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fenmere · 1 year ago

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Sunspot Coffee and Tea

Against our promise to avoid writing for a bit while recovering from a minor burnout, I wrote something here tonight. It might have been therapeutic to do so, honestly.

It's a coffee shop AU self insert crossover fanfic of Wildow's Otherverse and the Sunspot Chronicles, titled "Sunspot Coffee and Tea". It takes place on this Earth, though. Descriptions of Others, Practicioners, Aware, and the Seal are from the work of Wildbow, A.K.A. John C. McCrae, and belong to him. We reference them here with love, and no intentions to make any profit from them, even if we stretch their intended canonical possibilities a bit. References to everything else not of this Earth, including Ktletaccete, beshakete, and `etekeyerrinwuf, are of the Sunspot Chronicles and belong to us, the Inmara. All the characters are headmates and therefore real people.

The Black Drop was a real coffee shop that was really like that, and we miss it. A lot.

We'll probably put this up on AO3 later. No warnings are necessary for this fic. It's 6093 words, light, hopefully cute, and totally self indulgent:

In Tanasbourne, Hillsboro, Oregon, in one of the strip malls there, there used to be an Insomnia Cafe next to a brewpub.

It’s still a cafe. Of a sorts. It was bought out a couple years ago, however, and has a new name. It’s called Sunspot Coffee and Tea.

There are some interesting things about this cafe, not the least of which is that they don’t accept money. How they manage to stay functioning without actually doing business is a total mystery to all of their neighbors and patrons, but if you want any sort of drink or pastry there, all you have to do is walk up to the counter and ask for it. Of course, the pastries have to be available, and it’s first come first serve for them. But they produce them quickly enough that if they’re out of something, you just have to wait thirty minutes or so. At most.

Before it became the Sunspot, it was like most cafes of its sort, especially in that neighborhood, attracting working class people who had at least some decent income. And that part of Tanasbourne wasn’t really known for being accessible to the less fortunate.

However, after it became known what their new mode of “business” was, people in need would take the MAX and the bus from all around to get a free meal, and they were quite welcome.

The clientele changed quite quickly, and this created something of a controversy in the neighborhood. Theories sprang up and circulated when efforts to bring the law down on them failed utterly. Stories about the mafia, or even more unbelievable things. One of the stories is true.

Eventually, things settled down, and everyone got used to the new culture and routines that the Sunspot brought to Tanasbourne.

I happen to know exactly how that all played out and why, but I’m not telling. I’ve taken oaths. I’ll give you hints in this story, though, because I think I can get away with it, and it’s kinda fun.

In any case, it was under these circumstances in that cafe that I got to watch a connection made that I had never expected to see. One that may well lead to the kind of quiet, sweet partnership that causes the world to glow just a little brighter at the ambient level, without most people quite knowing the source.

Of course, it started during a day when Eh, our boss and Senior Captain, was working the counter.

I was sitting at a table with Gesedege and Gnargrim, enjoying a round of Brekken’s tea while slowly discussing the intersections of public relations and security for the shop. Which is to say that we mostly sat, quiet, watching steam rise from our drinks, looking around at the guests and just soaking up the joy of seeing people rest who might not otherwise get to. And then, occasionally, one of us would take a sip or say a word or two, and the other two would nod or take sips as well.

And a new person walked in. Someone we’d never seen before. And I could tell by the way they entered the shop, they hadn’t yet heard about who and what we were. They hadn’t got the story yet. They probably thought this was a typical coffee shop.

They put on a double layer of masks before entering, which was good. Largely unnecessary in the Sunspot, but with covid still running rampant in the rest of the world, despite all the propaganda suggesting otherwise, their N95 disposable under a metallic hot pink mermaid print etsy number was a really wise idea. And it certainly put most of our guests at ease, even though they weren’t wearing masks anymore themselves.

But there were some smirks as this person reached into the pocket of their navy blue sleeveless cloak to pull out their card purse as they navigated through the tables and easy chairs to the counter. The long, black feather in their wide brimmed black wool hat bobbed as they went, boots squeaking on the wood floor.

Eh smiled as they looked up from a drink they were preparing for someone else.

And it was at that eye contact that the person realized they’d walked into something different.

They probably hadn’t noticed the lack of a cash register or POS yet. They’d obviously missed the appearance of me and my compatriots, since they’d been absorbed in arranging their garments and fishing out their method of payment, and had glanced at the other guests. They’d just happened to look the other way as they passed our corner, which was right near the door.

If they’d seen us, they might have had the same reaction they were having at the sight of Eh.

Eh is tall. They tend to keep their height low enough that they don’t have to crouch while in the building, but their antlers will just miss scratching the ceiling when they straighten up from a task like decorating a mocha. Their tail has a tendency to fill the walkway from the kitchen to the front counter, and their wings will block the view of the front from the rest of the staff who are in the back. And through clever programming, they’ve managed to turn the outer skin of their body into a satiny dark purple that seems to be full of stars and nebulae and is somehow constantly rim lit, regardless of the actual lighting of their surroundings.

Most human beings, upon seeing that vision, will later describe it as having been like walking right into VRChat. Only, I’ve logged into VRChat, and nobody has yet been able to create an avatar of that detail and refinement.

“How may I help you?” Eh asked.

The newcomer looked around, clearly startled and worried, and caught the vision of Gnargrim, Gesedege, and myself holding our tea cups up in greeting.

If you look at my tumblr icon, you’ll know what I look like. I’m slightly smaller than Eh, and like to sit in my easy chair backward, resting arms and chin on the back.

Gnargrim, built like a cross between Eh and myself, also uses chairs in a similar way.

Gesedege, however, has taken to dressing like a human, and will stow their tail away in order to sit in a chair. But their muzzle, parabolic ears, and pair of horns tend to give away their origins as easily as Eh’s countenance.

Most new people at this point tend to freeze and gape, and it takes a certain amount of talking and coaching from the other guests to get them to relax and start to feel at home.

This person, however, scowled, brows knitting together above their mask, eyes squinting. They reached into their cloak to where a metal handled antique cane was hooked into an inside pocket and pulled it out with their right hand, clapping its point to the floor.

Gnargrim raised an eyebrow my direction.

We hadn’t seen this reaction before at all.

They whirled to speak to Eh, and asked, “Are we in the presence of Aware?” They lightly gestured at the other guests.

Eh opened their mouth for a moment, tongue and teeth glowing, pausing to think, before speaking, “Everyone here is aware of who we are, yes.”

The newcomer relaxed and bowed their head, then looked up and spoke more softly, “I’m sorry. My name is Anne. She/her. I’ve just moved down here from Washington, and didn’t realize a place like this was here. The Lord of Portland made no mention of the Sunspot, of course, but nobody else did either. I would have thought it would be recommended or warned about. Am I welcome here?”

Eh tilted their head, “Lord of Portland?”

Anne took a step back, and said, “Asterix. Right?”

Eh shook their head lightly, “I have never heard of them.”

“Him. How?” Anne corrected, then asked, tense. Then she shook herself out and stammered, “Sorry! Sorry. Please pardon my rudeness and short language. This feels like a very unusual situation and I’m finding it hard to mask.”

“You are wearing one,” Eh pointed out.

Anne looked around, then back at Eh and said, “I’m the only one here wearing one. Do you have a ward of protection up against pathogens?”

“You… could put it that way,” Eh said. “The air is heavily filtered and everyone here is personally protected with our technology. It should be safe for you to remove your mask here. If you wish to have your own personal protection, you’ll have to give us your consent to give it to you. It comes with side effects, however. You are also very welcome here. I am assured that this is considered a safe place to be, even though I have never heard of Asterix or a Lord of Portland.”

Anne hesitated midway through taking her hat off to remove her masks, then decided to proceed. Her long brown hair had a freshly trimmed sidecut, and her face was covered with a fine layer of stubble. Like many people in the Pacific Northwest, she didn’t wear any makeup, but she had earrings and an eyebrow piercing. Her glasses had little dragons sculpted into the sides of the rims.

She smiled hopefully as she put her masks into her pockets, cane hooked into the crook of her arm as she worked.

“Can I order a coffee?” Anne asked.

“You may have one,” Eh said. “I’d be more than happy to make it for you.”

Anne paused again, blinking, then asked, “How much is it?”

Eh smiled, “It is free to anyone who asks.”

“Even a twelve ounce decaf mocha?” Anne asked, gesturing at the drink that Eh had just finished up.

Eh nodded and said, “Yes. Even that.” Then they looked across the cafe and called the name, “Maxwell?”

A man in an orange knit skull cap and a blue puffy jacket got up from his seat and wandered over to get his drink, thanking Eh and nodding to Anne before sitting down again. Anne’s eye followed the checkered handkerchief that hung from Maxwell’s left back pocket. She didn’t seem to have any strong emotional reaction. It seemed like a reflexive look followed but a decision to be satisfied with it.

Then she looked at the line of big pride flags along the wall, and smiled back at Maxwell, nodding.

“OK. Please let me know if anything is expected from me. I’d like to be a good guest,” Anne said. “I would very much like to have a decaff twelve ounce mocha, with no whip cream. And, do you have pastries?”

Eh nodded, then gestured to the case to Anne’s left, which held all the available pastries.

Anne bent to look, leaning on her cane.

“Are those cheese danishes?” she asked.

“They are!” Eh replied.

“I’d like one of those.”

“Certainly!” As Eh began to work on Anne’s mocha, they reached over with a foot and slid the back door of the case open. And then they did one of our little tricks, turning their extended hind limb into a tendril with a hand on the end of it and used it to select one of the danishes and pull it out of the case to put on a plate.

Anne watched this with an intense curiosity, completely unalarmed.

It was obvious that the other guests who were still watching were impressed with her reactions, but they also largely started to turn their attention away. To them, she might as well have been a regular at that point.

Not to us, though. She was behaving somewhat strangely. She was speaking of things that were established to her, such as the Lord of Portland, that we knew nothing about. I could see in Eh’s eyes that they were avidly intent on learning more. And I made a note to ask Morde to look into it if Eh did not.

It looked like Anne was about to ask another question when Eh beat her to the punch, “So, what brings you to Tannasbourne?”

“Ah, my girlfriend,” Anne said. “I’ve moved in with her.”

“Oh! Wonderful!” Eh said.

“Of course, what with Practice and the Seal, now I’ve got business here, too,” Anne said, a little less brightly, in a humorously onerous tone as if Eh should know what that meant.

Eh nodded absently but didn’t say anything, letting Anne think what she might think for the moment.

“How long have you been here?” Anne asked. There wasn’t anyone behind her, so she felt like she could stand and chat.

Which suited Eh just fine. Eh replied, “We arrived about eight years ago, and set up shop two years ago, after the pandemic hit the cafe that was here particularly hard.”

“And, if you don’t mind me asking again, you don’t know the Lord of Portland?” Anne asked. “How is that?”

“Well,” Eh said amiably. “We didn’t know that there was one, to begin with, if you’re really not talking about the Mayor.”

“I’m really not,” Anne said. “That’s kind of amazing.”

“Is he kind of like Emperor Norton?” Eh asked, referring to Joshua Abraham Norton of San Francisco, who had declared himself Emperor of the United States in 1859. We knew about him from one of our regulars.

Anne turned her head sideways slowly and drawled out, “nooooo? Not really. Though, I think Emperor Norton might have been a Practitioner.” She said that with an emphasis that gave me visions of both italics and a capital letter. “Asterix is an Animus,” she explained. “A surprisingly strong one, too, for his origins.”

“An Animus?” Eh asked, clearly dawdling on Anne’s drink to maintain the excuse to do something while talking.

Anne didn’t seem to mind, but she did sway side to side on her feet a bit, still leaning on her cane. I had to admit, even though her back was turned to me I was still watching her expressions via our surveillance channel. Really Gnargrim’s job, but I was very curious about her. As were we all. She looked like she was trying to concentrate. Not frustrated, but maybe confused.

I’ve been studying human expression pretty avidly, so I’m fairly confident about that. But I could have been wrong.

“An Animus,” Anne confirmed. “You know. An Other that is a manifestation of an idea or common emotion?”

“Oh!” Eh exclaimed, stirring chocolate into the shot before pouring the foamed milk into the cup. “We do know one of those, but it didn’t follow us here. It was afraid there might be others like it, and it didn’t want to encroach.”

“OK, so you do know what a Lord is?”

“No,” Eh said. “We really don’t.”

“But, you’re Other and you know what an Animus is, and you’re here.”

Eh held up a claw with one hand, and the milk pitcher in the other, “I am friends with a thing that can be described by your definition of Animus, yes. But that’s not our word for it, though. And I’m not sure what you mean by ‘Other’. That sounded like it had a weight to it and a context that I don’t know about.”

“But you’re not human,” Anne said.

Eh shook their head, then began to pour the milk into Anne’s cup.

“So you must be Other,” she concluded.

“So,” Eh carefully waved the pitcher to create a rosette on the top of mocha. “Other, in this context, means not human? Such as an alien, yes? I’m assuming you wouldn’t call a cat or a bird an Other.” Eh was managing to verbally put that capital letter on that word, just like Anne had been doing.

