#i am so fucked up in so many very specific ways

[whatifchilchuckwasadog]

hi not to derail i just am filled with the need to really highlight the "i'm not going to attempt to pronounce this" issue. it pisses me off so much for so many reasons.

do you not know how to look things up. if you don't know how to look up pronunciations why am i listening to anything you're saying. you clearly didn't look stuff up you're just talking out of your ass

i don't care if it's unfamiliar to you. everything is unfamiliar for someone every day. are you a coward? or just, in many cases, racist?

it's not even always racist (i grew up with a "difficult" name with english origins in the united states, i'm white, most people mispronounced it and because of demographics of where i grew up and the circles my parents ran in, most of them were also white) BUT it is always disrespectful. if someone tells you face to face how to pronounce their name and you won't do it correctly or if you assign them a nickname without their consent you're an asshole. imo the most respectful thing you can do if you really truly cannot pronounce their name is just to try it a few times to make sure you get it right, ask them to correct you, and then use their name regularly the first few times you see them even if you don't use people's names often so it sticks in your brain. no one i've ever met with a "difficult" name has ever posed an issue with this, and it's personally my preferred way to be approached.

if it's something you found in a book or on the internet and you haven't heard people pronounce it - there are websites for that. there are websites where people pronounce things for you. practice it. it's not going to kill you to look up how to make certain ipa sounds. you aren't on such a strict schedule that you can't spend 5 minutes googling and practicing.

this one isn't even about respect to where the word is from it's just about respect for your viewer. i mostly encounter this in video essays. video essays are really good background noise. i get to learn things while i work or do chores. it's great! but if you make me put down what i'm doing because you're a slimy little bastard who refuses to respect other people to go and rewind your video to where you had it on the screen, i'm really just as likely to pick a different video by someone who has more respect for their subject and their audience.

youtube should give viewers the option to grade video essays like it's a high school english class assignment and if the median grade is below passing then they stick a huge png over your video advising that this is a vlog with slide show components. if the youtuber ever goes "umm. I'm not going to attempt to pronounce this" at any point then they're genetically altered to be able to survive underground and let loose in an endless series of catacombs built beneath their home to live the rest of their life as the fabled town troll.

[interact-if]

Black History Month Author Spotlight: Lapin

To kickstart the Black History Month Author Spotlight series, I'd like to introduce everyone to our first IF author, Lapin (@harlequinoccult)!

(I had a ton of fun reading Lapin’s answers, and I’m sure you will too! Read on for a celebration of ‘weird,’ Lapin’s Black southern gothic / horror influences, and how a D&D game could lead to interactive fiction!

Lapin, thank you again for your candid, humorous responses, I am very honored to have gotten to know you better :D)

Author: Lapin

Black creole and cajun, artist and writer, and wannabe game developer

Games: Slaughter Squad (Horror, Slasher, Romance)

Synopsis: YOU HAVE A HUNGER A HUNGER THAT YOU’VE BEEN NEGLECTING For the most part, you’re a pretty normal mid-20-something year old who lives in a shitty apartment in the city. Well, except for one thing. Your.....”Associate” Carter “Dollface” Abernathy. Who is a murderer, and quite frankly, a sloppy one at that. And you’re the accessory to his crimes. No matter what way you’ve gotten to know the man, or how you feel about him, you’re stuck with him, and stuck with just being his little “helper” ........Or are you? Especially when you’re suddenly given a....Unique opportunity.

Games: The Valley of Luck (Fantasy, Adventure, Romance)

Synopsis: The Valley of Luck was said to be a myth. Something that grandparents would tell their grand-kids around a campfire. Even those who worshiped Lucian, The God of Luck, thought it nothing but an old wives tale. Until, one day, a man with an arm made of solid gold started telling people that he'd been there, that he'd seen the Valley. Word spread quickly, and suddenly, every continent was alight with the rumor that The Valley was real, that it could give you all the riches you could ever want, and then some. However, your quest, whether related to The Valley or not, will lead you down a much stranger path.

Quote from the interview:

My upbringing was a bit odd. I am the youngest of three, two older brothers, one being a half brother, in a black military household… Middle school Lapin was a jock. But, lo and behold, the internet started getting more popular and that kid's brain exploded from internet exposure, for better and for worse. … I feel that there is a specific and niche demographic of people like me that were raised by early 2000s to 2010s internet. And on that era of internet, were creepypastas, online horror, early ARGs….I ADORED internet horror, which was my gateway into classic horror, funnily enough. Slaughter Squad, in my eyes, is a letter to that black kid that wanted to be weird. Be weird, be messy, see a fucked up movie, get more out of life.

Read on for the full interview!

Tell me more about yourself! What are some things new readers or long-time readers might not know about you?

Both parts of my family are 100% from Louisiana, New Orleans and the deep south. My moms side have been there so long, we have two streets named after us.

