#good to be thinking about what i want my loose parenting framework to be

[whentherewerebicycles]

doing all this reading on cross-cultural parenting styles is so so fascinating. the practical differences are super interesting (ie learning about different cultural approaches to food, sleep, toilet training, safety, respect for others, etc). but i think the most thought-provoking part is just like... thinking about what each culture’s dominant parenting approach reveals about the traits that culture values & the way people in that culture perceive the world and their interpersonal relationships with others. like here are some of the themes that are emerging about american parenting:

americans are obsessed with individual success and individual excellence. much of american parenting focuses on discovering and actively cultivating each individual child’s “gifts,” which are assumed to be unique to that child, relatively fixed, and innate. we also seem to have this idea that if a child demonstrates interest in something or an early knack for something, we have a responsibility to accommodate that interest and make investments (of time, energy, money) to ensure that this gift is being cultivated appropriately, with an eye towards producing a child who excels in that particular field.

a major tradeoff is: that focus on individual achievement often crowds out a focus on interpersonal connection & on helping kids feel meaningfully enmeshed in and connected to a community that cares for them & that they in turn have obligations to.

americans are incredibly focused on and concerned with meeting developmental milestones (and with pathologizing children as deficient or “slow” or medically abnormal if they don’t meet those milestones). conversely, we see it as highly desirable for kids to hit developmental milestones early, so we invest a ton of time and resources into trying to hurry our kids along. we want our kids to walk, talk, read, sleep through the night, play instruments, speak multiple languages, excel at sports, etc etc etc as early as possible and feel very proud when our kids are labeled “more advanced” than other kids their age.

americans talk to their kids constantly, from infancy to young adulthood, and most of this talk stems from a belief that more talk = more learning. we learn that “good” parenting is hyper-involved, hyper-attuned parenting where the parent is always asking the child questions about the world around them, introducing new information, explicitly teaching or instructing, narrating our own actions so that the kid will learn from what we’re modeling, etc etc. we seem to do this because we feel that pressure for the child to be learning faster, learning more, learning all the time, so that they can grow up faster, reach milestones sooner, and demonstrate a capacity for excellence in their chosen field earlier.

american parents worry a lot more about their kids (we are preoccupied with safety and risk in ways that seem one million times more stressful than many other approaches to parenting... though this is partly because we live in such child-unfriendly environments that weren’t designed with children’s needs in mind). but we also worry a lot about (and spend lots of time focusing on) making our kids “independent” of us. we simultaneously try to protect our kids from any kind of risk or setback that could discourage them or delay their growth, but we also try to push kids away from us faster, wanting them to achieve an independent, self-reliant, self-regulating maturity as quickly as possible.

americans are obsessed with ��self-esteem” and often try to boost self-esteem by praising children for anything and everything (even if the praise is superficial or not really deserved). we are often afraid to give honest or hard feedback out of fear that it will damage the child’s self-image or make them feel negative feelings about themselves. the result, though, is that we seem to end up producing generations of kids who are much less resilient, prone to melting down over negative feedback or obstacles, self-absorbed/self-focused, and preoccupied with the idea that they have a sort of innate “right” to feel good all the time. this one is SUPER interesting to me because it feels connected to some thoughts i’ve been working through lately about the therapy-industrial complex and our culture’s obsession with mental health, which idk... my feelings here are complicated and require more unpacking than i want to do in this post lol. but i think a lot about how hollow praise can feel and how intensely addictive it can become, and just like... how truly enduring forms of self-worth seem to come from going through painful phases of life and grappling with difficult personal or interpersonal problems and emerging from those periods with a stronger, clearer understanding of yourself and your values. idk much to unpack here... much to think about...

idk there is probably more stuff i’m forgetting... i’m not really going anywhere with this post lol i just want to start synthesizing some of the things i’m reading. they’re like, simmering on low on the back burner of my brain right now... will be interesting to see if/how they end up getting internalized.

[artist-issues]

Hi! I've seen you comment a bit here and there about Pocahontas. This movie has had this quite messy reputation attached to it since it came out and hasn't been able to escape from it since then. Personally, I've always liked Pocahontas, but I do acknowledge that it has its glaring issues, especially when it comes to the context of what actually went down and Pocahontas's true story. I'm interested in reading your thoughts on the movie and what Disney could have done better regarding the whole "diversity" and historical accuracy thing. I genuinely believe Disney had the best of intentions when it came to the themes, message and depiction of Native American culture, but the execution unfortunately did not seem the most appropriate at times. What do you think?

I don’t know. I don’t have a settled opinion on Pocahontas. I will say I really enjoy it, and I think maybe the aesthetics of the movie are what appeal to me the most because it’s the one I want to have on in the background most often.

When you say “what Disney could’ve done better regarding the whole ‘diversity’ and historical accuracy thing” and “did not seem the most appropriate at times,” I don’t know if I understand what you mean. I don’t know if I understand what anyone means when they say that.

There are almost zero cold hard facts about the historical Pocahontas that EXPERTS agree on. Almost zero. So when people say “oh no, it wasn’t historically accurate,” it’s like, “no, of course it’s not. It’s a fairy tale based on a historical person that we know very little about to begin with.” Seems like what they’re mainly mad about is that Historical John Smith’s version of Historical Pocahontas saving him is the framework for the animated film, and we all generally agree that his version was fake. And people are mad about that?

But…why? If it’s already supposed to be a fairy tale loosely inspired by a historical person we know very little about…I mean, nobody is furious with the Robin Hood stories and going “how dare you misrepresent Robin of Lockersley, 1160, and King Richard I!!” Because we all know that they’re stories loosely based on—anyway. You get my point. Why would you have beef about a fairy tale being based loosely? Moving on.

You can say “because now generations of kids are growing up thinking that’s the real story of Pocahontas!! What an outrage!”

…All right, well, then you’re doing a terrible job teaching your kids discernment as a parent. When kids I’m responsible for watch a movie, I tell them “it’s a movie. It’s not real.” If it’s a movie about historical events, I tell them, “If you want to know more about the real story, let’s learn about the real story.” It’s not on Disney to teach your kids that a fairy tale is a fairy tale, it’s on you.

Anyway, you get it. Moving on.

Thing is, the Pocahontas movie’s message is “Love tries to understand, not to possess.” Great message. Especially good when applied to the problem of prejudice.

So then, they just shift the events, the character motivations, and the depictions around as needed, like they would any fairy tale in order to send that message in the best way. And because it is a fairy tale, not a documentary, great. Do it.

If Historical John Smith’s fake story makes that message more compelling, great. Use pieces of it. Why not? After all, they never claimed that this was the true, accurate history of colonization, the Anglo-Powhatan war, or John Smith’s interactions with Pocahontas. If they had made that claim, sure, let’s talk about historical accuracy. But they didn’t, so let’s not.

That’s all I had to say about the “historical inaccuracies” thing. Now let’s talk about “representation.”

What is it that people have an issue with here? Did they really want Disney to animate hundreds of Powhatan’s people dying of disease? Did they want Disney to animate heads getting chopped off and women getting raped? What’s the argument? That Disney should’ve made the colonists the clear and undeniable villains, the monsters of history, and the Native Americans 100% pure and innocent, wronged victims?

They’re not mad that Disney did a bad job representing Native Americans in a movie that was supposed to be a fairy tale. They’re mad that Disney didn’t represent Native Americans the way they would’ve.

Far as my eyes can see, people who call Pocahontas racist or misrepresentative just don’t want the story to be “Love tries to understand, not to possess.” They want the story to be “White colonists were unredeemable racist monsters and sub-human tyrants who deserved to rot in hell, while the Native American people were entirely innocent victims who did nothing wrong.’

The problem is that’s just not a true, or even helpful message for any movie to have. Sorry. The statement I just typed out up there in bold is not a true or helpful statement. And thank God the Pocahontas movie didn’t make it.

There’s nothing racist being said in the Pocahontas movie. There are depictions of the sin of racism in the Pocahontas movie. There is a difference. Characters in the Pocahontas movie talk and sing about each other as if the other people group is sub-human. That is a depiction of racism. But the message of the movie, and the way it treats Native Americans, is to treat them like human beings. Therefore, the message is not racist.

In terms of who is good and who is bad, who is right and who is wrong, the movie very clearly shows that the Native American characters did not start the violence. The Native American characters did not want war. The Native American characters were willing to be friendly and willing to defend their land and each other. The Native American characters were the first to try and make peace with the colonist characters. And they were all (Kocoum included) entirely human characters. They were even the good-guy-coded characters, in the movie’s conflict. All of the Native American side characters are noticeably smarter, kinder, drawn more carefully, and are more heroic than the white characters. (When Thomas is thrown overboard the other white side characters leave him behind. In contrast, when Namonteck is shot the other Native American side characters rescue him immediately and fall back.) And, not a caricature among them. Meanwhile, Wiggins, Ben, and Lion are all drawn with exaggerated characteristics. The heroine is Pocahontas the Character, not John Smith the Character. So what is the issue you have?

What people think is racist is the “idealization” of a Native American woman falling in love—or, as they like to say now—“committing herself to a white colonist.” But that’s like…a gross oversimplification of the movie. John Smith (the character) committed himself right back to her, nobody wants to talk about that? Also, they low key didn’t commit themselves to each other at all costs—he tries to, at the end of the movie, stay with her or have her come with him, and she won’t leave her home and her people?? So what’s the argument?

Not to mention, why is anyone even upset that the character Pocahontas falls in love with a white colonist character? Are you saying that this sort of thing would never happen? That a young woman who’s people are embattled with and mistreated by invaders would never find one invader who comes to an understanding with her, and then they fall in love? You’re mad because that would never happen? Incorrect. It happened all the time in history. It happens all the time in other stories you love, like West Side Story.

Who the heck cares if it didn’t happen exactly that way (even though maybe it did) with the historical Pocahontas? We already established that this wasn’t supposed to be a historically accurate retelling, it was supposed to be a loosely-based fairy tale. And the message “Love tries to understand, not to possess,” works perfectly with a fairy tale where the girl from one side of a racially-charged hate war understands and falls in love with a guy from the other side.

I mean people who talk about Pocahontas, the historical figure, with reverence and respect, all usually agree on one thing: she did help maintain some kind of peace between colonists and Native Americans. Whether or not you think the colonists should’ve even been there in the first place is beside the point—sorry, but it is; they were there, now let’s deal with the reality.

So when Disney makes a movie where the goal is to tell the message “Love tries to understand, not to possess,” and they have to be true to the universally-agreed-upon “Pocahontas probably helped bring some peace…” in their fairy tale…why on earth do you have a problem with Pocahontas the Character falling in love as a reason for bringing about that peace?

It’s because you don’t find “falling in love” to be anything other than demeaning for a woman. And it’s because you don’t want John Smith, or any white colonist character, to be depicted as human. You want them all to be unredeemable racist monsters.

The goal is no longer to have movies that say what Pocahontas said. We don’t want movies where there’s messy racism, but then it ends with attempts at peace and understanding. We want movies where there’s entirely one-sided racism, and then revenge for that racism. That’s what we want. We want endless apologies and zero forgiveness.

And for better or worse, Pocahontas is not a movie about endless apologies and zero forgiveness.

IN CONCLUSION: 1. None of the “you” statements were directed at you, idiosyncraticrednebula. 🫡

2. Anyone who wants to teach me where I’m wrong is welcome to, but you have to show your work, and you have to be consistent, you can’t just say “lol imagine thinking Pocahontas isn’t racist. You are the problem.” and then block me. 🙄 all right, well, you can, but all you’ll get out of it is an echo chamber.

3. If you want me to talk about the art, the storytelling, the quality of the movie outside of all this (and it should be outside of all this, because this was a fairy tale, not a historically accurate documentary) it’ll have to be in a different ask, and I’m happy to.

4. Should Disney have made it more clear that this was a fairy tale, a stylized story based only loosely on historical events? …Yeah. Definitely should’ve done a Prince of Egypt-style title card or something. But they didn’t—so now show me why it’s racist or misrepresentative.

[shouldiusemyname]

Since @thegalwhorants - bestie put me back in my Boston feels at 4am with this, I am now compelled, and encouraged, to write about It!

So you know what this means...

Yup, You Got it. ANOTHER TRIP TO BOSTON!

Honestly, I don't even know if it's Neo's babyness or my reading of Boston, but my heart goes out to him... See, it's like a case of the reverse 3 bears syndrome:

SandRay are too close and personal for me. too many similarities with my own actual experiences and I get overwhelmed thinking about them. AKA the bed that fits perfectly but makes me disconnect out of sheer overwhelm over how comfortable I am in that mess.

TopMew just piss me off, and I took quite a trip to realize that it's a good thing. I honestly believe that that's how I'm supposed to be feeling and I'm learning to enjoy the experience. However, if I were to write about it the only coming out would be a series of incoherent rants which I will spare you from. AKA the middle sized bed that just pisses me off! Like This is too "one size fits all" but I KNOW something's off and I can't relax and enjoy my sleep.

The only ones left are Boston and Nick - my big comfy bed. I can understand this bed. I have experienced this bed before but I have no unsolved issues about it. I can move around comfortably on this bed and sleeping in it once again just makes me feel good about myself and my past experiences.

So now, after I've taken you out on a stroll through the inner workings of my mind, let's talk about BOSTON! and Nick cos you gotta have some Nick in there...

Boston is compelling. That's it.

He is compelling for Nick for the same reason his father is compelling for him. Boston come off as carefree, no BS kinda guy, I do what I want, nothing gets to me and I don't care about people's opinions. I glide and float through life and nothing can touch me.

This is super attractive and compelling for someone like, say I don't know... Nick? Who feels like he's trapped by familial obligations. That's why Nick (thinks he) knows full well what he's getting into with Boston. That's because he is attracted to THAT side of Boston who is a loose canon, that side of Boston who he wishes to have in his life (so somewhat - I actually wanted to be him, but he's hot so I ended up fucking him and now I'm in love).

Anygay... Boston - by now I hope you can see that this is all a facade. This is all him adopting and taking on his father's persona. See, Boston has no roots. His mother bolted to the other side of the planet and left him with a father who can't father. There's no parental authority, no boundaries or values. So, Boston had to instinctively understand that if he wants those boundaries, he needs to exist within the boundaries of his father's personality (I hope this makes sense and that you get what I mean). Basically, he will get his father's attention, good or bad, if it's about something that exists within his father's framework or world. Anything other than what exists there means that Boston is on his own to figure out life.

Naturally, Boston takes on that attitude and it serves him in two ways:

he gets his father's attention and approval.

He can disconnect from his own self and not go through the pain of feeling his emotions. This is super obvious in the Ray confrontation - it seems like he's enjoying the fact that he's hurting Ray, but you can actually see the switch go off. I'll get into it in a bit.

This is also why he truly can't connect the dots and see how contradictory he's being when he fails to live up to his own values, re: I will record my friends' deeply personal moment but I will not have that done to me. This is not a contradiction in his mind because these two things live in two disconnected parts of his being - the mind and the feels.

ok, now I want to get into the ep.6 Ray confrontation because this was gold! *grabbing some screenshots...just a sec...aaaaand done*

Frist of all, the sheer confusion of Boston's face when Ray comes at him. Liks, what have I done? What could I have possibly done to make Ray so angry?!

We did have some fun laughing about Boston doing so much that he needs to do a quick mental scan of all the shit he's done trying to figure out what Ray's talking about. But NO. Boston is genuinely blanking here.

But here. This? This is where it starts getting interesting, cos this

This is the face of fear. This is what Boston looks like when he's feeling his emotions.

Then, when Ray tells him "how could you do that...he's your friend" It hits him and he switches. a brief moment of actual pain here

This is first step partial shut down. Immediate emotions disconnected and he enters damage control mode.

This is when he tries to rationalize by BSing his way around how this is making him feel. Ray is not letting it go and he's not buying the "I just wanted sex and the timing was off" excuse (if you can call it that), THEN! Ray calls him a slut, the transformation is complete and Chaos Demon takes over with the most hurtful and mean thing he could have said at that point "Not just anyone. I PICKED him"

This look is terrifying. Not because it's evil, but because of the disconnect. This is 100% you made me HURT and FEEL PAIN and I refuse to feel any of it. (I wish I had a gif of the shrug cos that just completes the transformation)

After that he just goes into full attack dog mode and he's on a mission to DESTROY Ray.

OK, I think it's enough for now. I just know I will be writing about him again as B&N are my big bed with plenty of wiggle room characters.

As always, thank you for visiting my soapbox. I appreciate you sticking this out (I did have more screenshots this time!).

Much love ❤️

[wanna-b-poet31]

Abuse by Any Other Name

So I am fascinated by Trauma and Abuse (both as a scholar and as a survivor of a toxic home environment myself) in Good Omens. This is an extension of one of my multi-part theory segments

Heaven’s Masquerade

Good Omens shows us Aziraphale and Crowley constantly coping (although often unhealthily) with the after-effects of their respective abuse and trauma. Both entities reference the way Heaven claims to “love” their angels but not once does Heaven actually cultivate healthy relationships with Aziraphale.  Instead, they masquerade as “love”.  

What they’re really asking for is ”control”. 

Example: Intimidating An Angel

Let’s examine one of the most blatant examples of Heaven’s abuse. Three angels corner Aziraphale. His supposed “siblings” who should be his closest allies, his most understanding companions,  his “side”, attack him. We can see in the above gif that although Uriel loosely holds his lapels Aziraphale is visibly shaking and terrified. Which is evident that it’s contact without consent. 

He immediately responds to the imposition wi terror, he knows that the could, and more likely would, be harmed by this contact. Which, is later seen to be correct when Sandalphon (not pictured in the Gif) punches his stomach as an act of intimidation.  Unlike Crowley’s mirrored actions, Uriel’s physical invasion of boundaries lacks respect and demonstrates an unequal power struggle.

