#god what a fucking failure of a court system

[sanguinewolves]

my exfather be like

[and-yet-the-daisies-grow]

One of the things that makes me the angriest about my childhood is the fact that so many adults put so much on me. Going through my traumas individually was really difficult, but they just piled up and piled up, from both the sides that were supposed to be "good" and those that were bad.

And now, the people who hurt me but I chose to keep in my life keep seeing me as some sort of liability, as if I chose to become fucking disabled. As if I chose to be this way, or if they don't blame me, they blame fate. God. But that doesn't feel much better.

Because it wasn't an act of god that made me ill, it wasn't an accident or a single mistake snowballing into grave consequences. It was the repeated failures of both individuals and systems to keep me safe. I slipped through so many fucking cracks.

I wasn't protected by my parents, not by my grandparents, not by extended family, not by neighbors, teachers, passerbies. Not by Child Protective Services, not by child psychologists, not by the police or the court. Fucking nobody. And all throughout this miserable process, everyone in all of those fucking groups kept fucking gaslighting me as well. Either that this case isn't so bad or that I'm lying. CPS and those fucking child psychologists kept telling me and showing me that maybe, if my trauma was severe enough, I would be worthy of being saved. Maybe if I was being molested, maybe then. So I believed them. I believed and internalized the fact that all of my suffering was due to some personal failure.

And do you know what the fucking kicker is? The really funny bit? I was being molested the whole time I was around those people. And nobody knew. When I told them what was happening outright, I was a liar. Too young to know. When I didn't tell them, because it was so traumatic I still have a rock solid amnesia block on these memories, nobody noticed.

Fucking nobody.

And now people have the fucking NERVE to tell me that I have trust issues, that things are different now. People still blame me and want me to get it sorted out, as if I just decided to be suspicious, as if I don't have a fucking lifetime of experiences of all of these people and institutions abandoning me, while simultaneously telling me how much they care about real cases.

And that's what really sucks about CPTSD. On top of the trauma, everyone just gaslights the fuck out of you. The system gaslights you, and when you eventually open up to family or friends about the system, they gaslight you too.

It feels like being cast aside. As if some of us were just chosen to be everyone's rag, meant to take in all of this suffering and pain like a sponge.

It hurts. It hurts to be around anybody who knew me back then. It's tough not to hold a grudge.

[themissouchpart2]

The drugs i was administered last friday week...

Ive been poisoned before and i can pinpoint time of drug taken from waking vomitting with shit up my back upon waking.

The people that did this administered some particularly toxic substance which left an odious smell of egg to my horror upon waking. Prior to this i had spent seven days blocked up internally and was trying to detox and fast to clean out system. I know that failure to maintain bowels is extremely dangerous for tetraplegics and paraplegics.

The fact that others see me as disposable is hurtful but in my year long stay and review i find i can trust nobody anymore with so many wishing me dead at this stage and even nurses drs and out of towners all in of the attempts to finish me off.

I had issues with the supra pubic cathether since arriving here, seeing few drs just a rotation of drs being it students or half wit thick as planks medics who should not be in their present employment...

Not the first time ive come across evil bastards who like to lessen me in the ways they do.

What goes on here is worse than any other hospital ive experienced, and i would have no issue in stating this in a court of law.

From experience i have never been welcome in many places but i dont fear the reaper and am now facing an agonizing death... The sores are so painful... So tragic and that which is so painful i will never recover..

This has been done by the medical establishment... Ethics out of the window... Cover ups... Scheming and as God is my witness, Truth. They will deny decieve and demand for themselves... But i am a strong single woman... Though close now to death.

Ive witnessed many things here, heard the humour some find in peoples pain or suffering.. Insincerity and deceit..

And the issue of degrading me still goes on with vomit still in my hair from ages ago till now with my 6 showers in a year.

Its a fucking shit show in this place... Each day could be my last.

The juggernaut of bad pharma still remains...

Ive had so many drugs administered, had so many grade a pricks try to do me in... From places in europe, where women travelling alone facing risks, to trying to seek out a safe space, or enduring sexual assaults and witnessing the corruption, the deals, the fucking horror and desolation of how evil some people are.... They knew who did it... Strong pharmaceuticals administered like that..

I was like a bastard on the oxynorm... Its a terrible drug, used so freely on patients here, and agony on or off... Highly addictive and dangerous to users.

Artist nan goldins article in the guardian highlights her battles with oxycontin over her battles with pain and also the amount of deaths frim it..

Am i born to die again...

[sarcasticsra]

The more I think on it I have exactly 0 qualms with Rue’s actions

Like they didn’t know Hob’s mission until ep 6 at the end, and there was that moment of surprise that it was his victories that led to the almost engagement - that was an interesting moment, especially as they tell him he was used. Rue knows plenty about being used

Also the conversation got cut away from right as Hob asked if Rue or Binx knew who had done it, likely for dramatic effect

Rue’s letter after the masquerade ball talks about wanting to KNOW Hob - what would’ve happened if that letter had actually been delivered? Would they have had a version of this conversation then?

And seriously like why THIS engagement? Why was this the one they had to break up? What was different about it? There had to be something, right??? I suppose it could just be a “straw that breaks the camel’s back” sort of thing, and it seemed like they were maybe thinking of revealing themselves at this Bloom anyway and meeting Hob tipped the scales, but I gotta know what sparked it

But no matter what it was - this is a being who was ripped from their home and made to be what this court wanted them to be, and they contorted themself into that box for millennia, working painstakingly to ensure everyone else around them might know love, or happiness, all the while being kept at arm’s length in their own court because of their origins

And something, whatever it was, finally made them go, “enough!”

That’s fucking revolutionary

And it happened before the engagement was even officially announced. Still scandalous, sure, but at least gives the goblin court plausible deniability

The whole season has had significant themes of This System Sucks so I’m just not overly Concerned about the reputation of the courts

Particularly not of a court that has been happy to use and abuse a member to the point where he gets so close to almost DYING because he won’t remove the DAMN ARROWS FROM HIS BACK out of his misguided sense of honor and service (that they knowingly take advantage of)

Hob, who has also been an outsider, who has dealt with that by fully sublimating his own sense of self, a full on trauma response

Who danced with someone 6 or 8 times and could only think “how nice of them to take pity on me”

But god forbid someone inadvertently make his terrible court look bad lol

And that’s the point, isn’t it - they’re all terrible

Love and happiness are not important, only perception, and power, and influence

The only one not obsessed with power and status is Binx’s court, and they got consumed, an easy target that wasn’t even trying to fight back, was just trying to do their own thing

Years and years and years of do this, say that, smile here, play nice, don’t upset the system, most too entrenched in their own survival mechanisms to do anything but go along

Which is fair enough, but let’s not hold the person trying to change things responsible for the failures of the system they’re trying to change

If people don’t feel like they have a choice, that’s the courts’ fault

And dismantling the courts is the only way out

Rue might be one of the only ones capable of that

After all, the Chorus knows the power they hold. That’s why they wanted them to join

Burn it all down, Rue

They have it coming

[c-is-for-circinate]

As promised: let's talk Hades, and how acts of abuse can create toxic environments for everyone around them, and also how people react to those environments--and to them being disrupted.

(For reference, I have just kicked Theseus's ass for the first time, it was exactly as satisfying as it was intended to be, and then I got predictably slaughtered a couple of chambers into Styx. Spoilers for everything through that point, but please no spoilers in reblogs/comments for anything after that!) Also, TW for a whole lot of discussion of abuse, particularly verbal and emotional abuse, and abusive familyworkplace dynamics.

Okay, so. To start out with, Hades is an abusive parent. He engages in innumerable acts of verbal and emotional abuse towards his son, because yep, that's what you call it when a parent constantly berates and belittles their kid for every perceived failure, including the ones the parent themselves could have prevented. Sometimes especially the ones the parent could have prevented. Zagreus failed at his office clerk job because Hades refused to teach him how to do it and then blamed him for not already knowing how. Cerberus tore up the lounge because Hades, who was actually there, chose not to stop him. Hades created, possibly deliberately, and then took full advantage of every opportunity he saw to insult and demean his kid, and the clerk job flashback shows us that he was doing so even before the escape attempts started. I'm pretty sure we're all on the same page here, but: yep, that all constitutes abuse, even if they're gods. Even if Hades has reasons for Being Like That. Even if you think Zagreus seems okay and unharmed by it (which: repeatedly throwing yourself into a gauntlet of violence that inevitably ends in your own pain and death because you're so desperate to escape home, not actually an indicator of someone who's okay). We all good on that?

Cool. Because I'm not really here to talk about how Hades' abuse directly impacts Zagreus right now (although there's for sure an essay in that too). I'm thinking about how it impacts everybody else.

Hades isn't as obviously unreasonable with anybody else in his kingdom the way he is with his kid. When we see him lecture somebody else, it's usually for an actual failure to do their job: Hypnos for literally falling asleep on the job and not doing anything that was assigned to him, Megaera for letting us past her so many time, Orpheus for being a court bard who refuses to sing. His attitude is super confrontational and unpleasant, but on the surface it doesn't necessarily look as fucked-up. Thing is, though, whether any individual act of aggression towards an employee/family member is justified or not (I would generally argue 'not', because aggression towards employees/family members is, y'know, not justifiable)--it's not about the individual acts. It's about the entire cultivated atmosphere of toxicity and abuse.

One of the very first things Meg ever says to us is, "I'd rather be on your bad side than his." Up until that point, we've got no reason to believe Meg has any history whatsoever of fucking up at her job. In fact, we've got plenty of reason to believe she's good at it. She's fiercely proud of it, she's frequently Employee Of The [Time Period], and we've apparently never even met her sisters because she handles her shit herself. But she's still scared of Hades. Dusa, who is an anxious wreck at all times because oh god what if she gets fired what if she gets fired what if she gets fired, in spite of apparently being absolutely exemplary at her job, is scared of Hades. Every single shade in the Hall is clearly terrified of Hades, and it's not because of what he's done to each of them. It's what they've seen him do to other people.

Which is how toxic environments work, whether they're work environments or families. The Court of Hades is of course both, always, with the bonus hell layer of you can't quit even if you DIE. An abuser in authority doesn't have to target you in order to make you feel scared, cowed, and desperate to please them. Humans (and gods who are basically extra-powerful humans) are good at learning by example. The residents of the Court get the picture.

So this Court is a minefield--and everyone except Zagreus is very good at tiptoeing around mines. We see it in Meg, so desperate to do her job well. We see that Hypnos very clearly does not give a shit about anything, but he still makes sure to have a list of excuses ready if/when Hades ever confronts him about failure to do his job, just in case. We see it when Achilles tells us that my ability to help you is constrained by the authority your father gives me, or whatever the line was sixty runs ago when he couldn't let me into locked chambers. The system, such as it is, works, and if Nyx talks to Hades as little as possible, if Thanatos avoids the Court entirely, if Achilles treads very carefully and knows how to keep his head down--well that's just the system, right? That's just how things are.

Even Zagreus seems to have had a role in that system as the court fuckup. He's the kid who didn't have a real job or purpose. He could take the focus of Hades' generalized, day-to-day ire off of everyone else, without triggering some of the more direct and violent ire because the work he was doing didn't really matter (a LOT of Hades' rage-triggers seem to be related to job performance, which means that the people with real jobs are of course the most at risk). And he could do so "safely" (big emphasis on the quotation marks there) because he alone of the court is Hades' actual kid, who's Prince of the Underworld no matter how much he fucks up. If one of Nyx's other kids gets something really really wrong, she might be able to protect them from some consequences, but Hades doesn't have any layer of supposed parental affection holding him back from getting violently furious about it. Zagreus gets a nice bedroom and the abuse is limited to words rather than divine power, and Hades is a dick to everyone but he only occasionally condemns people to eternities of torture, and only for good reasons like refusing to sing when your job is to be court bard, so it's fine, everybody's fine, everything's totally fine, right?

Except it's not fine when everybody is so clearly worried about anything going wrong. And it's especially not fine for Zagreus, who's the person to finally say no. He's leaving, for his own sake, because he deserves better and he's finally convinced he can have it. And that turns the whole system into disarray.

I am endlessly fascinated by the ways this game portrays different characters reacting to this upheaval in their carefully-mapped minefield. It's different for authority figures and peers and servants, different based on how people are positioned in the house under Hades' rule, and it's so spot-on and I love it.

Nyx, for instance, is absolutely calm about the whole thing, because Nyx has power. Hades can't hurt her. Hades can't even really do much against her children, not when Hypnos and Thanatos are gods in their own right. Yes, Hades rules the kingdom, but Nyx owns the land, and she gives no shits about his rages. And it's interesting, too, to see the lines she doesn't draw. The deal seems to be that Hades doesn't fuck with her, and doesn't outright threaten her kids (because Hypnos is bad at his job, demonstrably so, and Hades hasn't ruined him yet), and she doesn't interfere with the way he treats the people around him. She gives Zagreus advice and support and the mirror, but she also doesn't take a direct stand against Hades. He can't hurt her, but he could make life...difficult. She's protected, her position in the minefield is more of a safe viewing platform than slogging through the middle of it, but the mines are still there.

And then we have Achilles, who is one of my favorite characters in the whole game because of how he reacts to this whole situation. Achilles, like Nyx, is so supportive. Every single time you see him he has something encouraging to say. He gives us his Codex, secretly finds us weapons, trained us for years, clearly wants us to succeed. And still he's limited, not necessarily out of fear for himself (though he has to be scared for himself, he knows what Hades does to people who anger him), but out of concern that if he gives Zagreus too much help in one way, he won't be able to provide help at all later. He's still so careful.

Achilles and Nyx are so fucking important to this story because they're the only authority figures Zagreus really has in his life except for his father, and they are so supportive. They're what keep this story from being a nightmare of psychological horror and depression. They can't stop the pressure from Hades and this life in his house being miserable for Zag, but they can give us hope, remind us that Zagreus is still loved. And they have such an incredibly important role when it comes to guilt, which is one of the biggest ways toxic systems maintain themselves.

