#if anyone has any essays on the matter im all for reading them let me indulge

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

Love is Stored in the Cat: A Nepeta Leijon Character Study

I guess these are a series now! I also have a request for Feferi in my inbox that I'll get around to eventually.

SO! Dear, sweet Nepeta.

Nepeta is the troll that is most against the existence of the hemocaste.

I believe the Ultimate Self speech was originally going to be from her, not Davepetasprite^2.

She's bad at shipping.

These all make her extremely impurrtant!!!

So furst of all, I'm going to start with the same disclaimer as my Eridan essay (go read that first!!! It sets up a lot of ideas that I'm expanding on here), which is that the things Hussie says are going to be lowered in value, because he likes to play coy about plot stuff. I'm also not counting anything but the actual text as canon, and even with in that text, I'm counting everything after GAME OVER as soft canon - a suggestion of what would have been, often truncated for time, often a deliberate middle finger to the shitty fandom.

Okay, so with that squared away!

Nepeta Says Fuck The Hemocaste

I'm not going to bother doing a deep dive on Nepeta's characterization, because fur the most part, I think the fandom more or less gets her right - she wears her heart (h33h33) on her sl33ve, after all! She's a very sweet little catgirl who loves roleplay and shipping, who is also a vicious hunter of wild beasts and lives in a cave. She's very nice and friendly, but has a tough streak and a spine.

She also says fuck the hemocaste, why does that even exist:

CT: D --> Your fraternization with the base classes have 100sened your morals, can't you see this AC: :33 < no! i dont care, they are fun AC: :33 < and i dont know anything about classes or bases or blood color, it doesn't matter! AC: :33 < what does gr33n blood even mean! it doesnt mean anything to me and it shouldnt mean anything to anyone else!

This is a radical stance not outright shared by any of the other trolls. Aradia calls highbloods "hateful sn0bs" that she and Tavros shouldn't have "ever had anything t0 d0 with", the highbloods are, of course, all casteist to varying degrees, and even Karkat seems fairly accepting of the class divide, at one point taunting Vriska that her rejection from the blue team is "ANOTHER INFURIATING VICTORY FOR GUTTER BLOOD OVER ARISTOCRACY". Not to mention his long-held dream of becoming a threshecutioner.

Even Feferi, despite saying to Eridan that "W-E AR-E NOT B-ETT-ER T)(AN ANYBODY!!!!!", is actually perfectly comfortable with the caste system's existence, comparing having to stop using her royal typing quirk to "peasant-IFICATING" herself - and let's not forget that a Beforus under her rule had its caste system 100% intact.

This means that Nepeta is the ONLY troll who has said, in no uncertain terms, that the caste system should not exist. It's stupid, it's bad, and it doesn't meowtter!

AND SHE'S RIGHT.

But she's never able to fully express this opinion, which brings us to:

A COMPLICKATED RELATIONSHIP WITH EQUIUS

Now, before I say anything, I must insist that I do believe these two work as good moirails. That does not, however, stop them from being 13, and therefore, being poor to each other the way 13-year-olds sometimes are. I don't think they should break up; I think they should re-examine certain dynamics, and I think they need some space to breathe apart from each other.

Equius has a lot of problems, which I won't get into overmuch here, because... that's a whole essay on its own (are you people seeing a trend yet). But with regards to Nepeta specifically, he's extremely controlling and protective, to the point where she's a little scared of him before the game begins:

AC: :33 < well it does sound like it will be a lot of fun but i think i should get purrmission first GC: BL4R!!!!! GC: TH4TS SO STUP1D GC: H3S NOT TH3 BOSS OF YOU AC: :33 < i know! AC: :33 < but still im kind of scared of him and i think purrhaps its best to just run it by him first so there isnt a kerfuffle about it or anything

She's also afraid to tell him about her crush on Karkat, since she knows he doesn't like Karkat:

AC: :33 < well AC: :33 < i have never told anybody this not even my moirail AC: :33 < heh, actually hes the LAST guy i might tell, he so wouldnt appurrve X33 AC: :33 < but yes i have liked somebody for quite some time, but alas he doesnt know it

By the time they end their game, she's gotten over this fear, seeing as she spends many hours curled up with Equius in a pile of robotics parts, but it still must be noted that they have some issues in their relationship that were never resolved, primarily on Equius's end. What this means for Nepeta, however, is that in addition to setting her up as the most outright anti-classism troll, the comic sets her up to be socially isolated due to her moirail's paranoia about letting her associate with both lowbloods (seeing them as bad influences) OR other highbloods, seeing them as dangerous.

He's not entirely wrong - his refusal to allow her to participate in FLARP kept her from winding up entangled in the horrible chain of revenge, as Tavros alludes:

AT: iT'S PROBABLY FOR THE BEST, AT: tHAT YOU LISTEN TO HIM, AC: :33 < i dont know AC: :33 < you think so? AT: wELL, AT: iF YOU DIDN'T LISTEN TO HIM BEFORE, AT: yOU MIGHT HAVE PLAYED GAMES WITH US BEFORE, AT: aND SOMETHING BAD MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED TO YOU, AC: :33 < hmm purrhaps

But he's still wrong. And it's probably an uncontrolled manifestation of his Heir of Void abilities - he's both consciously and unconsciously hiding her from other people.

This isn't to say she doesn't stand up for herself! Many of her discussions with Equius are pseudo-arguments, and she does get her way often enough, managing to get him to roleplay with her, and managing to get him back in the roboti% pile to talk about his feelings about Aradia. She also talks to the humans explicitly against Equius's orders, although she's keeping it a sneakret from him:

NEPETA: :33 < but equius already furbid me from doing that :(( NEPETA: :33 < not that i am listening to him, but shhhhh! :33 KARKAT: WAIT, HE DID? KARKAT: OK, THEN AS YOUR LEADER I ORDER YOU TO RP WITH THEM AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. BE AS OBNOXIOUS ABOUT IT AS YOU CAN. NEPETA: :33 < yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

But the fact that she has to tiptoe around him like this speaks to them having issues in their relationship that go unexamined and unresolved, especially since it's clear that Nepeta really would like to be friends with more people, were Equius not getting in her way. So, even though I do think they are good moirails for each other - they clearly genuinely, deeply care about one another. But they could use some relationship counselling.

In fact, Jasprosesprite^2 outright calls her lonely:

JASPROSESPRITE^2: Or the girl who likes ships! Cause they made her less lonely. ;3

So, she's anti-hemocaste and lonely, two character traits that were set up and never resolved. And beclaws this is Nepeta, in her honor, I'm going to talk about a third:

Her Unrequited Crush On Karcat

She has the BIGGEST flushed crush on Karkat. It's seen on her shipping wall twice, once with the word OTP on it.

And, despite never discussing it with her moirail, Nepeta mentions it once to Jaspersprite, and once to Jasprosesprite^2.

Now, I'm not really here to debate on the validity of KatNep - I think it's fine, even if I don't personally ship it, and don't personally think it would work out (there are lots of indications that they wouldn't work out, including Jasprosesprite^2 outright saying so). However, her crush on Karkat is both complicated and creates some interesting setups for her character. I am going to discuss it fairly critically either way, so KatNep shippers have been warned.

A lot of her feelings about Karkat - and about shipping in general - wind up being heavily interlinked with her status as a Hero of Heart, so I'm going to expand on it more there. But what I will note in this section is the fact that, despite Nepeta insisting twice that she doesn't think Karkat knows about her crush on her:

NEPETASPRITE: :33 < it was karkat NEPETASPRITE: :33 < but i never told him and im pretty sure he never found out how i felt!

He tooootally did:

KARKAT: OK, BUT TO BE FAIR, I'M PRETTY SURE SHE'S STILL OBSESSED WITH ME. KARKAT: IT'S A VERY UNFORTUNATE, VERY RED AND VERY UNREQUITED SITUATION I'VE BEEN TRYING TO TIPTOE AROUND FOR A LONG TIME, OK?

Interpret that how you will for shipping purposes, but I want to propose that this is a reflection of their statuses as Heart and Blood players. Heart, despite its players' obsessions with romance, is not the romance aspect, Blood is. Karkat displays this very same romantic acumen when he tells Dave that he's known Terezi and Gamzee were a thing for a long time, despite everyone else on the meteor trying to keep it a secret from him. Heart is, instead, about identity, feelings, motivations, souls, and self. In other words:

Nepeta Is Kind Of Bad At Shipping

Let's take a look at those shipping walls.

Let's break this down a little. Nepeta's ships are not entirely wrong, but even the successful ones are kind of wrong. Here's what I mean. We've already discussed how Equius and Nepeta's moirallegiance has some... issues in it. If we go down her list of ships that actually do happen, most of them have some issues in them!

Aradia expresses her regret for getting together with Equius in the Ministrife. Kanaya and Rose suffer some major relationship problems when Rose starts drinking, to the point Karkat feels a need to step in as an auspice. Karkat and Gamzee fail, as Karkat is not calmed by Gamzee, and Gamzee stops listening to Karkat. And while Sollux and Feferi seem to be fairly healthy, after they both wind up in the Furthest Ring, he's pretty much always next to Aradia - he and Feferi don't even get to exchange words with each other once they're in the Furthest Ring. Purrsonally, I think he and Feferi are meant to end up as moirails, but shhhh.

So what's happening here? Well, this goes back to her identity as a Heart player. Heart is concerned with feelings and motivations.

They simply want to understand the one thing we all are stuck with for our entire lives, i.e. our own minds. Forging an identity is extremely important to the Heart-bound, and every decision and action goes toward building a coherent narrative of their own story. That isn't to say Heart-bound don't care deeply for their friends and allies; they just have a tendency to assume that everyone is as concerned with identity as they are.

Nepeta's shipping has also been associated with her isolation and loneliness. When you put this together, it implies that Nepeta's shipping is about her desire to understand others, and much of her ships are based on one of the parties having feelings, regardless of compatibility, feasibility, or broader implications. After all, despite the fact that she has pretty terrible romantic acumen, she IS able to instinctively identify that Eridan's advances toward her were insincere:

NEPETASPRITE: :33 < well ok i guess eridan hit on me a few times NEPETASPRITE: :33 < but his advances always struck me as cr33py and insincere

And that Karkat secretly LOVES and RESPECTS his friends:

JASPROSESPRITE^2: On the contrary Nepeta. You deserve someone who will RESPECT and ADORE you. NEPETASPRITE: :33 < well... yes NEPETASPRITE: :33 < i always hoped to find someone like that some day NEPETASPRITE: :33 < i dunno maybe youre right but in spite of whatever problems he might have i always felt like i saw something in him that made me think he could be that purrson!

Or knowing that Equius loves to play games, and still feels sad about Aradia exploding:

AC: :33 < i s33 right through your stupid act, who are you trying to kid! AC: :33 < look how you go out of your way to use words that have x's in them so that you can use your silly purrcent signs AC: :33 < or use these absurd words that you can shoehorn a '100' into, even if its not strictly replacing 'loo'!!! AC: :33 < you are so transpurrent AC: :33 < i can tell you like to play games, d33p down you are a guy who likes to play games! AC: :33 < i can smell a guy who likes to play games from so fur away with this nose, you have no idea X33

NEPETA: :33 < she was so happy, just like she used to be, and she said she would s33 you soon! EQUIUS: D --> That's a nice thought, and thank you for sharing it EQUIUS: D --> But it was only a dream, and will surely have no consequence in reality NEPETA: :33 < equius? NEPETA: :33 < are those f33lings i an detecting with my wiggly whiskery nose? EQUIUS: D --> Maybe

Because feelings, and not relationships, are her actual domain.

And speaking of Heart powers...

Nepeta and the Ultimate Self

So from this point forward, I'm going to assume you're more or less agreeing with my take that at some point after Game Over, Hussie - for whatever reason - gave up on his original ending, and wound up truncating his ideas so he could finish the comic faster. I go more into detail about that here.

So, in this hypothetical original ending, I firmly believe that the speech about the Ultimate Self would have come from Nepeta. First, let's take a look at what the "Ultimate Self" entails, as it appears within the comic:

DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < everything that ever happens to every version of you is an important part of your ultimate self... like a superceding bodyless and timeless persona that crosses the boundaries of paradox space and unlike god tiers or bubble ghosts or whatever, it really IS immortal DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < but in your physical form there are all these partitions in your mind that prevent you from remembering any of that which makes your existence f33l totally linear DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < which is probably for the best! DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < in a regular body s33ing all that would be too overwhelming ... DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < and after it sinks in for a while you start coming to this understanding of a greater self DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < maybe i "got it" quicker though because of the two people i was and their aspects DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < understanding heart is all about the nuances of a distributed self DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < nepeta never got to make much headway with her aspect but shes finally gettin the chance DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < the time aspect is all about running into different versions of yourself so you kinda get confronted with it in a really literal way that can be disturbing DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < obviously davesprite stuggled with that too, but now its fine DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < hes fr33 from worrying about it all and what it means for his place in reality DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < because he can s33 now all his selves have relevance in painting the full picture of who he truly is DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < im not COMPLETELY sure because im not like some sort of ASPECT MASTER but DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < my avian slash feline intuition tells me that all roads will lead you here eventually DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < gaining the d33pest possible understanding of any aspect will bring you to the same final conclusion about your ultimate self

Now, I believe - and I hope you'll agree - that it's kind of lame, narratively, for Davesprite to have been set up with so much angst about not being the "real Dave," and for Nepeta to have all her issues with loneliness and shyness, and for these two specific iterations of each other to have never interacted, but suddenly getting double-prototyped fixes all of their problems, and they achieve Ultimate Selfhood despite being two total strangers to each other. So let's instead break down the more salient points about what Ultimate Selfhood entails, divorced from the fact that it's Davepetasprite^2 doing the narrating:

Every player in the game possesses an "Ultimate Self," an ultimate culmination of all their experiences and memories, specifically referred to as a "persona"

Normally, people are not aware of this, because it would be too overwhelming to deal with so many memories and iterations of each other.

Everyone will achieve Ultimate Selfhood eventually as the final culmination of their understanding of their aspect.

Heart is all about the nuances of a distributed self.

Let's talk about that last one some more, and by that I mean, let's see what Calliope has to say about it:

TT: I don't know why it had to be this way for me. Juggling these two waking selves at once. TT: I guess I'm used to it, but it still makes for a pretty intense existence. TT: Do you even know what the deal with that is? Like is there any precedent in your readings? UU: i don't know aboUt precedent, bUt it makes plenty of sense to me as the type of path one might expect for a hero of heart. UU: a path rUled by the heart aspect can be a joUrney of splintered self. UU: that is, the player's being may exhibit the same kind of fragmentation which certain classes coUld caUse in others. UU: i think this is what has triggered yoUr dUal-awareness between waking and dream selves, thoUgh it woUld not sUrprise me if the symptoms manifested in even more ways than this.

Now, Dirk has a clawmplicated relationship with his alternate selves, given that he's a Prince, but Nepeta wouldn't have the same struggles, or at least, not to the same degree. The problem is, hampered by Equius and her own shyness about discussing her thoughts and feelings with others:

NEPETASPRITE: :33 < i get so shy and worried what people might think of me if i say how i f33l NEPETASPRITE: :33 < im always so scared that they wont f33l the same way or just think im stupid or pathetic or something

She never actually gets to explore this part of herself.

But What If... She Did?

The way I imagine the original ending going is that each troll that gets saved by John's interference in the timeline then asks John to help them fix their own mistakes, thereby saving somebody else. Each successive trip through the meteor brings new character development, and also riddles the comic with progressively more password pages, which I think would be really funny. And throughout all this the Game Over team is searching for Vriska, Meenah, and the treasure, and resolving their arcs that way, so it's not like they would be replaced - they're the ones who get to kill LE. The process, in my mind, goes like this:

Terezi asks John to save Vriska, and prevent her from getting too spades with Gamzee, as these are her two greatest regrets.

Vriska obviously had great regrets about killing Tavros, both pre- and post-retcon, so she asks for his death to be prevented.

Tavros staying alive means that he and Gamzee wind up hashing out some stuff - Gamzee mentions that he feels "So aT ChIlL WiTh yOu" while talking to Tavros, and Tavros reciprocates the friendship and also - interestingly - acknowledges Gamzee's religion, calling it beautiful even if he doesn't necessarily believe in it. This is interesting because Karkat's inability to do so is explicitly one of the reasons their moirallegiance broke down. So having Tavros back, alive, means that he and Gamzee would likely end up in some sort of relationship, probably pale despite flushed leanings, and would bring Gamzee back into the fold.

Gamzee would then be like, yeah, wow, that time I killed Nepeta and Equius was pretty bad, huh? Especially since his decision to hang onto his friends' bodies and prototype them is often interpreted as him genuinely feeling bad about his dead friends (he tells Kurloz to shut up when Kurloz mentions all the dead friends, and his religion seems to be about a paradise he wants to share with his friends anyway). So he'd ask John to prevent him from killing them, resulting in the two of them getting to live.

Things get much more hypothetical from here, since so much of the character dynamics would have changed, but I think by this point, Equius might command ask John to let him say goodbye to Aradiabot before she explodes, which he expresses feeling very sad about. However, in doing so, John and Aradiabot end up in the same room, and when she realizes that he has the ability to change the timeline without repercussions, she'd seize him by the arm and demand that he take her back in time, to before she died. After all, she expresses regrets about her reckless actions, and how she always felt like it was all one big setup.

She would take Aradia's place in the Vriska revenge chain, being once more freed of her robot chassis, and from there, would trick Doc Scratch and the Handmaiden into thinking everything was still going according to their designs. Meanwhile, Alive!Aradia would be hanging out at Equius's place, borrowing his void powers to avoid notice, coordinating a new timeline that keeps the beats of the original (too much deviation causes unpredictability, and an paradox'd timeline offshoot without John's direct interference would still become doomed), but allows them greater freedom and the ability to overcome the machinations of Doc Scratch and associates.