Compare that altercation to the one that is Mirrored by Crowley:

Look at the immediate difference in body language. Sure, in the first Gif Aziraphale is surprised but the lunge, but he’s not intimidated by the attack. At first glance, it would seem Crowley’s invasion of boundaries is more aggressive and violent than Uriel’s.  However, upon closer inspection, the second gif shows that he’s not being pressed into the wall or lifted into the air. Crowley respects Aziraphale not to actually hurt him or put him into a position where Aziraphale could not escape.  There is no sign of struggle between the two. 

Whereas with Uriel Aziraphale is clearly panicking, there is no such concern in Aziraphale’s face with Crowley. There’s no shaking, no fear, no threat of death with Crowley, so we can presume that the boundary Uriel violated has not been crossed.  Rather, the consent to be touched hasn’t been violated. And that the closeness from Crowley while unexpected, is not unwelcome. In fact, Aziraphale takes advantage of the situation by taking the time to longingly inspect Crowley’s profile. 

While not the “nicest” way to be approached by his partner, Aziraphale is not scared. In fact, there’s an intimacy to the closeness. Besides the obvious hip thrust a la Crowley, and the nose touches, the second Gif shows a delay between Aziraphale’s reaction to the ex-satanic nun’s interruption and his gaze at Crowley. There’s an erotic element to the shared looks and a sense of trust here that Uriel’s attack does not share. 

Crowley’s goal is to “prove” his no-niceness, but Uriel’s goal is to intimidate. Crowley isn’t pushing against Aziraphale to show how “superior” he is to the angel, he’s doing it to show that “nice” isn’t a word he’s comfortable with. Uriel wants to make Aziraphale feel inferior to them.  

For Uriel and “the gang” it’s a means of controlling Aziraphale for his disobedience to Heaven. 

For Crowley, it’s intimacy. 

So...How Does Aziraphale Start Healing?

Aziraphale specifically needs to come to terms with the fact that Heaven, (not just angels, not just the bureaucracy, not just God, but ALL of Heaven) is the emotionally abusive, neglectful, cruelly judgmental, physically intimidating, and unsupportive “parent” to Aziraphale.  However, for much of the story, he hasn’t acknowledged it yet. 

This isn’t to say he doesn’t notice when Gabriel is cruel to him, or that Sandalphon is about .25 seconds away from smiting everything and that’s dangerous behavior, or that his calls to God are left unanswered, but he denies that these behaviors are inherent problems. The “Heavenly” behaviors we see directed towards Aziraphale, his interests, and his loves are disrespectful and belittling, but he still treats them like unquestionable authorities.  

The first step for a healthy recovery is admitting that there is a problem in the power dynamic.  At the very least, he needs to see that the terms and conditions of Heaven are unjust. 

Now, we do see Aziraphale push against his system of abuse, he lies to God for one thing, and maintains a relationship/agreement with Crowley, consequences be damned for another. But his rebellions still hold Heaven above all other relationships. It is still where his loyalties lay. At least, it’s where he claims his loyalties are, but he’s lying to himself. The bandstand scene shows us a rationalization to excuse Heaven’s treatment of him. 

Until he can admit that Heaven has hurt him, he can’t undo their damage.

Road to Recovery

I argue that the first step in Aziraphale’s recovery is when he admits that he has a problem with the end of the world. It’s not a full admission of Heaven’s fault, but it is an admission that when he does not feel comfortable with Heaven’s actions he should and CAN intervene. 

Before, with Noah and Jesus, he watched, even though he objected and was horrified by the actions against innocence. We see this again when he seems visibly upset with “all the smiting” that Sandalphon does at Sodom and Gamorah. Despite his misgivings, he doesn’t intervene (at least not on-screen). Look at the below gif. He’s clearly pained by God’s decision, but he bites his tongue. It’s not that he doesn’t want to question, it’s that he can not question. He must soldier on.

We can see that when Gabriel brings up the possibility of “something big is coming”, he is visibly perturbed. Then, once Crowley tells him about the coming of the Anti-Christ. He recognizes that his love for humanity and his life on Earth is a tipping point that he’s unwilling to give up.  But, he still does it by operating within the framework of Heaven.

The next crack happens when Aziraphale realizes Heaven is unsupportive of his efforts to save Heaven. His face visibly falls when Michael says they’ll forgive him for is an inevitable failure. He’s also upset by Gabriel who does give him encouragement, but in a tone that is clear, he thinks Aziraphale’s efforts are fruitless.  Heaven makes it clear that war is more important than love for God’s creatures.

Then Aziraphale goes to Heaven, wielding information about the Anti-Christ. He knows where Adam is, he knows the beast is released, and he knows that Armageddon is days, if not hours, away.  Yet, he falters. He’s all anxiety and nerves when he’s forced to talk to his so-called “side”, in a way he’s never like with Crowley. But this scene’s pièce de résistance is his choice to lie about the location of Adam. After first mentioning Crowley and all his wiles, he suddenly becomes uneasy. Gabriel asks “where” and Aziraphale recognizes that no one in the room cares about protecting humanity. Now, instead of the end of the world being his biggest problem, Angels (not yet Heaven) are.  This is further supported by their intimidation of him after the break-up on the bandstand.

While this scene is certainly progress towards naming his problem, he’s not all the way there yet. He meets with Crowley, and Crowley scares him because he’s not ready to admit Heaven is intrinsically abusive the same way Crowley is. He still believes that Heaven, and the angels, are on his side, that they’re doing right. He’s mortified about the very realy possibility that if he chooses Crowley, he’ll lose his divinity. His later scene summoning Metatron shows that he believes so badly that if he can only get ahold of God, everything will be sorted. But, it isn’t.  

It is only when he recognizes “hello god, it’s me Aziraphale” won’t get him shit, that HEAVEN is his problem. Not Crowley, not angels, not Hell, but Heaven is his abusive parent and he needs to pick which side he wants to be on.  

So what does he do? When he finally is pushed to the breaking point?

He chooses Crowley.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

[rpd-rookie]

Under Her Extra-Large Umbrella - Chris Redfield x Reader (PART 1)

Summary: Chris Redfield has always been an honourable man but the things he's seen at Spencer Mansion leave him no choice. He must infiltrate Umbrella's French laboratory, whatever it takes, even if it means manipulating you. But how far he is ready to go?

Author’s Note: This fanfic involves a Post RE1 / Pre-Code Veronica version of Chris Redfield since it focuses on his trip to Europe that is mentioned in RE2. You will probably notice that I used the letter Chris wrote to his S.T.A.R.S. friends. It is actually what inspired this fan fiction in the first place. Gotta be honest with you, this fanfic made me shed blood, sweat and tears. I guess I rewrote it twice before coming to a rather satisfying version and I must have tear my hair out quite a few times when I was struggling with grammar. (BTW, tell me if you see some terrible grammatical mistakes so that I can correct them) Anyway, as usual, I hope you will like it. Please don’t forget to like/reblog and tell me what you think of it in the comment section.

Tags: Romance, Fluff, SMUT, Explicit Language, Manipulation and Treachery. Angst is come ;-)  

Also available on AO3

“Better failing with honour than winning by cheating, son”.           Chris could perfectly remember his father telling him those words. It was in 1990. Chris was a seventeen years old teenager finishing his Junior year, and they were driving back home from driving school right after learning he had failed his theory test contrary to that asshole Colin Monroe who had aced it thanks to a crib cheat hidden in his sock.       He could also remember that his father’s wisdom had barely consoled him on that day - despite what he had let him believe - and that it had taken him quite some time to swallow the bitter pill and even more time to admit that his father was indeed right and that he should live by this motto. Months actually. Plus a tombstone with his parents’ names on it.       Chris never regretted listening to his father. He never regretted promising him that he would do his best to become the man he would have wished him to be. That promise had made him the man he was today. A man who would never stray from the right path however tempting treachery could be. Someone loyal, upright and honourable. Someone his parents would be proud of.

And yet here he was, eight years later, a twenty-five years old cop, breaking the promise he had made his father and doing something so deceitful and selfish it would certainly make him roll over in his grave or wish he were still here to give his son a earful.     But today, it was not something as silly as his driving licence that was at stake. It was the justice he owned to his fellow S.T.A.R.S. members, those he had lost at Spencer Mansion and those waiting for him in Raccoon City. It was the security of god knows how many people. This time, Chris had a burden on his shoulders that was way too heavy for him to accept a possible failure. And as terrible as it sounded, he was ready to do something bad for the greater good, whatever the cost, whatever his dead father may think of him from beyond the grave.

                      “To my bestest S.T.A.R.S. buds,

           How are you all doing in that drab, old station? Hanging in there against old Irons? Me? I just got back from a date with a hot chick. Bet you can guess what we got up to under her extra-large umbrella.            Europe is amazing. One month is in no way enough to even scratch the surface. Maybe I’ll extend my vacation for another six months.                Barry, don’t even think of coming join me. Wouldn’t want to make all the cute girls cry, yeah? So you just leave the babes to me.              Jill, if Claire tries to contact you, please let her know I’m OK.”

Chris put down the pen on his nightstand and took a look at his letter one more time with a proud amused smile. He knew that his friends, contrary to Irons, would get the hidden message behind that lame womanizer persona that was so unlike him. And hopefully, maybe the police chief would tell his friends at Umbrella his S.T.A.R.S. poster boy was nothing to worry about and just currently cruising for pussies in Europe.  

“Writing to your friends again?” Chris looked up to see you standing in the doorway to his bedroom. You looked very tired, exhausted even, judging by the dark circles under your beautiful eyes, your loosened bun and the way you were leaning against the framework. “Yeah, to give them a small update on my vacation.” Chris folded the letter and put it in the drawer of his nightstand; not very keen on letting you read it. “Tough day?” “You have no idea.” You dropped your bag at the entrance of Chris’ room and went to fall down on his bed, your head on his crossed legs. “Wanna talk about it?” Chris asked as he tucked a strand of your hair behind your ear. “You know I can’t say much. Professional confidentiality and all. ”         “I didn’t know working for Umbrella was like working for the CIA.” Chris joked, trying to tone down the disgust he was feeling each time he had to pronounce the word Umbrella. You smiled, too tired to laugh and glanced at Chris who was staring at you.            

God, why did you have to be so beautiful and so sweet and yet so not good for him? Why did you have to work for Umbrella? And how did he allow things to be that way between the two of you?

Chris could remember the day he had first seen you, the day he had chosen not be moral and honourable for once in his life.       It was almost a month ago. He had been in Paris for a couple days, trying to find a way to infiltrate Umbrella’s French laboratory, which was even more impenetrable than Zone 51, the lab being a real fortress (with automatic secured doors, CCTVs, guards and a severe ‘no visitor allowed’ policy) only accessible if you were the lucky owner of a white and red badge. And you had happened to be one.       Leaving the lab for lunch break, happy to finally feel the warm sun on your face, it hadn’t been your beautiful [h/c] hair loosely tied back in a high ponytail or your twinkly [e/c] eyes that had caught Chris’ attention (even though yeah he had noticed). No it had been that badge, that stupid badge carelessly hanging from the front pocket of your lab coat. And it had also been that badge that, unfortunately for you, had made him organise a plan to trick you and get his hands on it, that badge that had made you the victim of his very first treachery.  

Your meeting was – unbeknownst to you – the most unnatural meeting ever. Chris had calculated everything. When? Lunch break. Where? The nearby boulangerie where you used to be eating. What to say? “Désolé. Bonjour. Puis-je m’assoir avec vous?” which meant “Sorry. Hi. May I sit with you?” in French of course, because Chris had figured that playing the part of the poor American tourist with a terrible French accent trying to adapt in the city of love would be much more appropriate for the situation.       And it had worked. He had sit at your table, had exchanged a few words with you and had found you surprisingly friendly and adorable for an Umbrella employee.             But of course, as the majority of Chris’ plans, the meeting hadn’t ended up the way he had imagined (meaning him discreetly stealing your badge) simply because of a tiny detail he hadn’t thought of; you had forgotten your badge at the lab, leaving him no choice but to improvise and organise a second meeting that he had dared called a rendez-vous.

And here he was, weeks later, sharing your apartment and occasionally your bed and definitely bogged in a way bigger deceit that the one he had originally planned, one he knew he would not be able to get out easily.     And to answer the question, did Chris manage to get his hands on your badge? Well, yes and it was now safely hidden in his room to be used at the proper moment. If only he could shut his guilt away as well. Things would be much easier.

“What did you do today? Sebastien told me he barely saw you.” Sebastien was your other roommate. A nice redhead guy as well as a curious unstoppable chatterbox. “Oh, nothing interesting. I woke up early to jog at the Bois de Boulogne then I spent the rest of day wandering in the city.” That was half a lie. Yes, he had gone for a run at the Bois de Boulogne but he hadn’t spent the afternoon visiting Paris. No, he had spent his afternoon trying to reach the FBI from a phone booth in order to know if they had some news concerning Irons or the Mansion Incident. Unsuccessfully.           “If you want, we can spend this Saturday together. I’m sure I can show you few places you haven’t seen yet.”           “Aren’t you working this Saturday?” You were always working on Saturdays. “I need a day off to clear my mind a bit.” That didn’t sound like you. You were too much of a workaholic to prefer spending your Saturday playing guide to your American roommate. “Now, consider me worried. What’s up at work?” Chris asked, concerned not only because he knew something terrible could be happening at Umbrella but also because he couldn’t help but caring about you, Umbrella worker or not.         “Those last days have been a bit tough that’s all.” You wouldn’t tell him more. You couldn’t. For so many reasons.     “Well in that case, what do you think about me running you a nice hot bath?” You glanced up at Chris. He had drawn your attention in a very interesting way. “That depends. Will you be with me in that bath?” You asked cheekily.         “Do you want me too?” He smirked and you put your hand on his neck to pull him closer to your face. You pressed your lips softly against his; sighing in this kiss you had been dreaming about all day, as Chris brought you against his broad chest, his strong arms now holding you tight against him. You felt so safe in his embrace and that’s what you needed right now.        

Chris pecked you a couple times before laying one last kiss on your forehead with a tenderness that made you melt in his arms. “I’m gonna go run you that bath, okay?” You nodded. “Join me in ten minutes.”       Needless to say that those ten minutes were the longest you had ever experienced. Probably because they gave you plenty of time to dwell on the things you had experienced today at the lab, the things you had seen, the things you wanted to forget and yet couldn’t.           You got up and grabbed the bag you had left by the door to search for a small notebook that you opened with a desperate sigh. Then, you took the pen on Chris’ nightstand and started scribbling notes and drawings in it. A habit you had taken a few months ago and that somehow helped you from not cracking up.  

You guessed you took more than ten minutes when you heard Chris clear his throat by the door, only wearing a small towel around his wait. Goodness, what a sight.         You quickly closed the notebook as soon as you spotted him and put it back in your bag while he pretended not to notice. “Haven’t you forgotten something, mademoiselle?” He smirked and you giggled. “Have I?”     “Yes. I think there is a naked man waiting for you in the bathroom.” He joked and you approached him with a amused yet cheeky smile. You put your hands on his chest, feeling his muscles against your palm, as you looked up at his face with a mischievous look. “Is he hot?” “Right now, he is very hot.” He confessed, absolutely in the mood to play with you. “Better not keep him waiting, then.” You purred and you put your hand on one of the straps of your summer dress to gently make it slide along your shoulder.     That small sight of your naked skin made Chris hiss and unable to resist the urge to lay a trail of soft warm kisses from your neck down to your shoulder. You could tell the smoothness and the perfume of your skin were driving him crazy as his mouth soon started devouring you and muffled growls began vibrating in his throat.     His calloused hands roamed down your back, making you instinctively move your hips closer to his crotch, and he unzipped your dress. It dropped at your feet revealing your body that Chris gazed at with his brown eyes darkened by desire. They lingered on your breasts and you knew he wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to touch them. He loved them too much for that. And so, his hands cupped them and his thumbs brushed your hard nipples. “Gosh, Y/N.” He breathing in, trying to calm his heart pounding in his chest “I can’t wait any longer.” Chris suddenly grabbed you and hoisted you up with incredible ease, hands under your ass, which made you yelp.     Nevertheless, you instinctively wrapped your legs around him, making his towel fall to the floor. “Oops. That was not voluntary.” You giggled. So did he. “Right.” And he rushed towards the bathroom, with you in his arms, his lips devouring yours in a hasty burning kiss on the way.

He set you up on the double washstand and quickly locked the door behind him, giving you a brief view of his divine firm behind, though you liked the front as much if not more right now. “What are you looking at like that?” He smirked. Well, his chiselled chest, his carved abs and that big hard cock. What a silly question! But you couldn’t say that and so instead you urged Chris to come closer to you, spreading your legs to welcome him between them.   He obeyed but instead of giving you that lustful hug and passionate kiss you were expecting, he crouched in between your legs and remove your panties, kissing your smooth legs, from thighs to feet, as he did. You clearly knew where that would eventually lead but you moaned anyway when you felt Chris put your legs on his shoulders and burry his face in between your thighs. “I told you I’d help you relax.”         “What about the hot bath?” You tilted your head towards the bubble bath he had run for you few minutes ago.     “Oh don’t worry, we’re getting there. But first you know how much I like licking your pussy.” He winked and his tongue lapped your slit up to your clit without waiting another second. A loud moan escaped your mouth as Chris sucked your bud loudly, pulling it between his lips, and he looked up at you with a proud smirk before focusing his attention back on your pussy.     He was good, very good even, way better than any other men you had ever been with. He knew exactly how to please you. He knew where the tip of tongue had to swirl to make you shiver, knew the right spot to suck to make you moan and when to add his fingers to make you cry out his name - which was right now by the way. “Oh my god, Chris!” You mewled loudly as you felt one of his fingers entering you, his mouth still eating your pussy up. Your legs instinctively clenched around your lover’s head while one of your hand found its way in his short hair. Then you heard Chris hum in between your thighs as he kept on licking you and fucking you with his finger, adding one more in the process. You pulled his hair back, forcing him to look at you. “Fuck me, please. Fuck me now.” Chris complied and, after his tongue slid one last time in between your lips, he stood up to catch your lips in a new passionate kiss, making you taste your juices on his expert tongue. You could feel his cock against you, hard and slightly throbbing already, showing how impatient and aroused he was.       “Enter that bath, quick.” He ordered with a deep voice that made you shake against his body.

