#it's not a good spread to understand the whole system

[midnightwind]

I really do need to buy the Origins and Veilguard art books because I'm just making shit up about the Crow Houses again

[revelboo]

Dang man—THIS IS JUST ALL SO BEAUTIFUL! You are very good at writing these stories!! And you have so many—I’d die if I did that many stories at once😅

Thank you for being an awesome individual. You truly make my day whenever I see one of your stories. Just outstanding. Take care of yourself!!

Aww, thank you!

I Can Feel You Pt 12

Metroplex x Reader

• Curled up in the pile of blankets Ratchet had left you in exchange for a promise to stay away from the drone until Metroplex can take it over again, there’s no guilt. Understanding completely that if it activates without Metroplex controlling it, that you might get hurt by mistake. You’d waited until the medic had left to climb back in the drone’s lap with your blankets. Can’t even feel bad about immediately breaking your word, because you trust the Titan. If the drone is an extension of him, you trust it, too.

• Each time, it’s a bit easier to find Scamper. To slip into the drone. Slowly becoming aware of the warmth of you curled in his lap, head laying against his chassis as you rest. Waiting for him. It’s like sleepwalking, flexing servos that are and aren’t his. Trying to ignore that odd disconnect as he lifts a hand and ghosts his servos through your hair. Not sure of his control just yet and afraid of hurting you without meaning to if he misjudges his strength. So soft, barely there touches along your spine, the curve of your jaw, the delicate shell of your ear. Spark humming as he reassures himself that you’re right there, that this isn’t another dream. That he’s awake.

• Something strokes along your throat and tangled in sleep still, you open your eyes. See that glowing visor tipped toward you as a big, warm hand strokes along your collarbone. “You’re back,” you say, reaching up to touch him, feeling him press his mouth against your palm in a soft kiss. Not his face, but still him. Resting your head back against him, you relax as he reaches up to cup his hand over yours, keeping it there on him.

• “Always come back to you, little one.” Words still slow, taking more effort than he’d have imagined as his lips brush your palm. Slowly curling his other arm around you, feeling the slow beat of your heart against him. Just savoring being able to hold you like this. Letting you keep him focused, tying him to reality so he doesn’t drift. Too tired to do this for more than small amounts of time before exhaustion pulls at him. But these moments mean everything.

• “Ratchet. He said something’s wrong with you. Power’s being redirected,” you say, twisting in his lap to look up at him. Seeing that other face still a little jarring, a stranger. Visor already dimmer, he gently brushes his cheek against yours. “No, stay with me. Talk to me. Metroplex, please. Focus.”

• Hand cupping the back of your head as his mouth brushes yours, he tries to focus. That worry in your voice touching him. Attention starting to fracture when all he wants is to stay here with you. “Hurt,” he murmurs, lips brushing your forehead. “Hurting, little one. Come to me.” Because if that poison isn’t cut out, it’s going to kill him. It is killing him and he’s so tired of fighting a battle he can’t win. Needs you to tell the Autobots. For you to come back to him. Let him show you the problem so you can tell them, and they can fix the damage spreading through his systems. Because you’re the only one who’s been listening this whole time and he needs your help.

Previous

Next

[canmom]

"don't post links to pirate sites" as a security through obscurity strategy seems... weak. if a pirate site is so obscure that almost nobody can find it, it's also essentially pointless.

but yes, if a pirate site is common knowledge, the feds will be working on destroying it. so the idea is i assume to achieve an intermediate level of obscurity, where you have to have a certain amount of talent for asking the right people or searching the right things to find it. but... whatever capacity for research you are asking people to have on that front, the feds are equally capable of it, and they have a whole lot more time on their hands for tracking down pirate sites! security through obscurity is a losing game for piracy. the perfect sweet spot where people can find your pirate resource but the feds cannot is something of a mirage.

if not that, than what?

the current piracy system involves a few different tiers of accessibility, and various components that are more or less decentralised.

torrents are the most resilient tech because to stamp out a torrent (with DHT enabled) you have to suppress every seed. so, you have big public torrent trackers like TPB; these are well known and rely on hopping domains and redundancy for security. the ratio of seeds to leeches tends to be low, but the number of users is large enough that there will be at least a few seeds out there for most stuff. torrent clients have gotten a lot better at seeding strategies that take into account your seed ratio and what's currently available in the swarm, so if you just leave everything on seed and open your torrent client fairly often (use a VPN though lol), you don't really need to think about it.

then you have private trackers; these operate on an invite basis. the problem with this is that when the pool of users is so small, the odds of a given seed being online are also small. to prevent torrents dying, they gamify it: you get points for seeding and if you don't have enough points you can't download anything until you seed more. to help people get back in the game there will be 'freeleech' events. being active on a private tracker takes a bit of work.

and of course you have to get in in the first place, which tends to require a proven track record of seeding on other private trackers, and some kind of interview with the operators. getting involved in private trackers is a much bigger ask, you have to figure out where to get your foot in the door, and work your way up to the more insular trackers. it's like a mini subculture. it's valuable, but not scalable.

at the top level of inaccessibility is the warez scene. this is a whole subject that i'm not even gonna get into, go read wikipedia. historically this is where the files actually come from, before getting distributed on public trackers, usenet etc. but good luck getting in there lmao, they are understandably quite paranoid.

of course, for stuff to get on pirate sites you need somebody to go the effort of ripping and encoding it. this is where a major point of failure exists. when RarBG went down recently, the biggest loss was not the existing archive of torrent links, which can be backed up - it was that they were very active at converting scene releases into torrents with a decent balance of file size and quality, which then filter out into the various public trackers. that is much harder to replace! but what killed RarBG wasn't even suppression by authorities - according to their statement, it was a bunch of the admins getting covid or dying or fighting in the Russia-Ukraine war, which made the whole operation impossible to continue. so despite the thousands of people who download RarBG torrents, this single point of failure was overstressed and broke.

as far as the ethics of spreading links to pirate sites go... if it's something like a mega drive, yeah, the chances of a takedown are pretty high if it gets noticed! no question. but those things are by nature short-lived; if you want to use that for archival you're building on sand. there's also databases like emuparadise, but there was no saving that through obscurity, it just took Nintendo a minute to bring the case.

in this kind of centralised case, the clock is ticking from day 1. what we want is to maximise the number of people who are able to save copies while it's up, and then some of those people can put it up again somewhere else and keep the authorities playing whack-a-mole. (for a small collection of files, a sensible measure would be to make a torrent and a mega drive side by side, so that people can download the mega drive and then add the torrent to their client to seed if it gets nuked.)

as for torrent sites, the thing is that torrents rely for effectiveness on a swarm that is either very large or very responsible about seeding. if it's a public tracker, it has to be well known or it's pointless. instead of security through obscurity, the form of security for these sites is try to make the resource itself hard to take down - operating the tracker/archive in countries that don't have copyright treaties, maintaining mirrors, and of course distributing as many seeds as possible so the torrent can stay alive even if the site goes down.

the major problem with a dead torrent site is discoverability. if it's harder to find the torrent, fewer people will download it, the existing seeds will gradually go offline, and of course you can't download a torrent that you don't know exists. and while you could imagine a system of broadcasting metadata about a torrent (title, encoding etc.) in a DHT-like way but that would be so vulnerable to fakes and spam. maybe some kind of cryptographically signed 'this torrent is good' declaration is possible? I know certain torrent clients tout discovery features, but honestly I don't know how well they work. I'm sure there are projects that are way ahead of the game than me on this question.

but yeah anyway trying to browbeat people into not sharing links to pirate media is 1. futile, by the time you see it the cat is out of the bag 2. not a sustainable strategy for security. if you wanna lecture people, 'use a VPN and seed your torrents' is evergreen ;p

[raymurata]

Just scroll (or go ahead and block my #dav critical tag) if you don't wanna read me whining abt Bellara's Archive choice again, but I'm not done with the salt.

