#how can you use that term when you're fighting for people *not* to reproduce?

[fictionadventurer]

>:(

[northwest-cryptid]

Idk if I fully understand ffxiv being native-phobic? I just played through stormblood & what I got from that was colonialism bad, to put it in super simple terms. Like idk the entire point of it was liberate an oppressed peoples and give them back their homes? And maybe I missed it but I didn't see the Ala mhigans as being native coded or inspired?

You didn't see the Ala Mhigans being "Native Coded" because they aren't and yet Ala Mhigan clothes use Native patterns. You didn't see FFXIV being "Native-Phobic" because it's generally not, it likes to hide it's racism away in little pockets.

It's hard to see it when you're not used to seeing it. This isn't your fault, it's that you're looking in the wrong places.

This is the "Ala Mhigan Gown" it's being largely attributed to being "Ala Mhigan" it is not. It is Native.

These patterns are Native, and while I cannot claim exactly and exclusively which tribes use them I can say for certain that I'm Deer Clan Lakota and these patterns are ALL OVER my traditional Native clothing. To attribute our clothing to Ala Mhigo is wrong.

This pattern is being reproduced and sold as Ala Mhigan, as "Kimonos" and lastly, as cosplay.

And these patterns can be found across plenty of First Nation/Indigenous clothing and beadwork.

Like, here if you're curious:

Let's also quickly talk about the New World set,

This is just ugh. Believe it or not I like the pants, and the actual torso and shoes aren't bad either. IF (and this isn't the case) this set were to exclude the headdress and were to actually pay proper respect to Native design and culture I'd love it. I actually used to use this set in game minus the headdress obviously, but wouldn't you know it I'm literally Native. This feels like those party city costumes people make, and the parts it gets right are almost more upsetting because it's not being properly attributed to the right people despite knowing very well the devs clearly referenced actual Natives. Those straps on the pants for example are a very real thing, the clothing my father passed down to me has those, tipped with metal because it makes enough noise to scare off rattlesnakes since those were a threat for kids on the res. The colors and bead patterns also do follow a lot of various Native designs, though I find it harder to pin down these exact patterns.

You're looking at the plot, but that's not entirely where the problem lies; also sorry sorry but I can't overlook this. None of the story or plot justifies Zenos calling me a Savage. I do not care if he's the antagonist, that's a fucking slur. It's been used against me and my people for decades. It's been used against me when I was in middle and high school. So yes, even in recent times this is acknowledged as a slur by racist individuals seeking to cause us harm.

If you've never gotten into a physical fight that you didn't instigate only to have someone ask you "what are you gonna do savage? You gonna scalp me?" And then do the worst imitation of a Native war cry; you likely have no idea how annoying it is to see/hear even a villain in a video game call you a fucking savage, have this be hand-waved as kinda being whatever by the general public who don't deal with this kind of racism, and then furthermore when you go into FFXIV community spaces you see this blonde ass white boy being plastered up everywhere like "oh I wanna fuck him so bad" why do you want to fuck a racist?! He's not even hot. Any potential sex appeal he had left his body the second he uttered the word "savage" and you know the worst part? He's not real. Which means he didn't say that shit, someone at Square WROTE that into the game and really thought "hey is it okay to use a slur like this? Yeah it'll be fine no one is gonna know or care."

Can you IMAGINE if they had a villain drop the N word mid fight? You'd never hear the end of it I assure you.

I think the biggest issue is that people don't even know what Native is, they don't know tribes, they don't know patterns, they don't know our actual history.

You say you don't know how it's "Native-phobic" when it's racism and mockery of Natives is very apparent to Natives, but I can't fault you for it because you literally don't know what to look for.

I want to make it super clear I'm not mad at you, I'm upset that this game can get away with this shit because no one is actually educated on Native matters, culture, etc.

I hope this helps clear that up a little.

[cosmos-dot-semicolon]

⭐⭐⭐

Id love to hear your ideas if you have any you'd like to share! Either from stories you've put down or concepts you have in the spares drawer!

(⭐fanfic writers' commentary)

Hmm… spares you say..?

I wrote a lot of rough drafts for the other stories in my 'Fixing the Dice' collection (uncertain on the name still), but I didn't feel they were up to my standards so I never published them. I think I'd probably change some of their plots if/when I rewrite them, so I feel safe sharing these.

You probably won't see these exact concepts come to light though. sorry.

Thief is planning an escape route with Inventor. The story focuses on showcasing the tensions he has in the main campaign with the other contestants; I picked Inventor as the character for him to bounce off of because she's crafty in a different way, and picks up on the dungeons being rigged the fastest along with him.

I don't think I ever figured out whether Lady Luck was gonna come into it for the main story, but she does show up at the end and point a finger at Inventor to be like 'that's the guy you're trusting. lmao'

From what I remember this was the draft I liked the most. It was pretty tonally solid. I think I ran out of stamina when it came to writing because I was under so much stress at the time. Also I struggled a bit with characterisation between the two, since the dice tend to be a lot shorter on dialogue than Lady Luck and Jester.

