#its not like. a panic or fear thing in that case i legitimately have a fucked reaction time whenebver i go outside

[growling]

The deer instinct to just Stand There mildly confused whenever I notice a car barreling towards me on maximum speed but immediately flinch and scream and get into the defense stance whenever my 8 year old brother makes any sudden movement with his tiny grade schooler hands in my vicinity

[the-s1lly-corner]

Yayyy, so excited you're writing for TADC! Could you possibly write some hcs for Ragatha with a s/o that's really interested in animals but bugs?? As soon as it was revealed she fears centipedes, I've been obsessed with the idea of her ironically having a partner who loves the very thing she fears- They love to draw the anatomy of bugs and read facts about them...just complete obsession

Sometimes (before the two started dating) I imagine the s/o find centipedes and in the heat of the moment for forgot about Ragatha's immense fear, immediately going to show her with excitement because they love showing her their interests... only to be met with a screaming Ragatha before apologizing multiple times!

Ragatha x a bug loving partner!

YIPEE! i actually love this idea so much! i think this might be the last request for tonight! if i dont go to sleep after this im probably going to be drawing! yall better not be afraid to keep sending requests! i dont have much going on rn so its nice to be able to keep busy

very polite about it but you can see the fear flash in her eyes when you let slip that you love bugs; as well as you having a soft spot for centipedes

encourages your hobby, but like, from afar

avoids going into your room if you keep your bugs there, in cases and enclosures. its not that she doesnt want to spend time with you, but she doesnt like the idea of those hundreds of beady little eyes watching her!

loves your drawings, though, she has to admit that you got some real talent to be able to capture every detail of the critter, as well as being able to label them if its meant to be a diagram

i think asides the art shes the most tolerable of hearing bug facts, since some bugs do have some legitimately interesting and cool things going on with them

coming from someone who hates bugs btw, i panic when i see something more than an ant; will go fuzzy in the head if i see a spider or centipede

speaking of fear, i think ragatha is the type to seize up before running away. not screaming, but definitely getting a little incoherent as she begs you to go capture the damn thing

freezes like a statue when you approach her with a bug, forgetting shes scared of them. it truly looks like her soul left her body when youre about two feet in front of her

then it dawns on you

oh yeah!

shes... scared of them

you quickly turn around to shield your body between the creature and her, as well as quickly getting it out of her sight while letting the apologies spill out

quickly forgives you since it was a genuine accident, accidents happen

[lisa972kdlz]

Le cœur a sa mémoire :(Heart got his memory)

Another theoretical analysis about Underverse! More specifically about Error's character, his development, his personality and what might be going through his mind in the context of the series.

When you look at Error's behaviour in Underverse and compare it to his behaviour in the original comic, you quickly realise that it's not the same. And when you browse through the various versions of Error to be found in fandom, whether in fan fiction, comics or simple gags, it's this version of the Underverse that's found with varying degrees of nuance. In other words, a serious, grumpy, tsundere Error who hiss at the first person he meets. And... I'm really not a fan of this Error, because in my opinion it's less interesting and, above all, leads to received ideas that head straight for the cliché highway. Why do we have this skewed image of the character? Is it really inconsistent and unworthy of his integrity? Is this a bad thing, and does Underverse follow this line? Should we limit ourselves to saying that Underverse isn't canon so there's no reason to criticise constructively or even try to find connections?

Obviously not, because with a bit of imagination (and philosophy), there's (almost) always a way to put the pieces of the jigsaw together to give it concrete form! First of all, let's dissociate the Canon version of Error from its Fanon version.

In terms of personality, Error Canon is more like the Collector in The Owl House than the vampire-spider Miguel O'Hara in Spiderverse. An unhinged and paranoid Collector, but all the same. He's chatty, he smiles, and has no trouble talking to anyone, whether it's the creators who ask him questions, his prisoner Swap!Sans, or that strange visitor, the Sans that Fresh usually owns. It's a far cry from the grumpy, withdrawn character who refuses all human contact. In the comic, his reticence is often relatively controlled, and in any case, if he does do any harm, it very rarely comes back to the Gaster blasters. When Swap gives him a completely off-the-wall speech about friendship, yeah, he abandons him temporarily in the Anti-Void to teach him a lesson, but even in a panic he doesn't hurt or attack him. When he thinks he's being manipulated by Darkblitz8, he hangs her high into the air with his strings, but nothing more. Then he calms down straight away and quietly puts his hands back in his pockets and says, "What a nice lady, I love making new friends."

"Love. Making. New friends."

Yes, that's Error saying that, can you believe it? It's said as a joke, but OF COURSE he's sincere... And for a thousand and one reasons. What I mean is that, like every Sans else, he more has a tendency to hide his thoughts behind jokes or false humour than to reject or attack others. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it's a tendency.

The only time he pulls out his blasters (outside of destroying AU's) is when he gets a surprise hug from behind and when FRESH shows up out of nowhere. So it's relatively legitimate (but only relatively because there's nothing legitimate about exterminating your neighbour Ú^Ù).

Nevertheless, the Fandom version and the original version have one thing in common: Error is completely anti-social, fearful of others, and hates himself viscerally without admitting it to himself. But the "Tsundere" version is highly caricatured, with temperaments that are sometimes the exact opposite of what Error is! He is portrayed as cold, distant, incapable of not shouting when something displeases him, and so on. But in reality he answers questions, accepts a handshake from a stranger and even describes it as "pleasurable", talks about his tastes, admits word for word that he likes having people to talk to, concedes to requests... The only sensitive subjects are his personal problems, which include Papyrus, Toriel and, of course, himself.

But he hates glitches, right? The AU's and all that, he hates them?

Yes, he hates them, but subconsciously he makes a dissociation between the mass of shapeless glitches and an individual. When he goes to destroy AUs, they're glitches. When he meets someone at random and starts to build a human relationship with them (Swap), he almost forgets that he's supposed to hate him.

Canon Error plays the villain, but in fact he's a frightened little beast in denial about his extreme loneliness and strong self-hatred. This also fits the fandom version, but in a kind of misunderstood inverse: not only does he lose all his glitched, unpredictable, paranoid and nightmarish side, but above all he also loses his cute and childlike side, naive, unaware of social references like the term "ship", with surprising tastes and a real desire to form bonds when he feels it's safe to do so. As a result, he loses that strange duality that creates a feeling of unease, a mixture of fear and attachment, because we sense that he has totally human emotions but is too deranged to be able to be a truly healthy friend with anyone... He can hardly even be described as a narcissistic pervert, because he has already shown real compassion and even if he blames people for his misfortune, he won't tell them directly or make them feel guilty about it; he's more likely to say it to himself. He's more direct when he's in "destroyer" mode, but it's still accusations about people's glitch state in a general sense, like a "hate you all". No, he's not even just an asshole, he's just.... Insane. We forget that he's insane.

Also, when he feels threatened, Error will automatically step into his villain role with sardonic laughter and striking retorts. The Fanon version, on the other hand, will spit in the person's face and express his anger. He's rational, hateful, sinister, a killjoy and stable in his tempestuous character. Of course, there are fanarts and gags where the cute side is brought out... But they're usually just gags, and in fanfiction and comics they're rarely shown and often anecdotal without much imagination...

OK, I've been talking about the Fanon version for a while now, but does Error in Underverse have this problem?

Well...

No ┐( ∵ )┌!

Firstly because in Underverse it's moderate, and he's presented in situations where it's understandable (the majority of his interactions are with Ink, his sworn foe so obviously he's going to be on the defensive), but also, we'll see later, because the series raises an important side of who Error has become over the course of time, and confronts him with an ultimatum, where his status quô goes is smashed to pieces.

I'm not in favour of Error being ultra-aggressive and cold in stories in general because I find it makes him interesting as a dead rat, but portraying him as more serious, intelligent and aware of the world around him isn't a bad choice. How can we explain it?

Well... He grew old, that's all.

The Error of Underverse, and by extension of the Fandom, is a character who has evolved, been revisited and experienced in many different ways. He's gone from the "guy who messes things up in the AU's" to the "Destroyer", his overall power too has increased as fans have seen his potential for danger, which may be a parallel to the fact that he's... simply trained and toughened up as he goes along? There's nothing to stop us imagining a future based on the Canon we've been left with. He simply accumulates memory. Even the fact that Ink and Error are enemies, it isn't canon, but... Well, it makes perfect sense, because by putting universes in danger, of course he had to face the protector at some point!

Error has visited AU's, encountered situations that have taught him lessons... He has grown in maturity. Fine, he still gets nought for emotional maturity, but he has grown anyway, which is normal and a good thing (because if the characters never evolved in an open world, we'd be a bit bored all the same).

That said, there's a rather annoying glitch that's going to mess things up a bit...

It's her again, Ma'am the Canon description ! ✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧

In Canon, canonically, in real real real real.... Error is incapable of evolving. It's in his nature, quite simply. Because he's an "error".

According to Crayon Queen, the ending of Error's comic should have gone like this: Swap! Sans, as a result of being exposed to the Anti-Void, becomes an error in his own right, an erratic and unhinged being whose character and memory become dislocated and distorted. He retains his positive and heroic character, so it doesn't make him a villain, but he remains unpredictable and difficult to follow, and therefore dangerous. Error will feel horrible about this and will even be confronted with a deep guilt that will convince him to let him go. "Blueberror" will then be guided into the Omega Timeline by Core Frisk where he will go to live. And Error will find himself alone again in the Anti-Void, alone in this white nothingness, alone in the middle of All. As time goes by, he will forget all about the experience and return to the person he was before without questioning, for such is the destiny of errors. Corrupted things with no hope of salvation.

Yes, it's tragic, but that's the way it is! And Passive!Night is dead, get used to it!

(Never! QwQ)

(*Rubbing her hands) What if we tried to slip through the cracks and get round this restrictive element, all the while respecting the character and his universe?

Come on, let's get started?

We're off!

So why does Error lose his memory?

Because he's an error, all right. But is that all? Aren't there other remarkable factors that make him forget?

Already, exposure continues to the Anti-Void, where living leads to harmful consequences. To explain why, I had theorised that, being the opposite of the Void, it was the Core of the Multiverse, also known as the Great Whole, where codes intersect and aggreate. –I've done some research in the meantime and the Doodlesphere can't really be a Core, because it's Ink's 'private' dimension. It's an empty zone (perhaps an empty AU which is recognisable by its nature as a white or off-white nothingness without, however, corresponding to the properties of the Anti-Void) where the painter has grouped together some sort of links to access the AUs. It's a bit like a custom Doc document with thousands of URLs, but not a Heart.–

Exposed to the Anti-Void for too long, some of our codes end up merging with the dimension; we lose some, we receive some, until we become errors, a bit like a slow dissolution. Our memory is obviously affected. At the moment of transformation, but perhaps also as we continue to be exposed to it?

If you don't like this theory, there's also the fact that, well... It's a void. White. No wind, no heat or cold, no light, no shadow, no palpable matter. EVIDENTLY it causes an alteration in the brain and memory. If Error left the Anti-Void for somewhere less... Creepy, it's easy to imagine that his continual amnesia would be less severe.

And finally, the last and most important reason...

Error is alone and bored shitless.

Now let's going to do a bit of philosophy, because philosophy of the real world is science of fiction.

What is Memory (and owh shet I don't have fucking idea of the nuances of vocabulary in English philosophy–) ?

(Well in French "Souvenir" is meanging like memory and "Mémoire" the global uniting of the memories, I suppose there exists a term to make the nuance but I don't know enough about it so... Let's say that Souvenir = memory and Mémoire = Memory, okay?

Sorry ...TwT)

So, roughly speaking, it's the collection of our memories recorded by a stade of consciousness of a moment that was present but is now past. Not to be confused with storage medium: there's a lot of information recorded by the brain that we can't remember (in Error's case it's most certainly out of order too, at least in part).

The conditions for a memory are as follows: to fixate on an object, situation or person in order to take aware of it. Reflecting enables this to happen, because reflecting is about taking the initiative and interrupting the flow of thought in order to consider a specific idea; thinking that you've had that thought. It's like a computer: there are lots of images stored inside, but you won't have access to them, or only with difficulty, if you don't think about printing them out in physical format. In any case, to have a Memory, you need a trigger, something that connects you to reality and makes you say: I remember that.

And Error doesn't have that. There's nothing memorable about his life as an anomaly. He is alone, all the time, in a nothingness where nothing happens, where there is nothing beautiful. A memory is only a memory if we have a consciousness of a past and a present. But Anti-Void has no day, no night, no timetable, no real time. And the only time Error goes out is to kill masses of people he doesn't care about and doesn't even consider to be living beings. He doesn't care about the AU's he destroys. If we were to make a scrapbook of his holiday memories... It would be limited to sewing, sleep, Undernovela, destruction, conversation with imaginary people (his dolls or even us), Outertale, sewing, sleep.

He's alone and he FEELS alone. So lonely that he hears voices in his head, so lonely that he talks to his own dolls. He needs others. We can even assume, in the Canon at least, that he's an extrovert.

Yes, I just said Error was extroverted, and that's extremely weird 😅

But really, it's not so crazy. An extrovert is defined by the way the person resources themselves. Introverted, by being alone, extroverted, by seeing people. It's perfectly possible to be extroverted AND asocial and anti-anti-anti-antisocial. And there you boned a bit.

I'm not making any claims, what I can see is that Error has a certain ease in expressing himself and talking about himself (as long as it doesn't have to do with his problems) and that he's quite talkative. But then, maybe he's something else, intro or ambi, because in his condition of absolute solitude, ANYONE would have an immense need to be with other people.

Besides, don't you think that in his comic, the longer he lives with Swap, the more logical, stable and thoughtful he becomes? It's experience that accumulates. It's the Memory that works. Because with Swap, a friend at last, he can remember what's going on and realise how much time has passed. When he learns to knit with him, when he watches Undernovela with him, when he answers the creator's questions with him, and so on.

It's only after Swap has gone that Error closes in on himself again, letting the Anti-Void devour him once more.

To have a Memory, Error needs to get out of Anti-Void AND have a face, someone he can see fluently to remind him of his past experiences. And who fills that role perfectly in the Fandom, I'll give you three guesses?

Ink.

This is arguably the strongest no-canon relationship in the Undertale Multiverse. His exchanges with Ink, whether it's a confrontation, a tempestuous dialogue or a bullshit funny, all these little interactions help to forge an emotional bond between the two nemeses.

Whether fans develop this into a rivalship, a bromance or a romance, who cares,

EVIDENTLY Ink is very important to him.

EVIDENTLY he sees him, in some twisted way, as a friend.

Because Ink's the ONLY stable, long-term human relationship he has. And the only way to keep that bond is to keep destroying over and over again to get the painter's attention, and maybe even other people's attention. And given that Error's incapable of being healthy with anyone, because he hates himself too much and is too afraid of other people, what better way to show his attachment than with an "I hate you"?

I'm going to use a really stupid reference here, but Error has a bit of a Dory memory. She forgets everything as she goes along, but from the moment she meets Marlin, she forgets less and less. All she has to do is look at his face and she remembers everything they've been through. And afraid he'll abandon her all alone again, because she doesn't want to forget again.

What if that's what Error was afraid of in Underverse, when Ink 'abandons' him to go and play with X-Gaster? What if he's afraid that if he loses him, all his progression he accomplished so far will go up in smoke?

Ink is Error's Memory. It's very ironic.

And the icing on the cake is that Ink has a lot in common with Error: faced with extreme loneliness in a white void, loss of Memory, ignorance of the conscious state of the beings around them... Ink expresses this suffering through a desire to protect, and Error through a desire to destroy (it's superbly explained in THIS comic you'll found just after validated by the creator, I recommend it!) Isn't he the perfect friend? The funny thing is that in Underverse, the roles are 'reversed'. Ink is prepared to destroy everything, while Error is prepared to do anything to save what attention he has left. OK, he destroys the AU's, but he doesn't care about the AU's, he cares about Ink. He had the chance all along to do it, but he waited until the ultimatum. Because his battles with the painter and his status as quô are vital to him. He was pushed to the limit to commit the irreparable.