This would also prevent Sollux from becoming so self-loathing, since it's no longer "his fault" that Aradia dies, although he winds up in that hole again after Feferi gets killed. Now that his Aradia is alive, he wouldn't feel like he might as well stay in the bubbles because his closest companions are there, so he'd make it to the end, and would ask John to prevent Feferi's death.

Eridan still dies; he's so disconnected and isolated from all his friends that his course of actions is largely unaffected even by everybody else's timeline tweaks. But before Feferi can suggest bringing him back, Karkat would butt in.

The Friendship Troll should be the one to demand that ALL of their friends be revived, especially if they had everyone except only one guy, and Karkat and Eridan are heavily implied to be moirails anyway. The course of Karkat's fixes are so comprehensive, and primarily romance-based, that the end result of this final loop is everybody not only being alive, but god-tiered, with appropriate character development.

Now, where Nepeta's Heart powers would play into all of this is that she would start to notice something going on. After all, Heart players are sensitive to their splintered selves, and (Nepeta) is probably much closer to Nepeta than regular doomed timeline offshoots. As the loops continue, and Nepeta has more and more time to talk to people, and meets her dead alternate selves, and even meets (Nepeta), she starts to awaken to her Ultimate Self - to come into possession of alternate memories.

And if the Ultimate Self is a very soul-y kind of concept, such that Heart players have a natural advantage in coming to understand it, then isn't it a natural fit that a Rogue of Heart - one who steals from Heart or steals Heart for others - would be naturally inclined to share the wisdom of her alternate selves, and even the very concept of the Ultimate Self, with her friends?

Because the Ultimate Self is actually, in my opinion, a pretty good narrative device. It turns the sadness of the dead and doomed timelines into something littersweet instead, and makes it so any weirdness regarding time travel and not really knowing your friends anymore will eventually be resolved, even if off-screen.

It's not really narratively satisfying when Davepetasprite^2 suddenly comes into being and reaches enlightenment, but imagine if instead it's a post-character development Nepeta comforting Davesprite on his relevance, or Jade on her loneliness, or John on not really knowing these new post-retcon versions of his friends? It would feel a lot better, since in this hypothetical, she would have reached that point after on-screen character development. Being able to share her true self with her friends on the meteor - by necessity, since what else are they going to be doing for three years - leads to her finally being able to fulfill her role as a Rogue of Heart.

Also, at some point during these repeated meteor trips, she dates Karkat (whether that's successful or not, I'll leave to reader interpretation - you already know where I stand), fulfilling Jaspersprite's musing that she might only be able to date Karkat after she dies.

So that's two out of thr33 of her outstanding plot hooks resolved... okay. So, I try not to make these essays into ship propaganda, but hear me out:

Hate Is Stored In The FefNep

Okay, so, remember that thing about how Feferi is actually a huge casteist hypocrite? Well, let's also note that the comic, post-Murderstuck, seems to put Nepeta and Feferi together a lot - they're a Commodore and Rear Admiral in the ghost pirate army, respectively, and they also wind up as Fefetasprite. So I think it's not entirely out of left field to say that these two were implied to have SOMETHING going on.

And that something... is a difference in political views.

I mean, let's be real, there's a reason Fefetasprite is the most explode-prone after Tavrisprite. Miss "The Hemocaste is Stupid and Shouldn't Matter" vs. Miss "I Love Being A Princess And Call Jade Hornless and Finless (Derogatory)"? Come on, tell me you don't see it.

Without getting too much into Feferi, this hypocrisy, and unwillingness to check her privilege (so glad I found an excuse to use that term unironically), are probably her greatest character flaws - ie, the things you would expect the story to address about her. Meanwhile, one of Nepeta's flaws, which she laments to Jasproseprite^2, is that she feels too shy to talk about her feelings to other people, leading to her having never expressed her views on the hemocaste to anyone but Equius.

I think that they initially think they'd be friends. Each one of them would go "oh man, this other girl is soooo cute, I wish I could talk to her more often!"

And then, once they do, they realize they fucking hate each other. Nepeta would go "X00 < you are such a hypocrite who f33ls like youre better than all of us!!!" and Feferi would go "You're suc)( an uneducated glubbing P-EASANT! 3X0" and then they'd claw each others' eyes out. It would be so funny, and if a homestuck ship isn't extremely fucking funny, then why are we even here.

But more importantly, this would further them along into resolving each others' arcs - Feferi would be forced to grapple with the greater implications of classism, and Nepeta - who is shown having a spine the most in defiance of somebody else - would grow more aggressive about being open about her feelings in defiance of Feferi. Even Equius would get roped into it in a positive way - you can just imagine him going "D --> Can I really believe my auricular sponge clots D --> Nepeta, you are finally taking interest in politi%" and be 100% on board with teaching her so Feferi won't be able to call her uneducated.

And then for flushed, I dunno! Karkat's an option, and Jade and Jake also both love the fuck out of furries, and Tavros seems nice. But yeah I'll die on the fefnep hate ship. Guys it would be so funny.

Thank you as always for reading! Let me know if there's a troll you want to hear me ramble about next.

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

i have left

hey everyone this will probably be the last thing i post on this blog albeit im keeping it up for resources.

im eternally grateful for how this community has helped me through prostitution and everything, i have amazing mutuals and i have learned so much 💜

but it has become toxic. many of yall cant handle disagreement and default to being as condescending and obnoxious as possible. one of us calling out a post is not enough, we have to dog pile everyone with a slightly shitty opinion. some of yall have severely lost the plot if you ever had it in the first place. not everything is that serious, especially when it comes to online drama.

im sick of it. so many engage in the same bullshit we accuse online trans activists of. this is an echo chamber. so many just mindlessly parrot slogans and arguments. what im very sick of is seeing single tweets or posts by a nobody, usually anonymous, being spread as receipts and shit. you know how annoying it is when everything a self proclaimed terf somewhere on social media says is taken by trans activists at face value and representative of the community when theyre not even radical feminist, just transphobic? yeah. yet a lot of yall do the same by saving and sharing „receipts“ where some random person who claims theyre trans (or not even) says some fucked up or out of pocket shit. you will always find people like that online, from any politicial „camp“ or ideological alignment!

a lot of yall seem to think that debate is about winning and not like, having an exchange of arguments and let the audience come to their own conclusion

and i just dont hate trans people. in fact i feel kinship to any female or homosexual trans person, anyone except heterosexual males. many of yall dont even realise how male centered you are when you more or less equal the trans community to heterosexual men who have a fetish for humiliation and forced feminisation or whatever. who exist and are an issue and i do wish the trans community at large would distance themselves from those men, but its not all there is to it. yes i agree that we need to protect vulnerable young people, girls and especially lesbians and gay boys, from being pushed into transitioning, i think the age of consent should be put at 21 or something, but we have to acknowledge and consider that there are people who have already transitioned and will transition in the future and i just dont understand how you cant have any empathy for them. no matter what you think about transition, many trans people ARE vulnerable and marginalised. plus consider how many detransitioned women are in this community yet yall talk about trans people as mutilated and shit its gross. in the end we can only try to establish structures that keep people from self harming, but an adult of sound mind has the right to do so anyways, including plastic surgery and trans surgeries. and i want to keep my arms open to them; but a lot of rhetoric around it spread on here will only alienate them further.

right now im saving all my essays in notes so its out of my mind. i have missed the community a lot so maybe i will return at some point but i have also been feeling better since i stopped being on radblr. i miss the rare valuable input and thoughts by other women but overall i have felt unaligned with how things have been handled on here. it has been mostly negative instead of constructive and pragmatic. ive had the impression some of yall enjoy the „being in the in-group“ community aspect more than actually being here for feminist exchange. lack of nuance, lack of empathy, lack of reason. it pains me but i have more and more come to understand why people just block us without engaging on general suspicion because ive also come to be annoyed with some of yall engaging with posts - and im on „your side“.

anyways im doing okay, im going to drug counselling regularly now and am trying to establish a stable life for those of you who inquired, and i hope anyone reading this is self reflected enough to know whether this applies to her or not. bye

[cherubofthenight]

i'm somewhat prepared for my 20s

here's what i learned:

- You gotta save yourself; no one's gonna do it for you. Everyone has their own life, so take charge of yours!

- Starting over? You can do that whenever you want—it's unlimited! And remember, your body can tell you when a relationship isn’t giving you what you need and deserve.

- Stay away from people who are too scared to live life. And those who make fun of or insult you as a "joke"? Yeah, it's never really a joke. Surround yourself with people who genuinely care about your well-being and support you.

- People that don't have goals aren't for people who do.

- Are you your second option? No. So why would you be anyone else’s?

- Being single is a blessing, but if you do get into/are in a relationship make sure you have hobbies or hyper-fixation onto said person will most likely happen if it hasn't happened yet.

- Retinol at 25 is a must—it promotes collagen production and helps prevent fine lines and early signs of aging. And don’t forget sunscreen! Skin cancer is real—ask Hugh Jackman.

- Setting limits and boundaries is key to protect yourself in any relationship. Avoid oversharing, too! Think about the level of intimacy and trust with the person. If they seem disinterested or uncomfortable, that’s your cue to change the subject. Be clear about what topics you’re willing to discuss, and practice saying no when it comes to personal matters. Past experiences of oversharing can serve as good reminders to guard your privacy.

- Take care of your appearance. dress right, eat right, accessorize, etc.

- Get comfortable saying "no" without feeling guilty. Taking care of yourself should never feel like a chore; if it does, something's off.

- Never chase a man; that's just a waste of energy.

- Get your driver’s license and buy/start saving for a car like, now!

- Law of detachment. cultivating inner peace, focus on the present & and trusting yourself.

- Taking care of & bettering yourself should never feel like a chore

- Meditate—clearer mind means better decisions. Socialize and network; just get out of the house sometimes. But don’t be everywhere all the time. Your feelings matter, and only you know what you’ve been through.

- People come and go, and I like to see it as the universe teaching me lessons about the type of people I want in my life.

- Be particular with whom you share let into your space.

- Pleasing people will get you nowhere.

- Try new things, build new skills. sign up for freakin skillshare if you have to girl just DO SOMETHING.

- Sometimes you just gotta say "my future husband/wife/spouse would never" and move on.

- Vision boards. keep that future 'range rover pilates mom who works only when she wats to bc she and her spouse are STACKED' ver of yourself in your mind esp when you make life changing decisions.

- As the person living your life, you're the main character which means you should become someone that YOU love and stay true to them. you gotta be able to challenge yourself and then have faith that you can overcome and win always. you're probably still gonna care what people think, but your opinion of yourself should always matter the most. i don't wanna keep living by what i think someone is gonna think of me and then in 5-10 years im a bum who hasn't done shit for her self because she chose to live in fear yk.

- Perspective matters. always be the 'glass half-full' type of person. never focus on lack, celebrate whatever abundance you and practice gratitude. it helps so much in terms of focusing on and thus manifesting positivity in your life.

- Start taking care of your health now, your older self is gonna thank you.

- Knowledge is indeed power. stay curious, ask questions, do that research, read those books, watch those video essays.

- Take the time to get to know yourself—go out, stay in, try new things, and find out what you like and dislike. Avoid comparing yourself to others; you’re on your own separate journey.

- Financial literacy is essential. Learn to save, budget, and invest now; 30 year old you will be thanking you, once again miss range rover pilates mom.

- Not everyone is going to like you, and that's totally okay.

- Invest in your mental health; it’ll help you cope, make better decisions, and maintain healthy relationships while reducing burnout.

- It’s okay to be lazy sometimes! Everyone burns out, and that doesn’t make you less than anyone. Take your time and focus on yourself. Do things that bring you joy.

- Embrace mistakes; they’re essential for growth and give you more experience to handle adversity with confidence. Remember, everyone makes mistakes, so you’re never alone in that.

- You just got here! Calm down, breathe, chill, and relax. It’s okay not to have everything figured out right now. You’re going to find what’s meant for you—just enjoy the journey and have faith that everything will work out, no matter how hard things seem.

[orchidbreezefc]

I am asking you about Marco and Tobias in book 3 👀

IM SO MAD I WROTE UP A WHOLE ESSAY AND EVERNOTE JUST YEETED IT SO I HAD TO REWRITE IT AAAAA

cw for attempted suicide, animal death, and ego death. regular animorphs things

things start in book 2, where marco tells tobias (for those uninitiated, a boy in the body of a hawk) not to hunt prey because he couldn't be friends with someone who ate rats. this is Not Cool, and everyone treats it as such; tobias stonily ignores it, and it reads to me like marco realizes he fucked up.

book 3 is the first from tobias's pov, and centers around his conflict re: hawkness vs humanity. he's been sleeping in a drawer in jake's attic, eating cold hamburger and being generally miserable. halfway through the book he lets his guard down and follows the hawk instincts to catch and kill a mouse.

tobias immediately has a breakdown and attempts suicide. rachel gets him to stop at the last minute and marco breaks a skylight so tobias can fly outside (note marco risking his neck to help tobias out), whereupon he goes to the forest and surrenders his selfhood, giving in completely to the hawk's instincts. he gets better, but from that point on he hunts prey and sleeps in a tree.

the only person tobias talks to about his inner struggle this whole time is rachel. several times he comes to her and she tells him he's human through and through and his body doesn't matter, but tobias can tell she doesn't fully believe that.

reading tobias's pov, it took me a minute to recognize rachel's thought process: she says it because she thinks it's what he wants to hear. i doubt tobias knew what he needed to hear, but it was this: you aren't just human anymore, and that's okay. things are different now, but we're here to help you figure it out.

enter marco, surprisingly. tobias says at the start of the book that he and marco are very different people and he doesnt think they will ever be close because marco doesn't take anything seriously--which isn't accurate, but that's a different rant.

marco makes jokes about tobias being a hawk, and at this point, that makes him the only one who acknowledges tobias's new reality in any capacity. imagine how isolating that is. everything about your life, your reality, and your own body changes completely, and by every indication only 4 people will ever know that or interact with you ever again--and they mostly just pretend it isn't happening.

their reluctance to touch the topic is for two reasons. the first one is that they don't want to aggravate a sore spot by saying something insenitive. the second one is very clear as you read: these kids are 13, and they are AWKWARD.

they're at an age where unspoken social etiquette matters more than ever before and they are scrambling to find the boundaries where things become 'too weird'. this is a huge and recurring factor in their behavior! there is no etiquette for your friend being a hawk or turning into a bug, but they are so hyperaware of potential boundaries and not knowing where the line is that they err on the side of caution and just Don't.

everyone except marco.

this is for two reasons: one, as i touched on in [link: my last post], marco is extremely practical, and (correctly) believes he can't afford to ignore hard truths. the other is that i think he's so used to people being angry with him for running his mouth that he figures he may as well be the one to risk saying the wrong thing.

marco will throw himself on the conversational grenade. he's willing to (appropriately enough) be gored by the elephant in the room if that means it gets dealt with. he doesn't know how to talk about this any more than anyone else, including tobias, but he's going to find out where the mines are for all of them, even if that means stepping on one.

violent metaphors aside, marco DID fuck it up in book 2. yet in book 3, when he makes a hawk joke again, tobias says it makes him feel better, even as it earns dirty looks from the others, because marco jokes about everything. the jokes make it feel more normal, more approachable.

once tobias embraces the lifestyle, he tests the waters by making a joke of his own about hunting a snack. marco is the only one who laughs; he and tobias connect where tobias doesn't with anyone else. marco uses humor to cope, because joking about the difficult thing makes it less scary, and it helps tobias cope too. after this book tobias starts making a lot more jokes, and god, that bitch is funny.

where rachel's platitudes and jake and cassie's polite, awkward silence leave tobias feeling more alone, it's marco cracking dumb, sort of insensitive jokes that bridges the gap. it's an unconventional way to reach out, and not what you would call kindness, but conventionally reaching out didn't work, because tobias's problem isn't conventional.

there's a real push-and-pull between tobias and marco, and they are very different people. i don't think tobias would especially want to be emotionally vulnerable with marco at this point (and marco definitely wouldn't want him to), but in the end, marco is the one who implicitly tells tobias what he needed to hear: you aren't fully human anymore, and that's okay. we're here to help you figure it out.

[draculagerard]

You know how sometimes I send questions I could easily Google to your inbox because it’s more fun to hear a friend talk about their interests than see what the internet says?

Well anyway today it occurred to me that despite having absorbed a lot of spn knowledge through tumblr osmosis, I know basically nothing about Sam Winchester, one of the main characters of the show. Like I feel like I’ve got a at least a vibe of what Dean is like just from like … seeing memes and Destiel posts and stuff, but I could not describe Sam to you. Which feels like a shame.

So what’s his deal? What’s his personality like? What kind of character arc does he go through? Any Sam Winchester hot takes?

HII yes I would absolutely love to talk about him. so basically to explain his Thing, I need to give a little lore drop (bear with me).

Before he was born, his mother made a deal with a demon to let him in her house in 10 yrs. So when Sam was 6 months old, Azazel came into the Winchesters' home, fed baby Sam his own blood (and then killed Mary). Now, this ritual basically gave Sam psychic powers that he discovers in his early 20s, which is where the show begins.

Now time for an essay. Im sorry you ask me about Sam Winchester and I cannot shut up.

Anyway his whole thing is that he is The Freak and that he feels Unclean. And even before he knew it was the demon blood, he was like there is something inherently wrong and dirty about me and stuff. Theres a quote that kind of puts together all the scenes of him talking about that

"I remember looking at this picture of Sir Galahad [as a little kid] , and, and, and he was kneeling, and— and light streaming over his face, and— I remember… thinking, uh, I could never go on a quest like that. Because I'm not clean. I mean, I w— I was just a little kid. You think… maybe I knew? I mean, deep down, that— I had… demon blood in me, and about the evil of it, and that I'm— wasn't pure?" And then he talked about how something that was slowly killing him was "purifying him".

And no matter what he did or where he went, he didnt fit in. Not in his family, not in any of his schools, and not even when he ran away from home to go to college to live out his "normal life".