I think Witch was supposed to have a live interview with Lady Luck on her own request, which, as you can predict, doesn't go very well against someone much more experienced in entertainment and rooting for your downfall. I think I might've also had another way earlier version of her doing some fighting and magic, but I never wrote that down

I quit that one because I didn't have much to really say in it. Maybe a theme of influencer culture versus the entertainment industry? I suppose, but I don't care about either of those. I had a couple of ideas about a discussion about peoples' beliefs in magic and luck and whatever, but that felt a bit out of hand for a study on Witch's personality, who's like. A instagram user

…maybe I could make that contrast of attitudes work, actually. Try and reproduce the vibe of Eric Andre's 'did Margaret Thatcher effectively use girl power'. It'd probably still be a bastard to work with, tone-wise, but who knows?

I like to write these stories with a pinch of my own insecurities as the driving force, and I didn't really have any regarding fame at that point, so Witch was really hard to brainstorm for.

Warrior… I wanted to have him play off Jester and Lady Luck at the same time. He was kind of hard to think of a 'deal' for since he's the simplest of the four contestants in terms of character, and doesn't really pick up on Lady Luck's subtle-not-subtle evilness. The idea was instead to make this was a hope spot in the series between him and Jester, and have him trust Jester to help them find a way out, which ultimately fails.

I really struggled to find a setting for this. In the draft I wrote, I settled on a game-show-mandated road trip (they get to touch grass for one hour) out of the dungeons in that fancy car on the wheel. But it just didn't really work well tonally at all, and I personally have no experience on awkward car journeying at all, so.

Inventor I'm actually rewriting now. I've been posting snippets of it on my blog, even, since I'm no longer in contact with some of the friends who used to be my beta readers.

I don't want to spoil its new premise, but I will say the tone has changed massively from 'let's watch this nerd run around in a saw trap and solve maths puzzles that imply that the universe and all knowledge in it is fundamentally doomed' to 'Inventor's urge to know about everything in the dungeons and the world' versus 'WHY ARE YOU ASKING HER ABOUT IT'. It's a slight change, but I think it works way better with the ending I'm planning to use.

It's got a bit of commentary about how the general public reacts badly to maths and you only find respite from that with people who have learnt it sorta deal. I think Lady Luck would be the kind of deity who definitely knows the rules of her domain, given she's the one who designs the puzzles in-universe and is otherwise quite crafty, but obviously doesn't want to tell anyone any of that.

Unless. Well, unless she can get a new minion out of it.

…It's a fun time. I promise c: Now I just need to do research to make sure everything STEM-related I put in there is correct…

Jester was going to fail backstage. A fun reminder of how I was one of the few people who failed that level first try because I didn't realise it was a gimmick fight until half-way through >.>

I struggled with writing the action in this, since that's not usually a focal point of my writing. I felt that it would be useful for building up tension to an anti-climax, and we could have he rest of the story be a sense of failure and being stuck in life, but what actually ended up being written down just felt like a really stilted tonal shift from one bit I felt was obligatory to another I actually felt like doing.

also it played a little to one of my personal headcanons of Jester having a one-sided crush on their boss, with the scraps of recognition they have keeping them going despite the fact they can't leave the dungeons. This was definitely the least canon-compliant thing I put in the series, but I think it's still an interesting concept.

I will be honest. I don't think I would've handled it well. relationship angst doesn't work well with Dicey's mostly lighthearted tone I think. Nowadays I'd rather explore it with the jokey Pride Month DLC my brain cooked up because 'toxic yuri' and 'turbo divorce' are among my favourite words in the English langauge.

…not to get too personal but I think I was kind of putting way too many of my fears into that first draft and using writing it as an unhealthy coping mechanism. so. uhh. yeah after I got called out on that I was a bit embarassed and stopped. I think I'm in a better position nowadays, but as a result of that I don't really have a solid idea of where the tone would go on that story if I wrote it now.

I never really figured out what I wanted to happen to Jester in that fic. One potential ending had them being forced to cohost, like they'd always wanted. Another has the confrontation with their boss just kind of end on an impasse as they refuse to break. I think there was a bit where Lady Luck offers them their own escape at the cost of everyone else, which they did definitely refuse.

A bonus: I think I wrote one story about Warrior helping Jester move into an apartment or something after they got released. It was supposed to be a thing about finally getting to live your life the way you wanted and whatnot. I stopped writing that because I couldn't fucking fit the tone with the fact they were 5 foot tall cubes in my head

[simowis]

Monthly nonsense 23.8

The original anti-heat silence was clearly a good idea, so why did the official version change it to contradict the machine.

Hugs relieve anxiety because humans secrete oxytocin during hugs. I'm curious how prothean regulates their feelings.How does Javik stay calm and self-aware in such a desperate situation?

The Javik in me has developed quickly. He’s a kind of polite in fact. And he is more easy to imagine than Vegeta.

Suppose Javik's prothean society is very conservative and he discovers that the Normandy's crew in this cycle eat, drink, gamble and smoke, and he himself is seduced by the commander for one-night..what a culture shock that would be!

He cannot say to the Normandy crew: mind your secretions, don't smear the whole wall!

What a dirty, rudimentary, primitive and dangerous Normandy! And it's still the most advanced ship in the cycle!

Having him in my dreams, thinking with him about everything in my life, surrounded by his stories, is sweet torment.

Personality shines brightest when it's hit the hardest. Javik, who was alone in his kind, had a very, very beautiful personality. I wondered how he was able to say each word so calmly and objectively, with his voice so dull and his forehead so full of sadness.