What bugs me isn't that the choice to destroy the archive exists, it's that the game frames it, through its UI (which is the closest thing we have to a nonbiased narrator in this medium), as equally weighted against the opposite choice.

If they had worded it like this:

"Free the archive (the knowledge will be lost)" x "Keep the archive (the knowledge will be kept)"

With no extra commentary, then that would be better. If you got to be openly racist against the Dalish or openly in favor of the Dalish, period. Just like in previous games.

Bellara says "(the archive would help us) get back what made us who we were," and "With it, we could be that again."

Which is funny because... People don't study history to return to the past. It's fine if Bellara is idealistic and saying whatever unrealistic, grandiose dreams she and Cyrian had, but the Dalish would never (could never) become like the ancient elves again. For starters there is a Veil now. So what it would in fact do is help them understand where they come from, what they've been through, and trace the changes in their culture.

Of course our modern historians and scientists have tried to reclaim lost technology, too. They've figured out how the Romans made their extra sturdy concrete, and scientists in Brazil have long been trying to replicate the extra fertile Terra Preta from indigenous peoples that lived in the Amazon basin, and several South American historians would love to know how exactly the Inca used the quipu as a writing system aside from counting tool, etc... And that's super cool!!! And maybe (but that's a big maybe) the Archive could give the Dalish a technological edge to carve a corner of the world for themselves without the constant struggle with Tevinter trying to enslave them or Andrastians trying to subjugate them.

But I personally don't think anyone's reading Aztec accounts of human sacrifices to replicate the same practices in modern cults, or that there is an army out there utilizing Roman decimation as a method of discipline. We're using different horrific methods of control now, lol.

But let's say a modern general does decide that the best way to punish a battalion for one man's insurgence is to force every group of ten soldiers to violently murder the 10th man.... Do you really think that the fault would lie with the historian who unearthed that information and put it on Wikipedia? Or the insane general that decided to do this? Would modern morality and laws allow for that punishment to be executed? Do you think that the existence of that article online is inherently dangerous and controversial, and that it should be taken down? Do you think this general would have been a good and non-violent general if he hadn't ever read about Decimation? Or is it clear to you that violence and ingenuity are both inherent to mortals as a whole and can't be so easily blamed on the spread of knowledge?

Because it's not clear to DAV. The game (not Bellara, not Varric) words it very unambiguously as a dichotomy: The only safe way to deal with this Archive is to destroy it. Keeping it is inherently dangerous because the knowledge could fall in "the wrong hands."

What Bellara says is "Cyrian is gone because of what that thing knew," and "what about the bad side, the other things we did?" and "We stole the dwarves' dreams."

Again, she gets to say whatever she wants because she's a character and she's an anxious, idealistic mess. Love her for it. I like that she feels guilt here too because she has been established (through her way of dealing with Cyrian's first death) as someone who takes the blame for mistakes she didn't even commit (She certainly isn't responsible for Solas' actions). She's someone who drives herself sick cooking up the most horrific scenarios in her mind, and she's so compassionate she can't stand the thought of being the one perpetrating violence against innocents. Her misplaced guilt and dread are the emotions that lead her to consider destroying the Archive.

But no matter how guilty a young german may feel about the holocaust, destroying knowledge about gas chambers is not what will prevent other genocides from happening around the world. Individual guilt is barely productive.

Furthermore, Corinne Bursche says that DAV gives you a choice between "destroying" or "sharing" elven knowledge, which is not how the game worded it. But the point still stands even if the Veil Jumpers, for some condescending plot reason, completely lost control of this knowledge, or were so flippant as to put everything on Thedas' wikipedia without curing it at all.

Let's accept, too, that the Archive contains knowledge of how to build something equivalent to nuclear weapons, which one could argue is in fact truly dangerous, but... Well. Do you think it's fair that the countries that have nuclear arsenals are some of the most vocal about the dangers of other countries ever developing their own?

Because that's what it feels like, to me, when the game calls elven knowledge dangerous without ever allowing you to question -- what about Tevinter rituals and magic? Tevinter's millennium of slavery, still in practice at present day? Should we destroy all their libraries too to keep the world safe from dangerous magics? Why do we only get to tell the Dalish, the nomad nations severely subjugated in present Thedas (If you ever played the previous games and have the context, at least, since this game that happens in Tevinter somehow manages to completely gloss over racism against elves as if it never existed) to destroy a one-of-a-kind, ancient trove of knowledge? And have it be framed as good and safe? As "moving forward"?

If you choose to free the archive, Rook says "The elves deserve the chance to chart their own course" to which Bellara answers "Right. Define ourselves by who we are, not who we were," but once again that writing just makes me question Bioware -- Do they not understand the point of history at all? Do they think indigenous peoples are monoliths stuck in the past if they choose to study the history they lost to colonialism? What purpose do they think that keeping that history and culture extinct serves? Who do they think it benefits?

If you step outside of what the game is telling you as fact and think for yourself, with the context of the other DA games in mind, do you still agree that it's inherently dangerous to keep the Archive? Do you still think these are equally morally weighted choices?

Or would you agree that DAV has to subtly convince you, out of character, that keeping this knowledge is inherently dangerous to make this dichotomy make sense?

Again. This wouldn't bug me if they just owned up to the fact your protagonist can, once again, genocide elves/their culture, just like in previous games. And scapegoat present elves too for the sins of their thousand-years-old tyrants, now suddenly returned (it would make so much sense for characters in the narrative to scapegoat the elves, and for us as heroes to fight against that. But no, they don't even go there except through Bellara's guilt.). It's just bizarre to have an elven historian guiltily agreeing with destroying the Archive and then telling us "The Evanuris broke us and kept us broken" without anyone, either Rook or her, ever mentioning a thousand years of Tevinter slavery and several centuries of Andrastian persecution and subjugation.

No. The Evanuris are the be-all and end-all of evil and everything bad that ever happened in Thedas, ever, can be traced back to them.

[caffichai]

Food Bank Fundraiser

Hi everyone!

First of all, I want to say thanks to everyone who's been leaving such nice tags/comments on stuff I've posted! It's been really encouraging (o^▽^o)

Anyway, I think we all know it's very dark days on the economic front for many of us. So as such, I'd like to help raise some funds for Food Banks Canada! In exchange for you making a donation to the food bank, I will draw a character suggestion!

I know this is not really the sort of thing I normally do or post here but... many folks are struggling to put food on the table right now, and the food bank is a source of support for many and provides an absolute necessity. I've seen many people struggling in my own city, and food security has become an even bigger issue than it already was in the last couple of years with the food bank struggling to keep up with demand. Of course, food security is an issue across the whole country that's putting a huge strain on food banks, with nearly 5% of the entire population making use of food banks monthly, and 23% of the population reporting food insecurity (CBC, 2024; Global News, 2024). Unsurprisingly, those who are already most disadvantaged suffer the effects of food scarcity even more (Statistics Canada, 2023). To make matters more desperate, Canada's food bank system is on the brink of collapse (CTV News, 2024).