If Zagreus leaves, what happens to everybody else? Who takes Hades' wrath then? Who becomes court scapegoat if he's not there, and also, who gets punished for his escape? These questions matter, and we see him worry about it! He asks Nyx and Achilles both, is it going to be okay that you're helping me, are you going to be alright, will my father hurt you for this? And they are both so firm about telling him no. No, I will be fine. See, here's the list of reasons about why I'm going to be fine, why my position in this minefield is secure. They make a point of telling us that it's fine, that we do not need to hold ourself back from getting out of this abusive situation for their sake. That is instrumental in Zagreus's ability to keep making these escape attempts without feeling too guilty and worried and selfish to go on. (Another thing that's actually really important in setting up that dynamic--we see that Hades cares about Cerberus, even if he's using him as a pawn against us, and Cerberus seems to be the one figure in court who Hades doesn't get mad at. The dog isn't at risk, and that is really essential in keeping the story from getting too grim.) These people who we care about refuse to let themselves be held hostage to secure our good behavior.

It's also really useful for raising the stakes later in the story--we see Hades arguing with Nyx once or twice, and we see Zagreus feeling guilty about it, but it's also a sign that we're making enough progress to piss him off. After I finally made it out of Elysium on my last run, I came home to find him furious with Achilles in a way that actually makes me nervous, because Achilles does not have nearly as much security in his position as he says he does. (Achilles is such a good teacher/authority figure, because he knows goddamn well what Hades could do to him, and still refuses to let fear for his own situation stop him from helping the abused kid under his care escape his. And no, not everybody has the capacity to do that, but it matters so much coming from the guy who helped raise us. It matters so much. I do not even have the words for how much.)

It's also no mistake that many of the people we find supporting us along our journey are either the people with the most power in their immediate environment, or the least. Sisyphus helps us because what more could they do to me than this? Orpheus is a little wild around the eyes and somewhat disconnected from reality, and he wishes us the best because someone should get what they want and also he no longer gives a single fuck what happens to him. Eurydice has her own cozy little corner of Asphodel, as safe from Hades' rage as anybody anywhere in his realm because she's tucked in such an out-of-the-way middle place she's outside his notice. Dusa is so scared of everything anyway that, crush aside, she isn't any more threatened by us escaping than she is just by her everyday life here. Charon is unfathomable and unstoppable; Skelly literally exists to be a punching bag, and yet he also seems basically immune to pain, no matter what we do to him. There's no threat from Hades there.

So the people most at risk when I flip the world on its ear are the ones who have so much standing that they have something to lose, but not enough to protect them from losing it. Which of course brings us to Than and Meg--who are, of course, the two people who also seem by far the most upset by my attempts to leave.

As authority figures, Nyx and Achilles are constantly reinforcing the message that it's Hades' fault, not ours, if they or anybody else get caught in the crossfire of his wrath. I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, and it's not my guilt to bear. From Megaera and Thanatos, we get the opposite message--I am fucking with things, I am hurting people, and I need to stop. Zagreus isn't just abandoning them, as a friend or brother or lover or all of the above they're Greek gods who even knows. He's betraying them. They were in this together, as friends or lovers or whatever, but now Zagreus is sending earthquakes through the minefield they both still have to stand in. He is about to capsize this boat in the middle of a thunderstorm, he is fucking with the system, and they're the ones who are going to get most hurt.

I'm so curious how this is going to work for Than, who out of everyone we meet holds the closest role to Nyx's in terms of being sheltered from Hades' wrath. He's the guy who gets to leave, after all, even though he always has to come back. I've seen the least of him out of anybody so far because it took forever for me to get to Elysium, but two things really stand out and I'm so interested to see where they go. One, he really genuinely does care about Zagreus. He wants us safe, he wants us unhurt, the accessory he gives us only grants its bonus if we clear a room without taking injury, he keeps showing up to help. And two, he wants us to give up and go back and recognize how good we had it. Which is SO fucking interesting, considering how miserable Zagreus so clearly was, and how legitimate his reasons for being miserable were.

It makes me wonder so much about Than's standards for comparison. Does he know something we don't about what's waiting for us on the surface, something that might theoretically hurt Zagreus even more than staying down below? Has his life, which apparently allows him more freedom than anybody else in the Court, sucked horribly in ways we haven't seen, and that's why he spends so little time there in the first place? Either of those things is plausible, both of those things are plausible, and yet either one leads to this sense of patronizing, because he refuses to simply tell us. If something terrible is awaiting us, don't give us vague warnings, tell us what it is and let us decide for ourself! If you're fucking jealous because we might get out entirely and you're still stuck coming back here, say so. If you're worried about your mom--and he does bring her up, how could Zagreus turn his back on her like that, does seem to worry for her--then let's have an actual conversation about how many times she has insisted I do this and also how much I love her.

And, right, it's clear that a lot of Thanatos being upset is simply, you were going to leave me without even saying goodbye, you want to leave ME, which is understandable! But, like, he is demonstrably the one god who gets to visit the surface. He's the one person we actually COULD expect to see again. And he is absolutely also upset because there's an Order To Things, and we're fucking it up. We used to be his careless callow reckless friend who could talk back to Hades and get away with it, and now we're not, and everything is changing and we might leave him altogether, and we might leave him alone in that court without us, and he hates it.

Is it a short-sighted, selfish fear on his part? Yes, absolutely. Even if he's not scared of Hades on his own behalf, he is still frightened by what happens if we upset this system--and maybe it's the sanctity of a much bigger system than the Underworld that he's worried about! Maybe it's the whole divine and cosmic order. Whatever system he wants so badly to protect is enabling the abuse Zagreus has been dealing with for however-long he's been alive. Whatever system he wants so badly to protect OUGHT to be overturned, or at least shaken up. But this is what toxic systems DO. They convince the people within them that they have to be maintained, that a broken system that hurts the people within it is far better than no system at all, that changing the world is too scary and too dangerous. And Thanatos wants his whatever-Zagreus-is-to-him to be there, because he loves him and also because that's how the world works, and those things are all tangled up in one another, and that is how relationships are in a messed-up family like this so therefore I love it.

And Meg. Meg, the best for last, my dear, beautiful, furious, bitter, scared angry tired girl. I adore her. I am absolutely never going to date her, because the thing Zagreus needs most in his life hurts her, more directly than anybody else in the story, and that sucks, and it's not Zag's fault but they still shouldn't be together. Meg has taken more injury from this situation than anyone, quite literally as well as metaphorically, and it's not her fault any more than it's ours, but oh boy it has made her lash out and it's awful and it's perfect.

Meg's place in the Court of Hades is unique because she's not dead, not a mortal, not anything other than a god--but she's also not family. Nyx is not her mother. She's very much part of this system, she and her two sisters belong to Hades-the-realm and therefore also Hades-the-king, she can't leave, but she also doesn't have that protection of Nyx watching out for her in the same way. She's not royalty. She and her sisters (if you ask Hesiod instead of Virgil, which seems to be the interpretation the game's going with here) sprang from the blood of maimed Uranus at the same time as Aphrodite, but fuck knows Aphrodite isn't claiming them as siblings. And she can't be fired, exactly, but she sure can be demoted, and she sure can be made miserable in her job. Meg is vulnerable in a way very few people in Hades' employ are. She's a lot harder to do away with than any one random shade, but she's also a lot harder to miss blending in with a crowd.

What's more, she's the one person in this whole mess who is specifically tasked with stopping us from leaving. Hypnos isn't ordered to put us to sleep and keep us in our room. Thanatos can't be compelled or punished if he doesn't hunt us down. Achilles isn't told to lock us up and keep the keys. Meg is the one stationed at the doorway to Tartarus to keep us in. Meg is the one who gets in trouble when we leave. Meg (who Hades knows goddamn well Zagreus cares for, or cared for, who he absolutely knows we used to date) is the one who has to fight us again and again and again. And she's the one who keeps dying.

Again, it's this incredibly fucked-up guilt/hostage situation deliberately designed to keep people from fleeing abusive situations. Meg's insistence on fighting us now puts Zagreus in the position of having to hurt her himself again and again. Now suddenly we're the ones sticking a sword in our ex-girlfriend. Now suddenly someone can point to our desire to leave, to flee, to escape, and say, how selfish. How cruel. How terrible of us to want to go, when we're even willing to hurt the people we love to do it.

Except, right: Hades is the one who demands Meg stand there and stop us. Hades is the one who puts both of us in that position. Meg is also in an abusive situation, and she's willing to hurt us to protect herself. "I'd rather be on your bad side than your father's." It's easy to blame her at the start for being complicit, for being a tool of our father's abuse, for being on his side. It gets harder as the game goes on. I've killed her so many times. There's no way for her to beat me. She knows at this point that she can't beat me. She still fights, every single time, still throws herself upon that spike, not because she thinks she has any chance of stopping me but because she is so damn scared of what will happen if she doesn't try.

In fact, Meg's the one person we have actually seen face consequences for our actions so far, instead of just facing the threat of them. Her sisters are here. Her sisters, who she clearly does not want here, who are wild and violent and who she does not want in her life or anywhere near her, let alone near the job she takes so much pride in. She gets to deal with them now. (Hades doesn't have to deal with them. They're still not allowed in his court. But Meg does.) She gets stabbed, and bludgeoned, and shot, and lightning-struck, and poisoned, and every other thing we do to her. Thanatos doesn't. Nyx and Achilles and Hypnos don't. Bug Meg? Oh yes. Meg pays.

And yes, ok, she is complicit in this system. Everybody is complicit in this system. Zagreus who's trying to escape on his own behalf instead of overthrowing his father for the sake of everyone he'd otherwise be leaving behind is complicit in this system. Pointing fingers and pulling strings of who's more at fault? and who do we blame for this? is exactly how this sort of system perpetuates itself. Your sister always talked back at the dinner table and put everyone in an even worse and more violent mood. Your coworker refuses to work more than forty hours a week so now you have to take overtime to pick up their slack. You're enabling your dad by asking your sister to shut up, you're enabling your employer by working as hard as you do so you don't get fired, everyone's at fault, everyone's to blame, everyone is--

It's not everyone. It's Hades. It's Hades at the root of everything, and probably something big and institutional and fucked-up even beyond him. But even if everyone down in this Underworld does have to be trapped here forever, even if he's trapped here forever, Hades is neither challenging the system that put them here nor trying to make that fate better for anyone else stuck with him. He's just created an entire kingdom of backbiting and misery and people who can either go along with his whims or suffer the consequences.

At this point in the game, Meg is so fucking tired. Every time we run into her in the lounge, hunched over a table, the venom in her voice when she tells us "Do I look like I have anything to say to you?" is so bitter and so exhausted. There was a system, and she knew her place in the system, and it was a system divinely ordered by the gods themselves, and sure it was cruel but that's the literal will of the universe as far as she knows it. She had a role, and her role was vengeance and punishment and violence against those who'd committed the most egregious of sins in life, and there was a point to it, she was the divine deterrent to convince people not to do those things, and that was just, and that was right. The GODS THEMSELVES said so. How do you argue with that? You can't possibly argue with that!

And Zagreus is arguing with that. In trying to leave, he's questioning the unbreakable rule that nothing in the Underworld ever gets to leave it. In disobeying his father to do so, he's questioning the unbreakable rule that what the gods say is LAW. He's breaking everything.

And of course he's not trying to do any of that. He's not trying to destabilize the system at all. He's just trying to get himself out of it, to a place where he feels like he belongs and maybe a parent who's slightly nicer to him than this one. But toxic systems like this one break when the people within them have access to another option. When the kids find a way to actually leave, and not answer the phone, and not come home for holidays, and not deal with it any more. When the employees have the economic freedom to quit. When opportunities granted by education, money, social support, etc etc etc, show up and give people a choice. Even if the option is only ever for Zagreus--he's demonstrating that an option exists. Which is, of course, the one thing the system cannot ever allow.

I really like this game.

[sugamamacustard]

Let me help you

Pairing:  Alpha! Toru Oikawa x Omega! Reader, Alpha! Hajime Iwaizumi x Omega! Reader

Genre: Angst, fluff, Hurt/comfort.

Request: Because I like a bit of hurt/comfort, and I love the idea of an omega depression, I'm curious on how alpha third years on Aoba Johsai (so like Oikawa, Iwaizumi, Mattsun) would do in response to their omega being in an omega depression.

Summary: Because of unseen circumstances, you drop, and you drop hard. How does your alpha help you/redeem himself?

Author���s Note:  Oikawa’s got really long, so I didn’t include Mattsun or Makki. If you wanna request a part 2 I’ll get on it right away!

Requests: Open!

Toru Oikawa

➵ Truth be told, it was kind of his fault. 

➵Right after you both bonded, he immediately seemed to drop any redeeming qualities he had while courting you.

➵He skipped out on dates, stayed later and later at practice, gave the mile to his fangirls.

➵And while you could get over that, the worse thing you realized was when you went to cheer him on at one of his games. 

➵His bond mark was covered with a scent gland bandage and when Iwaizumi noticed it (He knew of your bonding), he sent a worried glance your way.

➵He could practically see the heartbreak from his place on the court. 

➵What was worse was that you didn’t make a scene. 

➵You stood, turned and left. That was it. 

➵ Oikawa was busy doing his pre-game whatever to notice, making the situation even worse.  

➵Iwaizumi wanted to follow you but the whistle of the ref called him back. 

➵ You didn’t want Iwaizumi to follow you anyway. 

➵You felt numb. So, so numb. 

➵Like anything you previously felt-- any longing, or wishing for your alpha-- reduced to a numb buzz that kept your body moving. 

➵You felt like you were on Autopilot. 

➵Toru made it fairly obvious that he wanted your bond mark on display, so why weren’t the same standards held to him? It wasn’t against the rules of volleyball-- several alphas had theirs out on proud display with their omega cheering in the stands. 

➵Was it you?

➵God, you felt so empty. Like your will to live was dripping away. 

➵You felt your omega lay down, whining as they tried to figure out what was wrong. Where did you go wrong? 

➵You barely felt the soft fleece of your blankets as you settled into your nest for who knows how long. 

___

 Toru was lost. You were in the stands during warm-up last game, but was gone by half-time. Okay, fine. Maybe you had to pee. But then you didn’t show up at all after that.  While at the time it took a back burner-- because we all know how Oikawa plays-- it was now front and center. His alpha was on edge and snapped on him twice already, sending sharp throbs of pain to his temples. It had been three days since Toru had seen you, his mate, so Toru could tell that was a big reason for his frustration. But Toru didn’t know why you had been gone for three days. 

If you were sick, why didn’t you text him? Were you injured? Toru didn’t know.  His neck burnt with anticipation at the thought of you in any peril. 

Where were you?

 Shoving his way past a few fangirls, Toru made his way into the gym, racking his brain for any sort of hint. Vacation maybe and you just forgot to tell him?

