#like. that's a 1950s cult leader/businessman!

[redladydeath]

I'm really not fond of the "Vox was a cult leader" thing

but I do think it'd be kinda funny if he used to be the L. Ron Hubbard of the Hellaverse

[blowdriedcheese]

The take-over of the autistic urge

It's time to infodump about my fictional Antichrist cult

NO INTRO, YOURE GETTING EVERYTHING. TIMELINE, RULES, CUSTOMS, NOTABLE FIGURES, NO MERCY

ALSO YES THIS IS WAY TOO INTRICATE FOR THREE FUCKING DANGANRONPA OCS BUT MY DESIRE TO CREATE MORE TOOK OVER AS TIME WENT ON

BACKSTORY AND TIMELINE ITS VERY LONG BC LOTS OF HISTORY THIS THING EXISTS FROM 1549-2019 (TIME OF IT TAKING PLACE)

_______________________________

• Backstory.

In 1549, Christianity was first introduced to the country of Japan. That same year, the youngest child of a wealthy businessman created a belief around the concept of this religion. This leader, Shishigami Hayato, was intrigued by Christianity; especially the parts that mentioned a so-called Antichrist.

The ideals of the Antichrist seemed like nothing bad, and something that needed to be realized. Hayato preached these ideals, and over the course of a few years, his insignificant little village was overtaken. Everyone had gotten sucked into the Antichrist craze.

The Edo period posed a difficult time for the Shishigami community, as Christianity had been banned. They went underground, their community becoming a secret society. During this time, the beliefs of the Antichrist only resonated more, and that's when an idea was introduced that would forever change the course of this society.

One of it's members claimed that she had received signs that the Shishigami bloodline would produce the Antichrist themselves on one faithful day; the 13th of September. Instead of the ideals, the community began to dedicate themselves to that cause. Nothing was more important than the family that lead them.

The end of the Edo period ended the ban on Christianity, and the community could freely practice their religion. At this point, it had grown. A small town who just happened to be converted had turned into a huge cult that stretched over the entire country. Even government officials had been turned to the belief.

Around the 1840s, a group of people caught wind of this cult. They didn't agree with the Antichrist idealization, believing that they would bring the end of the world upon themselves.

This group would rival the Shishigami cult for decades to follow, but wanted to do things the peaceful way. They didn't want to murder the family; just make them relinquish their authority, take over the cult, and then shut it down.

In the 1930s, a set of twins were born. One of them had a very special talent; she could communicate with the dead. It became clear that this girl was destined to be the leader due to her powers, and it took the cult's respect for the Shishigami family to another level.

This young girl, Yuukoo, went down in history for many things. New rules, questionable events, and her identity. She was the first transgender leader that the cult had, and would have to raise her brother's firstborn as her own.

When she was crowned the official leader of the cult in 1950, the time came for the annual meeting with the rivaling group. They asked with kindness, but Yuukoo responded with violence. A few days after that incident, the new Shishigami leader went missing.

When she returned, she had the leader of the rival group with her. They had tortured her, trying to force her to give up her title. Yuukoo's stubborn nature had been an advantage in this case, as she managed to escape during a moment of weakness without relinquishing her authority.

Angered, she had dragged the group's leader with her, and ordered him to be killed. Not just in any way, but the most violent act in the history of the cult. "You love your savior so much? Die like him." is what Yuukoo told him.

Yuukoo Shishigami died in the 1970s, having lead this cult into one if their greatest times, and also raising her niece like her own. That niece, in turn, had her own daughter; Shishigami Hanami.

Hanami, like her grandmother, had a very special gift. She saw the future in the form of prophecies. At 14 years old, in 1986, Hanami discovered that she would be the one to birth the Antichrist themselves.

There was so much pressure put on her, which lead to her developing depression and anxiety. The cult went from being in their prime to a rock bottom they had never experienced. Her followers were angry, and at this point they were leading more than Hanami.