I know this isn't going to something big enough to change the world or anything, but being able to make even a small impact for individual people is important too!

✨Incentives✨

Of course, I'm sure people aren't just in it for a reward, but rewards make things all the sweeter, right?

For those who want to contribute, I'll take a character suggestion and add it to a poll (depending on the number of contributors, it may be split up into multiple polls), and then I'll draw as many as I can from top to bottom ranking! If you contribute, please send me a DM with your donation receipt and your character idea! They won't necessarily all be drawn in the same style, and they'll be done according to how much time I've got. (I know that commissions are probably the biggest incentive, but realistically, I struggle to get them done quickly and they're probably not that affordable to everyone)

If you prefer SFW or NSFW, you can let me know (But NSFW will be posted to Cohost). If you make a bigger contribution, I'll reach out to you and ask if you wanna see more specifics/details in your piece. How's that for sweetening the pie? :3

For those who can't make a donation (which is completely understandable), simply spreading the post is also helpful, and I appreciate that greatly as well!

Don't forget that giving a donation allows you to get a tax break based on the amount donated as well!

Alternatives?

If you'd rather donate to your own local food bank, that's great too! You can DM me and send me a pic of your receipt and I'll still add your suggestion to the poll.

If you REALLY want a commission, you can also DM me and I'll do my best to fulfil it! I won't be taking commissions for this till/if there's at least a couple of items on the poll though. The proceeds will go to my own local food bank. The commission will be done later though, and may take some time to fulfil. I take payment only after starting.

When do we start??

I guess once there's a good number of poll options? I have no idea how long that will be, but rest assured I'll keep you updated!

Where do we contribute?

You can make your donation to Food Banks Canada! They really need it!

Alternatively, you can make a donation to your local food bank or equivalent charity.

Other Questions?

Feel free to send me a message or an ask! I'll get back to you ASAP. If I need to include more details or clarify something, let me know! It's my first time doing this!

TL;DR

I want to help raise money for food banks! Anyone who contributes to Food Banks Canada (or donates to their own local food bank or equivalent charity) can DM me with their receipt and give a character to add to the poll. Poll characters will be drawn in order of their ranking, as many as I can manage, over as long a period of time as I can manage!

No pressure to donate of course, I just figured this would be a fun way of raising a bit of money to help out, and allow us to donate more than what I personally can

Current Contributor Count: 13

Suggested Characters:

Imagine your beloved, obscure or popular character here on this poll list! Oooooooh, how lucrative :3

Total funds raised:

780.36$!!!

[psychotrenny]

Liberals say a lot of dumb shit, but if you're going to bother critiquing it then you need to understand what they're trying to say in the first place. Like "Late Stage Capitalism" isn't an especially useful or coherent term, but you can't dismiss it with "just say Imperialism" because that is very obviously not what people are talking about when they use it. Even just by contemporary usage, you should notice how it's nearly always employed by people complaining about declining quality of life (i.e. cuts to social safety nets, reduced domestic regulations, growing mismatch between costs of living and wages) within the Imperial Core. You never hear left liberals use it to discuss even the most obviously evil manifestations of Imperialism (i.e. coups and election subversion, "unjust" invasions, dropping napalm on children etc.) that even they are willing to criticise sometimes. In the contemporary discourse, it's functionally just a way to critique Neoliberalism by comparing it to Social Democracy- both are still equally Imperialist systems. Like "The Highest Stage of Capitalism" is consistently used by ML to mean imperialism, while "Late Stage Capitalism" is mostly used by Liberals to complain about getting an insufficient share of the loot.

There's also a need to consider that the idea of "Late Stage Capitalism" wasn't even popularised by left liberals; they merely adopted it and became its most enthusiastic users/abusers. The original use of the term "Late Capitalism" was in the early 20th century by reactionary (but Marxist influenced) German sociologist Werner Sombart to describe the state of capitalism in his time. However, by the 1960s it was most popular among members of the Frankfurt school of Marxism when discussing the features of the Post WW2 era. Its first popular use in English was in the 1975 translation of the thesis Late Capitalism by Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel, but the person who popularised it the most was probably USamerican Marxist Frederic Jameson. He used it in his 1991 essay "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which effectively engaged in the sort of "society has become soooo superficial and consumerist" critique that liberals are happy to eat up. This implanted the phrase firmly in the heads of Anglophone Imperial-Core Left Liberals and adjacent revisionists, and by the 2010s as more and more people were drawn into that whole milieu ("became radicalised" as they like to put it) the phrase spread and spread and now you see it everywhere in any vaguely "leftist" space.

Now this whole summary isn't an attempt to defend the phrase by discussing its pedigree; I don't think it was ever a very good or useful phrase and that developments in global capitalism can be discussed without declaring the dawn of a new epoch based on a disconnected jumble of often superficial changes. My point is that the phrase has a whole history of its own; it's not something that got thoughtlessly made up one day and any meaningful critique of the phrase has to consider this. You need to meet people where they are at, based on what they're actually saying and not what it roughly sounds like they're saying. When you treat "Late Stage Capitalism" as just the Liberal version of "Highest Stage of Capitalism" because the two phrases sound kinda similar, it's criticism of the most superficial and idealist type. In your attempt to "pwn the liberals", you've ended up talking like one

[swordandscytheandpen]

I do not understand the culture that has developed on this site surrounding Gazan fundraisers.

I'm not talking about the scams, even though that's the hot topic right now - it's almost certain that most of the fundraisers being spread are legitimate, as I see it.

But I've seen posts actively discouraging donations to aid agencies in favor of direct fundraisers, and that's just... do people realize that they're hurting Gazans as a whole when they prioritize individual fundraisers over MSF or UNRWA or the other aid orgs? Do they understand that? It's not that complex an economic problem!

There is a harsh shortage of supplies of all kinds in Gaza at the moment. The surplus of critical goods is zero. This means, in practical terms, that every bite of food is being eaten, every drop of water is being drunk, and every scrap of medicine is being used. It should be a matter of common sense that pumping more money into the isolated Gazan economy will not fix this problem, because there is nowhere to import more goods from. Instead, for every family that is able to eat because their fundraiser met its goal, there's another family that goes hungry, because no new food is being created - it's just being moved from one set of hungry mouths to another. It's a zero-sum game right now - negative-sum, even, since pouring in money without supplies also drives inflation.

In comparison, donating to aid organizations allows them to bring more aid in from outside Gaza, and more efficiently distribute that aid. It actually helps Gazans on net, rather than merely shuffling around starvation.

I know virtually nobody on Tumblr is economically literate, but this is really not that difficult a concept to understand! Shortages can typically only be solved on the supply side! Giving people more purchasing power is meaningless when there's a strictly limited amount to purchase! You're cranking up prices, all in the name of helping the few Gazan families that e-begged the best, at the expense of all the others.

And people on Tumblr are so dedicated to this net-ineffectual form of aid that they're condemning donations to the organizations that stand the best chances of helping, and even spreading misinformation about them. UNRWA is in fact still operating! The Israeli laws banning them don't go into effect until close to the end of January, and UNRWA is the group best positioned to create systems to succeed itself. Yet I'm seeing posts saying it's pointless to donate to them now!

And I just don't get why. What is Tumblr's attachment to this particular kind of donation? Do faces and names have that much of an effect on people, that emotion overrules efficacy? Is it mistrust of anything that could be considered an authority with power over people's lives? There are so many people who truly, deeply want to support Gaza, but are nonetheless acting against Gazans' best interests. Why???