 “Iwa-chan! I need your-” Toru paused, huffing when Iwaizumi roughly shoved past him. His alpha was on guard immediately, making Toru growl loudly.   “What’s you issue, Iwa? Blue-balled or something?” 

The laugh that left Iwaizumi made even him, the head alpha, shiver. “My issue? What’s yours?! You absolutely destroyed your relationship last game and ask me for help?! What the hell is wrong with you, Oikawa?!”  

Oikawa swallowed. There was no nickname. No sense of friendship in his words. They were straight malice, laced with acidic venom meant to hurt him. 

When Oikawa didn’t immediately answer, Iwaizumi continued. “You make them wear their bond mark for all the world to see, but cover yours up? What in the actual fuck is wrong with you?! How in the hell you got someone like them to glance your way for more than a second is beyond me, let alone bond you; but when you do, you fucking destroy them. You’re a failure of an alpha, Toru Oikawa.” 

Truth be told, Oikawa thought that him covering up his bond mark would save you from trouble. The less people who knew about him being mated the less people to harass you. But he was your alpha. He was supposed to make sure that didn’t happen anyway.  Fuck, Iwa was right. He was a failure. This became evident as more and more things came hurdling back at him.  He didn’t even grab his duffel before he was, quite literally, sprinting out of the gym. He didn’t care who he pushed over. He didn’t care who he snapped at. He didn’t care. He only care about one person and one person alone. 

___

You whined as hunger continued gnawing at your gut. You wanted to eat, really, but you just didn’t have the energy. You didn’t have the will. 

You still felt so numb and didn’t know where to go from here. At this point, it was clear you were in the midst of an Omega Depression, and to be fair-- that scared you. You wanted to spend the evening in your nest, restart and reboot, before talking to your alpha about it the next day. You truly didn’t mean to drop. 

But here you were. The aspect of ...starvation scared you. The aspect of no closure for yourself scared you. Death scared you. But you couldn’t fight yourself to fix it. Couldn’t bring yourself to even lift your head or stay awake for more than an hour. 

The door to your room slammed open, but you didn’t look up. It was probably your guardian coming in to try and get you to eat again. But you wouldn’t. 

Your heart dropped when the smell of burnt plastic invaded your sense. 

“No- no, no, no, no no- Please god no-” Oikawa felt his heart shatter at the sight of you. You looked like you had both feet dangling in the grave, hanging on by a loose root you grabbed onto in a last ditch effort. 

He continued repeating no while running his hands through his hair, already crying before he even set foot in your room.  When he did dare step closer, that was all it took before he was running to you, pulling you in close despite your whines of protest.  His grip on you was bruising, but he couldn’t risk letting you slip. Not again. 

“Please- please don’t leave me.” He sobbed into your shoulder, your own eyes stinging (Dehydration keeping tears from falling).  “I- I can fix this- I can fix us. Fuck- Please Y/N. Please omega, let me help you. Let me make this right!”

Though you didn’t say anything, the grip on his jacket told him all he needed to know. And though it would be a long road to recovery, you and him would conquer it. 

➵ Completely contrary to Oikawa, your drop wasn’t anyone’s fault.

➵Maybe the school systems, if there was blame to be put. 

➵So much had gone on in such a short period. 

➵You and your alpha, along with his team, had been bombarded with practice and paperwork in preparation for the upcoming tournament. 

➵But just because volleyball picked, doesn’t mean school drops off.

➵ You had essay after essay due, Unit exams which would soon fall into Final exams.

➵You and Hajime had barely even seen each other all week.

➵You both still sent each other good morning and good night texts, and if you see each other in the hallway you’ll give each other a quick peck. 

➵Honestly, it was obvious everyone was on edge. 

➵Teachers didn’t care though, they just kept piling on more, and more, and more work.

➵ And volleyball just kept getting closer and closer.

➵You stumbled into the gym with a chirp, trying to sort through the multitude of papers in your arms. 

➵Your back was aching and your arms were strained, but you couldn’t drop them. That would be a disaster. 

➵ The coach sent you a raised brow, offering a hand to help. You waved him off, sitting on the bench with a grunt.

➵Everyone was already sweaty and panting, practice in full swing. 

➵God, everyone looked so tired already. 

➵You could feel the waves of exhaustion.

➵ As they were just in deep in your bones as they were in theirs. 

___

“Did you finish filling out the registry forms?”

You looked up to the coach, nodding slowly before riffling through your papers and pulling out the ones you were looking for. You handed them to the beta, quickly going back to your notes once more. 

You noted the stumbled steps and slowed reflexes, but simply made it a point to emphasize rest with the boys. Maybe a day with no practice would do them more good then practice. 

Hajime was doing well, as usual, somehow keeping his head and energy high. You know he hasn’t gotten much rest either, and you felt for your alpha. Honestly, you just wanted one day with just you and your alpha, where you both could sleep the day away and come back good as new. 

That just sounded glorious. 

“You wouldn’t mind filling out the ref sheets either, would you?” The beta smirked, already handing you the sheets. He knew you had a tough time saying no to people older and/or bigger than you; and had you doing several things that most mangers would never touch.

It was tiring.

You reluctantly took the sheets, already starting on them. The notes you were working on were yanking from under you, the coach reading over them. 

He scoffed at your note of possibly skipping a practice. “Are you serious?” 

“I’m sorry?”

“Take a break?! These boys are on the brink of a skillful breakthrough, and you want to stop them?!” 

You closed in on yourself at the yells, trying to focus on the ref sheets. He continued yelling and berating you for the notes you made. You could feel the teams stares on you, but you also knew they wanted you to learn to stand up for yourself. They had been giving you a few minutes to try and collect yourself and if nothing happened they would step in. 

It only took seconds for you to finally break down, sobbing into your hands as the coach’s yelling reached a breaking point. The team took very time to act then and there. 

Oikawa and Kyoutani were snapping and growling, pushing him back and away from you while Hajime slid onto his knees in front of you, pulling you to his chest and kissing your bond mark. He rocked you side to side, purring and letting you cry. 

You sobbed and sobbed while the coach tried backtracking, but it was too late. The pack was on defense. One of them was in danger and they were going to make sure they all were safe. 

___

You don’t remember falling asleep, but when you wake up, your in Hajime’s arms, which are wrapped tight around your waist. 

Oikawa was on the other side of you, head on Hajime’s thigh, Makki and Mattsun were cuddling together a little to the left of you. Kyoutani was closest to you (He had a soft spot for you, almost like you were another older sister to him). You ran a hand through his hair for a moment before taking a deep breath in and out. The rest of the team was scattered in the puppy pile around you, and the gym was dark. 

In fact, everything was dark. There were chairs propped up by the door, just in case you supposed, and there were jackets littered everywhere. Your heart fluttered at the thought. 

Hajime’s arms subconsciously tightened around you, luring you back into sleep.

You, your alpha, and your pack.

[qqueenofhades]

Re: the post you reblogged about Bush. I'm 21 and tbh feel like I can only vote for Bernie, can you explain if/why I shouldn't? Thanks and sorry if this is dumb or anything.

Oh boy. Okay, I’ll do my best here. Note that a) this will get long, and b) I’m old, Tired, and I‘m pretty sure my brain tried to kill me last night. Since by nature I am sure I will say something Controversial ™, if anyone reads this and feels a deep urge to inform me that I am Wrong, just… mark it down as me being Wrong and move on with your life. But also, really, you should read this and hopefully think about it. Because while I’m glad you asked this question, it feels like there’s a lot in your cohort who won’t, and that worries me. A lot.

First, not to sound utterly old-woman-in-a-rocking-chair ancient, people who came of age/are only old enough to have Obama be the first president that they really remember have no idea how good they had it. The world was falling the fuck apart in 2008 (not coincidentally, after 8 years of Bush). We came within a flicker of the permanent collapse of the global economy. The War on Terror was in full roar, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were at their height, we had Dick Cheney as the cartoon supervillain before we had any of Trump’s cohort, and this was before Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden had exposed the extent of NSA/CIA intelligence-gathering/American excesses or there was any kind of public debate around the fact that we were all surveilled all the time. And the fact that a brown guy named Barack Hussein Obama was elected in this climate seems, and still seems tbh, kind of amazing. And Obama was certainly not a Perfect President ™. He had to scale back a lot of planned initiatives, he is notorious for expanding the drone strike/extrajudicial assassination program, he still subscribed to the overall principles of neoliberalism and American exceptionalism, etc etc. There is valid criticism to be made as to how the hopey-changey optimistic rhetoric stacked up against the hard realities of political office. And yet…. at this point, given what we’re seeing from the White House on a daily basis, the depth of the parallel universe/double standards is absurd.

Because here’s the thing. Obama, his entire family, and his entire administration had to be personally/ethically flawless the whole time (and they managed that – not one scandal or arrest in eight years, against the legions of Trumpistas now being convicted) because of the absolute frothing depths of Republican hatred, racial conspiracy theories, and obstruction against him. (Remember Merrick Garland and how Mitch McConnell got away with that, and now we have Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court? Because I remember that). If Obama had pulled one-tenth of the shit, one-twentieth of the shit that the Trump administration does every day, he would be gone. It also meant that people who only remember Obama think he was typical for an American president, and he wasn’t. Since about… Jimmy Carter, and definitely since Ronald Reagan, the American people have gone for the Trump model a lot more than the Obama model. Whatever your opinion on his politics or character, Obama was a constitutional law professor, a community activist, a neighborhood organizer and brilliant Ivy League intellectual who used to randomly lie awake at night thinking about income inequality. Americans don’t value intellectualism in their politicians; they just don’t. They don’t like thinking that “the elites” are smarter than them. They like the folksy populist who seems fun to have a beer with, and Reagan/Bush Senior/Clinton/Bush Junior sold this persona as hard as they possibly could. As noted in said post, Bush Junior (or Shrub as the late, great Molly Ivins memorably dubbed him) was Trump Lite but from a long-established political family who could operate like an outwardly civilized human.

The point is: when you think Obama was relatively normal (which, again, he wasn’t, for any number of reasons) and not the outlier in a much larger pattern of catastrophic damage that has been accelerated since, again, the 1980s (oh Ronnie Raygun, how you lastingly fucked us!), you miss the overall context in which this, and which Trump, happened. Like most left-wingers, I don’t agree with Obama’s recent and baffling decision to insert himself into the 2020 race and warn the Democratic candidates against being too progressive or whatever he was on about. I think he was giving into the same fear that appears to be motivating the remaining chunk of Joe Biden’s support: that middle/working-class white America won’t go for anything too wild or that might sniff of Socialism, and that Uncle Joe, recalled fondly as said folksy populist and the internet’s favorite meme grandfather from his time as VP, could pick up the votes that went to Trump last time. And that by nature, no one else can.

The underlying belief is that these white voters just can’t support anything too “un-American,” and that by pushing too hard left, Democratic candidates risk handing Trump a second term. Again: I don’t agree and I think he was mistaken in saying it. But I also can’t say that Obama of all people doesn’t know exactly the strength of the political machine operating against the Democratic Party and the progressive agenda as a whole, because he ran headfirst into it for eight years. The fact that he managed to pass any of his legislative agenda, usually before the Tea Party became a thing in 2010, is because Democrats controlled the House and Senate for the first two years of his first term. He was not perfect, but it was clear that he really did care (just look up the pictures of him with kids). He installed smart, efficient, and scandal-free people to do jobs they were qualified for. He gave us Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to join RBG on the Supreme Court. All of this seems… like a dream.

That said: here we are in a place where Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren are the front-runners for the Democratic nomination (and apparently Pete Buttigieg is getting some airplay as a dark horse candidate, which… whatever). The appeal of Biden is discussed above, and he sure as hell is not my favored candidate (frankly, I wish he’d just quit). But Sanders and Warren are 85% - 95% similar in their policy platforms. The fact that Michael “50 Billion Dollar Fortune” Bloomberg started rattling his chains about running for president is because either a Sanders or Warren presidency terrifies the outrageously exploitative billionaire capitalist oligarchy that runs this country and has been allowed to proceed essentially however the fuck they like since… you guessed it, the 1980s, the era of voodoo economics, deregulation, and the free market above all. Warren just happens to be ten years younger than Sanders and female, and Sanders’ age is not insignificant. He’s 80 years old and just had a heart attack, and there’s still a year to go to the election. It’s also more than a little eye-rolling to describe him as the only progressive candidate in the race, when he’s an old white man (however much we like and approve of his policy positions). And here’s the thing, which I think is a big part of the reason why this polarized ideological purity internet leftist culture mistrusts Warren:

She may have changed her mind on things in the past.

Scary, right? I sound like I’m being facetious, but I’m not. An argument I had to read with my own two eyes on this godforsaken hellsite was that since Warren became a Democrat around the time Clinton signed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, she sekritly hated gay people and might still be a corporate sellout, so on and etcetera. (And don’t even get me STARTED on the fact that DADT, coming a few years after the height of the AIDS crisis which was considered God’s Judgment of the Icky Gays, was the best Clinton could realistically hope to achieve, but this smacks of White Gay Syndrome anyway and that is a whole other kettle of fish.) Bernie has always demonstrably been a democratic socialist, and: good for him. I’m serious. But because there’s the chance that Warren might not have thought exactly as she does now at any point in her life, the hysterical and paranoid left-wing elements don’t trust that she might not still secretly do so. (Zomgz!) It’s the same element that’s feeding cancel culture and “wokeness.” Nobody can be allowed to have shifted or grown in their opinions or, like a functional, thoughtful, non-insane adult, changed their beliefs when presented with compelling evidence to the contrary. To the ideological hordes, any hint of uncertainty or past failure to completely toe the line is tantamount to heresy. Any evidence of any other belief except The Correct One means that this person is functionally as bad as Trump. And frankly, it’s only the Sanders supporters who, just as in 2016, are threatening to withhold their vote in the general election if their preferred candidate doesn’t win the primary, and indeed seem weirdly proud about it.

OK, boomer Bernie or Buster.