If that, is not two lunatics walking on a beam, I don't know what is.

I'm extrapolating here, but imagine that the odd island in the middle of the sea had been requisitionee by Error to be his new den precisely because he'd had enough of the Anti-Void and the memory loss it was causing him? Perhaps, having had a truce with Ink, he no longer felt the need to protect himself from him by staying in the Anti-Void (since Ink has a great fear of white spaces, it makes a good lair) and he was able to move in later. After all, the only time we see him in the Anti-Void is when Ink kicked him back in the arse and in the 2nd Xtrascene when he's snoozing. It's as if he's been sleeping off his wine or something, as if he's gone back there in a fit of rage to forget everything again in frustration at seeing Ink having fun without him. Haven't you noticed that the dolls and the footstool he sits in only exist in his dream? And that when he wakes up, he's on the floor with nothing around him? Why didn't he sleep in his footstool? It's as if he's actually moved all his stuff, except his souls, since they're best kept in the Anti-Void by Ink. The footstool isn't on the island in Xtra scene 1, but it is in Comic the Truce, Error moved it. Maybe he really leaved the Anti-Void and is only using it as a repository for souls? All this just to... Stop being mad? Live a more or less normal life? Become aware of who he is and... Simply be?

Very capylotract but I love this theory xD

And I also think that Error doesn't just see Ink as a tool or a means. I think he really thinks the two of them have a special relationship. Because he's romantically inclined, which is suggested by his Sans past, his taste for Outertale and the fact that he watches a rosewater series with a ship where his alternative version and the alternative version of the woman he loved are in a misunderstood and forbidden relationship, because he's afraid but also wants to be loved deep down given that he's incapable of giving himself self-esteem, because he shows intense frustration when Ink doesn't show him that it's mutual...

And because RIVALSHIP! It would be a perfect match for the Joker/Batman relationship in the Lego Batman movie and I think it's HANDSOME!!!! (*shakes fan-girling head)

(I don't know if Jakei will go with what I have developed but whatever she does will still be super awesome, I wouldn't worry about it ✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧!)

.

Error belongs to @loverofpiggies

Ink belongs to @comyet

Underverse belongs to @jakei95

[liongoatsnake]

Within the past few years there has been a steady rise of claims coming from the Christian fundamentalist fueled conservative/right that the second step in the “transgender agenda” is for the allowance of people to start identifying as nonhuman animals. In their eyes anyone who identifies as nonhuman is just as “absurd” as someone having a gender different than the one they were assigned at birth. When they compare otherkin/therians/furries (whether they are aware of these people already exist or not or by those labels), they are doing so because their eyes its all this wild detached from reality “identity politics” anarchy “The Left” is pushing. When conservatives lump non-LGBTQ topics in with the LGBTQ (furries/therians/otherkin, in this case but they’ve also included paraphilias, age repression, transracial,  body integrity dysphoria, and more plenty in the past as well) they are doing so under the perspective that all of these things are symptoms of society’s “degeneracy” and falling away from “God’s path/light.” They don’t care how ANY of these groups categorize themselves, or what ANY professionals say about any of these groups, or ANYTHING. They only see things they don’t like. While the acceptance of transgender people is still HIGHLY controversial in the United States and the violence against transgender people (especially transwoman of color), slowly more and more battles are one regarding the rights of trans people to be able to just use a damn bathroom. These cases are especially being one surrounding schools. Over the past decade there have been many news-talked about cases across the United States regarding young transgender people existing in their schools. Names, sports, etc have been bought about but none so more than the whole bathroom issue. Conservatives are obsessed with transgender people and their need of bathrooms. So what does this have to do with otherkin/therians/furries? Well, its because conservatives can see that they are loosing their fight over bathrooms. So they are raising their claims to try to drum-up a greater moral panic. Its not just “shock a transgirl using the girl’s bathroom” their moving on to “shock a child that identifies as a cat is using a littler box.” These rumors of such things probably stem from years and years of the conservatives claiming that “after” transgender people are accepted than “transspecies people” will be accepted next. And then when they discovered that otherkin/therians/furries existed, they just took that as confirmation to their claims/fears. Also, within the past 5 years or so the alterhuman community as a whole and the furry fandom has continued to expand and to an extent become more and more known by the general populous. Within the alterhuman community, the rise of people who claim to be “kinnies” (young people who just relate to characters rather than identifying as them) has caused a rise of confusion and misinformation within and surrounding the alterhuman community.

I would not be personally surprised if some of these “concerned parents” spreading rumors about litter boxes, lowed tables, or whatever aren’t hearing bits and pieces of stuff related to these groups of people and jumping to the conclusion that schools will be accommodating them too like they did with transgender people. So, they overhear their child listening to a TicTok of a kinnie talking about being a cat, or overhear their child knows a kid in their class who has a fursona, or even sees a kid wearing a tail or ears in school - boom they connect their slippery slope fallacy fears they’ve been building about LGBTQ people for years and use alterhumans/furries as evidence of their fears being legitimate. Thus why, even within the past half year, the rise of politicians, news articles, viral social media posts, etc are claiming or dismissing claims of people that identifying as animals in schools. Because conservatives strongly believe that this is the next step in the “transgender agenda” and they will blow anything and everything out of proportion to try to drum up a moral panic. So, what does this mean for the alterhuman and furry community? Its honestly hard to say, but I fear it won’t be good. If I’d hazard a guess, I fear it won’t be long until some poor teen furry/otherkin/therian/etc will end up in the news. Maybe because of bullying, maybe because some parent will cause a stir because they saw them wearing a tail or something, or maybe something else. Whatever the future, I feel like the alterhuman community and furry fandom are going to be continued to be lumped in with the LGBTQ community by conservatives for the foreseeable future. The LGBTQ community is already reacting negatively to the existence of otherkin/therians because of this comparison by conservatives regardless of what either communities say. We fear the continuation of being lumped together may continue to sour views to the existence of otherkin/therians or even nonbinary xenogender individuals. We might see parts of the LGBTQ community start punching down more as tends to happen. We also foresee a continued rise of media trying to focus on alterhumans especially but also furries to an extent.

The furry fandom, we think should fair well. They have a lot of people in the fandom well versed in dealing with the media, have academics ready with their data and research.

The alterhuman community does not have that. We don’t see alterhumans fairing as well. Research into otherkin and therians is still so limited. There are not well established and reliable people in the community who can professionally deal with the media’s was, and no academics that are ready with their reams of data and research. This could lead to issues down the road. Hopefully, things don’t go sideways and the conservative moral panic machine passes the alterhuman community by, but it also might latch on and start treating the community as its newest chew toy. Hard to say. - Sky Singer (he/him/his, red-tailed hawk)

[ribbononline]

When the joke AU gets out of hand and now its like, a whole thing

SO uhm here is the post about the fake marriage on Pasio au! Where the whole fake marriage thing ended up becoming more of a B plot more then anything, oops. The premise kind of got lost on me as I went along.

First things first, here’s the information I gathered from the Hoenn timeline in Pokemas itself so yall know what im working with (and as a side note, if you have no idea about the basic story of Pokemon Masters, the rest of this entire post might be a little confusing);

-Brendan is Normans son, and May the daughter of professor Birch. Brendan has at least defeated Normans gym, and neither of them have met Aqua or Magma, nor Archie or Maxie.

-Magma and Aqua don’t seem to be publicly known as bad in any way.

-The meteor with Zinnia has already happened, and someone else took that destiny from her. (I’ll be honest- I never end up really explaining this here. I had no idea how to even begin making sense of this considering this is post game stuff and Brendan never even seems to have made it to the Elite Four as far as we know)

And with that ! Here’s the actual story I managed to make out of that.

-The backstories for Archie and Maxie are the same as they’d normally be. Things only get different once the ORAS plots would normally start.

Magma and Aqua both don’t commit crimes (such as orb or submarine stealing) with their uniforms on and under their team names. As such, they’re still seen as regular, legit environment organisations trying to better the region.

May and Brendan never get involved with them either. Between no meddling kids and their crimes not being tied back to them, things end up going pretty fast on their end.

-Their crimes aren’t connected nor is anyone looking into them as something bigger- right up until the orbs get stolen. Those are considered important enough artifacts to raise some attention, and so, Steven and Wallace brought on the case to investigate as the Hoenn champions.

-It’s a lot easier said then done, and while they start to suspect Aqua and Magma have something to do with it, they have no concrete proof. Still, they do their best to figure out if it’s them and what their intentions with it would be.

-Regrettably for them they are too slow. Maxie and Archie both make it to the sea cavern , and both raise their respective legendaries. Kyogre is there, Groudon is there, as a result even Rayquaza shows up. There’s a lot going on— and then, within a couple of minutes, there isn’t. All legendaries vanish into thin air, so fast that the population of Hoenn never even realised what was happening out on sea. Except for some unfortunate swimmers who never end up being believed.

Maxie and Archie feel devestated, and the Hoenn League who did notice what happened is very alarmed. Keeping the incident quiet as to not incite a panic, Steven and Wallace are pushed onto this case instead now- to locate the missing legendaries, and ensure they won’t cause any harm- and maybe figure out what caused them to awaken in the first place.

Wallace and Steven immediately link that to the orbs, and as such, Aqua and Magma. Still, they have no actual proof- no one outside their teams saw Archie or Maxie doing anything.

-The reason behind the sudden disappearances turns out to be Hoopa! Who brought all of them to Pasio. The legendaries immediately went from fighting mode into very confused mode. They don’t know where they are or what happened. Groudon ends up hiding in the volcano on the island, while Kyogre keeps to the bottom of the water surrounding the island. -Rayquaza however doesn’t hide itself- and instead, floats around on a mountain top on the island. Rumors start floating around about it, and before long Zinnia shows up and becomes a sync pair with it.

-Steven and Wallace hear Rayquaza is over in Pasio, and figure the other two might be as well- so they go over to investigate. They also talk some with Zinnia about Rayquaza, but since it appears to be fine and calm and Zinnia is not planning on giving it up, she ends up keeping it and they leave her be to search for Groudon and Kyogre instead.

-Magma and Aqua also catch wind of Rayquaza being over there, and even hear about some sightings of what appear to be Kyogre and Groudon around the island. Now the plan is to get over there and get them…. but the problem is that Steven and Wallace are both there, and they’re well aware those two suspect them- and that suddenly showing up for no reason would probably only worsen those suspicions. While the both of them have complete faith in their power as a team, they’d rather not pick a fight with two champions if they can avoid it- especially when they’re on an island full of other champions and elite four members who would probably back them up if asked.

-Going with their entire team would definitely be too suspicious. That’s out. Going with their admins might still be risky- Plus, they can’t exactly leave their teams unattended back in Hoenn. So, Maxie and Archie end up figuring that the best course of action would be for them to go alone, at least for the time being. Scout out if they can locate the legendaries and a way to get to them- and then call backup if needed.

…But if they both go alone at the same time and end up fighting each other while they’re there… it wouldn’t help their case.

-And so, after some thinking things over, Maxie ends up deciding it’d be best if they went together under a temporary truce. So off to Aqua to talk it over with Archie he goes! There, they come up with their plan; faking a marriage, and going to Pasio under the excuse of being on honeymoon. Steven and Wallace wouldn’t be expecting it, so maybe it’d throw them off track! And for the rest of the trainers on Pasio- well, who isn’t happy for a couple living their best life? With a little luck it’d immediately make people trust them a bit more.

-So to Pasio they go! Maxie takes Camerupt as his sync partner, Archie partners with his Sharpedo. They rent a little vacation home- for obvious reasons, they’ll have to live together for a while, but with a little luck they can just avoid each other most of the time. Besides, at least the ad specified there being two beds.

-They misread the ad. There’s one single two person bed. Archie is promptly demoted to sleeping on the couch.

In general, while they do well enough at faking being very affectionate and loving in front of people, the moment they’re back in their house it’s a lot of fighting.

-Steven and Wallace are not stupid, and are immediately wary when Maxie and Archie suddenly show up no matter how well they’re putting on an act. Still, there’s not a lot they can do except keep an eye on them and ensure they stay away from the areas Kyogre and Groudon are spotted.

-The rest of the island however thinks they’re nice! Look at the cute couple having fun. Good for them.

-Overall, while things are going decently okay for Archie and Maxie, Steven and Wallace constantly blocking off areas where they could gather intel and trailing their every move is really hindering their ability to be able to do much of anything. And so the four of them enter an awkward stand still, where neither can really get the other off the island.

-For a while, Maxie and Archie just try to put on the act as best as they can, to hopefully get Steven and Wallace to lower their guard. They go on ‚dates‘ together, hang out with the other people around the island, attend events together, etc. Steven and Wallace still don’t trust them for shit however, and end up pushing May and Brendan towards them in the hopes that they might be able to spot something off.

-Brendan and May have no idea what anyone is trying to do here, and actually really like Archie and Maxie. They help show them all there is on Pasio and introduce them to new people time and time again.

-Eventually, Maxie and Archie realise that this is going to take a lot longer then they were hoping for- between Steven and Wallace not budging, and the trainers on Pasio constantly keeping them busy- they’re going to need an excuse to keep staying here. And they don’t actually need to wait long! -While being a lot less aggressive and in people’s face about it, Archie still talks about the environmental impact the island has on the ocean around it a good bit to some of the other trainers there- he is leader of an environmental group focused on the sea back at home, after all! People actually start agreeing with him, to a point it even reaches Lear. Conceding something should be done, Sawyer starts working on putting a team together that would help undo the damage they’ve caused by making the oceans around the island more habitable for the Pokemon that were made homeless because of them. Archie is one of the first people to get asked to join the team- and having a job there makes a great excuse to stay a while longer. Besides, it’s still working towards his goal to some extent, so he’s down! -A bit after that Maxie ends up joining the team that made the island and is currently in charge of keeping it thriving. Same for him- the job still aligns with his ideals, so he doesn’t mind doing it.

-This was also the time Archie started having serious back pain from sleeping on the couch each night, so he took the bed as well. Maxie threatened to kick him out, Archie wished him luck with that and… well, they both just keep to their side of the bed now.

-Back at home, Magma and Aqua are being good legit environmental groups working within the law. It’s been gaining them a great reputation, and being fully legitimate and not having to fear getting charged for crimes is also very nice for the teens working as grunts there.

-And so back in Pasio, Maxie and Archie forcefully have to take a step back from their plans… to live relatively normal lives instead. Surprise surprise, it’s not actually that bad! They enjoy their jobs, they actually start making some friends, half the kids on the island seem to have adopted them as cool new uncles… and they even start fighting less in private! They can actually get along sometimes.

Eventually the realisation hits that they’re living out the lives they wanted- before they ever joined Rocket and everything went so terribly wrong. Except their marriage being ‚fake‘, this was more or less the future they envisioned… and it’s very weird to think about.

-For Maxie, he does get sad reminiscing, and reminisce he does- but as long as Archie keeps going , he’d never give up his plans. While originally raising Groudon was truly out of his ideals, over time (and when their original breakup happened) it became less about that- and more about ‚winning‘ - winning out over Archie, and proving to both himself and the other he’d been right all along. Even when the evidence started pointing towards that not being the case and Tabitha only agreeing this was a bad idea, he was so caught up in not being able to lose now he never backed down- and just reassured himself the science had to be wrong.

As long as Archie is going, so is he.

-Archie however…. Archie’s plans of flooding the world to reset it- undo the damage humanity caused by ending it entirely- were born out of feeling like there truly was no other option, truly was no other good left. Being focused on that goal every day, it wasn’t hard to stay in that mindset. But now, having to forcibly take a step back- suddenly getting to live a normal life again, with a way to help that doesn’t require death and a support system outside of Aqua… Suddenly the hope returns that maybe there is more out there- maybe there is another way to go about this.