The same goes for the Prothean vi in Thessia. Just saying "you're doomed", a very honest statement of reality, aren't all Protheans just as ruthless in their words? Javik would probably reply "Yes, we are".But even then, he will fight to the last breath.

I could see that he was already drenched in despair, but there was still bright red blood in the cut, a leaping heart, an iron soul.…I just can't help being attracted to someone like this …

The love I'm in with him, fit the song "this kind of love" by鷺巣詩郎 so much. Yes. don't let it go away, never.

The game has too little Javik’s content!

The Reapers are really filled with malicious intent and have poor taste. Look at all these Husks, look at how long time they 'harvest' earth? Why not just a direct orbital attack?

Javik's 'leave you alone to face the reapers' strategy is to use this cyclically disobedient race as a discard, right? This strategy is still about retreating and buying time, it's still based on a desperate struggle, he wasn't thinking in terms of how to beat the reapers.

-

·Javik wonders why toilets are gender-specific ·Javik's dialogue about 'prothean women have a look in their eyes that men can't resist'. So my headcanon is: In short the breeding rituals are dominated by Prothean females. They have a mating season and a non-responding season, and whether or not they initiate is dependent on the pheromones and eyes of the female prothean. Their society is equal for men and women and not much different physiologically. When working together on a mission the female will determine which male is the best for her, and during the rutting season will invite the male with her eyes to spend the mating ritual with her, this is generally done as an honour and the male can't resist. After the breeding period the female lays several fertilised eggs, which are transported to a specialised breeding facility. For prothean children, the concept of parenthood is limited to that of a genetic giver, and it is the staff of the incubator who are closest to them. In the wake of the Reaper invasion, women, who have been charged with the greater responsibility of reproducing, may be less selective, and may drink pills to force ovulation and promote oestrus, so that they can perform as many mating rituals as possible in time for the war.

This may explains why Javik is so passive and says he's not a mate; but he doesn't refuse when Shepard invites him to spend the night at the party.

-

It's my duty to draw him better because I love him.

I've completely identified Prothean as a part of my people's culture.

Javik is very gentle.

Dreamed him again. He was having a speech among his people, he will be the last one, he promised, he will carry all of his men to live in the new cycle. Then the crowd seems peaceful and not afraid to die in the last battle.

Is this possible for Prothean don’t have the word “love” in their language but comrade is the closest word to it? …But all my cells are singing verses of love to him.

Prothean has so many undescribed gaps! Their society, their ideology, their racial personalities are all mine to draw. I can impose all my hypotheses on them.

It’s good to see my art make him live one more second in other people's head.

Why did his tights accentuate those vertical strips of yellow muscle he had? Were those parts exposed on the outside of the tights, or was the fabric thinner on those parts? Are the vertical strips of muscle parts necessary for contact with the outside world? Like his exposed fingers and knees?

Today is the lover’s day but I haven’t prepared the thing for him i’m sorry….

Satisfied, I have wrote good piece. For him, for shep also. That’s my Javik, and that’s my Shepard. He will be good end with this Shepard, giving him the word called hope. She will do more things for him than in game, for the hope she promises like me.

I found out that there is a special memory leak isolated mission in citidal. Rumour has it that the arena is built on a prothean graveyard. Maybe this is the 'game' Javik was talking about in his cycle?

A myriad of feelings condensed into one, but in the end there was only deep gratitude for him - and love, lots and lots of love.

I noticed that Javik, the other Protheans, and the Prothean's HUSK all have golden eyeballs. Are their signature colours gold and red? Were the buildings of their heyday gold? I have the feeling that Javik would fit in quite well with the gold colour.

What may sex between protheans like?

So little people understand him, no matter, I do.

[laryna6]

Nobles reproduce asexually and non-pureblood nobles originated from true contracts.

In a true contract the noble and human's souls join together and kind of merge around the edges. When the human dies, the noble's ~immune system goes 'hang on there's a part of me that's blurred with another mind and this could be dangerous for keeping myself 'myself.'' - The biggest danger to immortals is going insane/mindless if they don't decide how they're going to be and then act like that person consistently - see the human concept of 'integrity.'

(That is where the noble concept of 'inelegance' comes from - the Latin root is 'eligere' or 'choice,' and calling someone inelegant is saying 'you're making bad choices and if you keep acting this way you're going to lose your selfhood.' People who don't value the selfhood and rights of others will get a habit of acting as though people don't matter, and this habit means they will apply that to themselves too, and eventually degrade into bugfuck nuts or just mindless things over the millennia.)

So post true contract the part-human soul piece gets budded off and manifests as a new noble. Those nobles are capable of having children which are also non-purebloods. There are some nobles who came from true contracts with species other than hominids, too. There aren't any part-werewolf nobles because werewolf mental defenses don't permit a foreign influence over their souls (at least not long term w/o fighting it off) and a true contract requires cooperation from both parties to form.

Living around nobles caused humans to select for the ability to control psychic energy - not just true contracts, but nobles ~leak aura and humans who could absorb that aura could use it for healing and communication even without having a contract themselves. That's why there are humans with powers in Rai's Adventure and why Shinwoo is so tough: they've been living in range of a noble.

Nobles are required by law to have red eyes so humans can identify them: the criminal noble in Rai's Adventure has blue eyes and Raskreia assumes that Frankenstein is a noble breaking the law because he has noble style eyes (nested pupils) that aren't red.

