, accidentally put harmless instead of harmful) one is the laughing dog (”with every cry the spirit made, the kingdom’s castle broke more and more, until the residents of the kingdom disappeared, even himself.”)

basically its a regular pet dog but its in a jester outfit like its halloween or something, the dog was said to be a reincarnation of a medieval jester

basically, kinda like crumbling armour except with attachment, if you do attatchment, you’ll get a gift that gives you more work success

but, dont get your hopes up! if you do attachment too much the person with the gift will laugh until they cant breathe and eventually die (hi yes i didn’t notice that library of ruina has a jester related abnormality, im not kidding. i really didn’t know that it already existed)

the next one is moon jumper (”who knew the moon orbiting the earth would also have something orbiting it? it would seem pretty crazy to believe!”)

this guy is an astronaut with cow horns that hasn’t succumbed to space even though the glass thats protecting their face from space, has cracked a little, they were found circling the moon for some reason and even trying to jump over it

when they breach, they do it passively, usually, everywhere they go theres an effect that causes the room to have the gravity of the moon, meaning abnormalities (even himself) including employees go very slow (heres a thing i added, sometimes an employee may float upwards, they will soon fall down. the fall causes red damage, because you know- they fell-)

moon jumper can be very helpful when suppressing abnormalities due to this power, and after a few minutes he will slowly walk back to his containment

the next one is the cat’s fiddle (”people have thought the instrument was a curse made for the person wielding it,”) a lady with cat eyes, if you zoom in you can hear the sound of someone playing the fiddle. theres a new special work for this abnormality called “trade” for if the person wants to trade their weapon for the fiddle for a while, if you forget to bring it back by the end of the day, dont worry as the weapon that was traded for the fiddle will return back to the employee the next day, if the person wielding the fiddle ever goes insane, they’re eyes will become cat-like (mostly like the woman’s) and they’ll begin slicing the throats of people.

and the last one from the hey diddle diddle gang is the dish that ran with the spoon, (”wake up! please! its not over yet..”) it is a widower who sees illusions of his wife and the wedding disaster, he usually thinks his wife is still breathing. what this wedding disaster means is unknown.

when he breaches his illusion (aka his wife) will appear from another department, on top of a random department’s room will be a wedding ring, they are harmless at first, but if they finally see each other, and the wedding starts, the wedding will abruptly end with the wife’s neck bleeding, her falling onto the floor and fading out of existence, and the widower quickly snapped back to real life, with the realization that his wife is long gone, madness takes over him and he starts to attack the guests that partook in the wedding

next one! its another nursery rhyme related abnormality,

old man coma! (”whatever they said, whatever they tried to do, they couldn’t save him from eternal rest, I already took his last moments away.”)

basically its an old man, who appears to be sleeping in a bed.

his qliphoth counter is at 2, when its at 1, (either bad result, prudence level 3 and lower or repression work, it’ll also go down if the person was damaged by white damage in any way the day they’re working on old man coma) the containment will start to glitch a bit, likes its slipping back into reality, when its at 0, a flat-line can be heard, the containment will change again and the old man will now be lying in a hospital bed thats right next to a heart monitor,

the actual abnormality is his condition, which takes the form of a shadow with bleeding eyes, although its sort of calm, its violent to those who had previous head injuries, (example: hitting your head on things) since head injuries remind it of the old man

when it escapes from the containment it will search for employees with prudence 3 or lower, after it finds one it will soon go into the employee’s brain and make them pass out by just bumping either an employee or an abnormality, they will stay passed out till the end of the day, they will only go for one person, then they’ll be back in containment, but that doesn’t mean the employee will still live! at the next day the employee will be missing, and a notification will pop up that the employee is dead.

i keep getting alot of ideas so heres the final one: missing persons busride! (its based off of glitch in the matrix stuff,) (”so.. this is the thing that caused the mass disappearances?”)

this is a tool abnormality i thought of. like the name says its a bus with grayscale colors, when an employee gets onto the bus (aka uses it) it’ll drive to a portal and come back. there is a chance that the employee will get a work speed boost, but theres also a chance that the person will go missing, you’ll know this if the person comes back as a sorta visible glitchy shadow, there will be no notification specifying the person’s death, and if they are gone, they are gone forever, even if you try to reset or memory repository, they will still be gone. you will have to create the employee again if you want them back.

so thats all for now! i hope that this is alright,

#this was uploaded twice because one. i am so scared to post this cause it may be too edgy and two. uhh- i dont know #tw: murder #tw: death #tw: coma #tw: mention of mass disappearances #rootys abnormality ideas #abnormality ocs i guess #lobotomy corp related stuff-

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afroggyfrog · 4 years ago

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Political compass

To some people a political compass is just a “fun” quiz like “what type of bread are you?” and if you’re that kind of person then don’t waste your breath telling me I’m overthinking. There’s people that take it seriously, maybe they live in a 2d world with simple, 2d beliefs that always be plotted on a 2d grid, or maybe they just want that to be true, because it’s more comfortable than to think “I really don’t understand politics”.

A political compass of political compasses.

One axis can’t be used for more than one question

Let’s say we have a political compass of 1 axis, lets say, it has 2 questions.(i would have added “do you prefer donkeys or elephants” but that would just make it unnecessarily complex)

https://forms.gle/gCifTpqu2hTNo7s86

Do you prefer blue or red?

If you’re in a maze and your path is split, do you go to the left or to the right?