And so, after a lot of thinking, and a lot of doubting every answer he came up with- finally he rang up Shelly and Matt to talk things over, and talk about leaving Kyogre be. Shelly was thrilled- at the end she didn’t trust his plans with Kyogre anymore anways and seeing Archie finally with agree with her on that was a big relief to her. Matt didn’t entirely understand, but Archie seemed happier with this idea, and Shelly definitely seemed happier with this idea- so he certainly didn’t mind.

Afterwards, Shelly ends up privately talking to Archie some more, where he confided a lot in her about stuff he never told her before. It was a lot to take in, and she definitely wasn’t happy about his plans having always been to more or less commit genocide on humanity without ever having told them- but at the end of the day, he’s still her friend, no damage has actually been done, and he’s finally talking to her about it so they can work it out. As such, with some help from her, Archie ends up going to therapy on the regular to help keep him in a better headset.

-After all of this, Archie pulls Maxie aside to let him know he’s giving up on Kyogre, and Maxie… just doesn’t know how to feel about it at all- doesn’t even know if he can trust him. He certainly wasn’t expecting this either way. For a while, Archie just goes about his day on Pasio, while Maxie went very very quiet, just watching him from a distance.

They both spend so much time on this- suddenly given up was something he never thought would be an option, and it’s a lot to process. Besides, Archie could be lying. ….But truthfully, he’s known the other way too long to believe that. Archie is serious about this, and it’s not particularly hard to tell.

So, after a lot of hemming and hawing, he too finally rings up Courtney and Tabitha and calls of their mission with Groudon.

Magma and Aqua are both just legit regular environmental organisations now.

-Now with that decision made, they end up talking a lot over between each other themselves. About their past, about their teams, and about what they want to do now. This is where they finally decide to actually give their relationship another chance as well. Not necessarily as a romantic relationship- thought not strictly as just friends either. They decide to just take it slow, see what they’re comfortable with, and see where it takes them from there.

(A lot of trainers in Pasio actually worry this is when they got into a fight- since they stop acting overly affectionate to put on an act, and instead get to have awkward conversations trying to rekindle their relationship. Everyone is so worried about what happened. Sorry guys, they’ll be okay)

-Though they fully intent on going back to Hoenn and their teams, they’re not in a hurry to leave and stick out their job contract which only were for about half a year total anyways. During this, even Steven and Wallace start noticing a change in them and finally lower their guard a bit. They never do end up attempting to get to the legendaries- they’re just enjoying their time here now.

-When they do finally get back to Hoenn, they merge the teams and help the land and the sea together now. Archie also ends up convincing Maxie to join him for therapy sometimes- even without them almost ending the world, they do still both have their things to work trough.

-Groudon and Kyogre just vibe on Pasio now. They let kids battle them for fun sometimes. They’re doing alright.

-Brendan and May end up visiting Archie and Maxie a lot! That’s their cool gay uncles now.

-Somewhere along the way, as time passes, they actually end up legitimising the marriage documents they faked at the very start. And they still return to Pasio from time to time to meet up with the friends they made there. :]

Apologies if any of this was messy or unclear! it was a lot to try and condense down into a single post and I did my best, but ykno. if there did appear to be smth missing feel free to shoot me a message or an ask orz also this is my second time writing this post- first time i made the stupid mistake of typing it up in browser. And after over an hour of typing this all up…. tumblr refreshed for no reason, and deleted all of it. so writing this all a second time has been even harder then the first. ;; it hurt so bad.

Also, I do have a lot of thoughts n ideas abt the actual relationships they end up having w other characters on the island, but I’m saving that for another post! With the premise of Pasio there’s just so much potential to stuff all these diff characters from diff games into a place togehter and i want to make the most of that- so its prolly gonna b another long post lmao. i wont make this one even longer then it already is, so diff post it is

just know that they did in fact once see Giovanni on the island, and they almost ended up throwing hands.

(bonus; the link to the page where I keep all my oras HC posts and comics sorted)

[daaziscoolbesties]

[REPOST] MY 2K WORD COMMENTARY/ANALYSIS OF RANBOO’S LORE STREAM

‼️‼️This post contains lore spoilers from Ranboo’s 4/23 stream, “The Enderwalk Saga. Chapter 1: The Lessons”. If you haven’t seen that stream don’t read ahead unless you want spoilers‼️‼️

disclaimer: this isnt really an analysis as much as a bunch of commentary and half-baked theories.

-on the way to the mansion he was sort of talking to himself saying stuff like "i'm good i'm good" which m a y be a normal thing but also maybe it's not and it flew over our heads cause he talks to chats and donos like that so often

-again, this one may just be a normal thing but when he was climbing up the stairs in the mansion looking for foolish, he repeats some of his words like down to the exact same tone of voice and everything. 12:42,  "this mansion is way too big actually. this mansion is way too big actually." (why the repeated actually? seems odd to me but again it might just be a normal thing that i haven't picked up on). (right after) "okay okay lemme find him lemme find him" again repeated words in the e x a c t same tone.

-does everyone know about ranboo's silk touch hands ability thing? or was that just a techno and ranboo main character moment. bc if it was, how would foolish know that ranboo could pick up the full cake after it'd been partially eaten. unless everyone on the sever knows about that in which case this means nothing. but if they d o n t know... how would foolish know? ranboo wrote about it in the do not read book so maybe if it's not a publicly known thing maybe foolish got his hands on the book and read it??

-14:53-ish, they're talking about the war room and how it was for tubbo or whatever and ranboo says, and i quote "he prepares for lore but he's never gonna do it." now funny thing is at first i couldn't tell if he said "war" like in reference to the war room or "lore". but after playing the clip over and over i can say with ALMOST 100% certainty that he said lore. there is a definite L sound at the beginning of the word. which either means a) this was a slip up (doubtful bc he said later that there were no mistakes), b) he broke the fourth wall because they were supposed to be rping at that point, or c) i'm completely wrong and he said "war" which leads down an entire other road of possibilities

-15:17 "are you a book reader?" "*checks inventory for do not read book* uh yeah i'd say i'm a book reader-" dunno how i didn't catch this the first time I HATE THAT DAMN BOOK

-15:18 there's blue in his hotbar. where did he get the blue.

-16:40 "it's like a metaphor- i have two minds: i have my normal self, my normal little shift-dancing self, and then the builder one. the builder one is demanding. it's a very demanding mind." ranboo then lets out a weird sigh after this. i feel like what foolish was talking about was an indirect(?) parallel to ranboo in and out of enderwalk, there's how he normally is, trying to do best for others, and then there's enderwalk, meeting up with bad guys and "demanding" things (its very late as i write this i really don't know what i'm talking about)

-17:11 "you have your panic closet" i'm sorry his what now 😀 no but seriously how the hell did i miss some of these

-18:04 "you're asking me if i remember?" very funny ranboo thank you for making jokes in these trying times

-18:25 WHY DID HE GET OUT THE AXE WHEN STARING AT THE BEE

-19:38 why did foolish hold the grass block- most of these observations probably mean nothing but- h u h - is that- i'm too tired for this

-19:54 "i never properly thanked you for the deal you made with me" so foolish got something out of this deal, we're not sure if ranboo did. "the green cardboard box" again do you mean dream's house- but seriously the only people i can think of on the server that are associated with green are dream and sam. and i have no idea what cardboard box could be referring to.  foolish got a lime colored shulker from drista

-20:30 "we're supposed to only talk about it at a certain location" hmm now where would that be? panic room maybe? cause like usually after doing a big thing in the enderwalk state ranboo wakes up in the panic room so maybe?  the deal was that they only talk about it in his house

-21:52 how does ranboo receive(?) the lessons? like are they whispered to him in his mind or is he seeing them as words in front of him like we see? hmm

-"Lesson 14: If you have the opportunity to gain a favor, take it." "gain a favor" don't you usually ask people for favors though? how does one "gain a favor"? anyways i'm pretty sure lesson 14 has to do with the deal foolish was talking about. (the deal explained because i now have info: at some point a bit ago foolish met up with ranboo and asked to make a deal, he'd gotten a shulker box from drista. the deal was that ranboo would have ownership of the box, it would be under his name but foolish rents/borrows it indefinitely. ranboo negotiated that if he took ownership of the box he would get a "war favor"  from foolish where if something happens that creates sides, ranboo can ask him a favor that could change his side. but why would foolish want ranboo to have ownership of the shulker you may ask? well i have an answer for you. a theory actually but still. basically since drista technically isn't supposed to give out shit on the server if someone where to have that stuff then they may get in trouble. foolish wants to be able to use the shulker but if it gets found he doesn't want to get in trouble, so he can blame it on ranboo seeing as it's under his name.)

-22:16-ish "i still have this from when you *can't understand whats said here*" well i guess that sort of explains why he had the grass block? idk man (info update: he had the grass block from when ranboo threw it at him telling him to calm down like what ghostbur does with blue)

-31:35 "i figured out how to cause it" how to cause the enderwalk state

-38:30 "ninety three lessons" I STILL DONT KNOW WHY HE KEPT SAYING NINETY THREE AND NOT NINETY FOUR AND ITS DRIVING ME CRAZY LMAO

-39:01 "it's all for the greater good" okay well when are you gonna start thinking about yourself and not everyone else for once huh. self care bitch.

-40:31 he started holding the axe when he was looking at sam- gonna say it i really don't like that axe ahahah- WAIT A DAMN MINUTE THE AXE IS NAMED "axe of ender" I DONT LIKE THAT I DONT LIKE THAT AT ALL

-41:53 is there something?? physically keeping him from telling sam??? or maybe it's sort of like his enderwalk state taking control to make him shut the fuck up??? so many questions and approximately zero answers

-43:18 ranboo raising his voice legitimately scares me 😀👍

-"Lesson 27: Do not reminisce on what you have lost for it will weigh you down." showed up when he was thinking about and REMINISCING about the community house 👀👀

-"Lesson 53: Never fully trust anyone." showed up literally after he said that he thinks he can trust the other people on the server enough to tell them about what he did

-"Lesson 67: Leave no evidence of what you have helped with." this is different from the others because there doesn't seem to be at least a semi-direct connection to it? unless maybe at the time ranboo was near something he may have "helped with"? not sure about this one

-"Lesson 94: DO NOT LET THEM KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE DONE" yeah yeah i get it i get it he's fucked up some shit in enderwalk i don't feel like analyzing this thanks

-OH OH NOTICE HOW HE SAYS "REMEMBERING" WHEN THE LESSONS SHOW UP. IMPLYING THAT THIS ISNT A NEW THING, ITS HAPPENED BEFORE AND NOW HES REMEMBERING IT. MAYBE HE WROTE DOWN THE LESSONS WHEN HE WAS IN ENDERWALK AND NOW THAT HES BEEN EXPERIMENTING ITS BEEN EASIER FOR HIM TO REMEMBER THOSE ENDERWALK MEMORIES

-okokok the experiments are that he's been e x p e r i m e n t i n g on how to purposefully induce the enderwalk state. and we know now that it wasn't from the pain of the water because on the stream afterwords he said that it's caused by the intense fear of something happening. and so the "side effects" of the experiments is that since he's in enderwalk more often(?) he starts remembering more things from it

-OH MY GOD WAIT "there is a reason sam, there's so many reasons, theres ninety three of them" (44:47) WHAT IF EVERY LESSON IS TIED TO A QUOTE UNQUOTE "reason" THAT RANBOO THINKS HES A BAD PERSON/NEEDS TO BE LOCKED UP BUT HE SAYS NINETY THREE INSTEAD OF NINETY FOUR BECAUSE THE NINETY FOURTH LESSON DOESNT HAVE A REASON YET/HE DOESNT REMEMBER IT HAVING A REASON

-dude honestly the whole sam part hurts so much this man is scarily good at acting

-46:46 "i cant put you in the prison you wouldn't be able to see michael anymore" bestie that's the point he doesn't want to accidentally hurt michael or tubbo in the enderwalk state—

-okay but there's no way that sam couldn't tell that ranboo was at least TRYING to confess to something- i feel like he definitely knows more than he's letting on because usually like when people do bad shit or admit to doing bad shit he's like in Prison Guard Mode™️ (he literally cut off ponk's arm because he stole some keycards or something) and whatever and idk what he knows but he definitely knows something and is trying to protect ranboo. or he's trying to manipulate him or smth either one works—

-50:38 "you are a good person" "i am?" you can hear my heart shatter. "yes you are" "i don't think so sam" "i do, even if you don't" "i really don't think so" and there it goes again

-51:25 hello badboyhalo i see you to the left of ranboo

-52:44 "but then my curiosity got the best of me" curiosity killed the cat, bitch

-52:54 "there's ninety three, ninety four, ninety- theres so many reasons!" SEE!! NOT ONLY ARE THERE THAT MANY LESSONS THERE ARE REASONS THAT CORRESPOND IM S O SMART—

-52:56 "i don't want to remember anymore!" *quietly brings forth my theory that when ranboo loses a canon life his memory gets wiped*

-53:13 "ive opened pandora's box" isn't the prison?? literally called pandora's VAULT??? so this m a y be a stretch but i'm thinking that maybe this could be taken in the literal sense that he "opened" the prison and let dream out (the sirens at the end of quackity's stream confirm that dream is indeed out)

-53:42 mans just straight up walked through a ghost i—

-55:37 so are we just gonna ignore the eleventh page of the book? "he's alive, but hopefully soon dream won't be"??? alright nevermind it's most likely bc when tommy came back he recruited ranboo in his plan to kill dream

-55:47 notice how he writes "what am i?" as opposed to "who am i?" no elaboration here idk what it could be

-56:08 just so it's clear for anyone who doesn't know- he's wearing armor at this point, and i'm like 90% sure that when he wears his armor water can't hurt him. and i saw someone say somewhere that like with splash potions when thrown it turns into a gas-like thing? so again, it didn't hurt him, he didn't get hurt. he said in the chill stream that he wasn't comfortable making it where his character had to hurt himself to do that. the thing that causes the enderwalk isn't pain, it's intense and sudden emotions like fear and stress. thank you for coming to my tedtalk.

[nothorses]

So I have a question/something I'd like your input on, since I feel like you'd have something interesting to say about this.

Anyways, some background: i'm in a child and youth care program in a rather left leaning, relatively progressive college, in a rather left leaning/progressive city.

It's actually been a very validating experience so far--I feel so much more accepted here then at my last school, which, while it was located relatively close to the city, had a rather more conservative student body and faculty. I had to fight for accomodation and acceptance, and I didn't end up going to my convocation since, when I had asked, they said they wouldn't call my prefered name when I'd get the certificate at the ceremony, or use the right name on it (they made it seem that their hands were completely tied, even though I know of other schools who've done this exact thing, incl the school I'm at now, without needing proof of a legal name change).

Anyways, at this school, i'm even having instructors I don't even know well going to bat for me and using their connections to get the help I needed when I was having trouble with my name being displayed wrong in the online classroom. Like, thank god for having CYC's as profs, right?

So, to my point: one of our classes is all about inclusion and anti oppressive practices. It's literally the name of the class. I actually enjoy the class a fair bit--despite classes being virtual, my class is sharing a lot and there's a lot of bonding and openness going on in the virtual lecture space. It's encouraged me to be open about my own troubles as a trans person, and people have been v supportive.

In a recent lecture, we start talking about the different terms of discrimination against various groups that face oppression (like, racism, albleism, etc). So she asks us: what is the term for discrimination against trans people? And I say Transphobia. Because that's the term I see most often, and the one I say myself. Apparently the Proper term now is cissexism (or cisgenderism?), and I got chided for saying transphobia.