“No?” Anne said cautiously, putting a question to it in uncertainty. Then she asked more firmly, “What do you mean by ‘alien’?”

Eh glanced at Maxwell with a bit of a smirk, and said, “You know, like in 3rd Rock from the Sun.” We’d all watched that show on recommendation from our eldest regular.

Anne straightened up and did the backward step again, blinking.

Eh offered her her drink.

She squinted at them long and hard, then turned to my trio and did the same to us. I noticed that her pupils glowed a bright pink. Which is not something I’ve seen outside of our own Network before.

“You’re not Other,” she muttered.

“We’re not?” Eh asked.

“You don’t look like Others through my sight,” she replied.

“Interesting.”

“So, you’re aliens? Is that what you meant by ‘arrive’?” she asked.

“Ktletaccete,” Eh said. “Our word for aliens is ‘beshakete’, or Outsiders. And to you, we are Outsiders, yes. But we call ourselves Ktletaccete. It’s fascinating that you don’t detect us as Other, though. What does that mean, exactly?”

“You all have strong Selves like humans typically do. The spirits react to you as if you do, and you might be able to Practice, if you’re not doing it already,” Anne said. “You absolutely don’t resemble any of the Others I know about. My sight is particularly attuned to that kind of thing.”

Several of the guests were paying attention again.

“I think I need to sit down,” Anne said. “But, can we keep talking?”

Eh nodded, saying “Certainly.” And then commanded a chair to form from one of the bins, graphene colored clay crawling out of what people often took for a trash receptacle and slithering across the floor to shape itself into a seat particularly suited to Anne’s height and shape. Eh gestured at it.

Anne watched this and then pointed at the chair, stating, “That’s not Practice.”

“Ninite clay,” Eh said. “It’s part of how we got here.”

Anne experimentally sat down in the chair, and then looked surprised at how comfortable it was. It molded itself to her body and adjusted itself to her needs as best it could without the neural link.

Watching, Eh said, “The nanites are also how we provide protection against pathogens for those who consent.”

“Can they replicate?” she asked, with a tone of nervousness in her voice, moving as if considering standing up again.

“Yes,” Eh said. “But not without explicit command.”

“I thought that wasn’t possible!” Anne exclaimed. “I remember reading on Wikipedia…”

“The prevailing theory is that our Animus helped us make them,” Eh said. “If it is an Animus.”

“Oh.”

“Can you tell me what you mean by ‘Practice’?”

Anne took a sip of her mocha and raised her eyebrows in appreciation, “Magic. Through vows to keep true to one's word and uphold the old pacts, humanity can command the spirits to do work. Move energies. Alter reality a bit. Summon Others. Travel places. That sort of thing. Magic.” Then she looked startled with herself, and looked back fearfully at the other guests.

Maxwell grinned and waved back at her.

“Wait,” she hissed, turning back to Eh. “If you’re aliens and you don’t know about Others and the Practice and all that, then, what about everyone else here? Are they all aliens too? In disguise? Please tell me they are.”

“No, sorry. We cater to humans,” Eh said.

“Oh, shit,” Anne said, looking up at the corners of the room.

“What’s wrong?”

“I think I just said a whole lot of too much,” she shrank into her seat with dread.

Eh settled onto their haunches and leaned on the counter with their elbows, lowering their head with deference and concern, “That sounds bad. What are the consequences? Can we help somehow?”

Anne glanced at the other guests again, most of whom were now watching with various looks of surprise, concern, and enlightenment. Some of them were clearly putting two and two together for the first time regarding things we still had no clue about. Others seemed to be familiar with what Anne was saying, and maybe displaying concern for her. And the rest might have been hearing about this all for the first time.

Anne slumped and looked down at the floor, “I’m gonna take a big hit. I don’t know that there is anything you can do. I’m responsible for what everyone knows now.”

“Don’t sweat it, Anne,” Maxwell called from his seat. “We all know they’re aliens, right?” He looked around at the rest of the room, and was met with nods. “I don’t think anything you’ve said has really changed any lives here. Except maybe theirs, you know?” He gestured at Eh and the rest of us. “But, I bet you the Kletachitay don’t fall under the protection of the Seal, right?” He pronounced our people’s name with a distinctly West Coast accent. Most people around here did.

She rose slightly out of her seat to turn and look at him.

He nodded solemnly, with an inclination of encouragement, gesturing with his drink. Then, when he was sure she took that sentiment, he turned to relax back down into his own chair.

“It’s probably true,” someone else said.

Anne visibly relaxed and grinned nervously at Eh.

“Tell you what,” Eh said. “If you want to keep having this conversation in private, we can arrange that. If it would be better for you. We have our own secrets. We understand. But I would also like to learn more about this Lord of Portland, and maybe I should meet him at some point?”

Anne nodded.

Eh smiled, “There are a couple of ways we could do this. We do have a back office, which we could use, if you like. Or – well – we don’t really have hours, but it’s usually super quiet around 4 am. Sometimes we don’t have guests here at that time. But that’s not guaranteed. Or, you could consent to a neural terminal, and we could meet over the Network, if that’s not likely to mess with your, uh… You do Practice, right? Would your spirits reject the nanites?”

Anne’s eyes went wide as she took in a breath and held it, looking up at a corner of the room in thought. She looked fearfully back at Eh and said, “I don’t know. I’m kind of afraid to try. Um. Yes, I Practice. Yes. Um.” She glanced around the room again. “Through a bit of a loophole I can tell you about later.”

“A loophole?”

“Later.”

“OK.”

While they were having this part of the discussion, I witnessed yet another thing that was unprecedented to us.

Maxwell gave several of his fellow guests meaningful looks and exchanged nods. Then, some of them got up and spoke very quietly to other guests. And as Anne and Eh negotiated how they might talk in private, the presumably human guests of the Sunspot cafe began to gather their things and file out of the shop. Some of them waved to Eh or to me, Gnargrim, and Gesedege.

Eh looked just as surprised and bewildered as I did, and Anne noticed, so she looked back at the rest of the cafe to see what was happening.

“Don’t worry, Anne,” Maxwell said. “We’ve got your back. We’ll keep as much Innocence as we have left for you. Might come in handy, right?”

Anne looked utterly flabberghasted.

“After all,” he explained. “You’re family.” Then he gestured at the trans pride flag with his paper cup, and smirked.

He tugged the fold of his hat as he passed me, uttering my honorific, “m’Drah.”

Maxwell’s one of my favorites, but he surprised the hell out of me that day.

Anne stared at the flag for a few seconds then looked at the door closing behind Maxwell’s back, eyes brimming with tears.

“I never thought I’d find a replacement for the Black Drop,” Anne said in the now emptied shop. “I thought that was an era that was gone forever.” She heaved out a couple of silent laughs, shaking her head. “But this place. How do you – ?” She trailed off, apparently unable to complete the question.

Eh brought themself back from their own bewilderment and replied, “We have some secrets we’re not going to divulge to even you. At least, not until our Council can agree to it. It looks like we could convene one right now, though.”

“Let’s go a bit more slowly than that,” Anne said, shakily.

“Sure.”

“Um,” Anne said. “I’m not exactly human, myself. I mean, I’m human enough now that I can Practice. Gaining a human enough Self was… a neat trick. I’m not sure I can explain it without giving you a whole education on the different kinds of Others and how Practice under the Seal works, though. Let’s just say that I’m old enough and experienced enough that I’m absolutely mortified that I was that careless. Bewildered, in fact.”

“Was the Black Drop -” Eh started to ask.

“A coffee shop where I came from,” Anne replied. “They weren’t like this. I knew only a few Others and Practitioners from there, but you couldn’t talk about that stuff in their lobby. You could talk about everything else, though. You could talk openly and loudly about your weirdest special interests, about being plural, or what it meant to you to be queer, and no one would bat an eye. And they called me family the first day I walked in the door, too. We had to chase the occasional bigot out a few times, but it was home in a way that no home ever was, you know?”

“I’ve heard Maxwell say something like that about the Sunspot,” Eh said. “But I don’t really know? I can’t. I can approximate from my own experiences, but I’m not human or Other, as you describe it. I didn’t grow up in this world.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Anne said, finally trying her danish. She gestured with it, “This is phenomenal!”

“Thank you.”

“You really should meet with the Lord of Portland, though,” Anne said. “I think I can arrange that. I’m really surprised he hasn’t reached out to you. Maybe he doesn’t know you’re here for some reason? But he should. By virtue of his station, a place like this should be known to him. Your presence should be felt.”

“Could it be possible that someone we’ve done business with covered that without telling us how it all works?” Eh asked. “Kind of like how we operate here legally?”

“Maybe,” Anne said. “Also, you’re not Others and you’re not Practitioners, so you technically don’t fall under his rule. It’s just that you don’t really belong here, either. How did you get here?”

“Oh, that’s a long story,” Eh said. “But I think I can summarize it intelligibly.”

“I’ll try to understand it,“ Anne said.

They were both so much more relaxed now, and my Crew mates and I fell still to let them continue talking as if we weren’t even there. Eh never gave any indication we should leave, though, so we did stay and watch. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Eh so at ease with anyone before, honestly. I’ve known them through… so many lifetimes. I wondered what was different about Anne. Something was obviously clicking between them now. The speed with which they responded to each other picked up.

“One of our people, with help from `efeje`e, our Animus or whatever it is, figured out how to warp space/time and transport a vessel over hundreds of thousands of lightyears without aging significantly inside it,” Eh said, as if this was nothing more than discovering and developing a new Art. “We let her leave the original Sunspot on her own journey, with a Tunnel aboard so we could keep communication. And she’s been jumping around from star to star, exploring the galaxy since. And she’s been collecting a bit of a crew for herself in the process. But, um… That’s several novels worth of story. Anyway, she’s gotten pretty good at sneaking onto and off of inhabited planets without being noticed.”

Anne dropped her jaw and squinted, shaking her head, and said, “This sounds just like any science fiction story.”

“It feels like one, yeah,” Eh agreed. “The idea that we can bend space/time like that is phenomenal. After hundreds of millennia of evolution and development, you’d have thought we’d have discovered it sooner, if it was that possible. But, it did take help from `efeje`e, you know. And our agreement with it was also unprecedented.”

“So, maybe your warp drive was a kind of Practice?” Anne asked.

Eh shrugged, “Maybe.”

“But, wait,” Anne tore her danish in half and gestured with part of it. The chair had a cup holder when she needed it. “How did you get here, if you didn’t go with your explorer?”

“The Tunnel,” Eh said. “We can send consciousnesses through it. Everyone here is what we call Crew. We ascended long ago, our original bodies dying, and now live in the Network created by our nanites. When Molly told us about this planet, a few of us decided to transfer over and stay here. She dropped off a bin of nanites and we started making a new home here, as quietly as we could. But it became apparent humanity could use a little help, and our local Council decided to start being a bit more overt.” Eh gestured at the cafe in demonstration.

“And you’re doing this,” Anne gestured at the cafe herself, “without the help of Practice? I don’t even see Glamour at work.”

“As far as I know, yes,” Eh said. “Though, it seems Maxwell is aware of Practice, at least.”

“You’ve definitely cultivated a clientele full of Aware,” Anne remarked. “Which I supposed shouldn’t be at all surprising. You’re a bunch of extraterrestrials giving away food for free. Of course you’re going to attract the Aware. They need people like you. And they have a tendency to take weirdness like this in a certain kind of stride, because weirdness is part of what made them Aware. And if you haven’t even been visited by witch hunters, then someone’s gotta be covering for you.”

“Kinda figures, I guess,” Eh said.

Anne looked at Eh for a while, danish in one hand, drink in the other, then asked, “You look a lot like someone’s idea of a dragon.”

“I’ve been told that, yes,” Eh said. “We think this is what Ktletaccete looked like before we took to the stars and started tinkering with our genetics and life itself. Our oldest language hints at a shape like this, and it’s what felt right to me when I decided to stop being how I was born.”

“That sounds a little like something I’m familiar with,” Anne said, before taking a bite of the last of her danish.

Eh inclined their head, twitching it in the direction of that particular flag, “we’re family?”

Anne swallowed and looked at the flag, “You have trans people in your culture, too? Assigned gender?”

“Ah,” I couldn’t help myself from vocalizing, and Anne glanced at me. I grinned back, and nodded at Eh.

“Not the Sunspot. Or, the `etekeyerrinwuf,” Eh said. “We made sure our new world, our own Exodus Ship, didn’t have assigned gender. But Fenmere, Gesedege, Gnargrim, and I were all born on a ship that did. Or something close enough to it that it’s basically the same thing. We didn’t have the word ‘trans’, obviously. But, again, close enough. We weren’t able to end dysphoria by ending gender, though. Even with technological interventions before birth, eugenics even, as abhorrent as it is, we can’t stop some people from being born with the need for physical change. Sometimes it develops later in life, too. It’s better to accommodate it when it becomes known. Anyway, I digress. We have an understanding with your transgender people. We get it. It’s ultimately why we’re here.”

