#it is literally always just a bad response that has bad social consequences

[yuwuta]

hi 👋 bsf upstaging bf with choso???

ok i’ve gotten asks for pretty much every other jjk boy on this subject and i want to say something as an overarching theme: all of them ain’t shit. not a single one of them. there’s a scale, some (gojo) are worse than others, but in general, none of them really give a fuck, if that means upstaging, sabotaging, or straight up kicking your boyfriend to the curb so that they can be your boyfriend instead then so be it. but they’re not shit, NONE OF THEM!! but there is a hierarchy and different methods of execution and all that, so here’s where they stand 

president and ceo of not being shit: satoru gojo

why would satoru care about your boyfriend? in any and all universes, he is raised in a world where consequences mean nothing to him. so what if he’s a little rude to this guy? so what if he buys you a ridiculously expensive birthday gift that might be seen as romantic? so what if he offers to take you on a vacation that happens to overlap with your boyfriend’s birthday? the worst that will happen to satoru is nothing; the world bends to his whims, never the other way around.

it’s a combination of complete self-confidence + trust in you + getting joy out of bothering people that earns him this number one spot. he’s confident in every sense of the word, so he doesn’t see your boyfriend as a threat. even if satoru didn’t love you romantically, he wouldn’t see a boyfriend as a threat to your friendship either, because he has no doubts in himself—and to the second point, he doesn’t have any in you either: you’ve proven your loyalty to satoru, proven that even when he pisses you off, you still love him, even when you’re dating somebody else, you still make time for him, even when he’s being shitty and stubborn, you don’t kick him to the curb, you just pinch his ear and bring him back down to earth. he’s always chosen you, but you’ve always chosen him, too, so again, what’s to fear when a boyfriend is added to the equation? nothing, because satoru knows this guy can’t earn or replace the loyalty you’ve given him. 

and to top it all off, he likes watching your bf grind his teeth. he likes watching this guy have to hold his breath, because what can he say without sounding like an ass—he won’t ask you to tell satoru to fuck off because he hasn’t done anything wrong. treating your best friend to fancy dinners and exotic getaways and designer clothes is just nice when you have money—your bf would be pretty shitty to deny you that. and he’d sound insecure, too. and satoru knows your bf doesn’t have the balls to confront him, and even if he did he’d lose. it’d be embarrassing. so, satoru wins. he always wins. satoru engages in psychological warfare, and he has the physical strength, social power, and financial security to back it up, so he, literally, can never lose. and, sure, having your bf around is annoying, but it’s so much fun to watch other people lose that he lets the guy stick around for a while. you’ll get tired of him and run back to satoru eventually, and he’ll confess this time… hopefully.

vice president: kento nanami

if you expected kento to be lower on this list, think again, because he is just as bad. he’s only second place because he’s not as overt, nor does he wish to actually taunt your boyfriend like satoru would. for kento, you’re just his number one priority. you always have been, ever since you came into his life; it was confusing at first, for him to care so much about you beyond an objective sense of responsibility, but overtime he came to realize that he way he wants to take care of you is different. he doesn’t just want to ensure your comfort and safety physically, he wants to make sure you’re taken care of emotionally, he wants to bear your burdens for you, not just help you through them.

kento is a good friend, a trusted confidant, a reliable person overall, and over the years, he’s inadvertently raised your standards. casual situationships and relationships where you’re not the priority become unappealing when you’ve had someone by your side for so long who’s treated you better than that. if your best friend can buy you flowers, and make reservations at new restaurants, and drive an hour to pick you up in the rain, and cook for you when you’re feeling sick, then why would you tolerate anything less in a romantic partner? these things are the bare minimum to kento, but most other men fall far below average; it’s hard for them to compete where they cannot compare. 

so when you do accept a partner, kento is skeptical at best. he knows that what he does for the people in his life isn’t necessarily special, but he doubts that your boyfriend is capable of doing even that—and even if he does meet the standards, he’ll be outclassed anyway. because kento is a good person, but he’ gotten really good at how to be good to you. your boyfriend might get you flowers, but kento already knows your favorites. your boyfriend might send chocolates, but he doesn’t know which ones you’re allergic to, and the brand you prefer; kento does, which is why the ones he bought for you are gone within the week, and the generic box sent over by your boyfriend was re-gifted to satoru. when you voice your doubts about a date your boyfriend mentioned wanting to plan, kento feigns interest, and then innocence when he asks if you’re busy a few days later, if you’d like to help him bake something instead—something he knows you’d much rather do. the short version is—kento knows you, and he uses it to his advantage. he uses the knowledge gained during your friendship to outclass anybody in your dating pool, and he does it so smoothly that it hardly seems intentional or harmful, but it is. which is why he’s just as bad, if not worse, than satoru. 

treasurer: megumi fushiguro 

there’s actually no au in which megumi isn’t shit because no matter how you square it, he gets it from his daddy. whether he’s raised by just satoru, just toji, or some au where he has them both in his life—the common denominator is that they’re there. if megumi ever did confide in either of them about hating your boyfriend, both satoru and toji would offer the same advice: “can’t you just get rid of him? what’s he got on you?” which is absolutely not how you should parent a child...

megumi might have his doubts about his personality, but he’s never been insecure about his appearance. it’s hard to be when he looks like that, but also when he’s had either toji or satoru (or god forbid, both) in his ear his entire life. he might have some fucked up attachment issues and skepticisms about the general population, but he has a very secure view of himself. so, to start, he’s not impressed by your boyfriend, and is honestly a little offended that you think this guy is objectively more attractive, or that you’re more romantically/sexually attracted to him that you are to megumi—or even, any of your other friends. he’d rather you start dating nobara or yuuji, at least he could live with that because those are pretty people, but your choice in boyfriends… he’s not trying to be mean but you could do better. you’ve done better. 

secondly, megumi…. doesn’t care about him. at all. he’s not like satoru in that it brings him happiness to tease your boyfriend, he’s not like kento in that he skews your standards in his favor to nudge your boyfriend out of the picture; megumi literally does not care if this guy lives or dies. your boyfriend could drop dead and megumi would be like damn… that’s crazy… and move on with his life. which is a wild view to have of your best friend’s partner; and it also drives said partner to madness because why the fuck won’t your childhood friend acknowledge his existence?? but again, megumi doesn’t care that his apathy towards your boyfriend bothers him—megumi doesn’t see him, doesn’t know him, doesn’t care to know him, and it drives a wedge in your relationship. 

thirdly, megumi is, canonically, a bully to people he doesn’t like. if your boyfriend gets angered enough to the point of confronting megumi, or whining to you, then it’s inconsequential to megumi to hurt him, and he won’t hold back. also on the reverse side, if there was a situation in which your boyfriend was getting hurt or needed help, then megumi is not helping. he’d probably just watch, or join in. 

after a while, megumi grows past apathy into exhaustion. he thinks you should do better, he thinks you should know better, he thinks he’s better. and he is. he’ll show you that. (also, he is most likely to try to seduce you into infidelity because he doesn’t care about your boyfriend, so you’re single to him). 

first secretary of not giving a fuck: yuuji itadori 

jealousy is something that yuuji used to feel guilty about, guilty enough to drive him to confiding in satoru/nanami about his feelings and seeking advice for how to deal with it, because he thought being jealous meant that he was being a bad friend to you. but neither of his mentors are shit, so yuuji learns to adopt the age old mantra: all is far in love and war. 

he’s better than satoru in the sense that he doesn’t antagonize your boyfriend, he’s better than kento in the sense that he doesn’t outwardly outclass your boyfriend’s efforts, he’s better than megumi in the sense that he does care about people outside of his immediate circle of friends, and as long as your boyfriend is a human, then yuuji will care about his life; but in all other senses, yuuji is surprisingly neutral, and in some cases, actually worse. 

yuuji has two things to his advantage that he absolutely abuses: his likability, and his strength. when it comes to likability, he can just play the friendly, nice guy card. wrapping his arm around your shoulder, twirling you around in a hug, pinching your cheeks, playing with your hair, laying on your lap—he’s just yuuji, he’s just being friendly, he’s just being nice. it’d be pretty shitty of your boyfriend to tell him to be meaner to you, no? ^.^ yuuji is also sneaky with this in that he uses it to say otherwise mean things under the guise of a friendly disguise, and people rarely think otherwise of it. (“it’s fine if you go to the club with us if your bf doesn’t want you to. it’s not like you’re gonna marry him” “are those boxes giving you trouble, man? not surprising, haha!” “you guys didn’t break up yet? aw... i mean... well, no i meant that, but come on, let’s take shots!” all said with a smile that looks like this 😇😇 on his face)

in terms of strength, it’s an unbeatable challenge for your boyfriend—because even if he gets pissed off at yuuji being too close to you, too affectionate with you, too sweet to you, what’s he gonna do? because he certainly can’t beat yuuji in a fight—he couldn’t even beat yuuji in a race, he couldn’t even beat yuuji at mario kart, so there’s nothing for your boyfriend to do but shutup and wallow.  

second secretary: yuuta okkotsu

does he need an explanation… does mr. “how rude, this is pure love” need an explanation… does mr. “i will kill itadori yuuji myself” need an explanation… does mr. “i won’t let sensei kill his best friend again, [i’ll do it myself]” need an explanation… hasn’t he already proved himself as the single most loyal and contently insane person on the planet… 

once you have yuuta’s loyalty, you have it forever. not even for life, because he’d find a way to transcend space and time to protect you in the next one. even if, for some reason, you didn’t want it anymore, you have it; yuuta’s love is final sale, no exchanges or returns. the only reason he’s not ranked to be worse than megumi or yuuji is because yuuta has one grave disadvantage: he is not normally confrontational, and is the definition of anxious LOL. he’d feel bad if he didn’t make an effort to get to know your boyfriend, but that doesn’t mean he has to like him...