I went and turned my mic on and basically said that I feel like transphobia is the term the general population is only Just started to take seriously, and the instructor argued that as we're in an academic circle, and as CYCs, it's our job to use the most progressive terms to move things forward, and that we shouldn't be conflating the discrimination trans people face with a phobia. Since, not only does it validate the fear of trans people, but it's not fair to those that have legitimate phobias.

I dropped it there, but I was brave and I asked to speak with the instructor after class.

During that talk, I pretty much said that it's hard being probably the only trans person in at least first year, and being visible and open as one, and having to be told the "right" term to use for my own experiences. She could relate, she said, as she's a black woman, and have faced probably similar experiences from white people correcting her on terms she uses for her own experiences. She did say though, as she's in the role of an instructor, it is her job to educate herself, think on what they're saying, and potentially make changes to her language.

But, she also said she can't speak for my experiences, and she won't make me change my language.

I was appreciative, and I talked about things I've personally faced, and how, even just 10 years ago, trans people were treated so frequently as a joke. Even on screen deaths were funny in media. I brought up that the trans panic defense was still considered a valid defense to use in court not long ago (and still probably is in some places), and someone won a case recently that way. Even just the term "transphobia" is only just recently been taken seriously, in my eyes, while before it was often brushed off as not a legitimate concern. Even when I was first coming out, I was told I was just confused, or trans people were just doing it for attention. I still face open glares sometimes, purposeful misgendering, fights with my sister about some of her transphobic views she refuses to question... And while it was hard to be that vulnerable, the conversation ended on a very good note.

I personally don't feel ready to change this language. But I don't really know if I was in the right to argue all of this. I'm only one trans person, I don't want to talk over those who've probably fought to switch the language away from "transphobia" as the valid term. But, i'm in an awkward position of being an unofficial spokesperson as the token trans guy in the class, talking to a lot of folks who've admitted I am the first trans person they've met. So, i dunno, i'm weird with conflict and I was wondering what you're thoughts were on all of this.

This is kind of a tricky one for a lot of reasons, tbh? And I have... a few thoughts. This is already super long, so under the cut it goes!

The first thing is that “transphobia” and “cissexism” aren’t actually interchangeable; they’re different concepts. “Transphobia” refers to bigotry against trans people or transness in general, while “cissexism” or “cisgenderism” is appealing to (or is) the wider system of oppression. (x)

That’s not to say those words are actually used that way in practice, because they’re not, and I certainly don’t use them that way every time either. Like you said, “transphobia” is the word people more often understand. When I’m writing for or talking to audiences that don’t already have a strong background in trans theory, I stick to “transphobia” for clarity’s sake.

But if you’re positioning yourself as an educational authority on the subject, and even going so far as to correct trans people on those terms- you should know that. If your question is “which term refers to discrimination against trans people?”, your answer is reliant upon how you choose to define “discrimination” in that context.

It’s also reasonable to assume people would answer with the first term if they don’t know both of them, and what she’s set up sounds like an unfair “gotcha!” meant to cow uninformed cis people.

And tbh, I take issue with that. There’s a great essay on this- The Cycle of Socialization by Bobbie Harro. The core of this cycle, which allows oppression to continue and encourages its perpetuation, includes confusion and insecurity: oppression is complex, and big, and people are afraid of taking a stand and doing it wrong. They are insecure in their knowledge and position, and afraid that if they try, they’ll get it wrong, and they’ll be punished. So they stay silent. What is that “gotcha!” moment doing except enforcing that fear and silence?

The other thing here are her reasons for using “cissexism” instead. She’s absolutely right that there is dialogue about what terms to use, and her listed reasons are informed and well-educated. I don’t know how I feel about the discussion myself, honestly, as I’ve seen it from the start and I’ve watched it play out for multiple years.

I don’t know if I agree that it’s ableist, part of that being that the “-phobic” thing was originally created as a “compassionate justification” for people’s bigotry against gay people (though there is the “-misic/misia” replacement for “-phobia” if you prefer). That’s still problematic for different reasons; like she said, it might validate bigotry as “fear”. “Cissexism” illustrates bigotry as enforcing a system rather than being honestly rooted in feelings, and that’s generally a good thing, imo.

But, y’know, “transphobia” is what people readily understand, and punishing people for using it is counterproductive. Using “transphobia” as a starting point for a discussion and an understanding is helpful, too; it connects these ideas back to what people already know. It meets them where they are. If you want to add “cissexism” to their vocabulary from there, please do! But that shouldn’t be rooted in shame.

I don’t know if any of this is helpful, but I thought I’d throw out what seemed to be the core of the issue to me, in case it resonated with you. If you still feel weird about the interaction, it might be worth it to address that with her again; she seems like she’s genuinely trying, and cares, and like she’s open to making changes. If nothing else, you might be able to sort out what’s still bugging you and address it as a feelings issue, rather than a language one, if that works better for you.

Good luck! And sorry for the super long answer, lol.

[thetamrieliclibrary]

Catalogue of Afflictions in the City

To the alienist, the ability--or inability--of a living mind to cope with stimuli and deprivation is of the utmost interest. How is it that some minds endure when others fail? What manifests in the aftermath of those outcomes? How can those manifestations be identified and altered? The workings of our own minds are as much a mystery as the workings of the material world, and it is no less dangerous to neglect their care than it is to mistreat the corporeal self.

While Clockwork City is a facsimile of Nirn in many ways, it is not a duplication. Many of the rules that govern the world simply do not apply to this realm, and things often taken for granted in the terrestrial world are found to be of vital importance to an individual's sanity when they are suddenly found scarce. Here I will outline a number of the most common afflictions to develop in previously well-adjusted individuals now inhabiting the Clockwork City.

Cyclical Inert Ingestion -- Compulsive craving and ingestion of non-nutritious and sometimes harmful materials. It is not unusual for inhabitants and visitors in Clockwork City to experience a palate fatigue for the nutriment paste produced within the Brass Fortress, despite its inoffensive taste and complete nutritional profile. This often causes these individuals to experiment with consuming unusual substances for relief from that fatigue or because of a fallacious belief about the benefits of ingesting the substance that they have developed a taste for. In many cases this condition may safely go untreated, though some individuals' compulsions pose a significant danger to their health and those patients should be remanded to the Asylum Sanctorium for a more controlled therapeutic environment.

Magnusomnic Melancholy -- Connections between mortal beings and the stellar bodies are well established, though fraught with superstition and apocrypha. Our relationship with the sun is of particular relevance to the psyche. From simple moodiness and doldrums in the long nights of winter to the violent, frenzied aversion of victims of vampirism, exposure to the sun has a noticeable effect on the mental health of many races, so its complete absence from Clockwork City is trying on most individuals. Lethargy, irregular sleep patterns, dark thoughts or impulses, and a general malaise are all signs that your patient could be suffering from solar deprivation. See volumes on treatment regarding variations of light conjuration and simulated sunlight.

Encapsulation Syndrome -- A particularly insidious affliction similar to the acute fear of being trapped commonly observed in the terrestrial world. Individuals used to living their lives under open sky are sometimes disconcerted by the easily demarcated boundaries of Sotha Sil's heavens. They begin to feel an inescapable sense of confinement that creates ever-present feelings of anxiety and agitation. These mounting pressures will push them to breaking point if left unresolved and should be considered a priority for treatment.

Minisculation Terrors -- The terrors can be defined as bouts of irrational panic and paranoia that the victims are shrinking. It is unclear whether these episodes are a side effect of transitioning into this realm, or a pathological reaction to the experience of being miniaturized. Patients tend to describe peculiarities in their perception, ranging from a vague sense of things just being a little off, to vertigo, to delusional claims of evidence. For example, one such patient cited that they were now unable to reach an object they had placed on a high shelf the day before. Often these claims are a result of misremembered details, such as forgetting that they were wearing thick heeled shoes, though there is at least one recorded case of legitimate uncontrollable shrinking, so be diligent in investigating these claims.

Obsessive Focus and Fixation -- Particularly common among apostles. Sometimes our colleagues must be saved from themselves. Clockwork City was designed with freedom from distraction in mind. It is a place of contemplation and learning, and sometimes the example Lord Sotha Sil sets is adhered to too closely by his followers. We are not gods. We cannot withdraw into our studies indefinitely and tirelessly without consequence. It may be necessary to intervene in the studies of an apostle who has developed an unhealthy obsession with their research. Fixated patients have been known to neglect sleep, forget to eat, shun all contact with others, and in some cases literally work themselves to death. As such, we are granted the authority to remand such cases to Asylum Sanctorium at our discretion.

Corporeal Odium -- Self-loathing, specifically of one's physical form. Outside of Clockwork City it was primarily observed in kingdoms where one's physical features or biological heritage p;lay a significant role in an individual's societal worth. It is also a fairly common trait among possessing spirits. This condition is on the rise among Clockwork Apostles who believe their enhancements represent an ideal that their native flesh fails to live up to. Reckless augmentation, self-mutilation, and emotional volatility are all warning signs that an apostle's desire for alteration has become an unhealthy obsession and the patient should likely be remanded to the Asylum Sanctorium for psycho-spiritual realignment.

~ Follow for more books, journals, and notes from the Elder Scrolls series ~ Updates daily ~

[clockworknightmares]

Thank you @castielamigos-whump-side-blog​! Marshal has a great love of shocking devices and he thinks a collar is a good look on Laurent. (This is just a whole bunch of marshal being kind of a creep and Laurent being so tired, as usual)

Marshal smirks, tangling his fingers back into Laurent’s hair. He yanks his head back, exposing his neck. “You know what I think? I think you would look gorgeous with a collar. I really do love the new shock ones we’re about to put on the market. They’re addicting.”

Laurent grits his teeth and tosses his head, trying to yank away from Marshal’s grip, but without success. “W-what? The ones Locke sells s-so disgusting excuses for human beings can- can put on their brainwashed slaves they call p-pets?”

Marshal shrugs and traces Laurent’s delicate jawline with a finger. “It’s a perfectly legitimate business Laurie. Locke knows where the money is. Military and Pet tech are the two most profitable revenue sources for companies like ours. All those little chip implants, collars, cuffs, you name it- we make it. You will be making it. Once you come to your senses.” His finger trails from Laurent’s jaw to his neck, sending icy, gut-twisting spirals of fear down the inventor’s spine where they dig their claws in and hold fast.

“I w-won’t”, Laurent says. His mismatched pale eyes can’t completely meet Marshal’s. “I won’t contribute to trading in life- or- or m-making things that hurt people.” He doesn’t want to cause harm with his work. He wants to help, to heal.

“Laurie Laurie Laurie- for someone so smart you sure are stupid.” Marshal stands, hauling him up by the hair and a tight grip in his shirt. “You don’t have a choice. You’re just a cog in the machine. You’re capitalism’s dream employee. Even if you weren’t so useful and smart, I’m pretty sure Locke would still have his uses for you. But nooooo.... can’t damage that beautiful brain now can we?”

Laurent stumbles, weak and dizzy as Marshal pulls him up. He’s lost track of time completely, but he knows it’s been long, too long since he’s had something to eat. He’s dehydrated from the crying, the panic, and yet no water has been offered. Is he supposed to ask for it? Do they think just because he doesn’t sleep that he doesn’t need things that everyone else needs? The thoughts spin around blindly in his head as he lets Marshal pull him around by the hair until he’s released. He crumples to the floor like a marionette with its strings cut off, unable to control his limbs on his own any longer. One leg twists uncomfortably under him, but Laurent doesn’t have the energy to readjust.

Marshal has a well rested bounce in his step that Laurent envies from the bottom of his heart as he watches him from the floor. Even lifting a finger at this point sounds exhausting- so he doesn’t. Marshal doesn’t seem to care, his full attention on the black duffel bag he brought with him. He roots around for a few moments before he finds what he’s looking for: A bottle of water, a nutrition bar, and thin square black case.

Marshal unlocks the case and pulls out crisp, brand new collar from its sleek wrappings. ArlingLocke prides itself in the expensive look and feel of it’s products, down to the very packaging. Technology-wise the products are sound, Laurent will admit, but their purposes leave much to be desired in his opinion.

“Plenty of testing completed and about to be released on the market. The people we’ve sent them to for early reviews have all been giving the best feedback. All in all I say it will be a successful product. But I figured you could personally test it and give me your professional opinion.” Marshal crouches down and places the water bottle and bar to the side and chuckles at how Laurent’s eyes lock on to them. “Think I’d forget to feed you? C’mon now Laurie, I’m not here to starve you to death.” He tips Laurent’s chin up and grins. “I know more effective methods. Besides- Locke wants you alive and functional.”

“But first things first. You’ll get those once this is on.” Marshal unclasps the collar and dangles it in front of Laurent’s face. “How about you put it on? Get a good fit? Give me your opinion.”

Laurent jerks his head to the side. “I’m n-not going to do that.” He swallows, trying to ignore the stabbing twisting of his stomach, the hunger pangs that he wishes would vanish. The water too- calls to him and for a moment he wonders if the collar would be worth it. He needs that water, more than he needs food. If he wants to live.

Marshal sighs and rolls his eyes as if he’s dealing with a stubborn child. “You put the collar on yourself, I’ll give you both the water and the bar. You make me put the collar on and you just get the water.” He taps Laurent’s cheek with the collar. “Your choice smart boy.”

The tension hangs in the air, a silent battle of pride, desperation, and Marshal just... waiting, until a toothy grin spreads across his face as Laurent growls in hopeless frustration and grabs the collar and snaps it on, the prongs settling on the back of his neck. “S-satisfied you creep?”

“Not quite.” There’s a jerk on a strap and Laurent chokes, hands going up to try and relieve the pressure on his throat. As soon as his fingertips touch the collar, he convulses- a shock making his muscles freeze up and his eyes go wide. The scream catches in his throat, a wild thing trying to claw its way out of him. It’s gone in a second, but to Laurent it feels like hours.

“Well now we know it works”, Marshal says, fiddling with a remote. “If you know what’s good for you Laurie- don’t touch the collar.” He inspects the remote for a moment before tapping at it again. “Love this setting”, he mumbles, more to himself than to Laurent.

The collar sends a pulse of shock out, mild- but enough to sting sharply. It’s immediately followed by another pulse, stronger than the one before. Laurent gasps and reaches for the collar to pull it away but the next shock rips out a scream as his hands scrabble against the smooth floor.

“Said not to touch.” Marshal looks pleased with himself as he presses and holds the button, watching Laurent seize and shudder on the floor, broken screams forcing their way out. “Hey but give it some time. You’re a smart guy. You’ll learn.”

[let-me-love-you-loki]

An Ending Within-Ch. 10

Chapter 10

           The second we got backstage, Jericho looked down and saw me leaning heavily on Sammy. My heart jumped. Fear like something I hadn’t felt in years. Tears prickled at the corner of my eyes.

           “Get Jon. Call Seth,” I said, gasping, desperate to hold back the tide of panic that threatened to drown me.

           “You need a trainer,” Sammy replied, as if I didn’t know exactly what I needed.

           “I need you to shut up and get Jon,” I spat.

           Jericho swept his arms under my knees and lifted me up. He glared back at Sammy and jerked his head. “Find Mox,” he ordered before stalking off with me down the corridor.

           “Just fucking perfect,” I swore, banging my fist into the outside of my pricklingly numb thigh. “My first match and my leg just fucks off.”

           “You landed wrong, that’s all,” he replied.

           The Bucks appeared as we rounded the corner. Matt took one look at me and furrowed his brow in worry. “Llane, you good?”

           “Her fucking leg is fucking numb… again,” Jon snarled out of nowhere. He stalked down the hall toward me, fire snapping in his blue eyes. He stopped in front of us, wriggling his fingers at Jericho in a gimme gesture. “Hand her over. Right fucking now.”

           “Jon, I’m—” I started.

           “You’re not fucking fine, so don’t say it, goddammit,” he swore. He stepped forward and took me from Jericho’s arms. I smiled apologetically as Jon carried me off in the opposite direction, toward his dressing room.