Anne, apparently, was stuck on the first few words of Eh’s explanation, “Can - can I ask? How old are you?”

Eh smirked, but I wondered if Anne would read it as a smirk. Anne was too focused on the subject of her question to be bewildered by Ktletaccete expressions like a lot of other Earthly people often are, though.

“Do you want to know my age by my own personal years experienced? Or from your perspective, taking into account relativity?” Eh asked back.

Anne grimaced, “Let’s go with years you’ve experienced.”

Eh titled their head and looked at the ceiling as if to calculate. I knew this was a hard thing to answer for a Ktletaccete of our age. I don’t like thinking about my own age, myself. It kind of defies memory. Causes a kind of dysphoria itself. I could see Eh’s face twitch as they settled on an answer.

“I’m going to give you an estimate,” Eh said. “Calculated in your years, but for my experience. And really rounded off. At a certain point, the thousands digit means as much as the ones digit.”

Anne looked what I’ve come to discern as incredulous.

“Two hundred and some millennia,” Eh said. “Maybe thirty? Maybe fifty? It gets squidgy.”

Anne blinked and deflected internalizing that with an observation, “You use English vernacular like you were born here.”

“We’ve been here eight years, and we live in trillions of tiny machines that can house the consciousnesses of millions of us,” Eh said. “Our ability to translate and learn your language is… enhanced.”

“Two hundred thousand years?” Anne asked, back on the topic.

“Yes,” Eh said. “More or less. Mostly more.”

“Well,” she said. “At least you’re not embarrassingly older than me. Just a smidge, though. A bit of a smidge. Like a civilization or two. Well, technically, it’s off the other end, and there weren’t civilizations back then, so…”

Eh drew their head back and raised their lure in surprise, asking, “How does that work? If you’ll excuse me for asking. How does a human live that long? I thought your civilizations were less than a few thousand years old at this point. You only had your industrial revolution two hundred years ago or so. Your computer technology is less than a century old.”

Anne grinned, licked the icing off her fingers one at a time, and then rubbed her hand dry on her cloak as she stood up. She held out her hand as if to offer a handshake to Eh, and said, “Former Primordial Goddess of Hospitality and present trans girl, Anne Other Problem, at your service. Welcome to Earth, I guess!”

Eh straightened up and sloughed off a considerable amount of nanite clay, reconfiguring their body to be about the same size of a human, but otherwise the same shape as before. The excess clay oozed toward the large bin in the back, reverting to its graphene color almost immediately. Then they stepped around the counter to stand before Anne and took her hand to shake it.

“My name is Eh.Though, that’s really a title. My name is Yenfiri. My pronouns are they/them. Former Senior Captain and Founding Crew of the `etekeyerrinwuf, revolutionary, trans enby as you’d say, and co-Artisan of Sunspot Tea and Coffee,” Eh said. “And it is a real pleasure to meet you. Thank you.”

“I don’t have anywhere near the power I used to have,” Anne said. “But I’ll do my best to step back into my old role for you. Your customers… Or, I guess they’re your guests? Their actions speak very well for you and what you’ve done for them. We need places like this. But let’s try not to make too many waves. I think you’re in a more fragile position than you realize.”

“You’re our hostess,” Eh said, glancing at me.

I nodded. The Council would accept this. We had a habit of still treating Eh like Captain, anyway.

Eh concluded, “We’ll follow your lead.”

“Asterix might want you to pretend to be human from now on,” Anne said. “It might be for the best if you did, honestly. But that might also depend on what kind of protections you don’t know you have.”

Eh grimaced, “If it comes to that, we can comply. But it will hurt. Some of us will have to front more than others. Whatever it takes to do what’s safe, though.”

Anne nodded, “Let’s go see the Lord and find out what he has to say.”

“Sounds good.”

And nodding and waving to us, they walked out the door, just like that. Though, before they took their third step beyond the threshold, Eh had changed shape to their human disguise, which looked remarkably like Yenfiri had before their body had died. Just a different species, obviously.

#Sunspot Chronicles #Otherverse #crossover fanfiction #self insert #coffee shop au #selves insert really

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sonicenvy · 2 years ago

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Thinking about that one tnaos fic that I wrote (and never published) that was focused on a Lois and Clark investigating government corruption (that had a subplot of Lois finding out superman=clark) that was actually secretly an excuse for me to write about one of the top salty political opinions of mine, which is that privitisation of public goods and services is fundamentally bad and can only lead to corruption, harmful theocratic influence, shitty service and further fucking over of the poor and POC. Privitisation of public goods was, weirdly one of the first political issues that I was ever aware of. Like i remember first being angry and salty over this when i was like .... 14??? Why?

Chicago's parking meter deal

The CTA ticketing to ventra sale

I come from a family of union public school teachers and career government employees.

Just, like, being from Chicago in general... idk how to explain this.

This is somehow an issue that is largely ignored by a lot of people, because it happens on a municipal level more frequently and because it can be dense, and frankly .... boring to explain. But when it happens in your city or town, even if you don't know it happened, you notice. The good or service suddenly becomes more expensive. Wait times are worse. New, fancy looking, but lower quality infrastructure is built. Things become more inconvenient. There are louder vaguely christian undertones. The service is typically one that rich people don't use. etc

Anyways, my fic had some long screed about this, and when I most recently read this, I was like, oh my god, this fic is in the style of those 18th century "proto-novels" that i HATE that are a political essay cosplaying as a fictional story about something where all the characters talk in the author's essay voice about something. Granted those texts (like William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy) largely drove me insane because SO MANY of them were just about how men thought women should speak, act or exist in society at large, or were like, proto-incel texts about how women were innately whores or something. Basically a lot of anti-women nonsense from 18th century men who I can't stand (looking at you Rousseau, with ... uh ... sophie).

That said, I think any good investigative clois fic is inherently liberal and political because, uh, that's at the heart of lois and clark as a team. They're antifascists who are trying to make the world a better place by holding the power, wealthy and corrupt accountable for their actions through their work. Come to think of it, most comic book characters have always been explicitly political, even if some people want to refuse to see it and their stories have always been about discrimination, democracy and anti fascism.

On a semi-related note, the other (unpublished) fic of mine that I wrote in this genre was a P&P fic that was basically a love letter to 18th and early 19th century feminism for getting the ball rolling. It was also about how the proto feminism of the 18th and early 19th century was almost always deeply connected to the cause of abolition of slavery. That and it often intersected with the beginnings of labor movements when it was coming from working class women. The fic itself was something like, "Mrs. Darcy's Parlor Coffeehouse For Ladies".

For those less versed in the 18th century, the Coffeehouse was a place where gossip, ideas of revolution and general political discourse happened. Of course, women were generally excluded from participating in the conversations, though they were sometimes the hostesses of the coffeehouse, serving coffee to guests.

In my fic, Elizabeth, supported by her husband ofc, hosts parlor parties for women in their London House that she uses to disseminate ideas about proto feminism and other progressive ideas among women of the Ton. She suggests to these women that they deserve respect, education and time in their families, their societies and their marriages. She encourages them to work to make their husbands take them seriously as intelligent people and active sexual partners within their marriages. She distributes copies of Wollstonecraft. She (and Jane) use society parties to seek out their potential targets. Darcy is just, like, fucking stoked (and amused) to see all of this, and finds the time to have conversations with other gentlemen in the clubrooms (despite his complete discomfort with, like socialization in general) about drinking their respect women juice. idk, it sounded sexier in my head.

#margaret babbles

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corkcitylibraries · 2 years ago

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Cork in Verse | Ana Spehar Interviews Morgan Lyons

Morgan has a passion for writing both stories and poems depicting body respect, intersectional feminism and queer representation. She is currently writing a fantasy novel featuring a strong female protagonist without a love interest, as she feels it is important to showcase platonic love as well as romantic. Morgan has had poetry published with the Louisville Review (Kentucky), University College Cork's The F Word magazine, a publication run by UCC Feminist Society of which she is a proud member, and with Good Day Cork. Morgan has also attended the Rainbow Library Writing Course in Cork and is collaborating with other LGBTQIA+ artists to create stories where children and young adults can see queer characters in fiction. She currently lives in Cork where she is studying Spanish and Asian Studies at University College Cork.

When did you start writing? Where do you seek inspiration from?

I’ve been writing since I was a kid; when I was 10, we moved to the United States for a few years, and my fourth grade teacher had everyone in the class pick out a Writer’s Notebook- something just for us to write down ideas or poems or whatever came to mind. So, every night I would write something, and usually I would write about nature. There was this pond right outside my school in Connecticut, and if you waited long enough you could see turtles, beavers and red winged blackbirds, all creatures I hadn’t seen before when we were living in Ireland. I was so excited to write about them; I always feel so relaxed in nature, and I loved visiting the pond because you never knew which animals you’d see. My mind was blown that I was seeing so many creatures for the first time, I just had to write about it. After I left that school and we came back to Ireland, the habit of a Writer’s Notebook stuck. I always make sure to carry one with me (or have a good notes app available on my phone) because I’ll have a random thought or phrase that I need to write down and come back to later. My inspiration definitely comes from emotions, from me discovering my voice and what I want to say. I can’t wait until I know for sure what I want to say in a poem, or I’d never get started. My poems feel like a stream of consciousness around one concept like my period, then as I write I realize I want to portray negative and positive aspects. I’m angry I spent so many years ashamed and stuffing pads up my sleeve; yet writing about that shame and anger led me to write a stanza about my passion for feminism. I end up using multiple emotions in one poem even if it gets messy.

Does the creative process of writing affect your mood?

Absolutely! When I write it's like I’m putting a piece of myself into every poem and story. For poems like Notes to Make Up, Notes to Face, I need to remember a time when I wasn’t as comfortable in my body. If I’m writing a sad scene in one of my stories, or one where the main character is having an anxiety attack, I’ll need to tap into what it's like for me to have anxiety. It's tricky; you have to be careful about what you tap into, at the same time writing about things like a lack of self-confidence can be pretty satisfying, just to get your thoughts out on paper. Luckily it works the other way too - that feeling when I’m throwing words around, realizing I like the sound of them and instantly knowing what the next line should be…that makes my day. Or when I’m just free writing as a warmup exercise and I see the potential for a short story, completely lose track of time because I literally can’t put the pen down, it's the best experience in the world.

Who are your poetic influences and why?

For me, I find I’m influenced by song lyrics. Pale Hound is definitely one of my main muses, their work always encompasses so many emotions; it can be gloomy, vulnerable, heartfelt, all at the same time. There’s references to anxiety, songs about queer relationships and nostalgia; its their personal experience, something only they could write about, yet its so relatable. That’s something I strive towards when I write- to create something that resonates with myself as well as the reader.

I also get inspiration from my younger self. All the things I wanted to say but was too afraid to, the questions I had, about my body and identity, I still carry those with me. I’m still asking some of the same questions, and still learning to respect myself. Sometimes I’ll need to write a poem about my past experiences to show myself how far I’ve come and how far I still need to go in life. When I was a kid I never would have believed you if you told me I would one day write a poem about my period and have it published; I aim to write something the younger me would both cringe at and secretly be in awe of. My younger self still influences my work, and one day I think I’ll look back at the person I am now, take a snapshot of my insecurities and hopes, and write a poem about them.

In your opinion, what are the most important elements of a good poem?

Rhythm. Some lines need to be long, to get your point across, and some need to be shorter to have maximum impact. I think it's important to get the balance right; with the right ratio of short lines and long lines it's almost like a poem is breathing as you read it. I also think a poem needs to be sincere and not out to please an audience; if you try to write what you think people want to read instead of something you yourself are passionate about, the poem can have less of an impact.

What book would you recommend to our readers?

Rapunzella, Or, Don’t Touch My Hair by Ella McLeod. It's an amazing blend of prose and poetry, fantasy and real life. The main characters are all young women with so many layers and the majority is told via second person, something that really adds to the depth of the story. It's definitely a book I’ll be going back to in the future!

We Bleed. We Ache. We Fight.

I bleed.

Hot, sticky, damp.

At first I think it’s diarrhoea; dark brown, not red, not powerful

I’m supposed to feel powerful, something more than a child

My first period makes me ache

I hide.

Stuffing pads under my school jumper

Feigning a stomach ache, a headache, anything to avoid saying it

Period

Vagina

Uterus

They are me, inside me, making me bleed and hurt and hide

Yet I can’t say the words out loud

Gross, icky, private

I wonder.

Stains in my underwear

Sometimes red, sometimes not

Is this normal?

Afraid to wet my hands

Will blood ever fade?

My body has no schedule; In the middle of class

Standing up

That sinking feeling of damp leaking out

Does my body hate me? Or do I hate my body?

I leave.

Graduate.

Summer.

College.

Bleeding, aching, hurting

Cramps trapping me in bed

And the fatigue; was it always this hard?

Students handing out condoms; sex on my period

Is it dangerous? Stupid? Slutty?

It is still my body, and it is still a foreign place.

I...notice

Clubs. Societies.