Here’s the thing, the thing, the thing: there is never going to be an American president free of the deeply toxic elements of American ideology. There just won’t be. This country has been built how it has for 250 years, and it’s not gonna change. You are never going to have, at least not in the current system, some dream candidate who gets up there and parrots the left-wing talking points and attacks American imperialism, exceptionalism, ravaging global capitalism, military and oil addiction, etc. They want to be elected as leader of a country that has deeply internalized and taken these things to heart for its entire existence, and most of them believe it to some degree themselves. So this groupthink white liberal mentality where the only acceptable candidate is this Perfect Non-Problematic robot who has only ever had one belief their entire lives and has never ever wavered in their devotion to doctrine has really gotten bad. The Democratic Party would be considered… maybe center/mild left in most other developed countries. It’s not even really left-wing by general standards, and Sanders and Warren are the only two candidates for the nomination who are even willing to go there and explicitly put out policy proposals that challenge the systematic structure of power, oppression, and exploitation of the late-stage capitalist 21st century. Warren has the billionaires fussed, and instead of backing down, she’s doubling down. That’s part of why they’re so scared of her. (And also misogyny, because the world is depressing like that.) She is going head-on after picking a fight with some of the worst people on the planet, who are actively killing the rest of us, and I don’t know about you, but I like that.

Of course: none of this will mean squat if she (or the eventual Democratic winner, who I will vote for regardless of who it is, but as you can probably tell, she’s my ride or die) don’t a) win the White House and then do as they promised on the campaign trail, and b) don’t have a Democratic House and Senate willing to have a backbone and pass the laws. Even Nancy Pelosi, much as she’s otherwise a badass, held off on opening a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump for months out of fear it would benefit him, until the Ukraine thing fell into everyone’s laps. The Democrats are really horrible at sticking together and voting the party line the way Republicans do consistently, because Democrats are big-tent people who like to think of themselves as accepting and tolerant of other views and unwilling to force their members’ hands. The Republicans have no such qualms (and indeed, judging by their enabling of Trump, have no qualms at all). 

The modern American Republican party has become a vehicle for no-holds-barred power for rich white men at the expense of absolutely everything and everyone else, and if your rationale is that you can’t vote for the person opposing Donald Goddamn Trump is that you’re just not vibing with them on the language of that one policy proposal… well, I’m glad that you, White Middle Class Liberal, feel relatively safe that the consequences of that decision won’t affect you personally. Even if we’re due to be out of the Paris Climate Accords one day after the 2020 election, and the issue of climate change now has the most visibility it’s ever had after years of big-business, Republican-led efforts to deny and discredit the science, hey, Secret Corporate Shill, am I right? Can’t trust ‘er. Let’s go have a craft beer.

As has been said before: vote as far left as you want in the primary. Vote your ideology, vote whatever candidate you want, because the only way to make actual, real-world change is to do that. The huge, embedded, all-consuming and horrible system in which we operate is not just going to suddenly be run by fairy dust and happy thoughts overnight. Select candidates that reflect your values exactly, be as picky and ideologically militant as you want. That’s the time to do that! Then when it comes to the general election:

America is a two-party system. It sucks, but that’s the case. Third-party votes, or refraining from voting because “it doesn’t matter” are functionally useless at best and actively harmful at worst.

Either the Democratic candidate or Donald Trump will win the 2020 election.

There is absolutely no length that the Republican/GOP machine, and its malevolent allies elsewhere, will not go to in order to secure a Trump victory. None.

Any talk whatsoever about “progressive values” or any kind of liberal activism, coupled with a course of action that increases the possibility of a Trump victory, is hypocritical at best and actively malicious at worst.

This is why I found the Democratic response to Obama’s “don’t go too wild” comments interesting. Bernie doubled down on the fact that his plans have widespread public support, and he’s right. (Frankly, the fact that Sanders and Warren are polling at the top, and the fact that they’re politicians and would not be crafting these campaign messages if they didn’t know that they were being positively received, says plenty on its own). Warren cleverly highlighted and praised Obama’s accomplishments in office (i.e. the Affordable Care Act) and didn’t say squat about whether she agreed or disagreed with him, then went right back to campaigning about why billionaires suck. And some guy named Julian Castro basically blew Obama off and claimed that “any Democrat” could beat Trump in 2020, just by nature of existing and being non-insane.

This is very dangerous! Do not be Julian Castro!

As I said in my tags on the Bush post: everyone assumed that sensible people would vote for Kerry in 2004. Guess what happened? Yeah, he got Swift Boated. The race between Obama and McCain in 2008, even after those said nightmare years of Bush, was very close until the global crash broke it open in Obama’s favor, and Sarah Palin was an actual disqualifier for a politician being brazenly incompetent and unprepared. (Then again, she was a woman from a remote backwater state, not a billionaire businessman.) In 2012, we thought Corporate MormonBot Mitt Fuggin’ Romney was somehow the worst and most dangerous candidate the Republicans could offer. In 2016, up until Election Day itself, everyone assumed that HRC was a badly flawed candidate but would win anyway. And… we saw how that worked out. Complacency is literally deadly.

I was born when Reagan was still president. I’m just old enough to remember the efforts to impeach Clinton over forcing an intern to give him a BJ in the Oval Office (This led by the same Republicans making Donald Trump into a darling of the evangelical Christian right wing.) I’m definitely old enough to remember 9/11 and how America lost its mind after that, and I remember the Bush years. And, obviously, the contrast with Obama, the swing back toward Trump, and everything that has happened since. We can’t afford to do this again. We’re hanging by a thread as it is, and not just America, but the entire planet.

So yes. By all means, vote for Sanders in the primary. Then when November 3, 2020 rolls around, if you care about literally any of this at all, hold your nose if necessary and vote straight-ticket Democrat, from the president, to the House and Senate, to the state and local offices. I cannot put it more strongly than that.

[rabdoidal]

idk if this counts as dm court but do you have any advice for balancing things? my group plays in pbta so we dont have things like challenge ratings and stuff, and I feel like I haven't been challenging them enough with failed rolls. trying to be more strict feels like im being a killjoy and im not really sure how to balance the two

Ooh good question, I have super limited experience with PBtA / 2d6 systems - I've GM'd for Monsterhearts and played in Dungeon World, but never the full extent of a campaign - but certainly my go-to for keeping encounters fresh is thinking about external factors, and how characters can push themselves. I'll also say that while it can feel like you're being a buzzkill by being harsh, it really depends on the players and how they feel about failure. PBtA especially is a system based on failing up - and for a lot of players, failing spectacularly is just as fun as succeeding. It doesn't have to be cruel or harsh, but you definitely have the ability to be a little mean, or at least to redirect the energy of the situation (ie: if someone fails on a stealth roll to get into a fancy party, they could either just trip and fall and get captured, or they could be mistaken for royalty or one of the guards and get taken away from the area they were trying to investigate).

Some challenge ideas/tips:

Put varied enemies on the board that challenge different class features the players have (a magic stealing construct that's too strong for the wizard to defeat, stuff like that), but have it so all the enemies in the area cancel themselves out. If you use the rock-paper-scissors model, you can create, for example, worms that cause earth tremors when they hide underground, jumping spiders that are easily frightened by the tremors, and acidic frogs that want to eat the spiders, but the worms are vulnerable to acid. All of it together is a clusterfuck, and annoying if your players can't catch the worms before they go underground or can't get unstuck from frog slime, but they can still use the environment against itself to win the combat. They have the option to either brute force it or think through it, but neither way is unbalanced.

Put in non-violent combats - a battle where you're in an ancient temple and there is a timer counting down while your party has to correctly solve a puzzle (either them as people or mechanically through rolls) before the ruins collapse while another party member has to go find the treasure you came for before its destroyed - you can make things more manic and stressful, which can make even the most competent players freak out.

After a certain point with ttrpgs, players will reach a level where nothing can possibly kill them short of a god. You can pile on a bunch of shit, and in the moment if it feels like too much and the party is about to die, you can reduce the villains HP or have someone come and save them. The reason why the DM screen is so important is because it keeps the suspension of disbelief going when you think you might've fucked up. You can fudge their saving throws or the number of goons they have when it feels like you miscalculated the fight.

Go left field. If they're all competent fighters, hunters and mages, make them go on fantasy Great British Bake-off and make them use their limited life skills to win in order to proceed to the next battle, or win a huge prize. If they're a bunch of shitty teen vampires and witches, make them the Babysitter Club for a day.

Its hard to find a balance, but making challenges that can affect not just their characters, but their feelings as the players themselves, can help them have emotional stakes in what you give them. It's not the end of the world if they lose a pro-wrestling tournament, but the emotional loss will last a lot longer.

[onebillionstarsff]

if you think c!dream deserves torture, you don’t know what torture is

alrighty, it’s time for me to do annoyingly in-depth lore analysis again because i have seen way too many people on my dash and twitter timeline saying that c!dream deserves to be tortured.

i don’t really think people have a comprehensive, reality-based understanding of what torture actually is, what it can do, and the motivations behind it. i, unfortunately, do: i’ve done extensive professional-level study on torture, so i’m going to do my best to put out some knowledge into our little dsmp-related world.

obvious content warnings for references to torture and to violence below the cut (nothing too graphic, though; i know this isn’t an academic forum or government work)

all of this is /rp /dsmp

i’ll also list some sources at the very bottom if you want to learn more

alright then, let’s start: what is torture, anyway?

there are two types of definitions, general and legal. i’ll reference both, but the message they carry is essentially the same, so i’ll just paraphrase the united nations definition that’s party to (read: supported/enforced by) 170 countries:

torture is any act that intentionally causes SEVERE harm to someone, physical OR mental, for the purposes of extracting information or punishment for failure to do so, with explicit consent from an acting public authority.

i’ll break down those components in the context of the dsmp in a second, but i first want to make it very clear what torture ISN’T. torture is not manipulation, it is not "trauma” in the way trauma is broadly conceived, it is not even direct physical abuse. you can suffer abuse from, say, a parent or a partner, and that abuse is about a power dynamic, where one person is being forcibly subordinated to the other. torture, on the other hand, is not necessarily about power, and it’s definitely not ONLY about power dynamics; torture, by its very definition, has to be intensely and officially coercive, and it has to be SEVERE. there are not degrees of torture, like there are degrees of abuse: being deprived of sleep for days or even weeks at a time is just as psychologically impactful as losing a limb or being waterboarded (simulated drowning- a common torture method that the us has been known to employ).

this is my first major issue with the way some viewers of the dsmp approach this whole debacle. i constantly hear c!tommy’s manipulation by c!dream cited as a perfect justification for c!dream’s torture. what c!tommy, and others on the server- particularly the kids- went through is horrible, and intensely traumatic. i will never deny them that, especially as a survivor of abuse myself, but torture is not just another form of trauma. that’s a very important distinction that we, as viewers, have to draw: torture is considerably worse because it is sanctioned, it is coercive, and its explicit goal is not just to cause pain or make someone feel powerless (common goals of abusers), but instead to shatter someone.

in more specific terms, the mental goal of torture is to completely unmake someone’s conception of the world, how they interact with it, and their basic sense of identity. if you read accounts or speak with survivors of torture, it is frequently mentioned that their very way of processing everything in life was destroyed by pain and had to be rebuilt, completely different, after escape. by destroying one’s individuality, will, and their most integral of processing abilities, you destroy their grasp on the world; and, to put it lightly, such a breaking event is awful enough that, in an effort to make it stop and regain some sense of normalcy, the victim will tell their persecutors what they want to hear. it’s the reason why confessions obtained through torture are notoriously not admissible in courts of law. this goes far beyond abuse or manipulation, and i need everyone to understand that.

now, let’s get to c!dream’s situation. did he do awful things? yes, undoubtedly. i’m a c!dream apologist, but his manipulation of c!tommy and c!tubbo was very fucked up. beyond that, his notable “crimes” that others on the server aren’t also guilty of committing (e.g., murder, theft, arson, to name a few common ones) really just consist of especially massive destruction of property (people leave c!techno and c!phil out of this equation, much to my chagrin, but i won’t get into it here). punishment for his actions is understandable, and is typically what justice systems aim to do. but, even if we completely ignore the inherent inhumanity of pandora (HOOO BOY that’s a lot to ignore but i digress), c!dream is not being punished, he’s being tortured. 

going by the definition i used, let’s break it down:

c!sam knows what c!quackity is doing to c!dream, allows it, and even encourages it. as the warden, he is the person in an official, authority position giving their consent. 

c!quackity is, by his own admission, doing what he is to get information out of c!dream. it’s not a confession in this context, but very specific piece of knowledge, with the promise of death also hanging right above it.

list of extreme psychological abuse: long-term solitary confinement (torture if it’s more than 22 hours. c!dream has been in solitary confinement for more than 60 days now), deprivation of the passage of time, general verbal abuse, incredibly limited social contact (people start to fray without basic interaction after a while).

list of extreme physical abuse (god where do i start): prolonged starvation, malnourishment when he isn’t being starved (you will die without protein intake); use of Warden’s Will Breaker pickaxe (it can hack through obsidian, so i think that’s all i need to say), shears (can be used to do things like pull nails, break limb’s bones, amputate toes/fingers/a whole arm in c!ponk’s case), and an OP axe (a sharp blade capable of slicing easily through wood with brute force, and bone is significantly easier to crush than wood). 

so, we have consent of authority, coercion for the sake of extracting information, and severe physical/mental abuse meant solely to cause extreme pain. c!dream is being tortured according to the proper, internationally-sanctioned definition of the term, and that is not okay in any circumstances whatsoever. 

if you haven’t ever read survivors’ accounts (or the accounts of their victimizers), it’s difficult to understand just how uniquely despicable torture is, and the lifelong effects that remain after it’s over and done with. i honestly recommend you read some testimonials, because it absolutely changes the way you view authority and the world in general.

no one is deserving of this treatment, no matter what atrocities they may or may not have committed. 

it’s a basic tenet of human rights, and i don’t think it should be a hard pill to swallow that it’s never excusable in any circumstance. so, defend c!tommy & co. and criticize c!dream’s actions all you want, but please never say that torture is alright. that statement has real consequences, and real moral implications. don’t be an asshole, and don’t be disrespectful to people who have survived it.

if you’re curious, look into these events:

The Argentine Dirty War

Chicago Police’s Jon Burge and his torture regime

Abu Ghraib prison

Extensive torture by Pinochet’s regime in Chile

Guatemalan Civil War

Ugandan policing in the 21st century (Human Rights Watch report here)

if you want some reading, i recommend the following. tumblr will probably nerf this post because of links, but oh well.

Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (very important work in the literature on torture) 

John Conroy’s Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture

Levenson (e.d.) Torture: A Collection

[mochegato]

Hope on Board

Chapter 26 – A Bird is Never Late

Chapter 1     Chapter 25

“Two sentries at the door, reporting in regularly. As soon as they miss a check in, they’re going to know we’re here,” Red Robin observed quietly.

“Uncanny, can you record their check ins?” Chat asked.

“I can next time they do it and play it back when it is time if I have their radios,” Uncanny confirmed.

