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shiftytracts · 4 years ago

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Stop Wanting More, part 1 of 2 (T/M/A fic)

In which season-four Jon tries to quiet his hunger for live statements by gorging himself on paper ones, and Daisy tells him what she used to do when she got shaky between hunts. Part two here.

…For almost ten thousand words (~5.1k in this half, ~4.3 in the other), beeeecause of course I did.

Content warnings:

Disordered eating (mainly of the statement variety, but mentions also the literal kind)

Nausea, and brief descriptions of prior vomiting

Brief but not-ungraphic description of Jon’s (canon) Boneturning incident—so, injury, very mild body horror

Vague discussion of Daisy’s passive suicidality (in part two)

Animal cruelty and death: Daisy talks about hunting rats for sport (in part two)

—

Jon paused the tape recorder, closed his eyes, and tried to breathe. A statement’s second-to-last page was the hardest to get down. The dull ache that had begun under his ribs twenty minutes before now stretched down far enough to converge with the one in his stiff hips. His pulse throbbed in his stomach; he could feel it swell and recede beneath his hand with every beat. Nausea boomeranged up from somewhere under his navel. He reminded himself he could stop for now, finish this later—and, as always, that thought made him feel even colder than the sludge of other people’s fear pooling in his stomach. With his free hand Jon pressed Record again, and turned to 0101702’s final page. Oh, god, there was barely anything on it. Just the rest of this paragraph and then one more. He kept his eyes on the page, didn’t stop speaking its words, but fumbled blindly for another statement with his fingers.

“Knock knock,” Daisy said as she entered. “Christ—you’re still recording?”

In a flash Jon folded his hands on the table, sat up a little straighter, tried to suck in his gut. “Er—”

“Thought you said you were gonna do one more.”

“I’m almost done.”

“You’ve got another one right there.”

“I…” he considered I’m sorry, but then she’d say For what. “I don’t know what to tell you. It is my office.”

“Yeah, and your home,” Daisy scoffed—“and mine. Sort of.”

“D—did you want…? You’re welcome, to. Sit down, or….”

She did, on the arm of his couch. “I know, Jon. That’s not what I meant.”

“Okay.” To show he’d meant his welcome, Jon pushed his chair back from his desk and turned in it to face Daisy. Hopefully she’d remember he couldn’t ask What did you mean.

“I mean, don’t pretend this is work. How many statements have you had today? You don’t think that one can wait til tomorrow?”

Seven? Or would this one be eight. Jon forced himself to exhale out the portion of gut he’d been holding back since she arrived; it hurt too much to keep sucking in anyway. “A lot. I’m just.”

“Hungry, yeah.”

“Even when I’m stuffed I’m hungry.” He snarled a laugh, and set a rueful hand over his stomach like a fig leaf.

At first he’d tried sating the hunger with garden-variety food. That didn’t help much. Way back when he’d first transferred to the Archives Jon had fallen back into the old habit of forgetting to eat—which, yeah, not great, but, it did mean he remembered well how amazing it used to feel to cram down even a stale biscuit after too many hours’ inanition. All the hidden notes he’d found in yogurt and dry toast. He even remembered tearing up once at the taste of a banana, early in 2016. Before that he’d been sure he didn’t like bananas; afterward, for a short while he’d eaten one nearly every day, hoping vainly to recapture the ecstasy of banana after 14-hour fast. No luck, of course. After a few weeks he’d concluded he still didn’t much like banana as final course of healthy lunch. He’d especially disliked peeling them: how sometimes the stems bent without breaking, and the more times you tried the warmer, softer, more flexible they got. How little strings of peel still clung to the banana after you peeled off its main body, like static when you pull off a jumper. Or like the lint it leaves behind on your shirt. And the way bananas bruise, like people do. All these vestiges of its previous life—reminders it had lived to feed itself rather than him.

Since the coma, all people food—er. That was, all food intended for human consumption—tasted like that chase after a faded spark. Cloying and mushy and… organic, reminding him too much of the garden it came from. And the way it landed in his stomach was far worse. The original banana, the one Martin had pressed on him in the Archives in April 2016, had gone down like nectar, ambrosia, manna from heaven, &c.; the ones afterward, like an unwanted dessert always does. (Cloying. Mushy. A biology lesson mildly tapping its watch.) These days, though, eating regular dinner on a stomach empty of other people’s trauma felt like trying to fill up on cake. Not like cake after fourteen hours of nothing; Jon was pretty sure his 2016 stomach would have welcomed that. But like cake at dinner time. When you’re expecting, you know. Dinner. It gave him the brief, fake-seeming energy of a sugar high, and made him sick before it made him full.

Especially when he was otherwise ailing, for some reason? After Hopworth he’d treated himself to a lie down and a sandwich. The rest had helped, but he’d squandered most of the energy it gave him on the effort to keep the sandwich down. At that moment nothing, not even the coffin, had scared him so much as the thought of what it would feel like to throw up when you had only ten ribs on one side. He hadn’t expected losing them to hurt, at least not for long—had expected the rib to flow out of his skin into Jared Hopworth’s hand like an ice cube through water, which in retrospect was stupid given the testimony of Mr. Pryor in statement 0081103, but he hadn’t had time to reread that one beforehand and at the time Jon remembered only that Hopworth didn’t break his victims’ skin when he pulled out their bones. Turned out that wasn’t much comfort: he’d still had to break the ligaments attaching Jon’s ribs to his spine and chest. It had felt like a bad dislocation (four of them, technically), only instead of the feeling of bone pressing on things it shouldn’t there was an equally violating sense of tissue wallowing in holes that shouldn’t be there. He’d had this horror that if he were sick the flesh would crumple and pop where his ribs used to be, like when you try to suck the remaining water out of a near-empty bottle.

A few months after that he’d caught cold. (A point in the still-human column, Daisy had called it.) You know the first day or two of a cold, before the encroaching mucus takes out your ability to smell or taste properly, how innocuous olfactory phenomena like cheddar and laundry soap suddenly become Bad Smells, on par with the olive bar at a posh supermarket? Well, in a similar way, this one seemed to sharpen the dichotomy in his body’s opinions of people food and monster food. His lack-of-ribs had mostly healed by then though, so either vomiting with only ten ribs on one side did not cause the anomaly he’d feared, or, if it did, it hadn’t hurt enough for him to notice it in the cacophony (pucophony?) of other sensations.

(Daisy liked to play on words, so he’d been doing it more lately. This project the Eye seemed happy to help with, though in this case the suggestion arrived in his mind at the exact same moment as a reminder that, technically, the word cacophony can apply to sensations other than sound only by synecdoche.)

And then, a few weeks ago, when the whole Archives went down with norovirus… well, it wasn’t a fun time. He’d at first mistook the lethargy, weakness, trouble concentrating for signs of hunger—the new kind of hunger. Ms. Mullen-Jones’ statement about the Divine Chains cult hadn’t seemed all that bad, when he’d first recorded it. Scarier than if he’d read its events in a novel, of course; that was just how statements worked. He experienced them more vividly than stories, though less so than the events of his own life. (Because the people they happened to thought they were real! he’d told himself when he first took this job. It’s empathy, that’s all. Nope, sorry—evil magic.) When he read a paper statement these days, though, the knowledge it wouldn’t give him nightmares never quite left him. And he’d thought he was growing desensitized to the kinds of horror most people came to the Institute to report. Coming back up, though—maybe it was the fever, but god, the visions he got on that statement’s way out, of Agape and the soft, sticky hivecorpse of Claude Vilakazi’s followers—the way it made the donut he’d shoved down that morning (in a show of team spirit, god help him) come back up tasting like rotten rice wine—it was worse than the dreams. Worse, he could have sworn, than even the first time he ever dreamt Naomi Herne’s empty graveyard.

While hanging over the bowl of the Archives’ toilet waiting to see if he’d got it all up or if there was still more to come, Jon remembered thinking again of the banana Martin had given him. A few days earlier Daisy had made him watch the video of the I don’t understand this meme and at this point I’m too afraid to ask man vore-ing a banana; Jon had confessed to her, in a conspiratorial whisper-laugh, that for him vore itself had been one such meme until that very second, when the Eye had seen fit to inform him. But when applied to a banana, the term apparently just meant eating it peel and all. In 2016 Martin had broken the banana’s stem and pulled back a section of peel before handing it to Jon, so as to brook no argument. Was it really the banana itself he’d cried over? Not the gesture of friendship, when Jon deserved it so little? The thought of someone caring for him enough that when he got hangry at them they handed him a snack. Martin had been living in the Archives then, like Jon did now. Sleeping in Document Storage—a guest in a room owned by pieces of paper. Those bananas may have been the only thing that felt like his.

A Guest for Mr. Spider was about vore, technically. Not an uncommon topic in children’s literature. Some surmised that was where the fetish came from, though others maintained kinks like that were inborn, and the stories merely alerted their hosts to them for the first time. Red riding hood, three little pigs, little old lady who swallowed a fly. The Leitner touch was only the part where he drew you to his real-life lair and real-life ate you.

Looking back, that was probably the first thing he’d ever admired about Martin—how easy he’d made it look to skin a fruit. Not at the time admired, of course, but in those weeks afterward, when every banana Jon ate made him claw at the peel til his finger joints throbbed.

That stomach bug had struck the Archives with serendipitous timing, though. If he’d not found out how thin abstinence from the Hunt had made Daisy on the same day he’d barfed up a statement, Jon might not have pieced together what their combined evidence meant. Until then he’d put down his own post-coma weight loss to the fact he rarely ate more people food than a donut in twenty-four hours. Lots of avatars were scrawny, after all. Jane Prentiss, Mike Crew, Justin Gough, Annabelle Cane, John Amherst, Simon Fairchild. Jude Perry and Jared Hopworth could mold their respective fleshes however they wanted, so he didn’t count them as exceptions. True, Trevor Herbert’s bulk had struck him as odd; surely a homeless man wouldn’t waste cash on food his body no longer wanted. And what about Breekon and Hope? Did butterflies and a quartermaster’s pen and tongue sustain them? But maybe, Jon had told himself, it was like with alcohol. Maybe the avatars with more flesh on their bones had worked to develop a tolerance for (air quotes, heavy sarcasm) people food, for the sake of their physiques, or. So they could, he didn't know, eat socially? Without feeling sick, like Jon did whenever one of the others brought donuts.

Preposterously stupid, this theory seemed in retrospect. The truth was much simpler. It was like Jude Perry’d told him. She was strong and he was weak, because she fed her god with her actions, while Jon’s had had to resort to eating his flesh.

He wasn’t going back to live statements! That wasn’t an option; he knew that. He couldn’t feed his god with his actions. But he could have more paper ones. Maybe they were like the candles poor Eugene Vanderstock used to bring Agnes—the ones she’d sat over for hours. Hours and hours, inhaling the suffering that made them. They’d kept her strong enough, right? At least in body. All those people in charge of her care, all so much in her thrall—if she’d looked hungry one of them would’ve mentioned it in a statement.

During Jon’s school days, back when he was still trying to learn how to be a girl, this brief window had opened up right around age thirteen where the girls around him had enough self-consciousness to start developing eating disorders? But not enough to keep them secret. Thirteen had been this phase of, like, I’m a teenager now, see? I’ve got the teen angst now—SEE?! Where after they’d finished the day’s maths assignment, or while setting up microscope slides, one could overhear girls swapping self-harm anecdotes and tips for how best not to eat. Anne, whom he’d been almost friends with, went through two packs of chewing gum a day for a while. She would shove three or four sticks at a time in her mouth, then spit them back out into their wrappers as soon as they lost their flavor. Eventually they made her sick, and she switched to chain-sucking butterscotch discs. (Most artificial sweeteners, as the Eye now informed him, had mild laxative properties—including those used in gum.) Other acquaintances had brought comically large thermoses of coffee to school every day, and scurried to the toilet between classes. But it was another polyurious crowd that Jon kept thinking of, these days—the kids who would chug water every time they felt hungry. Trying to fill up on paper statements felt just like that.

He’d never understood that urge until now. Hunger was already a bad sensation; why would it help to add the further bad sensations of nausea and stomachache and cold? But now it made sense: feeling better was not the point. The point was to stop wanting more. He couldn’t get rid of the hunger, exactly—not in a way that mattered. Not the shards of glass in his belly, not the itch in his esophagus like a finger tapping behind his gag reflex, not the way simple motions like soaping his hands made his whole body ache. Not the sharpening of his senses to such a fine point that he jumped whenever Thérèse in the office above him shut her desk’s sticky drawer. (He hadn’t known that was what made the squeaky noise until a few weeks ago when the Eye decided he might like some office gossip. Even now he didn’t know which of the faces he sometimes passed up there belonged to Thérèse. She had no statements to make.) Nor the fog in his mind, though he tried sometimes to blame that on the Lonely. He couldn’t sate his hunger with paper statements—couldn’t make himself full, in the rosy way we usually connote that word. All warm and carefree and pleasantly sleepy. But he could cram the hole inside him with enough stale horrors that the temptation to chase down a fresh one momentarily left him.

And that was the new plan—to stuff himself with paper statements.

Tomorrow would mark two weeks since the day he’d first tried it. Brian from Artefact Storage had a statement to give him, Jon could feel—either Stranger or Spiral, it was hard to tell quite which. Something that caused paranoia. Not a great fit for that department. Good fit for a temple of the Eye, Jon supposed, remembering Tim and Michael Shelley. But Artefact Storage? God help him. He wondered if Elias had done it on purpose, hiring a paranoid man to work in a room full of objects that wanted him hurt. If so it must’ve been this one—this purpose. And on Wednesday mornings Brian manned the place all alone. Poor soul was already clinging to this job by a thread, though (so, Web…? That could cause paranoia too, as Jon well knew). Surely if Jon made him relive his trauma that would break it. Though perhaps that’d be a mercy. And but besides, two weeks ago Melanie had still lived here, and sat all morning between Jon’s office and Artefact Storage. Until she went to lunch. But by that time the woman whose laugh Jon could sometimes hear through the walls (Pooja, the Eye had since told him her name was) would have joined Brian. And it’d just be too weird, too risky, to go in and ask him about it with a third person in the room. Even if it wasn’t also evil.

So he’d read 0132210—the statement of Sierra Talbot, regarding a swimming pool whose depth changed every time she entered it—in hopes that’d make him quit thinking about the paranoid man down the hall. It didn’t, not really; paper statements didn’t take up as much of his attention as they used to. But he couldn’t get up and walk to Artefact Storage in the middle of one. When he finished and still couldn’t think of anything but Brian, he dug out another statement (this one from 1938, regarding a bad penny). Just to keep himself chained to his desk til lunch. And then a third (Liza Ho, attack of the killer seagulls). And by the end of that one he felt too heavy and cold inside to want to go anywhere but the couch. It made his stomach swell until it hurt to sit up straight, and the thought of shoving anything more inside made him feel sick—exactly like chugging water every time he felt hungry.

Basira had said maybe the Web just wanted to keep them so afraid of their own impulses they sat and did nothing so they couldn’t be puppeted. Maybe she was right. He’d never felt more like a spider, with his weak, skinny limbs and bloated stomach. Lying on the couch massaging other people’s horrors into more comfortable shapes inside him. Thank god he’d already given up tucking in his shirts, when he came back after the coma. Jon had worn the same trousers for three days in a row, now—shucked them off at the end of the day, hoping if he left them on the floor that’d convince him they were too dirty to wear again, and then slipped them back on over clean boxers in the morning. They were the only trousers he had that stayed up with the button left unfastened.

(Technically, the noun bloat refers to the feeling of weight or tightness in the abdomen. To describe a belly which has expanded beyond its typical size, one should use the word distended. Though these phenomena can occur separately, most people conflate them under the single word bloated. This trivia had seemed worthless when Beholding told him of it. But now he knew better. Every morning he woke up feeling like he’d had his whole torso replaced with the aching void of space, empty but for silver glints of pain that were the stars. And then he’d look down and find his belly still distended.)

Melanie and Basira didn’t know—at least not officially. They both seemed to have noticed how much more often lately they’d walked in on him recording, but Jon was pretty sure they suspected him less of bingeing on statements, more of pretending to record so as to avoid talking to them. He welcomed this misapprehension.

It was also possible they knew but declined to comment, since. Well, it was kind of a pathetic habit? Physically, a bit pathetic. Morally, though, such a big improvement over compelling statements by force that maybe they figured they ought to let him have it. If so he should be grateful, he reminded himself. Their pity, after all, was humiliating only in principle; Daisy’s teasing and concerned questions embarrassed him in practice.

“Enough navelgazing,” Daisy scoffed, but when Jon looked over at her he could see a smile creeping its way onto her face. “Look—finish the one you’re on, then come over here and I’ll. Tell you a story.”

“I—what?”

“Don’t know if it’ll count as a ‘statement,’” she said, with air quotes; “not much fear in it, more just.” She looked at the floor, then shrugged. “But it seems worth a try, yeah? Might make you feel better.”

“I-I, er. I really shouldn’t?” He meant in case it had a taste of human blood effect, but set his hand on his stomach again in hopes she’d think he meant he was too full.

“Yeah, you should. I want you to hear it.” Daisy shrugged again. “Think it might do you good to know.”