Non-pureblood nobles aren't as powerful as purebloods because their souls/energy forms are smaller and the human ability to control energy isn't as good as the noble ability - yet. If either Rai or Frankenstein were to die, the resulting noble would absolutely be as tough as a pureblood. Rai hasn't told Frankenstein that 'oh hey if I die there's going to be a baby' because he assumed the Previous Lord explained the birds and the bees of true contracts. Unfortunately, nobles not realizing 'oh hey I should use language to tell people important things' strikes again.

Before they picked up language from humans, nobles communicated by mind control - inserting concepts into the other noble's mind. And mind control isn't something to do lightly. A noble calling someone 'talkative' was originally not quite an insult, it was more like 'stop trying to control me or I will start stabbing you.' Because of the need for integrity to remain themselves over the millennia of immortality, a noble changing how they act/what they think is Serious Business. This is why Gejutel is stubborn AF and why he raised Regis to be the same way.

After all, the hierarchy of survival needs is very different for a species that doesn't need to eat or breathe and doesn't need to worry about dying from exposure when they can just manifest clothing, etc. The Landegre and Loyard clans dying wasn't impractical chivalry, it was 'if we stop acting as though people's lives have meaning then we will cease to be ourselves and that's worse than just going to sleep.'

My worldbuilding for how nobles and werewolves happened in Noblesse goes like so:

Nobles are energy/dimensional beings and the first one to achieve sapience, the original Lord, got very bored and wanted intelligent company. So he started looking for other intelligent life: he found other beings like him, but they weren't actually smart because they didn't need to be, they just floated around and existed.

Then he managed to filter signals out of the universal background noise, and found an intelligent species roughly similar to humanity - carbon based, evolved on an earthlikeish world, etc.

Unfortunately, they had developed the ability to modify themselves, and of course the rich and powerful were the ones to benefit and use it to become even more powerful/oppressive, while treating the people who couldn't afford to extend their lifespans like their lives were worthless.

Basically, they were making the same mistake the Union made: not valuing selfhood means losing selfhood when you're an immortal. Kindness, actual intelligence - the species was losing those traits by assholes killing all the non-assholes.

So the Original Lord was like 'shit I found people but I can't use them as a template for uplifting my kind because they're devolving into mindless things that just kill, which is even worse than being mindless things that just exist.'

So he created the original Noblesse to make sure that never happened to him (if he started looking down on his intellectual inferiors too much) or his kind.

Eventually he got sick of being alone, created a child, and then went into eternal sleep (went back to just mindlessly existing) as technically the second soul weapon (the Noblesse being the first).

That Lord was the one who went 'okay, this other species became intelligent from being in bodies on a planet' and pushed the rest of the nobles to manifest bodies on Earth and also put some of the descendants of that species there too in case that helped - which it sort of did, because the species that would eventually become werewolves attacked everything including the nobles, so they had to do/get good at *something* (fighting/self-defense) instead of sitting around like lumps.

After Earth developed its own life, that Lord saw that evolution was a thing and made it a rule that if you couldn't keep your body from being destroyed you had to go to eternal sleep. However even in the present day the youngest nobles are only sixth generation so they haven't had enough time for any real evolution to take place.

Nobles interacted/contracted with more species than just early hominids and gradually started to pick up how to think/solve problems from the minds around them, which accelerated when proto-humans came around and they started cohabitating. The Lord then ordered that nobles had to take human form because human brains were good at thinking.

Unfortunately, the werewolves were modified into chimeras that got the abilities of other species by eating them, and humans obviously objected to being eaten. But if werewolves didn't keep eating humans for their neurons their intelligence dropped back down. Nobles lent humans power so they could defend themselves and there was basically a werewolves vs. nobles/humans war until the Previous Lord figured out enough of werewolf biology that he could make them grow their own neurons and pass quasi-human bodies with brains down to their descendants. This is the result of a ~spell anchored in one of the noble sanctuaries and one of the reasons Muzaka was 'if we fight with the nobles and humans we don't win' when other werewolves were 'why DON'T we subjugate the inferior humans?' because forget fighting, the noble Lord could have turned off the array and lobotomized their entire species. (The Previous Lord did NOT pass any of this information down to Raskreia. None of the awake nobles know how their species originated except Rai, because the Noblesses have some programmed knowledge so they know what their job is.)

The rest of the werewolves didn't know about the array because like the nobles, they lacked any oral history tradition and the older werewolves didn't want to talk about how they once had no choice but to eat actual people because they were ashamed of it. Muzaka was told about it by the werewolf he defeated to become Lord.

So even though there are two other species on earth that are in theory very different from humans, they both think a surprising amount like humans because they're mostly using human brains to do it with, so there's no Lovecraftian 'these beings are so different from us we're just ants to them' and this is enforced because the Noblesse exists and their job is to go 'oh, so you think the powerful have the right to crush the weak? Alright, have it your way' before people who think that way can kill, or worse, influence others.

The concept of superior(gets to abuse)inferior is a predatory meme that already wiped out one sentient species - the modern werewolves are descended from that species, sure, but they're so different from them it would make more sense to call them humans than remnants of that species.