“Perfect,” Spoiler grinned.

“Are you in their security?” Snowflake asked.

“Yes.  Everything is looped.  We can sneak in without them seeing on the cameras.  I can’t break into the radios though,” Uncanny reported.

“We’ll just have to try to get them before they are able to send out an alert,” Signal shrugged.  

“Have you located Marinette?” Nightwing asked.  The anxiety in his voice and tightness in his stance was clear even if everyone present hadn’t had training in observation.

“I haven’t.  I don’t think they have her on security camera,” Uncanny shook her head in confusion.

Snowflake tapped Uncanny to let her know it was time to record the sentries, then signaled the rest when Uncanny confirmed she had it.

As soon as they got the signal, the group went into action.  Red Robin and Red Hood dropped behind the sentries and knocked them out quickly.  They grabbed their radios and passed them off to Uncanny.  “Everyone split up in groups of two.  Chat, you’re with me.  Everyone goes in a different direction.  Snowflake and Uncanny, you stay here until we call you.  I need Uncanny focusing on security, see if there’s another video system that might have Marinette.  Snowflake, I want you with her and available when we face a talon.  Anyone finds Marinette, report in immediately,” Batman instructed.  “Anyone gets into trouble, report it.  Anyone finds a talon, call in Snowflake immediately.  Let’s go.”

Everyone looked to one another and gave a determined nod.  This was for family, both Marinette and the twins were family.  They were not going to allow anything to happen to any of them and they were willing to do whatever they had to do in order to protect them. They paired off and went in separate directions without another word.

Somehow, they were extremely lucky and they seemed to miss all the guards doing their rounds, not that there were many.  As Batman had predicted, they hadn’t been expecting anyone to find them so quickly and their guard wasn’t fully up yet. They were able to make it deeply into the building with only having faced a few owls.

After about thirty minutes, Red Hood’s voice finally broke the silence over the coms.  “Fuck… Take a look at this Oracle.  What do you think is in the capsules?”

“Scanning now,” Oracle reported.  It only took a few minutes to come back with an answer. “People, or people shaped figures.”

Red Hood grimaced at the answer.  It was exactly what he feared.  “Talons?”

“Could be,” Oracle hedged.  “There does appear to be a lot of electrum in the bodies. Whatever it is, it can’t be good.”

“There’s hundreds…” Red Hood trailed off aghast at the idea.  If they woke these guys up, his team wouldn’t stand a chance.  They’d be dead in seconds.  Not to mention, even if they saved Marinette and the babies, the Court of Owls didn’t take failure well, they would retaliate.  Marinette and the twins would never be safe.  “Snowflake, can you make your way to my location?  I think it would be a good idea to blast this room before they activate any of these guys.”

“Affirmative.  On my way with Uncanny,” she answered quickly.

<><><><><> 

Robin opened the door to the next hallway carefully. With the door made of solid metal, there was no way to see if anyone was in the hallway except to actually enter it.  He froze when he saw partially concealed movement on the far side of the hallway. His eyes flicked up as a blur of red appeared and disappeared.  He studied the scene to try to ascertain if the movement was Marinette or a threat, easing into a fighting stance.  

But with his focus entirely on the movement ahead, the missed the thick, wooden plank heading for him from the other side until he heard wood shattering above him.  He jumped up into a flip to escape the attack.  Unfortunately, the attacker threw the remainder of the plank at him, hitting him mid flip, knocking him off balance, and gouging his skin.  He landed in a crouch ready to launch into a counter attack, but paused at finally being able to see the attacker.

“Shit!  Robin. Sorry!  I keep hurting you guys.  But, thank God you’re so short or that first swing would have caught you full in the face.” Her eyes bugged out when she realized she had just insulted him. “I mean…”

“Marinette…” he looked at her amazed for a moment before touching the blood running down his face and examining it in surprise.  He shook his head and tapped the com in his ear. “I have her.  I have Marinette.”

“How is she?” Nightwing asked in a frantic tone.

“She looks in good health and well trained.  I see three owls knocked out on the ground in the hallway behind her.” He raised an eyebrow at her.

“I’m pregnant not incapacitated,” she gave him an insulted look.  “I may not be able to run but I can stab someone or swing a bat, or batlike object in this case.  In fact, I have more mass behind my swing now.”

“Stab someone?” Robin asked with a raised eyebrow. That was not an answer he would have expected from her.

“They had knives.  Now they don’t.  I wanted something in case I got taken,” she shrugged.  “And I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave them with weapons they could use if they woke up.”

Robin nodded in approval.  “Smart.  Of course since they were looking for Grayson’s children, you could have always just informed them that yours are not in fact Grayson’s.

Marinette nodded at him, keeping her eyes on the hallway behind them.  “I considered that.  But it seemed like there were only two likely outcomes to that.  First, they believe me and kill me immediately, also killing the babies.  Or, second, they decide to make sure and take a blood sample before they’re born and confirm that they are in fact Dick’s.  So all that would have bought me was death or endangering the babies, because I don’t believe they would have been all that careful in taking the blood.”

Robin stared at her analytically for a few seconds as if seeing her for the first time.  “Less talking more moving,” Batman instructed gruffly over the coms.  “Snowflake, if you could make your way to my location, Chat and I could use your help, immediately.”

“I’m making my way to you, Robin,” Nightwing reported.

“Let’s get you out of here before you go into labor,” Robin told her.  “I’m not delivering any babies.”

“What?  Not looking forward to an upfront introduction to reproductive organs?” Red Robin laughed.

“I have had an extensive education on reproduction. I’m just not looking forward to seeing my… I’m just not looking to put my education into action.” Robin corrected quickly.

“Stay behind me,” Robin directed Marinette already moving back into the hallway he came from.  Marinette nodded and rushed to catch up, keeping an eye behind them, knowing Robin couldn’t.

They reached a corner and Robin motioned for her to stop. She pushed herself against the wall behind him as he listened for signs of movement in the other corridor.  He motioned to her that he heard two people coming and to stay back.  She nodded in understanding and tried to press even further into the wall as though there was any way to hide with her belly bulging as far out as it was.

The two figures passed their hallway, barely glancing in their direction before doing a double take, clearly not having expected to see anyone there.  Robin took advantage of their momentary hesitation, attacking both at the same time. He sent a flying kick to the first owl, sending him into the wall.  He quickly pivoted to the second owl.  He sent a series of jabs to his side.  The owl bent over in pain.  Robin roundhouse kicked him in the face, sending him into the wall.  The first owl tried to sneak up on him but Robin ducked at the last second.  He spun quickly knocking his legs out from under him.

Marinette watched in awe for a few seconds.  Robin was a whirlwind of punches and kicks. Fast and effective.  She turned to check behind them while he punched the second owl and let out a surprised gasp.  Three more had snuck up on them while Robin had been fighting.  The third owl grabbed her, holding her by the neck while the other two moved to attack Robin.  Marinette stopped struggling against him.  She wasn’t going to win a battle of strength or speed right now. But she didn’t need strength.  She had steel.

She slipped one of the knives she’d taken from the owls earlier and stabbed behind her catching the owl in the side.  He immediately let go falling as he grabbed his side, gasping for wet sounding breaths.  Marinette kicked him in the face and turned back to the other two owls who hadn’t noticed she was free yet.  She pulled the next two knives out of her boots.  The fourth owl was about to strike Robin.  Marinette threw the knife hitting him in the head with the hilt of the knife.  The owl held his head and spun toward her.

She gave him a strained smile.  “Need to work on that,” she offered weakly.

The owl shook his head and moved toward her while the fifth owl attacked Robin.  Robin got into a fighting stance, eyes darting to the owl moving toward Marinette. He snapped his eyes back to the owl advancing on him.  Marinette groaned and curled over grabbing her stomach.  “You have got to be kidding!” she groaned breathing heavily.

“Oh, come on!” Robin exclaimed almost losing his focus on the owl in front of him.

The owl moving toward her grinned and reached for her. When he was next to her, closer than an arm’s length away, Marinette shot up, driving the knife into the owl. The owl gasped, looking at her confused. Marinette punched his face, sending him sideways.  Robin, having already dispatched his owl, followed her punch with a kick, knocking him out.

“Are you okay?  Was that a contraction?”  A look of fear that hadn’t been there while fighting the owls, had now settled on his face.

“No, thankfully.  Hopefully I didn’t tempt fate though.” She grimaced at the thought. Their doctor actually thought it was extremely likely she would deliver any time now and this was not where she wanted to go into labor.

“Oh thank God!” He let out a relieved sigh.  “So you used your precarious situation to feign weakness?”

“Yes… I wanted him to lower his guard,” she said like it was obvious.

Robin stared at her for a few seconds again before nodding in approval.  “Adequate.” They both spun in the other direction when a figure ran into the hallway.

“Marinette!” Nightwing yelled running to her.  He ran up and hugged her tightly before pulling away just enough to check her for injuries.  “Are you okay?  How are the babies?  Are you sure that wasn’t a contraction?  The doctor said five weeks early wasn’t unlikely.”

Marinette stood stock straight.  “Um… fine.  I’m fine. Uh… Nightwing, right?” she asked awkwardly.

Dick immediately backed away.  “Yes.  Nightwing. That’s me.  Right.”  He forgot he hadn’t told her yet because Jason had called it from the beginning, he was a fucking dumbass.  His eyes caught on a large patch of red on her sweater.  “You’re bleeding!”  He moved closer again to examine her.

Marinette gave him a confused look and examined her sweater for what he was seeing.  Finally she saw the blood.  “Oh, that’s not mine.”  She gave him a sheepish look.  “There’s a few people that could belong to and none of them are me or Robin.”

Nightwing blinked at her a few times, unsure how to respond to that.  “Less talking, more moving,” Batman reminded him over the coms.

“Right.  Let’s get going.”  He took her hand and gently pulled her behind him as he moved.  Robin naturally fell into position behind her, watching their rear.

They seem to have had luck on their side once more. They made it to the lobby of the building with only a few more owls finding them, but that is where their luck ran out.  They could see the exit doors when a talon stepped in their way, standing between them and the doors.  Other owls entered the room, surrounding them.  The three took in the scene apprehensively.  “I estimate fifty owls and a talon,” Robin said conversationally, informing the rest of their team what was happening.

“Odd to only have one talon on call,” Nightwing agreed with a forced casualness.

“I’ve already taken care of one,” Batman rasped into the coms.

“Robin, you’re on protection duty,” Nightwing said quietly enough that only he and Marinette could hear.

“Of course,” Damian scoffed.

“We’re coming.  Black Bat and I should be there in a few minutes,” Red Robin reported.

“We cannot let you take the Gray Son,” the talon spoke gravely.

“The Gray Son?” Nightwing asked, face scrunching in confusion.

“The prophesied one.  Her child will be the perfect talon.  He is the true heir,” the talon continued.  Robin stiffened at his words, his stern expression tightening further. “The Gray Son of Gotham.”

Nightwing narrowed his eyes at the talon.  They were after his children?  They were going to try to turn his children into one of them?  How dare they?  Maybe the children should take Marinette’s last name.  There is the slightest possibility that might deter them.  He mentally shook his head.  That was unlikely and there was something else strange about the situation.  “The Court usually waits to take children until they’re older.  Why take these before they were born?”

“The recent failure forced us to ramp up our plan. The Court decided to start training the Gray Son in our ways as soon as he was born, to bring him to his destiny as early as possible,” the talon explained calmly, tightening his grip on his knives and subtly assessing the group.

“And what about the Gray Daughter?” Nightwing asked with a hostile edge in his voice, taking note of the number of weapons the talon appeared to have.  Likely he had more, but the ones on display would give him an insight into what else he might have.  He also took in how the other owls acted, their stances, their sense of hierarchy, their weapons.

“Of no consequence.  We likely would have killed her along with her mother.  You may keep them if that satisfies you,” the talon offered with a flippant tone.

“Sexist assholes,” Spoiler muttered over the coms.

Nightwing hummed in consideration, discretely looking around the room as he did.  “I think we’ll leave with all three.”

“Then you’ll leave with none!” The talon launched at Nightwing.  Robin pulled Marinette out of the way as Nightwing leapt toward him to block his way to Marinette.

Marinette tried to watch Nightwing fight the talon but couldn’t focus on him.  Robin was pulling and pushing her around so she was out of the way of punches and kicks that might have connected with her.  Luckily or not, they were aided by the deference the owls showed to the talon, giving him wide berth to attack and kill Nightwing.  That left the space behind Robin and Marinette open, but it also meant that every time the owls pushed them back, it pushed Marinette closer to the talon.

Robin and Marinette kept an eye behind them. Marinette stayed as close to Robin as she could without infringing on his fighting too much.  She had to stay away from the owls so they couldn’t grab her and take her to a different stronghold.  She grabbed one owl’s arm when he tried to pull her, twisting to trap his arm and ramming her elbow into it with enough force to break his arm. The owl recoiled and Robin finished her attack.  Unfortunately, that left her other side open, an opening that the other owls didn’t hesitate to take.  Marinette screamed when the owl took her, alerting Robin to the new threat.

However, the scream also attracted Nightwing’s attention, distracting him from his fight with the talon.  The talon launched at him, ripping into his skin with his claws. Nightwing let out a muffled cry, but pushed down the pain.  He didn’t have time for pain right now.  He had to protect Marinette.  The talon would take advantage of any distraction, as he already had.  He had to focus entirely on taking down the talon and trust his team to protect Marinette and his twins.

Marinette struggled against the owl that was pulling her away, but Robin just smirked at him and punched the owl next to him without looking.  Marinette furrowed her brow in confusion until she felt the arms around her loosen and heard the owl fall to the ground.  She turned to see Red Robin pick up the owl and throw him at the other owls.

“You’re late,” Robin snarked, turning back to fight more owls.  

“A Red Robin is never late.  He always arrives precisely when he means to,” Red Robin answered lightly.

“Nerd,” Stephanie scoffed into the coms.

“Well, he should have meant to arrive a while ago,” Robin growled.

“Eh.  You were holding your own.  And Marinette’s been covering for your mistakes.  You were fine,” Red Robin answered with a smirk as he hit several owls in one swing of his Bo staff.

“Besides,” Spoiler added, flying over the heads of a few more owls to land on the other side of Robin.  “This isn’t the only part of the building with owls.”  She punctuated her comment with a few well-placed kicks and swipes with her Bo staff.  