Jon turned back to his desk, unpaused the recording and wrapped up the statement. He’d quit bothering to record end notes on most of these—told himself he could add them in later, like he used to when he’d first taken this job. How proud 2016 Jon would have been to see how many statements the 2018 Archivist got through in a week.

He paused for a moment before standing up, to take as deep a breath as he could manage when stuffed full of paper. The end of that statement had gone down easier, since he’d had that few minutes’ break talking to Daisy, but he still didn’t love the idea of standing and walking. Especially since he knew once he got to the couch he’d be glued there by fatigue. If he didn’t pee now, he’d spend most of the night far enough into sleep to be paralyzed, but not far enough to numb his bladder. He excused himself to Daisy, promising to come right back. Then hauled himself up, with help from his cane and one arm of his chair.

Six limbs it took to maneuver this body now. Two more and he’d’ve gone full spider.

Three quarters of the way to the bathroom—that’s how long it took before the ache in his legs outpaced that in his stomach. He arrived on the toilet seat shaky and out of breath, as always. Months ago he’d given up standing to pee. When you sat you could rock back and forth, and cross your arms tight over waves of quease.

Not much came out, as was also usual lately. As far as Jon could tell, his body now required only enough water to keep his mouth from drying out while recording. Dehydration no longer made his head hurt, so, why bother. Good thing, too, he supposed—the last two weeks he hadn’t needed much non-metaphorical water inside for his body to parse that as needing to pee.

He let his trousers stay pooled around his ankles until after he’d washed and dried his hands. Then pulled up his shirt, to judge from his reflection whether they’d stay up with the fly undone. If he kept his hands in his pockets, yeah. Could you tell the difference, visually, once he put his shirt tails back down? Not for such a short distance. They wouldn’t have time to get disarranged.

It didn’t matter; Basira didn’t even glance at him on his way back, and all Institute staff who didn’t live here had gone home.

Jon opened the door to his office, said hello to Daisy but didn’t manage to look at her, and sat himself down on the other side of the couch. From the corner of his eye (or someone’s anyway) he saw her rise to her feet. “I’m gonna pee too,” she told him, picking her way toward the door; “get yourself comfortable, like you’re going to bed.”

“Where will you sit.”

“I’ll squeeze in.”

“I don’t mind leaving room for—?” Finally he made himself look up at her, in time to see her shake her head. Daisy hadn’t been strong on her feet either, since the Buried; she held herself up now with a hand on the doorjamb, elbow bent so her shoulder leant against that wrist. He regretted quibbling. “Never mind; I’ll just.”

“Really? You’re comfortable like that? You look like a sheep in clover.”

The knowledge came to him before he could ask her what that meant—complete with a nasty visual of what happens in cases acute enough to require rumenotomy. Jon swore he could feel himself swelling to accommodate this tidbit. His eye twitched in discomfort.

“Think I prefer ‘windbag,’ if it’s all the same to you.”

She made a face like that was grosser than what she had said. “You ruined my joke. I was gonna say I won’t let you have any more leaves til you look less like you might explode.”

“Sheep in clover suffocate,” Jon frowned; “they don’t explode. You must be thinking of how they cure them when—”

“Leaves. In. A. Book, Jon. That joke.”

“Oh. Yes, I see.” He made himself chuckle.

Daisy sighed and shifted on her feet. “I’ll be right back. Just lie down, alright? Like you’re going to bed.”

Jon agreed to lie down, but couldn’t decide whether to face the wall (as he would to sleep), leaving her to slide in between him and the back of the couch the way she had a few times before when she’d walked in on him catnapping, or whether he should lie on his back, where he could see her as soon as she opened the door. It was important to make sure she knew he appreciated her offer to give him a statement. Or, no—to tell him her story, he meant.

Ultimately he picked the latter course.

“You sleep like that?”

“Sometimes."

“I’ve never seen you sleep like that. You always face the wall.” Daisy crossed her arms, blew hair out of her face. “That for the tummy ache, or for me?”

“Uh….”

“Would it hurt you to face the wall.”

“No, I just.”

“Turn around, then. I’ll squeeze in,” she said again.

“I-if you’re sure.”

He rolled onto his side, gritting his teeth as the cramps in his stomach swirled in new directions. What made it slosh like that, he wondered. While he fought to regain his breath Jon watched Daisy climb up onto the back of the couch on shaking elbows and knees, then avalanche down hands- and feet-first so she fit between him and its cushions. He’d never watched her do this before—always either startled out of a doze at the sound of her thumping down next to him, or simply woken up to find her there.

“You’re just like the Admiral,” he informed her.

“True words spoken in jest,” muttered Daisy. Too quietly for him to hear what she said over the couch’s tortured creaks, but half a second after she finished speaking the words appeared before his mind, in white, all-capital letters with a black background like closed captions on the news. “That’s Georgie’s cat, right?” she said aloud.

“Yes.”

Her knee jostled the cap of his; when it made him gasp she snarled under her breath. “Sorry. Can you move your leg?”

“Yes, it’s fine, just—”

“I mean would you move your leg.”

“Oh.” He did so.

“Thanks. Ugh—you’re cold,” Daisy accused him; “where’s that blanket.” He pointed behind her to the arm of the couch where it lay folded. She shook it out, and draped it over both of them. Reached around behind him to make sure it covered his whole back. Jon tried to ignore the way his stomach lurched every time Daisy’s weight shifted against the cushions. Finally she settled next to him to catch her breath. Their foreheads touched; her stomach pressed into his, though not as tightly as the last time they’d lain like this. “Can you breathe or am I crushing you?”

“Not at all, you’re fine—in fact, if the couch cushions are chafing you too much you can—”

Daisy huffed, and scooted herself in closer to him. “That better?” She set her warm hand down right where his belly diverged from pelvis. Jon tried to keep both voice and tremor out of his exhale. Since the coffin, Daisy’s hands and feet suffered at night and after any exertion from the same excess of heat his sometimes did. So the cold inside him probably felt nice on her hand, if not to the rest of her.

(Like snuggling up to a hotel mattress, she’d described it, after the first time she joined him for a nap when he’d just had a statement. Cold, hard, covered in lumps and dents, and creaks when you roll over on it. “I’d prefer you didn’t,” he’d replied, while praying her elbow wouldn’t come any closer to the crevasse where his ribs used to be.)

“Christ you’re stuffed,” commented Daisy. For emphasis she lifted her fingers, then set them back down on his gut.

“I don’t know what you expected.”

“You won’t pop if I tell you a story?”

“Not literally,” Jon said, blinking.

“Of course not literally,” she scoffed; “you know what I mean.”

“Do I?”

“Will it make you sick. Don’t want you throwing up on me; this is Melanie’s shirt. If you ruin it she’ll hit us with her cane, and I don’t trust you to hit as hard back with yours.”

“Mine’s shorter and thicker,” he mused. “I don’t have to hit as hard.”

“Stop. Avoiding. The question.”

Jon sighed to show her he capitulated. Then thought about it. He felt cold and sick, but the idea of saying no to a statement made those feelings worse, not better. And the sharp clusters of pain in his belly were harder to sleep through than quease.

“I’ll be fine,” he decided. “It’ll help.”

“Alright. When you’re ready, ask me what I used to do when I got shaky between hunts.”

Read part two here.

#stuffing #nausea #stomachache #hunger kink #a shifty tract #nonsearchable tma tag #other titles i. jocoseriously considered include 'divine chains' (like the cult from 153 get it?);#'too much information' and 'a movable-type feast'.#also for a long time the file on my computer was called 'statement eating: the moive' because alas i was a teenage h/omes/tuck

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transcendentalmaggot · 3 years ago

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Sometimes I make a valiant yet invariably failed effort to refrain from criticizing how my parents raised me as their daughter with a birth defect and chronic medical conditions they still can’t bring themselves to talk about honestly after 31 years and I’m not certain if it’s several days worth of trying to find specialists that accept my insurance or will work out a payment plan for a new patient that’s making my bitterness bubble up but I’m not sure which was worse: punishing me to “toughen me up” for the real world by forcing me to endure preventable pain and casting new symptoms to doctors and family as a clear demonstration of my hysteria and laziness delaying needed care I should have received as a child or teenager. They accused me of faking even with the good grades in AP and honors courses, after school babysitting jobs, a dozen or so organizations and clubs, one of which I founded and ran and several that I played an active role in, volunteering, and helping take care of my grandma when she was living with us and in need of care due to her dementia. Not to mention symptoms like losing massive amounts of weight and not being able to keep food down, being unable to put weight on my left leg without agony and sudden falls. The lack of attention paid towards that is why I needed a replacement at 20, passing out from fevers when kidney stones would obstruct my kidney function, never had a medically necessary surgery on my kidneys that likely cut decades off my life span, etc. Ya know, all things kids are known to fake for years when they’ve already had dozens of operations and hospitalizations. There’s a sort of genius to it - claiming ignorance until it’s become something they could no longer ignore as if these moments aren’t seared into my memory. I remember holding my own insides in my hands after my failed surgery and fearing telling my parents more than going to the hospital or the ramifications of a failed complex surgery.

Or maybe it was telling me to always keep it a secret even to my closest friends so that I could diligently convince the world I was normal but somehow constantly sick because no one would understand what was wrong with me and may even find it disturbing (according to them this was to “protect me” from being bullied). Even now, whenever I start seeing somebody they assume I’m either being taken advantage of or that it’s only a matter of time before it ends because they can’t wrap their heads around anyone wanting someone with my problems. Of course it was never a secret to those around me, I just knew to never seek support from my family because they’d be more angry for me not “hiding things well enough”. Or perhaps it was their lifelong habit of rewarding me whenever I risked my well being to avoid asking for help or god forbid needing them. They absolutely spent many a night providing care and sleeping next to my hospital bed but I wish I could let go of this grief and anger. I can’t make my healing dependent on whether they will ever admit most of these things ever happened despite the numerous witnesses or that they ever made a misstep in my care. How can you forgive someone who can’t even admit they ever did anything wrong? I know it feels so much more potent and unmanageable due to the complete lack of distance and my isolation from my friends that still live in the area. I know, I know. It doesn’t help that my immediate reaction to feeling worse than average is to hide away and shut myself out from the world as if I’m deserving of punishment.

Having to answer multiple surveys within the last couple of weeks through NJ’s barely functional social services department about whether I feel like a “burden to my family” or “if I feel hopeless about the future and believe my loved ones would be happier without me around” with all the empathy of being asked what my favorite color of jeans are has me feeling hollow. My conservative-leaning family is in two camps: I’m only applying for help because I’m a morally bankrupt and overly privileged brat that dreams of being dependent on an antagonistic institution that would shoot me dead if bullets were cheaper and they didn’t fear the voters complaining about the corpses piling up on the streets or are in shock that the system works this way because they always assumed my case would be treated as an obvious exception “especially considering how much I pay in taxes to help people like you”.

#personal #venting #sleep deprived thoughts #compounded by the constant pain and anxiety #disability #long post

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naralanis · 4 years ago

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A Replicant!Lena AU because am drunk. Little bit. And watched that movie like last week. Anyway.

also on AO3

“Do you like our owl?”

The voice comes out of nowhere, and admittedly scares Kara enough that she startles the bird in turn, sending it flying in a flutter of beating wings and displeased hoots/

Her eyes follow the owl's trajectory through the opulent waiting room, up until it lands a bit ungracefully on a perch by the door she had come through. There's a woman there now, impeccably dressed and a prim, severe demeanor. Her jet-black hair is pulled tight into a ponytail; her eyes are a captivating green, and there's a full, manicured brow raised in question.

“I do,” Kara says, clearing her throat and not looking at the bird at all. “Is it real?"

A little smile tugs at the woman's wine-red lips, and she lets out a soft chuckle. “Of course,” she says, as if the question is entirely absurd, green eyes shimmering in the light. “Do you think Mr. Luthor would have a fake owl in his waiting room?”

Kara shrugs. “Must have been expensive.”

The woman's smile widens. “Incredibly so,” she quips, motioning to the door. “If you would follow me, Ms. Danvers; Mr. Luthor is ready for you now.”

“Right, right, thank you,” Kara says, reaching for her briefcase and hastening to follow. “Thank you, Ms...?”

The smile turns into a smirk, as if the woman seems to be enjoying playing with Kara as the blonde quickens her pace to follow after the echoing click of her heels. “Luthor,” she says cheekily. “But you can call me Lena.”

Kara almost stops dead in her tracks; she has to make a conscious effort to keep following after her. “Luthor?” she repeats dumbly, unable to conceal her surprise. “Are you a relative of Mr. Luthor's?”

“His sister.”

Kara has to process that information for a second; none of the files she had been given on Lex Luthor mentioned any living family, especially not a sister.

“I didn't know Lex Luthor had a sister,” she admits.

There's a twitch to Lena's upper lip, but it's gone in the blink of an eye. “I prefer to be... behind the scenes, so to speak,” she says. Her gaze abruptly turns to Kara, and yet her steps do not falter for even a moment. “Tell me, Ms. Danvers, have you been a Blade Runner long?”

Kara's brows furrow before she can help it. “For some time.”

“You must have retired quite a few Replicants.”

It wasn't a question, and Kara was not sure if she should treat it like one. “Some,” she said simply. She has never particularly enjoyed her job; it was just one of those things that had to be done, and something she happened to be more than competent at. Nothing more.

“What are your thoughts on them?” Lena presses on.

“Replicants?” Kara asks. The line of questioning throws her for a loop. “I have no thoughts one way or the other; they're... machines, for good or for bad.”

Lena nods, though her expression is unreadable. “And if they're... not good, it is your job to retire them.”

That was definitely not a question, Kara thinks. “Yes.”

“You must be quite good at spotting them.”

That also isn't a question, but Kara cannot think of a response before they reach an impressive set of heavy doors that look to be made of real wood. If Luthor has a real owl, it stands to reason that these would be real wood. Lena stops right at the threshold, shooting Kara an odd look that the blonde cannot process immediately, because they walk into a spacious office, and there, at the end of a long conference table, sits the man, the legend himself, in all his glory.

“Kara Danvers,” Lex Luthor greets them jovially, in a cheerful voice that inexplicably sends a chill down Kara's spine. “Thank you for showing her in, Lena.”

Lena gives him a polite nod, not leaving her post by the doors.

“Mr. Luthor,” Kara says, already reaching a hand out for him to shake, wanting to get this over as soon as possible for reasons she cannot presently fathom. Something about Lex just rubs her the wrong way, and she tries not to let that show as he approaches and shakes her hand. “Thank you for taking the time to see me, I understand you're quite a busy man.”

He grins, and Kara doesn't like it one bit. “Please, call me Lex. Of course, of course, anything I can do to help.”

Kara squares her shoulders, getting right down to business. “Well, Mr. Luthor—Lex--as you know, we'd like to establish a few baselines for your Nexus-6 model to help us with an ongoing investigation. I was hoping to...”

“All in good time, Ms. Danvers. Patience, patience. I'll help you with your little investigation however I can—if you can answer a few questions of mine first.”

She has to fight the uncomfortable feeling that manifests in the pit of her stomach. She's dimly aware of Lena's green gaze fixed on her and Luthor, interested, curious.

“That little test of yours... capillary dilation of the so-called blush response? Fluctuation of the pupil, involuntary dilation of the iris?”

“We call it Voight-Kampff for short,” Kara says, brow raised in question.

“I must admit I am rather curious, Ms. Danvers. Tell me, have you ever retired a human by mistake?”

“No,” she says quickly. “Mr. Luthor, what exactly is the purpose...”

“But it is a risk, in your profession,” he interrupts. “Is it not?”

Kara frowns. “What is your point, Mr. Luthor?”

Lex's grinning sets her teeth on edge. “The Nexus-6 is the pride and joy of my corporation, Ms. Danvers—the most advanced model ever put on the market. And yet, they still have flaws—fatal flaws, that caused the ones you're hunting to go... off the rails, so to speak.”

He seems to take Kara's silence as encouragement to keep going, and does just that, pacing in a way that unnerves her. “You see, they lack certain capabilities, certain... nuances that you and I are privileged to possess that we simply have not been able to reproduce artificially. Empathy, emotional maturity. They are, I hate to say it, woefully underdeveloped in that regard.”

“I am well aware, Mr. Luthor,” Kara interjects, annoyed that this man—a genius though he may be—is speaking to her as if hunting down those machines wasn't literally her job description. “That's why they have a failsafe.”

Luthor nods, and his expression remains unreadable, even if his unsettling smile is still very much in place. “Yes,” he confirms, stopping and holding the back of his chair. “The four-year lifespan. Tell me, Ms. Danvers, have you ever performed your little empathy test on a human subject?”

“No.”

His grin grows wider. “Lovely. I would love a demonstration, if you would be so kind to indulge me.”

Kara frowns. “Mr. Luthor, I'm here to acquire a new baseline for the Nexus-6 models so as to better understand...”

“Yes, yes, I know,” he waves her off. “I won't stop you from doing your job, Ms. Danvers. I would simply like to see a negative result before I provide you with a positive one. Is that agreeable?”

Kara feels her knuckles tightening around the handle of her briefcase; she wants this to be over.

“Very well. I assume you will be the subject, Mr. Luthor?”

His eyes glimmer in a way that makes Kara's stomach turn. “Try Lena.”