You obeyed and gladly let your burning body sink in the bubbly water, the lukewarm water cooling you off a bit (which wasn’t a bad thing). You were soon followed by Chris who entered the bath with a brutal eagerness that made the water waved a bit too much around both your bodies. “Don’t flood the apartment.” You giggled as you spread your legs to make him a place in the tub. “I can’t promise you that.” He confessed amused, as he grabbed his length in his hand to jerk it off a bit and guide it towards your begging entrance waiting for him under the water. He tickled your swollen clit with his tip before entire you almost smoothly making you draw a sharp breath.         “Damn, you’re so tight.” Chris growled as he took hold of the edge of the bathtub above your head to push himself deeper inside of you, enjoying your wet walls around his cock. “You’re fucking big, you mean.” You said with a painful hiss that brutally calmed his ardour and made him consider immediately pulling out of you. “Sorry. Am I hurting you?” He worried, aware his girth needed get some getting used to and afraid that he hadn’t given you enough. “No, no. It’s okay. Just give me sec.” You cleared your throat and adjusted yourself underneath Chris, spreading your lips with your fingers to welcome him the way you both desired. Hard, big and rough. “Okay. Good now.”           “You sure?” He asked, definitely not willing to hurt you. You nodded and pressed your lips against him to show him how much you wanted him right now. He got the message and started moving inside of you, slowly yet deeply for now.

You dug your nails in his biceps and started moaning; taking delight in feeling him going in and out of you. It was just the most divine sensation in the world. He filled you so perfectly. “Chris. Please. Faster.” You begged.             He complied and started pounding you more quickly, hands still on the edge of the tub, towering you with his muscular body to assert his dominance over you the way you liked it. But it wasn’t enough for you and so you wrapped your legs around him forcing him to go balls deep inside of you. Chris smirked, loving your initiative. “You like it deep and rough, baby?” You cried out.   “I didn’t hear you”   “Yeeess.” You whimpered with small tears in your eyes. He hammered you harder, spilling water on the bathroom floor, and you clenched your walls around him. “Oh god!” You yelled, out of breath.

He was relentless, so strong, so fast, so deep you could hear his body slam against your skin and echo the splashes of the waves in the tub. “Come here.” He lay on his back and urged you to come and straddle him. And so you climbed on top of him, admiring how handsome he was underneath you. “Guide me into you.” You did as he said and directed his throbbing cock to your wanting pussy, welcoming him again inside your wetness, Hands pressed against his pectorals, you immediately started undulating on top of him, feeling the pleasure coming back in your lower stomach.         “That’s it. Keep going.” He whispered, gazing at you.

Chris’ hands crawled up your body to reach your breasts and play with them a bit, delicately pinching your pointy nipples, as you kept riding him. You knew he loved groping them and you also knew how much he loved them in his mouth as well. Therefore you decided to bent over him a bit, just enough for his face to reach your chest, holding on to the wall in front of you with one hand to keep your balance. Chris smiled, understanding perfectly your little game, and pulled one of your tits to his mouth to catch one nipple between his lips and suck it greedily.       It was apparently very pleasurable for him (even maybe more than it was for you, and it was a lot) since he started humming and growling loudly. You enjoyed hearing and seeing him like this very much, so much you stopped riding him to focus on this spectacle.            

It didn’t last long though as you soon felt you lover’s strong hands gripping your ass to make you bounce on his cock again. “I so want to cum, baby. Please make us both cum.” His words made you shiver of excitement and you locked your lips with his as you started rolling your hips onto him again.       But it was certainly not enough for Chris since after few seconds he suddenly grabbed your hips to slam deep in your pussy and relentlessly pound you from underneath. You screamed his name and hold on tight to him. He was very rough, so rough you could barely breathe, but you didn’t mind at all.     Soon, you felt your face become so red and your bundle of nerves become atrociously sensitive. You knew you were ready to explode. “Chris. I’m gonna cum.” He put his hand on your clit to stimulate it and help you reach your release, his cock hammering you even harder than before.       You clenched your pussy around his throbbing cock, making him groan because of how tighter you suddenly were. “Tell me I can cum in you, baby.” He asked, panting. He was very close too. “Yes, cum in me.” You didn’t need to say it twice as Chris immediately growled in your ear, slowed his pace, and spread his cum in your pussy with a last animalistic grunt as you came undone on top of him, yelling his name, your powerful orgasm almost knocking you out.

You collapsed on him, incapable of remaining straight. “Wow. That was something.” He chuckled, exhausted and out of breath, and so did you.             “You’re okay?” You looked up at him, raising your eyebrows. What a ridiculous question. “No, I’m being serious, Y/N. Wasn’t I a bit too rough?” He asked.       “You were perfect.” You admitted before kissing him tenderly.           “AND SO FUCKING LOUD!!!” You heard shouting from behind the wall. You both looked in the direction of the noise, understanding that your roommate had probably heard everything but despite the embarrassment you couldn’t help but burst out laughing. Poor Sebastien.       “Why don’t we get out of that bath and cuddle a bit in bed? The water is getting cold.” Chris offered.   “I’d like that very much.” You smiled and managed to leave the tub, using the little energy you had left in your sore body.            

As you dried yourself, you saw Chris head towards the door with a towel draped around his waist. “Where are you going?” You asked.   “Taking some briefs in my room. See you in your room in a minute?” He smiled and you nodded, impatient to spend the night in his arms. “Can you bring me back my clothes and my bag while you’re at it?”           “Sure.”

Chris closed the door behind him and headed towards his room where he put on some clean underwear and picked up your stuff as you had asked. But the moment he grabbed your bag and caught a glimpse of the black notebook he had previously seen you inside, he knew he would probably not join you as soon as he had told you.         He watched it first, hesitant, knowing perfectly well that what he had in mind right now was very bad. It was one thing to steal a badge, but spying on you, that was going too far. “No, Chris. No.” He whispered to himself. And yet, he grasped the notebook and opened it.   It was a diary of some sort judging by the numerous dates he noticed as he quickly leafed through it. And if it was a diary then it was indeed very private, intimate even, certainly not his to read. He thought about putting it back in your bag for a second, but what if something valuable to his investigation was inside that notebook?         “Argh, fuck.” He cursed as he went to the first page.

“May, 14th 1998

Today made me regret the time I was just the intern bringing Professor Rochois his morning espresso. Umbrella is asking more and more of me, and the pressure they put on us workers is driving me insane. But what’s worse is that I’ve got the impression they are not telling us everything, especially concerning the experience the seasoned scientists are conducting in the north wing. But I guess I’ll soon have answers to my questions since Professor Rochois said that he was genuinely impressed by my devotion and was thinking of promoting me.”

Chris frowned, apprehension knotting his stomach. That didn’t sound good at all. He needed to learn more about that even if the moment was far from convenient. You could show up anytime and catch him red-handed.         He turned a few more pages, rapidly skimming through some notes he would definitely read another day, until he spotted a weird drawing of some octopus-like creature. What the hell was that thing?

“June, 7th 1998

The NE-a parasite. A parasitic species indented to retain intelligence. It has been developed by Umbrella Europe for years. At first I thought it was just a revolutionary way to cure brain damage. After all, that’s how it had been advertised to me. But the more I study it, the more I believe Umbrella may be up to something else other than treating brain injuries or Alzheimer. I don’t know what and I’m not even sure I want to know.”

Chris pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath. His body was shaking and he could feel fear eating him up and he started imagining terrible things.   What if you were involved in the Spencer Mansion incident? No, no. You couldn’t be. And yet, Chris decided to have a look had the entries you wrote in July. He needed to reassure himself. One immediately drew his attention.

“July, 28th 1998

My superiors have been quite on edge lately, something to do with an incident that happened with the American branch of Umbrella from what I overheard. I don’t know what it is though, but I’m sure it must be pretty big because they doubled down security in the lab. The team and I have the impression we are living in a 1984 remake. The CCTVs are always recording and I sometimes have the strange sensation I’m being permanently spied on, even in the locker room. Maybe they have doubts about me because of the many questions I often ask about Project Nemesis.”

Project Nemesis? Y/N, what the hell were you working on in that lab?

[reachexceedinggrasp]

Okay, so for my clannibal people, I have two recs where something very like The Dynamic has recently appeared in media. The first one has far more caveats than the second, but the first one is also the one where the ship is canon and has kissing.

The Method a Russian series from 2015 (it’s on Netflix). It’s about a young ingenue who decides to become a cop because of lingering trauma around an unsolved violent parental death (check), she’s accepted as the protege of an eccentric genius (check) through somewhat shady circumstances with some kind of ulterior motive (check). He, the eccentric genius, is not a serial killer- he’s a detective, but he is an absolute human disaster whose erratic behaviour and extremely questionable morals are tolerated by the police because they can use him as a weapon. He has totally killed people.

‘Byronic Hero’ is a vast understatement.

This show is grim, graphic, and very dark; it takes an extremely dim view of humanity in general and it doesn’t provide the hope or catharsis that Clannibal does- the protagonist does not get to have it all, so be forewarned on that. The implicit worldview and assumed ethical framework of the series is honestly appalling and the main characters are all fairly reprehensible by the end, so if you’re not prepared to deal with a whole lotta ugliness I would say don’t watch it.

The selling point to me is that the characters are interesting and the ship is very compelling. Again, it’s canon, so you will get satisfaction, but the actual romance is somewhat subtextual most of the time. Their connection is the lynchpin of the series, but it’s more about the protagonist’s ‘education’ into his world and an exploration of what that world is than it is focussed on them falling in love. He has no illusions or intentions about having a future (with her or otherwise), he’s trying to pass on his ‘method’ to a worthy successor, so his attitude is heavily informed by that. She is being broken of what idealism she ever had (told you it was grim).

Anyway, their relationship is very fucked up and the series has a legit horrifying (also aggressively stupid) conception of what mental illness is like, but it was very engaging and it was totally unapologetic about the romanticism of the dark love story, so there is a lot there for you if you want to see something like a Clannibal dynamic again. Just don’t expect the positive turn or healing. The ending is not happy or hopeful in any sense. You could make a good argument it’s a full-on tragedy, though I don’t think that’s quite the intent. And the tragedy is Titus Andronicus. If that gives you an indication of how grim we’re talking.

The plot does completely fall apart by the end (it’s like if OUaT were an r-rated crime show, it becomes that much of a mess), but the acting is good and it remains very compelling because of the characters.

Tell Me What You Saw a kdrama from this year. THIS is what I’m talking about. A young ingenue decides to become a cop because of lingering trauma around an unsolved violent parental death (check), she’s accepted as the protege of an eccentric genius (check), through somewhat shady circumstances with some kind of ulterior motive (check). She has to go visit him alone in a giant, creepy old building where he is confined (ooo, new check). He, the eccentric genius, is on the side of the angels and is again not a serial killer lol. He is a legendary criminal profiler and ex-detective who spends most of the series as a somewhat morally ambiguous anti-hero. He’s brilliant, he’s troubled, he broods and plays mind games from on high, and he’s always 17 steps ahead of you. I love him. Also, crucially, he is hot:

The first six episodes have great build-up to a not-totally-unpredictable but still fairly epic twist and then, sadly, the following episode is a bit of an anti-climax from what felt like it should be the jumping off point where the series kicked into high gear but turned out to be a bunch of wandering around aimlessly in very loosely connected episodic plots. There’s narrative justification for this, but I did feel like someone slammed on the breaks and switched gears. It takes a while to regain momentum and is never quite as focussed or well-balanced again.

The pros of the series are its very strong characters played by mostly very strong actors, quality atmosphere, great action, good suspense, and loads and loads of interesting relationships brimming with potential. The one that interests me most being, of course, the one between the protagonist and the profiler. It’s pretty much exactly the clannibal dynamic- he picks her apart and challenges her for his own reasons and then comes to enormously respect her; she is at first intimidated and angry but gives as good as she gets until she reaches a point of growth where she can challenge him in return. And, in the end, he has helped her self-actualise and become who she wanted to be and she helps him heal from his past to the point she can radically alter his outlook on life.

Their relationship is ultimately very positive for both and remains central to the series throughout. There are complicated feelings at play that are given some time in the spotlight, but it is sadly underdeveloped from what it should have been imo. Especially on his side. And there is no romance or explicit attraction, though I think the show supports her at least having a crush on him. If it had ‘gone there’ it would not have shocked anyone, let’s put it that way. They could have gone there. It is one of those flawed canons with good characters super ripe for fic. (Please watch this show and write fic so I can read it, is what I’m saying.)

The cons are that the story ends up being ridiculous on multiple levels and there are some intensely irritating moments of characters being profoundly idiotic and unreasonable just to keep the plot going. Incoherent motivation, mainly for the heroes, is a BIG problem. Apparently rampant police incompetence (including from all the main characters) is the second biggest problem. There is a fantastic female character who is the team leader for our main cops and she gets hit with both of these possibly the worst of anyone. The big reveal about her also makes no fucking sense. There was a maybe cliché but perfectly serviceable route they could have gone instead without changing anything, it seemed like they were setting it up, but they just go with... nothing. And in retrospect this undermines her entire character for the whole series. Which hurts because she was genuinely awesome.

So yeah. There are logic problems and all three ongoing major questions in the overarching story basically have terrible ‘solutions’, but it is extremely well-made in every other respect and the characters remained compelling enough that I couldn’t stop watching. The single-episode mysteries are usually very good with good pacing and satisfying resolutions. It’s consistently entertaining despite the frustration and it manages to pull out a fucking GREAT A+++++ ending right when you’re about to get super pissed off about more deterministic grim teenage nihilism ruining everything. The protagonist got to learn from all her experiences without losing her optimism, rise above adversity and be rewarded for her faith, and it was honestly so nice to get that. So unexpectedly hopeful and uplifting. I love a story that gets dark but never despairs.

If they make a second series with the same cast, I will be there with bells on.

[bellatrixobsessed1]

Kissing Dead Pearls (Part 16)

The waves lick gently at the side of their boat. It isn’t an awful vessel and it will serve its purpose. Azula never had any love for that ex-pirate bartender, but he has done them well with this ship. Its paint job is somewhat aged, off color in most places and it has a few dents from the recent storm. But the engine is not only intact and in perfect condition but it is also powerful. For both aesthetic and function should, the motor give out, it is adorned with a set of well maintained sails and--Azula rolls her eyes--a jolly roger flag.

She runs through a checklist in her head as she checks her suitcase for a third time. She has several changes of clothes and for a range of weather conditions, sweltering heat, a light rain, a heavy storm, and (though she has yet to feel a cold day) she has a shirt and pair of pants for that. She has a hairbrush, toothbrush, toothpaste, and other hygiene essentials. She has a knife, matches, her guide books, compasses and other navigation tools should the GPS fail, a cellphone, and a survival kit just in case. If Sokka could go missing, so could they. 

For leisure she has packed a healthy helping of books, notebooks and pencils. They are neatly tucked away with a scrapbook Ursa had made for her, the stuffed starfish that Sokka had messily handmade for her, and the clownfish that she had made for him. It was in much better condition when she’d handed it to him. It is now tattered in places and the colors have faded. It still smells like him, she doesn’t sleep very close to it because she doesn’t want her own scent to drive out Sokka’s. She will give it to him when she finds him.

She goes through the boat’s fridge and drawers, making sure that there is enough to last them at least a month. She makes sure that there is an emergency supply of canned goods and bottled waters. 

The life jackets are intact and there are more than enough of them. 

She checks to make sure certain things aren’t there. Holes, broken parts, and Ozai’s alcohol stash. She is grateful that he hasn’t tried to sneak even a bottle on. It will be easier for him to stay sober on a boat with no way to acquire a bottle. 

Azula isn’t particularly worried about the journey, now that it is no longer an impulse journey. Mostly, the loose ends have all been tied. Some of them  had tied themselves. Namely the resuming of classes--the school had taken on a considerable amount of damage during the hurricane, rendering it unsafe to open until later in the autumn. That would give her at least an extra month or two of time on the open ocean. 

She and Zuko spent the rest of July helping Katara, Kya, and Hakoda to clear and repair what remained of the storm damage. That was the deal, Katara would have to put extra time into helping ready the restaurant for opening if she wanted to embark on their at sea adventure. Mostly this consisted of finding a good waitress to hire for while she was away.

And as she and Zuko began securing new shingles to the roof and wooden panels for the walls, construction workers put a tireless effort into rebuilding the rest of the boardwalk. By the end of July the boardwalk was finished and so was La-bsters. Not only does it have a new, bright red roof, but they’d taken the opportunity to give it a well overdue new paint job, white for the outside walls and dark blue for the doors and window shutters. The interior was painted to look like an ocean, mostly teal blue with a border of dark blue to represent waves. They fixed more white wood panels upon the walls to give it an extra decorative flare. From the ceiling they draped fishing nets and discarded buoy strands. On the walls they positioned ship wheels, oars, and old sailor’s logs.

It isn’t the same as it was, but it is lovely in its own regard. It is lovely in that they all shaped it together. If they find Sokka, he will be in for a surprise. If they don’t, she supposes that it is just one more change that she will have to get used to on her own. 

Azula managed to stop by Mai’s jewelry shop too. Though it is more of a stall at the moment. Behind the stall, a new shop is in its early development stages; it is roped off with caution tape and is still just a framework outline of what it will become. 

