#identities both in-universe and out of it

[greatwritenorth]

Some Thoughts On Sunrise on the Reaping & Haymitch Abernathy

I haven't written anything on any of my tumblr accounts in years. However, I had a shower thought that I simply had to shout into the void, in case anyone saw it too, and tumblr still seemed like the best form to do it.

So, like many people, I read Sunrise on the Reaping, and then immediately had to reread the entire Hunger Games universe. I took a while to get into Sunrise (I wasn't emotionally ready when it came out), so I've only just finished re-reading the first novel, and, of course, consuming any media that shows up on my accounts (usually Pinterest these days). As I was showering tonight, I started thinking about things, and had a bit of a moment that I had to share. So, here I am about to write a text post that's going to get so long no one will actually read it.

All through the original The Hunger Games series, the parallels between Haymitch and Katniss are endless. Katniss is the one who understands him in the arena. He and Katniss are both "difficult people", and of course, Peeta insists that Katniss is Haymitch's favourite. It's true, at this point in his life, Haymitch is more like Katniss. He understands her, some of her trauma, and her general wariness of people. If you love people, they can hurt you, and be used to hurt you. That is a lesson that, sadly, by this point, both Katniss and Haymitch have learned.

However, the Haymitch that we see in Sunrise on the Reaping, isn't Katniss. He isn't angry (at least not as much as Katniss is), or guarded. He doesn't struggle with people. Before the hunger games, Haymitch wasn't Katniss—he was Peeta.

Haymitch wanted his death to mean something; he wanted to end the hunger games, stick it to the captiol. For most of the games, Katniss just wanted to survive. Peeta was the one who was thinking about his identity, how the capitol was using them, and how he wanted to do something to stop that.

Haymitch understood almost immediately, once he was told, why he needed to play to the audience during his interviews, and he fell into his role as "the rake" easily. He was nervous, but he did it. Katniss, initially, couldn't play the charm game for the cameras before her interview to save her life (literally). Peeta knew exactly what he was going to do and how to play it.

Most importantly of all, Haymitch loved a girl with a beautiful singing voice (and did things her own way) more than his own life. He connected with Katniss. He understood her pain, and he couldn't help seeing Louella in her style (and, likely, her father who he once loved too). However, I think he empathized with Peeta. Haymitch would have lost his mind if Lenore Dove was in the games instead of him. And, in the second novel, when Peeta expresses frustration with having to pretend to love Katniss when he really loves Katniss, Haymitch can emphasize with his pain in a way that Katniss (who is still struggling with her feelings, and sees things in a black and white way more often then not) cannot. I'm sure he could imagine what it'd be like to play act a life with Lenore Dove, for The Capitol of all people, when she didn't seem to care for you (or so you think), but you love her "like all fire".

I also think that this, among other factors (the right time, and more support), is what made Katniss and Peeta "smarter or more lucky". Yes, Katniss became the face of the revolution, but she couldn't have done it without Peeta. Peeta brought what Haymitch already had in his games, and Katniss brought the survival instincts, the anger, that Haymitch has an an adult.

[nebulablakemurphy]

Unintentionally things in the Moves & Countermoves Universe that I think are kinda interesting

-Y/N is 21 in Horn of Plenty, making Madge 16. The same age as Maysilee was when she was in the Quarter Quell. Knowing they look almost identical, it’s easy to understand how Haymitch made the mistake of calling Madge Maysilee (something he had never done before.)

-Everest is 19 when he goes to study in the Capitol, the same age Y/N was when she married Haymitch. Meaning they both learned about victor exploitation at the same age.

-Y/N is 15 when she goes to the games, Arista is 15 in Capitol Loss and when she finds out what happened to her parents.

[knifedog-machina]

Oh, that's a really good question! We're going to answer it for each of us, because while we're all human, we all have different relationships to said humanity and its normality (or lack thereof).

Max

I'm a velociraptor and a human, where sometimes I'm both enmeshed together and sometimes we split apart - so then I'm a human who's being bothered by this large bird that lives in my brain and doesn't understand abstract thought. (I love it to death, it's just also a weird little animal that's clueless about many things. It doesn't know what an oven is.)

I'd call my humanity alterhuman, even though I live in a human body that's always been human and always been mine! I'm alterhuman, especially when fully human, because my humanity is always affected by living with my animality, and because I have an alterhuman relationship to fiction - my sense of self is profoundly affected by my relationship to my writing, and I frame that in an alterhuman context because "fictionhearted" is a very useful word to describe how impactful my fiction has been on my personhood. I live with two other people in my brain who are from that writing, Jude and Gavin, so clearly it's powerful stuff!

Gavin

I'm a normal run-of-the-mill human being from Max's writing project, which we all contribute to now because Jude and I have personal insights into why we did whatever we did. We dropped in from an alternate universe Detroit, MI, USA, about a decade in the future, which is incredibly similar to the modern day except we have sapient androids who look like human beings, who are currently being recognized as their own people with inalienable rights.