Lena seems just as surprised as Kara feels at the suggestion, but does a remarkably better job of hiding it and regaining her composure. The clicking of her heels approaches immediately after Lex summons her, and her expression is completely neutral by the time she takes a seat at the table.

The brunette eyes Kara with a raised brow breaking her schooled expression, looking almost forcibly nonchalant. She pulls out a cigarette as Kara takes her time unloading and setting up her equipment, still very much aware of Lena's watchful green gaze.

“Do you mind if I smoke, Ms. Danvers?” she asks, and it sounds almost teasing.

The machine whirrs to life, and Kara contains a heavy sigh at the unshakeable feeling that she has walked straight into a trap of some kind.

Her gaze locks onto Lena's hypnotizing green irises, and she flicks the button to start.

“It shouldn't affect the test.”

~page break~

Kara's back is sore from leaning into the Voight-Kampff apparatus, and her eyes sting from the strain of looking through the visor for so long. It feels like hours have passed, but she's afraid of actually checking the time. She shuts off the machine with a strained huff as she rolls her shoulders and arches her back, feeling her spine pop pleasurably at the stretch. She blinks away the strain and dryness of her eyes, taking her time to sink back into her chair, and tries to give her mind a few precious extra moments to fully comprehend what she has just uncovered.

Lex had not moved a muscle during the entirety of the test; he's still sitting unnaturally still by the time Kara shuts off her equipment. Lena eyes her curiously, lips pulled into a taut line.

“Lena, if you would please excuse us a moment.”

Kara deliberately looks at her equipment, putting it away methodically and slowly, but for a moment she catches a hint of displeasure that flits across Lena's face at Lex's command. The brunette hesitates for only a second, but complies. Kara's heart beats in tandem with the fading staccato of Lena's heels, and once the door finally clicks closed behind the other woman, she tries to speak, only to find the words stuck to her throat.

Lex regards her knowingly, his expression—his smirk—shifting into something conspiratorial, as if he had just let her in on a great big joke.

“Well,” he says with obvious satisfaction, slapping his hands on the table. “I must say, I am impressed. That was rather... illuminating.”

“She's a Replicant.” Kara finally bites out, shutting the apparatus closed in its case with a bit more force than she intended. She stares down Luthor, probably doing a piss-poor job of concealing her inexplicable anger, but unable to bring herself to care. She wants him to deny it. She wants him to tell her that her equipment must be faulty; hell, she wants him to tell her that she is just plain wrong and that she sucks at her job. She wants anything but the truth she's still presently still struggling to fully comprehend.

“Well-observed, Ms. Danvers.” he says simply, nonchalantly.

“She doesn't know,” Kara murmur, unsure if to herself or to Luthor.

He shrugs, looking entirely unbothered. “I think she's beginning to suspect—I made her into a rather intelligent prototype, after all,” he explains, drumming his fingers casually on the solid wood of his conference table. “Tell me, Ms. Danvers, how many questions does it usually take you to, as some policemen so eloquently put it, ‘sniff out a skin-job,’ eh?”

Kara grits her teeth, “Twenty to thirty questions, cross-referenced, depending on the model,” she answers by rote. “How can she not... how can it not know what it is?”

Lex's smirk is unbearably smug. “It took you over a hundred for Lena, didn't it?”

Kara has to focus on unclenching her fists for a moment. “Yes,” she confirms, turning a flinty gaze to Luthor as she repeats her question. “How?”

“’More Human than Human’, Ms. Danvers—that is the motto here at LuthorCorp. Our goal is commerce; it's that simple. Lena is... an experiment. Nothing more.”

He stands, walking around the table tos top directly in front of Kara.

“The Nexus-6 is quite a marvel of bio-engineering, Ms. Danvers, if I do say so myself,” he begins again, voice laced with deliberate false-modesty. “Nevertheless, I began to observe in them certain behaviours, certain... strange obsessions. They are, after all, stunted, in a way; they are emotionally inexperienced. That’s to be expected; after all, they only have a few years to store and process experiences that take a lifetime to build, experiences that you and I may take for granted.”

His eyes glimmer in the low light of the room, pupils dilating in a way that takes Kara's mind back to the test she just performed; she wants to smash her machine to smithereens for reasons she cannot fathom.

“It's what makes them unstable, you see. If, however, we gift them with a past—any past—we create a cushion; a safety net for their emotional development, and thus, we can control them far better.”

Kara's eyes widen; she feels her throat go dry. “Memories,” she whispers. “You mean... you mean you're giving them memories.”

Lex chuckles, looking increasingly pleased with himself. “Bingo! With this process, we have better control over them. Who knows, perhaps we'll even be able to increase their lifespan, in time. They're quite expensive to make; it's such a shame they have such a short shelf-life.”

Kara opens her mouth, then closes it again, finding it difficult to form coherent sentences.

“What memories are you even giving them—she, she thinks she's your sister!” she finally croaks out.

Lex waves her off, unperturbed. “The source of the memories is inconsequential, Ms. Danvers. They can be fairytales, for all I care,” he says, and for the first time, as he regards Kara curiously, he looks... annoyed. “In Lena's case, I wanted them to be as real, as tangible as possible. Implanting some of my own memories—easily recalled, and easily corroborated with minimal tweaking—was the simplest course of action.”

Kara's not sure why the mere idea of memory implantation makes her sick to her stomach; she feels her hands balling into fists and jaw clenching so tightly she can practically hear the grind of her own teeth. Green eyes and questioning glances flash back to her mind, and Lex regards her pensively for a long moment. His smile fades by degrees, until his lips pull into a thin line, and for the first time, he looks displeased.

“Remember, Ms. Danvers,” he says, brows furrowing in clear distaste. “She's an experiment. Nothing more.”

#supercorp #kara danvers #lena luthor #supergirl #Replicant!Lena #Blade Runner AU #prob has been done before #but ya know what #here's my take #it's lukewarm at best #ficwriting #hooray for drunk posting

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alphaketoglutaricacid · 4 years ago

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@onehithero said: also we know theres at least some actual animals besides gadoll liek the scorpion n cows tht show up for a sec in ep 1 so tankers hav tht going for them re: food sources ..SORRY FOR RAMBLING SO MUCH deca dence essay got sleeper agent activated

onehithero said: i rly like what usaid abt kabu from natsumes pov too but i cannot form a half cohernet thought abt tht one

onehithero said: ALSO ALSO i think its interesting how the ep 8 conversation w minato is i think the only time kabu talks abt being jealous of humans being able to choose their own paths

onehithero said: also how minatos convinced hes like a good lil cog in the machine yet hes done 50 things tht wuld get him labeled as a bug but he just ignores all tht. the both of them can be so disconnected w reality

onehithero said: like minato didnt know abt 1)natsume 2) how the system has made kabu so severely depressed n he culdnt put up w it anymore.n minato continues pushing the just go along w the system shit he doesnt understand tht he was contributing to kabus misery.. n bc of tht kabu doesnt trust minato enough to tell him abt natsume for so long but then he goes n asks smth so big of him as go against the system

onehithero said: thinks abt how kabu n minato r obviously so important to each other but minato understands him less n less over time & kabu kinda already knew its risky to confide in minato like minato did know abt pipe which was a long time ago but he didnt know abt natsume til kabu was already sacrifing himself for her sake. n yet kabu then goes n tries to get him on his side anyway cuz he wants tht so badly..

onehithero said: OMG OMG CHEWS THESE WORDS SLOWLY N THROUGHLY SO DELICIOUS THANK U THANK U u get it u understand i love reading n writing essay lengh responses abt deca dence & again u just hit the nail on the head w this

Please let me know if this @ u 8 times and sorry if it did. I will reply under this readmore but i love this enthusiasm! I like discussing this stuff so if u want keep it coming. I wanna understand deca dence better and i think i will by sharing ideas w other ppl.

I think kabu and minatos relationship is as good as it is because theres clearly a lot of mutual love and respect between them even when they don’t understand each other and thats why minato still runs after him when he hears kabu going suicide mission lets go baby. I think its interesting that minato was like ready to lie down and accept getting mass scrapped until he hears kabu go im about to be hilarious and hes like actually living and staying alive sounds great actually forget what i said about it being over. you are so right about kabu and trust and natsume. I will always cherish episode 5 where kabu gives this big rousing speech about how natsume inspired him and saved his life and minatos there like ..who? ..what?? I think they may not be used to hiding things from each other. Also I think them drifting apart mirrors natsume and feis drifting apart tho I think while feis the instigator on that side kabus more on his side and minato like natsume is like wondering what in da world is going on. I think someone else wrote about this better than I can.

I do think minato does know kabus severely depressed because theres this line in ep 4 where he puts his hand on kabu and says like you’ve toiled enough at that awful job. and also in episode 11 when he and kabu talk and kabu says he was in a similar place as minato now in that he was waiting every day to be scrapped minato has no reaction until kabu says but that bug saved me. I think he knows kabus very depressed but he does not know how to address it cuz the system never gives either of them the tools or options for it. Though also I feel the system discourages meaningful relationships between the cyborgs so I think what minato and kabu have is likely pretty rare. Kabu donetello and turkey also fought together for a long time but turkey turns on donetello in a second even tho they fought together, he was his number two, and they were in prison together, and were pretty much all they got and donetello kills him in turn. I also think minato probably knew because he’s empathetic. Like I’m not sure about compassion but he’s very good at understanding where other ppl are and how to meet them in the middle so both parties get something they want. That’s how he got all the gamers to collect the old deca dence parts. Not by cashing in on ppl doing the right thing but by framing it as the final mission. He gets his lgbt community center coworkers for fight with him one last time by appealing to their sense of duty. He got the system to put kabu in jail instead of getting scrapped when Mikey got scrapped for a lesser offense. The list goes on. A tangent but I think the fact he acknowledges the living conditions of the humans are gonna get worse if nothing’s done even tho he’s apathetic at best towards them shows even when the system tries to mold the cyborgs into the roles it wants, sometimes the traits they have just keep on going despite themselves. I’m gonna stop myself before I go into jill and this theme but I’m gonna talk about it someday. So I think its more likely than not he knew but he didn’t know how to navigate around it also because it’s heavily implied he’s going thru the same thing and I think kabu might genuinely have no idea Bc kabu lacks empathy but his heart... is huge. When he hears minato express his feelings of not knowing what he wants he instantly tries to reach out and explain minatos not alone in what he feels. This is why they’re good foils. while kabu moves past where he was in the start where he states he does not intend to oppose the system and his compliance while also trying to do the bare minimum drives him to suicide, and finds the willpower and a reason to live and rebel against the system through his connection to other people (first natsume , he hangs out w kurenai sometimes too, and then with the jail robots). Meanwhile minato whos stuck in his literal ivory tower (it’s a Metaphor) never makes any of these connections. It’s the irony of kabu working at a armor repair job giving him some ability to connect w others vs minatos higher position isolating him from everyone else. I think kabu living amongst the ppl he harmed drove him to give up on life quicker, while minato being far apart shielded him from rlly having to see the effects of his actions I think he was headed a lil slower in the same direction. I think we’re led to believe minatos okay where he is but I think towards the end it’s clear minato has spent most of the series also in a bad place. I think he views things very similarly to kabu in that he wants to use what power he does have to protect the ppl he cares about similar to how initially kabu tried to just convince natsume to quit several times and he was like whatever at the rest of the humans who are natsumes comrades dying but he chooses to put it all on the line and try for some systemic change when he sees natsumes determination to fight. Also I think minato holds very little loyalty to the system cuz he doesn’t only like breaks 1000 rules for kabu (the hypocrisy) but he also looks the other way a lot. For example, when he overheard the top rankers talk about limiters he’s like I’ll pretend I don’t hear it also turn on private mode next time and he doesn’t berate them for considering cheating. Also donetello has been using an illegal avatar to climb to S rank again (isn’t it interesting that even after the ranked system is abolished something similar took its place). And his avatar looks the same as it did when minato worked with the guy. There’s probably like not that many ppl in s rank. And he calls himself donetello. Minato knows he’s supposed to be in jail but does he tell anyone? He’s like well.. that looks like someone else’s problem if they notice *goes and vapes* it’s so funny how little minato cares but it’s also not funny Bc some of minatos cruelest actions and things he’s complicit in are born not outta malice but apathy to everything. I think it shows (tangent number 4?) how the systems use of excessive force is counter productive cuz neither minato nor kabu are willing to report anything to disrupt the order Bc neither of them think the level of punishment is warranted. I also think that minato is probably the first person kabu really opens up to about why on a personal level he feels the system needs to be destroyed after Ep 7 is really interesting. It really speaks to how deep their [mutual and not platonic relationship I don’t know how to label ] is. I also think that he admits to minato that he envies human is rlly interesting and would like to hear what u have to think! I think it’s interesting that what really sets minato off is kabu saying he wants to choose for himself and also wants other cyborgs to have that freedom and I think it’s one of the few times we see minato get genuinely angry and have it not stem from worry. Tangent 5 I’m really extrapolating here but I think it’s very likely given how high up minato is that he likely knows of several cyborgs that rebelled against the system for similar reasons as kabu and knows how it ends and I think it probably feeds into his defeatist attitude. I think his role in the system must really kill whatever grasp of whatever minato has cuz he constantly has to act like it’s almost the end of the world and he’s strapped for resources all the time for like decades and decades of having to fake that type of desperation to entertain ur player base and cuz ur also on tv to entertain the general populace to distract them from their soul sucking jobs. I think that’s gotta mess with his perception of himself and also his ability to see that struggle as real and genuine. I think that’s also gotta be hard cuz he seems like out of his whole fuck we r under attack persona he seems like he’s a lil closed off but generally chill and somewhat upbeat to ppl who know him and he just wants to be isabella from animal crossing. I got really off track here. I think what really gets me is their relationship is built on knowing each other so well and so long , and how it’s managed to survive and persist through all this tragedy. They really mutually respect and love each other and that’s why kabu let’s minato walk away from his revolution even tho it compromises everything he works for. It’s why minato ultimently accepts kabus willingness to die for a tanker even tho he really doesn’t get it at all and it means it’s goodbye forever. But it’s still not enough to save either of them. Minato can’t save kabu from trying to passively starving himself to death and I’m not sure if kabu even knows where minato is at mentally. Sometimes no matter how close u are to someone there r things u miss and things u can’t help each other with. Even tho the two resolve to fight and then die together cuz this seems like the best choice Bc the system they were born into offers no alternatives, the deca dence doesn’t even activate without the help of other ppl. I think it shows one relationship cant support all that weight. In the end it is through their bonds with other ppl that gets them to an ending where they both survive when they decided alone their only option is death. Also u are so right about the other animals existing I totally forgot ty I cannot believe I forgot about the scorpion which calls to natsumes hairstyle which is a visual gag on how natsumes a bug and how like a scorpion, although unassuming, and fucking kill u, just like how her trying to get her boss to open up eventually leads to the whole thing toppling down. I also have a lot of thoughts about natsume but I’m still thinking of them and thinking hard Bc sometimes she becomes kabus inspiration Pinterest board and I don’t like that. When she shines she really shines but it starts getting sloppy towards the end so I have to think a lil longer about it. Okay I’m done. Also it’s kinda hard for me to look like I’m agreeing to ur points and nodding in this format but I really appreciate ur thoughts and will try to convey this. Maybe by formatting as a response to each of ur replies next time

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andy-the-8th · 3 years ago

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Day Of and Day After - Jess (Part 1)

First part of Creatures That Defy Logic - picks up right at the end of the movie

Read on AO3

There are a lot emotions wrapped up in seeing your best friend transform into a merman

"I finally get a friend, and he turns into a fish; this is so typical."

Damn, there were a lot of feelings wrapped up in the last few minutes. Jess had always been better with facts over feelings - science was straightforward, people were complicated. The whirlpool of emotions over such a quick span of time even more complicated, for him as well as everyone else there on the dock.

Exhilaration and awe - it was one thing to have been alongside Cody for the last few weeks, see his changes, speculate and then know he was a merman, in theory - and another thing entirely to see him fully transform and breach with a glittering tail right in broad daylight. Not exactly every day that creatures (people?) straight out of mythology just appear right in front of you. And the excitement that they'd get to hear about whatever he saw when he was away? New sealife, mysteries of the open oceans, may even merpeople culture? One hell of a prospect for anyone, triply so for an aspiring marine biologist.

Relief - more of a twofold sensation as well. Most prominently in the last few minutes, it certainly was a relief to not be dead. Almost drowning, no vital signs, shocked back to life by merman lightning - that'll do a wild number on your feelings about your own mortality. Still, Jess was kind of surprised that that wasn't the main sense of relief he felt right now.

Much more powerfully, he was relieved that Cody was safe. That boy's lack of self-preservation had scared Jess half to death plenty of times over - risking himself at the swim meets, ignoring the advice to stay away from the water, potentially blowing his cover to Sean or the school or worse. Whether or not it was normal to care so much, Jess didn't know or really care - he had spent plenty of nights unable to sleep, worried sick with images of cruel scientists, cold laboratory tanks, faceless men in black suits, dissection tables, taxidermists, freak shows - all kinds of threats, and the only thing Jess could about them was to try to keep Cody's secret.