Personality wise, he's the kind of guy who always can make other people talk about their own feelings, and he acts all sensitive and kind, but also he's a fucking hypocrite because he never tells anyone how he feels. It's very fun comparing Dean and Sam because Dean is like No i Cannot tell anyone how I feel and then spills his guts and then Sam is like Sharing feelings is healthy :) and then takes every genuine emotion to his grave.

More on his personality: Overall he's pretty like sarcastic and bitchy but in a younger brother kind of way. In the beginning he started off very angry and explosive and always jumped headfirst into problems. As the show went on, though, he just got visibly exhausted and tired of being angry and became the full opposite, where he's the one who never got angry while Dean became the angry one.

Also, veryyy important, he is the Nerd One. Like his catch phrases are "according to the lore" and "so get this", both said while looking at his laptop screen, reading through a bunch of stuff. He's the one who does the research and shit.

Actually wait. youre a tma fan. I can explain him very easily by telling you that he's like if Jon was a SPN character. Yk how Jon starts getting powers and it's a horror thing and he has crises about how much he's human and how much he's a monster. Exactly that. And also yk Jon's guilt thing? Sam has that too. Ofc with the human/monster element, but also you know how Jon blames himself for starting the apocalypse but in reality he was just a pawn who actually set off the last trigger? Sam did that EXACTLY and blames himself too. Also the nerd thing lol.

Sam Winchester hot takes? I have literally so many but none of them will seem hot with my curated tumblr. Like saying that Sam's thing about being impure is literally just a metaphor for being queer. Not intentionally queercoded but wow is it fucking queercoded. Oh actually a hot take is that I love late-seasons Sam as well and will defend him to my GRAVEEE.

I have so much to say but no way can I fit it all on this post soooooo... hope that gave you a basic understanding of him !!!!

[parentingtheoryandpractice]

Reply to Kelsey re: unschooling

Kelsey Piper wrote this critique of unschooling a little while ago, and I've been meaning to respond to it. It's been a while (travel, family visits, etc.), but I finally found some focused time to do some writing. This also ended up being much longer than I anticipated, so consider yourself warned on that front.

Here's a link to Kelsey's post in full, though I will quote some parts more specifically inline as well: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/cVsxtWVqEEjnFKke/

Points of Agreement

Before getting into the parts where afaict Kesley and I don’t see eye to eye, I wanted to acknowledge a few points of major agreement, including where it might not be obvious.

A bunch of the online unschooling community is a trash fire

My experience, like Kelsey’s, has been that there’s a lot of terrible unschooling advice online. IME the epistemology is kind of terrible, including sometimes in a kind of culty way, and I’ve also come across a bunch of people who are being mean, invalidating, and seemingly completely unempathetic and incurious when people write vulnerably about their concerns. I’ve found some groups to be substantially better than others, and I’ll say a little more about that below, but I think this is a point on which we basically agree. I find the state of most (not all ) of the unschooling groups I’ve found to be quite unfortunate.

That Sudbury example you cited strikes me as bad behavior

Kelsey’s post includes this reference to a passage from a Sudbury educator:

An essay about Sudbury Valley School that I read while thinking about how to educate our kids had the following anecdote in it: "A few years ago a teenage girl who had been a student at SVS since she was five told me quite angrily that she had wasted two years and learned nothing. I did not agree with her assessment of herself, but I did not feel like arguing with her, so I just said, "If you learned how bad it is to waste time, why then you could not have learned a better lesson so early in life, a lesson that will be of value for the rest of your days." That reply calmed her, and I believe it is a good illustration of the value of allowing young people to make mistakes and learn from them, rather than directing their lives in an effort to avoid mistakes."

I think I may object to this passage even more than Kelsey does!

I find what the educator said to be patronizing, invalidating, and missing the point. I think educators and people in positions of authority should especially try their best to engage substantively when their students tell them they are doing a bad job, and to try to mollify someone by offering an insincere framing in order to calm them down is pretty bad behavior.

And IMO of course it matters if a kid’s self-assessment is that they haven’t been using their time well.

Which isn’t to say I think it’s especially damning if someone said something like that once when they were impatient or frustrated, but if anyone is writing down that story in an unapologetic way, that person and I have a major disagreement.

It’s mostly good to let parents do their weird stuff

In her post, Kelsey says:

I don't feel like I can confidently opine on whether other people are doing a good job and I don't have any desire to do so. I think that the healthiest culture around parenting is one where we basically chill the fuck out about other parents making decisions we disagree with, and are grateful to live in a culture and company where we similarly have the freedom to make decisions that they disagree with. I feel defensive of parents doing weird things, because I'm doing weird things.

And once again, I’d say we agree! If you want to read more about the details of how I agree, here they are: https://parentingtheoryandpractice.tumblr.com/post/160828234181/respecting-other-peoples-parenting

Pedagogy is a real thing and I’ve also seen unschoolers act like it isn’t 

I’m not sure that “pedagogy” is quite the word I’m looking for here, but it’s the closest I have. I think there there are a bunch of skills that I respect involved in:

explaining things well

providing good puzzles and exercises

modeling the specifics of what is going on in the learners head and being responsive to it

breaking things down into pieces that the learner will be able to interface with

sequencing material based on which foundational bits build on each other

sometimes back-chaining from material that you, having more context, strongly expect that the learner will want to know later

When there is something that I am trying to convey to someone, whether it’s my child or someone else, I try to pay attention to pedagogy, and I think it can be very helpful!

I have personally done a ton of tutoring over my lifetime, including professionally (not unusual for the unschoolers I know personally—a ton of them have also been professional educators), and when I have done it, a bunch of my focus has usually been on pedagogy.

Additionally IME, overall, the online unschooling communities, including the ones I like most, tend to be uninterested in leveraging pedagogy. I am sympathetic to some of the reasons I can guess for why this might be the case, but I agree with what I think Kelsey is saying about how the online unschooling communities often aren’t passing some sort of basic checksum about telegraphing awareness of pedagogy, presumably sometimes bc they in fact lack it.

Kids often don’t know what’s out there

I also wholeheartedly agree that kids don’t start out knowing what sort of cool things in the world, and that they will be much better served if adults who care about them inform them about, and sometimes try to sell them on, cool stuff that the kids don’t already know about.

I’m pretty sure all the unschoolers whose views on unschooling I respect agree with me on this point, and I think it’s too bad when unschooling advocates say otherwise.

Educational coercion is costly, and almost never worth doing

This is a point of agreement that Kelsey acknowledged as such, but it seems good to me to state it here again. We both agree that forcing kids to study material that they don’t want to learn is a bad idea, for reasons that include but are not limited to, that it often fails on its own merits; the kids often don’t even learn the material.

Some things where my experience has been different

I also wanted to note some points where my experience has diverged from Kelsey’s that don’t feel especially core to me, before attempting to get to the heart of where I think the two of us disagree.

Basically, my own experience of the unschooling community I have found has been vastly more positive than what Kelsey described, and my anecdata from grown unschoolers, while not universally positive, also seems to have a much more positive skew.

In the first case, my guess is that the main thing that accounts for it is that I’ve met a ton of unschoolers in person, and that has been vastly more positive for me than mailing lists and facebook groups were. And also, I think the main mailing list I used to read was a better environment than what Kelsey has mostly come across, though that that list hasn’t been especially active in years.

I posted some comments on Kelsey’s original post saying this, but, for example, I have quite often heard unschoolers recommend that families not unschool, all considered! I can think of a bunch of concrete instances, and I have done it myself in a substantive way at least once that I can recall.

(This is particularly non-central, but I actually disagree that a family couldn’t successfully unschool a 4 and 6 with both parents working full time. I’m not sure I personally could do it, but I knew one family where both parents worked full time, but they did shift work and arranged it so that one of them was basically always with their kids. Both parents had lots of energy, and their family seemed to me to be thriving as much as the families I knew with stay at home parents.)

And, to be clear, when I talk about positive anecdotes, I’m explicitly trying to exclude anyone where I only heard about their story because they were presented, on a podcast, in a book, or a conference, etc. as a success story, since I understand that of course I wouldn’t be hearing from them if it hadn’t gone well in their case, and that I wouldn’t be hearing about the parts that didn’t go well.

But even so, I don’t think unschooling is any guarantee of a happy, fulfilling childhood that the kids feel good about upon reflection. I don’t think I ever thought that, but I do remember when I was just starting out learning about unschooling having some hopes for certain outcomes that I now consider to have been unrealistically high. In particular, I think unschooling is far from a cure-all for the challenges faced by highly neurodivergent kids, or kids with mental illness, even though I think in most of the cases I’ve seen it has served them better than a public school would. And, perhaps notably, it was talking to the unschooling friends I met in person that gave me a more realistic picture.

It was pretty early in my unschooling journey that I remember having a substantive discussion with a good unschooling friend of mine about a kid in our extended unschooling community who had lamented that he didn’t know certain academic material when was around 18 or so, and how we wanted to relate to that sort of thing.

Ultimately, I don’t want to get into too many details about which exact experiences and anecdotes I have from different unschooling communities, for all the usual reasons I usually avoid posting details on the internet about people who aren’t me, but I did want to note that what I have seen seems to be somewhat different from what Kelsey has seen.

What I think unschooling is, with an emphasis on where I think Kelsey and I disagree

One thing I’m hoping to avoid, is the discussion of what unschooling ought to mean. I think that could be an interesting fight to pick, and maybe one day I’ll want to, but my hope is to instead try to clarify what I am trying to do as an unschooler, with particular emphasis on where, based on Kelsey’s critique, I think we don’t see eye to eye.

So here are some things that seem core to me about what I mean when I say unschooling. (With the caveat that I would expect many of my friends who unschool to agree with me a bunch, but I don’t expect else anyone I know who unschools to have quite the same take on it as I do.)

Actively challenging cultural defaults about what kids ought to be learning

I think almost everyone I know agrees that it’s in some sense ideal when people get to spend time learning things that they are actively curious about in a moment-to-moment way. Like how babies sometimes gleefully play with crinkly paper, perhaps because they want to know what’s up with it. Or when sometimes adults are like “my new hobby is that I will now learn as much as I can about abstract algebra”, perhaps because they recently realized that their mind seems to have an abstract algebra shaped hole in it. Or the way a lot of people I know go on “wiki benders”, where they follow one wikipedia link after another, opening a bunch of tabs, collecting novel information and hooking it up to other information.

And I think almost everyone I know agrees that sometimes, it’s valuable for people to do a more back chain-y thing where they form plans about learning things for instrumental reasons. Such as when,even though they don’t care in any intrinsic sense how tax law works, they want to comply with relevant laws. Or they’re not especially driven to understand how toilets (or plumbers?) work today, but they do want their toilet fixed.

And I think most people also agree that it’s also important for people to sometimes notice that their friends and loved ones might benefit a lot from learning about something. I personally tend to lean towards preferring explicit consent for discussions about what other people think I ought to learn, but I have often found them quite valuable.

All of that is roughly how I think it should work for kids too.

When a kid is curious about something, or a kid wants to learn something in order to accomplish one of their goals, I trust that motivation. And when a parent has a felt sense that it would be good for a kid to learn about something, either because it seems like the kid would be intrinsically into it, or a kid could better accomplish their goals if they knew it, I trust that motivation too.

(With the major caveat that IMO it’s usually good to treat that latter thing lightly, since there are almost always more varied ways that I have modeled for my kids to accomplish their goals.)

And a lot of what unschooling means to me is that in addition to trusting all those reasons for kids to be learning things, I also have an active interest in deconstructing, for myself, the orientation where I defer to something like a “cultural default” about what my kids ought to be learning. If there are arguments that make sense to me from first principles, great! But afaict lots of people either choose to adopt, or have and don’t especially question, a pretty deferential attitude towards standard curricula, what “most people” are doing, or what “most people” think “most people” should be doing, etc.

And I buy that that attitude of deference serves a lot of families better than any of the realistic alternatives. I could defend it if I wanted to!

But it’s not what I want for my family. I think it works better for my family to reject the cultural default.

I’m not sure, based on what Kelsey wrote, how Kelsey relates to what I am calling the cultural default. I would guess, given what I know about her, that she’s given it a lot of real thought. And given Kelsey’s choices to start a school, she is obviously up for doing weird stuff! My guess is that I’m more of a radical on this point though, and it may explain some of why we seem to see things differently.

Kelsey says:

It would have been a mistake, in my opinion, to make her learn geometry when it seemed pointless to her. But it would equally have been a mistake to go 'well, geometry isn't suited to her'. The thing to do was to come up with interesting material which would provide her with different points of entry into geometry until she saw the reason to study it and was excited to do so.

When Kelsey uses geometry as an example of something where she kept working to find an angle that clicked with her kid, on my end there’s a bit of a missing mood—a missing mood like “why geometry though?”

It’s not that I can’t think of all sorts of good reasons that Kelsey could want her kid to learn geometry, or that I don’t believe that she has them, or that I think Kelsey needs to justify this focus to anyone at all (or perhaps anyone outside her family).

I don’t personally find it especially compelling that geometry is a subject that kids often learn in school these days, or that I think math is great (which I do), or that geometry is a deep topic that connects up to a lot of other cool topics. But of course there are other topics that I do really want my kids to learn, so I can try to relate by substituting geometry for one of those.

(As it happens, I do feel somewhat differently about algebra. Kyle Aretae, a long-time uschooling friend of mine made the case to me that deeply “getting” algebra tends to be pretty cruxy for whether kids can be on the track where they can pretty straightforwardly get a technical math-y type job. And I was persuaded both of his model of the educational tracks, and of the practical upside of unlocking that set of jobs for my kids if it seems doable. I do have a felt sense that it’s important.)

But the thing that I think points most to a disagreement is that I can’t quite imagine writing up a similar story without including some sort of explicit nod to why this topic in particular is one where I want to keep searching for an angle where it clicks. Because at this point the water that I seem to be swimming in is one where it’s pretty unnatural to take it as a background assumption that kids should especially be learning almost any particular subject.

I’m not sure how close I’ve gotten to identifying any real specific disagreement with Kelsey, but I’m pretty sure there is a substantive crux somewhere near what I’m trying to gesture at?

Hayekian anti-coercion

Kelsey says:

The Sudbury, etc content I read mostly encouraged us to treat her refusal here as deep wisdom - that she in some sense correctly knew that geometry wasn't valuable to her. I read lots of anecdotes about a child refusing to learn something and then it turned out years later that that had been completely correct of them. Our philosophy was more that kids are almost certainly correct when they say that a lesson is not valuable to them - and it's not right to force them to do it - but that this doesn't mean they are perceiving something deep about the subject matter, it often just means you haven't found the right entry point and should keep trying.

I think I agree with the denotation of the words Kelsey says here, and yet I’m also pretty sure we have fairly straightforwardly different priors about how much deep wisdom tends to be involved in kids’ lack of interest in learning stuff.

Though even thinking of it in terms of deep wisdom or not isn’t really how the question looks in my native ontology.

Certainly it is also my experience that sometimes people’s lack of interest in certain topics can be addressed easily and quickly with a different framing or entry point. The example Kelsey gives about the Pythagorean theorem unlocking geometry for her kid makes sense to me. I remember one of my kids having trouble with the voiced “th” sound, and words that started with that sound not helping, but when we talked about the word “brother”, it clicked. I could probably think of dozens of similar examples without too much trouble. And I think I would have been meaningfully mistaken if I thought something like “well, I guess this kid just isn’t ready to learn about that sound”, and given up. I can also recall many instances of teaching young kids a slightly different body mechanic, or iterating some fine motor skill with them, and I have had many experiences of these things clicking very quickly!

However, after trying a bunch of different approaches, I have often gotten a clear sense that “okay, my kid wants me to stop trying to get this to click with them”. And of course, I can then also go meta about that, and try to figure out why, and see if there’s a crux to be addressed. And as they get older, more introspective, and more willing to talk to me about it, they can often verbally tell me what’s going on.

One such example is that I tried to teach one of my kids about letters and their sounds when they were a toddler. I got a lot of traction at first, but then I ran into what I now think of as a tell-tale dynamic, where it seemed like I kept running up against a particular type of resistance–not at first when I tried a new tact, but in a delayed way, seemingly to me as though it was kicking in when a high-order process noticed what was going on.

My current best guess is that given where my kid was at developmentally, it seemed like a higher priority for them to classify objects as the same regardless of their orientation, and my project about identifying letters conflicted with that. And that in and of itself doesn’t mean I couldn’t have kept trying stuff–maybe if I only worked with them on letters that didn’t have the rotation issue and built up from there, something cool could have happened. But the sense I got from my kid was more like “I’m trying my best to hold onto my developmental priorities here, and it’s kind of exhausting and bad for our relationship to have you poking around in this vicinity. Drop this for now; do not pass go; do not collect $200.”

An example from my own life that still has emotional charge for me, some 25 or so years later, was when Nancy Bidlack, who ran the chamber music summer camp I attended from ages 13-18, was my cello teacher for the summer. I had had a few cello teachers by then, including one of warmest and kindest people I’ve ever spent a lot of time with. But I think, until that point, all of my teachers had some sort of goal like “get me to be a better cellist”, that in retrospect I think I subtly wasn’t bought into. (Some context here is that playing the cello was an optional part of my life. My mother made it very clear that if I wanted to stop I could.) Nancy seemed to intuitively and deeply get that not only did I not want to be a professional cellist (lots of the kids at this summer camp did go on to become professional musicians), but that I was mostly there because I liked the vibe and wanted to hang out with my friends playing chamber music. Because of that, I think, she taught me in a very different way, that was more about satisficing learning pieces I was assigned. And not only did it work better in a narrow sense–my recollection is that did learn my pieces better than usual that summer–the difference in how it felt on my end was dramatic, and very positive, and I’m confident it helped me inhabit myself more fully.