           My phone was ringing before we walked into the room. Jon snatched it up as he carried me over to the counter and sat me down, stretching my numb leg out. I swiped my finger over the front of my screen, unsurprised to find six missed calls from Seth.

           “Call him,” Jon said firmly, pacing from one end of the room to the other, cracking his knuckles and dragging his hands down his face. “He’s going to kill me. Both of them are.”

           “What? Jon, what are you talking about?” I asked, tapping out a message to Seth with the promise that I’d call him in a moment or two.

           “This is why I didn’t want to fight you,” he said miserably. It took a moment for me to understand what he meant. And why he’d been so against getting in the ring against me in a real match. “You were fine until I DDT’d you.”

           I scooted forward on the counter, already pins and needles were crawling up and down the outside of my thigh. My fingers went to my boot, tugging at the laces until I could kick the offending shoe to the ground. I looked hard at my toes, counting the time from thought to action. Wiggle… a fraction of a second later my big toe jerked.

           “Jon, stop and look at me.”

           He paced, more frantic than before. He raked his hands over his hair, the muscle in his jaw working as he ground his teeth.

           “Jon,” I said again, the pins and needles getting more uncomfortable around my knee. “Jon!”

           My ringtone trilled through the air. I glanced down and saw Seth’s face. I picked up, immediately going into soothing mode. “Don’t panic. I’m fine…”

           “You limped out of the arena, Llane,” Seth said, voice thick with panic.

           “It’s a blip. The doctor told us about these…” I watched Jon stalk the length of the room, getting more agitated as he went. I raised my voice, hoping he would hear it. “I’ve had them before. And I’m okay.”

           My husband sighed. “One to ten, how numb are you?”

           I relaxed, surprised that he wasn’t racing out of the house to get to me. “Two and dropping.”

           “Ok,” he replied, breathing deep. “Do you need me to come drive you home?”

           “No, it’s my left leg. I can drive.”

           It was quiet on the other end of the line for a moment. I heard the faint whimper of Sefina in the background. Seth cleared his throat. “Tell Dea—tell Jon that he’s welcome to stay here.”

           “I will. Love you.” Once he replied, I hung up and sighed. Jon was still pacing. “Jon. Jon! Jon! Jon!”

           It didn’t matter how loud I yelled his name. He was so deeply caught up in his worry that he’d hurt me. I hopped down from the counter, my left leg giving just a little as I hit the floor. My knee ached, and the numbness in my thigh was slowly working its way back into feeling.

           “DEAN!”

           He stopped, looking my way with panicked eyes. As much as he said he wasn’t that person, it was clear that there was part of him that was still my Dean—my friend, my brother, my eye in the storm.

           “I’m fine,” I said softly, talking to him just as I would a wounded animal. “I’m okay, Jon. The feeling is already coming back. It happens.”

           Jon crossed the room and wrapped me in a tight-armed hug. He crushed me against his chest, his lips resting against my hair. His heart hammered against my ear. For a moment, I couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

           “Llane…” he murmured at last, his voice low and broken.

           I hugged him tight around the middle. “I know,” I replied softly. “It scares me sometimes, too. But you didn’t do this, Jon. My leg is always going to be like this.”

           “It’s not fucking fair,” he sighed. “You deserve to have something good happen.”

           My heart squeezed tight in my chest. “I did. I’m here, aren’t I?”

           Jon hugged me so tightly that I couldn’t breathe, but it didn’t matter. For a moment, it was like nothing had changed. He was still Dean, the guy who became my best friend, my brother, who understood me when no one else could.

***

           “So… you legitimately had to learn how to walk again?” Nick asked from the seat next to me. “Did you have to do training again?”

           I nodded, flexing my foot and wiggling my toes. My leg was stretched out, KAFO brace going from thigh to ankle. I kept them in my bags, travelled with them just in case, but I hated that I had to wear it again. “Yes to both. I hated physical therapy. Like… loathed it. That was probably more depressing than being in the chair in the first place.”

           “Did Rollins do your retraining?”

           “Him and Marek together.” I laughed. “I was so clumsy. I’m surprised I didn’t lose my front teeth as many times as I hit the turnbuckle with my face.”

           “Jesus,” Nick said, leaning back in the chair, tipping the brim of his ballcap up. “I can’t imagine… Mox was right. You are a badass.”

           I grinned, blushing just a little as I got to my feet. “You really want to see the badass? Put me and Jon together in a team. See you in a week, Jackson.”

           Without another word, I hobbled off toward the parking lot with my bag over my shoulder. Jon was waiting by the door, the hood of his sweatshirt tugged up over his hair. “Took you long enough, dollface.”

           “Sorry, I was talking to Nick.”

           Jon winced when he looked at the brace on my leg. He held out his hand. “Keys. I’m driving.”

           I tossed the keys to him and hopped myself into the car. My knee was already stiff from the KAFO, and I was ready to get home and get out of it. “You remember the way?”

           He rolled his eyes. “Shut up. You’re buying dinner.”

           Laughing, I sent Seth a text to let him know we were on the way. He answered pretty quick—mostly because he wanted a burger.

***

           Seth was on the sofa, XBOX controller in his hand, Madden on the television when we came in. He glanced up, a worried half smile on his face when he saw the KAFO. It had been a long time since he’d seen me wear it. I didn’t have to ask if it bothered him—I could see it in the set of his jaw. The sight of it probably reminded him of those terrifying months after my surgery.

           I know it did for me.

           “Sefina asleep?” I asked, sinking down on the sofa beside him, my leg stretched out on the cushions. I wriggled my toes against his knee to show I was okay.

           He nodded as Jon leaned against the wall. “I wanted to see the munchkin,” Jon whispered, looking longingly down the hallway.

           “Go ahead,” Seth said, his lips tipping upward. “So what if she wakes up? She’ll fall asleep again.”

           The two watched each other for a moment, then reached out to tap their fists together. Jon grinned sideways at him before ghosting down the hallway to Sefina’s room. He pushed the door open slowly and tiptoed inside. I could hear him whispering “hey, princess” even in the living room.

           Seth dropped the controller on the table and reached over to run his fingers over the plastic and fabric of my brace. “I hate this thing.”

           “I do, too,” I replied, wriggling my toes again. “But it helps when the numbness kicks in. I’m proud of you by the way.”

           His fingers brushed my ankle. “Because I didn’t panic?”

           “Oh, you panicked. I heard it in your voice.” I smiled. “You just didn’t lose your mind like you did when I was training to get back in the ring. You’re getting better.”

           Electricity crackled along my skin when he smiled brightly, the gap in his front teeth as endearing now as it was the day we met. “You don’t give me a choice. But that’s a good thing.”

Tag List

@mox-made-me-do-it​ @lakamaa12​ @sammyfireheartashryver @cburdine​@easyobsession​ @xbutterflius-effectusx​ @0paint-thestars0 @Echrai @themumbler​ @bigdunneenergy​ @queenofthearchitect​ @vebner37​ @reigns-rollins-ambrose​ @mother-forker​ @gwyneirastorm​

[straightouttaneptune]

It girl pt. 4 - Superhero debut

Pairing: Mentor!Natasha Romanoff x Mentee!Reader, Platonic!Avengers x reader, Peter Parker x Reader (In the future)

Warning: Reader being a kickass, Peter x Reader is settling in... Not much to warn.

Summary: Natasha had once joked about picking a random new recruit trainee to teach all her skills since Tony had recently become Peter’s mentor. Fury sees this as a legitimate idea, and asks Natasha to choose her protège, code name: “it girl”.

A/N: I’m so sorry it took so long! But it’s finally here, and the reader is on a mission!!! Anyways, it’s been decided that this little series will end with Part 5 or a 6, depending on how long it will be. Enjoy xx

Prologue Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 5 Part 6

———————————————————————

2 weeks later

“We gotta go to that Stark internship now!” You and Peter told Ned and MJ simultaneously, before rushing out of the campus hand in hand.

“Peter, gimme your backpack.” He tossed his bag to you as you placed his and your bag into a self-navigating drone you pulled out of your pack, the coordinates heading right to the Avengers Compound.

“Alright. Ready?” You turned back at Peter in his spider-man get up, giving him a thumbs up.

He wrapped his arm around your waist, flustering you a little. No matter how many times the two of you did this, the contact with his well-built body always got your heart to pick up its pace. You’d liked Peter ever since he had that crush on Liz, but you’ve never had to suppress your feelings harder than the last few weeks. There were a lot more secrets, touching, grabbing and moments spent together compared to when you were just in the same friend group.

Peter thanked god that his mask covered his obviously red cheeks, and tried his hardest not to stare at your excited, adorable face.

You let yourself feel the cool wind combing through your hair, that drop of your stomach when he lets go of the web to shoot another, the awes and gasps of the people down below and obviously being hugged by Peter.

The two of you land right in front of the door, where Bucky and Sam were bickering at each other again. Something about Sam eating Bucky’s plums again, so now Bucky was going to make Sam mow the entire field.

“Oh hey, kids. Stark, Nat, your kids are here!” Sam yelled into the building, then continued to sass Bucky with arguments that made no sense whatsoever.

“Well, you have cooties, so I saved the plums from Bucky germs. It is safer in my stomach.”

“I hate you. So much.”

You waved goodbye to Peter and rushed up to your room, ready to change into training gear. But as soon as you entered the walk-in-closet, MINT's voice rang through the room. 

"Mission gear lock: Deactivated. Welcome, Y/N Y/L/N." Your eyes widened in surprise, rushing to the furthest side of the closet to look at the Mission gear compartment. 

To your surprise, the blue shield had been taken down, revealing black combat suits of different uses. The usual one, with all black form-fitting shape, tactical with bullet vests built into the top and knives stored in various places, covert that included zero design and came with a black eye mask, and so on. You pushed the clothes aside to reveal a screen, that asked you to swipe left and scan fingerprint to continue. 

You followed the instruction without hesitation, MINT immediately replying with "Authorized personnel. Agent in training, Y/N Y/L/N. Congratulations, Y/N." 

You jumped back in surprise as the walls started moving, the clothes that were hung up moved to the other side of the wall to reveal a new one, stacked with weapons and many types of guns. 

"What. the. fuck." You mumbled to yourself in astonishment, staring at the various weaponry that seemed too high-tech to even exist on the Earth. 

"I see you've already opened my gift." Your head couldn't whip sideways any faster,  spotting Natasha standing by the entrance, leaning her shoulder on the doorway. She dressed in her Black Widow suit that you only saw on TV during the NY and Sokovia attacks. 

"This is insane. I'm allowed on missions?" 

"Only a small mission, with me supervising from the compound, okay?" She held up her finger and gave you a stern look, which you nodded happily to. You were already pumped with adrenaline, ready to take on basically anything. 

“Alright. Let’s get you to Fury. Put the one with the... blue design on.” She rummaged through the suits, finally pulling one out. It looked exactly like the ones she wore during the battle of Sokovia, except it looked a little more updated.

You looked at yourself in the mirror, body covered in full-leather or spandex or whatever the material was. You looked good. Even though it was quite the workout to put it on, it felt perfect and comfortable, every inch of the suit hugging you right.

You felt the reinforced shoulder plates, the gun holster on your thigh squeezing lightly, and the best part was, the material was engineered by Tony to make sure whoever wore it, doesn’t sweat out of their minds. The material kept it’s cool even after the workout putting it on, and you didn’t feel uncomfortable at all.

“Alright it girl, let’s go.” Natasha knocked on the closet door before her head poked out. “Grab that gun on your right, and follow me.”

Not even a few hours later, you were dropped off on a lonely hill of god-knows-where in America, left on your own to fend for yourself.

“Agent 13 will only be a few miles away in case anything goes wrong, okay?” You heard Natasha speak into your comms. “And, call me Natashenka on missions. Especially covert ones.”

“Natashenka?”

“Yeah, it’s the Russian nickname for Natasha.”

“Mm, I like it.”

You walked alone for a little while, no enemy or buildings in sight. So it really caught you off guard when a bullet flew straight beside your ear, landing itself in a tree behind you.

You recalled your past training with Natasha, rolling on the ground to find shelter behind a thick tree. Taking out the gun out of your holster, you tried to keep calm as you tried to spot the shooter. You also powered up your shock bracelet just in case.

If you were gonna do this, you were gonna do this right. Kneeling down on one knee, you aimed your gun at the man standing in front of a small army-camp looking building. With a sharp exhale, your fingers pulled the trigger and the bullet flew through the warm summer air.

The bullet buried itself in the guard’s bulletproof vest, knocking him out cold. “Good job, Y/N. But be careful. He’s not dead.”

“I don’t wanna kill anyone!” You whispered into your comms, slowly making your way to the gate. It must’ve been a severely under-staffed base since that guy you took out was the only guard outside. 

You stalked into the base, and all you could say was that it looked damaged. It looked very close to collapsing, and you were trusted to retrieve all of the files on the Avengers from this dump. 

"Hello, sweetheart. What's a girl like you doing here?" You turned around to face an unexpected number of guards, all standing behind one especially dark, suspicious-looking man. 

Your mind rushed to find you a perfect lie to deceive them, so you wouldn't fucking die in there. "Mm. Anastasiya Primanova. Sent from the base in Russia, courtesy of Strucker." You used the thick Russian accent you've heard in movies before, hoping it would sound real. "Y/N? What is going on?" You heard Natasha's frantic voice after you introduced yourself as someone else entirely. You hid the nervous hammering heart behind a cold, dead expression, putting your gun back in the holster. Please buy this, please buy this, please...

"Strucker's dead." He stared at you, inspecting you, but at least he wasn't shooting at you. 

"Obviously. I did his dirty bidding. He wrote a will. I was to take over this American base. It's quite the dump. кто ты?" (Who are you?) You used all the techniques in the book, making sure he took you in as 'Anastasiya Primanova', not 'obviously American girl on a mission'. You raised your chin and cocked your head, an unmistakable sign when one is looking down at someone. If you wanted anyone to see you as above them, you had to fake it till you made it.

"Kazimir." 

"So, are you going to show me what you've been doing or what?" Your hand rested on the gun in your holster, the other on your hip. He looked like he was conflicted, but in the end, he bought the act. He dismissed the soldiers to go back to their designated posts and signaled you to follow him. 

"You shot one of my men." He looked at your side-profile, seemingly still skeptical. But to be fair, that was justified. 

"And I'll shoot you too if you keep talking to me." Your pocket knife made a sharp slash sound as you popped it out, looking back at him warningly. "I trained with the Winter Soldiers. Do not try me." Your acting was so on-point, you had to give yourself a pat on the back for it. Threatening him as a first-impression made him fear you, even though he didn't know anything about you. It was simple psychology in the animal psyche, where one learns to fear another if they seem superior to them. 

“Oh, my god, Y/N, what are you doing?” A faint panic in Natasha’s voice was evident, but you were improvising.

He took you to every room from floor 1 to sub-levels, and you were down to the last room. Now, you had a perfect image of the whole base in your head. The base was much more complicated than you had thought, it was working perfectly underground even though it looked like a mess on the outside. The Avengers would have to come back to destroy this place.

“This is the archive.” Kazimir scanned his card to show you the inside, before taking off to do whatever evil thing he had on his schedule.

You grabbed his jacket before he could fully walk away, pulling him back forcefully. He showed you a look of hostility, but you paid his resentment no attention.

“Card.” You put out your left palm, and he uneagerly left his card in your hands.

“Thank you.” You eyed him carefully one last time, making sure he had no intention of betraying you or knowledge that you were an imposter. When he only showed bitterness, you let him go.

“Наташенька, I’m in.” You whispered proudly, but discreet in case there were any listening devices or cameras. That was most likely.

“Good job! What was the whole thing with Anastasiya and everything?” She sounded relieved, letting out a small sigh.

“Simple acting... Human psychology... The important thing is, I got the file on the USB.” You stared at the USB in your hand, letting out the breath you didn’t know you were holding in.

