❝ Mm, not to come off as an insecure bitch because I'm obviously not, but whatever you're currently paying attention to is CLEARLY not as fascinating as me. Do the world a favor already and just put it down in favor of me, darling. I'm bored as fuck. ❞
I may be wrong, but to me it looks like Tob did the most massive eye roll ever known to mankind, he's like 'dude I cannot do this, say something, please, I'm tireddd'. And then Martin straight up refuses to answer the question and elaborate in any shape or form😂 He did not give two fucks, but didn't forget to keep it polite at the same time, 'thanks for your concern tho'😅 (if I got it right) He's like I know you don't give a damn, but thanks for the effort. What a man
Love when people come in with exotic animals and then get upset about other people coming over to interact with them and their exotic animals. Like. Ma'am. You are wandering around a bookstore in Central Texas with a BABY KANGAROO IN YOUR BAG. PEOPLE ARE GOING TO ASK YOU QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR NON-NATIVE SPECIES ANIMAL THAT YOU ARE CARRYING WITH YOU. IN PUBLIC.
@sportsthoughts and i were discussing geno's modeling potential and i realized i have never seen this photo on any of the old pens blogs ive been digging through? So here it's on tumblr now lol
I am of the firm belief that in Detroit: Become Human, Connor is a deviant from the start no matter how you play him. His storyline isnt about remaining a machine vs becoming a deviant, it's you choosing whether he's going to be a dickhead or not.
So I try not to make these rambles too powered by salt but considering Impactor is very near my favourite character in the franchise and as a result I read a lot of badfic featuring him out of sheer desperation for something, I'm seriously devastated by the way I've never seen it explored just what a harrowing and accurate description of moral injury and reflexive self-loathing he is.
Like, it's wild to me that we have it in the text, actually on page, that Impactor outright thinks he's a monster. We see it on page! It is written with plain words! He's stuck thinking like "can't survive if the other guy doesn't die", "your life is bought with the blood you spill, and you want to keep living so you best learn to like killing" to the point where he doesn't even want to live anymore and yet he can't stop, he's stuck, there's no safety for him to retreat back to because nobody taught him to value himself in any other way except in balance against someone else.
Like we know. Exactly what Impactor considers horrible, what he considers ugly and unseemly and corrupt. And it's all stuff that makes sense. It's all stuff the most of us probably find a little bit horrifying. We know that his perception of the world is so utterly bleak that there is no way but down, the only trajectory he sees for himself is to slip further and further from that surface because this is just his life now, this is what he is now, this may be what he always was, so isolated in his self-loathing that he can barely see the surface of where the horrible things end, and sure as hell doesn't think he can reach it. He's been cut off from his access to the sublime, to the fortifying, to the beautiful and wonderful and safe, this is all he has left, this is just what he is now.
I think the massive overriding misreading is assuming Impactor has any regard for himself. He may have the ability to act confident and move through the world with intellectual assurance over his own skill, and it's easy to take that as a sign that he has some kind of a core, undivided wholeness of personhood that lets him keep acting like he knows what he's doing. But I don't think that's it at all. His sense of self has been so completely fractured and damaged by the horrors he's committed and been isolated with that they've attached themselves to the space where his sense of self would otherwise be. Again, I'm not even extrapolating -- this just is the text of "Escape".
And then there's the negative influence of Guzzle, another person who thinks the way to deal with your trauma is by committing massive violence on it who has no idea this should maybe be something to discuss with people -- like, we see the way his abandon and reveling in having power and returning the violence drags Impactor down, too, because it's familiar, it makes sense, and then Impactor locks him in a box and goes "I can't fucking do this anymore". It's literally the most unsubtle death wish, it's a textbook flight arrest response, he doesn't want to keep doing the thing he's doing but he doesn't know what else there is, he sees no way out other than down.
And IDK I don't want to cast blame, honestly as a recovering abusive asshole myself, the terrible things he does to other people out of a sense of "this is how it has to be, don't be naive, don't be stupid", the loop of self-justification and grasping for value in his identity as an anonymous source of violence and ruiner of lives is a big part of why I love him so much, and his victims are really visible in the text, their mess deserves exploration and their pain deserves narrative validation, if only for completeness' sake
but like goddamn I just feel for this trash mech so much. He was left locked up with only his own bad thoughts for company, forced in a situation where becoming a worse person was the only way to escape further pain to the point where he's just completely cut off from his access to the sublime, to the fortifying, to the beautiful and wonderful and safe. Like where is there to go when the only things you know what to do are all fucked up? What do you do when all you've been "taught" is that living means killing, but you're getting extremely sick of the killing, when you're tired of your whole life being stained in blood and gore and the traces of the grotesquerie that is living with the knowledge that having power over other people is the ultimate act of survival when you never wanted that?
anxiety therapist was so nice to me 🥺 after I filled her in she was like "I can see you're going through a lot and have a lot of moving pieces in your life and that must be really hard, so if you ever want to pause our work just let me know."
Hsr!Klee is an Emanator of the Elation, a fact Kaeya, who took it upon himself to be the seemingly younger Fool’s guardian after first encountering and vouching for her before the Knights, is very jarred By, even after all the time he’s spent by her side.
This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.
e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.
I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.
This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.
And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.