#love when evil psychologist is good at evil psychology

[syncogon]

"no way that mf likes women"

watched a lcla ep tonight and why am i not buying a single thing dr. he is selling like 😭 "the one girl i loved actually died and that's why i freaked out" LIAR??? put that damn pocket watch away i bet he stuck that picture in an hour before meeting cxs for coffee it looks so New

[axetivev]

Papa!Reader, a Psychological who would work in Arkham Asylum. Dealing with most of Batman's enemies and actually vibing with them and having a better relationship then Bruce to his enemies (and his husband isn't having it).

Papa!Reader, a Psychological who will have a session with Joker while Bats and Hood stared at the clown's very soul. Batman would be prepared if Jason had the feel to charge to Joker while Y/N tried to stay professional, but deep down, he just wanted to laugh his ass off.

Papa!Reader, a Psychological who would tag along with Ivy about plants. Which led to papa!reader asking to buy plants to Bruce (in a ridiculous amount). Which led to Bruce coming to Arkham to question her; What did you do to my husband?

(MPREG INCOME) Papa!Reader, a Psychological who was pregnant and the super-villains, oddly enough. Gentle with him, unlike their usual evil persona, and if there's anyone who dares to say something horrible to him, they'll get a beat down.

Papa!Reader, a Psychological who was pretty much close to Batman like metal and magnet, talked so lovingly if anyone wasn't around. And the possibilities of his super-villains knowing Papa!reader was his husband made Bruce—i mean Batman go wild.

"My love... I can't let my enemies know I'm a lovebird with their psychologist..." Batman spoke, his voice was deep but barely a whisper while trying to stay professional as Papa!reader continues to shower his rough cheek with kisses.

"Mhm, deal with it, Bats. ♡"

Papa!Reader, a Psychological who would often bring snacks to his patients, declining wasn't an option. And it would never be.

Papa!Reader, a Psychological who got books from Harley Quinn about psychology. And would come home with 2-4 huge books about it.

Alfred : If I may ask, where do you get them. Master Y/N?

Papa!reader : Harley Quinn.

Alfred : Ah... Miss Quinn.

Bruce spits his coffee : Quinn???

Papa!Reader, a Psychological who would go on sessions with Damian (as Robin), clinging to him or when he sat down, Robin would rest his head in his lap, while reading a book or sleeping. And his patients would question Papa!reader

Patient : Why is the Boy Wonder sleeping on you?

Papa!reader who was writing while patting Robin's head : He's my son.

Patient who didn't hear it clearly : Your who...?

Papa!reader visibly sweating : Ah... j–just let him sleep! Let just continue—

Papa!Reader, a Psychological who would always bring a pepper spray. Well, Bruce was the one who told him he should bring one...

Papa!Reader, a Psychological who is absolute besties with Harley, Batman would grumble about the fact she "took" his husband away from his grasp.

NSFW!!

Papa!Reader, a Psychological who would get pinned against his office desk. Stomach facing the wooden table as Batman pound his hole without mercy if jealousy rose or just needed a quickie.

Batman came to Papa!reader's office. As the male was on his desk, busy with some documents, the Dark Knight grabbed Papa!reader's waist, kicking his chair, Batman immediately pulled down Papa!reader's pants as his hole was in sight, he wasted no time. Immediately pulling his own pants, before inserting his length. Pounding his husband's hole without mercy.

"Mmh... B–bats... s–slow down...mm..ngh!" Papa!Reader moaned, as Batman inserted his index and middle finger to his husband's mouth.

"Keep your voice down. You're a good boy, I know you are." Batman smirked against his cheek, before planting kisses on Papa!reader's soft cheek.

[zuko-always-lies]

Hey, as a long viewer of your anti iroh posts, which, as a person who just recently watched ATLA, I have a very controversial theory/headcanon based on my knowledge of general psychology (not a psychologist so disregard if incorrect) and perspective of Iroh's character and by the attitude of his fans that can possibly get me hate messages and even death threats. So I came to the conclusion that Iroh expresses an uncomfortable character of NPD or particularly a certain "sub" that you will, being Benevolent/Vulnerable Narcissim.

Iroh loves to present himself as "wise, kind and fatherly," but his actions showcase the total opposite, and his supposed identity appears far more shallow and self-centred. He never properly mentors or shows to really know Zuko. Instead, he simply uses Zuko to serve as his act of penance, which is why he never meaningfully teaches Zuko to become a better person or to realise that his father is at fault and that his sister is not his real enemy. But no, instead, he lays off to do the bare minimum. He shows less to no remorse for Zuko's predicament that was caused by him for not standing up to his brother when he was banished. Nor does Iroh show any for Zuko's victims. Instead, Iroh operates under the mindset that supporting Zuko and making him Firelord will accomplish his penance. His lack of care for Azula is precisely because she is an obstacle not just for Zuko but for his "penance" as well.