She was literally treated like a doormat, and her mental state only worsened as time went on. Many leaders had an average parenthood age of 20, with the youngest leader ever giving birth at 16. Hanami was in her 20s, and still hadn't managed to conceive. It added to the pressure and negative image everyone had of her.

At 29, Hanami finally got pregnant. It was pure hell for her. She had suffered from tokophobia for her entire life; the fear of pregnancy. She was terrified, and it didn't help that her husband, the love of her life, passed away during that time.

Her son, Seku, was born on the predicted day; 13th of September. Hanami loved him, but struggled with post-partum depression and had an overall difficult time caring for him. In his early years, Seku was primarily raised by his grandparents and other members of the cult.

After getting help, Hanami was able to raise him. Her mental health was still going to be an issue, but not so much that she couldn't be with her own child anymore. Now that her head was clearer, Hanami felt pride in being the mother of the Antichrist.

Yuukoo's decision from all those years ago came to bite the cult back in the ass in the form of the rivaling group's revenge. They heard of the Antichrist's birth, and they were planning to kill him. It was time to bring back the meetings between the two groups.

At 15, when Seku was given to title of the cult's leader, the whole Yuukoo scenario played out again. Kidnapped, and used as snuff entertainment. A week of 'entertainment' ending in the crucifixion of Shishigami Seku.

It was supposed to kill the Antichrist, but a member felt horrible for what their group did to this literal child, and saved him.

After that, the cult continued to expand. Theyre well on their way to world domination thanks to the dedication of their precious Antichrist.

• 2. Timeline

1528:

- Shishigami Hayato is born

1549:

- Introduction of Christianity of Japan

- Shishigami Hayato starts preaching the ideals of the Antichrist in his hometown

1589:

- Death of Shishigami Hayato

- Hayato passes on the torch to his offspring; the first instance of many passings to come

1603:

- Ban on Christianity in Japan

- Shishigami cult retreats from the public -> secret society

1836:

- Ban on Christianity lifted -> cult comes out of hiding

1843:

- Rival group is formed

1934:

- Yuukoo and her twin brother are born

1940:

- Discovery of Yuukoo's 'powers'

1950:

- Yuukoo is crowned cult leader

- Yuukoo comes out as a trans woman

- Meeting between cult and rival group goes wrong -> group starts to resort to violence

- Kidnapping and torture of Shishigami Yuukoo

- Crucifixion of rivaling group's leader

- Most infamous rule introduced by Yuukoo; physical harm to the Shishigami leader from anyone outside the cult will result in death

1952:

- Start of cult's Golden Age

1954:

- Yuukoo's niece is born -> Yuukoo adopts her and raises her as her daughter

1971:

- Death of Shishigami Yuukoo

- Downfall of cult's Golden Age -> true downfall

1972:

- Shishigami Hanami is born

1982:

- Discovery of Hanami's prophet 'powers'

1986:

- Prophecy foretells that Hanami is going to give birth to the Antichrist

1988:

- Hanami is crowned leader of the Shishigami cult

- Downfall of cult's Golden Age -> according to cult, fueled by their disapproval of Hanami

2001:

- Hanami gets pregnant

- Hanami husband passes away in a car accident

- Shishigami Seku is born -> Antichrist has come

- Hanami's depression takes over -> leaves her parents and cult members raise her child to get major help

2006:

- Hanami is well enough to raise Seku

2016:

- Rival group resurrection

- Crucifixion of Shishigami Seku

- Group member saves Seku

2018:

- Start of cult's Diamond Age

2019:

- Present day

▪︎I created this bullshit in 2019 so it's staying in 2019

[hollywoodjuliorivas]

Trumpism deserves to be called a cult

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

The comparisons have come hard and fast, at least since 2015. Trump is like Silvio Berlusconi, like Adolf Hitler, like Boris Johnson. A 2018 film called “The Trump Prophecy” took the evangelical route, comparing Trump to Cyrus the Great, the 6th century BC Persian monarch chosen by God to free Jewish captives in Babylon.