“Great. Now, get out of there.”

It was too easy from there. You glared at a couple soldiers on the way, made your way to the elevator and up, and just strolled out of the building. Once you were far enough, you called for the quinjet to take you back in.

“Y/N! Oh god, I was so nervous.” Natasha jumped out of the jet right as the door opened, rushing up to you. 

The adrenaline was starting to wear off, and the full realization of what you did started to dawn on you. “I just walked into a HYDRA base, made them think I was their leader and stole confidential files?!” Your organs felt like they were being jumbled up in the washing machine. You felt so dizzy you even had to hold onto Natasha for support.

“Director Fury, Mr. Fury, um, that base, that base was not what you said it was.” You crouched down to sit on the floor of the quinjet, safe and sound on your way back to the compound.

He looked to you curiously, waiting for you to say more.

“There was a place, underground, and hundreds of soldiers. You gotta- you gotta send the Avengers or something in there. There was a room, sub-level 2, where they were doing experimentations on animals, and they said they’ll start-“ You rambled while Natasha sat by your side, her face twisting into various emotions before she set her eyes on Fury with anger.

“We sent her to a fully-operational HYDRA facility?!” She shot up, her eyes wide with rage. Fury appeared more interested in how you went in there and didn’t die.

“You went inside and fooled them all? You saw- no, they guided you through every inch of the place, and you remember it?” He walked over to you, eyes narrowed and tone low.

“Fury!” 

“Right. But to be fair, you did a really good job.”

You chuckled, looking up at Natasha who still had a worried look on her face. Her sharp features softened when her eyes met with yours though, seeing how content you looked with yourself.

“Yeah. You did.” She smiled down at you sheepishly, as the quinjet came to a halt in front of the compound. The jet lowered itself on the concrete, FRIDAY’s voice ringing through the speakers. “Destination Arrived.”

A couple days later, practically everyone knew of the ‘it girl’ in the building who fooled over 100 HYDRA men and retrieved inside information and base layout that spies would take weeks to obtain.

You helped Steve make up a strategy for the infiltration, drawing him a map of every exit, every hide-out and all the places to avoid bombing. Sam started to randomly give you high-fives when crossing each other in the hall.

“What’s up, it girl?”

“Not much, Sam.”

*high-fives*

Thor would address you as “Y/N Natashadottier”, completely mistaking the whole Earth’s last-name system. You quite liked it, to be honest. A lot of times you went home to find your mother gone, her things packed with money on the table, clearly gone after your father again. In times like this, you never had anyone when you were younger. But now, you could easily show up at the Avengers Compound, and be welcomed, your room ready for you at all times. So in some ways, Natasha was your undocumented guardian.

Natasha couldn’t be more proud, everyone working in the new SHIELD was buzzing about the ‘it girl’, who was not a mutant, not an enhanced, not a genius, just a high-school girl who reads a lot of psychology books.

Peter also was excited for your big debut in the superhero world, the corners of his eyes crinkling every time someone mentions the ‘it girl’. Tony and Natasha obviously notice this, but they’re keeping quiet to see how fast you’ll get together.

Next chapter: Part 5

Taglist: @mindset-jupiter @fangirlingisajob @theadventurousqueen @gwenmxnstacy @ballerboobitch @the-lady-cersei-lannister @golden--rain @dollofbucky @sakuranomegami @elizabeth-santana-98 @anne2cold @eyeballtoes @marvel-is-a-mood @roseryss @redqueenstorm @orchideax @huntersociopathavenger @petertinglessss @marv-ells @hopefuloperaangelnerd @je11yfishwriter @iloveyou3000morgan @kewl-r @missmulti @grace-barnes-13  @samarcher79 @slow-dance-in-the-dark @intricate-melody @editsbyjenny @brenleestar @a-vvenger @princessizzy36 @sweetcrvture @itsbebeyyy @caws5749 @thenerdiverse

[andersunmenschlich]

Episode 8: Burned Out

Okay! So tonight I get the story of an Ivo Lensik, a contractor. (I sense a haunted house story.)

He gets called in to take over a wiring job for a guy who had jury duty, and decides to take the job and do it in the evenings since he has another job going during the day. So far, so good.

The house is on Hilltop Road, which apparently is a very quiet road with not a lot of people living on it. This means Ivo Lensik is going to be in an unfinished house in a secluded location as night falls, doesn't it? I like that. That is nicely spooky.

Let's see, the house has two floors, doors but no locks, and no windows.

...Why are they putting electricity into a house with no windows? It might just be me, but that seems like a good way to get a short.

Oh, and there's a big old dead tree in the yard.

I quite like trees, especially big ones, but the dead ones are only really good to look at since if you climb them the limbs have a tendency to break at inconvenient moments. This tree sounds particularly aesthetic: apparently it casts nice, clear, dark shadows even on overcast days. I don't know why, but I really like the sound of that.

Anyway, the third evening of this job, there comes a knock on the door. Ivo Lensik goes and opens the door (and takes a hammer, in case the knocker is unfriendly), and oh, look! It's a man in a tan jacket.

No word on a suitcase filled with flies, though.

The man in the tan jacket introduces himself as Raymond Fielding, the owner of the house.

And this is evidently not a crossover, since our statement-giver seems able to describe him quite easily: young, white, maybe mid-twenties, clean-shaven with shaggy chestnut brown hair. He produces the deed to the house, which says yep, a man named Raymond Fielding owns the place.

So Ivo Lensik lets him in, which is something I don't entirely understand. I mean... sure, he's got a deed saying the house belongs to Raymond Fielding, and sure, he says he's Raymond Fielding, but what proof is there that he is?

But our story-teller lets him in.

Raymond Fielding (self-proclaimed) heads over to an empty window and stares out into the backyard, which is weird but I guess doesn't get in Ivo's way, because he goes back to work. Then there's the smell of burning hair, and when Ivo Lensik looks for the man in the tan jacket all he finds is a smoldering patch of floor in front of the window.

...That's some extreme spontaneous human combustion, right there.

And the floor! Is that coming out of our Ivo Lensik's paycheck? I mean, how's he going to prove he didn't char the floor?

Oh. Apparently I was worrying about nothing, because when he takes a couple seconds to grab a fire extinguisher the smoldering bit goes as cold as the rest of the floor, and then the ashes turn out to just be sitting on top of the wooden flooring, which is fine once it's cleaned up.

That's surprisingly thoughtful of... Mr. Fielding, I guess, or whoever burned him.

Anyway, I approve.

Ivo cleans things up and then, as the situation sinks in, begins to panic because he thinks he's losing his mind. It seems his dad went a bit loopy later in life, and Ivo's worried it'll be him next.

Ivo's father, it seems, was obsessed with fractals. Big into mathematics, which I can understand. Math can be really fun, when you're not being forced to do it. But the older Mr. Lensik also developed this idea that some mysterious person who can be recognized because "all the bones are in his hands" was stalking him and trying to stop him from finishing his fractal work, which would definitely be stark, staring, unmoored-from-reality paranoia in our world, but since this is the world of The Magnus Archives, well... who knows?

Aha, and then one day he turns up dead in his locked(?) study with deep gouges along his wrists and arms (made by something the coroner can't identify) and a look of fear on his dead face, surrounded by drawings of fractals (not in blood, though, in pencil, mostly on paper but also on the walls). And this is called a suicide, because of course it is.

"All the bones are in his hands"?

I have no idea what that means, but dang it sounds creepy.

I'm picturing a kind of boneless man with giant hands full of all the bones the rest of his body doesn't have, dragging the squelching, wet, oozing part along like giant, bony spiders trailing a partly digested corpse.

In any case, Ivo's so worried about losing his mind that he loses his balance, slips on the just-cleaned floor, and hits his head.

Whereupon he loses consciousness.

Head wounds do have a marked tendency to bleed awfully. So when he wakes up, dizzy and bleeding, I'm sure it's quite dramatic. In fact he's so dizzy that he can't drive, and calls an ambulance instead. It comes and takes him to the hospital, and yes, he's got a terrible concussion, which I suppose means he can't be alone for a while, either.

At least he probably won't end up at the apartment of a strange man who eats notebook pages... but, then again, who knows?

He tells his doctor everything and asks if he's losing his mind.

His doctor says no, probably not—it would be very strange if he went that nuts that quickly, normally you have to sort of work up to full-on hallucinations, and Ivo is reassured.

Meanwhile, an eavesdropping nurse (an older lady) seems very interested in the story, but (like most eavesdroppers) doesn't hang around to be talked to. Just before Ivo's discharged, though, he sees her again. Actually it's her job to give him the final check, so they get to talk! Which, it seems, she wants to do.

She wants to know if the man in the tan jacket really called himself "Raymond Fielding."

Ivo says yes, he did, and he had a deed to the place with that name on it, too. This information seems to give the old lady a need to sit down. So she does, and explains that her family's among the few living on Hilltop Road, and they know that house.

Apparently there was a house there in the 1960s, and it belonged to a man named Raymond Fielding, who used it as a halfway house on behalf of the local diocese.

Having a bunch of juvenile delinquents around didn't make the neighbors happy, but everybody really liked Raymond so nobody said anything. And then one day Agnes showed up. She was eleven at most and might have been Raymond's actual daughter, and she was also kind of creepy, always standing in windows staring at people. But she didn't cause problems, so....

Oh, and then the delinquents slowly stopped causing problems.

Actually it looks like they slowly started vanishing.

And then there was no one living there but Raymond and his maybe-daughter Agnes... and then there was just Agnes, who by this point was a quiet young woman of 18 or 19.

Okay. Something's definitely up with Agnes.

People ask where Raymond went, and she just says he went away and the house is hers now. Which apparently is the case—the house has been legally signed over to her, and there's certainly no sign that Raymond's been murdered or anything. So she lives there, all by herself, which sounds lovely except I do wonder how she gets the groceries, and what happens if a pipe leaks or a drain gets clogged or something?

Maybe she knows how to handle all that sort of repair on her own, but if there's one thing I know it's that you can't buy groceries without money, and it's very difficult to get money without leaving the house unless you work from home somehow, which Agnes doesn't seem to do.

Ooh, and pets in the area tend to vanish, so people learn not to keep them.

...And it looks like small children aren't exempt from vanishing, either. So long, Henry White, five years old.

A week after little Henry goes missing, the Fielding house burns to the ground. No one calls the fire department, because Agnes creeps them out and they figure she might have had something to do with all these disappearances—which, frankly, seems like a pretty reasonable assumption to me, but that still looks like a fire hazard to the whole community, doesn't it, unless someone's come up with a way to prevent neighbors' houses from catching fire when something like this happens?

Well, maybe the Fielding house is set far enough away from the other houses (and the air's calm enough) that it isn't a problem. Who knows.

Anyway, there's no sign that there's anyone in the house at all, and when the fire finally gets put out a burned body is found inside—but it doesn't belong to Agnes. No, it's the skeleton of Raymond Fielding, missing its right hand. Huh. I wonder if that's the hand that signed the house over to Agnes....

Then people cleared up the rubble and had some confusion over who the land belonged to now, and finally they figured it out and someone started building.

That new house is where our Ivo Lensik is putting in wiring.

So the man in the tan jacket was a ghost. Haunted house! Called it.

Ivo Lensik, recovered from his concussion, decides to do his wiring work as much during the day as possible, and he does pretty well; but whenever he finds himself alone in a room, or things get quiet, he thinks he sees little Agnes's brown pigtails whisking around corners, or thinks he smells burning hair.

Funny, he didn't see anything to do with Agnes before, and... would she be dead now? I don't think she died in that fire, anyway. Maybe he's imagining that, now that he knows the story.

He does pretty well at working only during the day when there are other people around, but as they're finishing things up apparently he works later and later, and one night he looks up to find the sun's set and he's completely alone. Whereupon he starts sweating.

He thinks he's just freaking out at first, but no—he's legitimately burning up. Like fever, except more so.

Now, I'm usually cold. I live in the desert. On average it gets up to around 93 degrees Fahrenheit come July, and that strikes me as a bit warm but much better than winter, because my internal heating system basically doesn't work. That said, this doesn't sound great. I have no objection to lying around like a lizard on a rock, surrounded by heat that seems to melt all your muscles to useless, cozy goo... but this kind of heat sounds unpleasant.

Ivo takes off his coat and his hat and it doesn't do any good at all. He can't even breathe, he's so hot. He's collapsed to the floor (dying, I think) when there's a knock on the door and suddenly he's fine.

He climbs to his feet and answers the door, and it's a Catholic priest.

...Well, that was unexpected.

Oh, apparently the nice old lady from the hospital sent him (and apparently her name's Annie). Aw, she was worried about Ivo so she sent him an exorcist. With suspiciously good timing, too!

Father Edwin Burroughs wanders around and takes a look at the house while Ivo explains what's been happening, and then he tells Ivo to go hang out in the backyard while he runs through some prayers and things and sees if he can't do for ghosts what's typically done for demons.

In the backyard, Ivo suddenly develops an herbicidal mania and attacks the already dead tree with a crowbar.

Which seems... really weird to me.

And then the tree starts bleeding! Like, actual blood!

I wonder what kind of blood it is. And if it's human, would it be any good for transfusions? Could they just go tap the, I dunno, B- tree instead of asking for donations or going to the blood bank? Blood trees could be really handy so long as they didn't, you know, curse anyone who got their blood! ...Actually, depending on the curse, certain types of people might think it was worth it anyway.

Oh, and the tree's got old scorch marks at its base. Which I guess makes sense: it's an old tree, it would've been here when the old house burned, right?

Ivo decides to chain the tree to his car and drag the thing out of the ground, for reasons which are not well explained and make me think either he's got some kind of supernatural intuitive sense, or something's reaching into his head and using him as a tool to destroy the tree.

He drags the tree out of the ground.

The bleeding, surprisingly, stops.

Looking into the hole where the roots used to be, Ivo notices something in the dirt and climbs down to get it.

It's a six-inch-square wooden box engraved with patterns that remind me of that table from episode three (which, after the concussion, is the second thing in this episode to remind me of that one), and it's got a nice, fresh, green apple inside. Looks like it's just been picked.

When Ivo takes it out of the box, though, the freshness shrivels away, the skin splits, and spiders just pour out of the thing.

He screams and drops everything. The apple hits the ground and turns to dust.

Ivo backs off and waits for the spiders to leave before he goes back and wrecks what sounds like a perfectly lovely box, which wanton destruction I'm coming to expect from this particular statement-giver, and chucks the splinters into a trash can.

Not long after Ivo's finished trashing everything, Father Burroughs comes out of the house and, ignoring the tree, tells our guy that he's done his prayers and hopefully it'll help and here's his card.

Ivo works on the house for another week.

There are no further interesting incidents. Job done, he leaves and never goes back.

Jonathan Sims seems to blame the man in the tan jacket on the concussion that happened later, or else on the genetic disposition to mental problems that the doctor said probably weren't happening. That... it seems like he's really reaching here. Maybe it's less that he's an actual skeptic, and more that he really, really doesn't want to know what's actually going on?

That would make a kind of sense: it's a sort of self-defense. He only believes horrible things when he's forced to. Otherwise he's skeptical, sarcastic, and dismissive.

Oh, neat—Father Edwin Burroughs gave a statement, too!

I'm guessing the fact that it's mentioned means we get to hear it later.

Unless this is the kind of show where they taunt you with stuff you never get to know, but that's unusual and so I figure I'll be hearing that one eventually. Should be fun!

And apparently Ivo Lensik was the only contractor who got haunted by the house they were all working on, which is interesting. I wonder why? Was it just because he was the only one who stayed late? Or maybe he was the first one to stay late, or the only one to let in an ID-less stranger waving an old deed and claiming to be Raymond Fielding, or...?

Who knows.

Mr. Sims's assistants have apparently done a ton of work in research, as usual.