The nobles were confined on Lukedonia because they kept getting attached to humans and then as a species of immortals, not having any healthy way to deal with LOSING generation after generation of humans was really fucking them up. So the nobles still awake were quarantined on Lukedonia until humans became less fragile/achieved immortality and would stop dying on the nobles. The Previous Lord took most of his generation of clan leaders into eternal sleep so that their kids would have tons of problems and would have to get better at thinking to solve them. That's why he didn't want Raskreia to be Lord, because he felt guilty about how his entire plan for noble development was making the lives of the next generation of nobles as hard as possible, with them barely having any idea what they are or how their powers worked and then starting to interact with humans again when humans are predators and humans thinking nobles are shiny isn't necessarily going to end well for a noble once the average human is capable of fighting a noble without a contract.

So the project to uplift nobles is doing pretty well, but they still need to actually start talking to each other and passing on information. Given how good some oral traditions are, certain humans probably remember more about what things were like when nobles like Gejutel and Lagus were young than those nobles do.

The Union/Maduke's fascist 'family' need to be taken out before they do to this planet what happened to the original werewolf species.

Rai's brother tried to wipe out humanity because in their generation there were two noblesse and so their job got split in half, with Rai being tasked with internal threats and his brother with external. Rai's brother decided that humans were causing so many nobles to enter eternal sleep and humans were also possessive of nobles, so once humans evolved to be equal to nobles they'd probably try to subjugate them, so they had to be wiped out. Rai was 'the strong killing the weak is a much bigger danger to nobles than humans are' and ofc genocide is wrong, so Rai had to take him out. Some nobles who lost too many family to humans (those family members choosing to enter eternal sleep instead of staying awake with the noble family who loved them) were making bloodstones to support Rai's brother because of all the nobles who were attacking him to protect humans.

Rai's brother didn't want Rai to die, so the idea was to knock him out until he was done eliminating the humans and then make him eat a bloodstone to repair the damage. Most of the humans Rai's brother killed and the nobles who also died in the conflict were resurrected by the Previous Lord: there's an array that gathers human souls so they don't cease to exist on death that he created. It's powered by the array that drains the Lord's power in the throne room so they don't rip open the Earth's crust every time they lose their temper (see the two large blue crystals). He didn't tell Raskreia that the castle array does anything but protect Lukedonia from her power either.

Gejutel knows about the artificial afterlife but it wouldn't occur to him to tell anyone because talking is a fairly recent concept for him and doing it unnecessarily is being noisy. Raizel knows about it too but assumes Franken knows about it because Franken knows a lot of things. It's possible to resurrect them just like it's possible to wake up sleeping nobles. Unfortunately it doesn't work on werewolves because werewolves have defenses against getting engulfed by foreign energy fields and dragged out of their bodies, so werewolves actually die when they are killed.

[perfectly-balanced]

Thanos, I understand that you're trying to accomplish something good from your perspective, but I think you're overlooking the resilience of human nature. Even if the Earth gets destroyed humanity would be able to find a way to escape, to go to another planet or solar system perhaps. That's the beauty of human nature, we adapt under any condition and overcome to survive.

Since you have come to me with a rational, at least in comparison to others, approach, I am inclined to humor your argument.

Even though of course the very thought that you believe you were able to come up with an angle that I, an immortal all-powerful being, was not able to is still naive at best and insulting at worst.

Now, I have many counters to your points, as just about everything you said is deeply flawed under closer inspection. First of all, the human race isn’t the only species I did what I did for, far from it. So even assuming your arguments were correct, which they aren’t, the same couldn’t be said for all the other species.

As always, you humans remain self-centered and assume everything revolves around you, which is part of the problem that got you into this mess in the first place. To me, your kind is merely one infinitesimal grain of sand in the beach of the universe.

A particularly stubborn and irritating piece of sand, rougher than many of the others, mind you, and one insistent on getting into places it shouldn’t be, but still a single grain nonetheless.

Now, aside from that, as I said before I am immortal, which means I have been alive for a very long time. Long enough to have changed drastically since I was young.

I wasn’t always so intent on my current mission. Before I reached the conclusion that I would have to erase half of all life, I considered other options first. As in, all of them.

I was raised as a scientist, and so my first approach was naturally to eliminate all other possible solutions, the ‘nicer’ ones, first before resorting to drastic measures.

After my planet was destroyed, I traveled to many different worlds that were similarly on the brink of collapse, and ran experiments to test out my different options. Thousands of them. Even accounting for all of the variables, they all inevitably failed and the result remained the same: total self-destruction.

Believe me, I never wanted to harm anyone, and I never would have chose to do so without good reason. Had you known me as I was as a naive and helpful young man, you would believe me.

Now, from the experience of what I have observed and lived through, as well as just basic common sense, here is the truth. For convenience’s sake, let us merely talk about humans and Earth, since that is all you understandably know of.

The first flaw in your argument is that you are assuming that your planet will even see your own doom coming before it is too late. But all it takes is one event, one second to change everything.

For example, my own planet, Titan, appeared completely fine to the naked eye. It was only from studying and looking into the patterns and signs that I was able to predict what happened. But to anyone who simply lived there, everything seemed relatively fine.

Sure, there were massive population issues, as well as a shortage of food and other resources, but the same can be said for your planet, and you certainly wouldn’t consider that an apocalypse by any means.