People standing in the rain, collecting sanitary products

Sanitary products...so, my vagina, my uterus, they really are unclean

Filthy brown blood

Sanitary, feminine hygiene...are periods feminine?

EqualiTea night

Small group, biscuits, coffee

Talking

Smiling

Laughing

I listen

And learn

No.

So many no’s.

No shame. No whispers. No silence.

My vagina...they say the words

All the words, and more

Blood. PMS. Sex.

Sex on your period? Go for it

Orgasms chase away the cramps

Towel on the bed, ready for a crime scene

But the blood, it is not dirty.

Not disgusting. Not feminine

Menstruators

A new word

Not all menstruators are women, not all women are menstruators.

Where are our free tampons? Free pads? Free information about our bodies?

Our bodies bleed

Our bodies ache

Our bodies are whole

Not broken, not identical.

This is what they do, feminists, menstruators, people.

We stand.

We speak

We shout. Yell. Scream, so they will hear us

So we will hear ourselves

VAGINA. UTERUS. PERIODS.

They hand us free condoms; we need period products

Not a luxury; a necessity

We do not hide our words, our stories, or our questions

No more of that.

No more shame.

This is what we do:

We bleed. We ache. We fight.

Notes to Make Up, Notes to Face

Make up

What do I have to make up for?

Having Spots

Pores

Oil

Flaws

Imperfect

Imbalanced

A dab here, a dab there

Conceal. Tone down. Clean up. Don’t just clean up, give up.

Pay up. Get up, give up. Time, money, freedom.

Lips. Eyelashes. Cheeks.

Smooth them over.

You’re only human. Now make up for looking the part.

Make up; make time

Time to learn, time to realise, time to experiment

You are not anti feminist, anti expression

You bring joy,

You make some people soar

There is freedom in wearing you, freedom in leaving you

My freedom is raw, organic, imperfect

Dark circles under my eyes

Pimples along my cheek bones

Wrinkles when I furrow my brow

Make up?

Make space

Space for my face, my preference, my comfort

Space to sweat, space to laugh and space to exist

Face, don’t apologise. Just emphasise.

Enunciate every pore.

Make your own foundation, one of steadiness, one of loyalty, one of acceptance.

You can blush. Go splotchy, go red.

If your face is a canvas, then let life hold the paintbrush

You don’t need to panic, don’t need to hide

No need to justify Face, you exist. You are whole. You are free.

#corkcitylibaries #corkinverse

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pumpkinpaix · 4 years ago

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Pleeeeeeease get into the class one at some point because I very much want to understand the class dynamics happening in the story but I have yet to find a meta that dives into it

god anon you want me dead don’t you alsjdfljks

referring to this post

okay, so -- my specific salt about class interpretations in mdzs are very targeted. I can’t pretend to have a deep understanding of how class works in mdzs generally because uhhhhh yeah i don’t think i have that. i’m just not familiar enough with the genre and/or the particulars of chinese class systems. but! i can talk in general terms as to why I feel a certain way about the class dynamics that I do think I understand and how I think they relate to the themes of the novel! i’m gonna talk about wei wuxian, the daozhangs, xue yang, and 3zun with, I’m sure, a bunch of digressions along the way.

the usual disclaimers: i do not think you are a bad person if you hold opinions contrary to my own. i may disagree with you very strongly, but like. this isn’t a moral judgment, fandom is transformative and interpretive etc. etc. and i may change my mind. who knows what the future will bring!

OKAY so let’s begin!

here’s the thing about wei wuxian: he’s not poor. I think because characters use “son of a servant” kind of often when they’re trying to insult him, a lot of people latch onto that and think that it’s a much stronger indication of his societal status than it actually is. iirc, most of the insults that fall along the “son of a servant” line come after wei wuxian starts breaking severely from tradition. it’s a convenient thing to attack him for, but doesn’t actually indicate anything about his wealth. (exception: yu ziyuan, but that’s a personal familial issue) this is in direct contrast to jin guangyao who is constantly mocked for his family line, publicly and privately, no matter what he does.

so this, coupled with all the jokes about wwx never having any money (wei wuqian, sizhui’s “i’ve long since known you had no money” etc.), plus his like, rough years on the street as a child ends up producing this interpretation of wei wuxian, especially in modern aus, as someone who is very class conscious and “eat the rich”. but the fact of the matter is, wei wuxian IS rich. aside from the years in his childhood and the last two years of his life in yiling, like -- wei wuxian had money and status. he is gentry. he is respected as gentry. he is treated as a son by the sect leader of yunmeng jiang -- he does not have the jiang name, but it is so very clear that jiang fengmian favors him. wei wuxian is ranked fourth of all the eligible young masters in the cultivation world -- that is not a ranking he could have attained without being accepted into the upper class.

wei wuxian’s poverty does not affect him in the way that it affects jin guangyao or xue yang. he is of low-ish birth (still the son of jiang fengmian’s right hand man though! ok sure, “son of a servant” but like. >_> whatever anyways), but for most of his life he had money. he, jiang cheng, and their sect brothers go into town and steal lotus pods with the understanding that “jiang-shushu will pay for it”. this is a regular thing! that’s fucking rich kid behavior!!! wei wuxian is careless with money because he doesn’t have to worry about it. he still has almost all the benefits of being upper class: education, food security, respect, recognition etc. I think there may also be a misconception that wei wuxian was always on the verge of being kicked out by yu ziyuan, or that he was constantly walking on eggshells around her for fear of being disowned, but that is just textually untrue. i could provide receipts, but I admittedly don’t really feel like digging them up just now ;;

even in his last years in yiling, he was not the one who was dealing with the acute knowledge of poverty: wen qing is the one managing the money, and as far as we know, wei wuxian did little to no management of daily life during the burial mounds days -- mostly, he’s described as hiding in his cave for days on end, working on his inventions, running around like a force of chaos, frivolously making a mess of things -- it’s very very cute that he buries a’yuan in the dirt, but in classic wei wuxian fashion, he did Not think about the practical consequences of it -- that A’Yuan has no other clean clothes, and now he’s gotten this set dirty and has no intention of washing them. is this a personality thing? yeah, but I think it’s also indicative of his lack of concern over the logistics of everyday survival, re: wealth.

furthermore, i think it is important to remember that wei wuxian, when he is protecting the wen remnants, is not protecting common folk: he is still protecting gentry. fallen gentry, yes! but gentry nonetheless. wen qing was favored by wen ruohan, and wen ning himself says that he has a retinue of people under his command (the remnants, essentially). their branch of the family do not have the experience of living and growing in poverty -- they are impoverished and persecuted in their last years, but that’s a very different thing from being impoverished your whole life. (sidenote: I do not believe wei wuxian’s primary motivation for defending the wen remnants was justice -- i believe he did it because he felt he owed wen ning and wen qing a life debt, and once he was there, he wasn’t going to stand around and let the work camps go on. yes, he is concerned about justice and doing the right thing, but that’s not why he went in the first place. anyways, that’s another meta)

after wei wuxian returns, he then marries back into gentry, and very wealthy gentry at that. lwj provides him all the money he could ever want, he is never worried about going homeless, starving, being denied opportunities based on his class and accompanying disadvantages. who would dare? and neither wei wuxian nor lan wangji seem to have much interest in shaking up the order of things, except in little things like the way they teach the juniors. they live in gusu, under the auspices of the lan, and they live a happy, domestic life.

were his years on the street traumatizing? yes, of course they were, there’s so much delicious character exploration to be done re: wei wuxian’s relationship to food, his relationship to his own needs, and his relationship to the people he loves. it’s all important and good! but I feel very strongly that that experience, while it was formative for him, did not impart any true understanding of poverty and the common person’s everyday struggles, nor do I think he ever really gains that understanding. he is observant and canny and aware of class and blood, certainly, but not in a way that makes it his primary hill to die on (badum-tss).

this is in very stark contrast to characters like jin guangyao and xue yang, and to some extent, xiao xingchen and song lan. I’ll start with the daozhangs, because I think they’re the simplest (??).

I think both xiao xingchen and song lan have class consciousness, but in a very simplified, broad-strokes kind of way (at least, given the information we know about them). we know that the two of them share similar values and want to one day form their own sect that gives no weight to the nobility of your lineage and has no concern with your wealth. we also know that they both disdain intersect politics and are more concerned with ideals and principles rather than status. but, I think because of that, this actually somewhat limits their perception and understanding of how status is used to oppress. as far as we know, neither of them participated on any side in sunshot and they demonstrate much more interest in relating to the commoners. honestly, i hc that they were flitting around trying to help decimated towns, protecting defenseless villages etc. I ALSO think this has a lot of interesting potential in terms of xiao xingchen and wei wuxian’s relationship, if xiao xingchen is ever revived. regardless of whether you’re in CQL or novel verse, xiao xingchen really doesn’t know wei wuxian at all, other than knowing that he’s his shijie’s son. he knows that cangse-sanren met with a tragic end, like yanling-daoren before her, and that he wants to be different. but here is cangse-sanren’s son, laying waste to entire cities, desecrating the dead. I would very much like to get into xiao xingchen’s head during that period of time (and i think, if i do it right, i can write some of it into the songxiao fixit), but that’s neither here nor there, because i’ve wandered off from my point again.

i would posit that song lan is used to an ascetic lifestyle, and xiao xingchen probably is too -- but that’s different from poverty because there’s an element of choice to it. I also think that neither of them is particularly worldly, xiao xingchen especially. he lived on an isolated mountain until he was like, seventeen, and he came down full of ideals and naivete about how the world worked. I think that both of them see inequality, that they are angered by it, and that they want to do something about it -- but their solution is neither to topple the sects, nor is it to reform the system. rather, it seems to be more about withdrawing and creating their own removed world. I think that the daozhangs embody a kind of utopianism that isn’t present in the minds of any of the other characters, not even wangxian. honestly, baoshan-sanren’s mountain is a utopian ideal, but one that is not described. it exists outside of and beyond the world. i have a lot of jumbled, vague thoughts about utopianism generally, mostly informed by china miéville and ursula k. le guin, and I don’t think i have the ability to articulate them here, but i wanted to. hm. say something? there is something about the inherent dystopianism contained within every utopia, that utopias are necessary, but also reflections of the existence of terrible things in their conception. idk. there’s something in there, I know it!! but i suppose what I want to say is -- i do not think the daozhangs understand class and social hierarchy very deeply because they don’t see a need to examine it deeply. for their goals, the details aren’t the point. they’re not looking to reform within the system, they’re looking to build something outside of it. I think they spend a lot of time concerned with alleviating the symptoms of social oppression, and their values reflect the injustices they witness there.

regardless, even if their story ends in tragedy and there is a certain amount of critique re: the utopian approach, i think the text still emphasizes that xiao xingchen left a utopia and that he thought that people mattered enough for him to try, and that was an incredibly honorable, kind, and human thing to do.

YEAH SURE THE DAOZHANGS ARE THE SIMPLEST ok ok RETURNING to class and moving forward: xue yang.

i also don’t think xue yang has class consciousness lol, or not in any way that really matters, but I do think poverty impacted him in a much stronger way than it impacted wei wuxian. wei wuxian spent some years on the street as a child. xue yang grew up on the streets. chang ci’an’s horrific treatment of him was directly due to his class and social standing: chang ci’an is a nobleman and xue yang is not even worth the dirt beneath the wheels of his cart. what I think is the seminal point though, is that this does not make xue yang think particularly deeply about systemic injustice, because xue yang is so self-centered, self-driven, and individualistic. he is not even slightly concerned about how poverty and class might affect other people -- they’re other people. what he takes away from his experience is not an anger at being wrongfully cheated by a system, but an anger at being wrongfully cheated by a specific man.

xue yang is not particularly concerned with the politics of the aristocracy -- he has no obvious ambitions other than, “i want to eat sweets whenever i please”, “i want to hurt anyone who wrongs me”, and “i want to be so strong that no one can hurt me”. like, he just doesn’t care -- it’s not the kind of power he wants. he sneers at people for like, personal reasons, not class reasons -- “you think you’re better than me” re: xiao xingchen and song lan. to him, all people -- poor, wealthy, noble, common -- are essentially equal, and they are all beneath him. after all, what does he care what family someone comes from, how much money they have? everyone bleeds when you cut them. some of them might be harder to get to than others, but xue yang does not fear that sort of thing. it’s just another obstacle he needs to vault on his way to getting revenge and/or a pastry.

ANYWAYS onto jin guangyao (wow this is hm. getting rather long ahaha oh dear): I would argue that the two characters with the most acute understanding of class/societal politics and the injustice of them are jin guangyao and lan xichen. i’ll start with jin guangyao for obvious reasons.

where xue yang took the damaging effects of poverty as personal slights, I think jin guangyao is painfully aware that there is nothing personal about them, which is, in some ways, much worse. why are two sons, born on the same day to the same father, treated so differently? just because.

he watched his mother struggle and starve and work herself to the bone in a profession where she was constantly disrespected and abused for almost nothing in return, while his father could have lifted her out of poverty with the wave of a finger. why didn’t he? because he didn’t like her? no -- because he didn’t care, and the structures of the society they live in protect that kind of blase treatment of the lower class.