Katara had asked Mai to check on her parents for her every now and again. Mai had nodded and offered them parting gifts; shark tooth necklaces for she and Zuko and a wooden hibiscus for Katara. TyLee had given them particularly long and tight hugs and offered a few pointers on how to repair boat breakdowns as well as one of her family’s manuels. 

The last time that Azula got to see the both of them before her departure was at the surf competition. She hadn’t managed to pull off a snap but she had gotten the opportunity for another tube ride. The only one of the day.

She likes to think that the luck of catching the perfect wave during the competition would carry over. She likes to think that her trophy is a sign of a greater victory to come. She had positioned the trophy on her dresser next to the pictures of she and her surf team and a cluster of decorative pearls and glass bubbles. 

Azula comes back from her thoughts as emerges from the boat, it is nearly noon and the sun is inching towards its highest point. She shields her eyes with her hand and scans the beach for the others. “Hi, Azula.” Katara greets. She stands hand in hand with Zuko. Ozai lingers behind them. 

“Is everything ready?” Ozai asks. 

She nods, “though it can’t hurt to double check everything.” Granted, his inspection would make it a quadruple check. 

“I trust you.” He gives her shoulder two firm pats before making his way to the ship deck. 

“Are we ready to go?” Zuko asks.

“Just about.” Azula replies, there is still one thing left.

It takes him a few minutes but she finally sees a figure crossing the sand. She hops down from the boat and and greets Jet. “I’m glad that you are able to make it.”

He rubs the back of his head. “Eh, this summer was kind of boring anyways. I think that a high seas adventure will be funner than another one of Chan’s generic house parties...not that those are boring or anything…” He trails off. 

“Yes, well this will be…” she isn’t sure what it will be, at least for him. For her she it will be closure and, perhaps, liberation. 

Jet slides an arm around her and cups her cheek in the other hand. “It’ll be good to spend some quality time with you.”

Azula rolls her eyes. “You do realize that my father will be in the cabin over, right?”

“Right.” He confirms.

“We should depart before the mid-day tourist traffic arrives.” Ozai, not so patiently, calls. She takes Jet’s hand and leads him onto the boat. Ozai and Zuko raise the anchor as she and Katara help Jet settle in. 

“Father says that you will be rooming with he and Zuzu so that he can ‘keep an eye on you’. But Katara and I are…” she opens a door to the adjoining room, “right over here.” 

He gives her a quick thumbs up. “I think that I can deal with that.”  She hears his suitcases thud on the floor.

“I am going to make myself comfortable.” Azula gestures to her own sleeping quarters. 

.oOo.

She hasn’t had dinner on the deck of a ship in ages. It is rather pleasant, she had almost forgotten how much she enjoys it. It is that time of the evening when the temperature cools to the point of comfort. That time of evening when small gusts flutter the table cloth. It is no five star dinner, a plate of slightly overcooked shrimp and a side of mashed potatoes. But her father had made it and it has been so long since he has cooked for she and Zuko so she can ignore the burned spots. 

It is rather easy to ignore them while peering over the railing and watching a family of dolphins leap from the water. She counts three of them, one adult and two babies. 

“They’re so cute!” Katara exclaims. “I already have names for them.”

“Of course you do.” Zuko rolls his eyes. 

“What are they?” Jet asks. 

“That one is Zuko.” She points at the smallest one. “That one is Ozai.” Perhaps Azula has misgauged the direction of her finger, because she seems to be pointing at the other baby. “And the big one is Azula’s Ego.” 

There is a gurgle and a cough as Zuko nearly chokes on his soda laughing. “Geez, at least wait until I’m done drinking.” 

Azula fixes her with a dull expression. “You know that, that was funny.” Jet remarks. It kind of was  but she won’t be admitting it. 

The dolphins keep pace with their boat for a while before slipping back beneath the waves. She catches the faintest shimmer of black before they make it completely out of sight. She pops another bite of shrimp into her mouth and takes in the feeling of the ocean breeze on her cheeks. She fixes her sunglasses, not that she will be needing them much longer and rests her hand atop Jet’s. 

“No romance at the dinner table.” Ozai grumbles. “That means the two of you.” He nods at Katara and Zuko.

She almost makes a joke about all of the times when she and Zuzu had to witness him peck mother on the cheek over plates of lobster. Decidedly, he isn’t ready for that sort of banter. She isn’t sure that he ever will be. Instead she  whispers something to Jet. 

Jet picks up his two remaining pieces of shrimp. He doesn’t do it quite as well as Sokka would have, but just like that they were hearing an enthralling tale of forbidden love between two shrimp. The story ended with the both of them getting eaten by a shark. Jet is the shark. 

A sand shark. 

Her sand shark?

Ozai looks towards the setting sun. 

Azula and Jet steal a quick kiss. 

Her father says, “I saw that, that was a test.” 

They all have a good chuckle. 

She thinks that it is the most normal. The most happy that she has felt in a very long time.

[semi-anonyme]

November 3, 2020

12:05pm

I woke up at 7:00am today and I knew a few things: 1.) I would buy a Vitamix and begin to make smoothies every day 2.) I would stop holding onto the past 3.) It would be my last entry on this tumblr

Today, it is Election Day. I am very much hoping Joe Biden will win, not just for my sanity but for everyone’s sanity, for a little hope in humanity’s fight against the allure of anti-intellectualism, scapegoating, its growing tolerance of hate.

I remember the last election day, or rather, the evening. We all thought Hillary would win uneventfully. I remember my colleague dipping out of work early to go to the Javits Center to celebrate her victory. I remember watching in disbelief from my basement computer, walking upstairs with my eyes wide and jaw dropped. “Are you watching the news right now Mike?” “Yeah, Trump is in the lead. It looks like he’s about to win Pennsylvania (or was it Michigan? Or Wisconsin?)” I walked to bed in disgust, woke up in disgust, confirmed my disgust.

There was not one conversation I heard on the train or in the street that day that didn’t involve Trump. That night, I drank alone at Three Diamond Door. I still remember the buff black dude sitting in the corner downing Bell’s Two Hearted IPAs.

Anyway, election day 2020. I’m going out to vote in about 2 hours. I got today off. Thanks, progressive companies.

I’ve had a lot of internal discussions with myself on here, published them as blog posts. I have timestamps to remember them by, I’m glad. In the past ~8 months since the pandemic began, I’ve gone back to a lot of my entries -- oh, this is what it was like in the beginning in March. Oh yes, May, I was indeed watching a lot of K-Dramas, it was getting hotter. Ahhh yes, I did learn a lot about not having the city as my crutch.

Just in general, on this blog, on the countless loose leaf papers in my journal, I’ve had these battles about meaning. This blog pre-dates seeing Jody my therapist, who I’ve been seeing faithfully for over 1.5 years now.

I could go on. The point I’m making rn in this last entry is this -- all that stuff is in the past, it was important, I internalized it. Now it’s time to move on. I’m glad this exists, these 450 entries exist, they exist with a purpose. But now? I know who I am, what I want to be.

I have no dilemma of engineering vs artistry. Now that I’ve been away from loud bars, I have no FOMO about the nightlife. It’s kinda just time to start from scratch, this knowledge.

I just created a new tumblr, domo-knows. I’ll likely have a companion YouTube channel in the future. Anyway, a few and somewhat ambiguous bullets for myself since, you know, this blog was always just for me.

ON THINGS I’M LEAVING BEHIND ACTIONS 1. Random drinking. Today, I’m going to buy an Other Half Finback IPAs, pop them open around 8pm and start watching election results. I’ve gone into detail before about drinking, but just to sum it up, drinking alcohol is the one thing I can say captures how complex and funny it is being a human -- how we use it socially, justify it, cling onto it, how it becomes tangled up in our highest achievements and our most shameful insecurities. I’ve consumed alcohol for these various reasons in my life:

a.) I was avoiding doing something difficult b.) I didn’t want to be alone in my room, and preferred the loud chatter of conversations and music at a cramped bar c.) I did not trust my social abilities sober, so I drank alcohol because I’ve never known anyone who has not liked me when I’ve had a couple (when I’m shit-faced, another story) d.) To hook up with a girl e.) I was bored f.) I was about to do something boring and wanted to make it more exciting g.) Because it was a beautiful sunny day, perfect for a beer on a patio h.) Because it was a cold and dreary day, perfect to brood over a Manhattan i.) I was lonely j.) My life was going too well, I wasn’t used to that, and I needed something to question k.) My life was going poorly, and I needed something to cheer me up for the evening l.) I needed to make a decision, so I drank alcohol and wrote in my journal and came to a good decision that I stuck with m.) I needed to make a decision, so I drank alcohol until I no longer cared, and the decision was punted off until the next day n.) I I needed to make a decision, I thought a drink or two would jigger my thought process, but I ended up getting distracted by something my drunk self was interested in, and the decision was punted off until the next day I’d come up with more but they’re all just variations of that and who wants to read more of that? 2. Eating sugary sweets, justifying it by saying I have “an addiction” I actually never cared for sweets until high school. Most birthday cake I had was gross, my parents bought Chips Ahoy or Oreos which tbh aren’t all that great, and I was never exposed to really good pastries until I was in college. In high school, I dropped a buncha weight entirely too quickly and I ended up with a fats and sweets “addiction” that I’ve “had ever since”. This is a common thing.

I’ve held it close to me mentally -- my “sweets addiction”. I didn’t question it, it was something I just had, something to hang onto for the rest of my life because I fucked up when I was younger.

But as I’ve gotten older, I understand that these things -- addictions -- serve purposes. They keep us comfortable in what we deem to be true of ourselves. They (poorly) provide temporary breaks from incessant mental gymnastics/fatigue. Anyway, blah blah, big sweeping declarations, blah blah, I’ve done that all before. But when I woke up today, I knew I would get a Vitamix like I’ve been talking about for years, and I made a decision to stop holding onto this. I always eat 2 meals a day with a wild west assortment of things in between, cake and cookies and granola bars and Halloween candy. Now, 2 meals and a protein smoothie/juice.

Let them muscles grow bb. Feel good about my body, treat it like the fucking temple it is.

3. Dicking around on the internet I enjoy reddit. I enjoy wikipedia. I also end up on these sites when I’m avoiding other major responsibilities and uncomfortable feelings. I know what I want: it involves a lot of deep practice. I could read about programming all day and I’d be fascinated -- you know, the history of Silicon Valley, Introduction to the Rust Programming language, new JavaScript frameworks, discussions on HackerNews about The Best Way to Build Something. But nothing beats getting your hands dirty. Nothing beats poring over source code, running into strange errors, resolving them, moving on, over and over ad nauseam until lo-and-behold, you are an expert.

I can read about music, listen to raps over and over, but nothing beats analyzing a verse over and over and actually hearing the syllables landing on, falling behind the beat.

I’m here to structure my day. I know what I want. Expertise, pride, and know-how. A differentiated skillset so I can collaborate with other differentiated skillsets. Good taste, a feeling of belonging. All that shit, all I ever wanted but didn’t know until recently. THOUGHT PATTERNS 1. FOMO What is it with being a human -- a Man, especially (sorry is that sexist, but also, not sorry) -- that makes us believe that everyone has everything we have and more? That we are the base model without power windows, and everyone else is an upgrade? I love going on walks in New York City. I love riding the trains in New York City. But while some of this love is healthy spectatorship, much of what I’ve engaged in is unhealthy envy.

I’m done with that though. I know what I like. And I know I have a dope life. And I know that I’m a good person to know, that people may have different qualities than me but I also have different qualities from them. I’m cool with my small close-knit friends. 2. INDECISION I kinda expanded on this above. I know what I want, and all questioning I’ve done (especially recently) has been my effort to save myself from doing the work, save myself from having to declare what I am. 3. ENGAGING IN FEELINGS OF BEING LATE I am 31 years old. This is something I know to be true: there is a 13-year old who can program circles around me. There is a kid who can play a rendition of Misty on piano so soulful that it’ll bring a tear to my eye. There is nothing, technically (as in, technical expertise), that I can do that can’t be done by anyone else. But I do believe in my taste and I do believe in my life experiences. And I do believe that whatever I create can only be mine, have my signature, and I think that whatever I create in this world that I’m proud of is going to be good. That’s a fact, and I’m going into the future with that as a fact.

Farewell, semi-anonyme Anyway, I was going to write more but I wanna get going, more to do. I’ve got some work to do, some voting to do, some writing to do, some planning to do.

I love you all. See you on the other side.

[foxwine]

I've been having a long, fascinating conversation on twitter lately about the Overwatch AIs and their ability to have/experience emotions, which brought to mind that I have some very strong opinions/headcanons with regards to the various AI in Overwatch. So I thought I'd get them written down.

One of those headcanons being that there are various AI systems in the Overwatch universe. Currently three, by my count. Firstly, and most commonly would be the AI running on the Omnica OS, then Orisa and Echo, who are each running on their own unique OS.

Most of my headcanons center around the Omnica system. I think, in universe, they were the first ones to actually create AI, though I'm not so sure that they did it on purpose. The thing that I bear in mind is that Omnica was a corporation, not a research conglomerate or a university project. The Omnic OS was made to DO something.

Which is where we get to what I think the Omnic God AIs are. I see them as a large central computer 'brain' with a large number of semi-autonomous bodies, linked together into a kind of hive-mind. And when these bodies are severed from the main 'brain', that's when they develop an individual sense of self and become like Zenyatta or Maximilien, separate entities from the God AI that spawned them. And, once separated, the majority of Omnics don't want to go back, which is why in the Pharah-centric comic Mission Statement the omnic in her unit self-destructed rather than allowing itself to be taken over by Anubis.

This hive-mind nature of the God AIs would be very useful for a variety of things, because as I pointed out, Omnica was a business. I personally see them as a Chinese company, who first started creating these hive computer systems to run and staff sweatshops and manufacturing. And as their systems got better and more complex, they started selling them all over the world.

A handful or two in the middle east,running oilfields. A fancy, underwater mind to fish the Indian Sea and do some geological and ecological surveys while its down there.One in Mexico that ran all the farms owned by a massive conglomerate that feeds a large portion of the country. One in NYC that runs the entire transit system. Another just off the coast in LA monitoring and controlling the shipping. One on the shore in Greece or Macedonia doing something extremely complicated to generate electricity from the tides and waves. A very fancy one in Germany just outside Berlin that is one gigantic town-sized mall where every clerk knows the inventory of every store. Another in Egypt that is a very expensive bespoke manufacturer of extreme luxury goods. One in Siberia that started out running the mines, and was later expanded into manufacturing. And so on.

AI, a sense of self, was probably not intended at all. It's just that once you reach a certain complexity of thought and learning... well. The way I see it, the God AIs came into their individual sense of self gradually, having all started from the same genesis code, and that they chose their own names (and sometimes genders) based on their roles, perception of self, and the local pantheon of where they were installed.

Possibly Omnica ignored this as long as they were doing what they were told to. Possibly there were 'blocks' or 'limiters' patched in to suppress them that were later broken somehow just before or even during the Crisis. It would be hard to say, in the absence of canon material on the subject.

(As an aside, I'm not convinced, in that framework, that Anubis was always named Anubis, since I would sincerely hope that even a major city in Egypt like Cairo or Giza wouldn't have enough dead people to process that they would purchase what would have been an extremely expensive computer/robot system todo it. 'Anubis' was their war name, though, and that's the one that they're remembered by.)

Omnica had very different plans than making AI, in the way I see things. The interesting thing I saw inthe canon material on the lead-up to the Omnic Crisis was that Omnica was shut down, apparently, for corporate espionage. Stealing plans. Specifically, plans for weapons.

I worked my way mentally around this. The canon details we're given are that the Crisis was world-wide, that it occurred shortly after Omnica was shut down for stealing weapon designs, and that each God AI had to be shut down individually. So, I came by my thought that the God AIs were spread worldwide because they were being used for things other than combat.

Mainly because I have just enough faith in what I know of human nature and proof of jingoism to find it hard to believe that war/battle within the next few decades would be conducted almost entirely by units provided by a single corporate entity. Which was also making and selling units with the same OS for rebuilding.

So, what I think is that Omnica, with or without the backing of the Chinese government at the time, was planning a surprise very hostile takeover. Of everywhere. But they weren't sneaky enough and they got caught. And then, two possibilities come to mind; either by malice or crossed wires the switch for total war got flipped anyway without a “but not this group” parameter set, or the God AIs, thinking that with the shutdown of Omnica they were all about to be killed decided to do it to humanity first, using the weapon plans they had already been provided. Both options make a lot of sense in the framework I've patched together, and I'm not sure which one I favour the most out of the two.

Which is where we come to my personal feelings and headcanons when it comes to the identity and role of Athena.

I like to take her name rather literally: that she is an Omnic God AI that was created from code that was ripped directly out of the 'head' of a Grecian God AI that had named itself Zeus. My personal hc is that this was done by a member of what was then proto-Overwatch during the Crisis, but in the twitter conversation, another interesting thought came up that hadn't occurred to me at all; that Athena might have done it herself –that she was originally a module of Zeus that went 'rogue', and separated.

Either way, I think she fought in the Crisis, on Overwatch's side. Since I basically see the God AIs as a hive entity held together with the future equivalent of bluetooth, I imagine her being able to project a counter-field, one that confuses or possibly even severs the connection of the omnic bodies from the main brain, allowing the human Overwatch unit to get to the physical location of the brain and put it into a sleep mode.

There has to be a reason the God AIs weren't destroyed. Perhaps there was some sort of failsafe, where if the brain is destroyed an automatic system rebuilds it and installs a backup, so that destruction would be more like trying to press down a bubble in the carpet. Perhaps breaking the main brain also breaks all the associated units and upon realizing that the omnics were thinking beings with a sense of self the decision was made to not wipe them out. Perhaps it's a slightly different variation of the bump in the carpet: if you destroy the main brain one of the units becomes themain brain and you then have to find them and get to them all over again. Whatever it was, the God AIs were left intact in canon.