Personally, in my own history, I was not alterhuman before walking into this system - not otherhearted, not archetropal, not fictionhearted, nothing. I had no idea this subculture existed, even though I gotta assume it does exist in my world because I lived in what's approximately the modern United States, and alterhumanity has a history here. I feel confident in saying I was orthohuman back then, because my humanity had nothing that separated it from American norms of what makes a human being. I didn't feel like there was anything that made me fundamentally different from my peers, not in a way explainable by alterhumanity. I was a regular human guy!

But. As a fictional character, written by a writer - that's a different framework to look at things from. And looking at it from that perspective, I think I owe a lot of my normalcy to being written as The Everyman archetype. My fictional self was written to be essentially a typical guy with normal reactions to his increasingly fucked up circumstances, to contrast and foil with The Absolute Bullshit that our other protagonist Jude goes through for being an extremely specialized murderbot prototype. We're narrative foils and it worked out really damn well, it's a good story.

Taking that into account, is my humanity alterhuman? I think it's on the border, in some liminal space between normal and not. It's alterfictional for sure, it's been directly impacted by how I was a fictional character, and I can appreciate the metafictional nature of dual-wielding backstories, a personal past where I was a regular human being and a narrative past where I was intentionally written as a regular human being. I think it might play a part in why I'm so invariably human, while my partners and headmates are more fluid in their species.

And I'm involved in the alterhuman community now, which makes my analysis of my humanity very different from an orthohuman analysis of humanity - whenever I write about my species identity as human, I know that it is a species identity, and I can compare/contrast it with the lived nonhumanity of others, and that gives me a fundamentally alterhuman perspective on my species.

So I'm definitely human, at the end of the day, and I can't categorize it neatly into being typical or atypical. Humanity is full of contradictions, and I say this counts as an especially fun one!

Jude

I'm an android, the extremely specialized murderbot prototype Gavin mentioned up there! I'm also human by choice, human by association, human by transition - I'm transspecies, in the nonhuman to human direction, because humanity fits me more than being a fucked up android ever did.

I wrote an extremely long essay about it, where I say... pretty much everything I could say in this response. Basically, yeah, my humanity is fundamentally alterhuman. It's really not a normal human thing for your baseline species to be nonhuman, and it's definitely not a normal alterhuman thing to like becoming human, but here I am, being weird in both directions!

Actually, I’m curious—do individuals who are both nonhuman and human consider their human identity orthohuman (i.e. Not Alterhuman)?

I technically am also human and nonhuman, but my human identity is firmly rooted in my fictionkinity. Most folk I see talk about being human in relation to their “current” self or body or what have you—not a ‘type, like mine is.

So while my humanity is unambiguously alterhuman (depending on who you ask), the same doesn’t clearly hold up for others.

But does being nonhuman affect your humanity? Do you consider your humanity a part of your alterhuman identity?

[yusuke-of-valla]

I don't remember exactly what I dreamt about but I did wake up very upset about shows that treat the secret identity part of being a superhero as a burden for their narrative that they have to speedrun getting rid of

[smiley-mcdoggington]

I think people make Ford a creep more often because if you even hint that Ford Doesn't reciprocate Stan's feelings the entire show becomes Ford the Molestation Magnet who Cannot Catch A Break Ever

[afterthelambs]

Shuake and Jundori are basically the same ship

List of similarities between Joker/Akechi and Junpei/Chidori:

Ship is between a chill guy and an assassin

Characters share the same persona affinity (Arsene and Loki both use curse, Hermes and Medea both use fire)

Assassin's outfit colors are mainly white and red (specifically akechi's robin hood outfit)

Assassin's persona may hurt them (Loki has call of chaos and Medea attacks Chidori)

Assassin deceives the chill guy into thinking they're normal to get info on the group he's part of

Assassin betrays and kidnaps the chill guy + separates him from his friend group because he's the leader (Junpei was lying about being the leader but Chidori believed it)

Friend group is only cordial with the assassin at best but doesn't wish harm on them

Chill guy is the only one who truly connects with the assassin

Assassin insists they dont care about the chill guy but deep down they do

While responsible for their own actions, the assassin is still being manipulated by someone close to them

Revealed that the assassin's abilities were being exploited by the families of both games' wealthy Empress Arcana (Okumura used Akechi via Shido to assassinate enemies, Kirijo group used Chidori as a child experiment)

In late November, the assassin has a 1-vs-many fight against the chill guy and his friends

After you beat the assassin, the ones manipulating them appear and reveal they're willing to discard the assassin for being weak

The manipulators threaten to shoot the chill guy instead

Assassin sacrifices themself for the chill guy during the shooting

Chill guy's greatest wish was to be with the assassin and losing them challenges their resolve to fight (Joker may or may not fold on 2/2 but Junpei gets his resolve back as part of the plot)

Toxic doomed trope

If Royal and Reload (because thats what I played):

14. Chill guy and assassin have a special attack (showtime and theurgy)

15. Assassin died permanently in the original version of the games, but they can be saved in future remakes (if you spent enough time with them and made the right choices in-game)

I think that's it? But if anyone points out more I will edit this and add them

[nenoname]

the experience of reading stan twins fics and being constantly haunted by a name

[cabeswaterdrowned]

“Democracy’s a farce,” Ronan said, and Adam smirked, a private, small thing that was inherently exclusionary. An expression, in fact, that he could’ve very well learned from Ronan.”