yuuta might know that he has feelings for you, but he’s honestly content with a platonic relationship if that’s how you choose to express it towards him. if you want to be friends, then he’s your friend; your love is that pure and vital to him, that he takes it in whatever form he gets it. he’s desperate for you in a way that has him completely at your whim; he doesn’t need reciprocity to love you, just knowing you, and knowing you accept his love is more than enough. keeping him around as friend, keeping him in your life, keeping him in your mind—that’s all yuuta could truly ever want. so, even when you have a boyfriend, it stings a bit at first, but as long as you still have the same amount of room in your life for yuuta, then he won’t do any harm to this guy. 

unless: (a) your boyfriend makes it difficult for yuuta to have access to you, (b) your boyfriend outrightly ticks yuuta off, or (c) the worst option, your boyfriend does something to hurt you or make you sad, then he’s off yuuta’s radar completely. he won’t confront, and he won’t intervene. but if any of those conditions are not met, even for a second, then your boyfriend is as good as gone and there’s little anyone, yourself included, can do to stop him. 

honorable board members: choso kamo, toji fushiguro, toge inumaki

everything about choso is on sight. it takes one wrong move, the slightest misstep, even a breath out of place and he will end your relationship and your boyfriend’s life if he has to. choso does not play when it comes to the people he loves, he won’t stand for you being hurt or mistreated in any way. there’s no subtle psychological warfare, there’s no shovel talk, there’s no blame game: choso sees something wrong, and he takes it upon himself to correct it. your partners have one chance to treat you right, or they’ll wish they hadn’t met choso to begin with.

toji doesn’t really chase people, but you have always been the exception. he hates to admit it, but he’ll follow you anywhere you go, not caring for whoever else you decide to bring along. if the journey of your life is a car ride, toji always calls shotgun, and he doesn’t really care who else gets in the backseat, until they ask him to get out of his—then there’s a problem. and he’s never once felt bad about turning some guy into a hitchhiker. 

the greater good should be thankful that toge takes a voluntary vow of silence, because if he said even half of the things that were on his mind, the world might, quite literally, be set on fire. toge doesn’t care—not like megumi, him not caring isn’t apathy towards the life or death of other people, he just doesn’t care what reaction his actions pull out of people. you’ve told him it’s annoying when he pinches your cheeks and steals your boba, but that won’t stop him from doing it, esp not when you look so cute when you’re angry. yeah, he knows people get annoyed by his pranks, but that’s whatever. he knows your boyfriend hates when toge’s around you, but he doesn’t care. if it brings toge joy, he’ll do it. honestly, even if it doesn’t bring him joy, he’ll do it because he wants to. he’s not immune to consequences like satoru, he simply doesn’t care about them! he’ll just deal with it, he’s got a high tolerance for it—your boyfriend, however, seems like a weakling, so toge will simply outlast him. he’s outlasted all the others :) 

[ahoyimlosingmymind]

we can argue day and night whether or not Alden and Della were emotionally abusive, if the Vacker kid's lives really were perfect, if Fitz was just born with the coping mechanisms he has, or if they were created etc...

But here's the thing. When you take into consideration WHAT is valued in the lost cities, what is expected of imperfect people, all of the boundaries and barbed wire around what makes someone 'good'- nobody, and I mean NOBODY is coming out of that world emotionally unscathed.

Lord Cassius is not the only elf in the lost cities who cares about the status of himself and his children, and keeping up appearances. We know he has a warped view of his desire for Keefe to succeed being a form of love. We know how he has pathologized his self-absorbed need to keep his ego intact. He's a piece of shit. But part of the reason is that he values what his world has taught him to value. Prestige, sophistication, power etc...

There's a reason Mr. Forkle had to keep his twin a secret his whole life. A reason the Song Twins were rejected. Why Stina was raised to bite before assessing the danger. Because they were born 'imperfect' to their 'perfect' world's standards. They were born with the short stick. The scorn built in. There's a reason the school, Exullium, exists. For rejects, for people who don't meet the standard. Bad matches, being talentless etc... because their world rejects people who are 'chips' in the facade.

which means, that regardless of what you value, your world will punish you for anything that doesn't meet their quota. Sure, there's elves who choose their values over expectations (Dex's parents) but there's still a lifelong social punishment that comes with it.

Which means the threat of this punishment hangs over every elf's head. Which means that there are undoubtedly elves who adhere to values they don't agree with, solely out of fear of the consequences of choosing what they actually care about. This is their world. This is their lot in life.

And good luck trying to kill out this way of thinking and running the world, when elves live forever, and the people in power are the oldest elves in the world.

Now- imagine you're the Vacker's. You are the spitting image of what perfection is thought to be. You are renowned, watched- YOU ARE THE STANDARD. But even the Vacker's know they aren't perfect. Which means that regardless of how they feel about any of it, if they want to avoid scorn- they have to meet impossible requirements.

And to some parents, loving their kids means 'saving them' from that scorn. Which means heaping the expectations of the world onto their kids tenfold.

standards that are inherently abusive.

I don't think the Vacker's could come out the other side anything but emotionally abused. because the standards of their world. Because the standards they are held to, are so unrealistic, and the punishment for not meeting them is so heavy, the only way to meet them is to die a million deaths and not let anyone see that you are a corpse. You either become exactly what the world wants, or you fall, and everyone watches when you hit the pavement, and then they remark how ugly you look, and how you failed to even be appealing in death.

But guess what- that is your fate. Because it is impossible. And this type of pressure doesn't make diamonds, it creates kids like Fitz Vacker, who's fall from grace was inevitable. Because the standards were always impossible. No soul could meet them.

You can't come out of a world like that without some measure of emotional damage. It's a cycle.

Some elves choose to fight the power, but that resistance is futile when the power is literally ancient, with a relative scale for justice, and an 'objective' scale for judgement.

it just so happens that the Vacker's response was to melt their gold exactly into the shapes asked of them, regardless of how wrong it felt, and how much it hurt.

[aspd-culture]

What’s the difference between remorse and shame?

So remorse is inherent to having had done something wrong. While getting caught/the risk thereof, if someone got hurt emotionally or otherwise, the potential for social consequences, etc can *add* to that remorse, none of that is what causes it. Instead it is a societally built instinct that becomes an uncontrollable part of brain development quite early in life, though as we see in pwASPD it can be removed entirely or diluted by circumstances that make it useless, dangerous, or otherwise cause a child to believe other people don't feel that way. That instinct defines a bad and good and if you do something bad you feel this itch to make it up to anyone involved, to tell people what you did, to try and get forgiveness and atone for whatever it is you did, and even after all of that there will still be that feeling of remorse. It is this thing in the pit of your stomach nagging you about what you did wrong - not because of any effect it may have on you, and it occurs even if there is 0 chance it will affect you in any way - and not letting you forget about it.

Shame is a different social response, and in typical development, comes from perceived risk of social consequences (if people found out they'd hate me, so I must be bad and I shouldn't have done it) and a hit to self-esteem/self-worth on the basis that they did whatever they did. It can also come from PTSD as a trauma response, or OCD. As a trauma response, doing something that may have caused a valued adult or caregiver or even a friend that was taking a somewhat caregiving role for you will cause this shame as you risk falling out of favor with someone who is safe. You don't want them to see you in a negative light because their opinion of you directly affects how you feel about yourself. As an OCD obsession it can come from being either labelled as bad as a child and your brain taking that in and becoming extremely paranoid about good vs evil and which side you stand on, or for someone who is kind and caring and "good" by social standards and values that, as an attack on something you value most - as that is what OCD does by definition. Shame is a part of the anxiety needed to keep humans in packs back when we were surviving in small groups in the "wild" rather than in established towns/cities/civilization of any sort. If a human were to be cut off from the pack due to distaste towards them, it would be the end of them almost certainly. Humans were weaker to the elements, starvation, dehydration, and predators at the time, so you needed the protection that came in numbers both for the ability to keep food/water/shelter around and for the fact that animals were less likely to attack a group of humans than a single one. It was literally life or death if people liked you enough to keep you around, and so there is a very strong response built into humans' brains to keep social favor towards them - that's what we call shame.

So shame has something to do with how you view yourself or how others view you (and the potential consequences thereof), while remorse is an instinct that does not care about consequences, whether anyone knows, your opinion of yourself, etc. Remorse just is because of the fact that you did the thing. It's considered disingenuous to apologize or attempt to make amends exclusively on shame, and remorse is a large part of the social dance expected when someone knows you did something wrong. In fact, perceived remorse is a large part of court proceedings and legal decisions such as parole/probation vs jail time, length of sentence, etc. "You should be ashamed of yourself" is a bit of a misnomer, because really what they want is for you to feel an instinctual suffering as a result of having had done something wrong.

I hope this made sense; as always anyone is welcome to send in another ask for clarification if it didn't.

Plain text below the cut:

So remorse is inherent to having had done something wrong. While getting caught/the risk thereof, if someone got hurt emotionally or otherwise, the potential for social consequences, etc can *add* to that remorse, none of that is what causes it. Instead it is a societally built instinct that becomes an uncontrollable part of brain development quite early in life, though as we see in pwASPD it can be removed entirely or diluted by circumstances that make it useless, dangerous, or otherwise cause a child to believe other people don't feel that way. That instinct defines a bad and good and if you do something bad you feel this itch to make it up to anyone involved, to tell people what you did, to try and get forgiveness and atone for whatever it is you did, and even after all of that there will still be that feeling of remorse. It is this thing in the pit of your stomach nagging you about what you did wrong - not because of any effect it may have on you, and it occurs even if there is 0 chance it will affect you in any way - and not letting you forget about it.