These days I have a pretty high prior that my kids may want me to drop my educational agendas. If I let myself make up a number, I think maybe half the time I have had an agenda about one of my kids learning something in particular, I come up against something like this on their end, including when they were quite young and not able to confirm it verbally.

Which isn’t to say that I automatically give up just because my kid seems to want me to, since some things are quite important to me. And it doesn’t mean that even when I do drop my agenda for a while I might not revisit it later.

(In some cases, revisiting a thing later is more like my default plan. My 2yo is great at taking off his clothes, but pretty unskilled at putting his clothes on. I want him to be able to put his clothes on, which is why I have tried to show him how, but it doesn’t seem urgent. And I have a high prior that it will be much easier to show him in a year, and even easier in two years. I feel similarly about a bunch of academic subjects.)

And for me, part of respecting and supporting my kids’ developing personhood is trusting them when it seems like they are telling me, either in words or not, that if I keep trying to present the material in different ways, they will experience it as quite costly.

Which, on my end, ties into a philosophical position I hold pretty deeply about central planning importantly not working, especially at large scales. But if I speak from my gut, I want to say: “Not even within my family, and not even within my own mind.”

As I see it, the calculation problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem) is one angle on why it can work very well to be deferential to people (and even processes) about how they want to allocate their resources, very much including cognitive and attentional ones.

And then I see something a bit more abstract following from that, where it can be good and adaptive for people to build ego structures that often tend to reject a bunch of agendas other people might have about them, to maintain the sort of process-level separateness that makes them function well.

And so, not only do I have a higher prior that there’s deep wisdom in my kids’ choices about what to learn, but for me part and parcel of respecting their autonomy involves deferring to them quite a bit about when to keep trying to present material to them basically regardless of my prior about how deep their reasons are once they start to object. And empirically, they seem to object pretty often.

My kids seem to be unusually picky in this way, and that they probably get a lot of it from me, since I am also unusually picky this way.

On the other hand, a family is pretty small scale. (Cold take, but) I think central planning tends to work noticeably better for city states and small countries than it does for large countries. And families are obviously much, much smaller than even the smallest countries.

And, afaict, given people’s skills, context, and values, there’s a lot of variation in how it’s most functional to divide up their interpersonal and intrapersonal epistemology. (I don’t currently have great explicit models about which factors tend to have big effects here.)

Concretely I’ve encountered unschooling (and non-unschooling) families for whom it usually seemed to go smoothly when the parents had more of an agenda about the kids’ learning, and other families who seemed about as concerned about the potential downsides from that as I am. And I feel confident this is because our family dynamics around this sort of thing are meaningfully different. (Analyzing what seem to be the relevant differences interests me, but I consider it beyond the scope of this post, and I’m not sure I have a good handle on it anyway.)

So I’m not trying to say that I think everyone ought to be scrupulous about mostly holding educational agendas for their kids lightly, but I do think in some families there’s a lot of upside from relating to it that way.

Treating teaching as potentially costly

It’s usually quite costly for me whenever I’m in a “teaching” type context. Friends explaining stuff to me doesn’t really count, but when someone is occupying a role where they’re supposed to impart knowledge to me, it always seems to apply.

Kelsey says:

substituting the adult's judgment for the child's judgment and teaching the child to please the adult - which is a critique unschoolers often make of conventional education that seems to me to have some merit

And my guess from reading this is that Kelsey and I have a disagreement about how costly it usually is for certain kids to be taught things, even when the teaching is pretty good.

One cost associated with teaching people things in general, as I see it, is that afaict there’s a pretty real low-level tradeoff between being the sort of mind that can absorb the thousands of years worth of accumulated human knowledge, and the sort of mind that can figure out stuff more like from first principles.

I do care about that cost somewhat, and for whatever reason it felt wrong to me to leave it out, but ultimately that’s not the one I’m worried about it.

The cost I worry about ~isn’t present (or at least I expect it to be much lower) when I’m reading a book, or watching a video of a lecture, and isn’t there for me when I’m playing a video game, no matter how heavy-handedly educational. But, as I see it, it has basically always there when a person was teaching me something in realtime. And it’s particularly there when the person teaching the thing is an adult, and an authority figure, and it was higher when I was a kid than it is for me now.

Because, as I see it, the teacher role is super relationally fraught, and almost no one seems into doing it in a way that supports the type of personhood I’m aiming for, which I tried to explain above. My own experience has been that the vast majority, though of course not all, of people who are in official teaching type roles have a bunch of their intentionality, often unconsciously, pointed at something like actively trying to interfere with my ability to:

think for myself

maintain my own sense of taste about the subject matter

trust myself about when to keep thinking about something

perceive the material accurately when the teacher is wrong

etc. I’m trying to gesture at a cluster here, and my list isn’t meant to be exclusive or exhaustive

One example that has stuck with me was when I was in a zoom Q&A near the end of a virtual conference I was attending about a longtime hobby of mine. They were explaining a particular principle (that people in this domain often elide), and I asked under what circumstances it was especially important to pay attention to it (since many of their colleagues did often ignore it, and seemed to get good results anyway). One of them ~said “always”, and the other one backed him up right after. The tone of both of their responses struck me as contemptuous. I still think about this, because I think it left some barb in my mind that I have only mostly removed. There was a reason I asked the question! I also think it had a real answer, and I think they were using my genuine curiosity and intent to deeply understand the material as a springboard for emphasize something they wanted to emphasize for their own reasons. Which is, in many ways, fine. It was their event, and I think my expectations for the Q&A were naive. I have since developed some explicit heuristics for when the sorts of questions I like to ask subject-matter experts are likely to welcome. It’s an example of how teaching can affect me though.

According to my worldview, and because of the shape of the personhood I’m especially trying to support in the world, I believe that teaching at its best involves actively modeling and trying to mitigate the sort of vulnerability people, especially young people, are taking on in the student role. Especially when the students feel obligated to be polite to the teacher, if not to also treat them as an authority figure.

I will freely admit that I seem very sensitive to teaching dynamics. I have almost always complained about them after the fact when I am trying to learn from subject matter experts who aren’t already my friends. Lots of other people that I’ve talked to don’t seem to share my issues, due to, afaict, a combination of aiming for something different than I am aiming for, being robust in ways that I’m not, and having more adaptive strategies for interfacing.

Certainly it struck me when Kelsey said:

As an adult, I learn well when a person who is an enthusiastic expert about the topic walks me through the key ideas - so it makes sense to me that this is also true of children.

I rarely learn from being forced to attend mandatory training, so it makes sense to me that this doesn't work that well for children either.

Adults frequently do (and like!) classes, bootcamps, trainings, and other structured instructional settings, so it doesn't make sense to me to assert that children's love of learning is inherently destroyed by those things.

Adults don't pick up skills by magic intuition, and so it's not surprising that kids mostly don't either.

I do tend to like it when an enthusiastic expert walks me through something I’m interested in, when I ask them to, and when they treat me respectfully. I don’t like mandatory trainings! (Though fwiw I think I have often retained quite a bit of material from mandatory trainings—people seem to differ quite a bit on this point—but that’s not a crux for me about whether I like them.)

And I almost never like classes and bootcamps. I hate almost all trainings and structured instructional settings I have tried. Even conference talks with questions are often fraught for me.

And, as far as I can tell, my kids are a lot like me in this way.

I’m also pretty skeptical of the claim that adults frequently do and like those sorts of structured educational things? Some do, for sure. Afaict, compared to the population average, my friend group (and probably their kids, too) contains disproportionately many people who enjoy structured educational settings and also disproportionately many people who are deeply allergic to them.

And also my guess is that the number of minutes of their adult life that the median American voluntarily devotes to learning things in structured instructional settings, other than to obtain a credential they want, is pretty low.

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s important for me to know what most people are like, but as it stands I do have a pretty high prior that children I come into contact with will rightly and meaningfully object to a whole bunch of structured instructional settings, particularly academically focused ones, since I think the frame stuff that bugs me (and some others like me) out that I tried to point to above is more part of the standard cultural context for academic material than it is for stuff that’s more hobby-coded.

And to the point about magic intuition—I totally agree that it’s very possible to model learning in detail and pretty mechanistically. And at the same time, my sense is that I more like disagree than agree with the statement. I think most of the time adults learn things because they decide to learn it, and figure out something that works for them. And most of the time when I learn things it’s usually pretty opaque to the people around me unless they ask me about it or I decide to tell them about it.

Magic intuition, no, but I do think the vast majority of the learning that people of all ages do happens for reasons and in ways that approximately no one else is modeling. I taught myself to touch type on a Dvorak keyboard one summer when I was a kid in a very straightforward way–I read something on the internet that I found persuasive about how the layout was better, I found a typing program, installed it, and practiced a lot. But I imagine that the whole thing seemed pretty out-of-nowhere from my parents’ perspective, if they even knew I was doing it.

I also think my kids can learn substantially more and better with me involved and as a resource, a lot of the time, and I try to help them with their learning, so I’m not quite sure why I felt compelled to write the above paragraph disagreeing with the magic intuition point, but I did.

And to be clear, I do not claim that teaching is never good and worth it. I have taught people things, and often it has seemed good and worthwhile to me to have done it. Despite my relevant allergies, I continue to look for teachers who work for me, and I periodically attend events that I know I’ll have objections to, because they seem like the best way for me to learn the material. I have recommended that my kids take classes about things that interest them, sometimes they have done it, and sometimes it has been a great experience for them. And when one of my kids wants to opt into a teaching experience, I try my best to support it. Furthermore, if you read this and think “all that stuff you’re saying about teaching seems pretty neurotic and it doesn’t seem to apply to me or my family”, I think that’s great! I am very much not trying to sell anyone on relating to teaching the way I do.

Since Kelsey and I support kids opting out of their classes, I also think we are way more on the same page about a pretty fundamental point about how children’s education ought to look than most people are. And also, I think my concerns about teaching may explain some chunk of the differences I see in our stances.

Conclusion

I don’t think most people should unschool. I am not an unschooling evangelist. I might even say, as I have sometimes heard about whether people ought to become professional musicians, that people should only do it when they think they couldn’t live with themselves if they didn’t. And I think even most parents who deeply want to unschool will have a pretty rough time of it if they didn’t manage to find enough supportive community.

But I personally really like unschooling, and I can’t quite imagine doing anything else for my family. So, since there’s been a bunch of discourse about unschooling recently, from Kelsey and a bunch of stuff I’ve seen on my twitter timeline too, I wanted to at least weigh in on the conversation myself, and try to articulate some of what it means to me and what I find valuable about it.

This ended up being way longer than I expected or hoped it would be, so thanks for reading this far if you did!

Many thanks to everyone who helped me clarify my ideas by talking about them and gave me feedback on drafts, including Steph and James Payor, Pete Michaud, Kyle Aretae, Cristy Henry, and Anna Salamon.

[erectedingold]

Life Update

Writing this on my phone, think i might rn getting a little sick 😓

but lots going on rn, started school & tbh as i get older i realize school ain’t that bad bro! im so thankful for my classes & i dropped a science class cause fuck science i hate that shit SO MUCH. but when i was doing that i mentioned in my email to my guidance counselor the college im wanting to go to & she says to me “you probably won’t get in your gpa isn’t there & your SAT scores aren’t there as well, maybe check out *college*”

first of don’t talk to me like that. i know academically i am far from great but my talent & ambition outweighs ALL of that. never tell an artist they can’t go to an art school they deadass don’t even have math classes there dude like who tf do you think you are? i know my talent & what i can & cannot do so don’t doubt me ever again bitch LMAO. second don’t tell me where YOU think i should go. like please. i am being so fr don’t ever tell me where i belong because ill go where i want. so watch yourself the next time you talk to me.

that whole interaction ruined my day. my whole life i’ve been doubted but i know who i am & what i can do.

but i wrote my essay & it’s amazing, & now im gonna get 2 letters of recommendation from my teachers. one from my english teacher & the other from my business teacher. then i got 2 open responses i need to write for & then i can send my applications. if i don’t get into this school im applying for in boston idk what ima do tbh, im applying to one in NY & one in NYC but like fuck bro i’d rather one here in boston especially when i have friends here. also applying to one in california 😴

but back to school, i think the older i get the more i realize how EASY shit is, my math is easy, my english is easy, intro to psychology easy, history is a joke, & my related class is easy. it’s just managing time in the class room like damn it makes me annoyed that my senior year of high school i don’t have anxiety with school anymore 😭 is what it is though that just makes this year easier for me 🙏

my new film is dropping tomorrow i’m really nervous for it i’ll be honest idk why, im afraid of it getting NO views but also it doesn’t matter it’s my art & im proud of it 😴 it don’t matter what anyone thinks because i do it for me 🤷 i make art because creating makes me feel alive. that’s what i do it for, i make because its second nature to me, it’s like breathing i don’t think about to at all it comes so naturally to me & im truly blessed to have my brain this way.

i hope everyone who views it can feel the passion though 🙏

I’m also not taking any disrespect anymore, i’ve been on my journaling shit & some more self development. i’m going to start reading more because i want to be a better writer & also expose myself to more challenging material. i’ve been watching more international films which has been on my list for a while, subtitles aren’t that scary guys! enjoy the art made around the world never let a language barrier stop you from that.

but also finally just more self discovery on my end & solidifying my boundaries whether people like it or not because i will NOT allow myself to be disrespected in my one life. idgaf if it’s just “jokes” because my perception is my reality & if your joke is disrespectful then shut the fuck up 🤷 i also won’t be giving my energy to people who don’t match or or appreciate me. you don’t deserve me. there some people who i show nothing but kindness & give the biggest helping hand to when needed & i don’t get that energy back so guess what im not trying anymore because you’re not worth my time. simple as that.

i’m not going to give pieces of myself to people who no longer deserve it. i know that i always have good intentions & share my kindness always & i will no longer allow myself to be a doormat. people have mistaken my kindness for weakness & i won’t let them mistake it anymore.

i don’t have to have everyone like me or respect me so boom if you don’t get out of my life i don’t need you because when i look in the mirror i love myself & respect myself & that’s all i need. as long as you have yourself you have somebody.

i’m also cutting out some bad habits that i started that have been damaging to myself. i deserve better because i love me.

i am proud of me & who i’m becoming. ive been making big changes this year & im telling you 2025 will be the year of diego. im manifesting it.

but yeah i’ve been getting closer with my dawg nathan much respect & love to him always. amazing & talented filmmaker who is my best friend dude & im happy me & him have gotten closer recently. we both got broken up with around the same time & we’ve talked like everyday since dude, the universe has plans for us. we’re gonna be great i can feel it.

&& speaking of universe that’s another thing. the universe has a plan for everyone including you reading 🙏 if you feel lost something will happen to bring you onto the right track of self discovery & self love. keep going even when it’s hard because the reward will be great. i have full trust that everything i manifest will come to life & i’ll reach all my goals.

thank you for reading this blog post, lots of changes in my life & i am human & experiencing & living & breathing & feeling emotions. thankful for my mind.

- Diego Muñoz

[kittttycakes]

those prompt things were made for Hob I swear???????? ok so either "I didn't know you wore glasses and I'm thinking normal and platonic thoughts about you right now I swear" (who's wearing glasses? Who knows, many possibilities!

OR

"you bought me a SWORD? OH MAN IM GONNA BE SO DANGEROUS" because... REASONS

thank you for allowing me to spread the gospel of "glasses make everyone hotter" and it isn't just because I myself am a confirmed glasses wearer I swear

Hob nearly drops his cup when he sees him, hand gripping convulsively at the cardboard in an overcorrection that almost sees him with coffee down his arm. He has seen Morpheus in more stages and types of dress and undress than he can easily recall, robes and coats in materials no human hands save his own have ever touched, but he fears this may be his undoing. 

Get ahold of yourself, he tells himself sternly. There’s nothing unusual. Nothing to see here. You can and will be normal about this. 

When Morpheus draws closer, his brow furrows slightly, searching Hob’s face. “Are you well?”

“Am I—yes. Yes, well,” he says. He starts to say more, stops, and drinks his coffee instead for something to do, nearly scorching his tongue. It is, he must admit, a very good approximation of what he and his colleagues wear every day, albeit in a more monochrome color scheme than he would usually see. There’s still something so very him about it all that Hob knows he would be able to pick him out of a crowd of a hundred, a thousand, but he can’t stop staring at his face. 

“Do you like them?” Morpheus asks, falling into step beside him, as perceptive as he always is, now, when it comes to Hob. On anyone else, the tone would be infuriatingly casual, but Hob knows he’s enjoying this. He’s done it on purpose, the menace, and when Hob had told him he was welcome to drop in on him any time, even at the university, he hadn’t envisioned this. He hadn’t realized Morpheus would try to blend in. 

The glasses he’s chosen are a bit thicker framed than Hob’s own reading glasses, and they suit his face immensely, drawing attention to his eyes and giving him an air of scholarly intensity that Hob finds entirely appealing. He looks a bit like the sort of visiting professor that he wouldn’t mind being trapped in conversation with at the annual faculty dinner, no matter what topic he’d sunk his teeth into and refused to let go of, because listening to him would give Hob the unparalleled opportunity to simply look at him and to listen to the rise and fall of his voice. 

Hob aims for casual and falls somewhat short. “They’re new, I haven’t ever seen you wear those before.” 

“I chose them especially for the occasion.”

He was wrong. This wasn’t blending in, this was specifically targeted at him. He stops to let them both into his office, immediately closing the door behind them, dropping his bag and coffee and hoping they both land near and on the desk, respectively, and backing Morpheus up against the door. “Well, you certainly have my attention. Is that what you wanted?” 

Morpheus smiles slightly, terribly smug. Hob badly wants to kiss that look off of his face. “You do like them, then.” 

“You’re keeping those on. I’ve got plans,” he says, leaning in to kiss him, thanking a god he has not believed in for a good few centuries that he thought of going to work early that morning. The essays can wait. This is far more important.