[shattered-system]

The “Redefinition” of Systempunk

Updated version!

We're not typically an essay kind of blog, but there's something l've been turning over in my mind since l've seen it.

I have the post pulled up now actually, and about 11 hours ago @/the-alarm-system "recoined" (stole) the term systempunk in a long post, as well as designed a flag with its own meaning and I want to sort through some of it.

I also have a few personal pet peeves about their flag design, given that it's color palette clashes and the flag is way too busy. I don't expect it to spread far given that it violates several rules of good design (saying this as someone who has been to school for graphic design.)

I will not post it here, because I don't care to spread it any more than this post already may.

Their flag slightly predates my own version of the systempunk flag, but given that theirs was created for a separate concept with a stolen name, I maintain that we were the first.

We begin with their definition of systempunk.

“A term or Subculture surrounding the liberation of plurals and the critique of psychiatry."

First issue lies here. Both the destigmitization of dissociative disorders and critique of the psych field are extremely important discussions to have!

But they are separate discussions. There is absolutely overlap, but combining the two here is kind of shooting yourself in the foot, because then the conversation in that tag will be disorganized.

Have a systempunk movement AND an anti-psych or psych-critical movement. That way people can easily find the relevant discussions and terms.

This is followed up with a bit about the harm the psychiatric field has caused (not delving into that as that's not what this blog is about) and then circle back onto "the future is plural."

This is not one of the instances where OP means it in the "the future is destigmitization" sense, as they are pro endo. (On a side note, even ignoring the endo use of the phrase-- if I need to read about a slogan to understand the meaning of the slogan, it's a bad slogan. The point of a slogan is to communicate a concept quickly.)

The flag has black and brown stripes akin to the progress flag to represent systems of color, which is the only part of the design we have no critique for, but are describing anyway just as a bit of information.

The purple stripe stands for:

“Endo solidarity... endogenic systems are continuously harmed by antis who remain uncritical of psychiatry."

Once again, we are mixing two expansive concepts into one term.

The term anti-endo doesn't imply a position one way or the other on the psychiatry discussion.

Some anti-endos swear by the DSM5, others don't. Anti-endo is a term that means anti-endo/ endo-critical. That is all it means.

There is a difference between holding the DSM as the complete authority on mental illness and saying that a trauma disorder is caused by trauma.

I'm not sure if OP knows that and is choosing to cast anti-endos in a bad light, or legitimately confused. However, OP is a syscourse blog who is on a lot of blocklists and is spammy in the tags, and has likely been blocked by anyone who isn't also out looking to pick immature fights. (This is a system who made a post in all caps calling for an endo raid on #systempunk.)

Continuing directly from the last quote:

“[Antis] are against the liberation of plurals and deny a plural future in order to push singlethood onto others."

It's possible OP is referring to final fusion, which the anti-endo community is not a monolith on either. Most people we've interacted with are supporters of functional multiplicity (including ourselves.)

Most likely however, they mean that anti-endos "push singlethood" by telling endogenics that they can't have a trauma disorder without trauma.

And I could go into a whole tirade about that, but dozens of systems have done it before and I doubt any pro-endos have gotten this far. I am writing this for the anti-endo and on-the-fence audiences.

Visit @antimisinfo's helpful masterpost for a list of legitimate sources.

OP seems to believe that by “forcing” this singlethood, we are contributing directly to the oppression of systems. Hypocritically, OP themselves are contributing directly to the oppression of trauma victims.

Endogenics are not part of the "diverse experiences of plurality” (we are diverse, but united in origin) given that they don't exist. And if they did, they would have such a fundamentally different experience than trauma-formed systems that both groups would need separate language and tags to have space to themselves.

And endos already have a well-established punk tag for themselves. It seems they won't be happy until they chase trauma victims out of every space they create for themselves and steal every term. They've already stolen even the medical terminology used for CDDs.

The yellow stripe of the flag is meant to represent those with actual CDDs. Once again, psych stuff is brought up. However, I do agree with OP that those who do not want final fusion should not be pushed into it.

The pink and white stripes of the flag are entirely dedicated to anti-psych points. I think this would do wonderfully on it's own flag. But bringing the large range of discussion the anti-psych movement encompasses and the large range of discussion the CDD community has into the same tags is going to make it monumentally difficult to find the conversations you're wanting to have, and weaken both communities considerably.

There is a line of barbed wire across the flag that is partially for the same anti-psych movement as well as in favor of protecting and defending endogenic "identities." The ampersand stands for plurality.

There are fangs on the flag as well, encouraging systems to be loud and proud about their existence. And I agree that systems should make themselves known. However, endogenic systems don't exist, and their promotion will continue to drag us down.

I have read testimonies about traumagenic (real) systems being fakeclaimed or denied treatment by healthcare experts who, through exposure to endos, came to the conclusion CDDs are fake entirely.

Real systems seeking treatment and help after a lifetime of horrific abuse are being denied care.

Not to mention the setback of social acceptance by endos.

“Force plural liberation down the throats of others. Force the future to be plural."

[judeswhore]

uhm hi😳😳

u also sort of having a little crush on him too but you’ve been friends for so long that ur well aware of his reputation and you’ve had a front row seat to his revolving door of girls so u really don’t wna put urself in a situation where he can hurt u despite knowing that he has some kind of feelings for u. so ur always keeping that little bit of a distance between u, flirting but not letting it go too far, making it very clear that ur just friends by talking abt other guys ur seeing or bringing up girls he’s seeing. and it drives jude mad bc he wants u and he doesn’t really understand why the two of u can’t work out bc he can see there’s something there between u but ur constantly putting a little barrier up. so he’s just having to stick to being a love sick puppy, always asking abt u, always complimenting u, constantly trying to sit near u whenever ur out and being moody if u don’t join ur friends. who think it’s absolutely hilarious that he’s so smitten but u won’t do anything so they’re always torturing him abt how unlucky he is and how eventually he’s gna have to move on.

but the two of u end up on the same night out in the same club but with different groups of friends and without the supervision of ur normal group and somehow ur harmless flirting leads to making out in a dark corner which leads to jude half begging u to go home with him and he just looks so good and his hands feel incredible and all u can think abt is finally scratching that itch. and in ur head its okay bc it’ll happen once and u can get it out of ur system and ur friends won’t ever have to know bc they’re not even there. so u end up going home with him and it’s honestly the best sex of ur life bc jude actually cares abt u so he’s so attentive to ur needs and makes sure ur feeling good the whole time (he gives u more orgasms than you’ve ever had until ur quite literally crying and shaking from the pleasure) and its so strangely intimate and actually kind of perfect but when u wake up the next morning ur hit with a wave of embarrassment and worry over the whole thing bc this is jude and you’d promised urself you’d never go there with him bc it wasn’t worth the hurt down the line.

so ur asking him to keep it quiet and pretend it never happened, telling him it won’t happen again and that he can’t tell ur friends bc it’s really not something u want them to know. and ofc jude is agreeing despite the fact he’s quite disappointed and hurt that ur just gna leave it as a one night stand but he’s so stupidly in love with u that if that’s what u want ofc he’s gna respect it bc he really doesn’t wna ruin ur friendship. and things go back to normal for a little while and u manage to act like nothing happened until all of ur friends are out one night but u couldn’t make it and jude has one too many shots and starts moping again that ur not there and somehow that leads to him spilling his guts abt what happened to the guys and he’s going on abt how amazing it was and how it was the best night of his life and that ur just incredible and he can’t believe he won’t get to sleep with u again and he doesn’t mean it in a gross way and he doesn’t mean to disrespect ur wishes but he just couldn’t help himself and now that little bit of information spreads to ur girlfriends who confront u abt it and u can’t believe jude wld do that to u.