Shame is a different social response, and in typical development, comes from perceived risk of social consequences (if people found out they'd hate me, so I must be bad and I shouldn't have done it) and a hit to self-esteem/self-worth on the basis that they did whatever they did. It can also come from PTSD as a trauma response, or OCD. As a trauma response, doing something that may have caused a valued adult or caregiver or even a friend that was taking a somewhat caregiving role for you will cause this shame as you risk falling out of favor with someone who is safe. You don't want them to see you in a negative light because their opinion of you directly affects how you feel about yourself. As an OCD obsession it can come from being either labelled as bad as a child and your brain taking that in and becoming extremely paranoid about good vs evil and which side you stand on, or for someone who is kind and caring and "good" by social standards and values that, as an attack on something you value most - as that is what OCD does by definition. Shame is a part of the anxiety needed to keep humans in packs back when we were surviving in small groups in the "wild" rather than in established towns/cities/civilization of any sort. If a human were to be cut off from the pack due to distaste towards them, it would be the end of them almost certainly. Humans were weaker to the elements, starvation, dehydration, and predators at the time, so you needed the protection that came in numbers both for the ability to keep food/water/shelter around and for the fact that animals were less likely to attack a group of humans than a single one. It was literally life or death if people liked you enough to keep you around, and so there is a very strong response built into humans' brains to keep social favor towards them - that's what we call shame.

So shame has something to do with how you view yourself or how others view you (and the potential consequences thereof), while remorse is an instinct that does not care about consequences, whether anyone knows, your opinion of yourself, etc. Remorse just is because of the fact that you did the thing. It's considered disingenuous to apologize or attempt to make amends exclusively on shame, and remorse is a large part of the social dance expected when someone knows you did something wrong. In fact, perceived remorse is a large part of court proceedings and legal decisions such as parole/probation vs jail time, length of sentence, etc. "You should be ashamed of yourself" is a bit of a misnomer, because really what they want is for you to feel an instinctual suffering as a result of having had done something wrong.

I hope this made sense; as always anyone is welcome to send in another ask for clarification if it didn't.

[txttletale]

having thoughts about your point that players/the gm shouldn’t have to design anything for a good ttrpg and wondering if i’m thinking of the gm’s role using inaccurate terms. what would you call the gm’s responses to uncertain mechanical situations in a given game (e.g. a mixed success in pbta - the onus is on the gm to come up with what that means, following some guidance from the rules.)

it seems like something that people find comforting about d&d is that even though the rules are overly complex (and often confusing), many of the common mechanics have clearcut (and boring) outcomes (such as save or suck, hit or miss, etc), meaning the gm doesn’t have to produce/interpret a result themselves. is the other approach (i.e. rules-light) putting more “design” weight on the gm? or is that thinking of it too formally?

otherwise, good design being the gm’s responsibility seems like it just falls under the umbrella of playing in good faith - whatever the situation, it’s bad faith to create untenable/insoluble scenarios that the players can’t meaningfully navigate

yeah, i mean--PBtA games have a list of GM moves, right? when a player has a mixed success, usually that means they succeed and the GM makes a GM move. and obviously those moves have choices and stuff the GM needs to come up with -- something like Monster of the Week's "Put someone in trouble" or "Separate them" definitely require the GM to think of how that works in the fiction -- but that isn't game design, right? the mechanical aspect of that has been handled by the game's rules text. so i think that if there's more weight on the GM i think it's strictly creative weight rather than design weight, unlike the 5e GM who is forced to mechanize anything they might want to make up and is often left without any mechanical guidance

and i mean, i think in general 5e (and dnd more broadly) give the GM absolutely fucking nothing to work with. there are literally no GM-facing mechanical levels other than enemy statblocks (which also, unlike something like Lancer or even fucking 4th Edition, come with no guidance on how to use them or how to assemble combat encounters with them). it's much, much easier to GM a game with GM moves, because then you have an actual set of mechanical levers available to you--and of course, like the aforementioned "Separate them", these levers automatically lend themselves to telling the sort of stories the game advertise for their genre. here's some GM moves from other PBtA systems that, just by seeing them as a mechanical lever, can push the story into the genre and tone directions the game wants to emulate:

Put innocents in danger (Masks, teenage superhero drama)

Reveal an unwelcome truth (Fellowship, high fantasy adventure)

Make honour and shame real (Sagas of the Icelanders, saga-era viking drama)

Bring their gender into it (Night Witches, Soviet airwomen war story)

Make them teach a class (Pigsmoke, magic-school cutthroat academia)

and one of the absolute best things about GM moves (and similar mechanics, like BitD's consequences, or BOB's setting sheet moves) is that because they are clearly delineated and restricted, there's no self-policing. because a dnd 5th edition DM can, rules as written, say at any point "100 ogres appear and beat you to death", they always have to be navigating a series of unspoken social contracts, creating threats but never threats which can win, introducing problems and consequences at a rate that keeps stakes up but is also fundamentally winnable, make everythign feel 'fair'. and dnd players have learned to accept this all as just the table stakes of a GM role, but it doesn't have to be. because all that is game design, and in a better game, that design is taken care of. GM moves say 'look, we've already thought about pacing and fairness, here's the levers we've pre-designed for you to pull, go nuts and tell a story with them'.

so in my opinion PBtA mixed successes represent a lot less onus on the GM to design the game for the designers than anything that happens in 5th edition outside of individual clearly resolvable combat actions--and it's one of the reasons i started having much more fun with TTRPGs once i stopped GMing 5e and realized that other games gave me actual tools and support to work with instead of expecting me to do all that bull shit

[notesapp-lyricist]

original disco elysium skill system yayy

went down an entire rabbit hole. made a disco elysium style skill system based on how i personally function for reasons that totally make sense. so i thought before i start posting about it without any context i'd do like a summary of it. also they all have really elaborate descriptions but those can wait. until then enjoy the absolute jackshit my brain has come up with during the past few weeks. and w.bg references. very bad ones.

mens

(the answers await within silent halls. learn to listen.)

mental library - research addiction

compartmentalisation: neat little boxes within boxes within boxes within boxes and verbs starting with c for some reason, base would be proud

eloquence: reiterating the exact same point 4+ times using words fancy enough to still get full credit on a latin exam. using latin in everyday conversations in an attempt to sound fancy. constantly quoting kafka.

prudentia:

limited hangout: "no anne i don't know what the fourth challenge is"

lateral thinking: who gives a shit if you sit backwards on the horse if you get across the river

mores

(your dreams no longer speak to you, and their parting words were “this is who you are, this is what you have made yourself”.)

culpa: "oh no the consequences of my actions and everyone else's actions and also actions that didn't actually have any consequences i'm gonna cry about it now"

cerebral weave: cerebral weave isn't a word. your cerebrum wove that one.

sehnsucht: "i am literally going to tear out my arteries if i don't (insert any vague concept of purpose)"

per aspera identidem: "things always go to shit at one point but it sucks a lot less with one of those spiky balls"

cor: :(

penumbra: "fuck you my soul isn't just vast it's the fucking mariana trench" (alternatively "the cubic content of my soul is obscured by repressed memories")

corpus

(your body knows before you do. each heartbeat a reminder of the fear and the rushing of blood within.)

flinch:

jähzorn: "i am literally going to tear out your arteries if you don't stfu"

detachment: "what i'm not dissociating this is not dissociation this is composure"

hypervigilance: *stares (menacingly)*

triage: "i am being held together by duct tape and spite"

puls: that moment when you keep moving solely because of the inertia of it despite ripping apart at the seams

concordia

(there is a music beyond you. hum, and it will hum with you.)

dissonance: "you're different. live with it."

resonance: the uncanny synchronicity between two people that happens about once in a blue moon, and the yearning for it.

orchestra: the feeling of belonging to a group that also only happens once a blue moon, and the yearning for it

pizzicato: fine motorics. the moment when your hands become a tool rather than just a source of pain.

cadenza: "to be human is to perform."

echoes: "the world is a symphony, and you will hear her hum if you only choose to listen."

just as a side note about the categories, mens and mores are pretty obvious i think (brain shit and personality shit), corpus is like. visceral instincts, fear responses and protection mechanisms and whatnot, and concordia is just generally about how you interact with the world, socially and physically

also. there is a playlist https://open.spotify.com/playlist/11bsl0krT3uZ4wL76B2lC3?si=RAg_p1h5S5mj2VL7ZBwk9w&pi=e-Fu3w5C9YQ9G0

[ganymedesclock]

Very good points with the last post, but I was thinking more about when a protagonist who is Hated by society for any reason gains power and influence and absolutely nothing changes about how people treat them to the point where you can feel the hand of the author. And then the protagonist gets Glorious Revenge on the people who hurt them or were disrespectful to them in any measure with their new cool powers without any reflection on how that would affect the character emotionally and morally, much less the world’s perspective on them.

This is more of a problem in fanworks where all the author wants is emotional satisfaction and vindication, but creating a section of people in your story who will forever be unworthy of redemption or change in a way that doesn’t involve groveling at the protagonist’s feet and can be freely hurt and killed without any consequence due to the way people in their group treated your character in the past can circle back around to being discriminatory. Like there was a story(granted it was fanfic) I read that had Special Magic People(Fae)who were outcasts of society because they were really powerful, then had that society discriminate against them, then painted everyone with powers as forever righteous good people and every person without as Ugly Evil Unpeople who could be slaughtered without any implications. There’s a scene where one of the Fae considers getting a ‘human servant’ like all his friends have via enchantment and subsequent kidnapping but doesn’t because it wouldn’t be worth the hassle and humans are annoying. This is not meant to say anything about the character’s morals, rather stating that the character prefers solitude Babe that is slavery. Your magical Fae society is ok with slavery.