“so my mother couldn’t choose her own fate, is that her fault?” jin guangyao demands. he knows that he is unbelievably talented, that he has ambition, that he has potential, and that all of it is beyond his grasp just because his father didn’t want to bother with it. his mother’s life was destroyed, and his own opportunities were crippled with that negligence. it isn’t personal. that’s just the way things are. your individual identity is meaningless, your humanity does not exist. when he’s kicked down the steps of jinlin tai, it’s just more confirmation that no matter how talented or hardworking he is, no one will give him the time of day unless he finds a way to take it himself and become someone who “matters”.

jin guangyao’s cultivation is weak because he had a poor foundation, and he had a poor foundation because he was denied access to a good one. he copies others because that’s all he can do at this point, and he copies so well that he can hold his own against some of the strongest cultivators of his generation. he’s disparaged for copying and “stealing” techniques, but -- he never would have had to if only he had been born/accepted into the upper class. the fact is that i really do think jin guangyao was the most promising cultivator of his generation that we meet, including the twin jades and wei wuxian: he had natural talent, ambition, creativity, determination and cunning in spades. in some ways, I think that’s one of the overlooked tragedies of jin guangyao: the loss of not just the good man he could have been, but the powerful one too. imagine what he could have done.

jin guangyao spends his entire time in the world of the aristocracy feeling unsteady and terrified because he knows exactly how precarious his position is. he knows how easy it is to lose power, especially for someone like him. he’s working against so many disadvantages, and every scrap of honor he gets is a vicious battle. jin guangyao fears, and I think that’s something that’s lacking in xue yang, wei wuxian and the daozhangs’ experiences/understandings of poverty. i think it’s precisely that fear that emphasizes jin guangyao’s understanding of class and blood. jin guangyao exhibits an anxiety that neither wei wuxian nor xue yang do, and it’s because he truly knows how little he is worth in the eyes of society and how little there is he can do to change that. to me, it very much feels related to the anxiety of not knowing if tomorrow you’ll have something to eat, if tomorrow you’ll still have a home, if tomorrow someone will destroy you and never have to answer for it. it’s the anxiety of knowing helplessness intimately.

moreover, jin guangyao is the only person shown to use the wealth and power at his disposal to take concrete steps to actually help the common people typically ignored by the powerful -- the watchtowers. they’re described in chapter 42. it’s a system that is designed to cover remote areas that most cultivators are reluctant to go due to their inconvenience and the lack of means of the people who live there. the watchtowers assign cultivators to different posts, give aid to those previously forgotten, and if the people are too poor to pay what the cultivators demand, the lanling jin sect pays for it. jin guangyao worked on this for five years and burned a lot of bridges over it. people were strongly opposed to it, thinking that it was some kind of ploy for lanling jin’s personal benefit. but the thing is -- it worked. they were effective. people were helped.

i believe CQL frames the watchtowers as an allegory for a surveillance state/centralized control (i think?? it’s been a minute -- that’s the hazy impression i remember, something like a parallel to the wen supervisory offices?), but I personally don’t think that was the intent in the novel. the watchtowers are a public good. lanling jin doesn’t staff them with their own sect members -- they get nearby sects to staff them. it’s a warning network that they fund that’s supposed to benefit everyone, even those that everyone had considered expendable.

(did jin guangyao do terrible things to achieve this goal? yeah lol. it’s not confirmed, but his son sure did die... suspiciously...... at the hands of an outspoken critic of the watchtowers........ whom he then executed....... so like, maybe just a convenient coincidence for jin guangyao, two birds one stone, but. it seems. Unlikely.)

lan xichen is the only member of the gentry that ever shows serious compassion for and nuanced understanding of jin guangyao’s circumstances. lan xichen treats him as his equal regardless of jin guangyao’s current status -- even when he was meng yao, lan xichen treated him as a human being worthy of respect, as someone with great merits, as someone he would choose as a friend, but he did so knowing full well the delicate position meng yao occupied. this is in direct contrast to nie mingjue, who also believed that meng yao was worthy of respect as a human being, but was completely unable to comprehend the complexities of his circumstances and unwilling to grant him any grace. you know, the difference between “i acknowledge that your birth and status have had effects upon you, but I don’t think less of you for it” and “i don’t consider your birth and status at all when i interact with you because i think it is irrelevant” (“i don’t see color” anyone?)

to illustrate, from chapter 48:

大抵是觉得娼妓之子身上说不定也带着什么不干净的东西，这几名修士接过他双手奉上来的茶盏后，并不饮下，而是放到一边，还取出雪白的手巾，很难受似的，有意无意反复擦拭刚才碰过茶盏的手指。聂明玦并非细致之人，未曾注意到这种细节，魏无羡却用眼角余光扫到了这些。孟瑶视若未见，笑容不坠半分，继续奉茶。蓝曦臣接过茶盏之时，抬眸看他一眼，微笑道：“多谢。”

旋即低头饮了一口，这才继续与聂明玦交谈。旁的修士见了，有些不自在起来。

rough tl:

Probably because they believed that the son of a prostitute might also carry some unclean things upon his person, after these few cultivators took the teacups offered from [Meng Yao’s] two hands, they did not drink, but instead put them to one side, and furthermore brought out snow white handkerchiefs. Quite uncomfortably, and whether they were aware of it or not, they repeatedly wiped the fingers they had just used to touch the teacups. Nie Mingjue was not a detail-oriented person and never took note of such particulars, but Wei Wuxian caught these in the corner of his eye. Meng Yao appeared as if he had not seen, his smile unwavering in the slightest, and continued to serve tea. When Lan Xichen took the teacup, he glanced up at him and, smiling, said, “Thank you.”

He immediately dipped his head to take a sip, and only then continued to converse with Nie Mingjue. Seeing this, the nearby cultivators began to feel somewhat uneasy.

all right, since we’re in full cyan-rampaging-through-the-weeds mode at this point, i’m going to talk about how this is one of my favorite 3zun moments in the entire novel for characterization purposes because it really highlights how they all relate to one another, and to what degree each of them is aware of their own position in relation to the others and society as a whole.

1. nie mingjue, who is a forthright and blunt person, sets meng yao to serving tea and is done with it. he notices nothing wrong or inappropriate about the reactions of the people in the room because it’s not the sort of thing he considers important.

2. meng yao, knowing that his only avenue is to take it lying down with a smile, masks perfectly.

3. lan xichen, noticing all this, uses his own reputation to achieve two things at once: pointedly shame the other cultivators in attendance, and show meng yao that regardless of others’ opinions, he considers him an equal and does not endorse such behavior--and he does it while taking care that no fallout will come down on meng yao’s head.

is this yet another installment of cyan’s endless lxc defense thesis? why yes it is! no one is surprised! but this is my whole point: both meng yao and lan xichen understand the respective hierarchy and power dynamics within the room, while nie mingjue very much does not. this is not because nie mingjue is a bad person or because nie mingjue is stupid--it’s a combination of personality and upbringing. nie mingjue is straightforward and has no patience for such games. but then again, he can afford not to play because he was born into such a high position: that’s a privilege.

to break it down: meng yao knows that he is the lowest-ranked person in the room, sees the way people are subtly disrespecting him in full view of his general who is doing nothing about it. in some ways, this is good -- nie mingjue’s style of dealing with conflict is very direct and not at all suited to delicate political maneuvering. after all, the way he promoted meng yao was actually quite dangerous to meng yao: he essentially guaranteed that his men would bear meng yao a grudge and that their disrespect for him would only be compounded by their bitterness at being punished on his behalf. (it’s like, why often getting parents or teachers to intervene ineffectively in bullying can just be an incitement to more bullying -- same concept) meng yao’s reaction during that scene shows that he’s pretty painfully aware of this and is trying to defuse the situation to no avail. nie mingjue gives him a bootstrap speech (rip nie mingjue i love u so much but. sir) and then promotes him, which is pretty much the only saving grace of that entire exchange, for meng yao at least.

lan xichen, on the other hand, understands both that meng yao is the lowest-ranked person in the room and that any direct attempt to chastise the other cultivators in the room will only serve to hurt meng yao in the long run. he knows that if this were brought to nie mingjue’s attention, he would be outraged and not shy about it -- also bad for meng yao. so he uses what he has: his immaculate reputation. by acting contrary to the other cultivators’ behavior, he demonstrates that he finds their actions unacceptable but with the plausible deniability that it wasn’t directed at them, that this is just zewu-jun being his usual generous self. this means that the other cultivators have no one to blame but themselves, nothing to do but question their own actions. there is nowhere to cast off their discomfort. meng yao didn’t do anything. lan xichen didn’t do anything -- he just thanked meng yao and drank his tea, isn’t that what it’s there for? he doesn’t disrupt the peace, he doesn’t attack anyone and put them on the defensive, but he does make his position very clear.

i know this is a really small thing and i’m probably beating it to death, but I really think this shows just how cognizant lan xichen is of politics and emotional cause and effect in such situations. certainly, out of context I think the scene reads kind of cliche, but within the greater narrative of the story and within the arc of these characters specifically, I think it was a really smart scene to include. it also showcases lan xichen’s style of action: that he moves around and with a problematic situation as opposed to moving straight through.

not to be salty on main again, but this is why it’s very frustrating to me when I see people call lan xichen passive when he is anything but. his actions just don’t look like traditional “actions”, especially to an american audience. it’s easy to understand lan wangji and wei wuxian’s style of problem-solving: taking a stand, moving through, staying strong. lan xichen is juggling an inconceivable number of factors in any given situation, weighing his responsibilities in one role against those in another, and then trying to find the path through the thicket that will cause the least harm, both to himself and the thicket. lan wangji and wei wuxian are not particularly good at considering the far-reaching consequences of their actions -- again, not because they are bad people, but because of a combination of personality and upbringing. they’d just hack through the thicket, not thinking about the creatures that live in it. that is not a terrible thing! it isn’t. it’s a different way of approaching a problem, and it has different priorities. that’s okay. there are advantages and disadvantages on both sides, and where you come down is going to depend on your personal values.

okay we’ve spiraled far and away from my original point, but let’s circle back: i was talking about class.

I think it’s undeniable that class, birthright, fate etc. are some of the driving forces of thematic conflict in mdzs, and the way each character interacts with those forces reveals a lot about themselves and also about the larger themes of fate, chance, and what it means to be righteous and good and how that is and isn’t rewarded. a lot of the tragedy of mdzs (the tragedy that isn’t caused by direct aggression on the part of one group or another) stems from the injustices and slights that people suffered due to their lot in life. it isn’t fair. none of it is fair! we sympathize with jin guangyao because we recognize that what he suffered was unconscionable, even if we don’t excuse him. i sympathize A Lot with xue yang as well for similar reasons, though I understand that’s a harder sell. this is a story focused on the mistakes of an entrenched, aging gentry and the effects that those mistakes had on their children, and a lot of it has to do with prejudice based in class and birth status. whether the prejudice was the true reason or whether it was just a convenient excuse, the fact remains that the systems in place rewarded and protected the people in power who used it to cling to that power. mdzs is also a story of how the circumstances of one’s life can offer you impossible choices that you cannot abstain from, and it asks us to be compassionate to the people who made terrible choices in terrible times. it’s about the inherent complexity in all things! that sometimes, there are no good choices, and i don’t know, i’d like to think that people would show me compassion if I had to make the choices some of these characters did. not just wei wuxian, mind you, every single one of them. except jin guangshan because I Do Hate Him sorry. and i guess wen ruohan. i think that’s it.

good. GOD this is clocking in at //checks notes -- just over 5k. 8′D *stuffs some weeds into my mouth like the clown i am*

(ko-fi? :’D *lies down*)

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codenamesazanka · 3 years ago

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Related: More generally, this time more about the main conflict between Villains and Heroes, and how quirks play into it,

my other thumbs-up for Horikoshi’s worldbuilding is in the way he recognizes there’s not just quirks - there’s things like disability, background, education, socioeconomic class, rural vs urban attitudes, etc. All of which affects how someone’s quirk is perceived and what they go through in life.

We’ve got characters with deadly quirks that are successfully integrated into the world, a functional member of society; and characters with similarly deadly quirks who wallow in the criminal underworld; and we’ve got characters with powerful, strong, flashy quirks that easily become a Hero, and we’ve got characters with even better quirks than that ending up being a Villain bank robber. From what we’ve seen, a lot of the reason for differing trajectories in life is where these characters originate, which range from being born into a fabulously wealthy family, to being an dirt poor homeless orphan.

My favorite example of this disparity is the movie Villain Nine. Nine has a quirk that allows him to control the weather. As another character comments on it, it’s a god-like power, recalling the many deities in human tales who can bring rain or sun, storms or snow. It’s definitely a super strong, flashy quirk. There’s so many applications for it. Bring the guy to a drought-ridden land and he’s a Hero. in the old days, they would’ve made him king, probably.