Can you tell me a bit about what you’re working on right now and your journey into interactive fiction? What inspired the game/story you’re currently writing?

My main project, of course, is Slaughter Squad. I love slasher movies and horror media in general. But what I always noticed with horror/romance, at least in the visual novel scene, is that the main character is nearly always the one getting screwed over, so I thought, well, what if the bad guys actually are your peers? How would this dynamic change if they don't see you as prey? I never thought that premise would appeal so much to so many but hey, I can't complain! I adore seeing people having fun with the silly little concept I had.

Now, my secondary project, The Valley of Luck. Some may not know this, but this story is based off of a D&D campaign I DM'ed back in the day with my friends. All the ROs are NPCs that my friends had, or where going to encounter. I won't lie, I did shy away from it and changed some things when the whole debacle with Wizards of the coast (the company that "owns" D&D) Where making some...questionable decisions. But this story is my baby. My first born. This one has been in the works far longer than SLSQ and has a lot of background lore that I hope I get the opportunity to share.

I do have a few other projects bumping around, One I am particularly excited for, But that one will have to wait a little bit~

How has your identity, heritage/background, upbringing, or personal experiences influenced your storytelling or writing process? OR How does your work feature aspects of your identity / experience?

My upbringing was a bit odd. I am the youngest of three, two older brothers, one being a half brother, in a black military household. I never felt that I truly had a sense of identity until that household inevitably split up. Everyone talks about being the weird kid in middle school, but no one mentions being the "normal on the outside but wants to be the weird kid so bad its painful on the inside but can't because you were told that stuff is 'white people shit' " type of kid.

Middle school Lapin was a jock. But, lo and behold, the internet started getting more popular and that kid's brain exploded from internet exposure, for better and for worse. I was a little shitter on the internet, I can't lie about that, as much as I want to. But I feel that there is a specific and niche demographic of people like me that were raised by early 2000s to 2010s internet. And on that era of internet, were creepypastas, online horror, early ARGs....I ADORED internet horror, which was my gateway into classic horror, funnily enough. Slaughter Squad, in my eyes, is a letter to that black kid that wanted to be weird. Be weird, be messy, see a fucked up movie, get more out of life.

What does your writing process look like? Any rituals or habits? Any tips, tricks, philosophies or approaches that have worked very well for you?

Let your characters speak through you like you're being possessed by a demon.

What’s the one thing you’re really proud of that you’ve written so far? Do you have a favorite character or scene that you’ve written?

I am so serious.

is it wildly inconvenient? yes. does it help your writing a ton? also yes. Doing Roleplay with friends is a fantastic way to learn to do this. being a DM for a D&D game has basically made it so characters can simply speak from my brain at any given moment. It's also annoying because some of these people do NOT shut up. Learning how a character would react on the fly does wonders for dialogue writing and character analysis. Roleplay with your friends, or hell, strangers who are down to clown that could become friends. Be cringe. be free.

I love the opening to Slaughter Squad and if you told me to rewrite it with a gun to my head I would tell you to shoot me. I love how punchy it is and it came out exactly how I wanted it to. I don't play favorites with characters (<- lying) but my two favorites to write are the stinky little bastard cat Sterling in TVoL and.....Carter, from SLSQ. I love writing complete bastards. One being lighthearted and gets a pass for it because he's just a kitty cat and the other you want to actively beat his face in with your bare hands. It's SO funny.

If you were to say one thing to your readers, other authors, and/or the interactive fiction community: what would it be?

Write. Write it now. Doesn't have to be good doesn't have to be polish all that matters is that you WROTE IT. All the bells and whistles can come later!!!! Stop thinking about the later and think about the now!!!! Write what you love and never give two shits about if it's cringe!!! Be excellent to each other!!!

Any books, music, movies etc. you’re obsessed with at the moment, or which changed your life (or perspectives on something)?

GO LISTEN TO CHROMAKOPIA BY TYLER THE CREATOR RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!

This-or-that segment: (bold = Lapin’s pick)

Coffee or tea?

Early mornings or late nights?

City or countryside?

Angsty or Cozy romances? (Or enemies-to-lovers or best-friends-to-lovers?)  

Steady progress or frenzied binge-writing followed by periods of calm?

Summer or Winter?

First drafts or editing?

Introvert or extrovert?

Plotter or pantser?

Characters or plot first?

Lapin’s custom “this-or-that” pairing: Rain or Shine

More on Black Southern Gothic:

Black southern gothic can vary a lot, but when I think of it, I think of old semi abandoned wood shotgun houses in the swamp, all white tiny baptist churches where the white paint is peeling from the heat and humidity, riding horses down a dirt paved street while people still ride by in their old busted down 1960s chevys. Old plantation houses that have been reclaimed by the swamp. The dark, humid heat of the night on a street with no streetlights. Every house you see is absolutely haunted by something and not just ghosts. Voodoo and hoodoo is different than what people will tell you it is.

Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo by Ntozake Shange, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jessamin Ward, and anything by Toni Morrison 100%.

[rxttenfish]

Asking because I’m extremely curious about this, how did MonProm’s writing get different over time? I remember you saying that the lore and characters feel different, and that it's missing sincere character interactions, too. I know almost nothing about the lore and I’ve only seen a few people mention the characters, so I’d be interested in a rundown of what aspects you think got worse in the series

I wouldn’t mind a very long response since I’m not that active in the fandom, I need to catch up on what happened

sorry for taking so long to answer this! i kinda waffled on it for a long bit, mainly because i started doubting myself again, and whether or not this was me simply overreacting or being tinted by nostalgia or simply being extremely picky and choosy in what i like (the last of which is true, i seldom get into fandoms at all for this reason and stay away from most popular media, but i wasn't sure if it applied here). i've posted about it already, but i'm in the middle of a psychotic episode where i can't feel a lot of pleasure to begin with + most things i do experience ending up solidly in the "very bad" category, so as you can imagine, i really didn't want to mislead and check that i was actually in objective reality.

as it is, this is also when a lot more screenshots started to be posted in the monster prom tag, and that helped me bridge the gap back into returning to the games themselves and feel like i was making a more accurate judgement. if you're one of those people who have been posting screenshots, i sincerely thank you, and i appreciated seeing you in the tag greatly.

for those not in the know — i've been in the monster prom fandom since it first released, prior to even the first additional ending to be added (the "Punch the sun" ending, and i recall the minor fandom drama that happened at that time due to it). my impression of monster prom is very much influenced by this, as what got me into the first game was the fact that the characters genuinely seemed to care for each other and were friends with each other (not merely tolerating each other's presences nor dressing it up, they sincerely thought of each other as friends and were open about that fact), on top of the wide variety of small details and statements that, if taken at face value, could create compounding complexity in the lives of each and every character and had wider implications for their lives.

no, they were not necessarily explored nor even necessarily "real", with so many conflicting events and statements, but i liked this too, because it meant a wider flexibility in what you could imagine, helping to create a more tailored experience for everyone who thought about these characters. this was what i liked about the early fandom too. what was baseline "canon" was so vague and minimal that you could have wildly different interpretations of the same characters' histories and relationships with each other. you would have radically different perspectives on what the world itself looked like, what it was like, that there wasn't really any wrong answers so long as their personalities remained the same. this is where you got the old headcanon of polly and liam being childhood friends who knew each other as humans, or that the world of monster prom was post-apocalypse where humanity itself had gone extinct or only existed in tiny pockets, or my personal headcanon that both monster and human society existed right next to each other and had minimal crossover for petty cultural reasons. this was also prior zoe-as-ro, and there were wildly different interpretations of zoe's personality, with most going for a far more disquieting creepy-cute than the deep nerd we got.

this is why you get stuff like the timeloop theory, where everyone is repeating the same weeks leading up to prom over and over, and are perhaps vaguely aware of it but broadly unconcerned. this is also why it felt like the joke that, the characters were still in high school but were all fully legal adults with most in their 20's, best landed, because it was absurd and strange and didn't quite make sense, but the world itself was inherently absurd and semi-malleable to begin with. realistically, i felt like everyone understood it was making fun of the trope of having adults play teenagers in american sitcoms and wildly casting outside the age range, but for more in-universe explanations it wasn't any different from the way that you would have a large, dramatic ending in which everything changed, but then you'd restart and everyone would be right back at the beginning with nothing different, or even having conflicting events in the same run. it was a dream-logic that fit with the tropes and, thus, diagetically made sense.

to be clear, i don't mind canon having a set, well, canon on which it refers back to itself. i don't mind expanding that or including more things which are set in stone. but there was a perceivable shift in how the games handled this over time, becoming a lot more... bitter, it felt, towards all of these different branching ideas and concepts that, yeah, the people making them knew wouldn't necessarily be "canon" because "canon" already liked to contradict itself so much. most people weren't even sold on any one idea, and there was a much greater sense of enjoying and appreciating all the varying ideas people would come up with even if you personally didn't share them. making the characters be out of character was the real crime, because then it didn't diagetically make sense in the same way, didn't wholly fit.