Adam emulating rich boys he’s attracted to continues to go crazy

[warrior-of-storms]

they're menaces, they know that they're menaces, and they take pride in being menaces together.

Gwen can and will crash on Terry & Dana's couch when she's in the area, and her greatest joy in life is annoying old Bruce because she's not a Bat and he can't do anything about her. Gwen is like the sister Terry never had. They share like half a braincell whenever they're in the same place at the same time. Bruce is so done with them all of the time.

Somehow, Gwen's life is miserable enough that she considers visiting Terry in Gotham to be a vacation.

[tasticturbo]

[starculler]

Reverse Robins AU except the first kid Bruce collects is originally from the correct timeline/universe (physically and/or mentally, but either way having no way back home).

It's a tossup for me between having that first kid be Duke or Damian (both at once might be an interesting challenge!), but the results are the same:

A kid stuck in a world where they're the first sidekick with all the weight and responsibility and the learning curve that entails. Thinking they're alone until the one who came before them crash lands into their life, and then trying desperately not to let the version of this person they know best overshadow how they interact. Clinging desperately to a hard-won legacy while also having to re-invent themself from the ground up.

[notmyenergy]

how does Ateez lore also center on a character named MITO who wears an all-black cowboy fit

[fellhellion]

head in hands miles’s arc in spiderverse means so much to me. choosing to embody all that spiderman IS by earnestly trying to save those around him and rejecting the notion that he should simply lie down and let fate take its course....augh....

[rathayibacter]

thinking a lot about how IMMORTALITY squeezes a ton of meaning out of being a game. like, theoretically, you could get all the same themes and significance from watching all the footage once or twice, in order, all the way through. after all, that's kinda how previous game by the studio Her Story was: there was a full picture, and it was waiting for you to put all the pieces together so you could see it.

but IMMORTALITY's a bit different. the thing that you perceive to be the big mystery actually isn't that hard to solve, and is really just a couple stops to check off along your much longer journey of understanding. and so much of that is thanks to the specific mechanic of how you uncover new clips. you click on something in the shot, and you're brought to another shot with the same object, or a shot related to that object, or a shot thematically linked to that object. you're navigating via the Kuleshov Effect, and that means you're constantly, inevitably creating meaning through how you interact with the game.

like, super minor, non-spoiler-y example: there's a set of scenes connected by a cat. you see a cat in one scene and click on it, and you're taken to the rehearsal of a scene that will have that cat, but they aren't using the animal actor yet cuz it's just rehearsal. you're brought to the moment that an actress is leaning down and petting where the cat will be, at some point, later. it's a cute little move by the game designers, cuz yeah, these scenes are connected by that cat you clicked on, but not literally, only in the final product.

but then i clicked on the space where the cat would be, and it took me to another scene, once again with the actual cat. and isn't that funny. isn't that interesting. of course it makes sense in hindsight, right? we're traveling via cinematic language, and in rehearsal there's no difference between a cat and an empty bit of floor where the script tells you a cat will be. you gotta treat that empty space like there's a cat there, or else the whole thing falls apart.

this isn't a significant moment in the game. none of the three clips involved really matter that much. but like, at the same time, by connecting these three pretty empty filler scenes in this way, by taking you from a cat to a not-cat to a cat, and telling you that they're all equivalent, the game is making a pretty strong thematic declaration, one that would be completely absent if you'd just watched these three clips separately, in the parts of the movie that they belong in.

not every player is gonna read that deeply into this moment, just as i havent read this deeply into most of the other connections ive made in my so-far 12 and a half hours with the game. some folks will read something completely different into it (there's a pretty fun discussion you could have about it happening in 2 Of Everything specifically, playing into the mistaken identities plot via Schrödinger's cat). some players won't even find that connection at all! there's enough redundancy in everything here that nobody needs to find every possible point of interaction to finish or understand the game. and all that's kinda the beauty of it, right? there's a million ways to examine this text, to work your way through the enormous tower of information you're presented with, and every single one of those paths is gonna create unique meaning. they've taken the process of interpreting art and made it a game mechanic, without hamstringing the actual act of interpretation in the process. the game says "hey, in order to see everything, you're gonna have to make connections," but never forces your hand in what those connections have to be. it's absolutely fascinating.

[daydreamerdrew]

The Incredible Hulk (1968) #269

[thumperdaetime]

i have more goals in common with the teenage boy who gets shoved into lockers because he likes pink, than i do with his bullies. i am prepared to use what i can to fight for his safety, and would be thrilled if he felt empowered to do the same for someone else.

(the goal is survive btw)

If you are going to have literally no criteria for being queer, then how can you say that anyone isn't? How can you refer to any person in any context as cis/straight?

If someone tells me they’re queer I believe them. If someone tells me they’re straight I believe them. This isn’t that hard