[an-obsessed-writer]

Mind Over Matter

Summary: Everyone knew the Baron Helmut Zemo, you’d have to be living under a rock to not recognize the name of the ridiculously wealthy royal attending your university. He was the school’s top bachelor, a sophisticated and confident man who obviously was wealthy. That was enough to make any woman at the university swoon, but he was always known to never keep a girl for long. What happens when (Y/N) finds herself meeting him at one of his parties?

(A/N): i think i’ll turn this into a series, but not sure yet! im a whore for zemo rn as everyone is, let me know if you’re interested in reading more <3

Word Count: 2.2k

“(Y/N)!” Wanda plops onto your bed after she runs into the dorm, and smiles sweetly up at you. “Wanna go to a party tonight? Word has it that Zemo is throwing a major bash for the new school year.”

Everyone knew the Baron Helmut Zemo, you’d have to be living under a rock to not recognize the name of the ridiculously wealthy royal attending your university. He was the school’s top bachelor, a sophisticated and confident man who obviously was wealthy. That was enough to make any woman at the university swoon, but he was always known to never keep a girl for long. Fortunately, you didn’t live under a rock, just too immersed in your studies to care much about him. You’ve seen him walking on campus before, with his fur coat and maroon mock turtleneck, and you could see why he was such a popular man. It’s known that Europeans always have the best sense of style.

“I’ve already got a major essay to finish for my philosophy class next week, maybe next time?” You frown at your roommate, feigning sadness that you wouldn’t be able to make it, but by the look of her face, she wasn’t going to let you get out of this one.

“You promised you’d attend a party this year! We’re juniors and you’ve been to only a handful. Besides, his parties are super classy, everyone gets all dressed up. It’ll be fun, I swear.” Wanda looks up at you with pleading eyes, and you couldn’t help but think about the opportunity presented.

It was true, you hadn’t been to many parties since college started. Your grades were stellar, your reputation even more so. Studying as a pre-med was no joke, resulting in your non-existent social life, but you honestly didn’t mind it much. You kept your head down because college was expensive enough as it is, you couldn’t afford to get distracted. Closing the laptop on your lap, a sigh escapes your mouth, and Wanda took it as a silent submission for what she had planned.

“Perfect! It’s tonight at his mansion. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be able to get him wrapped around your finger by the end of the night,” she winked and immediately began rummaging through her closet for the perfect outfit. “I heard the theme was the 20’s, I’ve always loved the flapper girl outfits.” A laugh escaped from Wanda’s lips, and a mischievous smile was displayed on her face. 

If there was anyone you trusted at this place, it’d be Wanda Maximoff. Her brother Pietro came as a close second, but she’d been your rock throughout your educational journey. Everyone loved her, everyone wanted her at their parties, but she chose to stay in with you to watch movies and talk about guys on more than one occasion. Coming from Sokovia, Wanda and Zemo talked often because of their love for the Sokovian language, but nothing romantic ever stemmed from their interactions with each other.

Truth be told, you were a pretty girl. This never went unnoticed by the guys around you, leading to a few regretful hookups. Your confidence oozed from your cheeky smile and subtly flirtatious comments when appropriate, but you were adamant on not entering a relationship until school was over. However, you were the realist out of this duo, and you knew for a fact you’d never be able to pull a guy like Helmut Zemo. With his looks and amount of money, he could get the most sought after movie star (which everyone was fairly sure he hooked up with Megan Fox at one point, but that was just a rumor).

“Do you still have your flapper girl costume from Halloween a while ago? I’ve got mine, and I don’t think we have enough time to shop before the party,” Wanda inquired.

“Of course I do, it’s my go to Halloween costume now if I ever go out again.” You smiled, reminiscing over the memories from last Halloween, and stumbled off your bed to find the outfit. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The music was blasting, and you couldn’t help but look in awe of your surroundings. A double curved staircase with red carpeting was in front of you and Wanda, with grand railings connected to the marble floor below. The home was obnoxiously large, you could talk and an echo would rumble through the room. 

Wanda gives you an encouraging look, and grabs your hand to lead you towards the party room upstairs. The silver tassels from your mini dress rubbed against your dress with every step you took, and you knew there was no turning back now. Besides, there was no way you could leave this beautiful home anytime soon, you simply wanted to drink in it’s beauty forever.

Once upstairs, a man in a suit smiled at the two of you, and asked for your invitations, which Wanda gladly handed over. With a nod, he opened the doors that were taller than any of you, and the sight immediately took your breath away.

White, translucent balloons hung from the ceiling. Art deco inspired tables with feathers and gold tassels lining over them containing copious amounts of alcohol were in the middle of the room. Intricate white and golden wallpaper covered the walls, which helped bring everything together, but the flashing disco lights allowed a modern feel to this 1920’s inspired party.

Not too long after entering the room, Vision strutted over to the two of you after catching sight of his girlfriend. “Hello (Y/N),” he flashed a quick smile to you and placed a kiss on Wanda’s cheek, “Care if I steal my girlfriend away for a dance?”

“No problem at all,” you waved your hand to dismiss the two of them, and Wanda went off to the dance floor with her love. 

This was normal, Wanda would be whisked away by Vision, and you typically found a guy to bring you attention for the night, but something felt different. Right now, all you wanted was a drink, and you found yourself making a beeline towards the tables full of alcohol. 

The bartender was dressed in one of the finest suits, and you couldn’t help but wonder “If his employees are dressed like this, what was the Baron wearing?”

“What would you like?” Your mind blanked trying to think of alcohol that you liked, it’s been too long.

“Surprise me, it’s been a while.” You smiled sheepishly, but your attention was caught by the feeling of another person behind you.

“That won’t do, you look like you need something strong.” A thick, European accent filled your ears, and you couldn’t help the way that your body tensed up. With a turn of your head, your eyesight took hold of the one and only, Helmut Zemo.

He looked even more delicious standing so close to you. As expected, Zemo didn’t mess around with his looks. A burgundy, pinstripe suit hugged his figure, and you couldn’t help but take note of the way his arms looked under the tight sleeves.

“Something strong would be nice,” you say holding your chin up, not wanting to embarrass yourself in front of the most well known man in the school. With a wave of his finger and a command in a language you didn’t know, two shots of clear liquid were slammed on the table, and Zemo picked one up with a cheeky smile.

You narrowed your eyes at him and nervously picked up the shot glass with shaky hands. Lifting it up to your nose, your face contorted into an expression of disgust at the smell of acetone. “What is this?”

With a rumbling chuckle from Zemo, your cheeks blushed slightly, silently scolding yourself for losing your composure. He raised his glass and with a tilt of his head, he responded “Rakija, essentially European moonshine. I’ll take a shot with you, it can be too strong for some Americans.”

Silently, you nodded and raised the shot glass, mimicking his actions. Once he swiftly threw back the liquid into his mouth, you followed, and immediately wanted to gag. It burned as it went down your throat, the taste of pure chemicals became overwhelming, and you managed to keep a straight face through it all. Zemo slammed his glass back onto the table and took a step towards you in order to be able to communicate over the loud music.

“I apologize for being such a rude host, but I don’t recognize you.” The smell of rich cologne flooded your nostrils, and you could’ve melted right there. His eyes peered down onto you, being that you were significantly shorter than the man towering over your body, and you licked your lips.

“I usually stay in my dorm, I’m pre-med.” You held your hand out politely, “(Y/N).”

Zemo’s rough hands took hold of your own, lowering his head to leave a kiss on the indents of your knuckles. Without standing up straight, he raises his eyes to look at you through his eyebrows, “It’s a pleasure to meet you (Y/N), I hope you’re enjoying the party.”

His voice was like smooth caramel and melted chocolate, just the right mix of salty and sweet. His thick accent burned into your head with the way he said your name, and your hand was tingling from where his lips met your knuckles. After hearing the stories of his charming ways, you wanted to call bullshit, but experiencing this first hand was completely different. There was some truth to the rumors of the mysterious Baron, and you couldn’t help but feel drawn to find out more. The man simply oozed sex appeal.

“I actually just got here with Wanda. She’s off somewhere with Vision.” You were proud of how you managed to keep your voice at a steady level, knowing that your mind was going crazy with how close the two of you were.

Zemo’s eyebrow perked up at the mention of Wanda’s name and held out his hand with the corners of his mouth turning up ever so slightly, “Any friend of Wanda’s is a friend of mine, care to dance (Y/N)?”

Every fiber of your being wanted you to run, knowing that if you went to dance with him, there was no turning back. Still, you couldn’t stop your hand from being placed into his, and he swiftly pulled you along towards the dance floor. 

Sweaty bodies surrounded the two of you, but you could only focus on his eyes engulfing the way the dress hugged your body in all the right spots. He placed his hand on the small of your back where the dress was open, the touch sending shivers down your spine. The Baron’s hands were warm, completely contrasting the iciness of your skin. 

With another hand on your waist and a smirk, he began moving his hips, which you soon followed. As the song went on, the distance between you got smaller and smaller, until your chest was practically smushed against his. You lifted your left hand to run through his chestnut brown hair, and it was as soft as you expected it to be.

“Of course it is,” you thought to yourself. “A Baron deserves only the most expensive products.”

“You’d think I would know everyone on campus, but your beauty caught me by surprise.” His breath felt hot against your ear, and you swallowed thickly.

“Not many people know me,” you countered.

“What a shame, isn’t it darling?” The use of pet names was enough to make your knees buckle, especially when paired with the Sokovian drawl, but you shook your head in defiance.

“He probably says that to all the girls.” Even so, you wished your mind would be quiet so you could appreciate this moment for what it is. The chance to dance with the bachelor everyone was pining for, but he was only paying attention to you.

You didn’t respond, only picking up the pace of your swaying hips, grinding against his thigh. Zemo exhaled a quick breath, and wasted no time to smash his lips onto yours. This action sent electricity through your body, the taste of the alcohol on his breath only made him more alluring, and your mouth copied his movements. Teeth clacked against one another, but neither of you cared. The only thing you could think about was the feeling of his fingers trailing down your back, and the way you fit with him like a lost puzzle piece.

Zemo grabbed at the nape of your neck, signaling to deepen the kiss with a tightening grip and a nip at your bottom lip, but you pulled away before you did something you regret.

With a confused look, Zemo licked his lips. “Care to go upstairs to my room?”

“Actually,” you say breathlessly, “I think it’s better if I head out.” Regretfully, you untangle your bodies and take a step back from the powerful man standing in front of you.

Without taking a second to think about what you’ve just done, you turn and make your way to the exit, but not without glancing at the Baron one last time. 

His eyes never left you, and he stood still as you walked through the doors.

[fatehbaz]

hi maybe you’ve written about this before but i’m working for someone who is part of the ecological landscape alliance and we’ve been having big talks about the concept of “invasive” species vs “native” plants and how the concept is rooted in xenophobia, and also talking about how maybe invasive plants aren’t that bad?? this goes against everything i’ve ever heard anyone talk about invasive species but i really don’t know all that much about it. sounds silly maybe coming from a farmer but i really don’t have a super firm ecological understanding, most of my plant knowledge is agricultural based and im really curious to learn more and was hoping you could point me in the right direction?

Yes, I definitely run into this disk horse all the time. Especially the “maybe invasive plants aren’t that bad” discussion. It seems the native/alien stuff is most often mentioned in disk horse about the Anthropocene. Basically, you’ll sometimes see statements like: “Is anything really natural in the Anthropocene?” I have also seen, and spent a lot of time contemplating, how belief in the categories of “natural” and “alien/invasive” in discussion of ecology might be rooted in or at least inadvertently support racism/xenophobia.

But I am still wary of the “native vs alien” and “no creature or landscape is really natural, not any more” disk horse, at least as explored by some white/settler-colonial academics, for exactly the same reasons: because it might be rooted in or support racism/xenophobia. Because the proposal that “nothing is native, nothing is invasive” itself can actually engage in a sort of “settler absolution” that obscures how there really is a contrast between imperial and Indigenous peoples, and the “nothing is natural, nothing is invasive” proposal could excuse the colonial/imperial introduction and expansion of monoculture by accepting the spread of industry/agriculture/non-native species as an inevitability. And these concepts can actually work to generalize conditions of ecological degradation and apocalypse, as if to say that “all humans now live in such a damaged world, we’re all victims” (even though many non-white, especially Indigenous, people actually bear most of the violence and burden of living in “post-apocalyptic” ecologies.)

But actually, I don’t think I can be too helpful here.

I still have a lot of contemplating to do, about how categories of natural/invasive in ecology might support the violence of categorizing people as natural/invasive. Don’t really know where I stand yet, y’know? So I don’t want to be too quick to come to a conclusion. I don’t even really want to offer opinions here. That said, I am very sensitive to language, and the language that I use. So I do appreciate that there is an effort to interrogate the negative consequences of describing things with words like “alien”. Also, the categorizing of lifeforms is and always has been a mess.

I don’t have many reading recommendations. The “native vs alien” and “nothing is really native, actually” proposals are concepts that I brush up against but don’t read too deeply into, even though this disk horse has been popular-ish in dark ecology and academic ecology/environmental studies circles for at least 10 years or more by now.

I guess, for my thoughts on native vs alien, what counts as “natural”, invasive species, and how the disk horse can excuse settler-colonial/imperial racism, I would point to this post I made about Pablo Escobar’s feral hippopotamuses in Colombia.

One introduction to the concept, which I think is an enjoyable read (though I don’t necessarily agree with all of his implications), is this essay by Hugo Reinert about the category of “natural” and the “purity” of a species: “Requiem for a Junk-Bird: Violence, Purity and the Wild.” Cultural Studies Review. 2019.

Anna Boswell’s very famous article about stoats and non-native species in Aotearoa kind of dances around this same issue of naturalness: “Settler Sanctuaries and the Stoat-Free State.” Animal Studies Journal. 2017.

-------

Generally, I agree with the implication that there is no “remote” or untouched corner of the planet where ecology has escaped human influence.

On that aspect, here’s a post I made about “planetary urbanization”.

But the native/alien disk horse can be extended to problematique degrees, with proposals that sometimes remind me of sci-fi goofiness, like fans of dark ecology or weird fiction or Mieville/Van der Meer got a little too excited about “the boundary between human and other-than-human has become so blurred that there may as well no longer be distinctions between native species and invasive species”, like they got a little too drunk on theory and just decided that “everything is in flux!”. Criticisms, then, of the “nothing is native” disk horse include how this oversimiplifies ecology and might enable/excuse settler-colonial invasion.

A lot of the “invasive plants are good, actually!” disk horse I’ve seen shows up in Australian literature written by settler scholars, which might be pretty telling.

Basically, it seems some scholars will take Alfred Crosby’s “neo-Europe” and “ecological imperialism” concepts, and then say something like “look, the damage is done, so much of Earth’s soils/landscapes are altered by introduced plants that we may as well accept it as the new baseline/normal ecology, and work from there.” As if to point at how North America has been entirely overrun by non-native earthworms and then to say “well, the worms are going to inevitably destroy hardwoods forests, soils of the Great Lakes region, the boreal-temperate transition zone, and maple trees which supply place-based maple syrup foodsheds, so we may as well accept that we live in a damaged world.”

I don’t know if I’m entirely satisfied with this.

-------

Other related concepts brought up in the same  discussion of “nothing is really native” might include “invasion biology” and “assisted migration.” I see these concepts brought up in academic writing from the University of California system, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and “environmental humanities” generally. Basically, these writers/scholars will point to the past ten thousand-ish years of the Holocene, and how humans have had such profound influence on global ecology that “introduction of non-native species” and “mass-scale anthropogenic climate/ecological change” are not just recent developments since Industrial Revolution or Indus/Yellow/Mesopotamian statecraft, but even older. For example, I’ve talked a lot about how, in the Late Pleistocene or early Holocene, the Asiatic steppes and parts of the Great Plains could have apparently been more like intermittent woodlands before humans engaged in deliberate fire-setting to better target megafauna herds, meaning that the human role in creation of vast “naturally-occurring” grassland regions may be underestimated. This dove-tails with the better-established fact that the forests of Central America and eastern North America in the early Holocene were/are actually more like cultivated food forests managed by Indigenous people.

The argument, then, may also point to yams, sweet potato, and coconut as examples of creatures with what now appear to be “old” and “established” widespread transoceanic distribution ranges which actually may have been introduced via assisted migration by humans.

The argument, basically, says: Well, let’s say hypothetically that humans didn’t play a role in spreading sweet potato or coconut. By chance, if ocean currents “naturally” introduced these species, if these plants “naturally” colonized whatever lands they were swept off towards, doesn’t this mean they could essentially be “natural” to anywhere they might arrive and successfully establish themselves? Therefore, does it really matter if humans helped them get there?

This seems to be related to the “no plants are actually invasive” proposal. As if to say: “If English pasture grasses have successfully reproduced themselves in Patagonia, Aotearoa, South Africa, the Canadian prairies, etc., what does it mean that their migration was assisted by humans?”

But this is where I have reservations: It wasn’t just any humans that “assisted the migration” of monoculture grasses from Europe to the prairies of Turtle Island. It was specific humans, with deliberate intent, upholding specific institutions, protecting their own well-being at the expense of other humans and lifeforms, enacting specific violence against specific victims.

-------

Another aspect of this which I see mentioned often is how early human/Polynesian settlement in Oceania and the South Pacific is an example of how mass anthropogenic ecological change doesn’t always involve statecraft, mass mono/agriculture, and imperialism. Aside from the famous decline of creatures like the moa, Polynesian islands were also home to relict species of large land turtles and ancient terrestrial/semi-arboreal crocodiles until human arrival in recent millennia. Writers will also point to human settlement in the Caribbean, where human arrival coincided with extinction of remnant populations of endemic Pleistocene ground sloths. (This also happened on Mediterranean islands, which hosted endemic species of hippopotamus and goats until recent millennia.)

Again, though, this is where white/settler-colonial academics advocating “nothing is natural” can kind of obscure settler-colonial violence, by pointing to history of anthropogenic environmental change and saying “see, all humans provoke extinction.”