Yet Nine, as an adult, wanders the streets in tattered clothing, implied to be left behind from the rest of society. He says his life has been filled with circumstances that have suppressed him, and it started when he was born apparently in a public toilet. His backstory is not expanded on, but one can imagine the story of his parents is not a happy, unfortunate, healthy one, and things did not get better. It’s why he resent the current state of society, why he desired a world of a pure hierarchy where strong rule and get what they deserve.

There are claims, both in series(?) and in fanon, that the world of HeroAca is already like this, one where people with strong quirks succeed, while people with weak quirks don’t (and if you’re quirkless, forget it). Nine contradicts this completely, and not just him: there’s Jin with his incredible Double, Mr. Compress with his amazingly useful marble quirk, and hell, Overhaul has his break-and-repair quirk, complete with his medical knowledge to use it. All of them lived on the margins of society, ending up either dead or rotting in jail.

Similarly - and this is where the elements of the Mutant Metaphor pops up again - there are bias against people with ‘dangerous’ quirks, but it’s not a straightforward ‘everyone with a ‘evil’ quirk is discriminated against.’ While you have Shinsou who always gets his ability called Villainous, Toga with her quirk that requires blood drinking to work its effect - and who could forget Shigaraki Tomura, whose very touch destroys - there are characters with quirks that, while doesn’t immediately gets pinged as creepy, can very much be lethal depending on how they use it. Bakugou makes explosions with his hands, while even Uraraka can kill someone via dropping them from a great height.

in regards to these similarities, it can be said that this there is no inequality, that Villains are created by their own choices; or that the issues with Hero Society that Horikoshi tries to convey fails, inconsistent on what society accepts and who society tolerates.

But I argue this is exactly why it works, because much like how it is in real life, there are numerous factors to how marginalization and suppression works. My Hero Academia understands the layers of power in the world, understands the intersections of fortunes or injustices, both the contradictions and the sources that feed upon each other, weaving a complex web that ultimately reveals giant gaping holes in the structure of Hero Society. Poverty is one of them; the failures of social services like foster care or quirk counseling is another, as are the class and family you come from. There’s a reason why Iida can get away with vigilantism and attempted murder; Jin has one traffic accident that wasn’t even his fault and he got a record for it.

In the end, all this gets blamed on the individual for being a Villain who just didn’t work hard enough, who didn’t pull themself up by the bootstrap. That’s the key to it: issues are systemic, bleeding into various categories, but so well faded into the background, so easily disguised as individual flaws that the suffering can be denied and ignored.

#nalslastworkingbraincell #bnha #mha #heroaca #Hero Society #bnha Society #Heroes and Villains

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theladyragnell · 2 years ago

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Hello!! Hmm, AMA - if the mood strikes, I would love to hear about your writing process! How do you set about coming up with naming schemes for a set of characters? Sending good thoughts your way~

I'll start with the generalities and then move on to the specific question you asked! (And whoops, I got wordy, so most of it's under a cut.)

So, my writing process seems to be in flux, which makes this a little harder than usual to answer. I think it's partly Pandemic Brain Drain and partly just that I'm writing more complex and mature stories these days, but for my original work, at least, I've just in the last year or two started outlining for the first time.

In the past, I'd have some characters, or a concept, and usually a few candybar scenes (generally romance-related), and I'd start off! I didn't plot so much as I narrowed possibilities. In the first scene, very nearly anything could have happened next, in the scene after that, a few possibilities got eliminated, and so on and on, and then generally by the time I got to 60% of the way through the story I would know how the rest of the work had to fall out based on what I'd written before. I like that method, and it's still what I use for fanfic (though that tends to be shorter, so the candybar scenes tend to take up a larger proportion of the story, which probably helps).

With my current WIP, I wrote the first ~10,000 words and then spent two weeks writing an exhaustive outline once I had that mood down. I made some vague use of a few plotting methods (the lovely @samyazaz is an absolute font of those), but mostly I did the extremely cut-down no-prose version of the plotting method above. It's not the most efficient way of doing an outline, and the outline is no doubt bloated as hell, but the writing is going pretty well? I'll keep refining this process, but it's where I'm at right now.

Character names! Truly one of the worst parts about writing SFF when I'm doing original work, even if I'm using real-world names for first names I usually have to do something about surnames. Names, though, are really where there's an intersection of character and worldbuilding, and I'm trying to get better about it.

Things I try to keep in mind when naming characters or coming up with names:

Language: Are the characters all from the same place? Are there common name endings or phonemes? Katherine Addison's Goblin Emperor does a gorgeous job with this--people with goblin heritage are really the only ones who have "kh" in their names, at least from what I'm remembering now, and part of the reason it was hard to read for me the first time is because there are common name beginnings and phonemes and things, and I kept mixing up my Csethiros and Csorus and Csevets. Though it won't come up unless there's an audiobook, Addison also makes a point of saying that elves and goblins have different syllable stresses even if their names are similarly constructed.

Gender: Do people of different genders commonly have different name endings or beginnings? Once again turning to Addison, among the elves men often have names ending in -a, while only women seem to have -o or -u, and gender also impacts the ending of surnames. (Maia's house name is Drazhada, his surname is Drazhar, his unmarried sister is Drazhin, etc.) Or, in my current original WIP, there's a location where a lot of women have names ending in -ie and a lot of men have names ending in -a, and -or, -er, and -ar are more gender neutral.

Class: Do richer people have more syllables in their names? More middle names? Longer last names? Conversely, are they shorter? Do last names hyphenate, and does that change based on class or location? Are there names or nicknames that one class or another prefers not to use?

Personality: This matters more with real-world names that you're assigning to a character, and that I do mostly by feel. But again, maybe you've got a very regal fantasy character, a real snobby prince type, and "Kod" does not feel regal or princely, but Kinrod gets closer, and Elkinrod Felforth III gets you all the way there.

And then there's various other things, like religion and subcultures and characters being named after other characters, like Tasha Suri's culture in her Burning Kingdoms trilogy where people of a certain religion are named for prophecies and only share those names when they're getting close to fulfilled and go by nicknames, but those are all Advanced Naming Things and I've been writing this for half an hour so I'm leaving it there!

#cendiar #answered asks #i like talking about writing i'm just not the most coherent about it

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balillee · 3 years ago

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why 'there's no lore going on' right now in the dream smp - The Misfits Analogy

Fans of television, especially British television, will probably be familiar with an early 2010's show called Misfits. The show ran for five seasons spanning 2009 to 2013 - while the first two seasons (the first moreso than the second) are regarded more as cult classics, the latter half of the show completely falls in writing and production quality due to one significant change - the cast.

Seasons one and two of Misfits was centred around the original misfits gang - Nathan Young (portrayed by Robert Sheehan), Kelly Bailey (portrayed by Lauren Socha), Simon Bellamy (portrayed by Iwan Rheon), Alisha Daniels (portrayed by Antonia Thomas) and Curtis Donovan (portrayed by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett).

The show was good for two different factors from my perspective -

The intersection of superpowered television and interpersonal conflicts that broke the norm for stereotypes.

How the cast reflected modern British society.

In summary, the show followed a group of five young offenders at a community service centre. Not too interesting - but give them relatability, realism and explore their character development and their existing stereotypes/tropes through the use of superpowers? Genius.

Nathan was most definitely the fan favourite character of the show - he was outgoing, annoying, larger than life in a lot of ways and in all senses, he was a skeevy asshole who would insult characters at every turn. He was very much the class clown of the show and any British viewer could probably see someone they remember from school in Nathan, except Nathan was lovable and you could sympathise with him because you could see him struggling primarily at home and with his family.

Spoilers for the show - Nathan's power was immortality and the ability to resurrect himself from death. This power wasn't explicit immediately either to Nathan or to the audience unlike all of the other young offenders, and it reflected his 'nothing can hurt me ' attitude. Nathan was a character who could take any comment and brush it off like it was nothing, and he in the physical sense could take being thrown off a roof, impaled and practically buried alive and be sitting in his own coffin with his iPod all fine and dandy.

Kelly was also another standout example - her character reflected the stereotype of a chavvy girl, 'council house and violent' - loudmouthed, not very smart, questionable fashion choices and a bit abrasive. The only difference is that the show knew they had to subvert that stereotype - instead, Kelly was smart in her own way and she was empathic -> her superpower was the ability to hear other people's thoughts, and later, she became superintelligent and when her character left the show she decided to move to Uganda use her newfound rocket-scientist level intelligence for good. She was still loudmouthed and definitely chavvy, but she was also a whole human person who cared about other people and who was definitely intelligent.

If I kept going, I'd be lamenting about how season one's cast well reflected and subverted stereotypes and expectations using their superpowers, but I'd be here all day and that's really not the point I'm trying to make.

By the end of season 2, Robert Sheehan, as the standout performance from the show, decides to move on to greener pastures (which,, I don't blame him, being stuck on E4 would have been a nightmare for his career and look where he is now? He's a fan favourite as Klaus in TUA now!) - thus, Nathan is written out of the show in a post- season 2 special in which he gets locked up in prison in America.

This was the first character to get written out of the show.

In season 3, we lose Kelly who moves to Uganda with Seth to defuse landmines, and Simon and Alisha are both killed, and the only remaining member of the original ASBO five is Curtis.

Season 4 rolls around, and we pretty much have an entirely new Misfits cast - Curtis, and then we have Rudy (who had been present since season 3), and then we have new additions Jess, Finn and Abbey.

Let me tell you that by this point in the show, all of the fans had lost interest.

Not only had the two biggest fan favourites, Nathan and Kelly, left the show, but you now have to replace four out of the five original cast members with new ones that don't function the same way the originals did. What type of person is someone with X-ray vision trying to represent? You could argue that maybe Jess is good at figuring people out, but I don't really remember this being explored that much in the show. And the difference between this reflecting a minor personality trait is that the original cast didn't do that - in dumbed down terms, Alisha was a 'sket' who had the power to make people horny for her, oftentimes against her wishes, through skin-to-skin contact. That's much more impactful and there's a lot more to explore there.

Episode 7 of Season 4 of Misfits is the clearest indicator of the departure of the original show's intentions and explains perfectly why it didn't work the way it used to.

For the entirety of the season, Jess had been crushing on a guy called Alex from a bar she frequented (who later went on to replace Curtis as the fifth Misfits member in season 5, go figures) who, as far as we had seen, not at all reciprocated those feelings nor was there any indication of him wanting to.

In episode 7, we figure out why.

Jess, using her x-ray vision, finds out that Alex's penis was stolen by a trans man.

I'll be honest, when I first heard it, I thought it was a joke.

The show went from having a diverse cast, not only in terms of having two black characters in it's main cast, but also in it's diversity of character tropes that they aimed to subvert - to then having a mainly white cast in a show that actively perpetuates harmful stereotypes about trans people being dangerous.

Now, and I want to preface this, I don't think that the Dream SMP is malicious in the same way that the writing of that episode of Misfits is. I don't think the SMP is malicious at all. What I want to highlight is how the change in cast directly mirrored when the audience dropoff was and when the show itself started to go south in terms of quality, production and what they wanted to achieve.

For the sake of my argument, there is currently three seasons of the dream smp. The start of the server up until the end of the initial disc war is the prologue, season one encompasses Wilbur's L'Manberg and the Pogtopia arc, ending on November 16th, season 2 starts November 17th and ends January 20th (the disc war finale) and season 3 spans from January 21st to the present day.

Most of the fans of the Dream SMP can tell you that the primary story of the server is centred around quite a few certain characters who viewers started watching to see more of. I'm guilty of this myself - I primarily watch the SMP for Tommy's story, and I also stick around for Wilbur, Tubbo, Ranboo and a little bit for Phil, Techno and Jack Manifold. Those were the people I was invested in and those are the stories I like to follow. Not to discredit or to downplay the work or the stories of other characters, but I can imagine that there are a few people who watch the SMP primarily for a close few perspectives/storylines, and following some storylines over others just because you're not interested in them is completely fine and there's nothing wrong with that at all.

In season one, there was always things going on with my favourite characters. Tommy was always getting himself into spots of trouble and making up different schemes to get people to come visit L'Manberg as a tourist attraction, or getting people to support the rebellion, and this was interspersed with the heavier, plot-driven moments such as Wilbur's mental breakdown, the festival, the pit fight and the season 1 finale. This got me invested in him as a character because he had been there for quite a while and we'd seen him develop and grow into the character we now see in season 3.

In the back half of season 1 came Techno, who really shook things up and threw a spanner in the works and provided a totally different perspective - unlike Dream he didn't hate L'Manberg because he couldn't control it, and unlike Wilbur he didn't have a personal connection to it and he didn't know it's history. Techno initially hated L'Manberg because it was a government he knew nothing about (and still knows nothing about even today), and because violence and destruction is kind of his thing.

We had a well balanced cast of characters - not too many - that we could follow and who all had varying perspectives, experiences and personalities. We had clearly defined groups of individuals with different morals: you had the people on the side of Manberg, the people in Pogtopia who wanted Manberg blown up, the people in Pogtopia who didn't want Manberg blown up, and on the side to compliment it all you also had the Badlands, comprised of three longstanding members of the server,,,, and then Antfrost who was kidnapped by Tommy that one time. It was all wrapped up nicely in a neat little bow and there was structure to it all. There was one plot that went in one direction, and despite the many perspectives, it all ended up in the same spot and the story ended. There was a conclusion.