There was quite a bit of jostling, but Marinette had mostly been isolated from the attacks.  The few owls that made it through the line were off balance, just barely making it through and making them an easy target.  It was easy enough for Marinette to punch or kick them hard enough to make them fall and vulnerable to one of the other heroes.  

Signal worked from the side of the room to take down more owls, moving quickly and efficiently from one to the next and back again, using each as leverage to push harder against the other, adding power to his hits with his Eskrima sticks.  Black Bat arrived in the room from another direction and made quick work of taking down the owls in front of her.

Marinette looked up when she heard a yell from Signal to ice the room.  She did a double take seeing Snowflake blow into the room, making it freezing.  She gaped at the sight.  What was Snowflake doing in Gotham?  Her eyes caught back on the fight between Nightwing and the talon. It seemed like the frost was affecting them both.  She quickly glanced around the room and noticed the movements from the rest of the room slowing down slightly as well.  Reaction times reducing little by little, but it especially seemed to have an impact on the talon.  His entire fighting style changed.  He was more guarded now, more protected, more afraid of getting hurt, giving Nightwing an advantage.

Marinette jumped when a body landed next to her.  She had been so distracted by Nightwing’s fight, she hadn’t even seen him approach.  She lunged to punch him, but the figure twisted along her arm.  “My Lady!” He exclaimed loudly, holding up his arms in a placating manner.  

“Chat!” Marinette gave a relieved cry and pulled him down into a quick hug.  She pulled back to notice he was wearing his ice form, which made sense if he was the one to bring in Snowflake.  He had anticipated the change.

“You’re here!  And you brought friends.”  She grinned at him, pulling her back into a hug.

“Could have been a lot more too if someone hadn’t hid the glasses.” He gave her a playfully scornful look that quickly turned into an analytical one.  “You seem a bit less affected by the cold than I would have anticipated, Bug.”

She gave a devious look.  “Wayne Enterprises tech fabric.  Can’t even feel the cold except on my face, honestly.  Plus,” she added innocently, “it’s impervious to fire. That seemed valuable in Gotham. Wouldn’t save me from the blast force from the explosion but would save me from any fires created… like if a cult’s building got blown up.”  She gave him a serious look.  “Not that I’m suggesting you cataclysm an entire building, of course.”

“Of course,” he gave her a conspiratorial grin.

“Plagg on the other hand…” she trailed off, letting him finish the sentence himself.

Chat nodded in understanding and looked around them, calculatingly.  “Okay, this party has been fun, but honestly, not my scene.  Ready to take our leave?”  He looked at her again, focusing on her stomach.  “This is going to be a bit more awkward than it used to be but… need a ride?” he grinned at her opening his arms.

Marinette smiled and let him pick her up.  He was right.  It was a lot more difficult than it used to be due to her belly bur they made it work.  She could hold on if it meant the difference between her babies living and dying.  She held onto his shoulders while he extended his baton taking them in a high arc, well above the owls, to the doors.

The talon growled and pulled out darts that could incapacitate them.  Before he could use them Nightwing twisted in front of him, slamming an Eskrima stick into his hand hard enough to break it followed by his other Eskrima stick hitting him in the face.  The talon hid his groan of pain and launched at him again with his good hand and his arm. His hand may be useless right now, but the rest of him could fight.  He swung at Nightwing in a series of calculated punches that forced him back closer to the crowd of owls.  Nightwing caught a glimpse of Marinette and Chat making it through the door and felt a new surge of strength.  He looked back at the talon and launched into a volley of kicks and hits with the Eskrima sticks.

He pushed the talon back until he was on his knees, hitting him one final time to knock him out.  He turned back toward the front doors and took off running to find Marinette. With the talon taken care of, there were only a few more owls standing and his family could handle them.  He could trust his team.  He had to focus on his family.  But, with his focus on Marinette, he missed the talon sit up and aim a knife at him with his good hand.

A flash of light bathed the room in red for a moment. The talon seemed to be frozen for a moment until he moved in slow motion looking down at his chest and back up again just in time to see Nightwing run through the doors.  His strength left him a second later, as he collapsed on the floor, unable to regenerate.  

Uncanny Valley watched impassively as he fell.  Batman looked at her in shock.  She looked back with a questioning look.  “He was like the others wasn’t he?  Like the ones in the capsules I destroyed?  He wasn’t human.  He doesn’t have blood.  He was designed to destroy.”

Snowflake came up next to her and patted her on the shoulder as Signal knocked out the last owl standing.  “You did good,” she whispered to Uncanny.  She looked back at the bats.  “Do you need us for anything else?  I think I should get Uncanny back to her mom.  I think she’ll need to talk.”

Batman stepped forward with a kind smile.  “I think we can handle it from here.  Thank you for your help.  I don’t know if we would have been able to do it without you.”

Uncanny gave him a bright smile.  “You’re welcome.”  Snowflake nodded to them and guided Uncanny out the door with her.

“What did she mean he was like the others,” Red Robin wondered still watching the door they left through.

“She meant the room of talons waiting to be activated. I had Elsa freeze the room and Uncanny destroy each of the caskets and the talons inside with her beam thing,” Jason answered.  “I confirmed the things inside won’t ever come back no matter how much electrum they give them.”

They all snapped to attention when Chat walked back through the doors.  “Where is Marinette?  Are she and the babies safe?” Spoiler asked.

“Of course they’re safe, idiot.  Chat wouldn’t have left her unless she was safe and Nightwing had her,” Damian scoffed.

Chat gave a quick nod of agreement.  “Like the little man said.  She’s safe and with Nightwing.”  He looked around with a practiced nonchalance.  “So… how do bats feel about demolition with a single touch?” He asked waggling his eyebrows.

Chapter 27

Tags:

@dickinette-february @demonicbusiness @ichigorose @iloontjeboontje @ladybug-182 @toodaloo-kangaroo @dast218 @golden-promises @trippingovermyfeet @emimar7 @laurcad123 @lady-bee-fechin @thewitchwhowaited @redscarlet95 @jayjayspixiepop

[4ragon]

Can't speak for anyone else but I for one would love an incoherent rant about the dark age of the law plotline

Alright buckle up kiddos.

So I have a lot of complaints with Dual Destinies as a whole. It’s a poorly paced mess, the final confrontation was deeply underwhelming, it has all these weird “Gotcha” moments where they put in the most bizarre, logic breaking plot twists and then undo them within ten minutes completely for shock value. And yet, despite all of these issues, there is nothing in this world that pisses me off more than the words “The Dark Age of the Law.”

I hate the Dark Age of the Law subplot more than literally any other thing in Ace Attorney. It is a complete failure of a story in literally every possible way. It not only doesn’t work within the context of Dual Destinies, it also completely flies in the face of everything we understand about the original trilogy! It!!!! Sucks!!!!

But no. That was too coherent. I think we should break this down.

First I’m going to start on a macro level. The Dark Age of the Law is the clearest indication to me that the writers of Dual Destinies never played another Ace Attorney game. They treat this Dark Age of the Law thing like this big bad, this shiny new toy, this never before seen wonder, but??? Corruption has been a CENTRAL part of every single AA game since game one!! Since case 2 even!!!

The Dark Age of the Law is this whole idea that people have lost their trust in the court system. And what do they site as the catalyst for this breaking of trust? Phoenix Wright’s disbarment and Simon Blackquill’s arrest.

And okay. Phoenix Wright’s disbarment is a reasonable one. Phoenix was sort of known for being this paragon of truth and justice, this man willing to do what it took to find the truth and protect people in need. His name being smeared through the mud could very well shake up the foundations of trust that the people had in the court system.

But Simon Blackquill? Simon FUCKING Blackquill shook up people’s faith in the court system?? Simon Blackquill is the reason that people are convinced that the entire system is full of lies and deceit? SIMON CONFESSED!! He didn’t even do anything corrupt!! He murdered a woman, sure, but he then immediately lets everyone know “Yes, I super did this murder. No one else.” And they treat it like it’s this big turning point??

LANA SKYE!! You guys remember Lana Skye? The Chief Prosecutor at the time, who was accused of murder, and who still went to prison for doing like a million other crimes after being blackmailed by the chief of police.

SPEAKING OF WHICH the fucking CHIEF OF POLICE was a murderous monster who blackmailed people and also murdered. Did that have no effect on people’s trust in the courts?

Manfred von Karma? Never lost a case in 40 years, literally everyone talked about how he and Miles were KNOWN to be corrupt? Also, you know, murdered a man in cold blood?

Blaise Debeste??? Chairman of the fucking ETHICS BOARD???????? Like!!! That’s some deep fucking corruption right there!!!! And he constantly talks about the mysterious disappearances around him of people who disagreed with him, does that not shake your faith?!

In Turnabout Sisters, as early as case 1-2, Redd White calls up the Chief Prosecutor (who also is not Lana, just to be clear) and demands his complicitness in covering up his own crimes. That’s how central corruption is to the entirety of Ace Attorney.

And you’re going to look me in the fucking EYES and tell me Simon Blackquill, some 21 year old nobody with no power or influence, who theoretically stabbed a woman and made no effort to cover that up, is the reason the courts have lost the faith of the people? You have the NERVE??? the AUDACITY??? the fucking GALL????? to tell me that SIMON is what caused this? The system was never trustworthy, and if it was, what the FUCK did Simon have to do with changing that???

Horrible. Terrible. Disgusting.

BUT

Let’s pretend for a moment that Dual Destinies existed in a vacuum. First Ace Attorney game you’ve ever played. Never touched another one in your life. If you were unfamiliar with the world that Ace Attorney has already spent six games establishing, does the Dark Age of the Law subplot hold up?

No. No it doesn’t.

So as I’ve said a million times before, it was clear that Dual Destinies should not have tried to juggle three protagonists. It just didn’t work. They learned their lesson and booted Athena out of that protagonist title in SoJ, and as much as I hated that decision, it was at least a much stronger overarching story for it.

Now. There were three main throughlines in Dual Destinies. Athena’s story centered on introducing her, of course, but it also was about her struggle to save a friend who needed saving from the law and also himself. It was very AA1 in that way.

Apollo’s story was a little harder to outline, because a lot of it is saved for the last couple of cases, but it’s really about his relationship with Athena. Coming to trust her, his trust in her being shaken, struggling to overcome that, grief, loss, yadda yadda, and I have my criticisms of how it’s handled, but that’s the gist of it.

And Phoenix needed a story. So they made up this stupid fucking bullshit garbage and dumped it in his lap and said “Here you go, best friend! Our dear money maker! This is what you’re working with!” And then they proceeded to use it to beat the shit out of Phoenix until he started spitting out dollar bills.

Okay no sorry I have no idea what the fuck I just said but liSTEN

The Dark Age of the Law storyline was clearly supposed to have some significant thematic relevance to the story, given how hard they were hammering it into us in case three. It was supposed to mean something, and I think it was supposed to mean something to Phoenix in particular. After all, he and Miles won’t stop TALKING ABOUT IT GOD MAKE THEM SHUT UP

The Dark Age of the Law subplot had nothing to do with that final case. Remove it, and nothing changes, because, again, Simon had nothing to do with the corruption in the first place, and the Phantom certainly had nothing to do with corruption. It’s so surface level. “Uh oh, people don’t like the courts. If you can solve this unrelated crime, everything will be fixed.” And then he does (also Athena should’ve been the one to win the case, but that’s a different problem) and nothing ever comes of it, other than “Hooray, you fixed the corruption!” He didn’t??? Miles what the fuck are you talking about????

If they had woven in the corruption throughout the story somehow, maybe it would’ve found some way to be impactful? But it was a floundering, half-thought-out subplot in an already bloated game that failed to give any meaning or help anyone develop as a character. Hell, it kept falling out of relevancy and only popped in to rear its head when the writers remembered it existed and decided to have yet another person remind us that THIS IS IMPORTANT GUYS NO REALLY.

Like! Okay. What if they tied it more to AA4? I mean Phoenix’s disbarment and subsequent return could’ve actually affected the plot. Have people actively mistrust Phoenix or something. Or maybe have it affect anyone in any way. Sure it divides the fucking high schoolers for that mess of a “power of friendship” storyline, but so could a plot about, I don’t know, electing a homecoming queen or something. It affected Athena for one case, but what did that even teach her other than “Trust your gut, sweetie, don’t do lawyer crimes!” Phoenix didn’t have an arc in this game, and he shouldn’t have had to, unless it was coming to grips with the fact that he was never going to get those 7 years of his life back and the smears against his character were always going to linger. But they didn’t do that, they just needed him in there for brand recognition.

I can handle a lot of bullshit in these bullshit lawyer games. That’s part of the appeal. But unlike most of the other bullshit, this particular threat was unsatisfying, meandering, and unnecessary.

[loveoaths]

@ramenthings​ sent:  Plots please 🤪

oooooh, several ideas off the top of my head:

naruto & utakata. 

naruto’s canon time-skip verse:   after much cajoling and, let’s face it, blackmailing, naruto “convinces” utakata to stop being a lay-about-bum and teach him about the jinchuuriki-bijuu connection. utakata would have a second chance at mentoring someone after his utter failure with hotaru, and through much trial and error utakata just might change his mind about mentors being inherently harmful. naruto gets to connect with another jinchuuriki aside from gaara and learn more of the harsh realities of shinobi villages that aren’t konoha, and utakata gets to experience kinship and the first taste of redemption. 

naruto’s blank period/other time period: the ancient relic utakata is studying activates and forces utakata and naruto to be within 12 feet of each other until they can find the relic’s other half and disable it. this prompts them to go on a road trip across the elemental nations to get rid of each other, because let’s face, they would fucking hate each other for the first month of knowing each other. however, depending on the time period this takes place in, they’re likely both unsatisfied with what their lives have become, and this roadship of necessity becomes an existential journey as they externalize their past traumas and problems in new adventures and come to terms with what they want out of life. in essence, this is an odd couple broadship comedy.

naruto’s detective verse: detective “kurama” is hired to investigate a shady new corporation dominating a major city,but his investigation is thrown into an entirely new direction when he meets utakata, the corporation’s heir apparent, who agrees to help "kurama” take down the corporation and all of its allies, on one condition: he has to kill utakata first.

naruto & jashin.

cringe but make it fashion: remember those dark!naruto fics that were everywhere in 2007? this is that, but less cringe-inducing. jashin, god of merciful love ( and devastation ) attempts to court a young naruto into their fold. this goes about as well as you might expect, but you can’t blame an ancient god for trying, right?

naruto & yugito.

naruto’s canon genin timeline:  after the failed mission to kidnap hinata, yugito kidnaps young naruto and whisks him away to kumogakure, where he is raised as a kumogakure shinobi. this is a very wolf and cub plotline... tigress and kit.

naruto & haku.

post-LOW mission:  after haku’s death, their undead spirit haunts him and potentially attempts to radicalize him so he makes good on his “gonna change the shinobi system!” efforts. this is less of a plot and more of fun ask fodder.

no-massacre au:  the yuki tribes escaped most of the civil war massacres, so haku and naruto meet when the yuki tribe crashes the chuunin exams and enters their squadrons. haku, the future leader of the main tribe, could not care less about the exams, and is instead here to warn naruto about dangerous prophetic visions the tribe’s oracle had about him. naruto gets to learn a lot more about chakra, demons, and spooky shit than he does in canon. ( this heavily involves my yuki tribe headcanons but i promise they’re fun and traumatic! :] )

konoha-bound au:  naruto helps haku adjust to konoha life and maybe-just-maybe lets them move into his apartment until they can find a place. haku trains naruto on the side and they become besties.

yukikage and mizukage aus:  no real plots coming to mind atm, just might be fun for these two to hang out when they’re both kages with bratty sons.

honorable mention:  naruto & ryogi.

ryogi’s half uzumaki and it might be fun to hang out. dat’s it!