So all that in mind, there was the relief that Cody had finally gotten away from all of that. Going off with his mermaid mom (mermom?), another mythological creature as far as 99.99% of the world knew, safely out to sea. Maybe that was merpeople's best protection, that short of having physical evidence, most of the world didn't believe in them - guess that's how they manage to avoid discovery. Most people anyway. On that topic though, the next feeling Jess was dealing with -

Anger. This one didn't even really start to register until after Cody had resurfaced to wave goodbye one last time, but thinking about all the threats he'd been afraid of, Jess couldn't avoid the conclusion that his own father should have been at the top of that list. Hadn't he literally just kidnapped his friend to use him as bait? What had been his plan then, if he'd caught Cody's mom? His dad's mermaid obsession had just been a mundane fact of life growing up - a kind of sad, fruitless endeavor. He didn't like to think his dad was crazy, but it didn't mean he really had believed his mermaid stories and theories since he'd grown out of that. It was just like any parent's eccentric hobby - kind of embarrassing sometimes but ultimately innocuous, right? Jess hadn't ever thought of how dangerous it might have been if his father had caught on - and he mentally kicked himself for not making that connection, for not planning for it, for not talking his dad out of it - Jess had basically caught him at the swim meet, and guessed he'd have put it together when Jess was reading through his mermaid theory papers, talking about the thirteenth year theory - but actually capturing Cody and his mom? The dull, cold fear that had caught in Jess's throat when he'd seen his father testing the giant net, when he'd biked at top speed to the Griffin's house, when he'd found the cove empty, Cody already gone -

Well, at least the upside of almost-dying was shocking John Wheatley into the danger of his actions, to his own son if not the merpeople. Jess was pretty sure his father just hadn't been thinking of the consequences past simply catching the mermaid - was never really much of a realist like that.

This didn't make Jess any less angry with him.

On top of all of these feelings, and maybe least expected - loss?

He definitely wasn't expecting that. Sure, the feeling of loss was all around him - however temporary his departure, Cody going away was definitely crossing a line. He wasn't human, and for each person on the dock, that meant on some level, he wasn't really theirs anymore. Sam was losing her boyfriend, Mr. and Mrs. Griffin their child. In a way even his dad was losing his proof to justify his obsessive search over the last 13 years. Sure, Jess was losing his friend, but hadn't their relationship been built around helping Cody through this transformation? What was he losing, if this was just the logical endpoint? He'd known where the transformation was headed, and he didn't expect to feel anything other than scientific satisfaction now it was done.

Jess told himself it was natural to feel like this; humans are social creatures, empathy has been one of our strongest survival tools over the course of our evolution. To solve problems together. To care about each other. Like it or not, we feel how the others around us feel, in one way or another. It was simple science.

His whole time with Cody had been like the best science project ever - an fantastical extension of the assignment that had brought them together. The thrill of getting to know him had been tied to the thrill of discovering his new abilities, helping him test them, spending hours talking through theories and myths. From a purely scientific standpoint, spending time with Cody was fascinating. It was simply to be expected that he'd want to spend as much time with him as he could - as a scientist.

What Jess hadn't expected was Cody's interest in getting to know him in turn. It made sense - Cody was going through strange changes, and Jess was the closest source of finding answers. And more or less, Jess knew that that was the glue of their friendship. He wasn't bothered by that, really.

Of course Cody would listen attentively when he went off on a string of marine biology theories, whether to get ahead in school or to make sense of his transformations. Of course he'd start asking Jess to hang out when they were free - no one else knew what was going on, and he'd been drifting away from his real friends. Cody didn't trust anyone else with the secret - and that was simple self-preservation, to seek out a scientist, rather than a friend. Especially someone who wouldn't blow the secret.

And there had been a kind of special thrill in that for the first few weeks - Jess got to be the only one who knew. Jess got to be the only one who Cody trusted.

A purely scientific thrill.

Jess suddenly shivered as the salty breeze picked up a bit, snapping him out of his own head and the feelings rushing through it. Cody had probably only been gone a few minutes, even if it felt like hours. Mrs. Griffin was still quietly crying, leaning back on Mr. Griffin, both of them still facing the water. Jess didn't really know if he was supposed to say anything to them, or leave them to each other. Should he confront his dad now? Should he try to talk to Sam? oh god he should apologize for the kissing comment but would that just make it worse?

The silence grew more tense for the next several moments, until Sam finally spoke.

"I - I guess I'll just be going home now." Jess could hear that she was pushing to sound confident after crying. She shook her long red hair back behind her shoulders and readjusted her shirt as she stood up straight.

"Oh hon, don't worry, we can drive you back to your place." Mrs. Griffin looked up, finding her voice again, almost sounding relieved to be able to help someone, do something.

"No thanks, Mrs. G, I want to walk. I want to, uh, decompress. Take some time alone to, to y'know, process this. Just feel like I should get some air" she finished hurriedly, with a half-laugh, at the normality of the statement. She nodded awkwardly as she backed away, toward the steps leading up from the floating dock, a pursed-lips-everything's-fine-fake-smile on her face. "Jess, I'll see you at school then?"

Sam had almost never acknowledged him outside of talking through or next to Cody, so Jess gave a somewhat confused nod and tried to smile at her. They only had one day of school left, mostly to pack up books, say goodbye to everyone, and leave for the summer.

"OK wait then" Mrs. Griffin was quickly more serious, purposeful. "I know this would probably go without saying, but you kids cannot tell anyone what happened here." She was talking at Jess and Sam, but had an uncharacteristically sharp glare at Big John as she said this. He didn't miss that, and immediately looked penitent and cowed.

Clearly, Jess wasn't the only one angry at his father for using Cody as live bait.

"Of course!" Jess immediately responded emphatically, even a bit incredulously. He was almost put out that she felt the need to say this, as if they all hadn't - as if he hadn't, longer than anyone - kept Cody's secret safe.

"We'll, um...we'll just tell the school, um..." she was casting about, turning to her husband, looking for a quick explanation.

"Hon we don't need to tell the school anything right now - it's summer vacation, it's not that weird to leave a day early."

"No, we need to be clear, we need a convincing story -

"If anyone really asks we can say he's doing a swim training camp, and he'll be away most of the summer" Mr. Griffin offered, a slight twinge of his usual humor back in his inflection. "It's not really that far from the truth. We'll say it's somewhere in Australia, far enough away from anyone looking to visit or call. And your sister lives out there anyway." He put his hand on his wife's shoulder - Jess thought it looked like he was reassuring and steadying himself as much as he was for her.

Sharon breathed quickly, calming herself. "OK, perfect!" Mrs. Griffin clearly seemed relieved - not calmed, but at least less frantic. Jess was also happy to have something simple and straightforward to tell anyone who asked.

Not like anyone will ask *me* anyway he thought. Jess always had been used to being more or less invisible when it came to social gossip at school, which he honestly preferred. And furthermore, probably for the better, it wasn't like anyone really associated him with Cody, even the teachers. At least not in any meaningful way beyond biology homework. No one would think to ask the nerd that Cody Griffin got unluckily saddled with for a science project what had happened to him.

"OK. OK, good. I'll see you all later then." Sam was hurriedly wiping her face as she turned on her heel, dashing up the steps to the main pier above the floating dock. She was quickly out of sight.

"Jess, you wanna go home, get dried off?" His dad was looking at him now, worry still coating his words. John Wheatley was not a particularly emotional man when it came to anything other than fishing and sea monster stories, but he clearly had not forgotten how close a call his son had just had. "Maybe go to a doctor?"

Jess could hear Mrs. Griffin's sharp intake of breath at what Cody had always humorously called "the D word." Thinking of Cody laughing at that caused the corner of Jess's mouth to twitch up for a second. But once his dad had turned to him, Jess could still see Mrs. Griffin staring daggers into his back.

"No I'll be fine. I feel fine, really." Jess could hear his anger seeping into his own voice and inflection but didn't really care. John Wheatley may have been more thoughtless than he was malicious, but that wasn't enough for Jess to forgive him right now, and he was still too much of a mess of emotions to process any of that with other people.

"I'm going to head home. Mr. and Mrs. Griffin, um, have a good summer?" His inflection put it through as a question - he wasn't really sure what to say but at least that sounded funny enough to deflate the situation as much as possible. It worked - both the Griffins kind of quietly laughed at that.

"You too Jess. We'll see you soon." Jess smiled back at Mrs. Griffin's words, then hesitantly started to walk back up the dock. He was actually surprised that he didn't feel any dizziness or illness after being revived - apparently merman-made hand (fin?) defibrillation worked wonders for the body. He turned and started up the steps roughly, quickening as he reached the top. Big John didn't move to stop him, pausing awkwardly at the foot of the steps, clearly getting the message that Jess didn't want to talk to him right now. Jess reached the main dock and turned across the parking lot of the marina, down the little road toward the family boat yard and sheds, shoulders straight, and not looking back.

#the thirteenth year #mermen #mermaid #dcom #disney #disney channel original movies

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rickyriddle · 4 years ago

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Kirigaya Hitsugi profile

Hey there! I was meant to do this analysis since I read the latest KnR doujin about ChitaHitsu. Well, better late than never. There were some interesting new details about Hitsugi in this doujin and it did change the way I see her character. You may remember that I did in the past an analysis of Hitsugi with a different interpretation, but given the new information given, I changed my mind on her. So without further ado, let’s begin this analysis.

Let’s begin with what we know about Hitsugi. She’s an assassin known as Angel Trumpet and the ace of the Datura Organization which specialized with using the poison of the datura flower. According to an official AnR card game, Hitsugi is 15 years old. Given that she’s the ace of such a powerful organization at such a young age let me believe that she was an assassin for a long time, possibly trained since she’s a child. But those are speculation.

We were left to believe Hitsugi first met Chitaru at the bus station when she was lost on her way to Myojo Academy and seemingly fall in love at first sight with Chitaru. But, if you consider KnR canon (as I do), then it’s actually not the first time Hitsugi met Chitaru.

Hitsugi met Chitaru at a funeral. It doesn’t explicitly mention who died, but I assumed it’s Chitaru’s teacher’s daughter. Hitsugi mentioned that she went to the funeral out of curiosity, but she feels nothing, that there are no colours in her world and that she only has blackness in her heart.

But then she saw Chitaru rushing in the funeral, looking distressed (which is why I guess it’s the daughter of her teacher who died). When she saw Chitaru, Hitsugi said that colours shined upon her life. Chitaru probably didn’t see Hitsugi. So yes, Hitsugi fell for Chitaru at first sight but not when we thought she did.

(in that moment,)

Then she leaked information on Angel Trumpet’s existence, which was unknown until now. Why did she do that? It’s not said explicitly, but we can all assumed that she wanted Chitaru to know about her. Their apparently fateful meeting at Myojo Academy was all orchestrated by Hitsugi. Hitsugi knew she killed someone important to Chitaru (well, her teacher), so she used the leak about Angel Trumpet as a bait to attract Chitaru’s attention. She probably chose to participate in Class Black because she knew Chitaru would join too, to find Angel Trumpet.

Let me recapitulate. Hitsugi fell love at first sight for Chitaru even if she knew that she caused pain to her by killing her teacher’s daughter and leaked the existence of Angel Trumpet as a bait, manipulating her so they could meet. I knew ChitaHitsu was unhealthy, but this is beyond that. Hitsugi is obsessive, and she’s a manipulative stalker who hides behind a cute and childish persona. A true yandere.

Hitsugi remorselessly got closer to Chitaru even if she knew she wanted to kill her, she played the innocent little girl to gain Chitaru’s trust and deceived her. She unashamedly worked to win Chitaru’s heart while hiding her true self behind a childish mask. I initially thought that Hitsugi was struggling with keeping it secret and always intended to tell Chitaru, but now I have doubts. She did say to Suzu that there is something she absolutely can’t let Chitaru know (that she’s Angel Trumpet), but later say that “she’s the only one who can give Chitaru what she wants (her death), which made me think that perhaps she wanted to come clean. But now I just think that it was simply a constatation from Hitsugi, not that she actually intended to tell Chitaru the truth. She could have kept the masquerade forever as long as she gets what she wanted: Chitaru’s heart.

Her obsessive love for Chitaru was such that she even poisoned a fellow classmate who she suspected to have a crush on Chitaru. *cough* yandere *cough*

Unfortunately for her, Chitaru eventually discovered the truth. Hitsugi immediately gave a half-assed apology that seemed everything but sincere. She said, “I wouldn’t have killed her if I knew she was your friend” which is the dumbest apology ever. Hitsugi didn’t even know Chitaru when she killed that girl, so even if she knew she was Chitaru’s friend, she would have still killed her because at that time they didn’t know each other.

This is just a manipulative tactic to make it looks like she regrets her actions and controls Chitaru. Then came the other tentative of manipulation: the real justice knife and the fake love knife. In my first analysis, I thought it was the proof that Hitsugi always had planned to tell Chitaru the truth and let her choose her fate, but I don’t think so anymore. I think that she never intended to tell the truth but that she still considered the possibility of Chitaru finding the truth herself, thus planned the knives as a way to get away with her lie. By making it look like she’s giving a choice to Chitaru to either forgive her (love) or kill her (justice), she thought that it would be enough to influence Chitaru’s choice to use the fake knife and thus, forgive her.

But she underestimates Chitaru’s thirst for justice (well, more vengeance), and Chitaru ultimately used the real one and stabbed Hitsugi, before trying to take her own life (with poison) out of guilt and sorrow because she did love Hitsugi too.

But things didn’t end here for the love birds (unfortunately). They both survived thanks to the power of yuri and whatever (KnR 4 and KnR room 4 seem to contradict themselves on that one). They both ended up at the hospital and Chitaru ended up really weakened by the poison she drank. She could barely walk and had to undergo rehabilitation. Hitsugi stayed by her side but Chitaru still felt grudge towards Hitsugi and couldn’t fully forgive her. She faked to feel regret for her past action and started to show some crocodile tears and tried to “run” away, only to be stopped by Chitaru-san. Hitsugi did that to gain Chitaru’s sympathy and keep her control over her. She has no issues with guilt-tripping the one she loves if it means she’ll stay with her and never show any sincere regret and remorse for her past actions.

If we analyze most of her actions in the series, Hitsugi is a cold and manipulative person who hides behind a childish, cute and innocent persona, taking advantage of her petite body. She shows no remorse for the murders she had committed and very little to no empathy, and she’s ready to do anything to get what she wants. She does, however, seem conscious that she’s an awful person, but it’s unclear if she genuinely feels bad about it or only care because she doesn’t want Chitaru to hate her. Chitaru is the only person she seems to care about, and she’s willing to die if it’s what Chitaru wants. Some may think it’s just how passionate and devoted she is, but to me, that just sounds unhealthy and obsessive. Instead of facing and recognizing her mistakes, she would choose death. She seems to only be able to feel regret when it’s related to Chitaru, but she’s incapable to fully process the remorse.

Now, something interesting that Minakata mentioned in KnR room 4: “Recognizing that Otoya is an intrinsic psychopath, Hitsugi is a psychopath due to her environment.”

Did Minakata outright reveal that Hitsugi is actually a psychopath? Well, not exactly. Basically, Minakata called Otoya a “born psychopath”, thus she’s born that way, and Hitsugi as a “made psychopath”, thus became one due to her upbringing and environment. But, there is no such thing as a “made psychopath”. Psychopaths are born that way. So what is Hitsugi?

She’s a sociopath. Similar to psychopathy, sociopathy is put under the same diagnosis (antisocial personality disorder). I looked up in Japanese and there doesn’t seem to be a word for sociopath, which would explain why Minakata referred to both Otoya and Hitsugi as psychopaths. Also, sociopathy is sometimes referred to as “secondary psychopathy”. So technically, referring to Hitsugi as a psychopath may not be totally incorrect. But, for the sake of what is more commonly accepted in psychiatry, I’ll refer to her as a sociopath.

Is Hitsugi really a sociopath? I actually never thought about it until I saw this comment from Minakata, then realized… that it actually made a lot of sense. According to the diagnosis of ASPD, to be diagnosis with it you need to have those criteria:

- Failure to obey laws and norms by engaging in behaviour which results in criminal arrest, or would warrant criminal arrest: She’s literally an assassin. Sure, it’s her job, but poisoning Shiena out of jealousy wasn’t part of her job.

- Lying, deception, and manipulation for profit or self-amusement: Her whole character is about lying, deceiving and manipulating. She mostly does it for profit, but she did admit that she also killed and ruined people’s life out of curiosity.

- Impulsive behaviour: Hitsugi seems to have a lot of self-control, tho I would say that poisoning Shiena out of jealousy was kinda impulsive (especially since she did it after being provoked by Shiena). But other than that, Hitsugi is pretty high-functioning thus less impulsive than the typical sociopath.

- Irritability and aggression, manifested as frequently assaults others, or engages in fighting: Again, assassin, poisoning Shiena out of jealousy. But as I mentioned right above, she’s high-functioning so she has a good sense of self-control.

- Blatantly disregards the safety of self and others: I mean, she kills people and put herself in mortal danger.

- A pattern of irresponsibility: Doesn’t own up to her bad actions and continue to manipulate Chitaru even if she knows it’s wrong.

- Lack of remorse for actions: She doesn’t give a shit about all the life she took and the pain it caused to others.