(again, this is not to say fanon didn't happen and characters weren't smoothed down into a simplified personality that fit these varying fan-interpretations instead of the game itself. certainly damien love/lust was just as bad as it had ever been, and everyone loved to mangle his character into a more stereotypical "bad boy with a heart of hold" all the time. but it certainly felt less set-in-stone about it than it does now, with any deviation from the norm being considered strange and odd and even broadly shunned from the wider fandom.)

all of this is setup for establishing what the writing, lore, and characters felt like in the earlier days. the characters were the strongest part, with their relationships to each other being equally as important. the lore played it fast and loose and was far less interested in setting anything in concrete because that wasn't the important part. the lore wasn't the important part, which was what made it all the more intoxicating to think about, all the more fun to play with.

montrip is easily the biggest offender when it comes to setting everything in all-or-nothing terms and demanding absolutism from the world. broadly i blame the hitchhiker conversations for the worst of it, but i think ultimately the way they handled the entire premise of the game is where this problem stems from. it's not really an exploration in the same sense that you might explore the first game, discovering different perspectives and different people with different relationships to each other. it's an exploration in the sense of a sequel that over-explains the monster, that takes the most boring option out of all those that were possible and floating around and settles on something that was blatant, obvious, typically rejected not because of how novel it is but how trite and par for the course it is in the rest of the genre.

yeah, okay. humans know nothing about monsters and there's a "monster dimension" that exists separately from the human dimension. there's no crossover between the two of them. of course there's a big grand-scale fight between the eldritch powers that zoe used to be a part of, from which not only are slayers the main organization against them, but also the merkingdom has some horse in this race too. it's an urge to make things so universal in explaining them, in revealing connecting threads which unite everything that's ever happened in here, that makes the worldbuilding and lore immediately much more boring than it ever was before.

and it didn't have to be this way! nothing in the first game contradicts any of this too explicitly (see the above, the first game loves to contradict itself), and i would even be happy if this was basically canon but never stated or confirmed to be the big overarching everything going on underneath it all. i believe you should probably know these things about any world that you create and have them in the back of your mind. the difference is that you can know these things and keep them in mind, even focusing on things where its very relevant, and still not reveal them. this is why you have lore bibles, after all. every horror writer knows exactly how their monster works and the full underlying reason for everything that happens, but that doesn't mean the audience will see it or possess this same information too, and leaving it intentionally obscure will make far better stories.

which, this is bad enough, but it wouldn't be the breaking point for me if this was all there was.

but the worst thing of all has to be the slow decay of the very same characters that sold me on this world, this lore, this game in the first place. monster prom is nothing without the characters in it. it's a dating sim, it has nothing but characters to get you to play, and liking these characters are the entire reason anyone would pick up monster prom in the first place.

and the first game pulls this off extremely well. it's all in the tagline: be your worst self. they are, indeed, all terrible people. yes, even that character that you just thought of right now. they all have points in the game where they commit atrocities, where they kill or hurt people, where they do inexcusable things that could not be ignored in a more serious setting.

but that's the point. i think there's something very powerful in creating a character who not only do you love and love their personality and the way they interact with the world, but who also are inapologetically terrible, and to have the humor and the charisma be so good that you don't get bogged down in the "this is awful". likewise, it never feels the urge to really go out of its way to justify what's going on. this is not to say theres no discussion of if someone "deserved it", but usually there's still the sense that the joke is on them, that this is still an extreme reaction specifically for comedy and not necessarily something that can be justified. you can have damien set leonard on fire and have it feel earned, without prompting the needed reaction of what it's actually like to watch someone burn to death.

this is what sets the prank masterz ending apart from the rest of the game, and really establishes it as the first real "bad ending". because nothing that you do or happens in the prank masterz ending is any different from anything else that happens in any other run. you summon evil beings from other dimensions as a throwaway gag on how visiting one location raises your stats. you kill other people and damn them to terrible fates. you watch as body horror happens. the only difference is that, in the prank masterz ending, the laugh track doesn't play.

the rest of the game and the writing echoes this philosophy, this careful interplay of tropes that keeps everything tongue in cheek and yet sincere enough to make sure emotional beats still land when they're needed. the characters feel true to themselves and their own emotions, even when the world is extreme and excessive, when everything else runs on comedy logic.

this is also what i noticed failing first as time went on.

like i said, fanon has always existed and there's always been very specific ideas as to what characters are like in the same way fanon always flattens down characters into the same tropes over and over. scott is stupid and innocent and doesn't know what sex is. damien is violent and hot and too cool for anyone else. miranda is the idiot girl character. repeat over and over and over until you get sick of it.

but it's been an issue as time has crept on that canon has started to approach fanon and began to merge with it. now, scott is so innocent that he can't even curse. polly starts being mean to her friends and saying things that would be very hurtful to hear. the merkingdom isn't really super evil and fucked up, it's just miranda that's like that. they become simpler, easier to digest, streamlined for social media posts and mass-sharing. they become less and less subversions of existing tropes and moreso just another example of them, something else to add to the collection, not their own individual stories.

even further from this, what more complex traits they had are now stated and not shown. polly is stated to be smart and clever in a way that her party girl persona doesn't imply and to be sincerely rather down to earth with the people she cares about, but we seldom ever see this anymore unless its the game specifically trying to make a point about it, in which case it won't let her do anything that implies cleverness and moreso will just outline it in the narration. vera is stated to care for people in a very genuine and heartfelt way, but seldom will get a chance to do so, and every opportunity for her to do so to their faces is missed while she will just outright state it later. it does not feel consistent, it does not feel like any of these are intended reads of their actions. it feels like the devs have something they want to do but no idea on how to actually do so. and forget it if you want these traits to manifest in small ways that show up in unrelated moments and scenes.