But maybe it’s time to stop searching for the exact analogy for Trump, be he Cyrus or Boris, Adolf or a Silvio. What demands analysis is less the arrogant 73-year-old mediocrity in the Oval Office, but the worshipful attitude so many Americans have toward him.

A lot of nut jobs have peddled lies to Americans before, and even styled themselves as messianic. But at no time in history have so many Americans been drawn to what’s looking increasingly like a cult. I don’t use the term recklessly.

When Steven Hassan, an expert in cults and an ex-Moonie (as in the Unification Church, founded by a Korean businessman, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon), published “The Cult of Trump” last spring, some reviewers objected to his use of the cult framework as incendiary and not all that useful.

Indeed, for Trump critics to call his admirers cult members might be just another salvo in our nasty political warfare. It’s similar to the Trump psychologizing over the years that often doubles as name-calling: He’s a baby, a psychopath, a stone-cold narcissist.

The discourse around cults partakes of some woolly theories. “Mind control” and “brainwashing” are shibboleths from the 1950s, when the coinages were used to describe what Chinese Communists did to convert freethinkers to their cause. The implicit suggestion is that unsavory ideas and ideologies can only win adherents using extreme and witchy measures.

All that put me off the notion of Trumpism as a cult. But then in August, Trump looked heavenward and called himself “the chosen one.”

Suddenly, among evangelicals, it wasn’t enough to make comparisons with Cyrus or even King David. He had to be the savior himself. The far-right radio host Wayne Allyn Root called Trump “the second coming of God.” Then former Energy Secretary Rick Perry straight up affirmed Trump’s craziness, telling him, “You are here in this time because God ordained you.”

As 2019 drew to a close, my doubts about Trumpism as a cult dissolved. And I’m not alone.

Republican lawyer George Conway reportedly described his wife, Trump’s presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway, as a member of a cult. Former GOP strategist John Weaver has used the term. Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s onetime communications director, concurs. Also news vet Dan Rather, conservative political scientist Norman Ornstein, science journalist Steve Silberman, pastor John Pavlovitz and academic and journalist Jared Yates Sexton.

What the cult diagnosis may lack in scholarly rigor, it makes up for in explanatory power. When polled, far too many Republicans come across as having abandoned their commitment to libertarianism, family values or simple logic in favor of Trump worship. They’re lost to paranoia and factually unmoored talking points, just the way Hassan was lost to Sun Myung Moon.

It can be heartbreaking when loved ones succumb to Trumpism. (It’s a double whammy when your grief is dismissed as liberal tears.) A true believer undergoes a “radical personal change,” as Hassan puts it. The person you once knew seems somehow ... not there.

Journalists Luke O’Neil and Edwin Lyngar, as well as Jen Senko in “The Brainwashing of My Dad,” have compiled stories of Americans who have gone over. O’Neil summarized the transformation this way: “A loved one … sat down in front of Fox News, found some kind of deep, addictive comfort in the anger and paranoia, and became a different person.”

Sounds about right.

Hassan — who remembers, during his Moonie days, shouting, “I don’t care if Moon is like Hitler. I’ve chosen to follow him, and I’ll follow him to the end” — broke free, and became an expert on cults and how to leave them. He has spent his career proving it’s possible.

To see Trumpism as a cult is not to refuse to engage with its effects, the crimes committed in its name or the way it has awakened and emboldened the cruelest and most destructive beliefs and practices in the American playbook. Instead, the cult framework should relieve the pressure many of us feel to call Trumpites back to themselves, to keep arguing with them. They are stuck in a bad relationship with a controlling figure.

Understanding Trump is a fool’s errand. He’s sui generis, and far too erratic and finally insubstantial to reward close attention. Trump zealots are another matter. They are part of the tradition of radical converts in American history who elected to forfeit their authentic personalities and principles rather than refine or strengthen them. We need to stay focused on how so many Americans came to this pass and took this destructive course. The Trump cult will define American politics for decades to come, even after its dear leader is gone.