In season 2, the two primary additions to the 'cast' were Phil and Ranboo, whose characters complimented the existing story well. Phil functioned mostly as a successor to Wilbur alongside Ghostbur by exploring well the departure of Wilbur as a character in that moment, and he also functioned well as a companion to Techno's character. Ranboo, on the other hand, had a pretty good complimentary solo story that could be followed alongside the main plot, however his story wasn't too distant from the main story to the point where he was completely removed from it - he had direct involvement in different events such as the exile conflict, his connection to Dream as the main antagonist of the season and his involvement in blowing up the community house.

Season 2 starts with a focus on two different spaces - it breaks up a longstanding duo and the storyline diverges into two halves: Logstedshire and New L'Manberg, and you have Techno's short 'retirement' arc working decently to compliment it and also to set the tone for his character going forward in that season. In Logstedshire we see the aftermath of Tommy being exiled from L'Manberg by Dream - we see him endure what is (in canon) at least a month of isolation and physical and psychological abuse and it culminates on December 15th when Tommy rescues himself, jumps from the tower and goes to hide in Techno's house (which acts as a good precursor to his involvement in Techno's storyline in that season). On the other side, we follow Tubbo in L'Manberg dealing with Presidency - he talks a lot and gets 'friendly' with Dream, he prepares to run against Ranboo in the coming election cycle (primarily because he doesn't want to be President) and we see his interactions with the power-hungrier Quackity who all too often takes the reigns and this culminates in the creation of the Butcher Army, and following the Butcher Army's attack on December 16th, once again, we have two clearly defined sides:

One one side, we have Tubbo, Quackity and Fundy who represent L'Manberg, and on the other we have Tommy (who is unaware of the Butcher Army's attack), Phil and Techno, and more in the middle we have Ghostbur and Ranboo.

Season 2's finale format is a clear departure for the format of November 16th, but it's not a poor choice - I think, especially considering the story that they were telling, it worked perfectly. On November 16th, pretty much everyone was streaming their perspective of the event; at the time, there were even compilations of everyone's reactions to Wilbur blowing up L'Manberg. On January 20th, however, we only had two perspectives - Tubbo and Tommy.

I'll say it now, while Season 2 was definitely Clingyduo's season, it didn't focus solely on them. There was also a big focus on Techno as a character, whose arc came to an end a little earlier on Doomsday, and there was also a focus on Ranboo a lot as a solo character, and he streamed a little later on January 20th with what I refer to as the 'epilogue', where there was also a shift in his character to expect moving forward.

Why season 2's finale worked is because it was centralised around only three characters, only two of which we ever see the perspectives of, and it was the finale of the longest running storyline of the entire narrative - the disc war. Two boys who were on their last life, making their last stand at the one man who pulled the strings to make their lives miserable - those two perspectives only, and it worked. We didn't have compilations of everyone reacting to the things happening around them which worked for season 1, instead, we focused on these two characters whose turn it was to get the focus, and we had iconic and moving moments. We had the two boys walking down the prime path saying what they could only assume might have been their last goodbyes to the people that still had a shred of care for them, we had the two sailing to where they would face off against Dream for their final stand and finally talking about their feelings a little and dreading the implication that if they were both to die, nobody would live to tell their stories, we had Tommy choosing his best friend over his discs time and time again, and we had Punz - Dream's last confidant - standing against Dream and bringing everyone with him and sending him to prison, now on his last life too.

Everything about it was perfect. The more focused ending worked for the ending of season 2 because it was their time to have their climax moment - and it wasn't some spectacular display of explosions or violence like in Wilbur's finale on November 16th, where the ramifications hit everyone and we got to see it, nor was it a show of violence and almost oppressive dominance like Techno's finale was on Doomsday, where we saw everyone's breakdown and how the people contributing to the destruction of L'Manberg, no matter how righteous they thought they were, did not care to understand how much they were hurting and destroying the lives of the country's citizens. On January 20th, Tommy and Tubbo went into it thinking they were going to die, they got their asses handed to them despite how hard they tried, and they had their behinds saved by Tommy's preparative thinking by people who weren't there to save them more than they were there to get rid of Dream.

Season 3 suffers a lot from a lack of focus, awful pacing and really poor timing.

Seasons 1 and 2 occurred during the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic, where everyone was stuck at home and had more time to stream because it was their primary form of content and because it was the best way to communicate with their friends. Thus, the pacing of those seasons was extremely steady and things were always happening.

Now, lockdown restrictions have eased quite a bit, and creators can branch out a lot more and can meet with each other in real life and can do vlog-style content. Therefore, they don't stream as much, and the focus of the Dream SMP story has shifted more towards newer or sideplot characters. If you enjoy those characters, that's fine, but when they take the focus away from the characters and the storylines the majority are expecting, a lot of people won't try to keep up with it and from their perspective there'll be a massive lull in narrative content.

What I'm saying, is that Tommy streaming for thirteen days in a row in July 2021 is a fucking pipe dream. It happened in December because the story was consistent and the pacing was steady and he had the time and the want to be there. Now, Tommy's off making his vlogs and hanging out with his friends and thus he can't stream as much as he used to. He's sort of suffering from the Robert Sheehan problem, isn't he? Tommy is still involved with the Dream SMP and his story is definitely continuing, and his narrative in season 3 is really starting to pick up with the newer developments, it's just that he doesn't have as much time to play the role anymore because he isn't streaming as much.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing - it's obviously making him happy that his content is changing and I'm fully supportive of that.

So when all of these meetups are happening and we don't have as much content from the main characters that we follow anymore, what happens?

Well, the fans get a little itchy. This fandom, especially. They might throw out a comment or a tweet asking when they're going to stream on the SMP, or if they really don't understand why the Dream SMP is good, they'll ask when the next 'lore stream' is, and they'll lament a little about how the content and the story has slowed, especially in contrast to the fast pacing of season 2 which only lasted a little over two months with much more story going on than in season 3 despite it having been going on for triple the time. What they'll get in response is that the Dream SMP is still going on and that lore is still happening.

On all accounts, these statements aren't incorrect. Lore still is happening.

But when you've been following lovable characters for two seasons, setting up their struggles and then switching the focus onto newer or 'sideplot' characters that you haven't really followed before, there's going to be a bit of moaning about it on twitter dot com.

The SMP now suffers from having too many characters, too many unfocused narratives, and poor pacing/ditched or unfinished storylines from the characters we used to follow and love while we're being told to love other characters instead.

I never really cared too much about the egg subplot, I'll be honest. I was a little interested in the involvement of Sam, Puffy and Ponk, but other than that, I wasn't really too invested. It very much tried to replicate the 'you should have paid me more' moment from January 20th at the Red Banquet, and it really didn't hit as hard because most of the characters there were either ones that didn't belong there at all (like Niki, Fundy, HBomb, and Purpled), weren't that involved with the plotline and felt out of place with the established characters in that storyline (Techno, Quackity and Ranboo), or were new characters that were difficult to get on board with because they hadn't really had too much of a story beforehand (Hannah and Foolish), or in the case of Antfrost, characters with no known motivation to be there other than that being the storyline they're currently in. Not to discredit those involved or their characters, but the Red Banquet really tried to replicate what the disc finale did with it's focused perspectives and it's Punz moment, and it failed.

Now, following the egg subplot's finale, I'm meant to focus on Las Nevadas, Snowchester and the Syndicate.

Las Nevadas is the most consistent storyline, however it's biggest problem is that it is filled with new characters or ones that are barely there. Despite how long he's been on the server, Purpled really is a new character if only because he's only really become a character recently - Foolish is still considered new, Slimecicle is new, Fundy rarely streams on the SMP. The only consistent longstanding and heavily involved characters that are a part of Las Nevadas are Quackity and Sam, and even their streams are infrequent, with a lot of Sam's perspective not even focusing on Las Nevadas but instead the prison.

Snowchester's plot is very much dying, dead and in the water. She's suffering. We haven't seen Michael in over a month, a nuke is still missing, Jack Manifold is dubiously a citizen and Tubbo doesn't even think he has a character on the SMP. It breaks my heart.

The Syndicate suffer from a lack of existence. The four characters really aren't a friend group in canon - all of the stuff about them hanging out all the time and them basically being a book club is all fanon. They've hung out as a four all of twice, the first time they ever got together they celebrated someone's death and then basically invaded Snowchester to give themselves a reason not to destroy it, terrifying Tubbo in the process. The second time was because it was Techno's birthday.

Now, Techno is in prison, and the only reason Phil hasn't read the will to progress the story is likely because of difficult scheduling with other server members, which is written off in canon as Phil not wanting to accept the possibility of Techno potentially dying.

Literally reading the will and having the Syndicate figure out that Techno's in prison with Dream will solve all of season 3's formatting issues and have the story back on track.

Currently, we don't really have two clearly defined sides the way we always had. We were meant to root for L'Manberg against the Dream Team, we were meant to root for Pogtopia against Manberg, and in season 2 we had a lot more moral ambiguity and room for side switching between the forces of Dream, Techno and Phil against L'Manberg, and then we rooted for Clingyduo against Dream.

I can predict that if the will is read, here's how a good conflict can arise.

Two clearly defined different sides - Las Nevadas on the side of Pandora's Vault, and the Syndicate (currently consisting of Phil, Ranboo and Niki), and you have compromises to make. If the side of the Prison wins, Techno and Dream stay in Pandora's Vault without a proper trial and being treated inhumanely, and there's also the threat of the rest of the Syndicate also being imprisoned. If the side of the Syndicate wins, the prison is taken out and Techno and Dream are no longer being treated inhumanely - problem is that Dream's out, and he's very much dangerous because despite what c!Dream apologists will tell you, he's not docile and he's not going to have a healing arc with Techno because he doesn't think he's done anything wrong and Techno can't tell him that he's done anything wrong (because Techno is the most wilfully ignorant character who gets to be political it's INSANE) - he'll go right back to the evil, abusive bastard he was, obsessed with Tommy, probably worse now that he can easily get Wilbur to do anything he wants and more vindictive against Quackity. Plus, if the Syndicate take down Las Nevadas they'll hold the most power on the server systematically and the so-called anarchists will ironically be the top dogs of the server.

Then towards the middle you'll probably end up having Wilbur, Benchtrio and Jack Manifold - Tubbo and Jack would prefer Techno and Dream staying in prison, except Tubbo's really not on the greatest terms with Q at the minute (because Q's paranoid and making conflict with parties that would have otherwise helped him out and thought they were friends), whereas Tommy would be stuck between wanting Techno out but needing to either keep Dream in or kill him, and Wilbur will be having to pick between aiding Dream's escape from prison or staying with Tommy, because he can't have both. Ranboo will probably be having the same problem as Tommy, except he's on the side of the Syndicate and will have to pick between the Syndicate or keeping Dream imprisoned.

Season 3 is salvageable, it really is. You can fix the poor pacing and you can fix the lack of focus with literally one revelation from fucking Philza M|necraft. But as it stands now, season 3 suffers from a similar situation as Misfits - almost replacing the cast of characters we've followed for the longest time with a new one in a format completely different to the original seasons.

#dream smp #dsmp #dream smp analysis #dsmp analysis #dsmp meta #dream smp meta #long post #esclapoanalysis

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flying-elliska · 3 years ago

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I finished Young Royals ! Really liked it overall. Thoughts :

- they had a "must look like Isak Valtersen" line on the prince Wilhelm casting call didn't they

- obviously Simon, socialist sweetheart, is my fave. but yeah they did a good job with Willie too, the whole royalty thing is very over the top but by portraying his anxiety and the feeling of claustrophobia at having all these responsibilities thrust onto him actually made him weirdly relatable.

- the romance was just super sweet and adorable! Realistic teenagers with all the acne and bumbling awkwardness and spontaneity, very nice to see. Enough tenderness to make it feel real but not exploitative. I liked how they actually talked to each other about stuff that was bothering them. Plus you can tell they just really want to be close and spend time together and are delighted by the other's presence, which is the baseline of a good couple that sadly too many don't even reach (esp queer ones, sigh). Great chemistry, zero subtlety. It honestly surprised me how fast they moved but it makes sense since the focus of the story is more on how this intersects with Willie's royal status + their class differences rather than stuff like overcoming (internalized) homophobia etc. Which is great and very refreshing. The way they're drawn to each other makes perfect sense - Willie seeing Simon as the only real person around him, with his heartfelt singing and strong opinions, and Simon seems amazed that someone is finally noticing him and helping him and caring about him - and yet it feels like they've only touched the surface of what those two could be to each other so like. Lots of potential.