Thus, you’ll see these scholars invoke Anna Tsing or Donna Harraway, referencing the “arts of living on a damaged planet” or “living in post-capitalist ruins.” Essentially, advocates of “nothing is native, any more” might say “we all live in a post-apocalyptic world now, so we should get used to it.”

This, coming from white/settler-colonial academics, sometimes rubs me the wrong way, as if it’s sort of like wish-fulfillment, or “an adventure” for comfortable white academics to engage in low-stakes thought experiments about extinction, naturalness, and apocalypse from which they’re actually largely insulated, at least compared to the poor, non-white, non-academic people who cope with the worst of environmental racism and ecological collapse.

This, again coming from white/settler-colonial academics, is also of course more than a little grating, since it kind of co-opts or culturally appropriates the “Indigenous/Native people actually live in a post-apocalyptic world” concept proposed by Indigenous scholars. It kind of takes from Indigenous/non-white people, and then generalizes the apocalypse as something that all humans now live with in seemingly equal measure, obscuring the fact that many people are actually forced to cope and/or live with more-serious-of-an-apocalypse than others.

-------

At the end of the day: Sure, kudzu or English pasture grasses or coconuts or European earthworms or domesticated cattle might be generalist species which can successfully inhabit landscapes across the planet. So whether humans introduce them via agriculture, or whether they "naturally" expand by some accident or by drifting across ocean currents, they might exist in this strange ontological space between "native" and "alien" which confounds human conceptions of what "belongs"? And this is worth considering! This is good to think about! But there are still, and always have been, those "small" landscapes, those isolated pockets, those relicts and remnants in shaded stream corridors, where small populations of endemic species teeter on the verge, with highly-specialized adaptations to highly-specific microhabitats. You're not going to "assist the migration" of or "accidentally introduce" a cave-obligate salamander from a limestone cavern or a temperate rainforest-dwelling land-slug to a desert biome.

But, again, I still think it is good to stop and ask ourselves whether categories of “natural” and “alien/invasive” in ecology make sense, are outdated, or if they reinforce racism/xenophobia. And, again, I haven’t read enough -- I haven’t grappled with these questions enough -- to have an opinion which I’m comfortable sharing, so I don’t want to discourage this disk horse too much.

Anyway, hope some of this is interesting. Sorry. Again, I don’t really have any good recommendations.

[equal-shipping]

Why Kaishin Still Holds Up, Even Now.

I FINALLY watched the 23rd Detective Conan and let me tell you what...

Why are there not more episodes with these two working so closely together? Like please?! They got that solved so quickly and just shared information with one another and can I please just have them interact before the series ends pleaaaaaase.

Yet I'm not here for begging. I'm here to rant and cleverly disguise that rant as an essay.

I want to rant about trust in Detective Conan (specifically with a look at Kaishin) and the Enemies turned Rivals turned Friends turned Lovers trope.

[Mild Spoilers Ahead]

Trust as a Driving Force in Detective Conan

If someone asked me what is one of the many driving forces in the DC plot as well as the cornerstone of many of the relationships in DC it would be trust. Most of the characters in DC are living their lives with lies as the foundation of who they present themselves to be.

And here is something that I love about the relationship these two have with one another:

The trust that Shinichi has on Kid was earned and vice versa.

I don't think that Shinichi thinks that Kaito Kid is the most honest person in the world, but he does know that the magician works by a code and he trusts him to not put someone in any immediate danger despite the fact that Kaito Kid does not inherently talk too deep about his heists with him.

Ask yourself this. Where in canon did it say that in Kid's heist nobody gets hurt by Kid? I've read the manga and nowhere does he really say 'this is a safe show for everybody!' Let me tell you where it says it: Nowhere.

So why do we all assume it to be that way? Because even we have trust in our favourite thief that he won't do something to actively hurt someone. Since the story is being told in Shinichi's point of view, most of the times, we can rely on the trust that Shinichi has placed on Kid to not get anyone hurt.

One big example of this would be in the Detective Conan Movie: The Sunflowers of Inferno:

Leaving Ran in Kid's care is a conscious decision he is doing despite the fact that he doesn't know if Kid is even going to make it out. Shinichi loves Ran probably more than he loves himself and he wants her out of danger enough to place trust in someone that, situation wise, has no business whether Ran or Shinichi live or not. I honestly think that even Kid was surprised that Shinichi made that decision.

Now I'm not going to put my shipper goggles when I make this statement and go 'OH MY GOD THEY LOVE EACH OTHER SO MUCH IT SHOWS IT EVERYWHERE. LOOK AT THE SHOW, STUPID."

But these two have something that not many of the characters in DC have and that is a mutual trust without knowing all the details of their lives.

Kaito happened to guess that Conan was Shinichi and I doubt that Shinichi is going to meet Kuroba Kaito by the end of the series. These two barely know each other but through their interactions just happen to understand each other enough to work together amazingly when thrust into a situation where they have to help each other out.

Which brings me to the second thing I want to talk about.

My Enemy Went From Being My Rival to My Friend to my Lover, What Happens Now?

I want to break into Gosho's house and ask him to please let Kaito Kuroba meet Shinichi Kudou. Like this is such a might need that I'm almost scared of looking forward to the ending of DC because I just have a feeling it isn't going to happen.

I might also ask him why the hell every side character needs a romance subplot but that is neither here nor there.

But now that the ships have been decided and canon has sealed the final nail on everything, I just want to talk about the trope that makes Kaishin just so amazing for me.

If I am remembering my facts right, Magic Kaito came before Detective Conan. Kaito was a realized character, somewhat, and was clearly a very likable chara with a ridiculous high IQ and a secret he couldn't reveal to anybody.

I mean he's a goddamn beautiful man is what I'm trying to say.

When I first read the series I could immediately tell that Aoko was set to be the romantic interest, Gosho really ain't fooling nobody. She seemed cute, extroverted and a girl who seems to really care for Kaito. Of course there was the juicy tidbit of Kaito being the thief her father is hunting down that also kept the relationship interesting.

So I was more than okay with having these two together.

I was already a bit aware of Detective Conan so I was all for the ShinRan as well. The pining, the secrets, the care that Shinichi has for her that transcends the organizations doing!

Also fun fact: Kaito/Aoko was the basis for Shinichi/Ran! Which is why ShinRan is thematically better than Kaito/Aoko but I will not go into that.

So one sad day during quarantine, I decided to rewatch the series to see if I could get any writing inspiration.

Now I don't know if it was quarantine or a change of heart or just me growing up but Gosho's friend trope seemed boring to me the more the episodes continued on. I AM NOT THROWING THE FRIENDSHIP TROPE DOWN, IT IS BEAUTIFUL I STILL SHIP SHINRAN

But I was tired of picking vanilla and wanted to see what else was on the menu.

And as luck would have it, I had decided to watch episode 515: Kaito Kid's Teleportation Magic and fate decides to deliver me a wonderful hit to the heart:

What is it about characters pointing guns at each other that I love so much?

And Shinichi doesn't react like a normal fucking person he just goes:

He knows this man ain't gonna shoot. They have had five interactions before this (if we are going by anime episodes) and through all those interactions Shinichi managed to get to a level of banter with this guy that he hasn't had with any of his other enemies.

If he even considered Kaito Kid an enemy to begin with.

Both Kaito and Shinichi have a mutual respect for each other's skill.

They test each other out in several situations and are pleased when the other figures it out, kinda transitioning their little chases to more of a 'two really smart guys trying to outwit each other' and less of a detective trying to outsmart a thief.

Shinichi enjoys figuring out his magic and Kaito enjoys the challenge of making some of his magic tricks near impossible to figure out. Their friendship is something really special and if they can have it without even knowing the details of each other's life, imagine how strong it would be if they truly met each other face to face.

I don't really want to cross into headcanon territory that would turn them into lovers, lord knows we have more fanfiction to do so, but it is just wonderful to see these two men both living a lie respectively but finding some solace in each other that they can shut their brains off for one second and just...play.

Hell, Kid's heists might be Shinichi's safe place. In those heists he is known as the 'Kid Killer' and not just some brat who happens to figure shit out. His opinion matters in those heists.

And not just to the police, but to Kaito as well.

BUT IM GETTING OFF TOPIC!

I just wanted to show love to this wonderful ship q wq

[joskippy]

!!! ARCHIVIST MARTIN HEADCANONS PLS !!!

OHOHOH FELLA YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH HCS I HAVE FOR THIS AU

Literally all of this is going under a read more because I have this entire au mapped out in detail but basically I find the idea of Archivist!Martin very interesting because it's just changing one detail of the entire podcast and it completely alters the story.

(Under the read more is basically my entire idea for this au from season one to season four)

What happens in this au is that Elias hires and appoints Martin as head archivist because of the fact he was already deeply alligned with the lonely and was a interests of the webs. He lacked any real connection outside of the archives and was already of interest of two entities, he's basically a perfect candidate to become archivist. Tim, Sasha, and especially Jon are hesitant to be working under someone who they don't know and hold a slight grudge against Martin at the start for being obviously unqualifed for his job. Tim and Sasha, of course, immediately become more understanding when finding out about Martin's cv and just assuming he got unlucky and winded up with the role as the head archivist. Jon, on the other hand, still doesn't know about Martin's cv and continues holding the grudge against Martin.

Which leads us to season 1

In season one, Jon's opinion on Martin is "Oh lord this man I don't know is obviously unqualifed for his job and the role of archivist should've gone to my friend Sasha. I don't like this man but he is my boss so I will keep my mouth shut." Jon though, is still very passive agressive to Martin but is less of an ass to him in this au. Martin is very open about his opinion on statements and believes alot of them but similar to jon, will only record the ones that he knows have to be real. I still think Martin get's trapped in his flat by prentiss in this au, wanting to get more info for the case but not wanting to inconvenience any of his co-workers. While trapped in his flat, Jon takes over for him and records statements for Martin (Not in a "I want to impress my boss" matter but more of an "I'll show this twerp how it's really done") and realizes how much of toll it takes on him and how difficult the job is. When Martin comes back from his little worm adventure, Jon is much more nicer and understanding of him. Martin records what happened with him and prentiss and Jon offers him to stay in the little room he made for when he overstays at work. (Martin of course, is not happy with the fact Jon stays past work hours finishing up stuff but that doesnt matter). Y'know how the rest of s1 goes with the prentiss attack (Jon and Martin still share the heart to heart, Jon loses him and Tim in the tunnels) Jon finds Gertrude's body and it sparks his paranoia finding out she was shot to death and then we get to

Season 2

Jon's immediate assumption is that Martin killed Gertrude to get his job because like, he still doesn't know Martin well and then finds out this dude's predecessor got murdered so of course mr jon sims is going to go "oh so Martin for SURE murdered this lady." For the first half of the season, Jon pretends to be buddy buddy with Martin to see if anything's off with him and somewhere along the line Jon finds the noted Martin was writing to his mom in the trash and immediately assumes its about the murder. He catches Martin in his office and immediately corners Martin like "HEY I KNOW YOU KILLED GERTRUDE AND I GOT THE PROOF" and Martin just sighs and tells him about his cv and mother and Jon's opinion of Martin goes from "incompetent murderer who killed his predecessor to get his job and might kill me." to "highschool drop out whos just trying to make a living might end up being murdered too". With the not-sasha stuff it's sorta the same but Martin let's Jon in on some details of his suspicions on her. Martin get's framed for Jurgen's death and NOW WE ARE AT

Season 3

So since Martin obviously doesn't have a place to hide it at the start of season 3 so Jon offers him to stay at his place. Jon knows that Martin didn't kill Jurgen and is willing to take the risk of giving Martin a  place to stay. Martin, of course, is hesitant but takes the offer because he's been crushing on Jon for the past forever and definitely will take his chances in staying in hot guy's flat. You know the shenanigans of s3 (Martin get's burned by Jude, kidnapped by Daisy, kipdnapped by Nikola) and FINALLY get's back into the archives to apologize to Jon for being gone from the flat for so long and apologizes again cause he's about to go off to america. Martin get's kidnapped again, comes back to london, and now it's time to stop an apocalypse! ( Before the unknowing happens, Jon and Martin share a heart to heart and confess that they both share feelings for another and get together the day before 118 happens then shit goes DOWN ). Martin of course, goes off to the unknowing and Jon stays behind at the archives to distract Elias. Elias tries and fails to use Jon's feelings for Martin against him, then switches to what happened with Georgie and the dead women walking incidents against him, pinning it on him because of his connection with the web. Martin stops the unknowing, Jon comes home to the empty apartment and gets the news that Martin is in a coma. (He immediately blames it on himself) and now it's time for

Season 4

Jon losing Martin right after realizing that they both love each other absolutely tears him apart. He moves flats and he begins to separate himself from the rest of the archives and works with peter. Martin wakes up from his coma without anyone by his side and is told the news to him about his mom right the day after. S4 basically goes the same with Martin seeing Jon again finally after the coma and goes to hug him and tell him how much he missed him but Jon just stares at him like he saw a ghost and leaves without saying a word to him. Alot of their interactions are sparse, usually with Martin trying to spark a convo with Jon resulting in usually no response or just a head shake as he scutters off.  Then Martin finally is able to actually talk to Jon and tells him that he misses him and that maybe they could catch up sometime but Jon just laughs and tells him that hes busy. Martin later on finds out about how to cut off the connection with the eye and goes to tell Jon that they could leave the archives but Jon tells him that he can't and tells Martin he doesn't want to see him anymore and kicks Martin out his office. You know what happens in 158 and 159, it's basically the same and Jon and Martin settle down at the safehouse.

I don't have much for season 5 but I really like the idea that Martin is still optimistic even after the change and that he reassures Jon that he's gonna find a way to fix it when it reality he has no clue and it terrified to think about what is going to happpen to them. They don't stay in the cabin that long soon after since Martin is very eager to go to the pannopticon and ya! Yknow how it goes.

Im so sorry I wrote a whole essay worth of shit but this au means alot to me and i get very excited when people ask me about it!!

[chasseuses]

reasons why i love jade leech part 3

I don't know why I'm doing this again I am a big fool goodbye ☠️ but ahhahahwhahjwhsjfhfjfnfkbdsjbdkdbjd im a doormat for him so. haha. I'll just. fukcignvkjgknv everyone pls look away this is the last post i swear 🤩

Part 1, 2

So.... 🤡 Hi I'm back again with another simp post I'm your local Jade simp and I'm here to point out reasons why I'm an absolute doormat for this eel and why I'm staying as one.

I'M FUCKIFNCGD. SCRVEN AMWIANAJWBAJVWKQVWKAGAKAVDKFBYKDGSKEIANSJAMEINSLENDKEBEKSBEKSHEKDJEKSJRKDJRKDHSKDHKEHSKEBSKEJDLDHDKDBDKHRKDBEKSHEKSUSMS

Ok so, URGFKFHDKDUDKSJSKFHDKGDKDHD if you've been here long enough or something i think i posted something about his initial birthday suit up illustration here which i wrote while i was sobbing and being overly emotional over him.

BUT BASICALLY. IT WAS ABOUT HIS SMILE. I MEAN RTHGJKHJGK JADE LEECH..... SMILING.............N N .VJV.JV. WITHOUT ANY ULTERIOR MOTIVES...... IM FUCKFING DEAD YO!!!!!

HEAR ME OUT. I JUST GJVKJGKVNGKV ... dont u think there's just something about someone as shady as jade who looks shady 90% of the time look like he's not shady for the first time ༎ຶ‿༎ຶ

idk if that made sense but yeah.

ALSO IDK IF ANYONE WAS SIMPING HARD ENOUGH TO NOTICE BUT LIKE 😭 IF U COMPARE HIS HANDS TO FLOYD'S THERE'S A DIFFERENCE.

and now if you've known me long enough to know that i am a big fan of his hands, you'll know that i went absolutely crazy over this detail!!!!!! THEY WERE ROUGHER THAN FLOYD'S AND THAT WAS JUSTHGJJGKGKFNKFKGNGKGNFKDDJFKGNGKFJF A DIRECT HIT TO THE GUT WHAT THE FUCK DISPLEX YOU CANT DO THIS TO US 😭😭😭😭😭

do u see the fork he's holding?

yeah

i wanna be that fork so bad

im not even kidding

i legit want to be that fork.

why?

.

haha.

you dont need to know

ANYWAYS. ONTO THE STORY 🥰

we got a lot of lore for the twins this time around and i am tHRIVING :BIBBEK:

"However, and this is unusual for me, but so many people wishing me ‘Happy birthday’ has made me rather embarrassed." HELP?????????&(&!4(£;#(-__8-##(-_(£+£(£ I II I I I I HUCHJWNWISHEJDHWOHSKWGSKSYAKGSKA HI KAUAKSGKAGSKSGSJAYJAGSJAGAJSYSIGSJGSJSHSJAHsks

Their mother!!! Uses!!! -san!!!! At the end of their names!!!!!!! Which got me going 🧐 that is not usual at all!!!!! wtf is going on in the leech household

a lot of ppl theorized mafia stuff and all of that which honestly makes sense imo and also because i find that hella hot HAHSMDGSKDHKSJS mr leech...... 😳 mafia.... HELPGKFJKGJFKF

wait. won't that mean he's rich.

bonus points eyy /j GFJFHFJDHJFNF

"Well, they do say that married couples take after each other… It’s good that they get along well." MR LEECH YOUR HAND IN MARRIAGE RFNJVJKHKGKGKOGJGKVJKFCKIJGKTJKFFJKDHDKXHFFHFJ

guys im losing it

if that wasn't already obvious RHUFHGUF

HELLO????????? ONE OF THE REASONS WHY HE LIKES TERRARIUMS??1?"!"!'! HELPFKVKV CONTROL IT'S CONTROL

"Whether they live or die is also up to me…" i just think.

no i dont think but you get what i mean why the fuck is that line lowkey hot lmfao something is wrong with me

i dont knwo why the fuck but the fact that he likes unpredictability is also kinda????? lmao how boring was ur life that everything u did went exactly your way 😭 how does that bring u amusement i cant relate gomen mr leech

or am i completely wrong idk 🗿 mr leech tell me more about you onegai

Ok honestly, before the birthday card came out, I thought their earrings were like,,, from their parents or something. like heirlooms!! i thought they were precious in that aspect but what i rlly didn't expect is for them to fckinghgkgngknfkf FIGHT A DAMN STURGEON FOR ITS SCALES 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

deadass why would a sturgeon challenge them anyways 🧐 and the twins were just like, "ok sure but can we have your scales if we win" and they rlly did 😭 just how strong were you guys before middle school wtf!!!!

and they turned the scales into earrings 🧐 which is now what they wear!! p cute

they're apparently popular to use as amulets in the coral sea so i. i fucking rotted over this AHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHA hrufhfigjofhckfbcjc should i delve deeper into this? no. but perhaps you can find out what my rot is about just by reading this single bullet

"Floyd and I have gone near beaches on nights with fireworks as well." HELEPEHLEPDFKLEGSLDOSODB EGHFKCNDKMCURLDHLDGSMX

WATCHIFNFG FIREOEKSKF WITHHF JADE AJFNJFVJFHKDHF

ohmigod this is getting way longer than intended 🤡 should i continue

yeah fucj it HFJVHFJHCJFHJCJ everybody pls ignore my rot 😌

as all of you know, jade wears purple eyeliner. that's right.