[mrmichaelchadler]

Seymour Cassel: 1935-2019

Seymour Cassel, the character actor who became one of the great faces of the American independent film movement, passed away on April 7 at the age of 84 from complications stemming from Alzheimer’s disease. During a career that stretched over seven decades, racked up more than 200 screen and television appearances and earned him an Oscar nomination, he became a favorite of several generations of filmmakers and audiences alike. Although Cassel turned up more often in supporting roles than in leads, he always made the most of the screen time he was given. And when he did turn up, viewers who might not have known his actual name would instantly recognize his distinct look and sound. He was one of those increasingly rare performers whose mere presence in a film meant that things were almost certainly going to be interesting, so long as he was on the screen.

Born in Detroit on January 22, 1935, Cassel traveled with his mother, a burlesque dancer, and began performing vaudeville at the age of three. At the age of 17, he enlisted in the Navy and when he got out, he made his way to New York to further pursue a career in acting, studying at the American Theatre Wing and being tutored by the likes of Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg. In the mid-1950s, Cassel answered an ad seeking people to participate in a recently started acting workshop and that is where he met the group’s leader, John Cassavetes. This began an extended collaboration that would span several decades, encompass seven films, and lay the ground floor for what eventually became American independent film. In fact, Cassel made his screen debut in Cassavetes’ first film as a director, “Shadows” (1958), in which in not only played a small role but also served as an associate producer and camera operator for that micro-budgeted drama about the relationships of three African-American siblings, two brothers trying to make it as jazz musicians and their lighter-skinned sister who goes through a trio of romantic relationships. After this film, which would go on to win the Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1960 and become considered a landmark work of independent cinema, Cassel and Cassavetes collaborated on “Too Late Blues” (1962), “Faces” 1968), “Minnie and Moskowitz” (1971), “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” (1976), “Opening Night” (1978) and “Love Streams” (1984).

Seymour Cassel in "Faces"

In “Faces,” the film that earned Cassel an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, he plays a hippie who ends up picking up an upper-middle-class woman (Lynn Carlin) who is stuck in a terrible marriage; Cassel makes a rich and painfully relatable character out of a part that could have easily been reduced to a collection of cliches. “Minnie and Moskowitz” was a comedy/drama in which he plays a parking attendant—one armed with one of the great mustaches in screen history—who tries to win over a romantically disillusioned museum curator (Rowlands) and if the resulting film is generally not ranked as one of Cassavetes’ best, it is one of his most instantly engaging thanks to the wonderful byplay between its two leads. In “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,” Cassel plays a mob-connected club owner who sets up a compulsive gambler (Ben Gazzara) to commit the seemingly innocuous titular crime that turns out to be far more complicated than it seems. Cassel would then play himself in a brief appearance in “Opening Night” and work with Cassavetes one last time as Rowlands’s estranged husband in the director’s last (and perhaps best) major work, “Love Streams.” In these roles, Cassel ran the gamut from comedy to romance to drama to tragedy, and if he ever hit a false note at some point, I do not recall it.

When he wasn’t working with Cassavetes, Cassel worked steadily both in film and on television. There were brief appearances in such films as “Murder, Inc.” (1960), “The Nutty Professor” (1963), “The Killers” (1964), “Coogan’s Bluff" (1968), “The Last Tycoon” (1976) and “Valentino” (1977). He got a rare lead role in the future cult film “Death Game” (1977), in which he plays a married businessman, left home alone on his birthday, who invites in a couple of sexy young women (Colleen Camp and Sondra Locke) who turn up on his doorstep for a bit of fun, before things quickly and crazily turn into something more sinister. Cassel also appeared as the Governor in Sam Peckinpah’s bizarre trucker comedy “Convoy” (1978), one of the salesmen in Barry Levinson’s wonderful comedy “Tin Men” (1987) and as sidekick Sam Catchem in Warren Beatty’s glorious screen adaptation of “Dick Tracy” (1990). On television, he could be seen in episodes of such shows as “Wagon Train,” “Combat,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Batman,” “Emergency” and “Tales from the Darkside.”