But, in order to be diagnosed with sociopathy, one needs to be 18 or more. Yet, Hitsugi is only 15 years old. Sure, someone doesn’t suddenly turn into a sociopath at 18, the antisocial behaviours usually started during the teenage years. And the cause is mainly the upbringing, the environment and sometimes even trauma. Minakata did confirm that Hitsugi was that way because of her environment, which leads me to believe she was raised and trained to be an assassin from a young age. Years of conditioning to kill and potential mistreatment shut down her capacity to feel empathy and became a callous person who is only self-interested. There is no doubt that at 18 she would get diagnosed as a sociopath.

Maybe some will remind me that she truly loves Chitaru. I believe so too. That’s the thing, sociopaths are actually capable of love and can even feel some empathy for people they have bond with, which seems to be the case with Hitsugi. It’s one of the things that differentiated them from psychopaths, who can’t feel love or bond and will never experience empathy (like Otoya). Hitsugi genuinely loves Chitaru, but her love is obsessive, unhealthy, toxic and abusive. But, it allows her to have some empathy for Chitaru and Chitaru alone. She doesn’t feel bad about that girl she killed, but she does feel bad that it hurt Chitaru. Yet she can’t help but manipulate and deceive the one she loves, because she’s incapable of taking her responsibilities and own up to her past misdeeds. She doesn’t seem to feel particularly bad about that, as she is more likely to put her own need over Chitaru’s. Yet, thanks to the small amount of empathy she feels thanks to Chitaru, she also has the desire to make Chitaru’s wish come true by letting her kill her. Perhaps that since she’s not an adult yet, her feelings for Chitaru could tone down her antisocial tendencies, and she can finally feel regret over her past actions. In KnR room 4, we saw for the first time Hitsugi utterly shocked when Chitaru refused to kill her and instead want her to live, because no one as ever forgives her for living. She knows she deserves to die and she’s not worthy of forgiveness, so a part of her is changing thanks to Chitaru, and perhaps her sense of empathy is slowly coming back.

Another detail I think is worth mentioning, Hitsugi sent letters to some of her classmates, either to thank them or apologize to them, and added pills in case they are “tired to live” (so poison to kill them), basically giving them the tool if they ever want to commit suicide. Charming. Really disturbing and screwed up. So, even if she does change a little, she’ll probably always stay messed up.

I think that will be enough for Hitsugi. Let me know what you think, if you have any comments or if you disagree with me. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time. Bye!

#akuma no riddle #riddle story of devil #anr #koakuma no riddle #small riddle of evil #knr #minakata sunao #semi-canon #analysis #sociopath

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steviejayneblogs · 4 years ago

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4 Steps To Become More Confident!

5 Minute Read

When you’re confident and happy, it’s like magic clearing a pathway for you. Watch how people interact with you differently, work opportunities open up, outfits start to look better on you, and your walk changes.

I am a very confident person, but it wasn’t always like that. In high school it was especially hard although I kept to my magical recipe and kept moving forward. Now at the age of 27, I still heard women say, “I just wish I was confident or had people look at me like they do to you”.

My heart breaks when I hear that because we are all beautiful and radiate our own unique light. Here are the four steps to becoming more confident! You’ll feel the difference.

1. Reflect on Your Social circle:

Having one good friend is better than having ten fake friends.

Your social group can shape you as a person. We are very receptive to people near us. Surround yourself with people that make you feel good, that understand and accept you. Having friends that are positive and kind, will keep you in check to be the best version of yourself.

I once had friends that would never invite me to anything, wouldn’t let me in photos with them and they complained about everything. I felt very drained afterward just a few hours with them. I was convinced it was my lack of confidence or it was a “me” problem.

After reflecting, I noticed they weren’t there for me in the downs, only for the highs. I noticed when I removed them from my life, I had fewer stresses. I started rebuilding my confidence and put energy into real friendships that were mutual. I stopped feeling drained and stop questioning myself.

With my new friend, I actually found myself giggling thinking back on our jokes. We would talk about our goals and motivate each other. I had more time to focus on myself because we had an unspoken understanding of a healthy friendship with no unrealistic expectations.

2. Positive Affirmations:

Speaking to yourself with self-love in the morning and evening.

You’ll notice over time you will literally walk past your reflection and just compliment yourself, triggering a smile. You will do it naturally and feel great. We are brainwashed by so many things as soon as we open our phones, watch tv, hop in our car, or even when checking out at the supermarket register. Why can’t you be on your side and repeat self-love? Brainwash yourself until it sticks. You're not lying to yourself when you do this. You’ve just brainwashed that you're not worthy or beautiful. I'm telling you to brainwash yourself to be true to yourself. Only good can come from self-love and a healthy mindset.

Personally, I take 5 minutes and listen to a positive affirmation video with my headphones in. Whilst I do my morning and evening skincare routine. I’m looking at my reflection already, I may as well tell myself how much I appreciate all that I did today or going to do. If you’re not your biggest fan, how can you expect others to cheer you on?

I literally wake up knowing that this particular day will never happen again. I’m going to love myself and be appreciative of who I am and all that I am. With that, you will start to respect yourself on higher levels. You’ll set higher goals, eat better, make better decisions, say no to that guy that’s not texting you back. He clearly is blind, and you don’t have time to teach someone to see today!

3. Eating Right and Working Out:

You’ve heard of the saying “you are what you eat”. I view this as, if you eat junk food all those chemicals, preservatives have a reaction in your body. It will affect your mood swings and you can gain weight over time. Which again makes you feel a certain way in your clothing when it doesn’t fit.

When you eat healthily, you are fuelling your brain, you're giving all your cells the nutrition and antioxidants it needs. Giving you a natural glow, healthy nails, and hair, etc.

Working out will release happy endorphins making you feel good. It’s a great stress relief from your day and it's always a plus to be toned and a stronger version of yourself.

4. Being Kind to Others:

Being kind to others without putting yourself down. Kindness is accepting yourself and admiring others beauty. You help lift others on their confidence journey, then in return, someone will do the same to you. Kindness provokes a smile on your face, and you can’t help but be happy.

Kindness is having manners, saying thank you, and going out of your way to appreciate someone. In action, you are approachable because you are leading with a kind-hearted mindset. People will feel comfortable starting a conversation with you and will find your presence to be fun and alluring.

Your kindness goes hand in hand with empathy for others and wanting the best for others. Watch how you attract people. When you do good you will attract good back into your life. Be confident in that statement. Your magical pathway will open up to you.

Additional Notes:

Exploring and going on adventures is so amazing for your soul. You are putting yourself into situations that you would not normally be in and you are discovering aspects of your personality as each obstacle arises. So many people have life-changing experiences when on holiday. If your not then, your probably holding back or went on a holiday with the wrong circle of people? I always want to experience new situations, it's building on myself on a really fun level. I definitely recommend doing these confidence steps, then plan your adventure. You’ll make so many friends, and be so grateful for all that you have.

As always be safe and keep shining!

Author: Sunshine Zandt

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#confidence #self esteem #self improvement #self healing #loveyoursoul #howto

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setinprovincialbohemia · 5 years ago

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ON SELF-RESPECT

Joan Didion (1961)

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others. Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proved competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself; no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through ones’ marked cards the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others – who we are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

To protest that some fairly improbably people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one’s underwear. There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English inAppointment in Samara and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbably candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: “I hate careless people,” she told Nick Carraway. “It takes two to make an accident.”

Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of mortal nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self- respect springs.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-yaer-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: “Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke out about it.” Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, “fortunately for us,” hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnee.

In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult bin the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with ones head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.

But those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

#joan didion #vogue

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ice-cream-nekogirl · 4 years ago

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Damien Marsh is Amy’s ex-boyfriend who she met in America and fell in love with but later dumped and threw him out of a glass window. He arrives to UA in hopes to reconcile with Amy.

Name: Damien Marsh Hero Name: Hirudo Species: Warlock Special Power: Drain Weapon: “Sentio Wand”

Damien: These A-holes don’t know nothing. They’re too obsessed being perfect little goody goodies that they don’t know that you just gotta do what it takes to win and get what you need. But oh well... makes it easier for me.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8v_4O44sfjM

TRIGGER WARNING: References/allusions to sexual assault.

He’s got a very approachable disposition, is highly intelligent and good at social situations as he can read people, and he’s also quite attractive too which makes him come off as a very nice, savvy and likeable guy. However this is all merely a façade, as Damien is actually extremely manipulative, deceptive and callous as he sees himself above everyone he interacts with and just weasels his way into things just so he can benefit himself.

Damien was inspired by some of the nastier boys I had the misfortune of growing up with, and the idea for him came to me when I listened to Christina Perri’s song ‘Jar of Hearts’ and Damien was born and it gave me an idea for his special ability of draining the power and energy out of people. I also thought about Amy’s history and I thought that she’d be the type to get into a bad relationship, because she has had bad relationships, whether it was familial or romantic.

And the thing about Damien is that he’s a very insecure guy who thinks that everyone is so much better than him at everything, but to the point where he’s not very sympathetic because he lets all of his insecurities get to him and goes to extreme lengths to mask them by boasting about himself, presenting himself as this amazing and perfectly poised young man, and also taking credit for what others have done. He’s become like a leech, he sucks the positivity out of others if it means he’ll feel good about himself, because he does that.

He literally sucked the joy and happiness out of Amy by draining her of her magic and rendering her powerless because it made him feel good, made him feel stronger and like he was above her in every way. Every time Amy couldn’t use her powers and magic, was because Damien made sure that she had no power while he did. So, he ultimately represents a toxic person who drains the life out of people around him like a parasite all for his own benefit and because he wants to feel good about himself, but resorts to hurting other people to do that so he doesn’t have to feel bad about himself.

And he’s as slimy as he looks, seriously he’s one of the worst guys I’ve ever made, at least in terms of personality since he’s a total douche and makes BNHA jerks like Bakugo, Monoma and Shindo look like sweethearts.

Damien is a Jerkass incarnate, he’s emotionally abusive and manipulative to Amy, and also a complete jerk to Shinsou, Izuku and Todoroki when he meets them, and is a tool to boot since he’s such a faker and a shameless ass-kisser when he needs to be. However, people who are close to Amy such as Shinsou, Bakugo and Ashlen can see right through him, commenting that he absolutely stinks of bullshit and even Amy’s other classmates such as Jirou, Tokoyami and Tsuyu aren’t fooled by him and note that he’s a liar and a phony.

Needless to say, many of Amy’s peers are not very fond of him when some of them greet him, Shinsou, Bakugo and Todoroki despise him, and Ashlen grows to quickly despise him since he’s as fake as the people from her old school and is well aware that he makes her best friend uncomfortable.

Their fears and concerns are all proven to be very founded since Damien’s intentions come to light and it urges Class 2-A to act and fight him since he threatened and harmed some of their classmates and even killed one. Sadly though, Damien actually shows that he’s a force to be reckoned with in his own right since he already knows everything about the class both from the news and his step-sister’s Divination power allowing her to know everything about anybody she focuses on. Damien’s also a very powerful warlock and considered a dangerous person to fight and he proves it…

Personality:

At the very beginning, Damien was initially an introverted and shy young man with a lot of insecurities over his powers and feeling weak in comparison to his peers. And he treated Amy very kindly, feeling shy around her, but was also happier when he was around her and had a great time when they first started going out.

Unfortunately, this quickly changed when he started a relationship with her as he grew possessive, jealous and later on almost emotionally abusive and neglectful towards her as he flirted with other women despite being with her and disregarded all of her words and did what he wanted because he felt like it.

Becoming increasingly famous also made him much more entitled and pompous, but Damien showed that he also lacked empathy as he had no problem hurting Amy’s feelings and failed to see why she was so hurt by his actions or when he deliberately lost her favorite toy as he merely told her that she’s too old for toys anyway. Damien seems to enjoy fame and riches more than anything, as he has no real desire to be a hero or help anybody as he merely claims that he wants to help people, but is simply interested in only helping himself.

To other people, he seems like a nice and collected young man, but soon it quickly becomes clear that he only acts polite to others when in reality he’s very judgmental, petty and arrogant. Having no qualms insulting others and mocking them, as he insulted Shinsou many times and mocked Izuku’s process as a student at UA, while also insulting others such as Todoroki and Tokoyami.

Damien is a parasite both figuratively and literally as he latches himself onto others so he can take their power and life-force to make himself stronger until there is nothing left for him to take. Almost everything he does isn’t on his own merit, as he made Amy do all the work for him and perform rituals that would benefit him. Not only that, but even his main weapon the ‘Sentio Wand’ is something he crafted using a strand of Amy’s hair so he can use the power flowing in her DNA for himself.

Because his power allows him to take and absorb other’s powers/energy and steal them for himself, he developed a superiority complex as he loves to brag about how powerful he is even though his power relies on him stealing other people’s powers just so he can have any strength at all. He’s also callous and cruel, as he had no problem putting Amy down just to see her down and make himself feel better about himself and seemed to enjoy doing this since it felt good for him, which also shows that he’s a hedonist who does things that he enjoys simply because it feels good, whether it’s moral or not.

Due to his superiority complex, he’s also a chronic harasser and an entitled ass who believes that he deserves anybody he wants and deserves to get whatever he wants from people, as he not only forced Amy into trying to give him oral sex, but also forces her to kiss him by using Concilium on her and allowing him to forcefully kiss her. He also does this to Shinsou, Izuku and a majority of Class 2-A by forcefully kissing them without their consent so he can absorb their life force and put into himself.

Damien also has something of a misogynistic streak, or at least it’s only towards women he particularly dislikes as he makes misogynistic remarks towards Amy and her female friends, especially Ashlen and Madison as he noted that he needed to get Amy alone and away from them because he knows that ‘bitch friends always stick together’. He also made some pretty sexist remarks towards the other UA girls by calling them weak since neither of them have stood out in comparison to Amy, yet also says that Amy’s too much of a ‘bitch’ to get good attention, like Cordelia and the other Robichaux witches.

Ironically, he thinks highly of his younger stepsister because of her expertise in magic, intelligence and devotion towards him, but this may be because she’s the only human being that Damien has any love for and his only real redeeming quality. But Damien proves to be a bad influence on her as while he loves her very much, his worst qualities rubbed off on her she ultimately has no empathy for other people other than him. Damien is partially aware of this, but it’s why he’s protective of her, to the point of begging Papa Legba to keep her alive, although he got terrified when Papa turned over to murder him instead and it urged him to immediately offer to kill Amy instead of having either him or his step-sister die. Which shows that Amy didn’t mean that much to him because he had no problem trading her life for his own.

His lack of empathy extends to everyone else, as he looks down on everyone and humanity in general, insulting and belittling all of Amy’s peers. Damien is something of a sadist, as he enjoys going for a person’s weakest and sorest spots to provoke them into a reaction, as he lures Amy in and abuses her catatonic state when he reminds her of the hardships and personal feelings of abandonment she experienced from both Fiona and Hero Society, which allows him to drain her of her magic and kill her by drowning her in the bathtub.

His sadism extends to Amy’s other friends, as he makes fun of them when he’s fighting with all of them and mocks their grief over Amy as they discovered that he killed her. As he insults Todoroki by bringing up his traumatic childhood and friendship with Amy and also mocks Bakugo for his relationship with Amy, and pretends to sympathize with Izuku about his own past complications with the former. Damien also takes joy in making the others weaker than him and exerting his power over them by taking their power away for himself and appears to enjoy putting himself above others and crushing them afterwards simply because it makes him feel better about himself.

But despite his arrogance, Damien is a coward at heart as he pathetically pleaded for his life when Papa Legba was going to kill him and was willing to murder Amy if it meant that he could stay alive a little while longer. However, he also threw away lives of other warlocks who were his friends and who were helping him in his quest to find Amy, sacrificing them and letting them die or get thrown into jail by pro-heroes if it meant he could keep breathing air a little while longer. And finally, when he was killed, he tried to appeal to Amy as he begged and cried for her to call off the burning until the very end.

He’s also a foil for pretty much all of Amy’s closest friends Shinsou, Ashlen, Madison, Bakugo, Izuku, Todoroki and Kaminari.

While Shinsou’s been Amy’s best friend since childhood, she only met Damien about 3 years ago. They both felt like misfits and underestimated by their peers due to their supposedly ‘evil’ powers but Shinsou wants to use his powers for good while Damien has no qualms with using his powers for his own selfish desires. Likewise, Shinsou’s friendship with Amy is genuine as they bonded over their powers and feeling like misfits while Damien feigned bonding with Amy just to get her to do his bidding.

Ashlen and Amy became very fast friends as Damien did, but Amy had no idea about Ashlen’s origins nor did she know about her witch heritage and developed a genuine friendship made up of love between each other but Damien was well aware of Amy’s connection to the Supreme and used her for his own benefit as he faked a bond and had no real love for Amy. They’ve also both turned off her powers, but Ashlen did it as a means to keep Amy from going overboard, and from hurting others and herself, while Damien did this to keep her under him and to feel like the dominant one of their relationship.

Madison’s a bad influence on Amy as was Damien, but for all the way she bullies and pressures Amy, she genuinely loves her and wants her to be happy and make her feel good while Damien is more interested in his own feelings and is more content with putting Amy down if it means he’s happy.