Using power or magical-beinghood as a metaphor for queerness or disability is perfectly fine, but the problem comes when you try to make this all realistic instead of basing it on societal perception, because the thing about homophobia and racism and ableism is the fact that they are systems of power that place white, straight, rich, able bodied cis people at the top and everyone else at the bottom. Superpowers in context of sociology is more like: what if someone had a gun that they couldn’t unload, that was pointed at your head at all times. They wouldn’t shoot you with it, you think. But the gun is always there, and while the holder may not see it, you do. Which is a much better metaphor for living under systems that oppress you, with the caveat that superpowers are often inherent and social hierarchies are entirely made up.

Its just interesting how power is portrayed in the media as something that is either A. Born to or bestowed upon the protagonist and good or B. Something to be seeked out by the antagonist and bad. The idea that wanting what you weren’t given but other ‘more deserving’ people were is bad, but the idea that being more powerful than other people makes you inherently more moral rather than giving you more moral responsibility.

Ah, so you are positing the existence of type C, which is, "I want violent retribution on everyone who ever wronged me, but not to be held responsible for what I do with this power"

I think this can tie in with a lot of things. In aforementioned Danny Phantom, consider the bully character Dash. He literally introduces himself to the series by declaring- at max volume in a crowded cafeteria- that he has no future so high school is the best he's going to get.

Which is. needless to say. not something anyone with confidence says about themselves. But Dash does not exist to create problems for Danny, really; his primary function is being a justified target for Danny to punish over and over again.

People who are bullies understand that the concept of a bully is bad. They may have encountered- or fear- bullies themselves. But their solution is to idolize power and taking power. The Problem Is when I get pushed around, the problem isn't people shouldn't have the power to own/dominate others.

As you've pointed out this can run afoul in particular in social justice movements, since bullies exist everywhere and they will continue to co-opt whatever language gives them power and a platform. Some people just really, really want to hurt punish and control others. And broadly, they tend very quick to frame themselves as heroes punishing villains for being evil.

I recall back when I was in the Steven Universe fandom, someone told me their highly detailed system of how they wanted the Diamonds to die- they wanted Steven to murder Blue in front of Yellow, kill her next while she was grieving, and leave White alone and pleading before closing in for the finale.

Whether or not you like the Diamonds, or even whether or not you think the Diamonds should have died, it is obvious the objective is not removing or mitigating any threat here. The objective is sadism. The objective is wanting to punish people for ever having scared or upset you, and when a working fourth wall is at play it illuminates how insecure this mindset is. No matter how bad you think the Diamonds are, they are fictional characters, and not a perpetuation of bigotry or harmful stereotypes; they thus cannot hurt real people. The most they can do is be scary or upsetting, and even that is based on your willingness to go consume the media that has them in it. You could effortlessly turn off the tv and go watch a show where the hero makes the villain graphically explode every time, of which there are many.

But, we don't actually want things to get better! We want a justification to punish all the sinners that make trouble in our world. It's seductive it's reassuring it's a nice piping hot plate of comfort food that says "You're right forever! You actually ARE more special than anyone you don't want to interact with, your bullies or detractors actually ARE inherently lesser people than you. You will never have to face any sort of reality where people hurt your feelings but have some reason to exist or feel the way they do whether or not their actions are justified."

And incidentally, at its worst, this mentality can also utterly fail to address the very abuses it's trying to avenge. As you say, anon, it hinges on that the character remains a Dreadful Outcast forever.

Consider the plight of "Muggles" in Harry Potter. It sure feels like an amazing thing for an emotionally, materially, and physically abused boy to watch some magical giant show up, effortlessly boss his abusers around, and sweep him away from all that to a magical destiny world where he becomes stronger.

Only... at the end of every book they keep bringing him back. There are magical justifications for leaving him with his abusers. His cousin, who is also unambiguously hit and yelled at in the first book alone, does not even get the reprieves of special school even though we watch him become increasingly miserable with and enraged by his parents and their situation to the point that he makes at one point an unambiguous decision to stand by Harry with his parents watching.

This will come to nothing. Because Harry Potter takes the vicarious thrill children want to feel- that they know some secret that makes them special, reassuring when you don't think you're that cool and haven't had the life experience to invest in your identity yet- and basically turns it into, you don't deserve to be bullied because you're actually part of an old-money privileged over-class. With slaves! Why would you want to exist in a world where you reconcile with the foster sibling that pushed you around because he too was terrified of his parents and the dysfunctional house you lived in? He needs to know his place and be inferior to you, so that you can always be safe.

Because you never won't be traumatized and your trauma will never be a thing untouchable even by people who might care for you or be a friend to you, and if you decide the only way you will be safe is if you can rip a pound of flesh out of anyone who ever prods your wounds, then you won't feel safe unless you have someone on the figurative guillotine.

It's a status of victimhood that will never be lifted by any amount of power, because if you break the spell and admit that you have the capacity to hurt others and not the power to constantly be justified and eternally know evil when you see it, then that means you just might be the bad guy.

And you've made a world where nobody can even dip their toe in being the bad guy without deserving hell. So you can't be a sinner! That'd mean everything you feel is completely unjustified!

So, hail to the king, hail to the ultimate victim, whose suffering will never end because it is the throne he sits on to hold him above others.

And maybe I've played too much Final Fantasy Tactics Advance as a child, or maybe I just like monsters too much; but I've just always had the sneaking suspicion my life wouldn't improve if I could just stab everyone who ever hurt my feelings with a pitchfork.

I think using power to torment defenseless people is a bad thing no matter what that person did, and it is an unnecessary intrusion to actual harm reduction.

[dustteller]

What are some fantasy books you consider represent colonialism wrong/from a very white or colonial pov?

Sorry you dont have to tell which books etc you were vagueing im just genuinely interested !

Hmm, this is tough bc for the last three years most of the books I've consumed have been for college, and most of the stuff on Imperialism has been nonfiction for my PoliSci classes. When I wrote that post, I wasn't just thinking about books, but about media as a whole.

Now, I want to make it very clear that I don't necessarily consider any of the following works ✨️Problematic✨️ because they fail to capture certain elements of Imperialism/Colonialism (I'm using the terms interchangeably bc they're similar enough that in fiction they tend to get glomped together, but they're actually technically two different things but also It Does Not Matter). I don't consider a white person not completely grasping colonialism a moral failing. My issue is less moral and more of annoyance at how so often we hold up white people as the standards for writing about something *they didn't even write about well*.

And with that point made: Avatar. It's Avatar. Not the blue people movie (that one's awful, but I don't think I need to explain why), it's AtLA. Listen, I really do love AtLA. It's a great show that does an excellent job at demonstrating that just because something is targeted to children it doesnt have to be dumbed down and can still tell an incredible story. I also think that the showriters did a lot of research in order to write the Fire Nation and it's imperialist actions. It touches on a lot of elements of imperialism that a lot of other media fails to capture. It's a good show, it really is.

But it is still a children's show written by a bunch of white people. It annoys me to no end that people hold it up as The Pinnacle Of Anti-Imperialist-Colinialist-Racist Writing, the Golden Standard To Which All Things Must Be Held, when really its Baby's First Look Into Politics. It was WRITTEN to be Baby's First Look Into Politics. Half of its target audience is still literally munching on crayons.

I also don't like how it handles a lot of things. A lot of people have brought up Hama, but I also think that it doesn't do a great job with the Jet stuff. Again, its a children's show. Its HAS to show the right socially accepted moral lesson that Pacifism Best and Killing Bad. If you study real life imperialism tho, extremism is its natural consequence. Almost always, when there is a successful revolution, it IS led by extremist groups, because those are the people most willing to sacrifice themselves! I think AtLA does a good job at portraying Jet and Hama as sympathetic, but it also goes very hard on the Still Bad angle. The thing is, Aang's my way or the highway deal only really works because he's the Universes Specialest Boy Avatar. I don't think there's much of an aknowledgement that there really isn't much that people like Jet CAN do if its not turn to more extremist measures. I know a lot of white people are very pro-pacifism and love clean revolutions, but thats just. Not how it works.

If you're part of a colony, the sad reality is that you Will continue being a colony unless you can find a way to perform a mass upheaval of the existing system. And, sadly, the only viable way to do this for a lot of the colonized is violence. And violence born in anger is not known for being Clean and Pretty and Morally Just. I don't like the trend of holding colonized peoples solely accountable for their actions in response to the incredible colonial violences of an empire. I get to murder you indiscriminately, but you can't dare to murder in my general direction back, or you're just as bad as I am. Actions don't exist in a vacuum.

I think this is where AtLA's view on politics is weakest, because I feel it fails at providing a viable alternate measure to the actions of Hama and Jet. Aang, and by extension team avatar, has a privilege that they don't have access to. They're just mean to sit there and wait to be saved, I guess.

Also we spent three seasons seeing the after effect of a single shitty Emperor that the Avatar trusted deciding he was gonna be shitty and starting a hundred years of imperialism like some evil aureliano buendia, only to at the end immediately put Zuko on the throne? Maybe Zuko is a good emperor, but can you guarantee his kids will be? His grandkids? What happens if he gets murdered, Azula gets to take the throne and starts Being Evil again? The system remains unchanged, and it can still be abused in the exact same ways.

I bring up AtLA because I think it demonstrates these two aspects that I think make a lot of Imperialism According to White People (IAtWP) narratives fall flat to me. I use AtLa as an example precisely because its a good story, because I want to demonstrate that getting some stuff right and putting in effort and ending up with a good product doesn't mean that a work WON'T have these issues.

Generally, IAtWP narratives will have a very morally pure view on rebellions and demand higher levels of moral righteousness from the colonized than it does from the oppressed, or they will be overly dark and gritty and "realistic" and will refuse to interact with the morality of the setting, being an Everyone Bad, Actually narrative. Secondly, IAtWP stories tend to see Imperialism as a Good People/Bad People issue. Usually they will aknowledge the failures of an imperialist system, but they will still uphold the "superiority" of the imperialist system by treating it as the only way to govern, ergo revealing that they cannot conceive of alternate methods of rule.