Because you have grown up in a time when this is very normal, and likely haven’t had to deal with it yourself, slowly escalating warnings and catastrophes are expected for your society.

So even though your climate is changing and more damage is being done environmentally, you don’t take the increasing rate of hurricanes, floods, disease, starvation, fires and earthquakes to mean the world is ending. No, it is normal to you, what you have always known.

It is easier to get used to something when it is increased in gradual increments, and naturally humans as a whole are complacent in their ways of life until they are forced not to be, so as long as these inconvenient natural disasters are manageable, you will find a way to persevere through it. The sad fact is that most of you wouldn’t even notice your own total doom until it has already arrived.

After all, it is such an ugly concept that denial is truly the only option for most people until they are slapped in the face with the cold hard reality. But wouldn’t you rather take control of your own destiny for the better than to be at its mercy on its terms?

Regardless, as I was saying, on Titan things looked relatively fine on the surface, nothing to visually indicate the end of everything was near, which is why people were so quick to deny me. But I knew the truth, and just as I predicted, the first catastrophe to strike Titan came from the depths below.

Our planet’s surface was littered with cryovolcanoes, and our main center of population, the Eternal City, was surrounded by them. Everything seemed fine, up until the very moment when they erupted.

The initial wave of eruptions wiped out two-thirds of our population in one fell swoop. No one in their path even had time to escape. Most, I suspect, didn’t even see it coming. The spew of liquid nitrogen exploded miles above into the sky and flooded down, freezing the people solid until their corpses were reduced to broken little bits.

Unluckily for me but luckily for the universe, I was not on Titan during this time, as I had been banished into space by my own father, by my own government, for trying to help. I was spared the fate that so many suffered below me.

Of course, the volcanoes were merely the catalyst in a long series of resulting disasters that within days wiped out everyone who had survived that initial disaster. And that part I was there for but couldn’t ultimately do anything to help but put people who lay half-dead on the streets out of their misery.

The point is, chances are you won’t see destruction coming unless you know where to look and have the motivation, intelligence, opportunity and resources to look into it like I did.

But alright, let’s say for the sake of the argument that you are correct and enough people will see it coming. The first problem with that is that not everyone on Earth is of the same credibility and privilege.

Because you place your value socially on wealth and other material criteria, the smartest people are often not the ones in power. If someone smart enough to predict this sort of thing was able to in time, who’s to say anyone would even believe them?

Damn, you already have actual respected scientists on your planet coming forth daily with strong warnings, and no one of consequence listens or cares. Even citizens who do believe them forget about it quickly and go back to their daily lives and distractions. It’s all background noise until it affects them personally.

So somehow, the people who figured it out on Earth would need to convince the governments, the powers that be, of their validity, just like I had to try to do on Titan and many more planets.

And in my case, I was actually the son of the ruler of Titan, so I had the connections to back me up. On Titan our higher classes consisted of the most intelligent individuals rather than the wealthiest, and you would think rational men would be easier to convince of the truth than those who could profit from denying it, but alas.

All in all, even though I was not popular among my people, I still had more in my favor than a human would as your leaders are often corrupt and foolish and uneducated on scientific matters. I had all those advantages going for me, and yet I still wasn’t able to convince my government. That bodes ridiculously ill for the average human.

But again, let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the best case scenario despite all reasoning. The next problem that comes up is that even if both the masses and the government do listen, the result is that only people with power and influence will be able to save themselves.

Rest assured that were the apocalypse on your door, the only people who would be able to buy a ticket off your planet would be the people who could literally buy a ticket off your planet. And trust me, it wouldn’t be cheap.

Why should it be the rich and powerful who get to live on to continue humanity’s legacy, when they are quite plainly the worst among you, the ones who got you into this mess in the first place? Would they not just repeat the same mistakes on their new planet?

The human race would quickly die out in these hostile foreign conditions not meant to host them, seeing as these are not the best of you to begin with. Your chance of survival as a race would die out with these people who do not carry the necessary traits for survival and are not qualified to represent you or anything greater than their own self-interest.

Keep in mind as well that these people are mostly older since the elderly tend to be wealthier, so they would not be able to reproduce very quickly if at all and would not have a lot of time to actually implement their changes to a new planet that they would need to terraform it to be suitable for human life. All signs point to them being one of if not the last generation regardless of leaving Earth.

Which brings me to my next point. Would those who escaped not just end up destroying other planets, either quickly or in the future? How is that fair to other planets, to other species even who may get invaded and corrupted by those unpleasant humans who were rich enough to escape?

Why continue the cycle to its bitter end until everything is gone and ruined, when my plan halts that downward spiral completely? Sure, you get to live, but at what cost?

As I said, I don’t only care about whether humanity lives on, but life as a whole. If humanity surviving means other life being negatively affected, then the choice is very clear to me which takes priority.

You see, you self-righteous humans who fight me claim to desire only to preserve the life I will take, but the truth is you think only of preserving your own lives and, selfishly, the people you care about, not life itself.

Which yes, saving loved ones first is still selfish because you only wish to save them because you personally would be affected by their absence. You save your children from me, yet you give no thought to the futures you leave those same children you leave behind.

The truth is that you only have selfish reasons for saving yourselves. You, the generations who have ruined the Earth to begin with and left this mess for others to clean up.