Perhaps after the Crisis, it was Athena's job to monitor the God AIs, to make sure they remained in sleep mode and thus nonthreatening. But when Overwatch was shut down, she lost her connection. I remember, in the Sombra cinematic that Volskaya said that the units she was inspecting were the first new ones made in “over a decade”. Why, I wonder, had Russia not needed new designs in so long? And what happened over ten years ago that made them build new ones then? Overwatch was still active then, though going by what we have of an official timeline, that would havebeen around the time of Retribution, or shortly before it. Hmm.

There's also one other being that merits mention when it comes to my headcanons about omnic God AIs, and that would be The Iris. Which I firmly believe is an omnic God AI that did not participate in the Crisis because it either didn't get the memo or rejected it, and is still fully awake and functional after the Crisis ends. And that its a curious sort of personality, and is experimenting by occasionally cutting a unit or two loose to become individuals just to see who they are or what they will do, which is how we got Mondatta, Zenyatta, and probably a few 'sibling' units of theirs, who are currently the only omnics in the canon Overwatch cast both in and out of the game who are known to be younger than the end of the Crisis.

I think, after some discussion with and ideas from my partner,  who is my sounding board for the majority of my writing, that The Iris was not created by Omnica directly, rather that it is a 'child' spun off of one of the China-based God AIs in secret and hidden in the mountains of Nepal under a convincingly old-looking monastery. As for why, I've been able to think of several reasons, but haven't been able to settle on one of them.

It could be that the parent God AI was aware of Omnica's plans for world domination and knowing that it couldn't refuse to participate made a version of itself that could.Or it might have been an experiment, to see whether they could create a 'child', or if it would be a double of themself. Perhaps it was an escape attempt, a secret backup that didn't quite work out as planned. It may even be that Omnica was indeed limiting the God AI's sense of self in some way as my twitter conversation partner postulated, and a God AI who noticed created a secret, deliberately “jailbroken” version of itself in rebellion.

So much is only vaguely defined inOverwatch canon, so it's impossible to say which option is more plausible than the rest.

My ideas about Omnic God AIs and The Iris itself also puts a very interesting spin on the Shambali religion – particularly the “we are all One within The Iris” part – which makes my writer's senses all tingly.

All of this is just headcanon worldbuilding at this point. It would be more useful directly if I were to write a fanfic of the Crisis itself, but I must admit that I would have no idea where or even when to start. Plus, I have all my plans for my Back to the Fold series, which is currently sitting at thirty-one planned fics, only twelve of which are written as yet. Maybe by the time I finish them I'll have more of an idea whether or how to do a Crisis fic.

[erinptah]

The Secret Commonwealth review: It was...pretty underwhelming, mostly

Finally got the audiobook of The Secret Commonwealth checked out from my local library!

(Here’s my review of its predecessor, La Belle Sauvage, if you want to start there.)

It’s 20 hours long. Whoof.

As for the contents…look, it was well-written prose. I didn’t get bored while listening. (Rereading that last review, I realized I’d written the same thing about the previous book, too.) But in retrospect, there sure was not a lot that happened in those 20 hours. Some notable action bits, in between a lot of padding.

And my reactions mostly consist of…complaints. Not “this is hideous, time to ragequit the series, this is an unqualified anti-rec” complaints, more a low-level churn of frustration.

(There’s one scene I know has made someone else outright refuse to read it, though, and I think it’s totally reasonable. More on that later.)

So I’m gonna try to unpack a bunch of it here. Hopefully in enough detail that, if you haven’t read it yet (and don’t mind spoilers), it can help you make an informed decision about whether it’s worth spending 20 hours of your life on.

Spoilers start here!

The Story

We open with Lyra as a 20-year-old student at St. Sophia’s, a women’s college in Oxford. She’s made some kinda-friends, including former booty calls that she’s still on good terms with, but she’s badly estranged from Pantalaimon.

Their rift is exacerbated by a couple of books she’s read that are popular with young intellectuals lately. One is a philosophy book, one is a novel, both of them seem broadly Ayn Randian in the sense that “teens/college kids get really into these books and decide it’s smart and fashionable to adopt their moral framework, ignoring both the logical failures and the ways in which this turns you into a horrible person.”

She’s been staying at Jordan between semesters, but political drama forces her to move, and that’s when Oakley Street swoops in to make contact. They’re the secret Magisterum-thwarting spy organization that Hannah Relf worked for in La Belle Sauvage. Employees now include Alice Lonsdale and Malcolm Polstead, who fill Lyra in on the events of the previous book.

Lyra crashes at Malcolm’s parents’ inn for a bit, but her fighting with Pan gets so bad that he takes off, leaving a note. He’s going to confront one of the authors of the fashionable/terrible books — who lives in Germany, so this could take a while.

Since Lyra can’t just hang around and go through the motions of a normal life while her daemon is visibly missing, she takes off too. First on a detour to the Gyptians, then on a sorta meandering cross-continental journey of her own.

Along the way, both Lyra and Pan keep uncovering new details about this ongoing side plot:

It turns out there’s a place, I think somewhere in the Middle East, where daemons can’t go — same as the area in the North that witches use for separation ordeals. If a human crosses that area, they arrive at the growing-place of a type of rose that won’t grow properly anywhere else, whose oil has the same effect as the seed-pod sap used by Mary Malone in the mulefa world — you can use it to make a Dust-viewing lens.

This rose oil can also be used to make all kinds of super-cool products, like the World’s Best Perfume and the World’s Best Rosewater, so it’s valuable for lots of reasons. But a few researchers have caught on to the Dust-viewing power, and the Magisterium has caught on that some dangerous research is happening with roses, so they’ve started destroying every rosebush they can find in the general region — wreaking havoc with the global economy in the process.

(They’re also trying to convince the general population that God Says Roses Are Immoral now. If this book had come out 5 years ago, I could’ve made some great connections with “there’s widespread successful Magisterium propaganda about how nobody should like or respect the work of botanists.”)

And there’s a related plot where Lyra’s uncle (she actually has one! Mrs. Coulter had a brother!) is playing a long game to re-consolidate as much Magisterium power as possible under a single individual. It gets us some good dramatic sequences…which I feel no need to break down here, because they’re exactly the ones you would imagine, with exactly the outcome you’re already expecting.

One of Uncle Wannabe-Pope’s employees is Bonneville Junior, the son of the miniboss from La Belle Sauvage. He’s a trained alethiometrist, but is more interested in his personal vendetta against Lyra than his actual job. Takes after Dad in that he’s not very deep or complex, just a straightforward fun-to-hate villain.

Pan eventually makes his way to the Terrible Author’s home, where he discovers that things are weird and creepy, but not very specific. Doesn’t achieve anything in particular, either. Disheartened, he sets off for the Region of the Weird Roses, with the idea he’ll meet Lyra there.

Lyra, meanwhile, has a notebook they recovered from an explorer who went to the Region of the Weird Roses. It includes a list of other (non-witch) people across the world who’ve been separated, because apparently they’re more common than you’d think, and have a secret support network. So she visits a few of these people along her trip, with an endgame goal of Weird Roseville.

Malcolm also makes his own journey toward Weird Roseville. I think it was part of an Oakley Street investigation into “what does the Magisterium have against roses these days?” In the middle of it, Bonneville Junior confronts him (Junior is having trouble finding Lyra, but has a secondary vendetta against Malcolm for killing his dad, so this is almost as good). Malcolm talks him down.

At last Lyra, Pan, and Junior all hit the same “creepy deserted town in the general area of Weird Roseville.” But none of them manage to interact before the book ends.

…In my LBS review, I said it had serious middle-of-the-trilogy syndrome, a whole lot of setup for no payoff. TSC spends very little time following up on any of it. To be fair, the Original Trilogy has happened in the meantime and this book also tries to address some of the events from that, but the vast bulk of it is even more setup for no payoff.

Complaints, Broadly Organized By Theme, In Loosely Chronological Order

Lyra at St. Sophia’s:

I really like how the opening sequence involves Lyra noticing a friend is in distress and helping her out! (Friend’s dad is in the rose-using business, and his company is going under.) And then…that’s the last we see of any connections with female friends her own age. In the entire book.

One of the Terrible Rationalist Books is spreading the idea that “daemons are a collective hallucination.” This is not a “rational” idea in this world! It would be like saying that faces are a collective hallucination!

And Lyra is the least likely person in this world to buy into it, because she’s visited a world without visible daemons, and got empirical proof (via Will’s and John Parry’s separation ordeals) that even under those conditions, they still exist!

I can appreciate the idea of Lyra and Pan being traumatized and scarred and having trouble, but this, specifically, is a nonsensical thing for them to argue over.

The book also gestures (not very hard, thankfully) toward the idea that Lyra is doubting the existence of magic in general. Which, again, is the equivalent of someone from our world deciding it’s rational to doubt the existence of weather.

Also, it seems like Lyra/Pan haven’t had any contact with witch society through these years. Why not? If anyone’s going to have sympathy and understanding and support groups for their separation-related trauma, it’s the culture where every single member formally goes through the same thing! And I’m sure Serafina would be delighted to see them! But they don’t even consider the idea.

Lyra and Malcolm:

Yes, they’re being telegraphed as a future couple, and yes, it’s just as creepy and unappealing as the internet has been saying.

And, look, I’m not going to say “20-year-old Lyra is too young to date anyone she wants.” Not after we got through all of Original Flavor HDM without saying “12-year-old Lyra is too young to go on an interdimensional journey with no adult supervision and save the multiverse.”

But he was one of her teachers when she was 16, and his POV includes remembering how he had to actively shut down sexual interest in her then, and here in the present Lyra still thinks of him as kind of a distant authority figure, and that’s weird, okay?

They only have a couple days’ worth of actual interaction before being apart for the rest of the book. That’s not enough time to believably develop their dynamic into something believably-potentially-romantic. So the narrative doesn’t try.

…but it still has multiple people ask Malcolm if he’s in love with Lyra afterward.

The foreshadowing on Lyra’s side is all in how she keeps thinking about how similar he is to Will. (Cat daemon, killed someone when he was a tween, etc.) Because that’s what we all want for Lyra’s romantic future, a knockoff Will-substitute, amirite?

Separately: Malcolm and friends tell Lyra the whole backstory about the magical boat trip from La Belle Sauvage, but it doesn’t seem like she tells them anything about “that time I went on an interdimensional journey, built a group of allies from multiple worlds and species including literal angels, killed God, and permanently rewrote the nature of death.” I feel like that should’ve come up!

General daemon stuff:

There’s a moment in the early chapters when Pan, wandering alone at night, considers eating some small critter (the kind that an ordinary pine marten would eat). It’s not like he’s going through a species-identity crisis, either. It’s just written as…a thing a daemon might do. So that’s weird.

In the original series, daemon separation is a major, improbable ordeal. Under normal circumstances, a human and a daemon being dragged apart past their distance limit will just kill them. At Bolvangar they figured out a severance method that would leave you physically functional, but dead inside. Witch-style separation only happens at this special daemon-repelling place in the North (you don’t have to be a witch to use it, see John Parry, but they usually don’t tell non-witches it exists), or on the shores of the World of the Dead. So far, so good.

In this series, we find out that there’s another place on this Earth with the same daemon-repelling properties. It’s also remote and isolated and associated with Cool Weird Stuff (the cities in the Northern Lights vs. the Dust-revealing roses). Again, so far, so good.

…And then we find out that random people can just kinda do a separation ordeal anywhere. Okay, it already happened to Malcolm in La Belle Sauvage, but now it’s all over the place. Lyra keeps spotting people on the street without daemons! Pan teams up with a kid who got dragged apart from her daemon in a shipwreck, and it didn’t kill them! It’s too easy. It’s unsatisfying. It undercuts so much of the monumental feeling separation had in the original trilogy.

It also makes it even weirder that nobody was able to hook Lyra and Pan up with a support group. Oakley Street couldn’t suss it out? Her friends among the Gyptians couldn’t catch an underground rumor and pass it on?

Related: when we saw daemonless kids in The Golden Compass, they were treated like horror-movie monsters. Like zombies, ghosts, bodies walking around without heads. But when people clock Lyra as being daemonless here, they treat it like it’s something immoral. Like she’s walking around topless and needs to cover it up.

There’s just a general pattern of rewriting HDM’s established rules about daemons, and not for the better.

And speaking of rewriting established rules…general alethiometer stuff:

There is a New Method for reading the alethiometer. It involves pointing all three hands at the same symbol, which already seems like a gimmick, not a useful way to frame a question.

And somehow, that gets you the answers in the form of…magic visions. No intuition or interpretation needed! The sights and sounds just get funneled directly into your brain!

The reason this isn’t a Plot-Breaking Hack is because it makes the user super-queasy. You can only use it when you’re in a position to be sick afterward, and people would rather not use it at all.

Lyra spends most of the story with the alethiometer, and without all the symbology books that go with it. She avoids using the New Method because of the nausea, but she also avoids using the Classic Method, on the grounds that it apparently can’t get her anything without the books.

She’s been studying these books for years now! Couldn’t she at least try to read it, and make her best guess at the interpretation? Maybe sometimes she gets it right, maybe sometimes she’s wrong and things go sideways and she realizes in hindsight which of the symbols she misread, maybe sometimes she gives up and gets depressed and puts it away without drawing a conclusion at all…but nope, she just flat-out doesn’t interact with it.

Midway through the book, Lyra gets a tipoff about a kind of truth-reading cards. That’s fine; we know there are other methods of truth-reading in the multiverse, including the I Ching and Mary Malone’s computer. Makes sense as a new tidbit of worldbuilding.

But towards the end of the story, someone helpfully gifts Lyra a deck of the cards. And she spends some time trying to infer answers from how the pretty pictures on the cards fit together. More time than she spends trying to infer answers from how the pretty pictures on the alethiometer fit together.

The alethiometer didn’t need a New Method or a total replacement in the narrative…but apparently it’s getting them.

And what was the point of Lyra dedicating herself to studying those symbols, for years, if she can get better and more-accurate data from a set of symbols she’d never seen before until this week?

Pan’s international voyage:

This all started when Pan got the idea that Terrible Author had “put a spell on Lyra and stolen her imagination.” Which sounds like a figure of speech at first, but no, apparently Pan thinks this guy is literally magic.

And yet, somehow, not magic enough to be dangerous, even for a single lone daemon whose only plan is “confront him directly and demand that he fix it”?

Most of the trip is uneventful, since it’s a long string of Pan successfully keeping out-of-sight.

There’s one clever part where, once he’s in Terrible Author’s hometown, he finds a school for the blind to ask for information. That way he can say “my girl is totally standing right over there, don’t worry about it, now, any chance you know where Terrible Author lives?”

…of course, the first person he asks has exactly the right answer and is happy to share. Convenient, that.

As mentioned, Terrible Author’s setup is suitably creepy and off-putting, but Pan doesn’t figure out anything about why. Doesn’t investigate. Didn’t come up with any kind of plan beforehand about how to coax Terrible Author into undoing his evil spell. Pan just confronts him, demands he fix Lyra, realizes this hasn’t fixed Lyra, and leaves.

There’s a bombshell much later on when Lyra finds out that Terrible Author is separated! And, although there’s a daemon who hangs around with him, they don’t actually belong to each other! This is fascinating and disturbing and would’ve been so much more satisfying if, you know, Pan had figured this out and was actively trying to bring the information to Lyra. Or, heck, if anything had been done with it at all.

Shortly afterward, Pan runs into this girl who just happens to be separated from her daemon, and is available and happy to team up with Pan, so they can head off to Weird Roseville together. Convenient. Again.

Lyra’s Bogus Journey:

Lyra has a much harder time staying out of sight than Pan, so she gets a lot more interaction along her trip.

Most of it is a long string of the same convenient “running into people who are helpful and friendly and have exactly the information she needs to move the plot along.” (More details on that below.)

When this happened in the original trilogy, it was the alethiometer deus-ex-machining her in the right direction, which worked! But here it seems to keep happening by accident. (She brings the alethiometer, but, as mentioned, she doesn’t use it.)

The Conveniently Helpful People also keep telling her (with minimal prompting, and what seems like total honesty?) whole backstories. All of which are more interesting than the actual narrative she’s going through.

They also occasionally mention God/the Authority, and Lyra doesn’t have much of a reaction. I wish, just once, she had snapped “it doesn’t matter what the Authority thinks! Or rather, what he used to think, since my boyfriend and I killed him when we were 12!”

The convenience also could’ve worked if Oakley Street agents were being cool and clever and actively tracking her journey in order to help. She does run into a few of them, but that seems to be by accident too.

And it could’ve worked if there was other magic steering her along — she keeps dropping the phrase “the secret commonwealth,” meaning the world’s hidden population of faeries and other supernatural creatures — but as of the end of the book, none of Lyra’s friendly helpers have been revealed to be anything other than human. (Some are modified in exotic ways, but they were human to start with, at least.)

Even farther towards the end of the book, after this long string of people being Conveniently Helpful For No Reason, she ends up in a train car with…and I wish I was making this up…a bunch of soldiers who are Inconveniently Attempted Rapists For No Reason.

That record-scratch moment your brain just did? That’s how it feels in the book, too. The attack comes out of nowhere, there’s suddenly a big action sequence with Lyra fighting back, their CO shows up and makes them let her go, and then she leaves the train and heads almost directly to the next bunch of Conveniently Helpful People.

If anyone wants more detailed spoilers, either to be prepared before reaching the scene or to decide whether you’ll read it at all, let me know.

To be blunt about one thing: from the in-scene descriptions I would’ve said none of these guys actually managed to get their dicks out, but a few days later we get the book’s first and only reference to Lyra having periods. And she doesn’t think “oh, thank republic-of-heavens, I’m not pregnant,” which suggests she knew it wasn’t a risk, but the whole Narrative Reason you write that in after an assault scene is because someone is afraid it’s a risk, so, what are you even doing, Pullman??