[trelldraws]

The other night I was searching JSTOR for papers on 16th- and 17th-century German witch trials, as one does, when I came across this absolute showstopper of an abstract:

For 250 years insects and rodents accused of committing property crimes were tried as legal persons in French, Italian, and Swiss ecclesiastic courts under the same laws and according to the same procedures used to try actual persons. I argue that the Catholic Church used vermin trials to increase tithe revenues where tithe evasion threatened to erode them. Vermin trials achieved this by bolstering citizens' belief in the validity of Church punishments for tithe evasion: estrangement from God through sin, excommunication, and anathema. Vermin trials permitted ecclesiastics to evidence their supernatural sanctions' legitimacy by producing outcomes that supported those sanctions' validity. These outcomes strengthened citizens' belief that the Church's imprecation were real, which allowed ecclesiastics to reclaim jeopardized tithe revenue.

ME: THEY WHAT?

Needless to say, I had to click this paper, whereupon I passed in the course of several pages from wondering whether this was a really elaborate joke published in Chicago University's Journal of Law and Economics to literally crying with laughter:

Everyone has heard of a kangaroo court. But how about a court for kangaroos? What about a court for caterpillars? Impossible though it seems, for 250 years French, Italian, and Swiss legal systems had just that. Their ecclesiastic courts tried insects and rodents for property crimes according to the same procedures used to try legal persons. These courts summoned snails to answer charges of trespass, appointed legal counselors to locusts, and considered defenses for grasshoppers on the grounds that they were God's creatures. They convinced cockchafers of cozening crops, fulminated against field mice for filching from farmers, and exiled weevils under pain of excommunication and anathema.

Vermin trials were not the province of Dark Age ignorance or impoverished primitivism. They were of a much later, more enlightened vintage—a Renaissance one. Further, they occurred in the wealthiest countries in the world.

One interpretation of vermin trials is that the judicial officials who conducted them were mad. In examining these trials' records, it is tempting to conclude as much. In the records, we find distinguished judges ordering crickets to follow legal instructions, dignified jurists negotiating a settlement between farmers and beetles, and a decorous court granting a horde of rat defendants a continuance on the grounds that some cats prevented them from attending their trial.

-

[3] This paper considers ecclesiastic trials of vermin only. It does not consider the prosecution of domestic animals, such as dogs in pigs, in secular courts. For information on trials of domestic animals, which is often mixed with discussions of vermin trials, see Evans (1906) and Finkelstein (1981). For information on trials of inanimate objects, which is also occasionally mixed with discussions of animal trials, see Hyde (1916, 1917a, 1917b) and Pietz (1997). For information on animal trials under Roman law, see Jackson (1978).

This is so much absurdist litigation.

Early modern citizens' knowledge of pests and how to control them was poor. A perusal of pest control manuals used by professional farmers reveals just how poor. State-of-the-art Renaissance pesticides included sprinkling weasel ashes or water in which a cat had been bathed over fields to drive away mice; capturing a rodent, castrating it, and releasing it among other rodents to deter them; putting castor oil plants in afflicted fields to drive away moles; and hanging garlic around flock leaders' necks to protect sheep from wolves.[4]

[...]

Thus, it is unsurprising that, together with the other impressive remedies noted above, early modern farmers considered the ecclesiastical trial of vermin as a possible pesticide. Indeed, early modern pest control manuals explicitly advised farmers to use divine pesticide when confronted with difficult-to-resolve infestations. As one manual put it, "When all of these remedies are unsuccessful, one must turn to the ban of the Church" (Dannenfeldt 1982, p. 555).

Early modern citizens' divine-pesticide superstition is still less surprising when one considers the superstitions held by Europe's intellectual elite during the same period. These individuals held, for example, that the continent was infested by witches who had intercourse with demons and sole men's genitals while the men slept. When compared with this belief, simple farmers' belief that god might be able to exterminate pests is unremarkable.

[4] Early modern manuals contain a few pest control methods that are more sensible, for example, poison. But even these display incredible ignorance. One suggests using butter to poison rats.

-

Multiple communities beset by the same pests sometimes sued vermin collectively. For instance, in 1659 the Italian communes of Chiavenna, Mese, Gordona, Prada, and Samolico banded together to prosecute caterpillars they charge with trespassing on and damaging their fields.

A class action against caterpillars!!!

Ecclesiastic courts appointed defense attorneys to represent accused insects and rodents. Thus, when in 1519 the inhabitants of Glurns, Italy, sued some field mice for property damage, the court appointed legal counsel for the mice "to the end that they may have nothing to complain of in these proceedings" (Evans 1906, p. 112). Similarly, later that century, when the inhabitant of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, France, sued some weevils, the court appointed the creatures two legal representatives, a procurator and an advocate, "lest the animals against whom the action lies should remain defenseless" (Cohen 1993, p. 120).

Ecclesiastic judges showed impressive fairness towards vermin in such trials. Consider a fourteenth-century lawsuit brought against some flies by the inhabitants of Mainz, Germany. To the court's consternation, the flies refused to appear before the bench after being summonsed. The court concluded that "in consideration of their small size and the fact that they had not yet reached their majority," it would overlook the flies' failure to appear and would appoint them adequate defense counsel to prevent it from happening again (Evans 1906, pp. 110-11).

AAAAA

The lawyers representing vermin argued strenuously for their clients at trial. A common defense was that the defendants were God's creations. Thus, they had as much right to enjoy the fruit of His earth as the plaintiffs. Another common defense was that the case was invalid. Thus, the plaintiffs should be nonsuited.

One argument that vermin defense attorneys made towards this end was that their clients were vermin (Evans 1906, pp.98-99). This would have been a sensible argument against treating pests as legal persons—presumably the most sensible one—were it not offered by way of elaborate judicial proceedings that presumed the legitimacy of treating grasshoppers and moles as legal persons ipso facto.[6]

Procurators on both sides "took their job very seriously, devoting a great deal of time, knowledge, and legal expertise to the defense of their clients" (Cohen 1993, p.120). Vermin trials involved much legal wrangling. And judges at least pretended to be at great pains to decide cases justly.

[6] According to Chassenée (1531), another legal manuever [sic] attorneys for vermin resorted to was to argue that their clients were clerics, which entitled the vermin to the benefit of clergy. This would have permitted insects and rodents to have an ecclesiastic judge decide their case when the bishop granted jurisdiction to a secular magistrate (Evans 1906, pp.32-33). No vermin counselor ever used this argument. Still, the possibility that caterpillars or field mice might be men of the cloth was an argument the courts were willing to entertain.

By this point I was actually wheezing. Quoth a friend, accurately, upon being sent this excerpt: "???????????????? / The biggest, longest question mark of my life" ME FUCKING TOO

[7] Vermin often lost their case by default. Judges summoned vermin to appear in court to answer the charges against them three times. "The summoners were . . . served in the usual way by an officer of the court, reading them at the places most frequented by the animals" (Jamieson 1988, p. 51). If the vermin failed to respond to the third and final summons, the court could convict them.

-

To ensure that all members of the convicted species were aware of their sentence, the court announced the its verdict publictly and nailed broadsheets declaring its judgement to trees in the affected area. Alternatively, the court might bright some specimens before the bench to inform them of its decision, remitting the creatures to the afflicted area to share the decision with their colleagues (Dinzelbacher 2002, p. 410).

PLEASE!!!

TL;DR this whole paper was just such an experience, thank you god and the University of Chicago, I've never laughed so much in the course of reading an academic publication in my life, well-researched this is not but imagine submitting this paper with a straight face, this man has won academia

[modgirlyreposts-revamped]

Ok time for Security Breach AU lore. Always on that grind

TW for child neglect, abuse, death, and abandonment, divorce, attempted murder, manipulation, trauma in general, and breakups.

Security Breach is basically an entire new chapter of the story, so we're no longer focused on the Aftons, and the main characters are almost totally unrelated, save for Glitchtrap and Glamrock Freddy. Caleb is no longer much of an important character as he's basically trying to heal and progress his life but God I can't stop thinking about Caleb meeting Michael as Freddy again and. Fnhshfhdhf-

Anyways, main characters we're looking at here are Vanny, Vanessa, Gregory, Mike, and a few more minor OCs- Raha Salib, Anna Kwento, Nora... something? I forgor, and Mark whose last name I also forgor. Raha and Nora are technicians, Anna is a manager, and Mark just does the bare minimum to not get fired. Anna and Nora are very gay and Mark has a crush on Raha but he respects that she doesn't like him back. Ok they're all rlly minor actually I just love them.

Basically this story starts back in 1997, when Vanessa (Vanny) and Vanessa (not Vanny) are born- Vanessa is born to Joanne and Richard ("Bill") Alexander, and Vanny to Angela and Clayton Torres.

From the start neither of them has a great home life, and when Vanessa is ten her parents divorce, and Richard basically manipulates and scares Vanessa into lying about Joanne in court to win custody of her.

Three years later, Vanny's little brother Gregory is born, and after that, Clayton leaves the family entirely, already not wanting to care for one child, let alone two. This leaves infant Gregory in the hands of Angela and Vanny. He's raised by Angela with Vanny's help, until- when Vanny is 20 and Gregory 7- she leaves as well, and Gregory is brought into the foster system. Three years later, Vanny becomes a beta tester for Help Wanted, where she meets Glitchtrap who begins taking over her brain and psychologically torturing her to wear her down until she begins to obey. To be... completely honest, despite the tapes implying the Ness in the emails to be the security guard Vanessa, it's still just Vanny in my AU.

Also worth noting is Vanny and Vanessa's relationship, which started in high school and ended not too long after Angela left, which ended because it sent Vanny into a state of major distress that upended their relationship despite Vanessa doing her best to be there for her.

Vanessa was working for Fazbear Entertainment at the time, as was Vanny- though not in the tech department like Vanny was. Using Vanny, Glitchtrap tried to extend his reach to Vanessa by manipulating her, which she actively tried to resist like Jeremy did before Vanny. She took a job as a security guard to try and stop Vanny, but they simply utilized her position for their goals, making Vanessa an accessory to Vanny's crimes.

Around this time, Gregory runs away after Vanny tracks him down and attempts to kill him. Devastated and with no reason to return now that his only family has betrayed and abandoned him, he just runs, and hides from those searching for him. Especially Vanny.

He had actually been to the Pizzaplex before, knew Freddy, and suspected something was.. up with him that made him safer than anyone else, so he went back there to see Freddy, and hopefully find his sister and investigate what had changed about her.

Michael, through Freddy, desperately wanted to just protect a kid for once, not scramble to atone for the aftermath of his failure. So he allied with Gregory to protect him, recognizing aand empathizing with Gregory's want to save his sister.

In comes Vanessa, who's just tired and fucking burnt out and does NOT want Vanny dicking around in the mall, but also doesn't want Gregory and Freddy doing so either and thus stands as an antagonist to them for a.. little while? I have an idea for how she would ally with Gregory in particular but that'd need to be another ask.

Anyway I'm kinda not sure how this shit ends or anything I just wanted to talk about Them

I know you said that he's really minor, but Mark doing the bare minimum is a total mood lmao-

And can't really blame Vanessa, if my ex was being manipulated by a virus and running around a mall commiting crimes the last thing I'd want is a kid running around that same mall after hours, and a sentient animatronic bear helping him

[skeletorific]

How do you think the Beforus Ancestors(Aradia, Tavros, Sollux, Karkat, Nepeta, Kanaya, Terezi, Vriska, Equius, Gamzee, Eridan and Feferi)were like? I love your Alternian Ancestors stuff so far and was curious what you Interpretation of the Beforus ancestors were.

oh HELL yes I am about this.

Aradia Megido, the Tombkeep: I see Aradia as being born a bit later than the others, while the coddling laws are at their strongest. Rather than put up with that, as quickly as she can she removes herself from Beforan society to the very outskirts. Like their Alternian counterparts, Beforan’s are often avoidant of the notion of death. However, in their case, it is not because death is a failure of the dying, but a failure of those around them. It is not seen as a natural cycle but something to be abhorred and feared at all costs. As such, tombs are kept, but they are far away from the rest of civilization and usually talked about in hushed tones. Aradia grows up among these tombs, befriending the local ghosts and considers them her own coddling charge. She guards the tombs from any who get too curious, or more often, from well-meaning government officials looking to tear down monuments to such “nastiness”. What they find instead is an angry little girl with powerful psiionics. She becomes something of a bedtime story for young grubs, even long after her passing. They say she still haunts the halls.

Tavros Nitram, the Menager: In parallel to his obsession with Fiduspawn, I see Beforan Tavros as being some variety of animal handler, using his fully fledged wings (and his bronzeblood bankroll) to travel the world and collect rare and exotic creatures to his own plot of land, to tend to and train. Some know him as a kindly soul, treating all beasts with the utmost love and dedication. He seems like some kind of fairy tale figure, surrounded on all sides by animal companions who he communes with. To others, this is reckless ecosystem mixing, but then, what do scientists know anyways. He prefers the hero title a bit more, as it aligns more with his intentions anyways. Eventually one of his expeditions ends poorly, with him being confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. Outwardly he dies content to let his coddler and his animal friends care for him for the rest of his life, but there’s a restless spirit that he passes down to his descendant.