But then you get mad when I, a person with the desire and ability to fix things, come around and do exactly that cleaning for you. You are simply unhappy because you have to live to see it instead of shifting it off to your descendants once its not your problem anymore.

They deserve a voice advocating for their best interests too, you know, arguably more than you do, and I will always seek to stand up for the little guy, the ones those in power overlook and bully.

Just like the rich people who would leave this planet behind and go off to a new world, you, the very generations who have caused this mess, would simply ‘leave’ to a peaceful death content in being able to preserve your own moral self esteem and leave everyone else behind to suffer.

These people will die either way. At least with my plan, they disappear painlessly, with a snap of my fingers, a merciful end compared to the prolonged suffering and fear and confusion you would leave them with. I do not wish to cause them pain, they simply cease to exist in order to be spared a torturous life.

As I said before, I am old, and so this truth is all very apparent to me. I see the long game because of my age and experience, so quite frankly I care more about maintaining a future overall than I do about your individual happiness right now, because the generations of the past and present have done nothing to deserve what you would leave those of the future with.

The future is innocent and savable, seeds of potential and hope, whereas you are sinful and damned and your plight self-inflicted through selfishness and ignorance and laziness.

I know because I have seen it time and time again. I have not only thought this out, but lived it, for millennia upon millennia. Can you say the same? Do you have any right to call me crazy or deluded when you’ve never been through what I have?

I know people have taken to calling me 'mad’, but I am not insane, as many would have you believe. Especially because you simply cannot use human terms like 'crazy’ to compare to me because I am not human, and cannot be compared. There is no human word for my state of consciousness, it is beyond anything you could ever even comprehend.

And so the word 'insane’ as it relates to me is not only false but irrelevant because humans have no idea what it is like to live for thousands of years or the kind of change in perspective that brings when you can see the bigger picture outside of your own existence.

It brings wisdom, and eventually you reach a point where you achieve the highest form of yourself possible. I have already reached that potential through all of my experience.

I am a visionary, and historically, visionaries have not been treated the best. They all get called insane in their time, simply for seeing the larger story and daring to defy the norm.

So for you, a human who has never had to think about anything outside themselves, to consider life as a whole beyond the eighty or so years of your own life, my ideas seem mad. Because they affect your whole life, and to you, based on your perspective, eighty years is a long time, so obviously it seems much more harsh than it is objectively.

But the truth is, your individual eighty years don’t matter in the grand scheme of things once you are gone, and whether you’d like to believe it or not, the world doesn’t stop once you and everyone currently around you is dead. Your legacy continues only through the new generations who you have set up to take your place.

To you it might not matter what happens in the future because you won’t be around to see it, but for me, I see it all, generation after generation, and so each one is all the same to me.

I am not blessed with the same ignorance as you, I have been cursed with responsibility and opportunity that cannot be overlooked. Your flawed if noble intentions to preserve your lives matter to you, but not everyone is human and not everyone sees things that way.

There is an order to the universe, one that mortal beings have no business meddling in because they cannot fathom the big picture, how everything connects. 

And so like your gods from your religions on Earth, you simply must trust in your higher powers and believe that they have a grand design in mind that makes it all worth while, such as the Christian god did when he flooded Earth, an objectively cruel and vengeful act, for the greater good.

Which, curiously, people still defend him for and worship him regardless yet hate me for doing the same thing. You wouldn’t question whether you know better than a god, who can see all ends and beginnings, so why do you question me, for whom the same can be said?

The answer, I can tell, is simply because you do not like me on a personal level, and because it is easier to defend the actions of a god that occurred in the past and which you are standing on the other side of unaffected. Which is a foolish reason.

I have always said that if any of your very gods came down to Earth and stood before you, they would be rejected, attacked, defied, just like Christ himself was, to use another Christian example.

Society hated Christ in his time, it was only with the benefit of hindsight that people realized and appreciated his divinity, his pure intentions, the necessity of his actions, just like those of his 'father’s’.

Like the Romans, you may crucify me now, but my work has been accomplished and your future generations will thank me for it whether you like it or not. History will look down upon you, the selfish and misguided blasphemers who tried to save themselves at the cost of goodness.

Now, I believe I have explained everything adequately, so I will leave you with one final thought to counter your last claim.

If you humans are so resilient and capable of adapting under any circumstance, why weren’t you able to adapt to my snap? I agree that you are able to adapt theoretically, but your choices and refusals to adapt play a bigger role than your potential capabilities.

So long as you are unwilling, you will not adapt. The same applies to any potential disaster situation you are referring to if I were to have not intervened and let nature run its course.

Accept it, you will always deny and cling to your ways to the bitter end, unless you are forced to change. In this case, you were forced by me. You’re welcome.

[bookgeekconfessions]

(1)HI. First of all, I would like to say this: Lots oif things that you mentioned happened a long time ago. As far as I know, nobody today had a slave, or was a suffragette. So why does it matter? I think you're awesome for standing to be equal! I want to help everybody be equal too, but as a white girl, I am not going to apologise for things that happened in the past that I was not involved in. Another thing I've noticed is that while black people can be proud to be black,

(2) White people cannot be proud to be White. Also, the slave trade was originally started by Africans enslaving other Africans, so you can't blame everything on white people. Its still racism when its directed at white people! As of today, there are racist white people and racist black people. Finally, I would like to note that I am only 13, and I apologise for anything I've got wrong. Please correct me if I'm wrong. 