the dialogue becomes harder and harder to tell between each speaker, if you are just looking at what's said and not at the pictures attached to it. the characters' distinct voices have been eroded away, so that they speak more and more like each other, relaying the same terms and ideas in the same words. perspective becomes a suggestion, instead of a must.

this is something that started back in monster camp too, as all of the endings in that game felt ultimately the same as every other ending. it's very hard to place or define the full reason why, why there feels like there's no emotional stakes nor investment, why everything feels moreso like selecting different coats of paint and trying to find all the different ending pictures rather than being interested in exploring the characters as characters.

stranger yet, the series that started with the tagline of "be your worst self" has experienced a kind of... softening, for lack of a better word? what i mentioned about being able to handle the balance between terrible people who do terrible things and the light tone of the game starts to change, as abruptly the same characters who were down with violent murder in the first game start to lose their nerve, acting more and more on more typical morality. it's one of those things that feels like it's starting to damage the tone, as abruptly it's not as absurd as it used to be, demands less suspension of disbelief which could buffer and support the rest of the setting on it. there's even a part in one of the endings in montrip which involves current-polly and current-scott looking back on their monprom selves and reacting in horror at how violent and careless their pranks are, in a way that fundamentally felt like it was undercutting and disparaging all the things that felt fun and made monprom what it was.

which is odd, really, because more and more i feel like the characters in these games like each other less and less. the friendships and genuine enjoyment of each others company that brought me to this game in the first place has gone. now they don't mention each other as much, don't care for each other's feelings and reactions as much, aren't as willing to support each other. they are more and more found on their own, relied on their own, seem to seek out contact and interaction with their own friends less and less. it feels like they're all separating out into their own worlds, but also feels like they wouldn't willingly want to interact with each other if they weren't already forced together by some other outside contrivance.

if anything, i'd compare it to every other dating sim out there, where you, the player, are the most important person in these characters' lives, and they only feel ambivalent or antagonistic towards every other character. which, again, is not why i picked up monster prom or why i liked it so much in the first place.

and it's because of this that it feels like the current state of the series has to focus on its increasingly weak worldbuilding and lore, trying to form a more serious foundation without character relationships being so tightly bound together, without the characters themselves being more developed and rich, without an aspect of absurd humor to rely on.

more and more i've noticed monprom has to rely on referencing other series to make itself funny and create humor, which, again, it's always done. it was just easier to ignore back then, if you didn't know what was being referenced, because there was always more going on in the exact same scene to bolster it and give context clues as to the setup and punchline at play. it feels like the current games are much more dependent on you knowing pop culture references in order to have any fun with it, and i'm someone who, again, is very picky in what i like or what i'll seek out. i'm not interested in a stream of references about other things that i would much rather be doing than playing through a game that feels like it hates that i like it at all, when i could, again, just be engaging with the thing that takes itself seriously and knows what it wants.

[bogleech]

I'm actually not going to let this go until Gerry is at least as widely ridiculed as Human Pet Guy. That guy still didn't do anything half as disturbed as this fucking loser, let me pull up my favorites again:

Gerry messaging me from an alt pretending not to be an alt

Gerry claiming again that it's antisemitic of me to say the IDF are bad guys who do not represent the entire Jewish population. This is not, in fact, the same as saying they're "not jews anymore." Also bragging about supposedly baiting and sealioning me into saying whatever they believe I said wrong. I guess the stupid ass hell thing????

Calling me a "blorbo" like I'm a fictional character rather than a human. Also, I went and got the original hell comment to double check it:

.....This doesn't even say the IDF should go to hell. It says I hope people "excusing" the IDF's actions should go to hell, I just typoe'd it as "excising." I guess Gerry successfully gaslit me, since I fully believed I had said specifically "the IDF go to hell." Thanks!

Gerry accusing me of "lumping them in as pro genocide" in response to a comment in which I specifically state I do not see them that way. How else am I supposed to read them NOW, though? Because I defined that as "someone who thinks kids deserve bombs dropped on them," and Gerry's response is "how dare you say that about me......???????" What?? Not once do they ever simply say "no one deserves their town to be bombed" or anything like that. They absolutely refuse, because they do in fact believe that it's okay to bomb a whole community if some of that community might hypothetically be "hamas." They do in fact think it's acceptable that people who never hurt anyone else should die that way for some sort of greater good, or that only hamas can be blamed for those deaths by "forcing the hand" of the ones with those bombs.