Izuku was Amy’s first love, although she convinced herself that it was Damien, and that he reminded her of Izuku when they first met, however, they’re both extremely different. Damien and Izuku were both bullied by their peers for being different from others with Izuku being quirkless and Damien being one of the ‘weaker’ warlocks, but the difference is Izuku always had the desire to help other people and kept his kind nature even after gaining his powers while Damien ultimately just wanted to help himself and his growing powers gave him a sense of entitlement. And then there’s their relationships with Amy, while they’ve each gone downhill before, Izuku always treated Amy with genuine respect and valued her as a good friend that he can learn from and truly made the effort to apologize to her when he hurt her, while Damien’s fondness for Amy was real in the beginning he started to instead see her as someone he can benefit from and he never felt apologetic for hurting her, and saw no fault in his actions towards her.

Bakugo and Damien have both been in a relationship with her, and unlike Bakugo, he initially treated her kindly and politely while Bakugo and Amy started off as enemies. However, their relationships are starkly different as Amy and Bakugo have a close, somewhat belligerent but passionate relationship and he does respect Amy and genuinely cares about her happiness. But Damien instead faked a good guy persona and used his charm to woo Amy and has no real respect for her nor does he care about her happiness.

Damien and Todoroki bonded with Amy over sharing similar sad pasts, but Todoroki grew to appreciate and love Amy as he could truly understand her trauma and even began looking out for her when her past started to haunt her. And while Damien felt connected to her in the beginning, his selfishness showed as he started to only use Amy for his own comfort and couldn’t truly empathize with her and made no effort to do so.

Kaminari and Damien have dated Amy, but Kaminari and Amy only went on one day and remained very good friends who absolutely love each other’s company and have a lot of genuine fun with each other and make each other smile and laugh, while Damien continued to date Amy but started to mainly do what he wanted to the point where Amy had to pretend she wasn’t miserable with him.

Abilities/Super Moves:

Damien is a very powerful warlock, although physically he’s not very strong at all as he is very lanky and scrawny like most warlocks, with very little muscle and a very thin and skinny frame. But he becomes much physically stronger when he drains someone of enough energy and power to fuel himself. He also passed the Warlock examination by being able to perform Scrying, Transmutation and Stricidium. But Damien also showed to be quite proficient in at least four of the seven wonders such as Telekinesis, Concilium, Pyrokinesis and Vitalum Vitalis.

In fact, much like Amy, Damien has a very unique power that is a stronger form of one of the seven wonders due to having a parent who had a quirk that mutated into a unique, more powerful version of this wonder. He calls this power ‘Drain’ as it’s a much stronger version of Vitalum Vitalis, as Damien can balance the scales between life and death, but Drain allows him to also absorb his victim’s life-force, power, energy and vitality to make himself stronger and render them unable to use their power as Drain completely weakens them both physically and mentally. Drain is a very powerful and effective ability as anyone who falls victim to it is left powerless and unable to fight back to the point where some pass out from the drain in energy, or even die if Damien drains them of all of their life-force. And he can do so with numerous people as he drains one person, and uses his newfound strength to move onto the next on in a feeding frenzy he calls ‘Super Drain’.

But Damien appears to be only able to use this power through oral means by kissing his victims so he can drain and suck out their energy so he can take it in for himself. However, upon fighting Tokoyami, Damien realizes that he can’t kiss him to drain him, but instead uses his fangs that are also available for him to use to bite into someone to steal their life force as he bites Tokoyami on the neck instead to drain him of his energy, akin to a vampire. This move he would call ‘Vampire’s Kiss’ since he likens it to giving a hickey while draining his energy, much to Tokoyami’s great disgust.

Although according to Damien, Drain can also allow him to completely drain out the power of a victim if he drains them entirely of their life-force and takes it in for himself, which explains why he has gotten even stronger over time because he’s taken the life-force and power of other warlocks and witches.

Drain is also strong enough to take even some of the most dangerous powers from others that Damien attacks. In the form of a super move he calls ‘Leech’s Kiss’ as Damien realized that Izuku had some great powers upon kissing him and nearly killed him and stole his power by draining him of his entire life force because he had no idea it was the power of One For All that he was trying to absorb until he was stopped by Ashlen.

When Damien is draining someone of their life-force, his victims turn pale and sickly, but some also turn skeletal and hollow if he’s trying to absorb all of their life-force and energy, complete with hair turning dull, and their muscles going weak and almost atrophied.

While taking this life force makes Damien look healthier, younger and increasingly attractive, but this power comes at a cost to his own health as using Drain way too much has taken a toll on Damien’s body. He is mostly healthy and attractive on the outside but when he uses the power too much, his appearance drastically changes as he reveals himself as a pale, emaciated and sickly young man who looks constantly exhausted and has to rely on other’s life force just so he can replenish himself and regain his strength back.

Despite these flaws, Damien is still a very powerful and dangerous opponent in battle as he took down almost all of the 2-A students by himself using his magic and Drain alone, and absorbed their power and energy to make himself stronger and harder to beat. In fact he was even able to take down and drain the energy of strongholds such as Todoroki, Bakugo and Tokoyami once he caught them in his traps, and would have successfully killed Midoriya by sucking all of his life-force had Ashlen not saved him.

So while he’s a leech and a horrible person, he’s really not someone you want to fight in battle because he KNOWS how to lure people in, trick them and go for the kill since he’s an expert with Concilium, Telekinesis and Vitalum Vitalis.

It’s implied though that while he was burnt to the stake, that he’s not exactly dead-dead and could possibly make a return.

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m00nslippers · 5 years ago

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Actor!Jason AU Roman losing his shit because he wants Red Hood but he also wants Peters, then rumors of Hood and Peters are dating now he doesn’t know if he should have one of them killed or he should take both of them 😂 So now he sends Slade out to find out if Hood & Peters are truly dating, but Slade already knows Peters and Hood are the same (lol because Deathstroke) and Slade’s a closet Peters fan so he casually stalks Peters with the excuse it’s his “job” Roman still has no clue and yeah

Okay, the thing about Roman is, he’s a surprisingly busy guy. He’s running a company, a criminal empire, stalking Gotham elite’s social scene every night, and everyone knows if you want something done right you’ve got to do it yourself. The only other person he trusts to be competent is David Li, so Roman is usually all up micromanaging people, like “Where’s the drug shipment? What are Sionis Steel’s profit margins? Why have you not fucking killed any of those bats yet?” Someone doesn’t perform, he gets someone new to replace them. He’s in the work smarter not harder business, he’s not like these psycho rogues with stupid plots to get Batman’s attention, for him it’s all about the money, honey.

This being said, Roman doesn’t exactly have a lot of time to watch movies. He goes to the opera a few times a year to keep up appearances and because he’s old school Italian, so he appreciates it as an artform, but general action movies? Naw, not worth his time, he’s got better shit to do.

So when Jason Peters, some nobody-actor from Crime Alley got some attention for talking shit and calling Roman out for some kind of Gotham Celebrity Death Match charity idea, Roman is just like, who the hell is this guy? He’s got no clue.

Cue all of his False Facers piping up like, “Oh my god, Jason Peters called you out, boss!” and “He’s amazing! He’s the real deal!” and “What I wouldn’t pay to be punched by Jason Peters...” and “Jason Peters is a real Gotham homeboy.” They go on and on until Roman has to threaten to toss a few off his building if they don’t shut up. Apparently this kid is popular or something? All the Gotham thugs just love him and they love his movie. So as much as Roman doesn’t generally stoop to humoring his men, he figures it’s research into his enemy and the media keeps bothering him about this guy so he might as well see what he’s dealing with, decide whether to ignore this moron or send him a message he won’t soon forget.

So one night he turns the burners on his fireplace down low, pours some wine and turns on the ol’ On Demand and sits down to watch Gotham-Something-Hot-Something-Action-whatever, generic action movie title, he’s already forgotten. Roman has seen pictures of the man on the news before so he recognizes Peters right away when he comes on screen only a few minutes in. Peters is the lead, apparently recruited right off the Gotham streets? It’s like a Cinderella story, ridiculous.

For the early few scenes Peters doesn’t do much but stand around in a suit behind the stereotypical Carmine and Falcone stand-ins, looking menacing and intimidating. Roman just doesn’t get it. Sure, he’s definitely attractive even by Hollywood standards, and he really sells the implacable silence thing but it’s nothing some buff guy off the street can’t do, which may just be all Jason Peters is.

And then the first action scene happens, with Peters character walking into a warehouse meet full his Boss’s rival’s goons with nothing but an impeccable suit, a knife, an automatic rifle and a handgun and Roman is floored. Holy crap, Peters did all these stunts himself? He hasn’t seen such insanity since the last time he was in the unfortunate position of one of the bats trying to storm his penthouse and he couldn’t exactly appreciate it when he was trying to get to his safe room. This guy had real athletic ability and probably real skill to pull off this stuff. He could see how it would appeal to the basal idiots Roman employed who were easily distracted by flash. Peters believably delivers the impression of a one-man wrecking crew you would not want to be on the wrong side of.

But the movie has only just begun. Directly after the fight scene, Peters’ character reports to his bosses and then returns to his own apartment which is a crappy, rundown place in Crime Alley, and he’s stripping off his tie, shrugging off his suit jacket, and sees...blood spatter, still on his hand. And Peters goes into the bathroom and starts washing it off, motions getting jerky and frantic, eyes getting wide, breathing harsh and then he’s punching the mirror, shattering it to pieces and slicing his knuckles open and the man staggers back into the bathroom wall and slides down, tears running down his face. He reaches into his pocket and unfolds a picture of a girl and Peters speaks his first words of the film. He’s apologizing to his sister, he took this horrible awful job to give her a good life, to get them out of Crime Ally, but she got gunned down in the street before he could get them out and now he’s stuck, he’s stuck doing this shit and he’s good at it but he hates it. Every word on Peters’ mouth is pure Gotham City street syllables you can’t fake, and it all seems to come from a place of dark reality. You can hear the desperation and depression, see how broken and hollow he is. And Roman...he feels a thing.

And that is a big deal. Roman is a borderline sociopath--okay maybe he’s a full on sociopath--he lacks empathy, sob stories mean nothing to him. Yet another reason he doesn’t watch movies, it’s just all such unbelievable schlock. His whole life Roman grew up with a fake mother and a fake father surrounded by fake people faking everything. People pretend they’re civil and good in public, but they are all selfish inside, just looking out for themselves, they are all just like him, so Roman feels no remorse killing people, taking from them, cheating them, forcing them--if they had his power, they would do the same thing. Roman doesn’t feel things for other people.

But Jason Peters made him feel something in that scene.

Roman watches the rest of the movie in a daze. The lead actress comes in and usually Roman would be eyeing her up but he’s only got eyes for Peters. Fuck the love story, he’s just here for Peters, the plot is superfluous, Jason Peters is the only thing that matters in this movie. He sells every word, every emotion, sometimes the script seems to let him down a bit but he’s so good he manages to get the feeling across anyway. Roman is captivated.

By the time the ending credits roll, Roman has purchased the movie and is restarting it as he texts David Li to set up something with this guy post haste. A party, a charity auction, one of that Wayne bimbo’s galas, whatever, doesn’t matter, he needs an excuse to meet this guy. To see if he’s real.

So Li gets him into some kind of charity luncheon for underprivileged kids, and he manages to get himself at Peters’ table. He switches the name plates when no one is looking so he’s right next to the guy and he arrives, fashionably late, but with a big check for the charity. The guy looks just like his character, that’s real at least, not movie magic. Roman tries to engage Peters and after a few minutes of talking with the guy, pretending to be the charismatic business persona he adopts in public as Jason goes off about his Gotham Celebrity MMA Tournament idea--which Roman is really warming to if only because it would give him an excuse to gut-punch Cobblepot in public without ruining his reputation--and Roman gets this odd sense of Deja Vu. Peters feels so familiar, and Roman tells himself its because he just watched the man in a movie. It’s the speech patterns or something, sure.

And now Roman is starting to wonder if he could actually get this silly fight thing off the ground because if he went in, he would not only get to beat the snot out of Cobblepot in public but he’d have an excuse to get close to Peters. So they keep discussing it during the luncheon and finally Roman asks Peters, “So this is for charity or somethin'? What kind of money are you thinking to pull in with this fiasco?”

Peters’ smirks and said, “I was thinkin’ fifty million.”

Roman just scoffs, “Fifty million? What, are you trying to budget a movie? I thought you just did one of those.”

And then Peters goes still for a moment that lasts too long before he gives a stiff chuckle and says, “Naw, affordable housing for the Narrows, Park Ave and Bowery neighborhoods.”

And Roman doesn’t realize it then, but after he’s given Peters his business card, one with his actual personal number written on the back, he’s waiting for his driver to pull his car around and realizes shit. He knows exactly why Peters is so familiar.

Jason Peters is the fucking Red Hood.

#dun dun DUN #Oh no I made it angsty #This used to be a funny AU #If you missed the reference #the line about fifty million dollars is the same as their lines from Batman:Under The Red Hood #That's how Roman recognized him #Endulging my love of JayRoman #Jason really just wants to punch Bruce in public without any backlash #Roman is pretty on board with this idea #Accidental Actor!Jason AU #Actor!Jason #AA!J AU #Spicing up this AU #Jason Todd #Red Hood #Roman Sionis #Black Mask

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goldenkamuyhunting · 5 years ago

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Do you think Ogata is a sociopath?

Sorry for the late reply. Sadly this is an extremely busy working period for me.

Anyway…

is Ogata fitting sociopath trope?

It’s a really interesting question and also, if I’m not wrong, a hot topic for the fandom so I’ll try to answer it the best I can.

I’ll use as reference for the Sociopath trope tvtropes because it’s good enough to analyze a character of a litterary work.

So, for this trope, we’re given 5 defining qualities (I’ll copy the words of tvtrope below so people don’t have to go back and forth to check it).

1) Lack of Empathy and Devoid of Conscience: Their defining feature. Utterly ruthless doesn't begin to describe them: except for when trying to appear normal, they will disregard any social norms and semblance of morality in pursuit of their own selfish desires. The Sociopath will do whatever it takes: lie, cheat, steal, extort, manipulate, or use outright violence without the slightest hesitation, disgust or remorse, and for as little as Pleasure or The Evulz. Murder and violence have no more emotional weight than eating Chinese takeout or some other mundane activity, and they have no concern for the direct or collateral damage they do to other people, being unable to understand why anyone should. Likewise, they never truly understand the feelings of others on anything more than an intellectual level, and may even believe that everybody else is faking it too. As many Real Life criminal psychologists put it: "They know the words but not the music." Techniques for learning moral behaviour, such as reason, therapy, rehabilitation and behavioral reward/punishment, will not work on them or tend to only make their behavior even worse by making it easier for them to fake it. This is why the only thing resembling consistently successful treatment involves teaching them to avoid behaviors that have predictable consequences; they may still believe that consequences are bullshit, but if they have been made sufficiently aware of the fact that their behavior will always end up with them in jail, getting sued, or simply just getting jumped or killed when they fuck with the wrong people, and that they can't lie and fake their way out of it because people are wise to their game, they will usually shape up.

Noda actually debunk this in Ogata’s second apparition and it’s THE DEFINING FEATURE of the trope.

Not only he has Ogata decide they won’t kill Tanigaki in Huci’s house because Huci reminds him of his grandmother, whom he loved and therefore he doesn’t want to kill her (chap 43),

but he also have him to save Nikaido (Chap 45)

eventhough Ogata is sure it’s a trap (Chap 45).

In case people hadn’t gotten the message well Noda remarks his meetingwith Huci left an impression by having him remember her when Tanigaki mentionedher (chap 110)

making him consequently offer to help Tanigaki (yeah the way hewent at it was horrible) and in other small instances (like how although hedoesn’t believe in dreams he tells Asirpa he should write her instead than justsaying he should ignore her for being senile and naïve (chap 113)).

He also remarks that Ogata knew a wounded Nikaido would be a liability byshowing how one of the war techniques Ogata learnt in war was to woundopponents instead than killing them (chap 46)…

and underlines this again in thefight with Vasily, where not only it’s explained again how wounding opponentsis a technique used to damage enemies (Chap 162)...

but Ogata also comments on how Vasilywon’t expose himself for his companions as he evidently would be comfortablehearing their screams of pain through all the night (chap 162)...

which was what Ogata should have done instead than saving Nikaido.

We’ve other instances in which Ogata showed he’s not utterly ruthless,like when he saves Shinpei instead than letting his father kill him and onlyafterward killing the man (chap 59).

We’ve him claiming he doesn’t feel guilt for the people he kills and yethe hallucinates and is clearly haunted by the memory of his brother, whom hekilled (chap 164/165).

More recently instead we’ve the scene in which he comfort Koito (chap199)

...or the fact once he was left alone with Koito he didn’t harm him in retaliation for slamming his head against his nose but just tied him (Chap 200).

Noda likely created those settings exactly to debunk the defining feature of thetrope, so we won’t get the wrong impression about Ogata.