(3) Also I'm British, and don't really know too well whats happening in America so again, my apologies for anything I've got wrong.

Hey Anon,

I would usually ignore a message like this, but you say that you're thirteen and if that's true it will be easier to get my point across to a young brain over a 33-year-old brain that has been steeped in privilege for decades.

First of all, whoever told you that slavery began in Africa catered the truth to their whims. Those are "alternative facts," if you will. The truth is that slavery in some form or other has existed probably since the dawn of humanity, but I think it will take someone more than me to trace it back to its origins. That being said, the ancient Greeks had slaves, as did the Romans, the Egyptians (yes in Africa) and the Vikings had slaves just to name a few of the ancient societies. These slaves were usually spoils of war and were not based on racism as we know it now, meaning it was based on army strength.  If the Vikings raided your lands and you were not strong enough to stop them(few were) they would take your women and children back with them as slaves.

While slavery is not Ok in any form those wounds were very different as the ancient Viking, Roman empires, etc fell.

The transatlantic slave trade, which is the slave trade that polluted the western world started with the Portuguese in the 1600s and continued until the 1800s on record, but really it was around 1900s when the governments of the world were forcefully policing their laws.

The transatlantic slave trade was one of the most evil practices in the world because it happened purely because white people of Europe and later America decided that Africans were not humans. I have yet to hear of any other group having slaves for this reason. There were slaves based on religion, based on the outcome of wars, etc but to look at a set of people who bleed, feel pain, reproduce in the same exact way and say "well, they're not human so we can do ANYTHING we want" is a kind of evil so deep it can't go away quickly. Especially, because unlike the Roman Empire those societies did not fall.

Instead, freed slaves were expected to assimilate into the very slavery that enslaved them. Unfortunately, hate doesn't just disappear because of law. White peoples owned black people, is it realistic that the same generation of ppl would be able to look at their old “property” as equal? No. Could the next generation? No, they were raised by the slave owners. So for around 100 years black ppl had a sort of freedom but no real rights or opportunities. They were put into societal Cage  of "this little bit of the world is for you while the rest of it is for white people, because your skin was dark."

Then in the 1960s black Americans began to fight for their rights. We had a new branch of young people who decided that they were not ex-slaves or less than, they were equal and so they decided to fight.

Remember, I am talking about less than 100 years ago. My grandmother was alive when black people couldn't drink from the same water fountain as white people. My mother was raised in early integration America where white people had to grudgingly live side by side with her and they didn't like it.

So really, my siblings who range from 34-16 and I are the first in our family to grow up in a world where black people and white people living side by side is normal.

Saying that these things happened sooo long ago is oversimplifying a complex issue. I don't know where in England you live but I have family in London and they have stories of racism and injustice just as we do in America.

I am black, college educated and work on a  Netflix television show. I am one of three black people in the office of writers and editors, the crew of the show is more diverse. I had my first internship when I was 16 years old and since then I have always worked with a majority of white people. My classmates at NYU film were 150 in my class and five maybe ten of those students were black and none were black men.

I tell you this to give you an example of what I am working with as a person of color in this country. A person who looks like me achieving success is still not the rule, I am the exception to the rule. And, that's because the inequality from slavery still trickles down. Our hair that grows naturally out of or our head is very kinky, and for some women (like me) our hair is difficult to take care of so many of us get things like dreads. Dreadlocks are cultural and also practical and yet businesses are allowed to fire us for our hair and the way it naturally grows out of our head. Why? Because we are still seen as savages. Our hair styles seeen as less than, or improper.  Imagine if the government said it was ok to fire someone because their hair is black or brunette. Think about how much work goes into dyeing your hair blonde. There is bleaching and color dye that are the opposite of healthy for your hair. That is the same for the practices that help black people straighten their hair.

We are given the option of damaging our hair with products that have chemicals in it that can cause cancer or not hold down a job. This is a very small aspect of what we live with but this is racism and white supremacy in modern times.

Oh! And to answer your question...No, black people cannot be racist. Neither can Native Americans, Latinos, etc.  That is a myth that white people like to use in order to make themselves feel better. Racism is a system that disadvantages people based on race. It says that certain people are better, because of the color of their skin and therefore are superior and deserve to live superiorly. POC can not be racist in our current society because they do not have the power to be superior. Everyone CAN be prejudiced. But, my prejudice cannot affect the livelihood and safety of a white person. Which is why the term “reverse racism” is false. 

Black Pride is about having pride in your culture, in your history, in your past and how far you have come. It’s saying yes, we do not have all the opportunities and we have a horrible history, but look, we are overcoming! Sure, white people are still saying that we’re not as beautiful, that our looks are not the ideal and that our hair is nappy and ugly, but we are made of magic and we are beautiful. White pride says that you are better than other races. You can be proud to be British, you can be proud to be American, you can be proud to be Irish, you can be proud to be Jewish, or Catholic, etc. But, if you are proud to be white, what does that mean? What is the shared history of white people? What exactly would you be celebrating? 

Anon, I hope you read this whole message as I wrote it specifically for you and I hope you understand a new point of view. We are still a long way from equality because the descendants of slave owners still do not see us as 100% equal.

Sincerely,

Naomi