Seymour Cassel and Steve Buscemi in "In the Soup"

Although Cassel would have more than qualified for a place in the character actor pantheon based solely on his work with Cassavetes, his career got an unexpected and entirely welcome second wind when a new crop of filmmakers who had admired those performances began utilizing him in their own projects. In Alexander Rockwell’s “In the Soup,” he plays a somewhat shady guy who offers to fund the seemingly unfilmable passion project screenplay of a struggling filmmaker (Steve Buscemi) and ends up getting him involved in a number of increasingly bizarre schemes. Cassel’s performance was one of his very best, allowing the character's humor to shine through without making him seem like just an implausible goofball—the turn would earn him a Special Jury Prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival (where the film itself won the Grand Jury Prize) as well as the Silver Hugo from the Chicago International Film Festival. From this point on, Cassel would work steadily for the remainder of his career, appearing in such films as “Honeymoon in Vegas” (1992), “Indecent Proposal” (1993), “It Could Happen to You” (1994), “Dead Presidents” (1995), “Trees Lounge” (1996), “The Crew” (2000), “Stuck on You” (2003) and “Postal” (2007). 

Of the work in this later period of his career, his most significant collaboration would be with Wes Anderson, who cast him in three movies, “Rushmore” (1998), “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001) and “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” (2004). Of the three, the most significant was in “Rushmore” (pictured at top), which resulted in one of the very best performances of his entire career. As the simple barber father of an ambitious son—who, embarrassed by what his dad really does for a living, claims that he is really a brain surgeon—Cassel isn’t on the screen that much, but he makes every moment count with a performance that perfectly captures the spirit of Anderson’s alternately genial and melancholy work. When his son acts embarrassed by him, he puts on a brave face but you can see the heartbreak in his eyes. Later on, when he is introduced to Herman Blume (Bill Murray), the depressed millionaire whom his son has tried to make into a sort of father figure, it's one of those scenes in which everything is pitched so perfectly, thanks in no small part to Cassel and Murray's performances as their characters size each other up, that it's impossible to think of the film without it. 

Both a character actor and a character himself, Cassel had the kind of life and career that stretched so far and touched so many people in unexpected ways (did you know that he apparently gave Slash from Guns 'n Roses his nickname?) that if you tried to turn it all into a movie, it would seem almost too implausible to believe. With his sly smile and courtly charm, both of which could turn in an instant when required, he made good movies great and iffy ones watchable. Cassel was a genuine original, and while it's sad to think that there will be no more performances from him, at least the considerable body of work he has left behind will continue to entertain and astonish viewers for years to come.

from All Content http://bit.ly/2I91gzk

[redladydeath]

Personally I think "cult leader" is so lame and doesn't make any sense with his tech/electricity focus. Would absolutely be wasted potential of a character in my opinion. Obviously cults have existed throughout all of human history but they give me more 1960s-1980s vibes in the modern era. I also don't really trust the writers to handle the topic well, it's a very serious and real phenomenon and the show is too fast-paced/short/humor-focused to handle these themes in a proper way. Really hoping it isn't canonized.

Yeah, my thoughts exactly. It's just kinda off-theme for a character who's supposed to be centered on 1950s television and I think it'd just be distracting, especially if there ends up being a significant amount of pathos in his relationship with Alastor. I just can't feel bad about their friendship falling apart when that is going on in the background. Not sure why Alastor being a serial killer wouldn't be equally distracting, but it isn't, at least for me.

Vox is a fun character and I feel like I won't be able to enjoy him as much with a backstory detail like that. "Evil businessman" is a character type with so much potential and I feel like they'd be limiting themselves by introducing something so serious to a character who's so far been portrayed as mostly being the fun, cartoony sort of evil.