Martin couldn't figure out who built the old house, but the earliest records it turns up it show it being bought by Raymond Fielding's grandfather (Walter Fielding). Then it was inherited by his father (Alfred Fielding), and then by him. But there's no record that it was ever an official halfway house. Maybe he was running it illegally. Maybe that record got lost. No way to know.

Tim got an interview with the nice old nurse, Anna Kasuma, but didn't get any new info.

One of the residents of Hilltop Road did provide a photo of the old house in flames, which means that while nobody called the fire department, at least one person was taking pictures. This strikes me as extremely human.

The obit for Raymond Fielding said he worked with juvenile delinquents, and died in a house fire, but didn't give any real details.

Mr. Sim's little team down at the Magnus Institute apparently can't turn up any proof that Agnes ever even existed, which makes me think that something's definitely going on with her.

...Ooh.

And on the same day Ivo Lensik uprooted that old dead tree, a woman named Agnes Montague was found dead in her apartment.

Apparently she'd hanged herself, and there was a severed human hand attached to her waist with a chain—a right hand, one that the coroner time-of-death-ed at the same time Agnes Montague died, which makes no sense from a natural perspective but suggests some interesting things from an unnatural one.

What do you want to bet it was the ghost of Raymond Fielding that made Ivo Lensik uproot that old tree?

Oh, and Agnes Montague passed as only 26.

You know, if you're going to tie your life force to something, maybe don't pick a tree? It's as bad as a secret painting that you have to hide in a secret room of your house to prevent people from seeing how old and evil you're actually getting.

What would I tie mine to? Uh... hmm. I think maybe entropy. A painting never ages, sure—a tree loses life a lot more slowly than a human—but the entropy of a closed system never decreases over time. Tie your life to a painting and it'll age instead of you, to a tree and you'll get all its life, but if you tie your life force to entropy, well! That's a force that'll never run out, and if it should happen to decrease a bit... would that be so bad?

In any case, two more families lived in that house since this statement, and nothing weird happened to any of them, either.

Looks like Raymond got rid of Agnes and they both finally died.

This is a really good story! I like this one. It's very tidy.

[antoine-roquentin]

Author Richard Beck, in We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, locates the roots of the McMartin conspiracy theory in the social progress of the previous decade—particularly in the gains won by women. “In the ’80s you had a strong, vicious anti-­feminist backlash that helped conspiracies take hold,” Beck tells me. “In the ’70s, middle- and upper-middle-class women had started to enter the full-time workforce instead of being homemakers.” This was the dawn of what the economist Claudia Goldin has termed “the quiet revolution.” Thanks in part to expanding reproductive freedom, career horizons had widened sufficiently by the end of the 1970s for women to become, in Goldin’s words, “active participants who bargain somewhat effectively in the household and the labor market.” They were now forming their identities outside the context of the family and household.

The patriarchal family was under siege, as conservatives saw it, and day-care centers had become the physical representation of the social forces bedeviling them. “You had this Reagan-­driven conservative resurgence,” Beck says, “and day care was seen as at least suspicious, if not an actively maligned force of feminism.”

Day care held a prominent place in right-wing demonology. As far back as the 1960s, conservatives were warning darkly that child care “was a communist plot to destroy the traditional family,” as sociologist Jill Quadagno writes in The Color of Welfare. In 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would’ve established a national day-care system. In his veto message, Nixon used the Red-baiting language urged upon him by his special assistant, Pat Buchanan, saying the program would’ve committed “the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child-rearing against the family-centered approach.” In a decade of rising divorce rates, at least conspiracism and reactionary social conservatism could enjoy a happy marriage. By the time Judy Johnson came forward in 1983 with allegations that a teacher at the McMartin preschool had molested her child, the country had been primed to assume the worst by more than a decade of child-care fearmongering.

Certainly it wasn’t just the movement of women into the workplace that created the conditions for a reactionary panic. There were other cultural forces at work. The anti-rape campaign of the 1970s, historian Philip Jenkins writes in Moral Panic, had “formulated the concepts and vocabulary that would become integral to child-protection ideology,” in particular a “refusal to disbelieve” victims. The repressed-­memory movement of that era had created a therapeutic consensus surrounding kids’ claims of molestation: “Be willing to believe the unbelievable,” as the self-help book The Courage to Heal put it. “Believe the survivor…No one fantasizes abuse.” And the anti-cult movement of the late 1970s had raised the specter of satanic cabals engaging in human sacrifice and other sinister behavior.

Beck likens conspiracy theories to parables. The ones that stick are those that most effectively validate a group’s anxieties, with blame assigned to outsiders. In a 2017 paper on Pizzagate and pedophile conspiracies, psychology professor Jim Kline, now at Northern Marianas College, argues that conspiracy theories “are born during times of turmoil and uncertainty.” In an interview, Kline goes further: “Social turmoil can overwhelm critical thinking. It makes us get beyond what is logically possible. We go into this state of hysteria and we let that overwhelm ourselves.”

The McMartin accusations were a vivid demonstration of the rot in the American social structure, as perceived by conservatives. Perhaps inevitably, the claims metastasized. Now it was hundreds of children who had been assaulted and subjected to satanic rituals, and now, instead of just one McMartin teacher, there was an entire sex ring involved. One boy told of adults in masks and black robes dancing and moaning; of live rabbits chopped to bits by candlelight. “California’s Nightmare Nursery,” People magazine called it. But soon the case began to fall apart. The stories of abuse turned out to have been coaxed out of children by way of dubious and leading questioning. Judy Johnson, who made the initial accusations that her son had been molested, was found to be a paranoid schizophrenic. In 1986, a district attorney dropped charges—at one point there had been 208 counts in all—against all but two of the original defendants. A pair of trials ended in 1990 with the juries deadlocking on some charges and acquitting on the others. After seven years and $15 million in prosecution costs, the remaining charges were dropped.

However flimsy its premises, the case whipped up a national panic. In 1985, a teacher’s aide in Massachusetts was wrongly convicted of molesting 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old boys and girls; the prosecutor had told the jury that a gay man working in a day care was like a “chocoholic in a candy store.” Around that time, employees at Bronx day-care centers were arrested for allegedly sexually abusing children. Five men were sentenced before all ultimately saw their convictions overturned.

Liberals certainly participated in the hysteria—Gloria Steinem donated money to the McMartin investigation—but by and large it was a reactionary phenomenon. What drove the panic, Beck says, wasn’t just the sense that children were being harmed. “It’s that families were being harmed.”

In 2016, three decades after the McMartin trial, WikiLeaks, in cahoots with Russian hackers, published the private emails of top Hillary Clinton adviser John Podesta. In one, Podesta is invited to a fundraiser at Comet Ping Pong. Amateur internet sleuths blew it up into a conspiracy theory about a child-sex ring. The pedophiles communicated in code: “hotdog” meant “young boy”; “cheese” meant “little girl”; “sauce” meant “orgy.” The theory was easily debunked. Eventually it was abandoned by the high-­profile internet figures who’d initially given it oxygen, but not before Pizzagate, as it was immediately dubbed, had spilled over into reality. In December 2016, a 28-year-old man named Edgar Maddison Welch, having driven from North Carolina to Washington, DC, fired an assault rifle inside Comet in a bid to rescue the children he thought were locked away there. No one was hurt. Welch was sentenced to four years in prison.

The QAnon conspiracy picked up where Pizzagate left off, alleging that the liberal elite’s pedophile ring extends way beyond one restaurant and that it is only a matter of time before Trump arrests Podesta, Clinton, and other Democratic power brokers for their crimes. All of this was fueled by an anonymous internet poster dubbed Q, who claims to be a government insider.

With Pizzagate and QAnon, the molesters have changed from day-care workers to the liberal elite, and the politics behind the theories now are more explicitly spelled out. But the general context is more or less the same: conservative retrenchment after a period of progressive social gains. If women’s entry into the workplace in the latter half of the 20th century triggered deep anxieties about the decay of traditional gender roles and the family unit, in the 21st century it was same-sex marriage, growing acceptance of transgender rights, and the seeming cultural hegemony of a social justice agenda. “Q found that fear,” says Travis View, a conspiracy theory researcher and a host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

“While Q directly never touches on trans rights or those sorts of things, there is a great deal of anxiety on those sorts of issues,” he says, referring to the QAnon community at large. “They’re concerned generally on the sort of accep­tance of trans people and the oversexualization of children.” On the matter of transgender rights, the conspiracists are aligned with “normal” conservative politics; from the state legislatures to the White House, Repub­licans have made considerable hay out of attacking and overturning various protections that had been extended to trans people.

Conspiracy theories of all kinds draw their energy from social anxieties. Occasionally there is some real basis for the theories. In her book, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power, Anna Merlan details the belief among black New Orleanians after Hurricane Katrina that the city’s levees hadn’t failed on their own—they had been bombed intentionally to destroy the poor parts of New Orleans. The theory was “rooted in a real event—a 1927 decision to dynamite levees outside of New Orleans, the logic there being that they were going to flood low-lying areas and save the city itself,” Merlan said in an interview with Mother Jones’ Becca Andrews. “[I]t created a lingering sense of suspicion that maybe the government would do this again.”

View points out that the concern about elites preying on children isn’t baseless, either. “The core of elements of the systematic elite child abuse theories—they aren’t crazy,” he says. “There are instances of wealthy powerful abusing children and other people covering it up. Jeffrey Epstein, the Catholic Church. People have the sense that elites can commit horrifying crimes and get away with them.” The Epstein arrest earlier this month has done much to ratify the QAnon worldview. “This is just the beginning,” declared QAnoner Liz Crokin, a former gossip journalist. “The Storm is officially here.”

And thus does the legitimate concern about elite predation and impunity get woven into a demeaning and dangerous social crusade. The “Storm” cited by Crokin—also known as “The Great Awakening”—is part of the vivid eschatology that QAnon adherents share with tradi­tional conservative culture warriors, one in which judgment is at last be rendered against liberals, and the nuclear family is restored to its proper place. “One thing they often talk about after ‘The Storm’ is that they imagine that the economy will be restored so that a single income can support a family again,” View says. “They imagine traditional gender roles and norms will be upheld and how children are raised will return to what [it] used to be.”

The differences between the pedophile conspiracies of the 1980s and those of today are telling in their own way. There’s the matter of scale. The pedophile witch hunt of the ’80s managed to mobilize entire institutions, with much of the media uncritically amplifying its falsehoods and police taking action based on shoddy nonevidence. Lives were ruined around the country. But except for some reckless far-right pundits and websites, the media hasn’t taken the claims of Pizzagate and QAnon seriously. Earnest conversations about the conspiracies are limited to online image boards and social media. 

There’s also the nature of the targets. Where the pedophile conspiracies of the 1980s attacked the institutional emblems of feminist progress, the pedophile conspir­acies of the 2010s attack the cultural emblems of creeping cosmopolitanism. The ritual abuse of the 1980s supposedly happened in the suburbs in state or state-licensed institutions such as schools and child-care facilities. Today the abuse happens in businesses in cosmopolitan cities. Comet Ping Pong, in the Chevy Chase neighborhood of DC, is known as a welcoming space that regularly showcases progressive DIY artists and musicians—“a tangible emblem,” in the words of University of New Haven sociology professor Jeffrey S. Debies-­Carl, “of inclusivity, tolerance, and other progressive values that are threatening to the conspiracy-­prone alt-Right.”

British historian Norman Cohn, in his book Europe’s Inner Demons, finds elements of pedophile conspiracies throughout history. In the 1st century B.C., members of the Catiline conspiracy, an aristocratic plot to overthrow the Roman Republic, supposedly swore an oath over the entrails of a boy and then ate them. And in the witch hunts of the 15th–17th centuries, tens of thousands of people were tortured and killed over allegations that they’d performed ritual child murder, among other heinous acts.

The conspiracy theories documented by Cohn are fundamentally political. The rituals they describe are the means “by which a group of conspirators affirms its solidarity,” he writes, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing “an existing ruler or regime and to seize power.” The mass witch hunts that followed are political too, based on the “demonological obsessions of the intelligentsia.” The history of American political reaction is full of sex demons. Jim Crow was buttressed by myths about black male virility. Likewise, North Carolina’s infamous bathroom bill was sold in part on the fear that predatory men could say they’re transgender to gain access to women’s bathrooms. Opponents of abortion rights continue to conjure gory fantasies of promiscuous women committing “infanticide,” an incitement that Trump turned into an applause line in an April rally.

In this way, pedophile conspiracies act as a sort of propaganda of the counterrevolution, a fun-house reflection of the real threats to the social order. This is what connects QAnon and Pizzagate to McMartin to the witch hunts of the Middle Ages to the dawn of major religions. The demons may take different forms, but the conspiracy is basically the same: Our house is under attack.

“Decay of morals grows from day to day,” goes one despairing account. A secret cabal is wreaking havoc across the land, the man complains to his friend. Its members “recognize one another by secret signs and marks,” and “everywhere they introduce a kind of religion of lust” that subverts “ordinary fornication.” There is a rumor that they worship the “private parts of their director and high priest.” Maybe the rumor is false, “but such suspicions naturally attach to their secret and nocturnal rites.”

In this dialogue, written by Marcus Minucius Felix in the 2nd century, the Roman pagan Caecilius Natalis speaks of Christians the way Pizzagaters described John Podesta and his fellow liberal elite. Natalis is particularly incensed by the cult’s initiation ritual. The details are as “revolting as they are notorious”: New members are initiated into the cult, he reports, by stabbing and killing an infant who has been coated in dough.

[pretty-little-monster]

Mental Health First Aid Kit

In honor of Mental Health Month, I thought I would share my recipe for making a Nest for the Apocalypse (both personal and universal). Being autistic, this is a super important tool for me, but I think it could be helpful for any of us with mental health struggles.

Mental Health First Aid Kit and Self-Care Nest:

It is nice to put your Mental Health First Aid Kit (MHFAK) in a single place, where you feel safe and can be comfy with minimal effort (because sometimes you just need to curl into a little ball).

❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ 

This is different than a Mental Health Care Plan, which is a daily plan to keep you balanced. This kit is for when you have a meltdown, a panic or anxiety attack, a wave of depression or despair, are over-stimulated, uncomfortable, or just need to feel safe and secluded. The links are just things that I have found helpful- they are just to give you ideas, you need not buy anything! It is pretty easy to build a Care Nest with things that you already have in your house. The idea is to gather them into a place where they are easily accessible when you need them, in a small box or basket.

Begin with finding a safe, comfortable space that you know will be available. (I literally have a large dog bed under a table with my MHFAK and pillows and fairy lights.) Some people make a little child’s cloth tent, or a secure corner in their room. Make a comfortable Care Nest for your needs and store your MHFAK nearby. Make sure your family and/or roommates know that when you are in your Care Nest that you are not to be disturbed.

Optional items to build your MHFAK: If you are sensory seeking, like I am, scents and stimming are more important. If you are sensory avoidant, things like noise cancelling headphones and unscented lotion, chapstick, etc. are more important. This is a run down of what works for me, but it should be adapted to your needs.

Weighted blanket

There are a lot of options for these, but make sure you get one about 10% of your body weight or a little lighter or you can feel like you are being smothered (not a good feeling). These vary in price, so I would shop around.

Rollerball of a soothing perfume or balm to put on your pulse points

I like something with lavender, vanilla, or rose, but there are a lot of options out there. A small rollerball or solid perfume with a scent that that calms you is the most important.

❤  link

❤ link

Chapstick

Face mist

This can feel nice and refreshing.

  ❤ link

  ❤ link

Eyedrops and eye mask

Rest your eyes, especially if you have been crying.

Water bottle (invest in some flavoring or just some lemon juice!)

As my baby brother is fond of telling me “Hydrate or Die-drate.” Its amazing how often water and a snack help me back to a state of balance, or at least, less dire panic or despair. Remember that crying is extremely dehydrating, so drink up accordingly. Tea is great, and you should have some, but remember that it can be a stimulant and a diuretic. Water is your friend.