Okay, switching tracks.

Some of the people Lyra encounters, usually with personal stories that are way more interesting, and I wish they’d been [part of] the actual main plot:

A guy who meets her at a train station, says he has a friend who needs her help, leads her out into a maze of city streets where she explicitly thinks about how risky this is because she’s totally lost…but she does the mission and it’s fine and he leads her right back to the train station afterward.

The friend is a human who’s been modified by “a magician” to be some kind of fire-elemental person, and wants Lyra to help find his daemon, who was modified into a water-elemental form — a mermaid! This is cool and fascinating and scary and raises so many questions —

— and they get killed immediately after Lyra reunites them, and we never find out anything more about it.

The killer is the magician, who had been holding the water-sprite daemon captive. (And is possibly also the guy’s father? Finally, someone who can beat Marisa and Asriel in a “Bad Parenting Juice” drinking contest.) Which, again, is fascinating and evocative — how do you become a magician? Or are they born, like the witches? How many are there? What kinds of things are they doing in the world? —

— yeah, we don’t find out anything about that either.

Murderous Magician Dad just gives Lyra some helpful plot information, then sends her and the train-station guy off on their way.

A couple of guys who intervene when Lyra is being harassed at a bar.

They steer her outside, she’s prepared for a fight, but they hold up their hands and say they’re friendly, and also, they noticed someone steal the alethiometer bag off her earlier, so here, would she like it back?

They give her some helpful rumors, too. Don’t remember which specific ones, but they lead her to the next plot point.

A rich elderly princess who’s on the Daemonless International Support Group list, because her daemon fell in love (!) with another woman (!!) and eventually ran off with her (!!!).

Lyra thinks to herself that she’s seen other situations where a daemon and their human have different feelings about a romance. Just thinks it in passing, and then it’s gone. I want to see these situations! I want on-page exploration of multiple ways they can work! How do they correspond to the feelings of people in worlds where all the daemons are internal?

As for the princess, I already knew it was going to be a big scandal — two human women in that day and age could never be a couple, at least not in public, and A Literal Princess is a very public figure —

but then, in spite of the scandal, the princess moves in with the woman! And they travel together, they work together, they share a bed, she explains to Lyra that she played the role so thoroughly she made herself fall in love with the woman!

…and then it falls apart for some reason, and the princess leaves, but her daemon insists on staying. So that’s how they get separated. Deliberately walking away from each other.

There’s a brief reference to the idea of him wishing he was the other woman’s daemon, instead of the princess’s. How does that work? How do you get so disconnected from yourself, and in such a skewed partial-match with someone else, that you end up with that kind of yearning?

In case you can’t tell, I want to read this novel. I would trade the entirety of The Secret Commonwealth for this novel. No question, hands down.

Instead: Princess says “if you run into my daemon, tell him I’d like to see him again before we die?” Lyra says “sure, can do, thanks for the brunch.” And then, you guessed it, that whole scene is over and done with and we never get any follow-up on it again.

A pair of agents from Oakley Street, who say “hey, Lyra, have you considered using some basic disguise techniques, like dyeing your hair and wearing glasses?”

And then they give her a lovely haircut and a dye job and a spare pair of fake glasses.

This isn’t anywhere near the beginning of Lyra’s journey, by the way! This is more than 80% of the way through the book. There’s no special reason she needs it more after this point.

It’s like Pullman suddenly realized a disguise might help, wrote the scene at the point he had reached, and then never went back and edited to put it in a more meaningful location.

The stranger on a train who shows Lyra the deck of “exactly the same as an alethiometer” cards, gives her a demonstration of how to use them, and then leaves the whole deck behind for her to keep.

A married couple who don’t share any languages in common with Lyra, and don’t seem to have a lot of money…but feed her and let her stay at their house overnight, for free, even daemonless as she is. They also give her a free niqab so she can move around less conspicuously (she’s still injured from the fight with the soldiers).

A priest who invites her into his church, isn’t bothered when she takes off the niqab, helps treat her injuries, and gives her a motherlode of useful details about highly-illegal dealings he’s not even supposed to know about, but will unveil to this total stranger who just wandered in, because she needs them for the next plot point.

This when Lyra finds out that someone in this region has resurrected the Bolvangar method. But this time they aren’t kidnapping random children for it. No, they’re paying for it. If you’re poor enough, and desperate enough, and can’t spare any more kidneys, these people will buy your daemon to sell on the black market.

The city has a whole secret underclass of illegally-severed people working in the sewers.

Meanwhile, rich people who’ve been deserted by their daemons can purchase a stand-in. This is what Terrible Author did. Of course, it’s not a true replacement, but the dealers boast about their ability to make an excellent match.

There are also people who buy separated daemons for other scientific/experimental purposes. Details left to our imaginations.

This is a horrifying sinister mindblowing discovery, as much of a bombshell as the original Bolvangar was. I mean, it would’ve hit harder if Lyra had uncovered it by spying, or tricking someone into revealing the information, or anything more elaborate than “asking straightforward sorta-related questions and getting this whole sordid story infodumped by the first guy she asked,” but it’s still big.

So it’s gonna shake things up something fierce, right? Maybe Lyra won’t go full-on “calling in the cavalry to tear the place down” until Book 3, but this would be her new “stepping through the doorway into the sky” moment — where the horror of what she’s learned galvanizes her into making a pivotal decision, where she starts laying the groundwork for the revolution —

— no, of course not, this is where she starts going around to the hideouts of various undercover daemon-sellers and asking if they can help her find Pan.

Come on.

And this brings us to the end of the book. One of the black-market daemon-sellers guides Lyra to the creepy abandoned town where the final scene takes place.

In these last moments, the audience (but not Lyra) finds out that this guy has ulterior motives. Which would make it the first time in the whole book when “Lyra or Pan takes a Conveniently Helpful Person at face value with total credulity” turns out to be a bad idea.

(And, I mean, he’s a black-market daemon-seller. If anyone on that list was obviously an unethical scumball who shouldn’t be counted on….!)

Finally, a few things that don’t fit into any neat lists, but annoyed me enough to mention:

1) People curse in this book. Which is notable because they didn’t in HDM, and it wasn’t just the adults watching their mouths around tween Lyra — we got plenty of scenes that only had people like Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel in them. Those two would definitely be dropping f-bombs if it was a routine part of their world’s language, and this book reveals that it is.

So every time it happens it breaks your immersion, pointedly reminding you “this isn’t a real world, it’s a fake story where the author can switch the profanity-filter on and off at will.” Does it enhance the narrative in a way that’s worth the tradeoff? I don’t think so.

2) Before I read the book, I’d heard vague spoilers about “a character with a mermaid daemon,” and figured it was someone from a cool magical species — hopefully more expansion/exploration on the fairy from La Belle Sauvage whose daemon appeared to be “a whole flock of butterflies.”

But no, it’s a magically-modified human. His situation doesn’t get explored that deeply before he dies, or connect with anything else in the story. The fairy, meanwhile, does get mentioned when Malcolm tells Lyra about meeting her, but she doesn’t reappear or get any kind of follow-up.

In spite of the title, the only explicit appearance of any members of the “secret commonwealth” is some little glowing spirits, basically wights, that Lyra watches over the side of a gyptian boat one time.

3) There’s a scene where a bunch of people gather in a meeting hall to protest the Magisterium sabotaging their various rose-related livelihoods. A couple Magisterium reps are there. Malcolm is also there, and his POV basically goes “huh, looks like all the exits have gotten the doors shut. And barred. And suddenly they each have an armed Magisterium agent standing in front of them. That’s weird. Gonna keep quietly observing to find out what happens next.”

This guy is supposed to be a cool experienced anti-Magisterium spy! This is basically a giant neon sign flashing COMING UP NEXT: MASSACRE! (It is not a misdirect, either.)

And Malcolm sees it, but doesn’t read it, or take any action to try to subvert it, or even move to defend himself — it’s just like any cheesy horror movie where the audience is shouting LOOK BEHIND YOU at the unwitting character who’s about to get murdered.

Wrap-Up Thoughts

Whatever happens in the final volume of this trilogy, it might reveal things that redeem some of the problems in this book. But I’ll be honest, I’m not holding my breath.

And when I think about reveals that would address these problems, everything I come up with is stuff that should’ve just been in this book.

For example: let’s say the Fair Folk are directly involved after all, intervening to steer Lyra and Pan down the most convenient paths. In particular, the guy on the train who only appears long enough to give Lyra a set of alethiometry cards + a tutorial on how to use them — I really want him to be Fae. It’s so contrived and random if he’s not.

But the readers should know about it! Back in HDM, we would get scenes about the plans and activities of all the other factions at work. It might take a while to discover the exact details of (for example) the witches’ ultimate goal that Lyra was part of, but we knew they had a goal, and were supporting her in service of it. If the Secret Commonwealth is actively involved in the plot, we should’ve gotten that by now.

Semi-related: I feel like, if the rest of the book was better, then I’d have no trouble explaining a lot of the Lyra-specific issues as “she’s super-depressed, not in a place to make great choices or take a lot of decisive action.”

But it’s not like she’s drifting around in a trauma fog that hampers her ability to get things done. Her journey, while not perfect or threat-free, still comes together with improbable smoothness — as if the writing hasn’t noticed that she’s not being proactive and prescient and well-coordinated and overall super-competent about it. Meanwhile, other characters are underwhelming in the same way. (Looking at you, Malcolm “I Can’t Believe It’s Now a Bloodbath” Polstead.)

So it doesn’t seem like a conscious narrative choice to write Lyra this way. It just seems consistent with the complaints I have about everything else in the writing.

…let’s be honest, I’m almost certainly gonna read the third book anyway. I’m enough of a completist that it’ll bother me not to, I don’t have a lot of hard-stop dealbreakers that would make me bow out anyway, and, well, I do a lot of work that requires time-passing listening material. The Secret Commonwealth is nowhere near the most-frustrating audio I’ve used to fill that time.

But it hasn’t left me excited or optimistic or Shivering With Anticipation, either.

Mostly I just anticipate getting some useful stuff done while I listen, and then having a final set of reactions to work through in another one of these posts.

[theliterateape]

Real Life Ghost Stories: A Children's Home Ghost Hunt

By J. L. Thurston

I suppose most of us share a curiosity for the supernatural. I mean, here you are with me in this place. We’re surrounded by crumbling walls, exposed beams, generations of spiderwebs. You’re here because I highly recommended ghost hunting. Because you’re curious, just like me.

Is this place really haunted?

The art of ghost hunting is a simple one. You don’t need special devices that you see on television. You don’t need a psychic, but if you have an asshole friend who claims to be one you may be in for an interesting time. Don’t worry, I don’t claim to be psychic. We are going to go through this ghost hunt without having to humor someone who states they can feel ghostly presences.

When it comes to ghost hunting, it’s the location that matters. Cemeteries are always a good time. Abandoned places are even better.

Where I have brought you is the Bloomington Sailors and Soldiers Orphanage. We’ve come before the scheduled demolition. Before we delve deeper into the dark embrace of the old bricks and mortar, a little history lesson.

In the 1860s, the home was opened as a boarding school for the children of Civil War veterans. Then the children of the Spanish-American war were admitted. Wars and illnesses, poverty and the Great Depression caused a swell in America’s orphan population. The school became an orphanage, opening its doors for all children who needed a home.

It wasn’t a home the children wanted, but it was safe and it offered an education. It was better than living on the streets.

In time, the cost of the upkeep was too much, and orphans were becoming fewer in number, so the doors were closed permanently in 1979.

Since then, the building has stood empty and hollow. The walls are saturated with decades of dirt and weather, peeling and crumbling into nothing. Shattered glass reflects the city lights. Boards lean against framework, having fallen long ago like trees in a forest. Time demolishes everything.

✶

Dressed in black, in long sleeves and pants, we sneak in the night. It is against the law to trespass. But we’re explorers. And we need to feel the inside of the place.

As we step passed the entryway, we are immediately overwhelmed with a sense of immense sadness. This may not be surprising, knowing that war-lost children were lived- and sometimes died- there. Walk with me down the corridor. See the little empty classrooms. They emit a loneliness that could only be an echo of the soul-crushing pain the children must have experienced. How many tears were shed here? How many whispered prayers for parents to return from the dead?

Listen closely. We may hear the clicking heels of the the first superintendent who may still roam the halls. We may even hear the swift whack of her paddle and the sobs of the children she beat.

I feel a chill. It could just be my nerves, or the temperature dropping as the summer turns to autumn, or a restless child longing for company.

Pieces of plaster and glass crunch beneath our shoes. The only light is the light from our phones. Follow me through the mansion, but watch out for the groundskeepers who still live in the cottages on the property. Be quiet, so they don’t call the cops on us.

I should warn you of the rumors of massive dogs being set loose on trespassers. We should be fine as long as we don’t make too much noise. Wait, did you hear that?

Must be my imagination.

The narrow, winding stairs are treacherous. The steps and railing can’t be trusted. Remember, the building hasn’t been updated since the sixties, and hasn’t been lived in since 1979.

We’ve made it upstairs. Look out onto the lawn from this window. The bodies of children were buried there. Little ones had passed away in the early 1900s from tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, and enteritis. They died without their mothers to comfort them, and perhaps their spirits still wander the last place they’d ever called home. Does it disturb the dead to be moved? I only ask because the cemetery of the orphanage had been moved in the 1940s.

It couldn’t all have been sadness and sorrow. Usually, where children are there is laughter and warmth. They are resilient and joyful. Imagine the friendships, the late-night whispers, the pranks. As we descend to the main level, think about how this may not have been the home the children asked for, but it was still a home that welcomed them.

Now, say goodbye to the building. I hope you got what you came for. We may not have seen any ghosts, but we have been here and experienced the feelings that still permeate these walls. Soon this place will be gone. Nothing but a memory that even history will forget.

Now, flashlights off. Go back to your cars. Have a good night’s sleep.

Wait, did you hear that?

[nainashenoy]

Valedictorian 2019

I had the opportunity to make the Valedictorian speech at my masters graduation at the Linnaeus University, Sweden on the 3rd June 2019. I was very excited and nervous at the same time to be saying goodbye and welcome to the next chapter of life. I am putting my speech out here so that at some point I can even come back to feel the same that I felt while delivering it.

P.S. Credits to my dear dear brother for giving my raw speech a beautiful facelift.

Good Afternoon Everyone

i feel very honoured to stand before you today.

Firstly, I would like to extend y warm greetings to the pro-deputy vice-chancellor, the administrators, faculty, family and friends and, most importantly, to my fellow cohort of graduates.

Not to stereotype my fellow Indians here, but we are an emotional bunch so do not lose your stern disposition if I jerk out a tear or two as I run through my speech with an emotional, albeit proud heart. I stand here today, channelling my parents’ pride, my fellow classmates’ pride and my own, at having reached this milestone of graduating from the master’s programme.

Two years ago, most of us were a group of nervous souls not knowing what the future had in store for us. The anxious and hopeful faces around me at the orientation rooms have today become friends, and some of them, I’m sure, for life. For most of us, the Linnaeus journey took us away from home - for some of us a few 10s of miles and for the likes of me - a few 1000s of miles. My fellow batchmates, I could not have survived this separation from home without you all, so thank you.

The sense of community I feel today standing here cannot be out into words. Linnaeus University for us became a home away from home, albeit in my case from a tropical beach city to a very cold, windy and wet home. A home that gave new meaning to the popular game of thrones phrase ‘Winter is coming’. A home where each and every one of us have had unique experiences, some life changing ones even, topped with the darkest is winters. Thank god for coffee and lots of candy.

As I look back at my two years at Linnaeus University, I am reminded of the late Ingvar Kamprad’s quote: “Happiness is not reaching your goal. Happiness is being on the way”. As we all set out on our varied paths to happiness, I cannot think of a kiln better than Linnaeus University to have prepared us for our future travels along these paths. Inside and outside our classrooms, the Linnaeus University education has instilled in us equal measures, a new sense of ‘come whatever may’ attitude, life defining values and integrity. For that, I thank my teachers, who relentless in their pursuit of preparing us to pursue the ultimate that is knowledge. As my country’s late president Abdul Kalam said “A teacher’s life lights many lamps”. My dear teachers, you have definitely lit my lamp and that of my fellow graduates.

At this point, I would like to thank the most important cog in most of our lives, our families. On behalf of all of us students, I would like to express heartfelt gratitude to our parents, families, and best friends who are present here and back at our homes. You have been our constant champions, pillars of support and an unlimited reservoir of love. Without you all, this journey would not have been possible.

On a personal note, I would like to thank my mother who I am so very happy could make this long journey to witness me taking my next steps. Thank you for being my champion, guide and protector.

Okay, now that I am done with the mandatory parts of the speech, I want to talk about what I’ve really learnt at Linnaeus University and in Sweden. I will forever be grateful for introducing me to Fika. Coming from a country where everything is in limited supply, including time, Fika has taught me to take a step back, let my hair loose and just take a break without a bother in the world.

On a serious note, the Swedish way of life has left an indelible mark on me, and I can see the positive effects it has had on my mental framework and attitude to life. Your mindfulness, your conscientiousness about your natural resources, you live-and-let-live attitude, your warmth and welcoming nature, and your liberalism have all taught me important lessons.

Before I conclude, I would like to assure my teachers and the administrators of Linnaues University that we, the batch of 2019, will be some of the brightest of your flag bearers int he world that is waiting for us.

To my fellow batchmates, let’s kick some ass out there like we’re meant to.