2) Consummate Liar and Manipulator: In the event they are ever targets of suspicion in crime dramas and thrillers, sociopaths are able to fool any Living Lie Detectors in the cast, pass polygraphs effortlessly, and fool even you, the audience, into believing they are genuinely kind and caring people who are victims of a "big misunderstanding" (assuming they are not so smugly confident of their own invincibility that they feel no need to hide their unsavory personality). Moreover, despite their lack of empathy, sociopaths are capable of using their knowledge of others' desires, emotions and insecurities to manipulate them for their own personal gain. Because of this, many of them are Faux Affably Evil. This is related to their lack of empathy and shame - they don't feel the slightest discomfort about lying or exploiting others, so they do so with the same ease in which normal people perform mundane activities. This is why you should always assume that any apparent epiphany from a sociopath is bullshit; as far as they're concerned, it's just another tool to get what they want, and they don't actually believe that they have done anything wrong. Don't let them know that they are full of shit, because it will just force them to become more slick, but do act with the knowledge that they will go right back to their old ways the minute that they think it is safe to do so.

Yeah, Ogata lies in Golden Kamuy. All the cast does, even Asirpa.

But the idea here is he has to be a consummate one, a GOOD one, a masterful one, not just a guy who here and there lies. He has to be so good at lying he can manipulate others though his lies.

And Ogata fails at lying. Noda debunks this as well in Ogata’s second apparition when he tells Tanigaki that he was joking when he said Tanigaki might have killed Tamai and Co and Tanigaki is free to remain in Huci’s house because Ogata will act as if he had never seen Tanigaki (Chap 43).

Tanigaki is so sure Ogata is being sincere he thinks he has to leave AS SOON AS POSSIBLE (Chap 43).

And I’ve spent lot of time discussing how his lie about Sugimoto’s final moments was a complete and utter mess, the clear sign the most Ogata can do are extremely simple lies because as soon as he tries to make up a story that’s as unbelievable as possible.

Ogata can be a good strategist during a battle.

We see it in the Barato arc, also in the sniper duel and, if we want, also in his recent escape. However he’s clearly not good at manipulating people in interactions.

He can’t win over their trust, which is a big requisite to manipulate people as he’s almost universally distrusted, we see it not only with Tanigaki, who simply didn’t buy his lie nor spilled the truth about Sugimoto’s involvement but also with Sugimoto himself, who’ll be more prone to trust Kiro or Hijikata, who’ll both betray him to try to get Asirpa, and even Tsurumi than Ogata even when it’ll be really obvious Ogata is actually right (remember the fake Ainu arc?), with Yuusaku, who won’t spend time with whose women nor kill a man, with Asirpa, who won’t give him the code and honestly, I’m not even sure his attempt at hinting Tsurumi’s involvement in Koito’s kidnapping will be something Koito will understand.

In order to be a manipulator is not enough to attempt to manipulate, you’ve to do so successfully. And Ogata fails at this.

3) Pathological Need for Stimulation: The Sociopath's raison d'etre (i.e.: an overriding goal which serves as one's "reason for existence"). Due to their inability to empathize or even care for those around them, sociopaths largely view their existence as boring or meaningless and therefore feel compelled to engage in "thrill-seeking" activities to alleviate their restlessness. How this manifests depends largely on the sociopath's personality. It can be as relatively benign as binging on video games, compulsively gambling, or leading highly promiscuous lifestyles. Far more dangerous examples are prone to satiate their lust for thrills by partaking in criminal enterprises, becoming serial rapists and/or killers, or (if they are unusually high-functioning) accumulating vast wealth and/or influence for the sole purpose of dominating as many people as they can for their own amusement. Due to their obsession with indulging their insatiable appetites however they want whenever they want, sociopaths have a very low tolerance for inconvenience or irritation which in turn leads them to have a pronounced lack of impulse control. Because of this, many of them are Ax-Crazy, have a Hair-Trigger Temper, and/or are Mood Swingers.

That’s hard to say.

So far Ogata never stated to find existence boring without action. Sure, he’s engaged in a very risky hunt and he’s rather reckless but does he has a pathological need for this or, like the rest of the cast, he’s just thinking this is the price to pay to reach his goal? He’s in this for the fun of it or he has a different purpose? Until we don’t know Ogata’s goal we can speculate as much as we want but we can hardly say for sure.

What we know is Ogata has a very good impulse control, that he’s usually very cold and even in the few circumstances we’ve seen him angry or in a tight spot he hardly lost it.

4) Shallow Affect and Complete Lack of Emotional Reciprocity: A Sociopath is physiologically incapable of experiencing a deep emotional attachment towards others but - being a Consummate Liar - learns early in life how to fake them. This shallow emotional life means that the Sociopath is unable to form sincere long-term relationships with anything or anyone, but will feign feelings of love and affection if they feel it serves their purposes. Most of the true feelings a sociopath harbors towards others, positive or negative, are rooted in an insatiable desire to dominate or control them. While narcissists desire to be loved or at least respected, sociopaths don't care whether others view them positively as long as they don't stand in the way of their own self-centered gratification. In the rare event that a Sociopath actually does form an "attachment" to another person, it rises no further than that between an owner and a possession and/or a valuable resource for advancing their goals. Thus, once such "friends" cease to be useful or entertaining, they will abandon them or, in some cases, even kill them without any hesitation or regret. Any emotional reaction to having committed a heinous act is met indifference at best and glee at worst.

Technically debunked again in Ogata’s second apparition.

As said before not only Ogata declared he had feelings for his grandmother but even went out of his way to spare Huci because it reminded him of her.

But I know this is viewed in a rather controversial manner.

In fact so far we hadn’t seen him developing a deep emotional attachment toward others as he remained a loner.

The fandom though was very impressed by two things.

One is his relationship with Yuusaku. It’s worth to note that Noda made very clear that Ogata wanted to avoid Yuusaku and not have a relationship with him at all (chap 164),

...and it was on Tsurumi’s request he ended up on having to try to deceive him and get them what they wanted. It’s also meaningful how Ogata never played the whole thing on the affection side. The most he did was to point out he and Yuusaku were brothers so they should get to mischief together, but he never tried to use feelings into the play, he insisted in calling Yuusaku ‘Yuusaku-dono’ and he never asked Yuusaku to do something because Ogata loved him or out of the love Yuusaku should feel for him.

Ogata is clearly not faking any affection for Yuusaku, he’s at most giving him some of his time. Yuusaku, who has already decided Ogata has to be delighted to have a little brother even when Ogata clearly hinted the contrary, might not see it but this speaks more of Yuusaku’s obsession to get Ogata to be his big brother than about Ogata’s attempt at faking feelings he didn’t felt.

The other thing the fandom likes to talk about is Ogata’s relationship with Asirpa.

That one is a rather controversial topic.

Asirpa is friendly with Ogata. Nothing over the top, she just deal with him with the same kindness she would deal with everyone else (actually she’s kinder with Tanigaki considering the guy threatened her and tried to use her as human shield and she completely forgave him that and saved his life. Twice).

Ogata’s interactions with her, for most of the story, are not responding to it at all.

He’s not faking affection, he’s just mostly not interacting and keeping on his own.

It takes him months to say ‘citatap’ as she repeatedly asked him and call Asirpa by name. It’ll take him even more to say ‘hinna’.

Asirpa decides to remain friendly with him. That’s Asirpa’s decision, it’s not Ogata’s actions, or more exactly his lack of actions that cause Asirpa to remain friend with him.

And Asirpa is clearly not the type who needs to be rejected to latch to someone as we see she’s just fine with being friend with Sugimoto, Shiraishi, Kiroranke, Tanigaki and others, who aren’t keeping distant, nor she’s so starved for affection just a word would win her over.

Even when he will try to get her to give him the code he won’t try to play it on the ‘if you care for me/trust me give me the code’ or on the ‘I care for you so I’m telling you what would be best for you’.

Really, to assume Ogata was faking affection with her would require accepting he can’t fake it to save his life.

5) Grandiose Sense of Self-Worth: The trait that ties it all together - the one that changes it from moustache-twirling evil into a mental disorder. Sociopaths will go so far as to convince themselves that they have succeeded in their plan, even as failure stares them in the face and snaps on the handcuffs. They genuinely believe it. They don't really care what others truly think on the matter, but they do care about what they say, and like to fill their social circle with people who say what they want to hear. Any others - even former 'friends' - will be dismissed from the sociopath's social circle simply for doubting them. They consider themselves better than anybody else and that they are entitled to special treatment - and they can't stand anybody being considered better than them. However, while the Narcissist is self-conscious of how they measure up to others' standards (and therefore will experience shame or guilt for failing them), a sociopath's grandiosity is all-encompassing to the point they have no concern how their actions reflect upon them UNLESS it threatens their ability to indulge their appetite for further stimulation. They are incapable of acknowledging personal responsibility for failure, and will always blame others, no matter how irrational it is. In fact, it's considerably difficult convincing them that the activity they have partaken in has even failed. This is all part of why a sociopath can't change - since they consider themselves to already be perfect, and refuse to acknowledge failure on their part, and consider the true opinions and feelings of others insignificant, they never try to improve themselves.

Honestly I wouldn’t say Ogata has a grandiose sense of self worth.

Sure, he knows he’s an amazing sniper and he occasionally brags about it.

Everyone does know Ogata is amazing at sniping. This is, after all, a fact that’s accepted by the whole cast and that’s actually proved more than once, after all Ogata fits the trope of improbable aiming skills with his impressive feats of shooting two deer at once or managing to catch three woodcocks with a less suitable rifle, exterminating a reindeer herd on his own or hitting targets with an impossible precision from an amazing distance.

Ushiyama too comments on how he’s Ushiyama, the Undefeated, even if he lost to Gansoku here and there when they only used fists (Chap 143).

Just bragging a little on a real skill isn’t a sign of grandiose sense of self-worth, just of rightful pride for it. Yeah, modesty is an important virtue but you don’t turn into a sociopath if you’re proud of what you can do.

What’s more noteworthy though is he knows he’s a rejected kid, anunwanted one, who wasn’t loved and that feels he lacked something fundamental. He’s aware of how, being an illegitimate, his existence was a source of shame for his father. He comments on how he knew he wouldn’t be able to persuade Asirpa, admitting his failure. He admits his responsibility in his actions.

Therefore I can’t really see him as a guy with a grandiose sense of self worth.

And so with this, we’ve finished with the defining traits for this trope.

Tvtropes also says:

Many of these traits are shared with other disorders, but it's the combination of them all that creates the trueSociopath.

In short you need them all to have a character that fits this TROPE (please, remember, this is a TROPE, the real personality disorder that goes with the same name is not something an ordinary person can find out in real people with this checklist, no, not even if, like me, they studied psychology in high school, this is a list for a TROPE as this is a fictional work).

As a result honestly I can’t see Ogata fitting into them because, for the first 2, Noda actually did his best to remark howthey don’t fit to Ogata from his second apparition, for the 3rd we can’t really say as we lack material, I’ll let the 4th up to debate and honestly, I don’t see him matching with the 5th.

As a trope Ogata fits the cold sniper with improbable aiming skills and an ambiguous disorder (at least for now... who knows, in the future Noda might tell us).

The one of the sociopath isn’t really cut on him.

It doesn’t mean Ogata is a good person, or that he only does good things, it’s clear he does a BIG DEAL OF TERRIBLY WRONG THINGS and we know sociopaths can do this sort of wrong things.

However Noda apparently wasn’t interested in making Ogata a sociopath or otherwise he wouldn’t have written scenes debunking a sociopath’s main characteristics and, believe it or not, in real life you don’t need to be a sociopath to do the sort of wrong things Ogata does so it’s not like Noda is being unrealistic.

Sorry to whoever wanted him to be one, I know each fandom loves to have its own memetic psychopath but as they’re not my cup of tea I fear I won’t partake into the ‘fun’ of turning Ogata into one.

Thank you for your ask!

#Golden Kamuy #Ogata Hyakunosuke #Ask

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cummunication · 5 years ago

Text

Are you Dating a Sociopath?

1 in 25. Research indicates that’s how many people are diagnosable sociopaths. When it comes to psychopaths, (luckily) the number is higher… 1 in 100. But let’s not get them confused. “Sociopaths are often called psychopaths and vice versa but there are differences between a psychopath and a sociopath. … And while sociopaths and psychopaths do share some traits, sociopathy (antisocial personality disorder) is generally considered less severe than psychopathy.” For example, a sociopath might be someone who takes advantage of others for money, fame, sex etc. while a psychopath is more likely to be a serial killer and commit mass murders. You can go your entire life without anyone knowing you’re a sociopath while psychopaths are the people more likely to commit severe crimes and end up in jail.

Antisocial personality disorder is the diagnosis in which sociopathy and psychopathy fall (cluster B) and it has been on the rise over the years. If you’re swiping daily on tinder, how many people do you pass each day? (I wouldn’t know because I’m not on the app but I suspect a decent amount). Let’s say you swipe 25 times each day. That means over the span of one week you have passed roughly 7 sociopaths. This can be alarming whilst dating because sociopaths don’t look like Hannibal Lecter and you can’t tell someone is mentally ill by looking at them. Sociopath’s actually tend to be extremely alluring and charismatic. It’s no surprise you may end up falling for one and not find out until it’s “too late”. So what are signs to look out for? Could you actually be dating a sociopath? Let’s learn more.

“When you’re in love, it’s easy to gloss over some of your partner’s less flattering traits. But if your gut tells you something might really be off with this person, don’t write off those feelings ― especially if you suspect they could be a sociopath. Sociopaths don’t look like the Joker and show up cackling and howling and ready to manipulate They’re not always so easy to recognize. They can appear to be the guy next door. And until you get to know them, you wouldn’t necessarily know they are sociopaths. So what is a sociopath exactly? Characteristics include a persistent disregard for right and wrong, a tendency to lie and manipulate others, a lack of empathy and remorse, emotional volatility, an inflated ego, and engaging in impulsive and irresponsible behavior. And though the label is frequently used in the media and pop culture, it’s not actually a clinical term. The closest clinical diagnosis would be antisocial personality disorder, which is characterized by a pattern of disregarding or violating social norms, laws and the rights of others without remorse ― not being a loner, as the name might suggest. It’s estimated that roughly 3 percent of men and 1 percent of women meet the criteria for antisocial personality disorder. It’s worth noting that some experts prefer to use the term “psychopath” instead. Some use sociopath and psychopath interchangeably to describe a person with a more extreme case of antisocial personality disorder. Others, contend sociopaths and psychopaths are similar, but differ in some key ways ― for example, sociopaths lack empathy but are capable of it, while psychopaths are incapable of it altogether.” If you frequent my blog you are well aware I was in a life-threatening relationship several years ago. Although my ex never sought professional help (as many sociopaths don’t) I would bet my life on him being a sociopath. Since I am not a licensed professional, I can not technically diagnose him but like I said, I’d bet my life on it. I’ve also had my mental health professionals refer to him having a personality disorder… narcissistic, borderline as well as sociopathy. In the beginning, he was beyond everything I could’ve asked for. Little did I know what was to come or who he was behind the mask. If only I’d known what to lookout for I might’ve saved myself years of misery. So due to my own experiences I’m here to help you. Here are some of the most prevalent, common warning signs you or a loved one may be in a dangerous relationship with a sociopath. “RED FLAG #1. Having an over-sized ego. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) notes that sociopaths have an inflated sense of self. They are narcissists to the extreme, with a huge sense of entitlement. They tend to blame others for their own failures. They prey on your good qualities. People with sociopathic tendencies are accustomed to lying, so it’s not as hard for them to fake feelings. Some sociopaths are skilled at pretending they’re wounded and hurt. Sometimes a sociopath will target a woman because she’s big-hearted and maternal and vulnerable to wanting to care for someone who’s been emotionally hurt.” RED FLAG #2. Lying and exhibiting manipulative behavior. Sociopaths use deceit and manipulation on a regular basis. Why? Lying for the sake of lying. Lying just to see whether you can trick people. And sometimes telling larger lies to get larger effects. Their professions of love feel false and hollow. They often will say things like, ‘You’re the girl I’ve always wanted.“ Or, ‘I couldn’t be luckier to find someone like you.’ Sort of pat, trope, cliche expressions, as if they heard that in a movie and they’re merely repeating it. Their professions of love and caring do not feel genuine. Something about it feels off. They do not feel emotions in the same way that regular people do. What they do is see others express emotions in real life or on TV and then they mimic them.” My ex-boyfriend once dropped off a note on my car while we had been broken up and I had gone no contact for several weeks. What first appeared as a heartfelt, long, love letter, I later found out he copied off the internet. Of course he claimed to have created this beautiful poem himself but I guess he forgot the internet is a thing and how easy it would be to access the lyrics. Needless to say, it didn’t mean much after I found out it was copyrighted. “RED FLAG #3. Exhibiting lack of empathy. They don’t really have the meaningful emotional inner worlds that most people have and perhaps because of that they can’t really imagine or feel the emotional worlds of other people. It’s very foreign to them. They treat you or others with contempt and cruelty. You might also want to observe not just how they treat you, but how they treat other people in the room. Sometimes you’ll catch them behaving heartlessly to someone when they don’t know you’re watching. RED FLAG #4. Showing a lack of remorse or shame. The DSM-V entry on antisocial personality disorder indicates that sociopaths lack remorse, guilt or shame. They have volatile mood swings. This person might have unexpected, unstable and abrupt mood swings. You say something and suddenly they go into rage. A sociopath likes to control and manipulate. So if they thought their ability to control was being threatened, that might send them into a tizzy. RED FLAG #5. Staying eerily calm in scary or dangerous situations. A sociopath might not be anxious following a car accident, for instance. Experiments have shown that while normal people show fear when they see disturbing images or are threatened with electric shocks, sociopaths tend not to.” This is due to a difference in biology. FMRI scans show people with antisocial personality disorder have a different sized amygdala than someone without. This physiological difference may explain their constant need for stimulation as the amygdala also known as the “fight or flight” part of the brain, is in charge of emotions such as fear; which sociopath’s display less of. “RED FLAG #6. Behaving irresponsibly or with extreme impulsivity. Sociopaths bounce from goal to goal, and act on the spur of the moment, according to the DSM. They can be irresponsible when it comes to their finances and their obligations to other people. They may have a criminal past and refuse to take any responsibility for those misdeeds. Particularly if they tell you there was a criminal past but say, ‘It’s not my fault. They just did it to me. I happened to be in the wrong place and I was blamed.” Side note - My ex happened to say the same exact thing when he was convicted of a felony. According to him, however, nothing was ever his fault. “They’re constantly making messes you’re left to clean up. There would be regular crises in your life related to money going missing, or other relationships with family or friends breaking down, this is because the psychopath prioritizes his or her needs and enjoys risk-taking and sensation-seeking behavior. You would be left to clean up the mess. RED FLAG #10. Showing disregard for societal norms. They break rules and laws because they don’t believe society’s rules apply to them.” My ex boyfriend would smoke cigarettes inside of public restaurants, and whip out his penis in the middle of a family park. He would also frequently disregard traffic signs and make safety violations while driving. I’m not sure if he did this to be funny, to scare me, or because he felt he was above the law. Perhaps it was a mixture of all three. “They are also extremely controlling. You begin to detect that your partner is excessively controlling, dictating when, where, what time and under what circumstances you’re going to get together. They attempt to manipulate your behavior and control who your friends are and your activities. RED FLAG #7. Having few friends. Sociopaths tend not to have friends—not real ones, anyway. Sociopaths don’t want friends, unless they need them. Or all of their friends are superficially connected with them, friends by association. They don’t have many friends or close relationships. The individual is very, very evasive about their personal life and details of past relationships and very overly guarded and evasive. And if they get irritated when you probe them about it, that could be a bad sign. RED FLAG #8. Being charming—but only superficially. Sociopaths can be very charismatic and friendly — because they know it will help them get what they want. They are expert con artists and always have a secret agenda. People are so amazed when they find that someone is a sociopath because they’re so amazingly effective at blending in. They’re masters of disguise. Their main tool to keep them from being discovered is a creation of an outer personality. They seem too good to be true. They are that man or woman at a club or at a bar who just seems to be paying you too much attention and is too solicitous. However, you quite like the attention. That’s the thing about psychopaths: They can at first be fun to be around, and so you get drawn in. They need to do this, as they are later going to use you and all the information that they have extracted from you during this courting phase. They establish a closeness only in as much as it is useful to them. There’s something glib about their charm. There’s no depth to it. It can be turned on and off. RED FLAG #9. Living by the “pleasure principle. If it feels good and they are able to avoid consequences, they will do it! They live their life in the fast lane — to the extreme — seeking stimulation, excitement and pleasure from wherever they can get it. RED FLAG #11. Having “intense” eyes. Sociopaths have no problem with maintaining uninterrupted eye contact. failure to look away politely is also perceived as being aggressive or seductive.” I’d like to add, even if your partner does in fact, have many or all these characteristics, if you are indeed in a relationship with a sociopath you might dismiss them and brush it off as being “all in your head”. This is due to something called “gas-lighting” which is a manipulative tactic sociopaths use to make you believe you’re crazy. That’s why it can be so difficult to end a relationship with a toxic person. I’d like to reassure you if you suspect something is up with your significant other, you’re probably right. Especially if you spend a decent amount of time researching “am I in an abusive relationship” or look up videos on sociopaths. They’re very good at making you doubt yourself so you don’t leave them. I’d suggest listening to your intuition. Your instincts are there it just becomes harder to recognize while dating a dysfunctional person who abuses you. I hope this helped in even the slightest way. Feel free to reach out with any further questions or comments. Help is available and you are not alone. Contact the national domestic violence hotline for more information/resources.