Purple eyeliner.

Why does this matter, you ask? Oh sweet summer child, it may not matter to you but to me—eyeliner is super fucking hot I kid you not I started crying at night when I thought about this and wrote a mini essay about it like a fool so I'm just going to.

I am legitimately losing my shit over this like-?? Who allowed you to fucking put on eyeliner? You're already deadly without them and more so with them.

It honestly makes me wonder if he puts this on his own or not but seeing how deft he is with his hands, it's not a stretch to assume that he puts it on his own.

And I find that really hot since look at those clean strokes..!! He's better at applying them than me. I have this desire to let him do my makeup but when I think about it I start making incomprehensible noises and bury my face into my pillow. Purple eyeliner just-? Looks so good on him?

It should be illegal at this rate he looks so tempting I hate it. Sometimes I just have this urge to ruin in, I don t care how I just want to smudge it for some reason. Like deadass, I just want you all to appreciate how good his eyes look!

HELP HIS EYESDHFHTKHEKFHDKFHDMFHKDHFKSGDK IM FUCKFINDG LSOING IT

WHY DO I LOVE HIS EYES SO MUCH I DONT FUCKING KNOW I'VE NEVER BEEN A FAN OF CHARACTERS WITH MISMATCHED EYES BUT WITH HIM IM JUSTHGJJFJG KG NVM

His eyes are fucking beautiful, man. 🤡💞 Could stare at them for hours and never get tired!!!!

Need I say more?

BRO IM FUVKGIGNVJKGVKNGKFHFKFFJF HIS TEETH IM CRYIGGN WHAT THE ACTUALLY FUCK I KNEW THEY WERE SHARP BUTJGKVJGKGJFKGJCKFJKCFJKFFHKCJFKGJDOFHKDHFKDHDKDHDJ BARKBARKBARKBARK

I mean what 🗿

guys displex is insane because they literally made jade have two ssrs in a row with banners that were available at the same time do you know how painful that was for me

when jamil bday card dropped all i lost ebg because i panicked over the thought of a jade bday card and started saving!!! and i did!!!! i managed to save up 100 pulls and i was so fucking chill after that but then,

abema stream happened

i was asleep when that happened so when i woke up i had like 283628 pings in discord telling me that he has an ssr for the halloween event and i was just 🗿 yo say sike his bday is soon displex must be joking

haha nope! they were dead serious.

that shit was painful i started crying 🤡 what the fuck because i didn't have enough gems for both ssrs and his halloween card was just absolutely beautiful.

so i went insane and saved 200 copies of the same jade card in attempt to make him come home before pity so i dont have to whale

I mean,

Black nails.

The bandages.

The harness.

The hat is kinda ugly but that's ok.

THE BELTS AT HIS WAISTFJTKDJRKFBFKFHOFHDKDHDKSGDKSHSKXHSKJS

SO I WAS REALLY DESPERATE AHHSHDHFJFGHJFJF THANKFULLY THEY BOTH CAME HOME BEFORE PITY SO TYSM JADE I LOVE U FOR THAT AHAHJAHDJ

oh shit this got long so imma just end this here 🐬 if you read this far, congrats HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA

[hanijunk]

Alright boys, girls, and nonbinary folks of the world. It’s 5:36am (1/30 when I first started) as I decide to give up on my attempt to continue to focus on learning statistics, avoid studying for my two upcoming midterms, and put off my two actual essays for two different classes.

Instead we’re going into a dive about ✨ KazuFuuma ✨ . Is this me telling you you gotta ship it? No of course not, you’re entitled to your own ships! You don’t really gotta care about it as a ship. But I do want people to recognize it’s THERE canonically, and how disregarding it is extremely unfair to Kazuki as a character particularly. Also, I’m working on the assumption anyone clicking this at least knows the bare bones about what KazuFuuma (ex. You know they are a ship of Kazuki/Fuuma from Dolce, you know they are childhood friends, you know who Dolce is, you know about Honeyworks, etc.) I’ll be making references to specific things, but I won’t always go into heavy detail. Might just hope you know it or take my word for what it is, and go into analyzing it. Some I’ll put direct references to find, but some I’ll trust you can find it yourself. If you somehow read this MAMMOTH and want reference to a specific thing mentioned, hmu I can help you find it!!

Also I hate tumblr formatting sm if you legit wanna read this 7 page essay but hate tumblr format lmk I'll add it as a google doc link instead too. anYWHO

Before actually getting into the meat of things lemme preface some stuff.

Again it’s like almost 6am so this will be disorganized and very train of thought (and likely long due to the fact when I fly by the seat of my pants I’m known to get unnecessarily extensive). It’s definitely gonna be in large part why it’s important to recognize as a romantic relationship foundation and what about it shapes Kazuki’s character in particular. Maybe a bit of how it’s been built up and its general focus and implications. Dunno yet. We’ll see LMAOO

I say f*ck. Not a lot, just a handful of times. This ain’t something scholarly this is for my own enjoyment so if you don’t like that might not wanna read. And it’s not like spitefully I just curse a lot if you haven’t...read my tags before lol

Again this is through the lens of a Kazuki stan. Of COURSE I’m going to have some level of bias, but if anything that bias may help more than hurt because that means I become FIXATED and think a lot about Kazuki. Which plays into establishing just how important it is that Kazufuuma’s relationship is recognized, especially in a romantic light at this point. Lmfao. 

I’ll have a few more prefaces about the actual content below but to keep this from getting too long if you wanna read come below the cut owo

I have extremely limited knowledge of Japanese just taking a few classes in highschool (so like 3 yrs ago) and live in America. This means a lot of my knowledge is gathered through the english translations of the super duper incredible and lovely people in the Honeyworks fandom who provide translations (delaix and takanenene esp have provided so much for me being able to understand Dolce) and my own limited Japanese paired with Google Translate for things that remain untranslated.

This only will be drawing on information I have come in contact with and have access to and making assumptions based on that, most (if not all) of which is in the public domain. So things like the Dolce Manga Volumes released via Animate, exclusive 4komas, and Light Novels are out of my area for the most part (apart from again snippets of translations thanks to this fandom’s godlike and generous translators).

I will not be drawing on anything from the first Dolce album with the exception of Nade Nade. From a meta standpoint, I consider those songs as songs made as performance media as opposed to character explorations. Nade Nade is the exception because (1) it was released a whole year before the album and (2) you can tell it’s explicitly an exploration of Fuuma and Kazuki’s interpersonal relationship even if it’s in a slightly more performance based context than the songs that came out with the Dolce LNs. Easiest parallel I can make to show this is if you held Non-Fantasy, Yume Fanfare, and Samishigariya up against each other, you could tell the difference in intended audience and intended purpose the same way the Dolce 1st album, Nade Nade, and the songs of the LNs do respectively. Even if there is some basis to ground Kazufuuma, for the purposes of this essay I’ll be acting under the assumption the 1st album falls under the Non-Fantasy equivalent category.

THAT WAS A LOT OF PREFACING CONSIDERING LIKE 2 PPL WILL PROBABLY READ IT I just have a tendency to anytime I do anything analytical lay down ground acknowledgements for myself to work on just...cuz it makes me feel less guilty for any accidental misinformation even if I’m writing towards my future self to read lolll IM SORRY WITHOUT FURTHER TO DO HERE’S THE BRAIN DUMP

First let’s go ahead and establish why it needs to be recognized as an important relationship. Again, I’m a Kazuki stan. He’s my favorite character not only of Dolce but also of the entire Honeyworks series, and as much as I love him for reasons outside the ship, whether you like it or not Kazufuuma is an essential aspect of his character and narrative. Of course there’s the fact that him and Fuuma are childhood friends, so that’s going to in part define their characters and interactions with each other and those around them. They’re both going to be relevant to one another and important to one another’s stories to an even greater extent than the rest of the members of Dolce. But on Kazuki’s side at least, it’s an EXTREME amount. A running plotpoint in Dolce Diary is the sheer amount of dedication Kazuki has to Fuuma and how much his thoughts and decisions are influenced by Fuuma, whether it be how he feels happiest spending time with Fuuma, how he decided to get his piercing to represent he wanted to protect Fuuma, how he doesn’t want to dislike food so he can eat what Fuuma dislikes, etc. Not to mention running jokes about his borderline overprotectiveness and downright possessiveness of Fuuma, how proud he is when Fuuma gets praised, or that one 4koma that literally explicitly states he can read Fuuma’s mind when he thinks motherfucking ‘dirty thoughts’ about his childhood friend (Fuuma). I still don’t know what the fuck to make of that last bit. Genuinely. Or the fact it’s a fucking running joke. As in it’s not a one off. It’s been brought up multiple times. Kazuki what the fuck. 

That’s not to say that he doesn’t have character outside of Fuuma or he doesn’t interact with people other than Fuuma. He’s great friends with Sara, Girisha, and Kippei and is shown time and time again to have fun interactions with all of them, generally acting as the best support friend for every member of the group, not Fuuma alone. For instance how he helps Kippei with his self confidence issues or stays over at Sara’s to protect him from a cockroach (which he fails at lol). Nor is that to say all his interactions involving Fuuma focus solely on his devotion to Fuuma, especially in instances where the manga focuses on Dolce as a group dynamic (though even in that setting there are times where jokes about his devotion are thrown in). He’s kind, he’s stupid, he’s friendly, he’s an amazing character in his own right, and I love him for all those reasons. But that doesn’t change the fact a major part of his character and his character interactions are rooted in Fuuma, and arguably some of his most interesting, eccentric, and notable behaviors and traits revolve around Fuuma (again the mind reading for example).

Hell let’s take it one step further. If you look at the character bios of the Dolce members, you get everyone’s motives for being an idol and interests. Of them, Kazuki is the only one to have another character mentioned directly, not to mention that supporting Fuuma is explicitly stated to be his primary motive as to why he became an idol. Not even Fuuma’s sister is mentioned, though two arguments can be made for this. The first would be that Fuuma’s backstory about wanting to fulfill his dream for himself and his sister was decided later to explain Fuuma’s choice to crossdress though it can be argued it was intentionally done to leave it as a reveal at a later date, to which I would argue I don’t think this backstory was a choice in post. While Fuuma’s dedicated Dolce Diary extra exploring that backstory was released a little less than a year after Dolce was revealed, the preview to set up Fuuma’s backstory was actually the first thing released after the character bios on the Dolce Official Twitter page if you exclude a drawing of Dolce from Yamako. The second argument could be that information about his sister was intentionally withheld to set up the reveal when Fuuma’s extra released to explore it. However, going by that logic (which I do agree with), that would also mean that Fuuma’s inclusion and importance in Kazuki’s character bio also set up his dedicated extra, which I don’t think would be incorrect to assume considering what his actual extra turned out being.

Which brings me to the thing that makes it inexplicable to write off the romantic implications behind Kazufuuma: Kazuki’s dedicated Dolce Diary extra, Suki. I shipped Kazufuuma before even knowing of Suki, sure. But the fact that Suki even exists is a shock to me and drove into me the fact that Kazufuuma wasn’t just my own projection. Again, it’s not a surprise that Fuuma shapes Kazuki’s life. They’re childhood friends, of course they’re going to be important to each other. But this extra explicitly brought Kazuki’s feelings towards Fuuma under a direct spotlight. At first I was thinking oh, this extra was just to acknowledge the fact that Kazuki and Fuuma’s relationship can have romantic implications, but the end of it the conclusion that we got was that it didn’t matter what type of “like” he felt for Fuuma. Originally, I thought it wasn’t anything more than saying there are all types of like, and it doesn’t always need to be explicitly defined, but I appreciated the fact they were aware that they were writing Kazuki in a way that conveyed romantic implications. 

Then I thought about it because, again, I love Kazuki of course I’m going to think about his character extra, and realized...that’s not how these character extras have worked. There are only three character extras out as far as I know and have read: Fuuma, Kippei, and Kazuki. If we look at Fuuma and Kippei’s, each extra had a conclusion, sure, but they didn’t have a resolution. Rather, they were simply setting up explicitly what each character’s primary character arc and conflict were. Fuuma’s extra brought attention to the fact that he’s particularly a crossdressing idol by exploring the motives behind it. His choice to be a crossdressing idol is constantly under fire both by himself and the world around him. He’s not immune to those who consider his crossdressing strange, and a part of his story is both finding people who accept his decision to crossdress and to succeed for himself as a crossdressing idol. It’s an essential part of how we understand and define him as a character and it’s a central part of how he interacts with the world around him. For Kippei, it lays the severity of his insecurity under the spotlight and his journey and motives for improving himself. Again, this isn’t something isolated and resolved in the extra; his extreme insecurity and negativity is constantly affecting how he interacts with practically everyone from his fellow Dolce members to his fans despite the fact in all honesty? He’s fucking insanely talented in his own right, his own brother mentioning how smart he is and how he has amazing reflexes. For Kippei, his negativity is an essential part of how we understand and define him and central to how he interacts with the world as much as Fuuma’s decision to crossdress is to him.

Which brings us back to Kazuki, of course. In his dedicated extra, in the chapter that’s supposed to explore and establish and bring attention to an essential part of his character, the aspect of himself under investigation is how he feels about Fuuma. It’s not just how he behaves around Fuuma, it’s explicitly an exploration of his feelings, on top of the fact it’s explicitly an exploration about whether or not he likes Fuuma r o m a n t i c a l l y. Literally the conflict is spurred on by someone outright asking “Do you like him?” and having to clarify “I mean romantically.” What they decided to focus on for Kazuki’s character and emphasize and establish is that Kazuki’s like towards Fuuma toes the line between friendship and romance. His ambiguous feelings towards Fuuma (if we leave them inconclusive as Suki did) are just like Fuuma’s crossdressing and Kippei’s insecurity in the sense the weight of whatever those feelings may be are seen in how he interacts with the world around him and influences his behaviors. It would be another story if they introduced the potential and shut it down all within the extra, because then his central conflict would to me be less directly open to romantic potential and more simply about how his arc was meant to explore the dynamic of the behavior of an extremely dedicated best friend. The fact that he may be romantically attracted to Fuuma or may be only platonically dedicated to Fuuma is instead something that looms over Kazuki in the same way Fuuma’s decision to crossdress constantly looms over him. It’s what Dolce wanted to point to and say this is Kazuki’s central character conflict and central arc: exploring what type of feelings he has towards Fuuma. 

Sure, it can be argued that there’s only three Dolce Diary character extras, there’s not enough to be sure about that being the purpose of the extras unless we get the other two’s extras. First, at this point I honestly don’t know if or when they’re going to release an extra revolving around Sara and Girisha just because not only has it been over a year and a half since the latest Dolce Diary Character Extra (Kazuki’s) was released despite the gap between the first and latest Dolce Diary Character Extra (Fuuma’s and Kazuki’s) were within a year of release but also because the Dolce 4komas and comics they’ve been posting to Twitter have decreased (last one being over half a year ago) potentially due to them deciding to focus on releasing Dolce manga content through the purchasable volumes instead. (This is not particularly related to the Kazufuuma argument, just wanted to put out there my two cents on what Sara and Girisha’s extra/focal arc would be. Based on a large part of the Dolce Diary in conjuncture with Can’t an Idol Fall in Love, I’d argue Sara’s would be his journey to regain his passion for performing, and if it’s not that I’d say it’d be coming out of his self-imposed isolation and opening up to people again. As for Girisha, I have less of a concrete idea but I’m assuming it’d be something pertaining to how people often misconceive him whether it be in tandem with his determination, his optimism and sociability, or his stupidity/ability to ignore those misconceptions and work past them. But Girisha is treated like the comedic relief 90% of the time so I’m not entirely sure, but his primary conflict is definitely rooted in misconceptions of him being his roadblock imo. #MoreGirishaContentPlz) That being said, I personally feel like the three are already enough evidence, especially considering it would be honestly even more cruel for Kazuki’s character-centric extra to be focusing on something that wasn’t essential to his character and character arc, anyway. And though it’s not explicitly stated that these chapters are extras exploring a central character, you can kind of tell based on how they are (to my knowledge) the only Dolce Diary updates with cover/title cards each which include their focal character front and center. So working off that fact, the Kazuki-centric chapter established that a pillar to his narrative was his feelings towards Fuuma and that those feelings are still open to romantic potential. 