going out as a group the next day and the tension is obvious and u can’t just let it go bc ur fuming that jude has gone and bragged abt getting with u and u feel like shit that he’s one of ur closest friends and he’s treated u like this. so ur following him into the bathroom to ask wtf he’s playing at and u end up having this huge fight bc ur accusing him of being like every other guy and saying this is exactly why u never acted on ur feelings bc u knew he’d let u down and you’d just be like another number to him and jude is just so confused but feels so bad bc that’s not what he wanted and he never meant for it to come out the way he did but he couldn’t help himself when he’s so into u. he’s just letting u rant at him for a while before he’s having to literally cover ur mouth w his hand to get u to shut up and listen to him while he explains and even as he’s explaining he’s telling u he knows it’s not an excuse but u literally drive him crazy and he had to tell his best friend that he finally got w the girl of his dreams and he’s giving u this big love confession that stuns u to the spot bc u knew he liked u but not to this extent and now it’s starting to feel a little silly that you’ve been avoiding ur feelings and not letting him in

this whole situation leading to u finally letting him take u on a date and when ur friends find out abt that they’re all sort of breathing a sigh of relief bc they don’t have to put up w jude being lovesick anymore

[reasonsforhope]

Btw, if anyone cares to know, my position on Biden and the 2024 election is this:

Starting September* 1, 2024, I will be doing whatever I can to make sure that Trump does not get a second term as president

Until that day, I'm going to be doing whatever I can to push for an end to the genocide in Gaza and an immediate ceasefire, and that includes criticizing, protesting, and lambasting Biden for funding and providing weapons for Israel's genocide

ETA: I will still be posting about significant good things the Biden administration has done, though, because some of it is a really big deal that people deserve to know about

ETA: But I will not be defending Biden from any criticism around Palestine/Israel/war crimes

*This originally said October 1st but someone pointed out to me that there are a few states where early voting starts in late September, including a couple swing states, so I changed it because that's a very good point

I don't plan to tell anyone not to vote for Biden in the meantime, myself, because shitty two party system and I'm really serious about Trump not getting reelected

But I'm also not going to do anything to discourage people who are seriously rallying against Biden, because he is, you know, literally bypassing Congress to make sure he can fund crimes against humanity

I never want to diminish that reality.

And more than that: If we want genocide to actually be a dealbreaker for politicians and presidents... then we need to start acting like it could be.

--

Details/related thoughts:

I will still be posting about good things Biden and his administration are doing, because they are the ones running the US government and Congress is super deadlocked, so a lot of the national-level good news in the US has been done by his administration, and I'm not going to stop posting about that good news

Shout-out to the anon who accused me of being a US government propagandist with a whole PR team bc I posted about Biden a few days in a row. I promise you I'm blogging from my bed in my pjs and do not have a PR team lol

Also, for people who don't think we should be spreading serious criticism about Biden, for fear of Trump winning in 2024: I hear you--that's an incredibly valid fear. I've struggled with that myself, in the process of coming to this(/these) decision(s). But consider this: it's better that we really pile on the criticism and pressure now, because a) people are dying, and b) Biden's chances will be much worse if Israel is still bombing/decimating Gaza on election day

Relatedly, for anyone who's tempted to think Trump would be better when it comes to the Gaza genocide, again, it's really understandable to want to put your hope in any viable alternative. However, I promise you that is not going to happen. Joe Biden at least conditionally gives a couple shits about human life. Trump doesn't. Remember Trump's Muslim ban? In all likelihood, Trump would just tell Israel to bomb Gaza harder and ban Palestinian refugees from entering the US

Last thing on Trump: maybe this is naive of me, but for a lot of reasons, I'm not actually particularly worried about Trump winning in 2024. If I was, I might have made some different calls here. I have a few asks about this in my inbox and will probably make a post at some point about the reasons why, but yeah, Democrats have mostly been wanting to run against Trump instead of DeSantis or Haley or whoever for some very real reasons

You're welcome to disagree with me/this post in any direction, btw

Seriously, I'm just a random person who doesn't speak for anyone besides myself and my own blog. I'm not saying these are categorically the right answers, or that any of this is what everyone should be doing. This is simply the system I have settled on (right now) for how I personally want to handle all of this

You're welcome to disagree with me but please don't send me any angry asks about any of it. Not that I in any way get a lot of those, thankfully! But yeah, this isn't something I'm interested in debating, this is mostly for notification/explanation purposes

[mistresscitrusslice]

I hate that Arcane made the decision to make Hextech an inherently evil power. It should not have been that simple and the real-world applications are not that simple. Making Hextech evil is an anti-progress message.

Hextech is basically a fantasy reflection of nuclear power. Nuclear power is almost objectively a good thing, but tends to be conflated with nuclear missiles despite there being a huge gap between the two. The best thing coal companies ever did to try and save their industry was to convince us that they’re the same.

Most detractors will point to the Chornobyl disaster as an example of the dangers of nuclear energy. They fail to recognize that that happened largely due to incompetence and outdated reactor designs, all flaws that have been fixed long ago. Today’s reactors have failsafes upon failsafes and risky old designs have been retired. Even the disaster at Fukushima was nowhere near the caliber of Chornobyl. There are millions of people living in Fukushima today.

It is willful ignorance to continue using coal while waiting for a better source of energy to emerge. Nuclear energy isn’t perfect, but it’s far cleaner and safer today than coal power ever has been. Nuclear waste is disposed of with incredible safeguards rather than billowing up to linger in the atmosphere and slowly cook the planet. The US Bureau of Labor recorded about 20 annual deaths per 100k workers in the coal industry in 2021 (while we’re at it, 10 per 100k for oil and gas) while the nuclear industry had exactly zero. Even if nuclear energy isn’t perfect, it’s pretty close, and we’d be fools not to switch over to it until a viable replacement arises (solar and wind are not strong enough, at least right now).

Oh yeah, this was supposed to be about Hextech. Jayce is stupid, Heimerdinger is the coal industry, and I don’t think Viktor has a real-life equivalent in this nuclear-Hextech metaphor. Unless we say he just took bare, unprotected radioactive material and plopped it down in the middle of town square. Or… became the radioactive material, idk. That’s the closest I can get. Jayce saw the Runeterra equivalent of Chornobyl and decided to shut down all Hextech operations immediately. I understand why, but that doesn’t make him right. Heimerdinger is comfortable with the way things are now, in no small part because it’s comfortable for him even though Zaunites had it so bad in the coal mines they had a whole attempted revolution over it. Perhaps he was right and Hextech needed more safeguards, but there was no reason to eliminate it entirely. You want Zaunites to stop dying in the mines? Support Hextech so people have a better power source. (That’s not gonna fix everything; mostly a systemic change is needed, but Hextech instead of coal would also help.)

Let’s assess the problems with Hextech. There seem to be two central ones: the spread of magical energy causing Ekko’s tree rot and Viktor’s… whole thing.

The source of the magical energy rotting Ekko’s favorite tree comes from the Hexgates surging over capacity and releasing that energy underground thanks to the redirection tunnel/chamber that they built. This is a fixable problem. They can relocate the Hexgates, design a way to absorb the magical energy, find ways to relieve the magical buildup before it becomes a problem, etc. Don’t ask me, I’m not a mage.