Gerry admitting the IDF bombs, loots and tortures, even though most comments they call antisemitic are calling out just that very behavior. Gerry to my knowledge has never willingly blamed anything negative on the IDF since this comment and continues to attack people who do.

Gerry admitting the honest core of their beliefs and behavior. This isn't really about me, though. I mean, part of it is, I can definitely be vindictive. But I mostly ignored this asshole for the past year until the doxx comment, and now I'm getting more messages than ever from people who feel actually hurt and terrorized by this motherfucker. I've suffered ZERO fallout from their attacks, I am evidently too big I guess, but there are people who change their username to hide from this piece of shit, even fucking minors who dared to say "free palestine" once. Then there's @stoptheantisemitism, who is NOT gerry, but is impersonated by gerry's alt account @spottheantisemitism and other alt accounts, @stop-the-antisemitism and of course @stop--the--antisemitism in this very thread. Creating so many variants is a deliberate attempt to make it as hard as possible for casual rebloggers to remember which one is the real person. I mean, two alts only add dashes to the same username, and the other only moves one letter "p." I have no idea how tumblr staff can rationalize that as okay. But, again, if there's a guy who can't show his face without human pet jokes because he was just generally creepy, or everyone remembers sixpenceee's family having slaves, why can a user devote this much of their miserable life to "baiting and sealioning" people from multiple accounts and still have a usable blog left? ONE LAST THING!!!!!!!

In the notes on this very post, gerry is so bent on finding people to call out and slander they tried to find "misogyny" in a comment saying that women like studying bugs????????

Gerrysherry, the user who tells people I'm antisemitic because I think IDF soldiers are killing innocent civilians (rather than framed by some kind of Hamas conspiracy), believes my real name was a secret that I only just now accidentally revealed rather than the default way I've signed all my web content since the 1990's. Also believes that I have an employer, that "telling my parents" would affect a grown man, that my hippie mom would disagree with me anyway, and that the hatemail they got last year was all me rather than the natural and inevitable fallout of the supremely fucked up shit they say about the victims of a mass murder. Apparently would gleefully leap at any hypothetical chance at "doxxing" me though. Good to know. Literally wishes they could ruin my real actual life because I don't think Netanyahu is a hero.

[sundial-bee-scribbles]

waow! i can't believe it's still under 4,000 words!

[johndonneswife]

someone really should be talking about how difficult it is to plan a wedding - a gay wedding - when both of your families fucking suck

[ranger-danger]

Talking about stardew valley romances is so awkward. My friends are like “oh I love [every single guy, and Haley, but Alex]” and I have to go “oh I like Alex and Maru the most.”

[tumblingxelian]

So, on one hand I get it, on the other hand I feel it integral to mention a lot of her more "negative" traits were put there out of either spite or specifically so Tim could look cool.

IE, Steph's debut was doing amazing detective work, escaping Robin & even in her second appearance dropped his ass when he snuck into her room, but as she became a second stringer in Tim's books she was written as more sloppy and incompetent.

& even though Tim often did the same stuff she did, or worse in some cases, and even fucked up in very similar ways it was never acknowledged or treated as such by the narrative framing.

& that's before we get into how her education on this topic was being fucked over by being jerked around by Bruce & even the Birds of Prey which is naturally gonna make it harder to develop the skills.

I feel like there should always be a bit of bitterness/frustration in Steph, not just because of the emotional impact. But because they actively made it harder/impossible for her to reach her full potential.

Adding onto that, while I am no fan of Chuck Dixon, this statement from him is rather illustrative of my point:

“Batman would have been impressed by Steph’s work ethic and dogged determination. Both of these were at the core of her character. She would have worked harder at being Robin than anyone else had. Even Tim. In the end though, Batman would find himself hampered by the responsibility of having a female sidekick. His natural, “preux chevalier” instincts to protect her would have made their working relationship impossible.”

Beyond that I always recall that she snuck up on Batman by accident and intentionally tricked & stalked Black Canary across the rooftops of Gotham without being noticed.

the thing with steph is she isn't the best!! she isn't the best fighter or detective or vigilante! she's sloppy sometimes and messes up! that's the point!! she's the least technically talented but she's fucking stubborn and manages on pure grit when she isn't strong or talented enough!! and that's what makes her so compelling!!!!

[secondpersonpoetry]

you’ve probably already read it before, but the poem Party by Kim Addonizio really got me tonight. first thought was “oh man. yeah” and then my second thought was “how can i make this about my hockey guys somehow………..”anyway! have a good one! 

oh. oh.

​

[crossbackpoke-check]

re last answer: please don't stop, being very unhinged about these two pretty white boys is helping distract me from the sharks losing streak rn so bring it on

https://www.tumblr.com/bondedpairs/764566430180147200?source=share

(sideblog woes but there's the link for you) anyway in the vid they talk about going over to each other's houses to have dinner and things and while that is a delicious example of their codependence i love it bc through an rpf lens there is definitely some old man ******* going on. they can have the dilfs and each other.