On that second point, white american/european people who live in an imperial system never seem to grasp the idea that those poor suffering colonized masses are also capable of the concept of innovation. I think where a lot of white leftists fail when interacting with anti-imperialist rhetoric is that they limit themselves to the anti-imperialism. They can recognize that imperialism is bad, but they can't concieve of the colonized as anything BUT colonized. Even while free, they are Free From Imperialism. The truth is, we have entire fields of scholarship discussing the intricacies of how to navigate freedom. There's internal debates in politics and public and academia about how freedom will work for us. I'm going to talk now from a puertorrican/latin american perspective, since that's my field of specialization. Freedom is not an abstract concept to us. We have spent decades examining the fabric of our society to find alternatives to the current system. Here in Puerto Rico, the modern independence conversation dates back all the way to the 19th century. For most of that time, Puerto Rico and Cuba acted in conjunction when it came to academic matters. Until Castro, you did not discuss Puertorrican independence without Cuba also being talked about, because there was a very strong solidarity between the two nations. This is, of course, without mentioning the work that Haiti and the Dominical Republic also shared with us, as well as a wider Latin America. If you read W.E.B Du Bois' essays on imperialism, he does not focus only on Africa, but he also frequently talks about Latin America and Asia and MENA and even some European nations/ethinicities/racial groups when discussing unity. If we look at Political Science, the Dependence Theory, which is one of the frameworks through which imperialism and colonialism are understood today, was pioneered by Latin American and South/South East Asian academics in conjunction, academics of dozens and dozens of countries that worked and interacted and argued with each other to create a field of scholarship that directly countered the trends in white academia of the time. Even more colloquially, I do not know a single Puertorican that knows the basics of the history of the Philippines that does not solidarize with them and consider them our siblings in the same way that we think of the rest of Latin America. The Global South is not composed of a bunch of meek little victim nations, isolated within our own colonial bubbled, but of over a hundred countries that actively interact with each other's ideas.

I find white authors and creators often do not understand the level at which imperialism has effected the very way that we think about the world, or at the level to which we talk to each other about it. To them, we only exist within the context of interractions with our colonial powers. They often underestimate the level of solidarity in thought that has formed within nations BECAUSE of imperialism. And as a result, they always write overly simplistic resistance moments lead by vague ideologies and people that don't know what they're talking about. Theres a lot more to resistance than the resistance itself, there has to be a strong backbone of intellectual tradition to back it up.

I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but I still think it's important when discussing how white creators fail at portraying imperialism and colonialism. They fail by not being able to see it from the point of view of the colonized. I know I didn't fully answer the question, but I hope this makes sense and helps you understand the framework through which I judge a piece of media that interacts with the themes of Colonialsm and Imperialism. I just want to add here at the end, that this is just how I see it, and not an Objectively Correct Method Of Identification or anything. I know a lot of people that consider things differently, because we all have different frameworks which we use to view the issue. Its not a matter of being right or wrong, but a matter of how we all interact with the world differently. Now, please pray for me that I don't get murdered for this.

[xpc-web-dev]

typical sexism from you females.. Every girl with pronouns on their bio is so toxic bunch of hypocrites. Stop dividing against men. your paranoia and fear isn't a reflection of the reall world. youre just brainwashed and brainwashing other girls on social media spreading misinformation. typical stigma towards men on tech. none of yall take responsibillity for your own actions. not our fault not many of you are in this tech field. hypocrites.

Girls, in today's class we have a living example of what I said this week.

Never let a sexist, male chauvinist and misogynist man make you feel inferior, because he will definitely be stupid.

UHEHUEUEHUEHUEUEHHEUHEHUEHUE UEUUHEHUEHUEHUEHUEHUEHUEHUEHUEHUEHUE

We even noticed that in addition to not knowing what sexism is, he has text interpretation problems, he is exactly what I said, because I didn't make a generalization (at no time did I say ALL MEN), if he offended is because he is exactly sexist, sexist and misogynistic.

And girls this makes a lot of sense because he is LITERALLY everything he said I am.

Soon he is talking about himself in 3rd person and I can prove it HUEUHUHUEUE.

1- He called me and called other women who put her/her in the bios of toxic and hypocritical, and it was precisely him who took the time to send me an aggressive message and probably with the intention of making me feel bad. Is this not toxic?

2- Then he says "you don't take responsibility for your own actions", BUT HE IS the one who sends me a 100% anonymous message, after all he doesn't want to ASSUME the RESPONSIBILITY of the consequence of talking shit to me. Too easy to text me aggressively but not allow me to return a reply on your dm, right?

3-Says I'm brainwashing you because I'm turning you against men and that's so sexist, he subjugates women to the point of indirectly saying that whoever reads what I said has no critical sense/cognitive ability to think for themselves only.

+ Besides, brainwashing is nothing less than manipulation, which is exactly what he's trying to do, make me feel bad and he's the owner of truth and justice.

+ And this is also so egocentric, the person has to be very mentally unbalanced to think that his opinion will manipulate a mass.

I'm just a regular person with a blog.

+++Guess someone's parents didn't warn them that the world doesn't revolve around their shitty little opinion UHEUHEUHEHUEHUE

4-Finally, the coolest thing, he is a hypocrite, because well, although I think he doesn't know the meaning of the terms he uses, he is a beautiful hypocrite.

He condemns certain actions and instead of having an aversion to them, he reproduces them.

Here in Brazil we have the meme " Finally the hypocrisy " and I think he would love it

Here the meme:

HUEUHEUHEUHEUUHEHUEUUHEHUEUHEHHUEUHEHUEHEUHEHUE

Now I want to give some advice:

- I usually ignore this kind of thing, when I notice that the person's problem is self-centeredness/want to attract attention with hate because their life is shit I ignore it because being ignored is a stab in their emotions.

But here, I wanted to answer because First I was like, Why is someone bothered by me??Then I laughed and I understood that he was very hurt just by my saying not to bow our heads to stupid men.

And what do men like that hate? Women smarter than them.

So why not show all the logical flaws in your argument?

IAnd also to show other women that we should NEVER shut up when someone wants to make us feel inferior, stupid or villainous/bad. Even more so if it's from a stranger on the internet or and especially someone from your personal life.

Insecurity and fear may exist, but I wish you can always have courage!

Be well, drink water and women you are amazing, capable and smart.

[deramin2]

I also think the constant push for ever-changing new EdTech pushed by tech bros who view the education system as a cash grab and school administrators lapping it up along with pivoting to vibes based curriculum, none of which has ever been shown to work (and most discredited), has also been a big factor. EdTech that has often included "gameification" that's directly based on manipulative gambling principles.

While being constantly bombarded by manipulative ads crowding out or obscuring real content stop that web pages are significantly harder to concentrate on and your attention is always being robbed unless you actively fight back.

Meanwhile the humanities and arts are stripped from their education until it's the most banal surface level bullshit that completely obscures why anything happened on purpose and is expressly designed by conservatives to destroy critical thinking, especially about social issues. And deny them access to library books that could fill in those gaps. So they've been forced to rely on increasingly rigged search results and social media all full of propaganda to educate themselves.

While being taught that they can't trust interacting at all with any familiar adult because any who would want to even befriend them are predators. While their parents or caregivers are forced to work longer and longer hours and the intergenerational family caregiver system is increasingly gutted.

They've also been aware their whole lives that the entire world is hurtling towards environmental catastrophe while the adults in power so nothing (and have lived through increasingly extreme weather). They've also been taught that being shot with guns by strangers is just a normal factor life that's your personal responsibility to avoid. They were also totally abandoned Ina plague and left to die while they see their classmates, rescuers, and parents get increasingly chronically ill through reinfection. So they don't exactly have a reason to believe in the future or the power of change through knowledge and collective action.

While being denied access to third spaces because kids just hanging out on the sidewalk minding their own business have the cops called on them. Basically everywhere forces you to pay and even then they don't want unsupervised teens. This will I overheard an older woman earthing when they were kids they used to play and take the bus alone and it was such a formative experience, but patents who let their kids do that today are neglectful and unsafe parents. Kids literally cannot go outside to hang out and have slower offline experiences. They've learned to but want to because it's bad when they've tried.

So all they have are online spaces increasingly full of manipulation and attention undermining and very confident lies.

It's not that the Zoomers and Gen Alpha are stupid, or even that kids in general are stupid. It's that we collectively built the world to manipulate and then fail them. They have no frame of reference for how bad what's been done to them is because as far as they're concerned it's all normal and the way things have always been. Adults fucked them up, and now we're living with the consequences. And it's not punching down on younger generations to talk about how that structurally happened and what we might want to do differently.

if pointing out that the age of getting a phone decreasing along with the prevalence of short form video as the dominant form of social media content during the most significant collective educational gap in recent history all of which happened during one of the most significant windows of psychological development in a human lifetime has had a deleterious effect on the attention spans, self-regulation, impulse control, social skills, tech literacy, and actual literacy of zoomers and gen alpha. if pointing out that that is a real and serious problem makes me a boomer and an old crank who has fallen for “kids these days” propaganda someone find me a porch and a rocking chair so i can yell at you to get off my lawn

[jonaleddelhi]

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[bucketofhomestucktrash]

"a more developed brain" therein lies the problem. sure. OP of that post has eloquence that makes you make assumptions about their ability to control actions. neither here nor there (but . trust someones words about their disability in future maybe). but. what about people who can't? like people who /genuinely/ cant. my cousin has a severe development disability and will almost certainly never be able to control starting to scream and sob in public when her brain LITERALLY can't comprehend the emotions she is feeling. some people have tics, some people have much more difficulty controlling motor nerves, some people's ability to comunicate is far more limited. to put it simply: some disabilities /literally/ affect the developent of the brain, and as much as you now are hiding behind being autistic to brush off being a dick to someone, what it really says is that you have no interaction with disabled people who aren't eloquent enough to make their voices known in public. and that you dont think of or care about them. if you have reason for me not to think this - i'd love to hear more

I wasn’t attempting to talk about those who have severe brain development problems, but rather I was attempting to make a point about a majority of disabled people being able to have an understanding about and an ability to take responsibility for their actions as I am trying to do. OP articulated a concept in a way that shows to their audience (at least to me but of course I may be wrong that’s always a possibility) that their brain is capable of introspective thinking, though perhaps not without someone for help understanding other perspectives as it seems that helps with many people, disabled or not. I never was trying to imply that this is the case for everyone and I understand how awful I have come across in certain choice words. I’m not asking you to overlook the things I said but rather understand I am changing as a person based on this experience and trying to work more with myself and my support system so I don’t do things like that in the future and rethink some of my ideologies as they come up as being wrong or controversial.