#sociopath #sociopaths #clusterb #abuse #domestic abuse #domestic violence #mental abuse #emotional abuse #verbal abuse #dating #dating advice #relationship #relationships #redflags

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writingonthemoon · 5 years ago

Text

Old Clothes Part 3

Part 1//Part 2

Word Count: ≈ 2985

Warnings: Mentions of death, blood, loss, traumatic events, swearing, suggested suicide in past

Fuck guys, I'm sorry this is so late. I meant to post it on the 25th, but I had no WiFi for basically the entire day since I was travelling. And I probably wrote, like, 85% of this during my 45 minutes of break time at work so it'll most likely be bad. But I still hope you really enjoy it an I’ll try to do my best to update with school starting and me still working, but yeah. Enjoy!

Old clothes were never quite right. The fabric never felt like it should on the skin and there were always hems that were too short on the pant and arms that were just a tad long. Some spots always had to be patched up and items had to be tailored no matter what condition they were received in or how old they were. In the lack of honesty upon the heart of the wearer, the clothing has to keep pace and ensure the lie is believed. The appearance of perfection had to be true to the eye before it could be to the mind, then the heart. My brother hated that saying.

If anyone were to wonder where the devil had gone once he escaped hell, they would be directed to my siblings, particularly my little brother. He was a wolf in sheep's clothing and my sister a fox in a hare. Clara was always influenced by her big brother because he was only four years her elder and a born salesman. The two were a force of destruction and anything in their path would be ruined in their wake. My mother had given up on them once Clara learned to walk and began sprinting after her troublesome brother and into danger. It was all left to me by then.

He was never responsible, even if his name was that of an Old God. Well, there's only so much to say when I only knew him up until he was 12. And to compare him with others his age, the boy was well beyond their maturity. Of course, he was. The Burn was ingrained into his life since he was born. Ashes made up his skin and the fire burned in his soul. Often times I felt pity for the small child that would curl beside me as the campfire smouldered. No one should have to go through with the consequences of my actions, especially one so young and impressionable. In those moments, I would tell him stories of heroes who did the right thing because it was just that. I could never let him follow my lead. No, my little Elijah would never become what I was.

Before I realized, I was wriggling in Jack's grasp to escape the present. His arms flexed and I could tell he wasn't going to let me get away so easily if I still seemed erratic. My eyes made their way down to my hands and they were shaking like a tree in a hurricane. I curled them into fists to take control back and it worked long enough for Jack's grip to relax. My body stumbled forward and crumpled in front of the image of my little brother, "Oh my god, Elijah." Tears welled and I held the face of my family I lost long ago, hoping everything would come back once again. Just one more time, I wanted to see my baby brother and sister and my parents. One more time. Just one. And I did; in Albert and Buttons, I did. But they weren't them.

The shattering of my heart cleared the cloud of emotions from my mind and I pulled my hands from the cheeks of the imposter boy. I held them to my chest, ashamed of what I had done and the commotion I had caused. "I'm sorry," I mumbled, shaking my head lightly and looking to the wrinkles in the skirt that would never go away. "I'm so sorry. This isn't right."

A hand met my shoulder and I flinched at the feeling. Comfort wasn't meant for someone like me, who was the source of turmoil and chaos and fear. I looked to see who couldn't and it was Crutchie by my side. I could feel his empathy pulsing through the air like waves. "Whaddya mean?" He worked his way down to the ground beside me, "What ain't right?"

"This." I gestured to the space around our small group, "All of this. You, Albert, Buttons. Even Jack, none of this is right. The fact I'm here—" a sob got caught in my throat, "I shouldn't be."

Albert crouched in front of me, "Youse gonna be back home in a bit, Dette. We just gotta clean you up." All I could see was Clara, my baby sister who I lost so much time with. Her shining brown eyes and freckled nose and red hair that went everywhere it wasn't supposed to. It pained me to see her and know it wasn't real.

"No, you don't understand." There was resentment in my tone. Not towards those around me, but myself.

"Then help us understand." Jack's voice came from behind me, "Tell us what's goin' on. You may've just met us, but we is gonna be the best chance you gotta talk. 'cause I know none a those rich folks will listen ta ya."

"None of you will get it, though. There's one person who does and they're gone. He's gone and he's never going to come back to me."

"So you lost someone." I nodded as if it were a question, but it was a confirmation. "Do you think talkin' 'bout it will help?" I nodded once again, the words bouncing in the corners of my brain.

Buttons looked to the leader, "Should I go find Davey?" He even sounded like Elijah. There was the British accent that was only an idea since the time in England was short to non-existent. Next thing I knew, he was gone, running off into the woods of newsboys that were in an unnatural silence.

"Okay, Dave's comin', so let's get ya fixed up, okay?" The comfort in Jack's voice led me to rise with the others and I followed him to a bathroom. A sink was filled with water that was once steaming but had cooled exponentially since it was run. My hands were placed in the liquid and it started becoming a haunting red that chilled me.

"Okay, once we is done wit cleanin'—” a few shouts and a crash made all our heads snap toward to door, "Dammit," Jack ran from us.

I pulled the drain in the sink and watched the swirling tornado direct the water to the black void. My fingers flicked the faucet on, water flowing onto my palms and stinging slightly. I sucked in a sharp breath and watched the blood flow down the sides of the white porcelain. I scrubbed at my knuckles and shut the water off, drying my hands with what was probably the cleanest towel the boys owned. I wrapped my hands up with Albert and Crutchie watching on. It felt like a surgical operation with the still air. The completion of my task was the beginning of a conversation, one I was not looking forward to.

"Jesse..." Crutchie started, meeting my eyes in the mirror, "did he understand?" I nodded, "What happened to him?"

I shrugged, a bitter laugh and unknowing gestures going with it, "How should I know? He left me years ago when we were in Cairo and I haven't seen him since." I held my head with my hands for a moment, "I mean, someone that you've given your life to and vice versa should have the decency of finding a way to contact you at some point in your years apart. It's only proper manners."

"Years?" Albert was confused beside me, "But youse only seventeen."

I stopped. Fuck, I messed up. I just started and now I have to do this all again, "D—did I say years? I meant—" Footsteps sounding from behind us gave me a way out of the corner I put myself in.

He was tall and much more put together and clean than any of the others I had met. His nose hooked and he was tired, yet still held a proper posture that would seem otherwise. "Hi, I'm David Jacobs." He put his hand out for me to shake and I did such, even with the pain radiating up my arm.

"Odette. How do?" I took note of how Buttons stood behind David and how there were still flakes of blood on his face.

"Alright. So, uh..." He trailed off and I took this time to observe him.

"You have a little brother, don't you." The reaction I got from him was what I expected, "The way you carry yourself... you're trying to make an impression not only on me and the younger boys, but someone else too. Someone close." He slowly nodded and I could sense the question he would ask, "I carried myself the same way you do. All older siblings do it without even knowing... I had a little brother. Sister too. They're gone now."

"But you said your nephew was just born. Unless you have another sibling, that means..." Albert protested, trying to make the fake timeline real.

"Compared to the life I've lived, he might as well have been." I smiled softly, "How old was your Nona Clara?"

"Wha—uh, 86. She was 86 when she passed."

Of course. She was living right under my nose for all those years in the city we promised to live in together. "Thirteen years ago." My voice gained a far-off sound to it like my body was here by my mind was somewhere else, "Huh, she lasted longer than I thought she would with all the stupid things she did. She always beat the odds. Then again, she was eight the last I saw her."

"How could you have known my Nona?" Albert's voice was rising to a level higher than his usual one. It was confusion that was getting him.

"It was Treegap wood, no? The one your Nona Clara lost her sister in. You may have only been three when you heard the stories, but you know it's true. And Buttons," I spun to face the thirteen-year-old, "do you have a grandfather of some sort named Elijah by any chance? Had two sisters? One named Clara and the other Odette? We're his parents named Lilijah and James?"

He was frightened, but he had been through worse and this was more confusing that anything, "Are you a witch or something?"

I laughed, but it seemed more deranged than my normal one. Perhaps that was what was happening to me. I was going mad, "No, of course, I'm not a witch and they certainly don't exist either. I'd know if they did." I shook my head slightly as I continued to laugh, "I'm something much better... or worse depending on how you look at it."

"Okay, Dette, you're freaking us all out." Crutchie held out a hand to calm me down. Funny how Jesse used to do the same thing. "Can we bring you somewhere not in the restroom so you can explain?" I nodded like a child almost and skipped along behind the brood of boys that led me to an empty kitchen area. It must not be used much as there was more dust than the pyramids settled on every surface.

Jack, who had now appeared and stood close to Davey to get the rundown, was staring at me while I sat on a table. The group, my interrogators, were across from me in a neat line. It was the neatest thing in the room. I looked at their expressions, putting together the puzzle of emotions they all presented.

Davey was doing the same I was, only trying to figure out where my mind had gone. Jack's head was cocked to the side, wondering what had happened to the intelligent girl he was talking with only moments ago. Buttons and Albert were talking quietly with one another, relaying the information I gave both of them in my blaze of insanity. Crutchie was something different. He wasn't judging or putting me in a box or to a timeline. His features were soft and his brow sloped down in concern and sadness. For the short time I had known him, his heart had already made up its opinion on me. I don't think it was the right one, but there's not much I can do about others.

Once the silence filled the room, I cut through it, "I'm sane, you know." I gazed at the boys in front of me, "The loneliness and loss get to you sometimes, but I'm okay." I nodded to assure them all.

Davey stepped forward, raising his chin in a boost of confidence, "How can we be sure? Why are you rambling on about relatives that have died like you knew them when they were kids? And how can you deduce all these things about us without batting an eye? Is your name even Odette? We want to know what you're hiding and we want to know it now."

I sighed and looked to the boots that covered my half stockinged feet. There were holes in which my one heel and bottoms of my arches were exposed. Stockings were the things I hated most about my mother’s process. I watched her burn them, so I burn them too. "How many of you have lost someone?" They all proceeded to raise their hands. Each one spoke when I motioned for them too. Davey and Buttons—whose name was apparently Benjamin—had lost grandparents, as most will. Albert, along with my sister, had his mother die on him at a young age. Jack and Crutchie had lost everyone in a few years. The Newsboys were all they had left of a family, "I've lost people too. I got separated from my family in a forest when I was seventeen. I hadn't seen them until today." I looked to Albert and Benjamin and smiled before continuing, "I travelled with someone I met that day for years. We went everywhere. We loved each other...but it didn't last. We split paths back in 1870, was it? I honestly don't remember, but I've tried to stop caring about him." I shrugged with my arms crossed, "Yes, I know absolutely none of this makes sense, but it will in a minute." I shook out my hands and breathed heavily once or twice, trying to calm my nerves. I’d never had to tell anyone this before and the fact I was telling this entire group was nervewracking, "That day I lost my family, I was in Treegap wood and it was 1808. I met a different family that was passing through as well. They promised to help me come morning. There was a spring and we all drank from it since it was water and...none of us knew what exactly happened, but we were suddenly immortal. It took us some time to figure it out, but the news seemed like a blessing at the time. I now realise it's a curse. And, believe me, I've tried breaking that curse more times than you'd expect."

"The person, it was this Jesse guy Crutch mentioned?" I nodded in response to Jack’s question, "And you’re name is Odette?" Another nod. "What’s your last name?"

"Really? Ugh, it’s...Davenport." The name was wrong for me to say. The name revealed the lie and the lie became fuel for the blaze that would soon follow. Why was I doing this to myself? Bringing a Burn unto myself wasn't unusual for me to do, but I always hated myself for it.

"That’s my name!" Benjamin was so excited he forgot his confusion and began hopping a little. The motion was a mirror image of my Elijah when I would surprise him with a gift.

My chest hurt at a pang of guilt that came over me. I could’ve protected this boy if I had known, "That's wonderful, Ben. Absolutely fantastic."

Albert used his hands while he spoke, a thing I did when I was overwhelmed and stressed that had rubbed off onto Clara. Apples don't fall far, "You twisted the truth when you was talkin' wit me earlier. You said you lost contact, but you lost em fully. Your nephew was just born because you've lived foreva. What about the burnin' you mentioned? That real?"

"The Burn? Yeah, that's real. My mother LIlijah taught us all about it. My father James would give us little lessons on the places we were going or about the things we were passing. London was always a place we wanted to return to, my parents and I, but we never ended up getting there."

"If you're up to it," Crutchie made me look to him with his gentle voice and the feeling of his fingertips against the top of my hand. All I saw was Jesse, but I didn't hear him in what was being spoken because he never spoke calmly like Crutchie did. Jesse was always showing emotion with his words, whether it was frustration or joy or sorrow, you always got what he was feeling. Crutchie knew when to stop that and feel what his companion felt. I liked that, "do you think you can tell us more? About your family and the Burn and why?"

If you're up to it. If you're up to it. The words echoed through my mind, catching me off guard. I had never gotten such an option from anyone, not even my family or myself. I always had to do it or something would happen. The choice was mine and the power to say no was great. My need to answer yes was stronger, "I’ve already dug my grave, so why not lay in it."

I ran a hand through my hair and blew out an extra breath, "The Burn existed before I was born, but I was the one who brought judgement upon our past. As the court ruled, I am to carry out the sentence."

#gah this is so late #it isnt exactly what I wanted #but this is what i've got #old clothes

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