Now to the Viktor apocalypse. This is a very fixable problem. THROW AWAY THE HEXCORE. Whoops, too late, it’s already merged with your husband lab partner? Make your speech about how he was never broken, etc etc. sooner to avoid him becoming Hextech Jesus or, failing all better solutions, detain him. Just detain him! I don’t like it either, but if the fate of the world is at stake, you gotta detain Viktor until you can love confession/therapy the Hexcore’s manipulation out of him. Let’s also not ignore the fact that this is a very niche, very unlikely problem to arise again. It was unlikely to begin with. No other project Jayce and Viktor worked on posed any threat of this problem. Caitlyn’s gun did not have thoughts of world domination. Viktor just happened to create the world’s cultiest AI. Actually, we don’t even know if the Hexcore was like this before the introduction of shimmer. It could be that those two are just a horrible combination and Hextech on its own doesn’t have the Glorious Evolution issue; only the magical contamination issue in the above Ekko tree section.

Sorry about the long post and sorry about the nuclear energy detour. Anyway, I’m still pro-Hextech and nothing can change that.

[maryland-officially]

Ok I'm genuinely confused here so don't be mean please. All of this is /genq /nbr

I have a dissociation disorder and I'm questioning plurality (I would be considered traumagenic if I am 1). From my understanding of systems, they're formed through trauma that happens before the age of ten. The brain puts up amnesia barriers and the child's personality doesn't form correctly, so multiple alters are formed instead.

Endos confuse me. They're systems that say they somehow did this without trauma? How do they fit into this? Like, I want to be supportive but some of the rhetoric I've seen genuinely pushed me into a panic attack once (it was a post saying basically you can just make headmates whenever if you want and for fun, you don't need trauma or anything which I think made me upset cos... Why would someone want to be a system and how could they view it as a whole as fun?? & the idea you could just manifest it out of thin air confuses me deeply)

I'm sorry if you don't want asks like this but you're a relatively big blog and I've just seen you say you support endos so I figured you'd be a good person to ask.

Explanation below cut because it got long ^^

Ah, well. Most, if not like all endogenic systems, are non-disordered or use that term.

Endogenic systems can form in many different ways -- we're traumagenic, but we're pretty sure there are some endo alters, and we usually find them by talking into the void of the brain and getting a response that isn't from somebody established-- I'm sorry, this isn't very helpful, but think about it like:

Talking to yourself in your brain, and then suddenly you realize that you do not in fact control the person/alter replying, and that is not you. That's kind of what it's like.

Think of a cave:

At first, you think the echo is yourself. And it probably is, or it could be. And then the echo doesn't say what you say anymore -- it changes it and it isn't exactly 'you' speaking. Well the brain is the cave and the echo is a headmate forming.

This is the way that WE know about when alters form. It's a bit like this. We/a member thinks that we/they're thinking to our/themselves, and then bam. somebody different. not formed from stress or trauma

I'm sure there are other ways this could happen,, but none that we know of

so instead of uhm

I've seen this diagram/things like it to describe DID + plurality, so I'll explain with this.

This is an adult brain

This is a child's brain

This is the child's brain developing

With this model, DID (from what I've seen,,) looks like this.

The circles spread out, and might combine into large circles between themselves but not a full one as the brain develops

I'm not sure how accurate this model is, but I've seen people use it to describe DID. This is a sort of simplified version that makes more sense but is probably less detailed

Anyway let's say an endogenic systems starts as a large circle -- though,, this might not always be correct and is probably not majorly correct, since brains take a while to develop (im so sorry if this diagram is confusing. The circles are supposed to resemble child's thoughts/personality traits and how they assemble into a person. Or at least i think--)

Well anyway, an endogenic systems would look like this in my brain:

A part of the person kind of drifts off into its own thing

And then it might turn out like this

Sometimes there's a piece that there's no way to know where came from. They just kind of appear. They might have dropped from the brain, who knows? It can be hard to tell.

These can be fictives, or other alters.

Anyway this is my take/diagram on how endo systems form. It's probably inaccurate, but hopefully we got it mostly right ;;

[faghubby]

Bachlor/Bachelorette party

I walked out of the bathroom in just a towel to see Kelly laying on her stomach. Her ass on display her thong disappearing between her juicy cheeks. I knelt down and parted her legs. Pulling the thin piece of material to the side burying my tounge into her ass. Kelly moaned but was still scrolling thru her phone. After a few minutes she lifted her ass giving me access to her pussy as well. I slid my fingers into her wet slit. And continued to eat her ass. She stopped me and rolled over. I removed her panties completely. And licked and sucked her clit.

"You are so good to me" she moaned then grabbed my head as she succumbed to an orgasm. After she just tossed my hair and headed to a shower herself. I got dressed my erection settling on its own. Kelly fully dressed found me in the garage breaking down all the cardboard boxes for recycling.

"Paul, I have an important question to ask you" Kelly said. I stopped for a moment as she bent down on her knee.

"Will you marry me" she asked. I was stunned. I was suppose to ask her. And here now. Not very romantic. She held a small box. I took it and opened it. There was a diamond ring. It wasn't something I normally would wear.

"Kelly, shouldn't I ask you?" I said helping her up.

"No, I don't want that type of marriage" she said cupping her hand to my face.

"Yes" I replied and she placed the ring on my finger. She then took my hand and led me inside.

"We should talk about some things before you commit to me" Kelly said sitting me down.

"I don't want an equal marriage" she said. Holding my hand. I was confused. "I will be head of household" she stated.

"I don't understand" I said.

"I want a 1930 marriage but with me taking the husband role" Kelly explained. "You will stay at home, your job will be to take care of the house and me. Cook, clean, do the laundry and of course look pretty for me.

"Kelly, what would people think?" I said stunned

"That you are my little plaything" Kelly smiled. I frowned.

"Paul, I love you. But you have alot of short comings" Kelly told me. I knew she made alit more money then I did. But that couldn't be it. I looked at her quetionly. She grabbed both my hands ,looked into my eyes.

"You have no ambition, you are indecisive always waiting for me to tell what to do, you have little will power, and sorry but you are lacking in" she said looking down to indicate my crotch. I almost burst into tears.

"I love you and want always in my life" Kelly stated. "But this is how it would have to be"

"I understand" I said getting up. I went outside to think. I sat in the backyard and stared at the ring on my finger. I had always thought Kelly out of my league. But as I looked back. She had asked me out first. She was right I always just went along with what she wanted. Would much change, I wouldn't have to go to work. I already liked to cook. It had been over an hour when I returned and found Kelly.

"Yes I would honored to be your husband" I stated. She kissed me then pushed me to my knees she spread her legs. She wore no panties under her dress. Pulling me to pussy. I sucked and liked until she came again. I moved thinking we would have sex.

"Stop" Kelly said flatly. "I told you that you are lacking you have never satisfied me that way, have you?" I lowered my eyes. I knew she was telling the truth. "We will come up with a system in which you can.... release the presure" she told me. Seeing my face she softened.

"Since it is a special occasion" she opened my shorts and rubbed me thru my underwear.

"Please" I whined

"Want me to stroke it?" She teased. I shook my head excitedly.

"But my hand will get all sticky, I will make you cum if you clean my hand with your tounge" Kelly stated. I was stunned but she took out my dick and stroked me quickly. I came even quicker. She raised her hand to my lips.