Sollux Captor, The Dronebee: Completely and utterly unremarkable in every way. Sollux contented himself with working his function as a goldblood. His technical ability was fostered at every turn by a Beforan education system eager to see a lowblood embrace their “natural talents”, but while he made minor waves in the programming circles in which he moved with his often unique approach to coding, to most he was just one worker among thousands, very valuable of course! Every worker is valuable :) But ultimately.....not worthy of notice. Which is fine: that’s how Sollux likes it, and more than that if left him time to pursue more personal projects, such as a little game later known as sgrub. Just because he’s not vocally complaining doesn’t mean he’s not compiling a list. From his perspective, Beforan civilization is a ticking timebomb anyways. Why shouldn’t he be the one to start the countdown?

Karkat Vantas, the Advocate: Look, I know we all love revolutionary Karkat, but I think something we forget is that Karkat was pretty pro-system even as late in the game as Act 6. So, for the Beforan model.....well, every system needs its bootlickers. Karkat Vantas becomes a mouthpiece for some lowblood lobbying groups, acting in vocal support of the Empress’s coddling plan. Its not all love of power: legitimately there is a part of Karkat that tries to see how this is good. Healthy. The needs of his friends are being met, they’re safe, and attended to. Surely all of that is worth a little......infantilization, right? He deals with a lot of criticism from other lowbloods for being a sellout, and though he does his best to cultivate a calm unflappable demeanor so craved by Beforans, I guarantee Beforus has more than a few Grubtube compiliations of Vantas meltdowns that Kankri watches when he needs a good cringe. As he got older he slowly began to question the system he’d spent his whole life building, but ultimately lowbloods don’t live long enough for those kinds of regrets.

Nepeta Leijon, the Believer: What, you think clowns have the monopoly on weird religious communes? Nah. To be fair to Nepeta, her commune’s status as a “cult” is probably more indicative of Beforan prudery than anything else. Her sect, the Righteous Assembly of Withdrawn Renegades (or RAWR for short), is dedicated to the principles of free love and a return to the natural. Within the massive tunnel and cave system in which they live, trolls are free to strip themselves of signifiers like caste and clan and live as the gods intended: covered in dirt, chasing something furry, and flirting furrociously :33. While Nepeta in life insisted there was no leader it was her effect on people that kept them coming back for more, and while the commune purrsisted after her eventual death, ultimately its membership dwindled. Meulin was brought up among some of the last vestiges of it, and some of their old hideouts have been inherited by the Lost Weeaboos.

Kanaya Maryam, The Prioress: Literally, the prior. One of the earliest trolls, widely considered the Matriarch of Trolls in some sense. In her time she revolutionized many of the practices of auxiliatrices, ensuring greater safety for the grubs and greater care for the mother grubs. Many of the norms now in place for jadebloods are in large part due to her own influence. Despite her farreaching influence (and the fact that she left behind a journal of her practices), not much is known about her personal temperament. Quick readers may catch a certain dry sarcasm behind her words, and the especially studious scholar may note slight reference to a few great lovers (and a few great disappearances, *cough* rainbowdrinker *cough*. Her greatest secret is her brief and tumultuous kismesis with Vriska Serket, notorious Mafiosa, but only a very few historians have ever uncovered it. In part, her long shadow may have contributed to her descendant’s eventual anxiety regarding her prescribed role,

Terezi Pyrope, the Gumshoe: Beforan justice is tricky. As opposed to Alternia, there are in fact actual laws in place that aren’t just “don’t fuck with highbloods”, but in many ways its almost more corrupt. More often than not the courts are more concerned with petty infractions than it is with actual injustice, and furthermore, inter-caste tension remains a huge concern that bubbles up in violence. After a few years badgering olives for traffic tickets while watching actual fully fledged crime families get off scott free, well....Terezi had had enough. She took her pursuit of justice into the real world, working as a private detective for hire. She’s notorious for her, erm....quirks, but she’s a fastidious hunter and a careful investigator when she wants to be. She brings em back alive. USU4LLY >:).

Vriska Serket, the Mafiosa/Mapm8ker: Let’s be clear, a lot of Vriska’s society was laid on top of her and it was abuse from which she struggled to free herself. However, what does one do when freed from society, but seek to shake things up a bit. She’s still a thief of Light, make mistake, and she slowly works up the ranks from card shark working the tables to in charge of a small army of foot soldiers, smuggling mindhoney to goldbloods (who have been restricted “for their own good”) and sopor slime to clowns. She’s the flamboyant head of her own criminal empire, with the code of only stealing from those she deems worthy and a reckless approach to life

However, most of that isn’t generally known. And to the outside world, she’s just a simple cartographer, travelling the world to assemble some nice, safe, boring maps. Indeed, when her journal was finally unearthed by her descendant, she couldn’t help but wonder if these exploits were true, or simply a story her ancestor liked to imagine herself into on her off days. Tough to say.

Equius Zahhak, the Showpony: Alright, y’all knew I couldn’t stay away from that one. Equius was something of a puzzle to his descendent when Horuss actually went back through his (meticulously kept) caste records. By all accounts, he was an intelligent, capable, hardworking man. A tinkerer in his off hours, he was a pioneer in the field of robotics, and by all accounts not romantically unsuccessful. And yet, the man never seemed concerned with making a name for himself. Instead, over the course of his long life, you could perpetually find him at the shoulder of someone more powerful and important than he was. Was he....a bodyguard? Trophy husband? Butler? Hard to say, but there he was. Trotted out like the loyal steed he was.

Gamzee Makara, the Borrower: A peculiar legend of clownery regards a strange “hobo looking motherfucker what will wander into your hive and be all and snatching up your most secretous things for the messiah’s wider purposes”. So far as is known, he is not malignant, although its not unknown for a troll to occasionally disappear while running after him to retrieve their stolen items. Even without that possible threat, its usually not worth it to chase after him: the things he takes have a way of ending up back in your hands, one miraculous way or another. Gamzee is an itinerant monk, wandering the countrysides. Some passerby he’ll occasionally offer aid to, or proverbs. Which might be helpful if anyone could decipher what they mean. Ultimately he’s a happy man, if prone to fits of temper and bouts of melancholy. Still, as he notes, he’s got motherfucking friends all over these globes :o) what’s a motherfucker gotta be lonely for?

Eridan Ampora, the Magician: Well.....the Empress doesn’t exactly need Orphaners. As such, the violets are largely left to their own devices. Given they’re often prone to creative endeavours, Eridan found his own outlet. He became renowned as an illusionist, and at one point his shows were capable of drawing large and massive crowds, who would gasp in awe at his tricks and wonder if the violet really did have a trace of magic in his blood. He seemed to like the idea, eventually penning a popular grubling children’s series about a boy with those very abilities (which eventually found its way into the young hands of his descendent). However, celebrity wasn’t necessarily the best mix with Eridan’s temperament. He was prone to some truly disastrous quadrant outings, as well as developing several more addictive habits to drown out the oddly oppressive loneliness that permeated him. These bad habits were only worsened by the worst thing to ever happen to Eridan Ampora: the internet. With access to videos of his performance, most were pretty easily able to spot the trick of it, and hell hath no fury like a cyberbullying teen going after a b list internet celebrity. He took it as a sign to swear off the craft forever and lived the rest of his life on book residuals, alone, drunk, and miserable

Feferi Peixes, Her Highness: Not as much to say about this one, as Feferi is the one we have the most information about. Like it says on the tine, she instituted the coddling system on Beforus. This was widely considered a Bad Idea by those victimized by it, but you couldn’t pay anyone in Feferi’s court to tell her that. The Empress is sweet tempered and excitable, it’d be like telling a child 12 perigree night is cancelled. Perhaps the great irony is that as Feferi gets older, the thing that frustrates her most is that it feels like no one takes her seriously as a person. Merely as a figurehead. Still, she lives her life on Beforus ultimately convinced this is what’s best for the greater good. 

[kiricade]

Track #2

a playlist inspired by the documentary Thirteeenth

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JU$T - Run the Jewels

RTJ speaks to the spirit of Ava Duvernay’s documentary, Thirteenth, from the very beginning. Their lyrics sardonically recast the American Dream as dystopian reality. The language around academic and fiscal accomplishments are revealed to mask an underlying, contemporary system of slavery--slavery under capital, and slavery under consumption: “Master economics cuz you took yourself from squalor, mastered economics cuz your grade say you a scholar, mastered Instagram cuz you can instigate a follow,” are the opening lines, and while innocuous in themselves, are punctuated by the repetition of a righteous utterance of “slave”. This refrain serves as a subversive reminder that, “the Thirteenth Amendment say that slavery’s abolished, shit,” but, “look at all these slave masters posing on your dollar.” Similarly, Thirteenth acknowledges the continuity of slavery despite the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, illustrating modern slavery’s rapid, bipartisan-powered evolution under the Reagan, Nixon, and Clinton administrations.

The Guillotine - The Coup

“The Guillotine” is a reference to a major symbol of the French Revolution, which is generally viewed by historians as having been caused by the failure of France’s “Old Regimee” to pacify acute social and economic inequality. Transnational intellectual elites shifted the public sphere from Versailles (the home of the Court) to Paris, making the influence of the Court less effective. A financial crisis, further exacerbated by state debt, food shortages, and a population boom, led to the radicalization of the urban poor. If this is sounding familiar that’s because it is the dream imagined by The Coup, only this time for Black American liberation. The Old Regime, feudalism, and the privileges of nobility (including the exemption from taxes) were forcibly abolished under the Revolution. In “The Guillotine”, Boots incorporates this major French event to illustrate a radical solution to today’s unliveable serfdom. “Hey, you! We got your war, we’re at the gates, we’re at your door!” is a reference to the Bastille, a prison which was symbolically liberated by French revolutionaries. In a contemporary, American context, the Bastille can be construed as the mass industrial prison complex. But Boots further develops this analog: “It’s finna blow ‘cause they got the TV, we got the truth,” refers to the monopoly that capital has on American speech. Despite the stereotyping of the black urban male, and the continued disenfranchisement of felons in television, music, newscasting, and the mainstream, Boots’ message optimistically asserts that “the truth” will triumph over manufactured consent. Even though white supremacy controls all aspects of the justice system, people will ultimately triumph: “They [white elite] own the judges and we [the people] got the proof; we got hella people, they got hella ‘copters; they got the bombs but we got the--we got the--we got the Guillotine!”

Close Your Eyes (And Count to F**k) - Run the Jewels

Just as Thirteenth addresses the racial disparities of being on death row, “Close Your Eyes” challenges the machinery of solitary confinement, torture, and uses institutionalized religion as a metaphor for the disproportoinate burden placed on the young, black male. The story is told from the perspective of a prisoner in solitary, who has broken out and is leading a prison coup. The “conditions'' have created the narrator--the “villain”, who is “given vision, the vision becomes a vow to seek vengeance on all the vicious.” RTJ equivocates retributive justice with justified revenge, suggesting that victimized black men are righteous in wreaking vengeance on the justice system, and for seeking dues in an eye-for-an-eye-like fashion. Before they kill the wardens, the prisoners waterboard them--“We killin' 'em for freedom 'cause they tortured us for boredom. And even if some good ones die, fuck it, the Lord'll sort 'em.” This line is a reference to the Albigensian Massacre, during which the Papal Legate said, “Kill them; let God sort them,” justifying the slaughter of faithful Catholics along with Papal enemies. This old story translates to the modern day in the form of a justice system which treats black people in America as meaningless collateral in the pursuit of capital; the narrator encourages the prisoners to respond in kind. RTJ furthermore draws a comparison between enslavers and pedophilic members of the clergy, who strip “kids to the nude and tell them God’ll forgive them.” In this comparison, the clergy and enslavers use shame to keep their victims silent. By RTJ’s reasoning, if black children believe that they are sinful, then they will not feel justified to defend their basic human rights, or to bring vengeance on those who have wronged them.

No Rest for the Weary - Blue Scholars

Blue Scholars is composed of lead rapper Geologic, the son of Filipino immigrants, and jazz pianist Sabzi, an Iranian-American. Despite being an API crew, their music addresses the racial and socioeconomic issues plaguing marginalized groups in America more generally. “No Rest for the Weary” speaks to the colonial-imperialist legacy of American labor, and the mass industrial prison complex. “Diamonds ain’t enough to cover up a legacy of strange fruit,” is a tribute to Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit”, which was penned to challenge the lynching of Black people in the South. “No Rest” reminds us that lynchings never ended, through allusions to the ways in which the early and contemporary police state impact intersectional peoples:

Pages torn out of the memory of those who remain shackled in the chains of international capital gain.

Geologic explains that those who have been enslaved have had their histories stolen from them. It isn’t clear whether Geologic means to say Black diasporic peoples who were enslaved by white colonizers, or Black Americans who are enslaved today under the mass industrial complex. To Geologic, it doesn’t matter, since all forms of slavery are driven by capital gain. DuVernay’s documentary, Thirteenth, similarly breaks this down for us, and uses examples of corrupt capital, such as the ALEC coalition, to demonstrate the parallels between old and contemporary slavery.

Blood of the Fang - CLPPNG

CLPPNG’s “Blood of the Fang” is filled with vampiric imagery, and opens with a reference to the experimental horror film, Ganja & Hess. In the original film, vampirism serves proxy to the assimilation or submission of black people to white people and white society. “Blood of the Fang'' continues this theme. At its heart, the song is a critique of moderate modern politics:

Queen Angela done told y’all, ‘Grasp at the root,’ so what y’all talking about ‘hands up don’t shoot’? [...] Brother Malcolm done told y’all, ‘By any means,’ so what y’all talking about, ‘all on the same team’?

CLPPNG invokes powerful black leaders such as Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Geronimo Pratt, Ericka Huggins, Malcolm X, and others, and in particular targets of COINTELPRO. He provides a poetic history of COINTELPRO, a covert and illegal CIA program that sought to sabotage and surveille black, communist, and socialist organizations. While the origins of COINTELPRO preceded the modern mass industrial complex, its systematic dismantling of black leadership enabled the culture we see today. CLPPNG facilitates a revival of radical and revolutionary politics in the face of a racist police state and industrial prison industry. It is not enough, according to CLPPNG, to simply demand, “don’t shoot.” Meanwhile, ‘all on the same team’ refers to President Barack Obama’s speech following the 2016 election transition--and serves to highlight the bipartisan effort to disenfranchise Black Americans, and undermine efforts at abolition.

* this concludes Xing’s half of the project; part ii was posted by Cesaria