These questions perfectly correspond to what a politics fan might call “democrat” or “republican”, and to be serious, the answers to this probably predict who you’re gonna vote for at least a little. So what’s the problem with this model? You might not think that people who prefer different colours or maze paths wouldn’t hate each other but the whole point of politics is to hate each other So imagine this was a real political test, and if someone answers differently from you, yo hate them. Now imagine that my political axis is GOP and DEM, if you select blue left youre a DEM extremist and if you select red right youre a GOP extremist, anything else and you’re a centrist.

From the point of view of an extremist (according to the american political compass), you’ve got your side, your polar opposite, and some people who are in the middle and it all seems to make some sense.

From the point of view of someone who happens to like red but also sticks to the left side of a maze your political compass results puts you in the exact same spot as your polar opposite whom you hate very much, in the same spot as someone who answered neutral to both questions, and to one side and to the other, sit people who you think as pretty much the same as eachother, since they both just agree and disagree with you in equal measures, and none of it makes any sense.

Now imagine if there was a country where the leftists wore the color red and the rightists wore blue (i think it might just be literally every country except america?) and all of a sudden the same political compass puts all the previous extremists into the middle and it splits the 3 centrists into the left, right, and center (that 1 guy who answers neutral on everything is literally the only person worth the title of centrist)

To put this into the simplest words I can, you can have extremists that are perfectly opposed to each other end up in the middle, unless the questions aren’t all just the same thing rephrased. And this is a huge flaw that you cant get rid of unless you add a new dimension to the compass, a new dimension for every single question you add, at 1 question a line, at 2 questions a 2d grid, at 3 questions a cube... So the political compass can only tell you as much info about someone as you can get frrom asking them only 2 questions, trying to cram more than 2 questions into it will only lead to misrepresentation.

Almost every political extremist sits in the center

Because the larger the number of possible policies you could use to guess someones political compass position, the more combinations of extreme stances on each policy could end up canceling each-other on the compass, but that doesn’t make them any less extreme, it just means that in order to be in one of the corners or the sides only 8 combinations of extremist opinions can be had. If you have 3 policies each with 2 extremist stances that can be had, thats already 8 combinations, for 4 policies thats 16, for 10 policies that let you be an extremist thats 1024 combinations. That means that if humans were only capable of having 10 policies then only 0.8% of the ideologies with the most extremist positions on each policy would be seen as an extremist by the political compass.

But even if it’s broken in theory, you would at least expect right wingers to be on the right side and left wingers to be on the left side of the compass, since even if your opinion isn’t represented by the political compass, neither is your opinion represented by the 2 parties, so they should at least misrepresent your opinion in the same way (it always boils down to 2 parties because our voting systems are just broken but voting systems deserve their own separate post)

Why americans are immune to noticing its defects

I’m not a historian, but I read somewhere that the popular version of the political compass cant be applied to 20th century european politics because the political compass of the time was this triangle.

It seems pretty intuitive that different cultures at different time periods would need unique and incompatible political compasses. A political compass may ask stuff about race to someone who’s never talked to someone of a different race irl, or a question about congress to someone who’s country doesn’t have a congress, it can ask “are people more divided by class than by nationality” and the answer feels like it should vary solely by the country they are in rather than by their opinion, these are all questions I randomly got by searching for political compass.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence but every political compass I ever saw seemed like it was designed to only work on americans, this may or may not be due to the fact that american politics are the only politics that are ever talked about internationally. I also went and searched for “compas politic romanesc”, i found a study written in english that contained a political compass quiz written for romanians but the site where the quiz was hosted is just a blank page for me, you can still find the questions written in english in the link to the study at page 10) Every other result was also in english, so I wouldn’t even know political compasses existed if i didn’t know english.

So why does the compass designed for your personal culture end up feeling useful?

There’s this bias called the halo effect. To put it simply, if you are a fan of someone, or something, you’re going to convince yourself that every part of it is good, if you’re a democrat, you’ll convince yourself that everything they do is right, even if there’s no reason why ideas like open borders, climate change alarmism, additional taxes, gay marriage etc are related, you’ll convince yourself that if you like more ideas from democrats than you like from republicans, you’ll have to like ALL the ideas that come from democrats.

If you live in a world where everyone’s convinced themselves that there’s 2 sides then all of a sudden the political compass doesn’t feel like its grossly oversimplified to the point of making no sense, in fact, it even looks like it has more nuance than it needs, why do we need the authoritarian axis again? oh, theres a couple loud minorities in addition to the main parties, like communists and fascists and libertarians and hippies and because they’re all american off-brands the political compass puts each of them into their unique spots on the compass.

Sure every american who calls themselves a fascist will end up on the far right, but not Mussolini himself with his “race is a social construct” ideas, the father of fascism himself could be deemed a centrist by a modern-day political compass because hes not american.

Extremists that happen to be seen as centrists by the compass can simply be forgotten, after all, they’re probably the way they are because they’re not americans which means you’ll never have to discuss politics with them.

The silver lining

In a world where due to a broken voting system there are only 2 parties that matter, and where the halo effect makes people unnaturally aligned with the either one of the 2 dominant parties, a political compass could be helpful to someone who lived in a cave and was never corrupted by constant stream of political propaganda that is spewed online. Sure that his randomly-generated political opinion is 90% likely to be somewhere in the center, where every extremist sits, except 4 of them, but just on the off-chance that he aligns with one of the sides that america has deemed worthy of being trademarked he will know it, and can buy their branded stickers and hats.

The alternative

Just don’t talk about politics It’s a waste of time.

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