"Good husbands always clean up their mess" she cooed, I hesitated but then stuck out my tounge. Kelly shoved her whole hand to my mouth. Bathing my tounge in my own cum.

"I would love it if everytime you cum you lick it all up" Kelly told me. Kelly had never even sucked my dick in the 3 years we had been dating.

Kelly had me quit my job the very next day. Told all our friends and family about the engagement. And for the next few months Kelly slowly explained what she expected of me. She would inspect my cleaning correcting what she didn't like. Picked out the menu I was to make. Even told me what clothes to wear. Gave me a exercise routine I was to look good at all times but especially in public. Kelly quickly controlled everything. My video games where gone. Our sex life became intense. With me orally pleasing her almost everyday. And her denying me or forcing me to eat my own cum.

One night when we had a few friends over. Someone asked. How I had proposed. Kelly quickly corrected them saying she had asked me. And then stated I would take her last name. Everyone laughed. But I knew Kelly was serious. We had not talked about it but I didn't want to embarras her in front of our friends. But then Kelly made me show everyone my engagement ring. The guys all looked at me strange. Bit the girls cooed around me.

After everyone had left I was doing the dishes when Kelly came up behind me.

"I want to fuck you" she told me in a husky voice. I got excited immediately. "Like a husband fucks his wife" she continued grabbing my ass. "I have a toy, you will let me won't you?" I was terrified she intended on fucking me didn't she. She unbuckled my pants and pulled down my boxers. Her finger covered in something cool rubbed against my asshole.

"Kelly" I wimpered. She just pushed two fingers in.

"Umm" is all the noise I made as she started to work them in and out. She reached around my dick still hard.

"I knew you like this" she giggled. She bent me over the sink more and finger fucked me for several minutes. Before she let me stand up and fix my pants.

A few days later she came to bed wearing a dildo. That the other end was inside her pussy. She was forceful as she positioned me on my back and lubed my ass. Then shoved her cock into my ass. She fucked me with a passion and speed I had never witnessed. Not stopping until she had cum twice. My ass was sore when she pulled the toy out. I laid in bed and cried.

"All girls cry aliille when they lose their virginity" Kelly told me holding me tight.

In the morning my ass still sore Kelly was already up getting ready for work.

"Since you are a woman now" She told me. As she handed me a pair of panties. "These are much more fitting your status" I spent the whole day crying wondering what had become of me. But as soon as Kelly came home she rushed to fuck me again. After this she became even more controlling. Budgeting how much money I could spend. Even limiting how much time I spent on the phone.

A few weeks later it was my bachelor party. Kelly insisted I wear a cock cage she had bought just for the occasion. It felt odd but I was allowed to go out with some friends and celebrate. My friends took me to a private club. As we walked in there was Kelly on stage naked getting split roasted by my step brother and one of my old co workers. I wanted to cry but held it together as I was led to a front row seat. Only to see my best friend strip down and work his big cock into Kelly's ass. In the course of the next two hours I watched Kelly get fucked by two dozen of our friends. Then my best friend Alex led me on stage.

"Clean her up" he told me pushing my face into her used swollen cunt. He held me there until I gave in and started to lick up all of there sperm. Most had left by then. Kelly didn't let me stop until I had cleaned her ass as well. Kelly then took me home where she fucked me until I came in the cage.

Now on our 10 year wedding anniversary I am still locked in chastity and have been fir the past 5 years. I also wear a custom cage that only is 3/4 of an inch long. Kelly works as I raise our 3 children. Brad, James and Christine all named after their fathers.

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

if tom got the DADA job what would he have been like as a teacher? would dumbledore have tried to watch him/get him fired?

Tom's Not Getting the Job

Well, you answered it, anon, Tom was never getting that job.

That's the whole thing.

The first time he tries, he's only eighteen and very unqualified for the position. Dippet said no and... Dumbledore strongly implies that he put in a very strong word against Tom being hired. I'm not sure Tom would have been hired anyway, he was only eighteen and had no credentials and we're told canonically that Hogwarts teaching is a very prestigious position and they do not typically hire you straight out of school, but regardless Dumbledore did actively put in word against him which meant it probably wouldn't have happened.

Then some years later after Tom's gone abroad, Tom comes back for the interview with Dumbledore and the interview is just Dumbledore laughing at him and telling him he's an idiot for thinking he'd ever get this job and Dumbledore would never ever hire him.

So long as Dumbledore's around, Tom's not getting the job. Tom also either didn't have the connections with the Board of Governors or the Ministry/was too proud to use them to get himself that job (I'm inclined to believe the latter but technically we don't know for certain).

Tom was never getting that job.

Dumbledore wouldn't sit around waiting for him to get fired, because he already did it, he fired Tom by never hiring him. It's done. It ain't happening and the only way it would happen is if someone went completely over Dumbledore's head and there was nothing he could do about it.

Tom the Teacher

Well, he'd be in the staff meetings from hell (does Hogwarts even have staff meetings?) where every time they meet it's Dumbledore saying something weird about him regardless of whether or not he's up to shit.

I imagine Dumbledore would do everything in his power to give Tom as little authority as possible and make sure rumor's good and spread around the students that Tom sucks.

Given Tom probably isn't telling the world he's a half-blood here or the Heir of Slytherin, as he didn't seem to canonically until he came out as Voldemort/that's not a great thing to do when the Chamber of Secrets is right there and he was at the school at the time when that happened, that means the Purebloods don't like him but you also have Dumbledore's camp not liking Tom on top of that because Dumbledore doesn't like Tom.

(Now, if Tom's not becoming Voldemort, Dumbledore might not have quite the same following he does by the time we reach canon, as most of those people were involved in the conflict with Voldemort/that's what's most present in cultural memory in Harry Potter, but I imagine he's still very influential for the same reason he was such a lightning rod for the resistance movement in HP against Voldemort.)

Honestly? I see Tom being a relatively ordinary Hogwarts professor, he's probably a lot better than all of the DADA professors Harry had, maybe even most of his professors period, but he still has to deal with kids who don't want to learn and a system of magic people don't understand. Magic in Harry Potter is just memorizing spells, not how they work, and so the better wizards and witches are just those who memorize more spells faster. Tom can't make the kids who do this well do it any better than any other professor and he can't make the kids who don't do it well suddenly do it better.

It's also very out of scope to discuss how magic even works and start doing something interesting with it when it's something the wizarding world just doesn't discuss or deal with at all and will just confuse most of the students (even up to seventeen) that he'd be dealing with.

I imagine Tom hates putting up with Dumbledore and is just waiting for the man to retire or die.