- man the way Simon's friends must have roasted him after he like casually brought over the fucking prince with an obvious crush situation going on jfjfjfjf I feel like they didn't get enough comedy value out of that

- liked the focus on class differences and the glance at insane rich kid behavior with the whole ridiculous secret society shit and bragging about how amazingly privileged they are and how they could get away with murder. It felt appropriately nasty even if I'm sure the reality is worse. August was a great antagonist, in that his motivations make sense, and sure the pressure he is under and the death of his father sucks, and you have a feeling he could be a better person, but his actions and choices are still utterly loathsome because he's so afraid of losing his status. Great portrayal of what entitlement does to a person.

- Felice is a great character and her and her gang embracing Sara into their group was so sweet. I loved that she stood up to her mom by giving the Lucia thing to Sara. I thought we would get a storyline of Willie leading her on to show his straightness but I'm glad we didn't.

- Speaking of Sara she's sweet and an interesting character but wtf at her choices at the end there, that was Not It

- the ending was frustrating because it doesn't feel like a proper resolution - it's obvious that they want a s2 and they better get it - but in hindsight I like it. I like Simon standing up for himself. I was rooting for Willie to pull a big romcom move and kiss Simon in front of everyone but that wouldn't have been realistic. Because if/when he comes out, the repercussions will be massive, he knows that. The obstacles are real and they can't be hand waved away by the Power of Love, which gives more weight to the whole thing. So I like that we leave him in that uncertain place where he's starting to realize that the monarchy is really fucked up and that he loves Simon and wants to fight for him and that there's a "revolution" coming (the music does a lot there) he just doesn't know how yet. It will be really interesting to see how they move from there.

- I did not like the adhd medication plotline!!!! At all ! 95% of times when adhd is adressed in the media it's about meds being abused. It's like writers think this is the only story worth telling about adhd and I'm really tired of it. It honestly feels trivializing and exploitative for the sake of drama, but of course even on these shows that pride themselves on having good rep in other areas there is still zero awareness of this. At least they had actual neuroatypical characters, even though neither of them really gave me big relatable/recognizable adhd vibes. And they made it clear that it's not a diagnosis you can get on a whim and that it impacted Sara's life in big ways (although not sure that would have been there if they didn't make her autistic as well). So they're not the worst offenders but it still made me grit my teeth.

- I bet at least one of their writers has read a Royalty AU fanfic because this just feels straight up like that

- maybe not quite a fave, the music choices are a bit try-hard sometimes, it definitely doesn't have skam's naturalistic coolness (I'm pretty sure there was a Netflix Sweden executive with "let's make another skam" somewhere in his notes), but yeah I was surprised by how much I liked it actually and really looking forward to s2

#young royals #young royals netflix #young royals spoilers #wilmon #is that the ship name ?#adhd representation #ellie watches things

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demiromanticmickey · 3 years ago

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I'm glad so many people find Heartstopper relatable. I don't relate to it, personally. The character I relate to most is Tao and he's straight.

The thing is, while I enjoy stories like Love, Simon and Heatstopper and understand and appreciate how important they are, I don't feel represented by them because the protagonists are white queer men.

Even though they have qpoc - Bram, Elle, Tara - these stories never explore what it means to be both queer and poc. Not that I'm surprised by that since the source material for both were written by white authors. And I can't help but notice the trend white authors have developed of making their second leads and side characters queer and black specifically but, like I said, never delving into what that means. And I get it, they can't know what that means. But excluding the intersection of race and sexuality/gender identity just make their attempts at inclusivity feel half-hearted.

Like, Tara receives the brunt of homophobia after she and Darcy come out and this is chalked up to the fact that Darcy came out years ago so she's super confident about being a lesbian and not, like the possibility that Tara may be targeted because she is also a dark skinned black girl. Because that's immediately why I thought people were being particularly nasty towards her.

I love Heartstopper, but I also don't feel represented by it. And that's fine, I don't need to relate to a queer story to enjoy it. I also don't look to queer content made by white people to feel represented in the first place.

It's why I loved rediscovering BL and GL. Even though these characters are not racial minorities where they live, their experiences with family is what resonates with me and feels a little closer to my own lived experiences. I may not have liked how Bad Buddy chose to handle the parents' storyline narratively, but it is something that feels relatable to me.

There are just some things - family, racism, class, etc. - that cannot be divorced from queerness when you're not white. They are inextricable. And that makes it difficult to relate to mainstream queer western media when it's focus is still on white people.

#i cannot stress enough how much i *don't* hate heartstopper #i love it a lot #im not hating on anything so don't come for me lmao #im just thinking thoughts #*

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samdotdocx · 4 years ago

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A very long-winded essay about why I love Night in the Woods and The Ramayana makes me Big Mad ft. Lets Talk About Mental Illness™

So I was in this class called 'The Ecology of Language". Excellent class, 10/10 would recommend - and especially relevant in the Indian context in particular, but that's a topic for another day.

One of the things we talked about was the concept of 'relatibality' in media, which, I'm sure we can all agree is a large component of contemporary character or story-line development. Considering the context of modern readers, what that sometimes ends up looking like (in our society that is built on constantly being told we are lacking, and the subsequent need to satisfy manufactured desires), is some wonderfully nuanced characters in stories stories that are three-dimensional, well rounded, and well developed and written. It's pretty great. And sometimes, what that means is that we have excellent characters that don't conform to the standard 'protagonist' stereotype. They might not even be 'good' (this is NOT a villain-apologist post). In fact, they might be complete idiots. They might be the people in stories who make all the wrong choices.

One such relatable character is Mae, and it's because she's an unmitigated train-wreck.

Anyone who knows the game probably knows what I'm talking about when I say the illustration style and character designs are gorgeous. Anyone who's ever dissociated probably knows what I'm talking about when I say that illustration style and character design were excellently used to create the sort of subliminal, surreal state of Mae's mind. And as you play the game, you see how that state of mind plays with the other characters, and - spoiler - it isn't great.

This is the first of the relatable aspects of Mae’s character; there are people around her who love her and are worried about her, but at the same time, are angry and irritated about her behaviour. At what point does it become too much to ask of those around you to forgive all your continuous and repetitive mistakes? Even if you have a good reason for it, mental illness is not an excuse for being exploitative, even if it is unintentional. Mae is not trying to hurt the people around her, but she constantly needs emotional labour from them – it’s exhausting, and people’s patience is going to run out eventually, as is their right.

Another aspect of this behaviour is the lack of reciprocity, an example of this being when Bea’s mother died of cancer – and Mae didn’t even notice.

There are several instances of Mae’s thoughtless behaviour throughout the game; she gets completely wasted and makes a scene at the party, gets jealous of of Greg and Angus because they’re leaving the town without her, and ends up destroying the radiator Bea was supposed to fix, getting her in trouble.

The thing is though, that Mae is given the opportunity to fix her mistakes.

A large part of relatability is the want so see yourself in a character. Mae is relatable to me because there are several circumstances and events in our lives that match up, but more than that; the game is an interactive visualization of her healing process. Her nine steps, if you will. She is given a second chance – and that chance is hard won, particularly in the context of the game.

Mae talks about feeling like she’s falling behind, of knowing that she is, in a way, wasting an opportunity that was a privilege in the first place, especially considering her family’s financial situation – but at the same time, being literally unable to help herself. And the aspects of the gameplay that hint at the supernatural elements of the story possibly being a figment of Mae’s imagination – well. All us depressed losers know what it's like to not be able to trust your own judgement and point of view. She talks about why she dropped out of college, and her description of the dissociation, and the mental and emotional deadening that it causes is spot on and so well represented.

It underscores the point that the logical brain knows that mental illness is an illness like any other – but the emotional brain doesn’t care.

The game does a brilliant job of laying bare the realities of middle class life, and makes painfully clear the fact that, at that level, it doesn’t matter how difficult things are for you. The world isn’t going to wait for you to get back on your feet.

Mae’s mental state and the limitations it imposes on her cultivates a state of extreme frustration. Again, relatable. It’s an understated aspect of illness of any kind; the anger at yourself, and how that anger carries over into a lot of things in your day to day life. After a point, it becomes a habit. Mae does this too; she's belligerent, and instigative, and unrepentant of consequences, because anger blinds you.

It's not how things will always be. I have the privilege of hindsight, so I can say that with authority. But, this isn’t the kind of thing that ever fully leaves you, either. If you break a kneecap, it’s going to bother you for the rest of your life, and similarly, mental illness has a ‘no return, no refund’ policy. So you grow up, and you try to adapt those habits and impulses into a more positive context. Recycling, right? Maybe you set your sights on things that actually deserve your anger, and you go from there. You find people who, for their own reasons, perhaps or perhaps not related to your own, are angry.

And you don’t understand the people who are not.

A large part of the anger and frustration surrounding mental illness is due to the stigma surrounding it. It’s frustrating to be so powerless and dependent, but this is exacerbated by the attitude of ‘it can’t be that bad’, which makes it so difficult to reach out, to be able to say, ‘I need a break’ – and actually get one. This is an attitude that carries over to a lot of other issues as well, and the worst part is – we are surrounded by people who are okay with it, who believe in and support that mentality.

The myth of Sita, for example. She is a strong female figure in Indian mythology, who overcomes her circumstances to live a ‘good’ life, and for all intents and purposes, is a hell of a role model.

But that’s the thing; her life wasn’t good, was it? She was supposed be a goddess reincarnated, she should have been powerful, and respected, but instead she is reduced to ‘wife’ – and everyone today is fine with it.

I respect her immensely for the choices she made; marrying for love was her choice, going into exile with her husband was her choice. She was the paragon of virtue, of 'wifeliness', of kindness – she chose her husband over everyone and everything else, including herself, as was expected of her. But yet – she couldn't win his trust or respect. It should not even have needed to be won.

It’s commendable the way she takes it all in stride, but why did she? She was kidnapped and held captive for years, entirely against her will, and her husband's response to that is to force her to walk through fire to prove her ‘purity’ – and she does it. And she stays with him after, and I cannot understand the depths of her patience and forgiveness, because I would have been livid, and I want her to be so too. I’m furious for her, because Ram was not just her husband, he was also the king, and his later verdict to exile her, alone, while heavily pregnant, his readiness to condemn her based on speculation and public sentiment, was not just a verdict against her, it was against every woman in his kingdom who had ever been victimised.

Sita became a martyr to the modern feminist movement – if she could not be angry on her own behalf, we will do it for her. But at the same time, she is still relatable, because we are held to a slightly lesser degree of the same expectations. There are always going to be aspects of things that you relate to. ‘Big Mood’ culture is a strong indicator of the human ability to empathise, especially with characters that you like, or respect.

Sita’s world, I imagine, was run by the expectations her society and community had of her, and maybe she didn’t even have the liberty to be angry. Who is responsible for portraying her in passive acceptance of her fate? Is that representation reliable? Would the story have been different had it been written by a woman?

I can't remember a time when I was not angry, especially about things like this. I am always ready to fight, and I think the same goes for so many other people today, sometimes to our detriment. I cannot imagine a world where that was not at the very least an option. Not necessarily the best option, - but Sita’s world was very different to ours. Even with centuries between us, we’ve just gotten over angry and depressed women being labelled as ‘hysterical’ and subsequently being locked away. What is it like, to have to be calm and careful in response to being treated like this? This care in response may not be an overt requirement anymore – though the fact remains that society will not take you seriously if you become hysterical - but shouldn't you, at the very least, be able to rely on the support of other people in the same boat?

That is the main difference in these stories, and another main point of relatability to me; Mae, like myself, had a support system. Sita did not. Mae was selfish and demanding in so many ways, and required a lot of time and patience and healing before she was able to give back, but she got there eventually because she was able to put herself first. She fought for herself, and when she couldn’t, she had other people to fight for her. Night in the Woods represents the intersection of oppressed minorities and community with their portrayal of Mae, Greg, and Angus in particular, and the importance of community support – and, the difference between geographical community, and communities formed through camaraderie and actual unity. And so does the Ramayana - except, where was Sita’s community? Where were her sisters, or her parents, when she was abandoned in the woods, and later when she committed suicide? We are well aware, in the modern day, of the state of mind that causes people to kill themselves, and yet that is a part of the story that we never talk about. Where were her people then?

What would have happened if she had been more like Mae, and put herself first instead of bleeding herself dry for people who never respected her, and would never do the same for her?

People relate to personalities. They relate to choices, and circumstances, and habits, and it is neither a good nor a bad thing, to be relatable or not. Sita will be highly relatable to people who, like her, were governed by their circumstances, and were screwed over despite their best efforts. People who felt they couldn’t, or shouldn’t exercise their power and agency. Sita’s death was at odds with her strong personality, and so was her deference to her fate on many occasions, but there are a lot of people out there who will relate to the feeling of simply wanting things to be over. Mae on the other hand; she’s a steamroller, and she doesn’t stop. There’s a reason her character is a cat, and jokingly referred to as feral in the game. She is persistent, she is growing.

[1] In Defence of Kaikeyi and Draupadi: a Note – by Fritz Blackwellhttps://www.jstor.org/stable/23334398?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/emergency-room-wait-times-sexism/410515/

#ramayana discourse #night in the woods #sita #tw suicice #tw mental illness #mae borowski #spam-by-sam

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