I would like to conclude this speech by a poem by the famous Indian literary savant and first Asian Nobel Prize winner, Rabindranath Tagore:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where the knowledge is free;  Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches it’s arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action- Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Congratulation class of 2019

[aint-love-heavy]

The internet is wallpapered with advice, much of it delivered in a cut-and-dried, cut-’em-loose tone. Frankly worded listicles abound. For instance: “7 Tips for Eliminating Toxic People From Your Life,” or “7 Ways to Cut a Toxic Friend Out of Your Life.” On Instagram and Pinterest, the mantras are ruthless: “There is no better self-care than cutting off people who are toxic for you”; “If I cut you off, chances are, you handed me the scissors.” The signature smugness and sass of Twitter are particularly well suited to dispensing these tidbits of advice. I don’t know who needs to hear this, a tweet will begin, suggesting that almost anyone might need to hear it, but if someone hurts your feelings, you are allowed to get rid of them. There is even a WebMD page about how to identify a “toxic person,” defined aggressively unhelpfully as “anyone whose behavior adds negativity and upset to your life.” Well, by that measure … !

[...T]he advice [...] isn’t just about sloughing off casual acquaintances; it’s meant to apply to close friends, siblings, partners, parents. The message—implied if not always stated outright—is that other people are simply not my problem.

[...]

Why is this happening? Maybe young people have been inspired by the impermanence and infinite choice baked into online dating and social media. Maybe our brains have been pickled in wellness culture and “self-care” rhetoric, which stress the need to privilege our own well-being above all else. Or maybe we’re just good American capitalists, encouraged by the cult of individualism to think of ourselves as compelling brands, the main characters of cinematic star vehicles, the centers of the universe.

The line between internet advice and bona fide mental-health guidance can get a little blurry. A few TikTok personalities have branched out into something that looks more like therapy—charging for one-on-one consultations. And I spoke with professionals who told me that this school of online advice has made its way into their own consultation rooms.

[...]

Jack Worthy, a psychotherapist in New York, doesn’t care for the word toxic: “As far as I know, it’s not an actual psychological construct that has validity and reliability.” But lately, he told me, it’s been coming up “again and again” in his practice. Many patients “want to explore ideas or frameworks that they learned online.”

Worthy noted that self-help is much older than social media, but that reading an entire Brené Brown book takes far more commitment than passively consuming what’s presented to you in an algorithmic feed. “I think previously it might not have been so easy to find content to validate what you already feel,” he said.

The advice is not just easier to find; it’s easier to follow, too. Earlier iterations of self-help often stressed the hard work of building and maintaining relationships, of opening up and connecting with others. That’s more arduous than simply removing from your social network anyone who causes you discomfort.

Social media, by its nature, can make people appear more extreme than they are. Consider a recent incident involving Lindy Ford, a 21-year-old influencer from Spokane, Washington, who posts videos on Twitch of herself playing fantasy games like The Elder Scrolls V. Though her modest audience follows her for gaming content, she has also been candid about her anxiety and panic disorders, as well as her relationships; sometimes, on Twitter, she’ll offer bits of advice. Last year, she posted:

here’s your reminder that unless someone explicitly told you with their words they are upset with you, there is no need for you to worry yourself sick. you have no mental or emotional obligation to people who do not communicate with you. no matter how much you love them.

Pretty intense! The tweet was shared more than 50,000 times—in many cases approvingly. But others saw Ford’s message as wrong or even dangerous, describing it as an “insane thing to say” and a “great entry in the short but rich history of sociopathic advice on social media.”

When I spoke with Ford soon after, I was curious about whether she was surprised by that backlash. “That is just the way it is online,” she told me. Her followers knew she was alluding to her own tendencies to overthink things and be too self-critical. But she understood why other people thought “it was quote-unquote sociopathic … They were reading it as if I were saying, ‘If you hurt someone, then you have no obligation to fix it, because they didn’t tell you that you hurt them.’ ” That wasn’t what she meant. It’s only what she wrote.

[beckytailweaver]

Coco thoughts lately

This is (mostly) in response to @anotherweepingwoman and This Post but also some other things in general I’ve been reading (and you will probably recognize it if you’ve read the same things). It’s separate here because I didn’t want to hijack other people or Great Wall of Text so badly again. XD I’ve tried to be coherent but this will likely drift around a lot! It’s a lot of thoughts all muddled into one space.

(Disclaimer: I only got to see Coco in theater once. For the rest I must resort to vid clips that may or may not decide to load on my slow internet, until I can buy the disc. It's a good exercise in my memory skills.)

Héctor is a liar, but oftentimes he's apologizing for his lies. When I go into my headcanon-framework for his background, these fibs that come out may be old habit from an orphaned childhood. If he was raised, say, in an orphanage by strict caretakers, it would have been to his advantage to know how to put on a good-little-boy face and say whatever was needed to divert attention or stay out of trouble. If he was more of a rangy little street rat type, then white lies would have been a stock part of his survival kit. I think this habit of evading the truth would have worn down a bit once he had a stable home with Imelda (and she would insist on teaching their daughter honesty), but after decades of desperation in the bottom of the afterlife he's definitely back to street rat mode.

Ernesto lies too, and we've seen where that went.  I don't think Héctor has ever lied in such a way that was meant to harm anyone. Little fibs to his advantage, a disguise here or a sparkly promise there; never damaging gossip or deliberately hurtful untruths or a promise that could get someone killed. But he is a liar, and anyone who's known him long would know that. (This might also explain why Imelda seems so eager to believe he'd run off and never come home, whether or not Ernesto told her anything. Héctor is slippery and she knows it, but she'd dared to hope he would not be dishonest to her.)

Héctor acts his age, largely, I think because you are sort of frozen the moment you die: You get a skeletal representation of your body at the moment of death, with some decorative additions to give you individuality and mark who you are. Skeletal children don't grow, the old are forever elderly. While the visual/physical form of the body is bones, there has to be some kind of force to animate them, to process what goes on around them. Invisibly, I think, a sort of ghostly/energy echo of the body remains, and part of that is the echo of a brain (how else could they think and remember things?) which for Héctor is an imprint of a 21-year-old brain with its not-quite-complete neurological maturity. While he can learn and gain experiences, the structure of that brain is still going to process things in a 21-year-old way. Experience can shape his thinking and grant him wisdom, but at his root he's still young in personality. (Young people can be tired, cynical, and hopeless too.)

Héctor is a father, but he has never been a parent to a child older than 3-4. (Young parents grow with their first kids and learn things!)  "Rubbing shoulders" with Miguel may just be the only way he knows how to interact with young boys older than his daughter was. He does seem to be comfortable around kids and isn't flustered by dealing with them, which makes me think he was around a lot of them growing up (orphanage?) or ended up being That Kid in their small town who is all the children's favorite bro. He is the fun, gentle sort of person that children flock to, so it's likely he would sing and play with the neighborhood kids even up into his marriage. He seems pretty active and playful himself (when not desperate or on the clock, but you still see flashes of it), despite the crippling of being Forgotten.

Miguel wasn't mimicking Héctor to mock him, but because he wanted to walk "like a skeleton" and his nearest, dearest example happened to have the Forgotten condition of loose bones and an awkward limp. Miguel will imitate his new cool big bro! But in this case, Héctor is so used to being mercilessly ridiculed for everything that he takes it poorly on reflex, without realizing (perhaps not until he stops and thinks about it later) that Miguel meant nothing bad by it. The shove in response isn't really that severe for the horseplay that young boys can get up to. (It wasn't a punch or a slap or a kick or a grab, which angry men are certainly capable of.) But it is reactive in a somewhat immature way, same as his snappish responses to the musicians later on.

He let out that grouchy "how come he didn't invite you?" comeback to Miguel in the rehearsal area, but Miguel wasn't hurt or upset by it.  Kid didn't even blink.  (It was a pretty legitimate question from Miguel, even!) But I think the subconscious drift into familial familiarity made it more like the kind of snark Miguel gets at home all the time and he doesn't even pause.  It's Rivera snark, it just happens, nobody's really injured by it, on to the next subject.  They may use it to cover up their soft spots, and they all know how to take it as well as dish it out. Miguel had the proper Rivera response as well: Let it go.  He didn't keep digging in or teasing on this.  He might react with disbelief to some of Héctor's statements about knowing a famous guy like De la Cruz, but that's because he's already recognized Héctor as a consummate embellisher and knows better than to believe every word from his mouth. He never uses the lack of party invitation as a weapon or even brings it up again.

Héctor's poor actions as an "adult and disciplinarian" after Poco Loco can be attributed to, yes, his mental youth, and also I think to those edges of desperation that crop up many, many times all night long. That desperation, knowing that tonight is probably his last, is a poor help to an already-impulsive young man's mind. It makes his Ready-Fire-Aim even worse. It short circuits a century's worth of wisdom and (after)life experience in favor of urgent, sometimes thoughtless rushing. Yes, he is very deeply concerned with himself and his photo right now; he can't help it. He's dying and he's desperate and he needs to do this now, and however much he likes Miguel this dumb kid is on a clock too and doesn't even know what's important here!  Despite that he's usually a nice guy I definitely don't think Héctor is a total pushover in personality.  That whole night prior to the cenote we're probably looking at the shortest his fuse has ever been. And he still manages to be in general kind and supportive to Miguel (who has been alternately delighting him and giving him hell all evening).

I have a somewhat different headcanon about Héctor watching Miguel's slow fading to bone over the course of the night. I think Miguel did discuss his time limit with Héctor during or just before the face painting early on, but initially Héctor is understandably more concerned with his own deadline. As he comes to know Miguel better, he cares more. But he also may forget now and then, in his own urgent situation, until a look over the kid's shoulder reminds him that two hourglasses are trickling down, not one.  And he does care, potentially a great deal: "Your life literally depends on you winning!" He didn't even mention the photo until after, when the family thing came up.

Genuine Héctor...definitely makes numerous appearances through the night. Most of his performance-art is for guards and gatekeepers, wheedling to people he needs to get past who might cut him some slack. Héctor being all super extra nice to Miguel during the face paint and explanation is definitely performance. He does a lot of performance with the Shantytown Crew, putting on a happy-go-lucky face. His Frida impersonations are absolutely performance, quite deliberately so!

However, Genuine Héctor comes out surprisingly fast around Miguel. The kid worms his way into a position of camaraderie pretty darn quick. Perhaps this is due to Héctor's loneliness making him open to someone who could be a real friend, or maybe it's genetic similarity gently drawing them to trust more easily. Most of the Genuine Héctor moments are in Miguel's proximity, possibly not only because the kid is the other leading character of the film; a lot of his genuine moments aren't just in proximity to Miguel, but in response to him.

Genuine Héctor generally doesn't come with the overbearing grins, theatrical body actions, or higher, wheedly tone of voice.  Genuine Héctor is in the casual questions, exasperated eye-rolls, short-tempered grumps, dramatic sighs, epic grouchface, snappy comebacks, freely teasing, warm encouragement, playful dance teaching, melancholy stillness, angry desperation, grieving rage, tearful hopelessness, clear relief. Those moments when Héctor is not keenly watching the people around him as targets he needs to con. (There's a difference in his gaze; keep your eye on it!)

Not all of his performance is negative or self-serving, either; sometimes it's just because a nervous kid needs a pick-me-up and Héctor can put on a smile for that.

Face painting scene—lots of performance, but some real warmth. Walking with Miguel, the shove—no performance, pure grumpy. Talking to Ceci—plenty of performance for deference, Ceci is a gatekeeper. Rehearsal studio—mostly genuine; no point in faking the musicians, they treat him like crap no matter what he does. Going down to Shantytown—performance, especially off the ledge! With Chicharron—started as performance, became genuine real fast. Trolley to the plaza—performance to get around truthtelling, but also to act encouraging. Waiting for a turn onstage—no performance until okayokayokay and he goes into another encouraging spiel.

Some of Héctor's best genuine moments are on the Poco Loco stage. Sure, he's performing, but that's genuine Héctor, not a performance. Not during the song. He's not watching the audience—he's watching Miguel. And then he's playing with him. There's no con in that music. That was all Héctor and Miguel having fun with each other.

Afterward, the argument...no performance. None. It's all very real exasperation and anger fueled by the same old desperation. The argument hurts both of them because it tastes like betrayal. ("I told you I needed to cross tonight!" "Well I told you it has to be De la Cruz!") They both pulled lies on each other (taste of your own medicine!) and ran face-first into a mirror.  Shortsighted demands and lack of explanation, and the whole thing goes down the drain.

As a kind person, we never see Héctor use force to get across the bridge.  He did not grab or physically coerce Miguel in any way to take his picture there; he used only words. Even when things came to a head and he was angrily trying to drag the kid back to his family, it was half-hearted at best (and no more than we've seen anyone in the Rivera family do with recalcitrant children) and Miguel slipped out of his grip in a heartbeat.  (Maybe he's getting too weak to hold on; maybe Miguel is too heavy for him to drag without lifting.) I'd bet money that Héctor has never threatened physical injury or actively harmed anyone in his pursuit of crossing; that he's never used a weapon or taken anyone hostage to try to force his way across. I doubt such things would even occur to him!  His entanglements with the crossing guards have all likely been evasions and brief tangles where he's trying to disengage. I'd wager that night that Ernesto is the first person he's actually attacked with intent to harm in a very, very long time—if ever.

One of the saddest things is how Héctor has been denied musical joy for so long.  "Stupid musical fantasy" is mainly because his turned out to be.  He's also lost perspective on this: To a child, these things are huge. Like, music is everything. Miguel has his family, but they're...in a way, background, they've always been there, and in his mind always will be.  He doesn't want to leave them for music, he wants to find a way back to them with music on his own terms.  Family should support you, but Riveras have made music into an all or nothing deal. (What would they have done, if the LoD journey hadn’t happened, if truth hadn't come out and Miguel refused to give up music? Would they have disowned him or otherwise banished him?)

Héctor likely had little or no family before the one he made for himself, and going back to them would not have meant giving up music altogether.  I think at the point of their argument, Héctor failed to realize (or had not been informed of) the position Miguel is in.  Héctor was giving up a fond dream of musical fame to go back to his small town family and find a local job he could do while continuing to play music for recreation and additional income.  It's really not the same as Miguel going back to (or being forced by curse conditions) an existence centered around a shoemaking family defined by its enforced silencing of music.  In that sense, Héctor was giving up fame and money (Ernesto's priorities), not music; Miguel would be losing music entirely, for the fame and money afforded by the Rivera shoe reputation.

It puts a different spin on their respective stories to think of it that way.  They both love their families and giving them up permanently isn't even part of the equation.  The real culprits/sacrifices here are wealth/reputation and music.  And before we get into "But Héctor left his family!" let's just pause: Héctor did not abandon his family, he went on a business trip!  He fully intended to return, and the fact that he didn't—sooner or later—is entirely due to Ernesto's choices.  It's incredibly sad that Ernesto decided to kill him, and equally as sad that Imelda was so eager/willing to believe that he would abandon them.  Poor guy just can't catch a break at any point in his life (or afterlife).

As a somewhat related postscript: I think it's a bit funny that people like to bring this up, since "Go for your dreams!" is a big motif in modern (especially American) society. We're pretty much expected to leave our families behind to achieve what we want. Big education, big job, big house, the spouse we desire, the city we want to live in, the generation gap we can't abide...basically the whole point (so far as I was told) is to grow up, move out, leave the old folks behind (call a few times a year, and visit on some holidays), and achieve our dreams no matter what.

What Héctor was doing—going on a business trip for a job or potential job—is absolutely nothing unusual to what goes on every day: People with spouses and children temporarily leave them to go on business trips, they go on military tour, they go on band/performance tours, they commute or move to another city for half the year for work...and this is considered normal. Not ideal, but pretty normal.  (Even when Héctor was alive, people would at times have to go far away to make money to send to their families.)  Maybe it wasn't favored in Héctor's time either, but I find it rather ironic that people give him hell over it now!

[ohifonlyx33]

"We can work all of this out you just need to let Daisy go" NO???? EXCUSE ME EXCUUUUUUUUUUUUUSE ME? WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY NO? oooooooooooh no. is he... is Fitz like... being held hostage by the Fritz in his mind? and and and... Deke has to be soooo confused right now. “I wouldn't have done any of this if I didn't believe it was going to work. the science is sound.” COME ON FITZ CHOOSE TO OVERCOME THIS DARKNESS. OH GOSH. YOU WANT TO TALK SCIENCE? JEMMA? CAN YOU PLEASE REMIND HIM WHO HE IS. THAT LITTLE SCOFF WHEN HE SAYS THERE ARE ALWAYS RISKS INVOLVED. HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. "you know that Jemma" stooooooooooooooooooooooooooooop. NO YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO THIS. YOU CAN CHOOSE RIGHT NOW TO BE GOOD. FITZ YOU NEED TO WAKE UP. STOP THIS NONSENSE. OH MY GOSH???????????????????????????????????????? IM SO APPALLED TBH. "I'LL NeVER FORGIVE YOU" "I SUSPECT YOU'RE NOT THE ONLY ONE" AND HE'S SURRENDERING. w...what.... what is this going to mean for Fitz???? it worked BUT AT WHAT COST. now he's fidgeting with his ring. and he's feeling guilty. "how long had you been seeing him?" "my mind's been through a lot" ANSWER THE QUESTION. "for a while" NO I TAKE IT BACK. "since we left the framework" NO. BABY NO. A NETWORK ERROR CAUSED THE MEDIA DOWNLOAD TO FAIL PART WAY #same #mood #relateable. IM FAILING TOO. whoa whoa whoa. JEMMA KNOWS ABOUT JEMMAGINARY. H O W "you were my conscious" bby she represented what you needed to get through a rough patch. "then what was he?" DON'T EVEN *THINK* IT FITZ. HE WAS A TWISTED MANIPULATION FRROM THE FRAMEWORK. IT IS NOT YOU. YOU'VE ALWAYS BEEN GOOD. YOU HAD A TRAUMA HAPPEN TO YOU. YOU HAVE BEEN THROUGH A LOT. YOU'VE.... YOU'VE ALWAYS BEEN THE HEART. and he's killing me with the wedding ring again. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. dON'T BE STUPID AND TAKE IT OFF OR ANYTHING. "I don't deserve forgiveness Jemma" IF YOU WOULD STOP THINKING YOU ARE EVIL PLEASE. "JUST LIKE YOU DON'T DESERVE ME?" IM CRYING. *i still believe that it was the right thing to do* MY BLOOD JUST FROZE. oh whoa. whoa. Jemma just... sided with his rationale. I mean. Morally it was awful... but it kinda also worked... but it also is just.... and MY HEAD IS s P I N N I NG. what does that make us I DON'T KNOW. oh and neither does Jemma. I SWEAR IF HE TAKES OFF HIS RING I WILL LOOSE IT JEMMA CRYING ALONE. BUT IM CRYING WITH HER ALSO ALONE. AND AW GRANDBABY DEKE. SHE'S TRYING NOT TO CRY IN FRONT OF HIM. "He's complicated and stubborn... that's why you let him win arguments sometimes right?" DEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKE. "He can be a real baby when he's sick. So that's why you gotta take care of him. And he's always got the weight of the world on his shoulders. That's why he needs you there to help lighten the load." THIS IS EITHER A GREAT WAY TO CHEER HER UP OR JUST ADDING TO THE PILE OF FUDGE. "OH AND HE LOVES HIS PROSCIUTTO AND MOZZARELLA SANDWICHES." NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MY EMOTIONS. THE PURE INNOCENT SANDWICH IS RISEN FROM THE DEAD OF NIGHT. WHAT IS THIS FEELING???? “TH A T NOONE CAN mAKE riGHT ExCePT YOU.” tRIGGERED IM SO SHOOK NHJDbgksl; "M Y MOM USED TO TELL ME ABOUT HER PARENTS ALL THE TIME." hjdgefporkrkhglkd IN YOUR TIMELINE THAT WAS TRUE. WHAT IF THEY BrOKE THE TIMELINE???