[dingodad]

What's the deal with the obscure cult thing

the trolls' introductions give us an outline of each troll's position in their society. we have to remember that, at the point of the trolls' introduction, the caste system was only kind of just starting to be born as a concept. gamzee's introduction on p. 2012, where we get the "You belong to a RATHER OBSCURE CULT" line, comes a whole 70 pages before we even get this exchange:

GC: SOLLUX, PL34S3 / GC: YOU 4R3 MR 4PPL3B3RRY BL4ST 4ND 3V3RYON3 KNOWS THOS3 4R3 YOUR F4VOR1T3 FL4VORS / GC: 3V3N THOUGH YOU TYP3 1N YUCKY MUST4RD / GC: WH1CH 1S W31RD >:\ TA: maybe there ii2 more two me than you thiink. [...] maybe ii ju2t want two giive the red and blue thiing a re2t for a change and not make iit 2o iit2 liike, oh look iit2 that prediictable fuck wiith tho2e two 2tupiid color2, iit2 amaziing how much everyone fuckiing hate2 hiim.

of which Hussie has this to say in the published commentary (Book 4, p. 101):

Terezi says it's weird that Sollux types in yucky mustard, even though his "favorite colors" are red and blue. It's really not weird at all, considering literally everyone in his blood class types in that color. But this idea may not have been fully locked in yet as an ironclad canon fact. While Hivebent continuously provides the scoop on what the facts of this culture are, it is simultaneously exploring certain nebulous ideas before fully committing to them. This is a very good strategy when it comes to improvisational worldbuilding.

when Gamzee's cult is described as "obscure", it makes no sense to interpret this as meaning "obscure within his caste", because the caste idea wasn't even fully formed in the author's mind at that point in time, let alone the reader's. what that line is saying is that Gamzee's cult is obscure within his society. and everyone seems to ignore the very sentence after that comment, which says exactly what i'm saying, almost explicitly:

The beliefs of this cult are SOMEWHAT FROWNED UPON by those dwelling in more common lawnrings.

Gamzee's beliefs are strange to commoners. the very clear implication being that among the upper echelons of Alternian society, being a juggalo isn't that frowned upon at all! sometimes Hussie leaves things unsaid about the world of Homestuck because they're not important or to deliberately leave them up to interpretation, but quite often things go unsaid because when you read between the lines they really should speak for themselves. the fact that Alternia's upper castes are more and more uncommon is one of these things (but to drive the point home, there's this comment from Formspring: "lower classes must be much more copious than higher classes. The lowbloods die off much more quickly, and so must be spawned in greater numbers.").

it's odd that this particular "obscure cult" line has become a sticking point, because Kanaya's intro does the exact same thing when it describes her as "one of the few of [her] kind who can withstand the BLISTERING ALTERNIAN SUN, and perhaps the only who enjoys the feel of its rays." we all seem to understand that this isn't claiming daywalking as a unique power of Kanaya's, but merely hinting at the fact that Kanaya is part of a rare caste with that ability. I guess many don't make the comparison because Gamzee's caste is never explicitly singled out as a rare one?

from there, what limited background we do get on the Alternian regime hammers home the point. "subjugglator" (this has the word juggalo in it. a lot of people try to get out of this one) and "Highblood" are used as functional synonyms in Scratch's intermission:

p. 4054: The highbloods were livid over the unprecedented heresy, and soon, a massive sectarian war followed, spreading across the planet and throughout the galaxy. The conflict was lopsided of course, with the Highbloods given full support from the Condesce and her sea dwellers. p. 4063: [the Condesce] could use her leverage to delegate oppression to the subjugglators, whose unique abilities and exceptional brutality made them natural enforcers. They too would delegate in their governance, exploiting the pride and loyalty of dangerous bluebloods beneath them...

the fact that the guy literally called The Grand Highblood is a massive clown is basically garnish; but the fact that the word Highblood with a capital H, even outside of the context of Gamzee's ancestor, was basically used exclusively to refer to purplebloods in the comic seems to have been largely forgotten. this only continues into Act 6, even when a lot of the fandom's misconceptions and reconceptions of the lore started to seep into the comic proper:

You're not really up on Alternian history, but apparently at some point the empress got fed up with the Subjugglators' stranglehold on the soda market, and released a drink that was said to be more loaded with sugar than even the wicked elixir itself. The Highbloods considered such marketing reports to be blasphemous lies, however. (Act 6 Intermission 1, part 2)

emphasis all my own, to make clear that basically no distinction is made between Highbloods as a political institution and the subjugglators as a religious authority. but really, Act 6 is when the whole clown thing should have started to become really obvious, anyway, with lines like "There was this sense that [the Condesce] just loved the idea of delegating the extreme subjugation of the world's population to a pair of demented clown rappers" and the increasing inescapability of Lord English's influence on the story only entrenching that the presence of these juggalos on Alternia had real significance and was not some one off joke.

years ago when it was at its peak, the idea that the subjugglators "were only ever meant to be an obscure cult" seemed to me to have originated among troll enthusiasts who dropped off the comic around Scratch's takeover and didn't really care for overarching plot points like Lord English taking prominence into Act 6. but I guess now that troll discussion has started to center the design process that went into the Hiveswap trolls, the argument has circled back around into the mainstream? but basically to answer your question the deal with the obscure cult thing is that it's bogus. people wanted to make fantrolls who weren't juggaloes because what they fundamentally forget is that a race of juggalos controlling alternia is actually meant to be, and is, really fucking funny

[velvetvexations]

I understand the instinct behind it to a degree but it really does worry me how fast people in progressive spaces are willing to buy into conspiracy level thinking about there being shadowy groups of transphobes plotting to freeze other trans people out or like, that every big news story or movie/tv/book release is planned to distract us from Sudan or Gaza, cuz like quite often things are just coincidences? The most insidious thing about systemic oppression is that it's so self-sufficient it doesn't NEED people to conspire to fuck over xyz demographic, it just does that on it's own. The instant you buy in to conspiratorial thinking you're in danger, and that includes painting a large group of queer creators as active, intentional transmisognists who should be shunned forever and ignoring the realistic read which is that it's clearly an unfortunate coincidence that can be fixed! It's the whole "if the building was designed to be inaccessible even if everyone working there loves disabled people the building is still inaccessible" thing, for a lot of reasons not a lot of trans and queer people end up even in the line to possibly be front and center in a show or two, and Dropout is clearly working to change that and include queer people, but it's slow going and the system is stacked against trans people and no one is perfect and Dropout is also still a VERY small company all things considered trying to build themselves up from almost nothing, they need support so they can offer space to more trans people and transfems! Like what good does spreading a bullshit rumor about the main cast all being closet raging transmisognists do aside from tear down one of the only queer platforms we have??

When College Humor got bought by Sam they could only afford like ONE employee, do we want to have to wait years and years and years for another new platform to arise that has the money and power to represent us?? I'd rather uplift and push to be better a platform that is run by queer people who want to do better for all of us even if they don't always succeeded than sit here begging Disney to acknowledge that we exist while spreading horrid rumors about every legit queer creator who wants to platform us secretly being a huge bigot in disguise.

It's so awful, I hate how every time someone works their ass off to make a fucking difference for queer people all the terminally online progressive queers have to rip them to shreds for not being 100% perfect in every way until we have nothing but sanitized corporate overlords who don't think we deserve to be on screen at all. Every progressive queer creator gets put through this eventually and I'm so sick of it. The Vlogbrothers, The McElroy Family, Nightvale Presents, She-ra, Steven Universe, Chappell Roan, Becky Albertalli, it KEEPS happening!! And we will never get anywhere if the slightest misstep or honest unfortunate coincidence is enough to deem the only people who are trying to represent us, many of which ARE us, as irredeemable bigots who should be crucified in the town square.

Imo this is just a massive case of people always falling for conspiratorial thinking out of a refusal to actually understand how systemic bigotry works in favor of the "everyone is always secretly intentionally conspiring against us" lie and refusing to give queer creators/allies ANY grace or room for error or the benefit of the doubt because like. I guess destroying other queer people and our allies is what some of us do best. The fact that it's only ever queer people and allies who get this treatment makes me sick. We can't let ourselves have anything, it's perfect or it's evil. What the fuck is even the point of queer rep anymore if all of it is going to get treated like this eventually?

.