I want to be clear that I understand my mistake in responding to the original post and have been doing a lot of thinking about how I misunderstood it. I should’ve read the post more than two or three times since it seems I do have difficulty fully processing wording at times and should be clear about what the post is saying before anything is said. I’m trying to force myself to rethink many of my writings more than I would. I’m not trying to make this a sob story about me or anything, I just want to note that I do have very intense anxiety and have been attempting to interact with others online to help alleviate social anxiety when interacting with others in general, both in person and online as recommended by my therapist. I believe that this experience has been rather enlightening about how I should go forward when I have access to take my time in responding, especially if I don’t want to be misunderstood or misunderstand those around me. Again, this is not an excuse on my part and I genuinely see how bad my wording and commenting was phrased and how it came across. I feel as though I’m being accused of hypocrisy (in the ‘hiding behind a disability’ comment way) when I’m simply stating how my disbalities may affect me and those around me, how I have thought about my actions and the reactions, and am attempting to better myself, yet others are saying that people must deal with their actions because of their disability and that’s what I see as hiding behind a disability. I don’t see how I’m hiding behind a disability at all when I am openly taking responsibility for my actions instead of ignoring the consequences. I massively misunderstood OPs post but that doesn’t make me a horrible very bad no go type of person? But either way, I would like to not dwell on that post for my whole week, as I feel like I can do that enough in my own brain 🫠👍

I will say, I find it still a bit infantilizing of people with tics who cant control them to call them child-like for tics alone. I understand there’s certain instances where there are people who have very severe developmental problems. Maybe much of my reaction was having people in my life tell me that I have to deal with their, for a lack of a better term, ‘problems’ because they’re disabled even though it’s also causing me ‘problems’ and they refused to discuss it in any manner that helps both of us cope instead of just them coping. Honestly, I still find OPs response and original post rather aggressive in wording. Maybe that’s also why I was having trouble making myself read and reread the post. I felt a group I was apart of was being misrepresented and I got defensive in a way, and again it’s not an excuse, but it’s good to understand how you react and to better yourself from there. But not everyone can. But can’t someone who can articulate such a concept as OP did be somewhat introspective? Again, my main problem was it felt like OP (from how I first took the post) was saying that disabled adults are child-like because of certain behaviors hence hating children for those certain behaviors means you’re ableist to disabled adults. I don’t think I’m wrong for being upset over that sentiment, but I think I’m wrong for not ensuring I fully understood the post before replying and replying in such the way that I did. The things I said weren’t perfectly worded nor were they nice in any way. I find it hard to accept that I have been mean in the past but everyone has that, right? And I have to accept I have been mean and need to process and understand it, and I think I’m really getting there.

I don’t find a disability an excuse to not be introspective, but of course there are that set of disabled adults who genuinely cannot and I’m not trying to say people that can’t need to or have to. There’s a clear difference there that we both see and understand. I find it a strange line to tread. Maybe I’m not ready exactly to talk about such a complex issue because of my reactions and knowing how I’ll react if people act volatile to me if I misunderstand or misrepresent my ideologies.

I don’t find that you should be mean or aggressive to others for the sake of being that way or as an excused reaction to how you feel. And I did that and I am wrong for it. Yet I keep getting replies that are telling me I’m awful for a mistake I’m attempting to be introspective for and adjust my behavior and beliefs to rectify my interactions with others. I didn’t want drama, nor did I intend to hurt anyone. I understand I did do those things. Everyone has been wonderful in telling me why exactly I’m wrong, but I truly believe there’s no superiority morality to be mean to someone even who was in the wrong and especially be mean to someone who is saying they’re trying to change based on an incorrect action and explaining why.

I believe as a human being, disabled or not, we should be willing to work with those around us to find the best situation for everyone to feel comfortable when we are able to. Yeah, some people can’t or the situation might be more complex, but again, that’s not what I was trying to get at and I totally understand how I misworded and overreacted. That was a bad interaction. Not a bad person.

P.S. Sorry if there’s any confusion to what I said. I definitely overthought my wording a lot and went back to rewrite stuff again and again the best I could, that’s why it’s so long 😭 It’s just feeling like instead of working with me to better myself I’m just kinda getting yelled at? Which is probably my brain freaking out but hey. I need to be able to talk to others, especially about serious topics, without just folding to anxiety about being the worst person there is for literally every action I do and agreeing with anything presented to me with authority and aggression. I am a person and I might be wrong at times and that’s okay. I’d like to learn and better myself. :(

[voxiiferous]

🌊🌊🌊!!!!

Send me a “🌊” and I’ll put my muses playlist on shuffle and do a deep dive on why I like that song for them. | @heavensxstray

Desire - Meg Myers

...well this might get dark. Consequences of shuffle I suppose. My apologies! And... yeah, I think this whole thing can go under the read more.

I think the best place to start with is the sound: there is a sense of forboding to the initial beat. The clapping is a bit of a sharp sound, and even the music itself does not fall into the light, happy, and airy quality of a lot of romance songs. Even before the lyrics begin, the emotional response is aiming for somewhat ominous. This is not a song that gently lowers you into the darker undercurrents, even if those do become more obvious later on.

Most of my Vox playlist does not revolve heavily around his relationship to Valentino, there's a select few songs, some of which are more fun, like 'We Are Never Getting Back Together'. That, while accurate, reflects the more superficial aspects of their relationship, as presented to the city and on social media. What Desire does, is strips the presentable aspects away.

The first line is "Baby, I wanna touch you", not love, but physical, even if it is couched within the term of endearment, with the intent to soften it. The second line raises more questions-- "I wanna breathe into your will". Here, the seeming affection feels secondary to a much more possessive nature, something only reinforced by the following line, "See, I gotta hunt you". Not only is this possessive, but dangerous. No longer is this the casual want, but a mandatory need-- the intensity of desire belies the more pressing desire.

The specific reference of breathe is incredibly evocative for my version of Vox, something that can be visualized in this art. Valentino has quite literally breathed his way into Vox's entire system. His filtration system, while good, can only do so much about the onslaught of smoke.

Something you see with Vox and Valentino is a sort of mutual worsening. Neither party is saying 'I can make him better', but rather, "I gotta bring you to my hell". This line takes on new connotation when the involved parties are, quite literally, in Hell to start. A recurring them in Vox's relationship with Val is this idea that 'yes it may be bad, but I deserve it', or 'yes it may be bad, but this is Hell, expecting happiness is naive'. Even in a Hell that offers them as much freedom as Pentagram City does, this is not a fulfilling, happy relationship.

The next line in the verse, initially feels like the first line repeated, saying "Baby, I wanna fuck you". In much the same way that abusive relationships tend to get worse, here a similar progression can be noted. Touch is replaced with fuck, more crass, less personal, less affectionate. In fact, the whole second half of the verse feels like a mutated reprisal, as it continues on as:

I wanna feel you in my bones Boy, I'm gonna love you I'm gonna tear into your soul

Love is juxtaposed between these two images, unable to stand alone as something that feels genuine, but more as an afterthought. In Vox's relationship, that rings true. Love, at this point, is secondary to sex, and to appearance. Valentino is as much a part of him as his own circuitry, and nearly as removable.

The chorus, which while longer, I'm only going to focus on the first three lines, because the rest of it repeats the last.

Desire, I'm hungry I hope you feed me How do you want me, how do you want me?

They break up, htey make up, and always, Vox finds himself asking Val that question: "how do you want me?" Apologetic? Pretend like nothing has happened? Expensive? Does Val want a boyfriend or just another bed-partner? The directionality of this song, can, at times, be somewhat vague, with two participants, “you” and “I”, though as the song only has one singer, it could be implied that it is unidirectional, even if the repeated question can feel at odds with the more assertive claims.

The use of “hope” is also interesting, in that it appears in the surface, to be an appeal to the concept of desire itself. For Vox, this plea can be seen in a somewhat desperate light. He can’t eat, he cannot found nourishment in any other place, but at the same time, what he hopes for from each encounter seems largely unavailable. He is, in essence, not being fed.

The second verse delves deeper into these darker impulses, starting with what once again, draws upon the format begin in the first verse, saying “Honey, I wanna break you”. The term of endearment has changed to something seemingly sweeter and more romantic, only as a prelude to the promise of violence. Considering Valentino’s proclivity towards quite literally breaking Vox’s face, this is accurate. The violence is not an act of an enemy, but something rolled into what is supposedly love.

Moving on, we get a slightly more metaphorical use of "I wanna throw you to the hounds"-- rather than literal hounds, it is those of media and public opinion. Vox's broken screen ends up on screen: why? They both have different motivation, Vox does it because he wants to get the narrative under his control, he doesn't want to be seen as weak. So you laugh it off, you post it, you pretend to everyone that sees that it doesn't hurt. It had been better, once. Their fights had been private, not public, and everyone had only seen them at their best. That changed.