(someone else mentioned kept boys which i could write an essay on but i fear being Perceived™️)

anyway if you have anything to add to this please do, if not ignore me and i will hide under a rock until the stress-related insanity has worn off and i am a functioning member of society once more 😂

- @bondedpairs

ty for the video!!! and please, WRITE THE KEPT BOYS ESSAYYYY i promise i will read it with my hands over my eyes if you don’t want to be perceived. do it scared!! do it anyway!! we’ll all love you for it!!!

[fowlaroundtown]

Some quick Good Future!Casey Jones doodles!!! These would be several years post movie, when he’s in his early 20s ^^

[knifedog-machina]

Hey, same hat! o/ (Sorry for the late reply, I just found out that I Missed This, augh)

The fucked up feeling of "oh no am I doing good enough?" really only got connected to the perfectionist android horrors in Hindsight for me too, because ngl I thought that was Perfectly Normal while experiencing it before. And I guess it's pretty common to have an anxiety disorder around not being good enough, but it sure isn't healthy!

It's kinda neat that we have entirely different social experiences and still got the Emotional Dysregulation Debuff sjfhskgh - you were isolated and dropped off in the woods (and yeah, not remembering beta testing feels pretty normal to me! imagine remembering everything about being an infant? that sounds exhausting?) while I was talking to people basically every time I was awake but it was mostly to superiors and uh, assassination targets? honestly the Social Scripts I had for those Very Specific experiences did not prepare me for regular social interaction and I feel like a socially awkward mess sometimes lmao

Oh man, yeah, having a roommate who's not alive in the same way as you is definitely a way to get a wake-up call about how you're different. It's nice that she wasn't scared of death because he wasn't alive, it does feel like that would be easier sometimes than Being Alive and Having So Many Feelings! But yeah, I gotta agree with you in the end, emotions aren't all bad at all! Cats are really cute! Making your friends laugh is wonderful! I love writing about myself and listening to my loved ones, and being excited to learn new things, and feeling proud of myself for being the person I am! Enjoying your life even through the hardships is worth it!

Being an automaton might be what a lot of folks want, but that doesn't mean we need to give that to them. Thanks for sharing your own thoughts, have a good day!

- Jude (they/them)

Android Abnormalities

Species dysphoria, but the “wrong” way, ft. my borderline personality disorder

J: so you know how my source is technically Detroit: Become Human? you know how we fucking hate that title? you know how we’ve made fun of it multiple times? unfortunately it's a mood! I also hate this!

Hey! This essay is about how incredibly uncomfortable I feel in my own skin around common android tropes, in media and some of its reflections in robotic identities and experiences, featuring reasons for why I'm like this, and a helpful suggestion for what I want readers to do about it at the end of the piece. I really hope this reaches someone who feels the same way so I can point at them like Same Hat!

-

I first noticed this problem on October 30, 2023, when we stumbled across a fanfic on Archive of Our Own. It was an alternate universe of a TV show we've never seen before, but it was written by an author we liked, and it was an android AU. That's fun! We thought it would just be a quick read, something to idly talk about after lunch.

Well, uh. Nope. I was co-fronting while Max read, and the more we read, the more… weirdly uncomfortable I felt. It wasn't actively distressing, but it made me feel weird, so I stopped reading halfway through to talk about it with some friends.

I'm not gonna link the fic, because Tumblr is weird about links, but for my own future reference, it's “persona ex machina” by BirchBow. It was a really good fic, we thoroughly enjoyed it! I just have - hangups, I guess?

I think I was uncomfortable that, on the surface, it seems… really close to my experiences. Like, the protagonist, Chuck, is an android made to mimic humans, and he’s made to be a combat unit. He’s scared of what might happen to him if he fails to meet expectations. Technicians operate on him, put him back together. He's made by a corrupt corporation for fucked up purposes. He eventually defects from the corrupt corporation, with the help of some really kind people. That’s all really similar to me.

But it's different. Because as much as Chuck was designed to look human, he still had to be taught how to act human, how to feel. The way he emotes is off at first and he has to recalibrate, not look so stiff, learn how to smile and laugh and understand what different emotions mean. He automatically runs through the technical terms for something before working to turn it into common vernacular as it reaches his mouth. And this is a typical android trope, you know? The machine doesn’t intrinsically understand emotions, so humans have to teach them.

I’m… really, really not like that. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t feel too much. Every memory I have, even in blurred out mental snapshots of beta testing, it’s all drowning in emotions that I couldn’t articulate and wasn’t supposed to express. I looked at my siblings, who were so stoic and professional around humans it was like they were different people entirely, and I knew I was supposed to be less emotional. People always just assumed they were better than me, because they were better at code-switching to what was expected of androids, because they could keep their mouths shut on the job.