But if you follow me, this is why up until Can’t an Idol Fall in Love With Another Idol’s release, I was terrified of them writing that off. I would have been ok if it was just an arc that was given attention then continued to actively work in the background, as all the character arcs have been over all of Dolce’s content. The fact that they might be giving Fuuma a love interest and giving Fuuma a love arc while Kazuki’s feelings were still up in the air and were still the primary highlighted narrative for him would have been fucking scuffed. To me, it would be like… why would they make him so Fuuma-centric to the point that even his dedicated chapter was not just focused on Fuuma but focused on the ambiguity and potential of him having romantic feelings for Fuuma, yet reduce him to being Fuuma's designated right-hand man. Don’t get me wrong, friendships are just as important as romantic relationships. But again, rather than conclude Kazuki’s answer in Suki to be that his feelings were of friendship, they left it open ended and allow audience members to be actively aware that Kazuki’s feelings towards Fuuma still had potential to be romantically coded. It would just be so weird to quickly close off that narrative by giving Fuuma a love interest as opposed to letting Kazuki conclude it himself. It would be fucking beyond frustrating for me, at least Eventually, I kept trying to drive my hopes that they would explore Kazuki’s narrative at all down to the ground because it was a Fuuma-centric novel; maybe if anything they’d explore those feelings in his own novel after the fact. But then they kept having little drops here and there of Kazuki being even the slightest bit relevant and I’d go back to questioning “Are??? They??? Is this on purpose??? Do they know what they’re doing or are they just doing this because Kazuki’s just so important to Fuuma as his best friend that he’s there as his right-hand I genuinely can’t tell???” And um. Welp.

Safe to say Can’t An Idol Fall in Love sold me on the fact that they know what they’re doing LOL. And to anyone who thinks that Kazuki’s feelings can still be read as ambiguous in CAIFILWAI as opposed to explicitly romantic - whether it be due to a fear they may pull the “I like him as a friend” card or due to the disbelief that they have an explicit mlm main character in the Honeyworks series - I’d like to cover any bases that may make you think this way. If you think it’s just Kazuki acting like a protective friend, why do you think he calls Yui a rival? If you’ve only seen the MV and think it’s ambiguous or can be taken as the "likfe" for friend, then does that mean you think Yui’s feelings toward Fuuma are also ambiguous or as a friend? With the way Yui responds, she is trying to rival Kazuki’s feelings towards Fuuma. She and Kazuki recognize whatever feeling it is that they hold towards Fuuma, both of their feelings are the same type. I don’t think most people would argue that Yui’s confession about Fuuma was one of pure respect and friendship. Plus, if anything I’d argue of the three characters in the MV, Fuuma is the one whose feelings are left the most ambiguous despite him being the central character. It’s heavily implied that he may be forming feelings for Yui, but nowhere is it established either in the song or in the MV, especially if you compare it to Kazuki and Yui’s declarations or if you compare it to Sara’s feelings for Uru in Can’t An Idol Fall in Love. Fuuma’s romantic narrative here is trying to figure out how he feels for Yui, while for Kazuki and Yui they’ve established a rivalry because they both have mutually established they like Fuuma romantically.

If the MV isn’t enough for you and Suki isn’t enough for you for...some reason…??? You can check out the snippets of the light novel which the wonderful takanenene translated: one which revisits the conflict set up in Suki and one that covers the confession scene in the MV in more detail. If the fact that the conflict set up in Suki (aka the lurking feeling of not knowing if all he felt for Fuuma was only platonic or more than platonic) was specifically reestablished in the LN for anyone who didn’t keep up with Dolce Diary didn’t tip you off that it was something important, his behavior in the confession scene as depicted by the LN definitely should have. He’s possessive about his spot by Fuuma’s side. He doesn’t want that spot to be taken by anyone else. Even if he knows that they can help Fuuma, he wants it to be him. And this line: “Kazuki then trails off his words, quietly saying ‘That’s why…’ and then gave Yui a slightly painful smile, his cheeks turning red,” before he declares Yui a rival and states he likes Fuuma. If you can tell me you read that line and are still on the fence about Kazuki’s “like” towards Fuuma being romantic, please message me and I will see how I can get through to you. Like it wasn’t even just a romantically coded confession. It’s just a romantic confession. That “like” is romantic. And I’m so proud that he’s not only come to understand for himself how he feels, but that he’s confident enough to ask the person he sees as a romantic rival to speak in private and not only clarify her feelings for Fuuma but before she can even do that firmly establishes that he loves Fuuma with conviction. Kazuki my boy I’m so proud of you. *sniffs*

And that’s it for establishing Kazufuuma as at least canonically one-sidedly canon and why there’s not only no reason to deny it but also why denying it is a fucking disrespectful move towards Kazuki. He’s a character, sure, but that doesn’t change the fact you shouldn’t write off his struggle to come to be convicted enough to say it out loud. This has been something weighing on him at least a year, if not more (all I know is it started when both he and Fuuma were in some year in middle school). And as a character in a piece of media, I’ve been saying this the entire time, but brushing it off as non-romantic is literally chucking a fucking pillar of his character’s story into the gutter. And to those who may be saying Kazuki’s confession came out of nowhere and is pandering reread this entire fucking essay again I dare you to do it and tell me to my face it’s pandering. Again. Writing off the buildup as pandering is disrespectful to him, disrespectful to his character and narrative, and disrespectful to the wonderful people who have been creating Dolce so diligently and have crafted this narrative for us. Saying his “supposed feelings” and “ambiguous confession” is pandering is like saying Fuuma’s crossdressing is pandering which. If you say either of those I will find you and I will shank you in the fucking gut. Even if you’re not fully into Dolce, recognize these characters are actually very well developed and executed amazingly, as per every Honeyworks character that has come to exist. I don’t blame you if you weren’t aware of the weight of Kazufuuma, but now that you read this I hope you are. That’s mainly what I needed to get out there, but as follows will be me more exploring how Kazufuuma has been built up and generally waving my hand off at where it may be going. If you want you can dip, thanks for reading up to here because I know I repeated a lot because it’s just. So important to drill into your head and has been something I’ve been hung up about constantly. LOL

As for where exactly they’re taking it from this point on, I honestly don’t know. In all honesty, I didn’t even expect them to take it the direction they did. But honestly, I think the direction they went with it is really interesting and better than I could have imagined, in my opinion at least. Honeyworks never ceases to amaze me with their storytelling and narrative choices, and I don’t think there’s any that stand out to me as being severely questionable that they haven’t reapproached at some point down the line. And, again, I think they’re treating this with a lot of care and deserved respect. So I’m just gonna be gushing about how smart they set it up and how smart they’ve been executing it and maybe my own hopes on the direction it could go.

Whether they make Kazufuuma reciprocated I have no real clue or bearings, but to me my gut reaction is they will. Of course, I’m biased, but again if you trace things all the way back to 2018 and step through Dolce’s content and growth from there, I’d say even if they didn’t know if they could execute it like this and see it to fruition, I’d argue that Kazufuuma has been at least heavily implied since the beginning as a relationship they wanted to explore from both sides of the relationship. Obviously I brought up Kazuki’s character bio already, but if you look at the *goes to count* 5th Dolce Diary update already has a joke jabbing at the fact that Kazuki is technically Fuuma’s type (and the way Kippei and Kazuki excitedly react is so cute). The fifth update. And as stated before there are tons of Kazufuuma moments in Dolce Diary, whether it’s played for comedic effect or played straight (and this is post Suki but oh my god I’ve said it before I’ll say it again get yourself someone who looks at you the way Kazuki looks at Fuuma oh my jesus). But song-wise, I mentioned the one Dolce album song I would bring up is Nade Nade and this is where it comes! 

Not only is Nade Nade specifically focused on Kazuki and Fuuma’s relationship as opposed to the whole of Dolce despite being the first song, it included the setup/preview of the Fuuma-centric extra prior to the full release of the Fuuma-centric extra itself and was released early as fuck. Literally between the 6th and 7th update to Dolce Diary. Sure, it could be to isolate them as a duo for marketing purposes (they’re very often the two promoted idols together if the whole of the group aren’t included), but the way it’s established as a perspective song as opposed to a general idol duet is what fascinates me. Anyone who didn’t know about Dolce prior and only followed Honeyworks for music would be first introduced to these characters through this song alone, and maybe this is where my Kazufuuma bias comes from but I was one of those people LOL. I thought it was just a cute one-off relationship that they had set up for the purpose of a song and that it was an implied friends-to-lovers story that would never get a conclusion. Also I mistakenly thought Fuuma was a girl oop-. In the full context of Dolce, this song in part helped establish Fuuma and Kazuki more solidly as a unique duo out of all of Dolce, but it also specifically explored through Fuuma’s eyes just how much Fuuma recognizes and appreciates the unwavering support Kazuki gives him to follow his dreams as he wishes. For Fuuma, he loves Kazuki too, though whether it holds any romantic potential in the same way Kazuki loves him has never been explored to nearly the same extent. But Fuuma appreciates how Kazuki’s remained by his side and does everything he can to support him, so Nade Nade explores how his way of expressing his love and thankfulness to Kazuki is by never saying that he needs Kazuki by his side. He’s glad Kazuki’s always been there for him, and his reciprocation takes on the form of being ready to unwaveringly support Kazuki and not ask for more than he already has, even if it meant Kazuki would be leaving his side, despite the fact that he really does wish they could remain together forever just as Kazuki does. The one point he lets himself say something vaguely close to always wanting to stay together, he gets a surprised expression out of Kazuki and says an ambiguous “suki dayo.” Of course, this it much less romantically coded than what we get from Kazuki in Suki and CAIFILWAI, but there is an interesting emphasis put on it nonetheless. Keep in mind, this is all established through the song, which released long before not only Fuuma’s character-centric extra released but also Kazuki’s character-centric extra released, so there is at least a substantial setup for Fuuma’s feelings towards Kazuki’s being strong as well and possibly grow to be reciprocated one day.

I think for me the most fascinating part about Nade Nade is how they tied it back around to Can’t An Idol Fall In Love with Another Idol. Again, without remembering Nade Nade, I still thought CAIFILWAI was brilliantly explored and executed, even if some people would have preferred no love triangle. But honestly, revisiting Nade Nade makes me trust even more the direction they’re taking with this. Whether or not they make Kazufuuma canon mutually (which. Even if they for some inexplicable reason didn’t I’m going down with this ship.), I’m sure they’re putting a lot of thought into the story, because the last bit of Nade Nade directly parallels the misunderstanding that arose from Fuuma mishearing the Kazuki and Yui. Fuuma is resolved to support Kazuki in any area he’s given the chance, and that explicitly includes if Kazuki had some girl he liked, which is what he assumes is going on. The fact that they tied this back around in the form of a misunderstanding was really really smart and Honeyworks is always so good at parallels and references back to their older songs, but for some reason I didn’t expect this. I don’t know how to say why, but the fact that the song that started it all, kicked off both Dolce and Kazufuuma, was directly referenced both visually in the MV with a cameo at the start and narratively despite the central dynamic being predominantly explored in this story in particular was that of Fuuma and another potential love interest and involves said potential love interest for some reason makes me think that (sorry Yui) this is all planned out for Kazufuuma in the grand scheme of things. That being said, I don’t know if me thinking it was planned all along is just me with shipper goggles, but the idea it’s come full circle nearly 3 years later is not shipper goggles and a very very well done parallel in my opinion, whether this trajectory was their plan for Kazufuuma from the beginning or not. Just wanted to gush about that some more. 

There’s more I could go into especially if I went into specific details about interactions or specific implications established in Honeyworks' Dolce content about different characters that would be fascinating to explore in relation to and under the lens of Kazufuuma, but I think this is uh...plenty long enough. Plus, I doubt you'll stop seeing Kazufuuma posts from me so those ideas will probably just be miniposts or somethin.

Back to the overarching point of this segment, idk what they’ll do with this story in the end, but do I think Kazufuuma will canon? I’m used to looking at ships that aren’t explicitly apparent with a sliver of skepticism, but all things considered (as I stated before) yeah. I don’t see reason why they wouldn’t now that they’ve explicitly identified there is a romantic dimension to it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Like to me, the setup isn’t something that would be written off as unrequited? And this doesn’t have to play into why I don’t think it will canon, my personal opinion on the Fuuyui relationship (again albeit through the lens of a hard Kazufuuma shipper lmao) has it’s own merits and is really cute, I find it cute in the way I found Koyuhina cute. I personally never really shipped Koyuhina, and especially since they slipped Kotarou into Ima Suki Ni Naru I was more curious about who this kid was and how he played into things I didn’t really see Koyuhina as something that would come to fruition. Similarly, there’s more importance in the overall sense on Kazuki than there is Yui (considering he’s one of the 5 original and focal members of this generation of idols, this would be natural), as well as the fact there’s just way more foundation and exploration in Fuuma and Kazuki’s relationship than there is Fuuma and Yui. As for how much of a balance there is inside the LN itself, the fact that they seem to have spent a substantial amount relaying the foundation of Fuuma and Kazuki’s relationship and re-exploring it (at least in Kazuki’s perspective) at all on top of how much content there is covering their relationship prior to the LN ever since Dolce’s origin just feels like that relationship holds more weight. Pretty much Kazufuuma feels more established as a priority in general. The way I personally hope Fuuyui plays out is whether they wind up holding mutual feelings or not or whether Fuuma doesn’t feel that way towards Yui is they get a relationship akin to Kotarou and Arisa. Albeit, Kotarou and Arisa never viewed each other in a romantic light, but they had mutual respect and solidarity. That’s the type of friendship I hope comes out of Fuyui. And considering there hasn’t been a break-up in any Honeyworks’ canon relationships (nor do I expect there to be… they’re all perfect for each other LMAO) it would actually be interesting if Fuuyui get together but don’t endgame and Kazufuuma is established as the inseparable endgame after some realization or another, though I don’t expect them to go that route nor do I know if that’d be the best way to go about it anyway. Also final point, Honeyworks seems to have a thing for childhood friends trope anyway soooooo owo All in all, don’t know where they’re taking it, just excited to see where it goes. 

TL;DR of this *counts* 7 page essay, stan Kazufuuma. Not gonna proof this. Maybe I’ll edit and repost but yall are getting a confusing clusterfuck of ramblings over 2-3 hr periods of me writing across 3 different days at around 5am each day. Uh. If you got this far like and subscribe and-- jk plz reply to this mammoth anywhere you see fit or tell me if you have stuffs to add or counter or whatnot I like hearing people talk about Kazufuuma ;w; I am Kazuki and Kazufuuma brainrot can you tell after reading this? No? Lemme just remind you I’m K--

[relaxxattack]

contemplating if sending this ask is worth the c!sam discourse bc tbh I've been exhausted by it these past days but! you talked about sam and regret and - I feel like sam is in this position where he's constantly on the edge, because his problem is that he cares too much - he does regret a fuck ton, but he doesn't see any other way to do anything, and thus puts on this warden persona, a steel barrier between himself and his emotions, to be, he's the definition of "between a rock and a hard place", damned if you do, damned if you don't

I think a very good example is quackity's stream, where it's so clear how easily influenced he is, and how when he latches onto an idea, he gets tunnel vision. with tommy - he mourns and it hit him like a truck, but in his mind what could he do? as he said - dream could have used tommy as a hostage etc, and safety of the server, thus inescapability of the prison, is a priority. with ghostbur also - if he extended the bridge, in his mind, dream would most likely use ghotbur as a hostage and escape (dream hismelf called ghostbur a hostage, so), plus, with how much tommy's death in that cell fucked him up, I don't think he calculated the fact that tommy is armed, his brain just couldn't out tommy in that cell again, and that's why he put down the lava

he is very paranoid about the prison, fueled by isolation and time spent with dream, enabled and at the same time manipulated by quackity, fresh from the egg banquet which was a final testament of the fact that he can't trust any of his closest friends no matter how much he tries to help them and no matter how much they seem like they're trustworthy (the eggpire, hannah etc), drowning in guilt over tommy's death (remember the quackity stream and the ranboo stream in particular), with no support system, nothing there to at least suggest another direction, plus he has a natural tendency to bear everything onto himself - responsibility, faults, everything - regardless of what anyone says or does, and a tendency of getting tunnel vision when he latches onto an idea (for example that tommy was there to release dream, not kill him)

and let me say this - this isn't a justification of sam's actions, this isn't to say that what he did or said was good actually, nor is it to say that he wasn't at fault, because it isn't, what he said to tommy was horrible and uncalled for and it was still sam's actions, what he did to ponk, and what he allows quackity to do is horrible and wrong, and there's no debate about that, I'm not here to debate that

however I'm here to say that i think, to say that he's not unwavering in his actions, and to say that he's fine with them? to me it's wrong. when he says 'i will murder you' and 'im doing this out of my free will' and 'it was perfect when it was just me and him'? the tone he uses is a tired one, it's defeated, it's the voice of a man that knows what he does is wrong and hates it but doesn't see any other way

as cc!sam said - c!sam has to choose between what he thinks is good for the server, and what he personally thinks is right - these are not the same things to sam. (also cc!sam, when talking about whether or not c!sam goes to see dream/tortures him, said that c!sam would rather not see or be anywhere dream at all (and also that he doesn't torture him himself), which are his personal feelings, as opposed to what he's doing "for the good of the server" aka "it was perfect when it was just him and me")

so - how does regret factor into c!sam? I feel like he does not regret his actions in a way because he saw those as the only option - However, I do think that he regrets the very fact that it was the only option - he doesn't regret the actions itself but the fact that he, in his eyes, had to do them

please keep in mind that 4th paragraph, not trying to defend his actions or words here, nor trying to say that people have no right to be mad, I'm just saying that I think people greately overestimate sam's stability and "confidence" he has in what he does, I feel like people often mistake "he did his best in the situation he was in given his capabilities and mental state" with "he did good", and that's why when people try to explain sam's character they get angry. because no! he did bad! he did terrible actually! but the key here is why he did so badly, and why, because of his mental state, he didn't have the capability to do better

anyway sorry for the essay in your asks, I hope this is at least somewhat entertaining to read

i was absolutely terrified by the length of this when i saw it in my inbox tbh 😭 but the tone it was written in was pretty gently and your points were good and insightful so i was able to read it yes :]

thank you for saying this i think it was well-said