The next few lines lean further into the possession and the violence than love.

Yeah, I gotta hurt you I gotta hear it from your mouth Boy, I wanna taste you I wanna skin you with my tongue I'm gonna kill you I'm gonna lay you in the ground

For abusive relationships, they escalate, and in this case, what affection may have existed has seemingly vanished. For Valentino and Vox, this is so much where they are right now. Vox knows, every time, that it won't be the last time Val hurts him. He doesn't even count on an apology anymore. Most of the time, he accepts the blame himself. His fault, he knows what sort of person Val is. He knows, and he keeps going back. He makes Val angry, he knows the risks. And sometimes, he plays the role of loving boyfriend well enough that it does't come to that, but even then, eventually it gives again, and he'll be back in his apartment, trading out, and trading up. Broken glass haunts his dreams nowadays. He also isn't certain that he will survive this relationship.

One of Val's employees, years ago, said to him something about that, and while the specifics have faded with willful ignorance, the theme remains.

The bridge line repeats the conceptual line of the chorus, adding to it, saying "I wanna feel you, I want it all", and for Vox, more than the chorus, this is what he says when he wants to make it better. He takes this 50 year long relationship, unable to wash his hands of it permanently, and goes back, apologizes for the fight, and pretends that he doesn't feel empty more days than not. Much of the song feels fractured in comparison to something with a narrative, in much the same way their relationship has. It's rotating, neither moving forward towards a next step, like marriage, or children, or living together, but just wearing a larger rut in the road.

--

DAMN IT! The next song, because I am going to do it, but this whole post has turned into a Val heavy one:

We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together - Taylor Swift

Everyone needs an iconic breakup song, and if Desire is them in the present, then this is them twenty-thirty years ago. Compared to Desire, this song has a much stronger through-line, starting with verse 1.

I remember when we broke up the first time Saying, "This is it, I've had enough," 'cause like We hadn't seen each other in a month When you said you needed space (What?) Then you come around again and say "Baby, I miss you and I swear I'm gonna change, trust me" Remember how that lasted for a day? I say, "I hate you," we break up, you call me, "I love you"

From sound alone, this is bouncier, happier. It might not be true love, but there's affection, there's the repeat, falling into a catchy tune. Broken up, not bitter, angry and empty.

In the early 1990s, was the first time they properly broke up. Before that, they had been good. Fifteen years was better than a lot of relationships! And honestly, Vox had thought that would be the end of it. They would keep some business association, but that would be it. They hadn't met Velvette yet, or if they had, then she was still very much new, they weren't close, they weren't really the Triple V's.

And here's the thing, he was upset. Aside from a... two-day affair with Tom Trench in the 1960s, Valentino was his only partner, and certainly the only one long-term. They were a power couple! The argument had been big, but not the largest one they will ever have. It probably came after some big project, and it took up time. Maybe Vox had to reschedule a date, maybe he'd just been too tired to give Val the attention he wanted.

And then they have a business meeting, and end up back together. A mistake, he'll tell himself. They were hasty calling it quits, they still loved each other, every couple has their rough patches. It only made sense that theirs would be a further down the line, because they had longer. A honeymoon period can be a decade or two when you have forever to be together.

And then it's not just the once. They break up again, and again, and Val's always so apologetic after each one. He'll be more understanding, and Vox will stop judging Val's career, and they'll do better.

Combining the pre-chorus and the chorus, you see where the repetition of the romance comes through.

We called it off again last night, but Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh This time, I'm telling you, I'm telling you [Chorus] We are never, ever, ever getting back together We are never, ever, ever getting back together You go talk to your friends, talk to my friends, talk to me But we are never, ever, ever, ever getting back together Like, ever

Here is where you begin to see things shift. Voxtagram won't come around for years yet, and to the press, they're as strong as ever. But more people start to see the flaws. Hellaina knows-- Hellaina, who had never liked Valentino, finds him the subject of her acerbic tongue more often. (The other people who would agree with her haven't died yet). On one hand, he has Hellaina saying to leave him, and on the other he has the social expectation of them as a couple on top, and Velvette saying how adorable they are, and how they have to get back together. How, if they stay broken up, that it won't be the same, that the 3V's won't be.

Sometimes they break up, and Vox thinks it was a stupid reason once he as some time to calm down. He'll take val out to dinner, buy him a new gift, some flowers, something, and it'll be right as rain. The public is happy, he's happy.

So what if they break up, and come back together, on repeat? They're two people in high stress positions, sometimes those emotions boil over. It's fine. They're fine. If it were really that bad Val (or him!) would have moved on, found someone else.

Verse two!

I'm really gonna miss you picking fights And me falling for it, screaming that I'm right And you would hide away and find your peace of mind With some indie record that's much cooler than mine

This is how their breakups go in those early days: they break up, Vox goes back to his penthouse, or Val to his. Val releases a new film, Vox throws himself into work. Business comes up, they have a business meeting, and they fuck. Vox says sorry and is genuine, and maybe they don't talk about it as much as they should, or why they were upset, but they get over it.

They make less media engagements, but they still have enough intertwined business. Something else is that Val tends to go outwards: he sleeps with his employees, he shows up at his clubs. He shows that it doesn't matter. Vox goes inwards: he takes more of his control back from Hellaina who gets more freedom when things are going really well. He throws himself into work: movies, tv show, contracts, time to meet and talk to more of his employees-- that one's got this brand new idea that's oh so good. If you want a promotion, now is sort of your best chance at getting it because he's so involved with everything. Micromanagement, thy name is Vox.

By the end of the 1990s, things are starting to fall more towards what they are later on. Vox is less quick to apologize, things are good for slightly less time. Sometimes, when they break up his screen gets broken. Hellaina repairs it, or he does, or the people at the store, bound to secrecy. It starts to spill more two. Arguments in private turn to ones on their dates. It's still not online, because that isn't an option yet, but it will be soon enough. While all this is happening, the boredom is also setting in. There's been nothing new in the same way in years. There's improvement, but nothing major, no fun new innovations.

Flash forward to the bridge:

I used to think that we were forever, ever And I used to say, "Never say never" Ugh, so he calls me up and he's like, "I still love you" And I'm like, "I just, I mean, this is exhausting, you know? Like, we are never getting back together, like, ever"

He reaches this point, when he sort of realizes, without admitting it to himself, or changing anything, that something has gone wrong. He's tired-- he's going to say yes, they're going to break up. Hellaina is still going to hate Val, so he's going to keep going to their meetings. There is never enough space between them for it to last, never enough motivation to cut the ties. By the time that Voxtagram hits, and it all gets worse, he's adjusted. He's learned to ignore what Hellaina says because he doesn't want to hear it, he doesn't want to admit that this relationship is sort of in pieces. And the longer he ignores it, the harder it is to let go, because it stops being fifteen years, and becomes twenty, thirty, forty.

--

And because why not! One more Val song for the road. Same shuffle parameters, in 68 songs and SOMEHOW it gets all the ones related to this ship. What are you trying to tell me universe?

Listen to Your Heart - DHT (Nostalgia gets this video instead of the prettier one from a few years ago, because there is also half a dozen remixes that change up the musical vibe).

Because I chose this particular version of, not out of any overwhelming preference for it, I'm ignoring the sound of it this time around... except no. No it does sort of matter. If We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together is them in the 1990s, when things start going downhill, and Desire is them now, then this is somewhere between, the 2000s, the 2010s.

Let's start, sensibly enough, at the beginning-- "I know there's something in the wake of your smile / I get a notion from the look in your eyes, yeah". There's a familiarity in these lines, a sense that the person singing knows who they're singing too, and for these two, that's true! They've been together now for several decades, whatever flaws, and whatever problems lay between them, that much is fact. There are good times, when they are a united front, and it truly feels like it did when everything was new.

The next two lines, "You've built a love, but that love falls apart / Your little piece of heaven turns too dark" is where they are in this period. It's happy, it's... not. Vox still wants to salvage things, because he honestly thinks that there is something worth saving. Their relationship means he isn't lonely, means he is part of a triumvirate, and in Hell, it's hard to look at that and want to give it up. This period is sort of an unravelling. Vox is more depressed than he was, and it's more solidified too, their relationship is starting to have serious cracks, and those cracks are more public. Not quite online yet, but not hidden either.

The chorus reinforces this theme.

Listen to your heart When he's calling for you Listen to your heart There's nothing else you can do I don't know where you're going And I don't know why But listen to your heart Before you tell him goodbye

What you see here is this shifting in who weighs in on their relationship. It's more public, which means more people care. Hellaina has more support saying to leave him. Everyone has a penny for their thoughts: leave him, stay with him, they'll never last, they'll last through this like everything else. And in some ways, that's nice to have a thousand people rooting for you... and at their best it is! It helps to push the fact that they feel like they're on top of the world. The problems come, more, when they break up, and suddenly everyone is saying things that contradict.

it's more than just the world online though-- it's Val too. When it's not Vox coming back, with an apology poised and flowers, it's Val with an apology and saying 'I'll never do it again'.

Sometimes you wonder if this fight is worthwhile The precious moments are all lost in the tide, yeah They're swept away and nothing is what it seems The feeling of belonging to your dreams

He doesn't really believe it anymore, but fifteen years ago, while the doubt was heavyset, he still wanted more to keep it good. Their fights tended to have less of a hair trigger, and the alternative was being alone, in Hell, as an Overlord. He'd done that before, and it's lonely.

In some ways, Vox gets exactly what he always wanted in death. Ge gets success, respect, love, he's on screens and everyone knows his name. But the problem there is that it's a show. Vox's face is a tv screen, and he might as well be living on it. Voxtagram is carefully curated, his smile on the billboards calculated, tone of voice, how much vulnerability to get people to like him. Voxtagram also, when he breaks and scrolls through, is the record of the good moments, the premiers, the dates, the smiles, the moments that Vox wants to hold onto, because on screen, in those perfect filtered memories, it isn't what comes next.