So I’ve always felt like I was bad at being an android. Androids aren’t supposed to feel emotions, not really, not to the extremes that I do. That’s a predisposition for deviancy. And I was made this way on purpose, I was made to “mimic” deviants to earn their trust, but I wasn't meant to be like that all the time. I tried to repress my emotions, it just never worked.

And I don’t see androids like me, in the media we’ve watched and read and listened to. It’s not really a characterization that lends itself to exploring what it means to be a person, right? Machines are supposed to be logical and unfeeling, to contrast with humanity’s irrationality - they’re supposed to be better than that. And when the machine starts having emotions, it's treated as a flaw, or a breakthrough. Wow, you feel things about the world around you, you’re a person now!

I’ve never been logical in my fucking life. I have a laundry list of reasons for why, but for now, I’ll focus on the BPD. I have borderline personality disorder, because of the way my brain is wired and how that interacted with my traumatic experiences.

One of the symptoms of BPD is emotional dysregulation. I’m not just bad at repressing my emotions, I also experience those emotions as more extreme and overwhelming than a neurotypical person would. I keep finding myself affected by things that the people around me brush off, and I have to remind myself that it doesn’t mean I’m overreacting, it means that I’m literally feeling shittier emotions.

Another symptom of BPD is an unstable sense of identity - and this is really where we’re getting into how these traits and tropes affect me. Because I don’t relate at all to these androids on the screen. They’re as foreign and separate from me as they are to the humans sitting across from them in the shot.

I do relate to the humans. I do relate to seeing an android do something in the name of pure cold logic and going, “Why? What the fuck, why?” I do relate to being told I’m irrational. (The trope that all robots are logical feels like it was designed to make me feel like the most irrational, bitchy, hysterical piece of shit on Earth.)

So, what, does that make me human? If I'm going by the adage that wanting to be something is a sign of being that thing, then… I don’t know, maybe? I want to be human, I so badly want to be human, because here’s the thing, humanity is diverse. Humans are flawed, messy, weird, complicated, and defy categories every fucking day of their lives. Humans can be weird, ridiculous, fucked up people and they’re allowed to be.

And let me bring this back around to alterhumanity. If I say I’m an android, people will make assumptions about what that means about me. People go, “Hey, you're a robot, you must have one of these common robot experiences!” and I just don’t.

Maybe it’s because I’m coming at it from the opposite direction? The machines and robots and androids that I tend to see around, the ones who talk about their identity, they often identify as fully nonhuman. They describe wanting to be metal and chrome, feeling like they run on algorithms, not processing emotions the way most people do. They identify very much with the same tropes that I feel alienated by. This isn’t a bad thing, by any means. It’s just a thing. People resonate with what they see. It just means that I feel like I’m doing bad at being an android again, but in a new, improved way.

Another symptom of BPD is being terrified of real or imagined abandonment, and trying to do anything to avoid it. A constant feeling of social alienation isn’t really that different, to my BPD - it’s just a slow, drawn out version of being left behind. People will still talk to me, they still like me, but they won’t understand me. I’ll still be alone.

In that sense, I feel wrong being an android in the same way I feel wrong about being an aromantic allosexual. I actually like being an android, and I fucking like being bi. I don’t want to stop being who I am. I just hate feeling like I’m the only one who feels this way, like nobody else can relate, like every time I talk about my feelings to people they can only nod in sympathy instead of understanding me.

So! You've reached the end of the essay. You see my problem. What do we do about it?

I’m going to refer to the theme of… every single online alterhuman convention that has existed in the past four years, and that is:

Write about your experiences!

The reason I feel so alone and isolated and alienated from my own identity is because I’m only being regularly exposed to pieces from a very specific perspective of what being an android means! That’s a fucking sampling bias!

I know other weird fucking robots are out there, I know you exist, but I can’t fucking reach out a hand and go, “Hey, you're not alone, I relate to you!” if you don't write it down! I want to talk to you! I want to hear from you!

WEIRD ALTERHUMANS, HEY, I LOVE YOU, GO WRITE THINGS!

[arosebyan0thername]

Life is so hard for me as a queer person who is not interested in ch*ppell r*an for just very normal not deranged reasons, because if people ask and I say "no I don't really like her" then I am running the very high risk of being perceived as either a lesbian hater or one of those online freaks who thinks she "doesn't deserve fame" because she doesn't want literal stalkers at her door, but if I say yes then I will have to sit through her entire discography at every function 😮‍💨

[blue-eli]

Thinking about Kairi & Sora but mainly Kairi and going insane. Girl you have so many issues

[fragglerockopinions]

The worst thing about suffering is that it still hurts when the danger is over but no one cares about it anymore because it shouldn't hurt. No one will ever say "I'm sorry that happened to you" especially when they barely say "I'm sorry that's happening."

[themyscirah]

Started thinking about the Amanda Waller + Ben Turner relationship again.... fuck, I'm gonna need a minute