Snack

This depends on how your body responds to stress. Some people get nauseated, in which case, some rice crackers get something mild in your tummy. If you need some quick calories, sugar, and protein, I suggest single servings of nut butter. These are my favourite for international flights, long days in the laboratory, or times when I have forgotten to take care of my physical needs.

❤ Rice crackers

❤ Nut butter

mynoise app or similar soothing sounds. (An mp3 player with a premade playlist also works.)

hand lotion

There are so many lovely scents and lotions. Find one that works best for you.

  ❤ link

Letters to yourself

When you are having a good day, write yourself a little note on a little notecard (I use the backs of my out-of-date business cards). They don’t have to be long or deep. Just a reminder that what you are feeling isn’t permanent. Remember that fear itself can’t hurt you. Despair, as a feeling, can’t hurt you. It HURTS inside and that is real, legitimate, and painful, but it isn’t permanent and those feelings by themselves can’t physically harm you. Let yourself feel safe, even for just a little bit. If you have trouble coming up with something, look for inspirational quotes. (Pinterest and Tumblr are great for this)

Stimming toy

Depending on your needs, a stim or fidget toy or jewelry can help, especially if, like me, you are on the spectrum.

A comfy pillow and pillow spray

❤ link

❤ link

Soft stuffed animal

Something to get your mind off of things.

This could be:

❤ a nap

❤ sketching

❤ knitting or crocheting

❤ journal

❤ reading or re-reading your favourite books, poetry, or short stories. I gravitate to young adult books because they often take me away more easily than “deep literature”. But if deep literature is your jam, keep a copy of Crime and Punishment or War and Peace close.

[kieang]

and then i do not know what to think, all over again. i was just sitting down. i was just checking the time. i was just. living. and your name flashes to life on the screen. 

the first thought isn’t even a thought. it’s the familiar surge of anxiety i didn’t know was named panic in seventh grade. it’s the relief when it released its grip on my heart with its disappearance in ninth grade. it’s the anger of having realized it is thanks to my numbness to it, the absence of that blooming fear, but not the absence of its root, in eleventh grade. it’s the dread of witnessing its return when i thought it to have been vanquished for good, now. how can something as innocent as a ping of a notification freeze me in place? worry worry worry. fear fear fear. panic panic panic. a text? is it a text? from who? not you. please not you. please don’t tell me i’ve done wrong again. please don’t accuse me again. please don’t be angry again. 

the second thought is once again a feeling. confusion? disbelief? a blank faced sob because why couldn’t we just keep the distance? and of course it’s well wishes. of course it’s a hope you’re doing okay. because, you know, pandemic and all. of course it’s a statement and not an inquiry. of course it’s good natured. of course of course of course now the only thing i can call you is a person graciously looking out even for out-of-touch once-friends, who i can’t even accuse of an ulterior motive because clearly you’re not here to strike a conversation, you’re just dropping by to show some support and i hate that i hate that i hate that. i can’t even hate you, and i knew not to hate you, but i sure as hell hated our dynamics and i hated the fact that the world isn’t made from yes or no, this or that, good or bad, black or white, because then i could either say you’re wonderful or horrible but you’re both and so is everyone else in this world but i wish it were different even though if that were the case then life would have no meaning. 

the third thought is that i cannot possibly sit in this state of what am i supposed to do forever, i have to write it all down. 

the fourth thought is oh, that means i’m not the only one who hasn’t deleted any contacts. 

the fifth thought is am i going to reply?

the sixth thought is what would i even say? 

the seventh thought is all i know for certain is that i have forgiven but i will never want to be more than acquaintances. 

the eighth thought is that even acquaintances deserve courtesy. 

the ninth thought is that i am not obligated to answer. 

the tenth thought is i’ve been ignoring all calls and have thus amassed 52 missed calls in my phone’s call log and have no intention of confirming my living status any time soon, and when i was hoping desperately not two hours ago that i’d answer without pause if one specific friend would just hit me up with some nonsensical bullshit in boredom like he used to, i think i really should’ve been more specific about who i was hoping to hear from, because i certainly was not referring to the subject of my distress right now. 

the eleventh thought is i am legitimately too scared to look at my phone’s screen again because that name strikes fear and pain into my heart. 

the twelfth thought is i don’t want to answer because if i get a response then it’ll be this train wreck of a thought process all over again. 

[arcticdementor]

There is, as happens so often these days, a spectre haunting the imagination of the western left. That specter is most commonly dubbed ”strasserism”, though it has other names, such as ”redbrownism”, ”nazbolism”, or more unwieldy names like ”Angela Nagle leftism”. When I came into the left at the beginning of the last decade, these terms did not exist in any meaningful way. As far as me and the people I knew were concerned, ”strasserite” was an incredibly obscure term used exclusively by online neo-nazis is their petty, internicine conflicts. None of us paid them or their silly ideological totems any heed.

At the beginning of the first half of the 2010’s, the left I was a part of was finally starting to feel hopeful again, after the disorientation and loss of direction that came with the fall of actually existing socialism. During the long winter years of the 90’s and early 00’s, people either hopelessly and bitterly clung to a prophecy that everyone else had now fully discarded, or they tried finding new boutique causes to replace the ones that had failed. To take my native Sweden as an example, two of the more significant new causes were opposing the neo-nazis and opposing globalization. There were some victories – or at least, people liked to think so – but the idea of actually achieving political power was dead in everything but name. The left mostly came to accept the role as the social conscience of liberalism, or in the case of antifascism, fancied itself as the Batman protecting end-of-history Gotham City. The streets of triumphant liberal society might have been gritty, the politicians corrupt and undeserving, but antifascist Batman still rose out of bed every night to protect the craven and the low from monsters lurking in the shadows. Or so they liked to think. Most of the time, they just hung out and drank beer.

…

All the details of the intervening decade are beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s fair to say that the left today is more broken and politically defunct than at any point since the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, a case can be made that the crisis facing the left today is more serious than the crisis of the late 80s and early 90s. ”Left populism” as a political model has failed. Jeremy Corbyn has presided over the worst labour party showing in nearly a century. The ”Sanders moment” is over, and there’s no sequel to any of these failed left projects anywhere in sight. This decline is likely terminal and irreversible, because unlike the decline in the 90s, the left no longer has any significant working class support. In fact, with each new ”left revival” a la Corbyn, the constant bleeding of working class support only seems to accelerate. Comrade Bhaskar at Jacobin magazine touts the (in)famous AOC as the next new great presidential candidate and hope for global socialism, but anyone with an IQ somewhere north of the melting point of water – or at least, anyone who doesn’t have a paper he’s eagerly trying to sell you – knows that this is a truly desperate flight of fancy that will never come to pass, not in a million years.

…

We first begin with the obvious. Strasserism does not actually exist. Nobody reads the Strasser brothers, not even the neo-nazis who threw accusations of strasserism at each other decades before anyone else. Nobody outside of Russia – and for that matter, nobody inside of Russia – cares about the intellectual output of the National Bolshevik party, if such an output were to be shown to exist. The reason the term strasserism has been brought out from the dustbin of history by the contemporary left is because said left is currently in the middle of a social and political panic, and this panic has at least two central functions. Firstly, panics such as these are one way for a group of believers to deal with a situation where prophecy fails. For the left, the only thing it knows today is constant failure. Like any religious cult, the failure of prophecy can only be redeemed by shedding the blood of those members identified as polluting the faith. The price of social cohesion is the turn toward constant purges.

…

Partaking in this ritual of self-depreciation does not mark you as an outsider. It is only if you break the rules of the game, only if you acknowledge the man behind the curtain, only if you point to the basic truth hidden behind this outer layer of ironic self-mockery that you become one of us, one of the so-called strasserites. This truth is a fairly simple marxist truth. Classes have class interests, and so the idea that you could have a political movement – the left – that was well and truly dominated by one class, yet still wholly committed to the class interests of another class, but also just too bumbling and out of touch to ever do a good job of looking out for the class it supposedly ”really” cares about is, to put it extremely mildly, a dubious idea. It is much more likely that a political movement dominated by one class will also be more or less entirely dedicated to pursuing the class interests of that class, while also being unable to take any strong action that goes against the interests of its dominant class.

…

There was a socialism before Marx, and it was utopian and based on human reason and moral progress. There are good reasons for why this brand of socialism fell out of favor, but within its context one can definitely hold the view that a small class of enlightened and educated well-to-do people, acting out of the goodness of their own hearts, will eventually bring about socialism by lifting up the poor, racist and/or stupid proles. You don’t have to agree with it, but it fits together.

A central premise of marxist, materialist or scientific socialism, on the other hand, is that classes simply cannot act this way. Classes pursue their own interests and act politically not out of greed, or generosity, or any other personal bit of sentiment, but due to historical and economical pressures. It is this very simple fact that makes the ”materialism” of someone like Bhaskar Sunkara at Jacobin magazine, and of most leftists of his stripe in general, so incredibly contradictory. For it to work, there has to be an unstated agreement among the faithful to never seriously use the tools of marxist analysis on the left itself. Any and all self-examination must remain on the level of personal discussion (”can person so and so really be a socialist, when her parents are so rich?”). The punishment for transgression against this agreement, for breaking the most sacred code of Omerta the modern left has, is swift and severe: you will get cancelled for this, and you will be added to the ever growing list of ”strasserites” and ”secret nazis” who tried to lure the faithful away from the true path. What happened to Angela Nagle is instructive in this regard; her article, The Left Case Against Open Borders, was an attempt to argue against unrestricted immigration from a class-based, materialist perspective. It’s quite likely – and also quite amusing – that she would probably have recieved less sustained hate online if she had written that immigration shouldn’t be allowed as long as non-white people talk funny and smell bad.

…

I bring my own example up not to relitigate old battles but to underline the point that the sin that earns people the label of ”strasserite” or ”chud” or ”redbrown nazi” has nothing to do with racist animus, or even the issue of immigration more generally. Conjuring up the threat of racism and the ghosts of Nazi Germany is not done because it is true, but because it is necessary. In my case, having a father who came to Sweden to work from central Africa proved to be an embarassing but fairly minor speed bump on the way to declaring me a fighter for aryan blood purity. There is nothing foolish or irrational about any of this; our esteemed comrades are simply doing the only thing they can do, faced with a contradiction they are unable to resolve and a movement that is rapidly falling apart.

…

While I don’t pretend to speak for anyone other than myself, I would claim that the ”strasserite” class-analysis of politics in the west and the role of the left today has a few central features. To start: as the economies in western countries have shifted over the past decades, a new sort of class of people has sprung up and grown in social and political importance. In the united states, the most common name for this class is PMCs; the professional-managerial classes. Their name is less important than their function and political trajectory. To brutally simplify things for the sake of brevity, the notable feature of many PMCs as political actors is a blend of political liberalism and cultural progressivism, merged with a political project aimed at increasingly subsidizing their own reproduction as a class, ideally by means of state transfers. The state should forgive student debt. The state should dabble in reparations. The state should hire ”ideas people” to write up reports and thinkpieces about reparations. The state should create new racial justice commissions, or just generally create more jobs that can employ people who by dint of belonging to this class feel that them taking a job at Walmart means that capitalism has failed and it’s time for a revolution. The most radical, put-upon and economically insecure parts of this class today naturally gravitate toward the left, because the left is – no matter what leftists delude themselves by saying – a fairly focused, competent and credible class project. When Corbyn came out of nowhere and became Labour party leader, it was a real grassroots movement that brought him there; a grassroots movement of students and people who either have ambition to move up the ladder or a legitimate fear of looming proletarianization, of falling down the social and economic ladder and finding themselves joining the proles.

The particular form of ”pro-worker” rhetoric these members of the PMC use mostly boils down to a sort of charity. Vote for us, and we’ll give you higher benefits and free broadband, Labour recently tried to tell the recalcitrant workers of the north. It didn’t work. This mode of ”charity” is hardly selfless – it would be a free ”gift” from these PMC activists given to their precious salt of the earth proletarians, and like all gifts it would be reliant on the goodwill and generosity of the giver. Its main function would also surely be to feather the ever growing number of nests for this class of comfortable, university-educated administrators. And when some leftists start seriously debating why ”racists” should be denied medical care from the NHS, one starts getting a sense of just how much hierarchical domination their future ”worker’s paradise” promises to deliver to the working poor.

The point here is not a moral one. After Labour lost, one exasperated member and activist despaired over how blind the workers were, how easily fooled they were by tory propaganda. ”Don’t they see how evil capitalism is? How brutal and unfair it is?”, this activist wrote: ”I have many friends with good grades who are stuck working at grocery stores, stocking shelves”. Anyone who pretends to be some sort of materialist cannot in good conscience make fun of sentiments like this; it is completely rational for someone in that position to think that ”the evils of capitalism” are somehow laid bare for the world to see when their friends are forced to stock shelves like a common peon in order to pay the rent. That the other workers at the grocery store probably find this way of thinking completely ludicrous and arrogant is obviously besides the point.  Politically speaking, the fury and energy that proletarianization engenders should never be underestimated, because it causes political explosions. Jeremy Corbyn successfully challenged the political cartel that had been running Labour on the back of such a political explosion.

We should not make fun of an activist who despairs at the state of the world when good, solid middle class people with solid middle class grades can no longer achieve the middle class lifestyle they were promised. It is however a basic political truth that a worker’s movement consisting of people who are angry at the prospect social and economic ”demotion” – in other words, people who are fighting against the cruel fate of having to become workers – cannot ever succeed. Promising free broadband, or unlimited Space Communism, or some other stupid fantasy world where getting angry at having to work like a normal person is acceptable because nobody has to work won’t really change that.

…

The grand political divide that sundered the house of modern ”socialism” boils down to the question of which class should have its interests taken care of in the first instance. It is all well and good to talk about ”doing both”, or try to soothe workers by saying that once socialism wins, nobody will work, so they’ll all be taken care of then.  A century ago Joe Hill mocked the preachers who tried to placate starving workers by promising them there’d be plenty of pie up in the sky after they were all dead. Today, Aaron Bastani does an even more pathetic job within that vaunted political tradition, promising the british working class asteroid mining and fully automated communist holodecks once The Revolution(tm) succeeds. Until that day comes, though, it can’t really be helped that they’ll have to stay under the thumb of – and fight the battles for – the downwardly mobile professionals, huh? After all, who will build all those fancy asteroid miners if little Junior suddenly has to work at Starbucks like a common plebeian?

This is not a question of left incompetence, or Brexit suddenly wrecking everything, or something that Bernie woulda, coulda, shoulda done. The left is bleeding working class support everywhere. The left is picking up support among the more affluent and well-to-do stratas everywhere. The left is merging with greens and liberal ”progressives” everywhere. This is not incompetence, or cowardice. It is not personal, nor can it be fixed by the actions of individual persons; it is a vindication of historical materialism, and it is playing out right before our very eyes.

It is time for the ”socialism” of the professional and managerial classes and the socialism of the working classes to part ways. The former is moribund and a historical dead-end. The latter, I think, still has a case to be made for it. More importantly – and personal experience from outside the left bears this out  – it still has an audience that is willing to listen to it.

…

Workers aren’t stupid. They’re not evil. They haven’t been ”tricked by the media”. They need no false shepherds to guide them, no well-paid moral commissars to teach them to not randomly slaughter their neighbors because of muh racism. They have abandoned the left parties because the left parties have abandoned them, not ”culturally” as some proponents of identity politics would like you to think, but materially. They know their own class interests, and they know that the left is inimical to those interests. This is good news, at least for those of us with the courage and political will needed to help them free themselves from their so-called ”betters”. Let the Labour activists of London lament over how ”disappointed” they are that the working class has stopped following orders. We will not be like you. We will not promise new masters and new yokes to live under, new aristocracies and ”vanguards” to subsidize, new cadres of people selling them moral sermons and sensitivity courses. We will promise them a chance at revenge.