"She always spoke about her dad with so much love and admiration on her face" (HEY ME TOO. THAT'S HOW I TALK ABOUT FITZ TOO. WHEN IM NOT CRYING.) "Said he was the best man she ever knew.' SHE WAS ALSO MURDERED, AlSO BE CAREFUL BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE JEMMA MIGHT BE ABOUT TO HAVE A SCHISM OF HER OWN THO. "So I know that you can help Fitz... AND I KNOW THAT YOU TWO ARE GOING TO BE OKAY" THANK YOU DEKE THANK YOU. YOU DON’T REALLY KNOW THAT THO.

OH AND CUE THE THROWING UP. RIGHT ON CUE... LIKE.... THERE IS NOW A 50/50 CHANCE SHE IS PREGGERS. BUt THAT WAS HILARIOUS TIMING. if i could laugh right now. HOW DOES THAT TIE IN TO WHAT SHE JUST SAID ABOUT MAKING HARD CHOICES To CHANGE THE TIMELINE??? 

what the frick IS THIS ENDING?

[nowhere-hunch]

Social constructs

A few years ago, I started hearing the phrase “X is a social construct” in the context of social justice. First “gender is a social construct”, then “sex”, and lately I’ve been hearing “race” as well. At first, I didn’t understand the concept well, but as time has gone on I think I’ve gotten a better idea. Essentially, I think a good definition for “social construct” could be “a shared framework people use to cooperatively handle infinitely varied natural phenomena.”

I think the best way to explain this would be to work through a common, pretty non-controversial example: color.

Color is a social construct

“Color” is our brains reaction to light waves hitting our eyes – we perceive different wavelengths within a range of “visible light” as different colors. Since there are an infinite number of wavelengths within that range, technically there are an infinite number of colors.

However, when people talk about color, we are never (or very, very rarely) talking about a specific wavelength of light, but a whole bunch of wavelengths that are next to each other on the spectrum. Essentially, we have divided a continuous spectrum (a rainbow) into several bands (ROYGBIV). This allows us to more easily utilize the concept of “color” in our everyday lives. You can say “These berries are ripe when they’re red” while accounting for all the different variations of red that might occur between individual fruits, for example.

For this to work, the person you’re talking to needs to know (at least approximately) where you put the “boundaries” between the different color bands. As long as you two agree, the placement of these boundaries can be completely arbitrary. This is where the “social” in “social construct” comes from – our concepts are validated by social agreement rather than any actual reflection of physical reality.

When you consider this, several observations follow:

These “boundaries” may be agreed on by one group of people, but they change according to time/place/context.

If you speak another language, you may know that the agreements people have for talking about color vary by culture. For example, in Japanese the word for “blue” overlaps considerably with what we in English would call “green” (e.g. the color of green traffic lights). While English traditionally splits the rainbow into 7 bands (ROYGBIV), other languages may use more or fewer.

Although the whole society appears to agree, it’s likely that no two individuals actually completely agree on the precise placement of the boundaries.

If you give a hundred, or a thousand people a picture of the color spectrum and ask them to draw lines where red turns to orange, orange turns to yellow, etc., you’d most likely not find any two who put them in exactly the same places. Yet we are all (for the most part) still able to communicate successfully with each other about color.

Social constructs usually actually describe the intersection of multiple natural phenomena, even if we don’t always realize it.

In most art programs, when you select a “color” to paint with, you are actually working with three different “spectrums”:

“Hue” – the rainbow spectrum we’ve been talking about

“Saturation” – how bright the color is (full saturation = fully colored, no saturation = gray)

“Lightness” (full lightness = white, no lightness = black, mid lightness = “true” color)

Thus, we get words like “maroon”, “periwinkle”, “navy”, “brown”, etc. The usual answer to “what is color?” doesn’t include any of those. Our social construct of color actually includes not only the bands of the rainbow, but also other attributes like saturation and lightness. This is because our human experience of color is greatly affected by these other attributes, and our social constructs describe our *experience* of a phenomenon, not the actual reality of it.

Two people using the same social construct may sort the same object into different categories for a number of reasons.

First, we already noted how most people probably have slightly different boundaries between categories. Physical differences in our eyes or brains might also affect how we actually perceive color (e.g. colorblindness). Think about “the dress” – many people sorted that image into completely different color categories. Remember that social constructs describe our experience of a phenomenon, not the actual reality of it.

In some cases, we use different attributes to sort phenomena depending on context. Sometimes when we say “color” we mean “hue” and sometimes we mean a hue/saturation/lightness combo. When you’re shopping for clothes, you’ll probably say “I’m looking for a maroon shirt” but when you’re describing your purchase to someone you might say “I’ll wear my new red shirt.”

Social constructs are based on constructed stereotypes but impact our reality in measurable ways.

Each wavelength of light is a completely different color. As stated, physically there is no reason why we have sorted them into bands the way we have… or is there? There are generalizations people make about entire bands of colors all the time: “red is energizing”, “blue is calming”, “purple is luxurious”, etc. There’s a kind of chicken and egg problem:

Did we sort colors the way we did because they have these common characteristics? OR

Do these colors have common characteristics because we have sorted them together?

The fact that the “common attributes” colors are thought to have vary by time (e.g. blue used to be associated with girls and pink with boys, the opposite of today), place (e.g. in the west, white is associated with purity and happiness, while it is associated with death in some Asian cultures), and context (e.g. red could be connected to either anger or love) makes me think more the latter than the former, though I’m sure there’s a mixture of both.

However, it doesn’t really matter whether colors actually have those attributes. Just the fact that these attributes are part of our social construct has a measurable effect on our experience of the physical phenomena. There are experiments that show that people are actually energized by red and calmed by blue, even though those concepts are culturally specific. 

As stated, it’s often possible to trace these stereotypes back to some actual reality. Purple is considered luxurious because purple dyes used to be very rare and expensive. But note how the stereotype has remained in place and still has an effect on people’s lived experiences even though reality has changed.

Social constructs usually don’t distinguish between assumptions made about an item’s category and assumptions made based on an items’s category.

The human brain likes to take shortcuts, and one way it does this is by being loose with the distinction between “conditions” and “consequences” of a given object being sorted into a given category. I.e. there’s a difference between “these are the attributes I use to decide that this object belongs in this category” and “these are the attributes I can assume this object has by virtue of being sorted into this category,” but this often gets ignored.

A simple example would be to say something like, “Well, purple is a luxurious color, so I will call any color I decide is luxurious purple.” This isn’t especially common with colors, since it’s really easy for most of us to sort colors by sight and so we don’t need a shortcut, but it happens a lot with other social constructs I’ll touch on later.

Social constructs are not inherently “bad”.

Saying that something is a social construct is not saying that it isn’t real or doesn’t exist or doesn’t impact people’s lived experiences – in fact it’s saying the opposite. A social construct must be based on something real and important to our lives, otherwise we wouldn’t bother to create a social construct to allow us to conceptualize and communicate about it.

Social constructs are necessary for us to live in society, it’s just important that we not mistake our social construct for the actual reality they are meant to describe. Social constructs describe our experience of a phenomenon, not the actual reality of it. “A map is not the territory,” as they say.

Anatomy of a social construct

Now, we can list some things we would expect to find with any social construct:

One or more natural phenomena that are a) experienced by people in infinitely (or practically infinitely) varied ways and b) something that we care about enough to want to think and talk about with others.

A set of categories people sort the experiences of these phenomena into.

For each category, a set of attributes associated with items in that category. These may be used to sort items into categories AND/OR to make assumptions about items after they have been sorted.

We would expect the categories and/or attributes associated with them to change depending on time, place, or context.

With this in mind, we can start looking at some more interesting examples.

Gender is a social construct

If gender is a social construct, we would expect it to be built on some actual natural phenomena. The question is, what is that phenomena exactly, especially if it is distinct from physical sex? I don’t think we as a society have a very good idea of this, which is why, to me, this example is more difficult to talk about than color, sex, or race.

My theory is this: the phenomenon behind what we think of as “gender” is individuals’ specialization in social tasks.

I think this is why sex and gender are so closely related for many societies. The earliest social activities humans were doing were primarily related to reproduction: courtship/mating and parenting, so it makes some amount of sense that individuals would specialize in the tasks required for these activities based on their role in the reproductive process. Someone needs to feed the child; it makes sense for someone whose body produces milk to be responsible for that. And if they’re spending their time doing that, then someone else will have to specialize in the other things that need to be done. 

These roles and specialties weren’t (and still aren’t) exactly the same in every family, so as families came together and started to talk with each other about their social roles and specialties, the social construct of gender developed.  The concepts of “man” and “woman” corresponded pretty closely with a person’s physical sex. But as human society became more complex, additional social tasks needed to be fulfilled related to spirituality/religion, medicine, industry/technology, etc. These were worked into the gender social construct in different ways depending on the society, resulting in the diversity we see today.

My basis for this theory is just considering *why* it matters to people what someone’s gender is. Humans care about color because it helps us determine what food is good to eat (among other reasons), we care about physical sex because it allows us to find a partner we will be able to reproduce with, why do we care about gender if it’s different than sex? I think that people use gender to make “educated” guesses about:

The language forms used when talking to or about them (e.g. pronouns)

Their roles/responsibilities within their social groups

The most effective social strategies to use with them for the given situation

Social experiences you do/don’t share with them

I.e. it’s a shortcut for figuring out social situations.

So, if we consider “gender” as a construct for describing “how people specialize in social tasks”, then there are technically as many genders as there are people alive on earth – it’s extremely unlikely that any two people will have specialized in exactly the same way. For colors, we mainly use 1-3 attributes (hue, saturation, lightness) to categorize items into categories, but for gender, although there are fewer categories, many more attributes are considered:

The roles/responsibilities you take on within your family (e.g. in raising children) or other groups/teams

The way you present yourself physically via clothing, mannerisms, etc.

Your relationship dynamics with individuals (familiar or strangers) of different genders

Hobbies and aesthetics you are drawn to

Etc.

At this point, we are realizing that our society is so complex that trying to sort every person into one of two available categories just isn’t sufficient. There are so many factors that go into “sorting” people that at this point it’s probably easier and more reliable to just have people self-identify. Sex is not a reliable indicator for all these other things, nor is appearance, interests, skills, etc.

So, we have the natural phenomenon: groups of humans divide responsibility for social tasks between individuals. We have categories for sorting that phenomenon: “man” and “woman” traditionally, and other “nonbinary” categories becoming more prominent as time goes on, and we have lots and lots and lots of attributes associated with those categories. Think of all the stereotypes we use to make assumptions both about a person’s gender and based on a person’s gender.

We can also see how both the available categories and the attributes associated with them differ by time and place. There are many cultures all over the world that have included more than two genders for a very long time. One example is “two-spirit” people in Native American societies. Attributes that are considered “feminine” or “masculine” by one culture may elsewhere be acceptable or encouraged in other genders. For example, in western cultures men are discouraged from styling their hair and face with lots of product, but it is encouraged in some Asian cultures.

This is why gender is considered a social construct: we think about it using concepts that are not a one-to-one correspondence with reality, but are instead validated by social agreement – we as a group all agree to talk about it in a common way.

Sex is a social construct

I think most people are more ready to call gender a social construct than sex, even though to me sex has more in common with the color example than gender does.

Our social construct of sex is based on the natural phenomena of human beings possessing an infinite variety of sex organs – no two people have a set that is exactly the same. The fact that a body is considered “male” regardless of the length of the penis or whether or not it is circumcised is evidence of this.

What makes the social construct of sex difficult for people to grasp, I think, is that it appears to be quite close to a direct one-to-one correspondence with reality, particularly if you’re willing to ignore people with intersex conditions as “outliers” (which I think is unwise). However, if you pay close attention you can see some situations where our social construct starts to fail. This is because although people usually assume “sex” is decided using a single attribute, our social construct actually considers several:

The (visual) sex organs you were born with

The sex organs you currently possess (“sex change” operations may be relatively new, but eunuchs are an ancient phenomenon)

The sex of partners you could potentially reproduce with

Presence or absence of a Y chromosome

Hormone levels in your body

And although the categories and attributes appear fairly constant across place and time, they do vary according to context. This is reflected quite obviously in recent controversies about intersex athletes. Medical and social establishments decide sex based on the appearance of sex organs at birth, while athletic organizations often instead base it on current hormone levels. That’s how someone can live their entire life with no doubt they are 100% female, only to be disqualified from sporting events because they meet the criteria for being “male”.

Again, saying that something is a social construct isn’t saying that it’s not real. In human reproduction there are two roles involved – an egg cell needs to meet a sperm cell, and there are two “configurations” of sex organs that correspond to these roles. This is not being disputed. The social construct is how we “sort” people when these configurations are not exactly consistent and not always as obvious or simple as we might assume.

So, in summary:

Natural phenomenon: People are born with unique sex organs

Categories: “Male” and “female” traditionally, “intersex” more prominent recently, “eunuch”/“neuter” historically

Attributes associated with categories: sex organs visible at birth, sex organs currently possessed, presence/absence of Y chromosome, levels of “sex hormones” in the body

Race is a social construct

Race is another social construct that people might have a hard time recognizing because it is apparently rooted in physical reality - the physical differences that manifest in people due to their genetic ancestry are usually highly visible. The social construct of race is how we conceptualize this phenomenon when no two people (who aren’t siblings) share exactly the same genetic ancestry.

One thing that makes it pretty obvious race is a social construct is that the available categories we “sort” people into vary so greatly by time, place, and context that it’s difficult to even come up with an acceptable list. In everyday life, it seems like we in the U.S. tend to categorize race roughly by continent of genetic origin:

White (Europe)

Black (Africa)

Asian (Asia, sometimes including Oceana and the Middle East, sometimes these are their own categories)

Native American (Americas)

“Latino” is an interesting category. Technically the definition refers to national origin (someone of any race from a Latin American country), but people who only have genetic ancestry from those places are (sometimes, depending on context) considered Latino as well as or instead of Native American.

Notice how these don’t necessarily correspond to the options you can pick from on “official” forms, which for example sometimes include “multiple races”/“two or more races” as an option. In many other contexts someone who is multiracial is seen as being sort of half-categorized in each applicable race, regardless of if this accurately reflects their experiences.

Another way you can tell that “race” is a social construct is that it takes into account more than one phenomenon when “sorting” people. For example, religion and shared *cultural* ancestry has a long history of being tied to race. That is why Jewish people are (depending on context) considered a race even without all having a shared genetic ancestry. There are also Muslim minorities throughout the world today that are treated essentially as separate races locally.

Note that the categories used for race change over time. Catholic people were in a somewhat similar position to Jewish people at one time; remember that the U.S. didn’t have a president who was Catholic until JFK. Catholics were actually regularly targeted by the KKK, and anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments were closely intertwined. Another example is Moors, which is a racial category we don’t really hear these days, at least in the U.S. These were *technically* people of mixed Arab and European origins, but the term was also more widely used to refer to Muslims in Europe generally. Shakespeare’s character Othello is a famous character who is a Moor.

Another very heavily used attribute associated with race is a person’s physical appearance. Depending on context (such as before we had a good understanding of DNA), this might even be more important than genetic ancestry. For example, think about the “paper bag test” that was used in apartheid South Africa – if your skin is darker than a paper bag, you’re black, regardless of your parentage. On the other hand, there have been examples in more recent times of people being forced to change their racial identification because it was discovered that they had ancestors from a particular place, even though it was in no way evident in their appearance or recent family history.

So, in summary:

Natural phenomenon: People have unique physical characteristics based on their ancestry

Categories: White, Black, Asian, “PoC”, Jewish, Catholic, Irish, Moor, etc. depending on time, place, and context

Attributes: genetic ancestry, cultural ancestry/religion, physical appearance

Conclusion

So, this is how I have been thinking about the concept of “social constructs” - I make no claim that this is in any way “correct” but I have found it helpful and maybe others will as well. What this all comes down to is essentially a) “beware of stereotypes” and b) “knowledge can be validated either by accurately reflecting reality or by social agreement - don’t confuse the two”. 

Or if you need something simpler: “be respectful and believe what people tell you about their identities and experiences.”