And there are voices that want to be heard So much to mention, but you can't find the words The scent of magic, the beauty that's been When love was wilder than the wind I don't know where you're going And I don't know why But listen to your heart Before You tell him goodbye

To finish off the song, you get that repeated line again! And it really is so so much of Vox and Val's relationship at this point. The best years are gone, but he's not working on autopilot yet either. He's still got enough emotional investment to want to see it through... through to what? He's not sure but he's certain there has to be something at the end of the tunnel. Like a gambler, convinced that he'll win big the next round.

[py-dreamer]

honestly mood and a part of me definitely agrees

They both have indeed messed up and both deserve dunce hats for what they both did

But there's also a deep dark part of me that's seen so much of the scale skewered to one side, the fandom bashing one of them and coddling the other to the point I find peeps who defend the other one are to be outliers and bashing them being the norm.

Meanwhile in my personal view, one normally being bashed is at least has been shown to be canonically remorseful, is at least trying to work on things despite their flaws and has aknowleged those consequences and has dearly paid for them himself.

Yet I still see so many peeps bashing them, characterizing them as a socially inept asshole who has no semblance of responsibility, everyone hates them and if there are apologies in a fic, they will go hands and knees sobbing at how guilty and listing everything that they were in the wrong about meanwhile the other guy will just say: "I did bad things too." and leave it at that. Or he will not the accept the apology and also refuses to apologies for the sh!t he's pulled.

The guy getting coddled is also literally a villain and though is currently an anti-hero at the moment and HAS NOT APOLOGIZED TO ANY OF THE CHARACTERS HE'S WRONGED WHO NEVER HARMED HIM IN THE PAST.

And I see so much content where they characterize him as an 'uwu babygirl damsel in distress' who needs to be protected and is uncharecteristically weak and I just have to plough through it to get to stuff I can enjoy.

Even in stuff (fics) everyone objectively enjoys sometimes I can still sniff the skewering of the scales or big elephants in the room not being aknowleged and his sins are brushed under the carpet or if you think about some thing sin retrospect are supper messed up yet you just have to suck it up in order to enjoy that fan-content that is absolutely great but wreaks of skewed opinions. AND IT'S ALWAYS THE SAME WAY OF BASHING AND CODDLING!!!!

To the point that other characters will be grouped with the one that's coddled by the fandom even though they have very little canon interaction and normally you'd be fine with it.

But when you see it skewed always to one side and everyone hating the other guy...you kinda get a wee bit sick off it.

And after wadding through all of that, you're left with like 4 blogs who actually speak out about this and post excellent content too but are left feeling a bit peeved about the skewering of everything until you yourself are protecting the character getting bashed and trying to call out the other guy just to even the scales and make something for once instead of 'complaining'.

I can respect anyone who does favor one character over another. And if you're avoiding this drama, that's great! Good for you!

I'm just a wee bit peeved and caught in this storm trying to 'even' out what can sometimes feels like the overwhelming majority.

(Again, if your opinions are skewed that's fine. Just don't send any hate pls we're all allowed our own opinions. Please don't stop making fan content, it's all great, it really is. Do whatever your heart feels.)

Okay, soooo… can we talk about the ‘I'm gonna call out the monkeys bullshit!’ thing going on in a lot of fics 😅 ? I've seen it a lot, usually it's ‘I'm gonna call out Macaque’ or ‘I'm gonna call out Wukong’ and, well, okay I'm in for some monkey angst or the monkeys getting the consequences of their actions but there is so much unnecessary hatred sometimes.

Like… please, they both messed up, 😔. Can we acknowledge that? I just feel like everyone (and I mean everyone down to Chang'e??? Who is literally on the moon and never interacts with anyone much??) is hating either Wukong or Macaque. And while okay the monkeys should feel the consequences of their actions… When the whole cast is against one monkey and hates him so viciously, it just makes me sympathize with the monkey getting all the hate.

Am I the only one who just wants to put those monkeys in blankets and pet them on the head and say it's gonna be okay?? Maybe it's just too much angst for me or my fluffy heart is coming out, idk.

I think I'm just gonna avoid those ‘I'm calling out’ fics now ‘cause I can’t handle that much angst, 😭.

Like please I love both monkeys equally.

Anyway, it was just a rant of mine, you can disagree, no hate.

[autisticstarseed]

ok on one hand misinformation and ignorance is a huge issue on modern social media especially in activism spaces but on the other hand yall hate autistic and nd people so ridiculously goddamn fucking much so it is a bit tiring to keep seeing the same old joke set up of smth sarcastic/ironic posed as real and then waiting for someone to take it seriously so you can publicly mock them for asking like. disability allies we’ve been telling you how to go about this for years but honestly even when someones not disabled is it Rly that hot of a take that intentional traps for ppl who are too trusting or lacking that ‘non literal’ social skill are just overall mean spirited and not funny and ur jokey meme opportunities rly arent worth shooting down Anyones attempts at understanding smth better and that the only right answer to being genuinely asked for clarity on if what you’ve said is ‘real’ or not is, 1. The Truth, 2. with the same amount of politeness as you were asked

[kujakumai]

Thinking again why I’m not super happy with the anime’s Atem-as-social-equity reformer flashback, and I think part of it has to do with the structure and wider problems inherent in MW, namely the treatment of the Kul Elna reveal and how its implications for the moral status of fantasy-kingdom-Egypt at large are just sort of ducked. 

It’s like...afraid, I guess, to dare suggest that Atem or his father have any (even unknowing) complicity in a terrible system, or that it casts any shadow over their rule as kings, eager to dismiss it as totally the fault of one bad guy. It flinches from the idea that any of this is Atem’s responsibility to correct, fearing that by ceding to it he could no longer be the protagonist. But I don’t think that’s the case!

I find no contradiction is positioning Atem as a good-hearted hero and also saying that he’s the king, that this is a role he’s been trained into his entire life and as such sometimes struggles to question that which he thinks is normative, and that as king he’s part of a giant, messy, complex political project he can’t always control, with history and inertia he can’t always push back on and people who don’t always have his best interests at heart, and sometimes he just signs off on what his advisors recommend because he’s literally 16 and they sound like they know what they’re talking about and that has terrible consequences. That’s...really grounded and compelling actually! Remarkably moreso than a lot of fantasy! I love it! I really love that MW doesn’t depict a perfect fantasy realm with a sage divine chosen monarch, but a country made of both good and bad actors, each with their own problems, that was handed to a smart and kind but young and anxious high schooler who is just sort of doing his best. It’s really human. 

We don’t have to handwave and dismiss Kul Elna’s tragedy and TKB’s grief to keep Atem a sympathetic wide-eyed hero. Keeping Atem the hero doesn’t require that TKB be held up as villain. All we have to do to square these things is, y’know, have Atem realize the system he’s in charge of is really messed up and to try his best to fix it. Instead of what he does in canon, which is be sad about it for two panels while Mahad assures him this doesn’t have to rattle his worldview or change how he feels about anything and that the status quo is just fine, don’t worry about it.

So I guess I think that if we’re going to ascribe views like “When I’m Pharaoh, everyone’s going to be equal,” into Atem’s mouth, that’s a declaration that should happen near the end. It’s not something we should hear in a childhood flashback, the implication being that he’s always been a shining example of perfect future king and doesn’t need to do any work and obviously his critics and enemies were always wrong. That should be the “My dad fucked up, this is fucked up, and I’m fixing it. Now.” Depicting Atem’s heroism and strong sense of justice shouldn’t come at the expense of further villainizing TKB by comparison into someone fundamentally unreasonable--it should be done by vindicating him.

But like. In the real world Atem died very soon after that and handed his kingdom off to Priest “torture program” Set. So maybe having him learn something and announce a new shining direction for the future would be totally pointless. I dunno.

[utilitycaster]

okay my two biggest thoughts on common trends in the fandom this week:

1. I can draw a straight line from people being weird about Imogen and Laudna’s fight to people being weird about Asmodeus and like, in the end, the lesson to be learned here is that consequence will nearly always outweigh intent in terms of how you are seen and how others feel about you. If you create war to make peace seem sweeter, you still created war, and people are still going to hate you for it, and that is not only a valid response but I would argue the most understandable and obvious response. “It’s the thought that counts” is a phrase for when you get an ugly sweater rather than a video game; not for when you get something that has a notable negative impact on your quality of life. If someone hurt you with good intentions, it is still hurt that they caused with their actions. [FWIW I have my thoughts on the intentions of these characters too, and it’s more complicated than good/bad, but the point is that a reaction based on intentions rather than consequence is a luxury of the comfortable.]

2. I think people do not realize that while Brennan does frequently explore anticapitalist themes in Dimension 20, the enemy isn’t as simple as just “capitalism bad” but rather goes deeper into why capitalism is bad, namely, that it is based in, fosters, and indeed rewards such things as selfishness, arrogance, entitlement, unchecked power, and inequality. That’s why such shows as a Crown of Candy or Escape from the Bloodkeep still feel very true to the Dimension 20 style despite being in non-capitalist settings; they are about abuse of power and arrogance and unequal social structure. While Avalir is indicated to be a capitalist society, the problem is actually the hubris and the endless thirst for power, not the literal need to acquire capital in the economic sense. [This also covers the part about religion, ie, religion is good when it is used for individuals to feel connection and spirituality and self-acceptance, and bad when it’s used to gain power and to subjugate others; the arrogance and disdain the mages of the Age of Arcanum have for such people as Purvan is itself comparable to how religious fundamentalists feel about those they deem unfaithful, because the root cause ultimately isn’t belief in god or money, it’s being willing to hurt others in the pursuit of power via those things.]