It's also interesting the lack of self-awareness that Iroh has. He calls Azula crazy for doing what he did for decades. The only difference is that Azula genuinely cares for her nation while Iroh doesn't really care except his glory. He sent his son to the front lines to fight his own battles for him, which isn't that different from Ozai's treatment of Azula and Zuko. Oh, and at the finale, what does he do? Send Zuko and Katara into danger while abandoning them to satisfy his selfish desire. Of course, as you mentioned, he also doesn't live up to his own "wisdom" instead using that wisdom to appear smart and confuse others. Because in all honesty, Zuko NEVER applies any of Iroh's suppose wisdom because Iroh doesn't ever think to teach BLUNTLY to Zuko, like any basic teacher can look at Iroh and already have their hands in their face, but of course the further issue is that instead of applying basic healthy logic, Iroh instead utilises the toxic sibling rivalry to manipulate Zuko into becoming his "perfect" son. Zuko becomes a better person despite Iroh not because of him, Zuko's "metamorphosis" (aka breakdown) is the best example of how unhealthy Iroh's parenting is.

Iroh is also shameless when it comes to his mistakes. He never feels guilt or apologises to June for his blatant sexual harassment. He has no shame for being friends with the Rough Rhinos or assisting Zhao in the further conquest and bloodshed of the Northen Water Tribe. He never thinks or comes clean with his crimes against the Earth Kingdom, instead choosing to profit off the very same people he victimised. He never apologises to Zuko for being a shitty mentor/Uncle.

Iroh reminds me of ALOT of narcissistic so called "benevolent" or "vulnerable" people who will appear kind and even express self hatred but only for further validation and without taking risks or responsibility whatsoever for their mistakes, instead blaming others or doing "good" little things to create a narrative that they are "saints" and that people who disagree or despise them are "crazy or evil".

This might be far-fetched, but when you consider that to this day, the majority of ATLA fans have been juiced in this narrative that Iroh = 50 year old warmonger is a Saint who should be worshipped and that Zuko should be "thankful and grateful" of said Iroh, and that Azula = 14 year old abused child soldier who did the least messed up things and is the youngest member is demonised for being "crazy" and even Aang gets treated inferior to Iroh, well it already feels right at home with typical narcissistic narratives

I've had similar thoughts myself, but I really don't like applying medical diagnoses to fictional characters living in a very different society, so I never quite articulated them. Certainly Iroh seems to be an extraordinarily self-centered person who puts major effort into pretending not be so self-centered.

[mulders-too-large-shirt]

s2 episode 21 thoughts

spooky episode. child death. garage strangulation. not much to laugh about today!

(i looked up the episode title- calusari- to see what the actual practices mentioned looked like, and the first result was a wikipedia page on the episode. i was like woah, wonder what made this special enough to get a wikipedia page... but it looks like EVERY SINGLE EPISODE has its own page??? that is absolutely wild... between this and having a wikipedia page for almost every number, no wonder they are always asking for money)

((i jest. mostly. wikipedia is a wonderful resource and deserves your financial support, but i wanted to make sure there really was a wikipedia page for random numbers and now i'm on the page for 353... wonder why some numbers get full articles and others don't...))

i digress. let us begin.

plot summary: “a young boy’s family is plagued by several tragic accidents” <- that’s just an average day for mulder, the boy with the saddest childhood around

i stand corrected post-episode. turns out it can get worse than what he went through. this is shocking to all.

here we begin, in an amusement park with kids on a train, much like one i allegedly went to as a child but have no memory of!

love that it clarifies the mom's accent is Romanian in the subtitles. also we have an older boy and a younger boy and a dad.

NOOO little man lost his balloon… they tell him it's going to balloon land, this is a good way to handle such a loss… and nooo the baby dropped his ice cream and fell into the dirt :( L after L is being taken!

the older boy is angry because his balloon was taken and given to the younger brother… i sympathize, but also every balloon is the same, and little man just fell into the dirt so he needs a win!!

sad baby must go to the bathroom with mom... she ties the baby to the sink and the balloon soars away :(

THE BABY IS GONE! he freed himself in search of balloon! and the other little boy seems to be psychically piloting baby towards the train by moving the balloon.

NOOOOO BABY HIT BY TRAIN…. and this young gentleman is somehow responsible…. he has his balloon back now…

this is soooo cold. children can be mean but that is like really next level. we need to deal with this universe’s epidemic of evil children

back to our agents, investigating the case

mulder: “see this is a helium balloon, and the one thing i did learn in kindergarten is that when you let them go they float up, up, and away” <- wow, an educated man... an oxford graduate

(side note do we know where scully went to school? did i just miss that mention or has it never been said...)

((he studied psychology... so that would make him a psychologist, right... which means he CANNOT prescribe you meds so don't even think about it))

“did you learn about wind in kindergarten?” is scully's response, and LMAOOOOOO she’s funny

but the wind was blowing in the other direction that day!!!

leading us to bring the photo to chuck, who is is the king of digital imaging… thank you for ur service, chuck, i say as he applies some filters to the image of a baby walking toward a train

so there is some sort of Thing on the tracks, which allegedly looks like electromagnetic energy. but scully is NOT convinced: "this information is the the same reason why you’ll see a newspaper photo with Jesus’ face appearing in the foliage of an elm tree" ... because people want to see it!

(wow, i thought at this moment, we used to get stories of people seeing jesus in the trees of leaves. how beautiful. now we just get facebook ads of jesus made of shrimp for some reason)

mulder points out that baby was on a very tight leash, and scully says "i’ve seen some pretty slippery two year olds”... she has stories to tell. let's hear them.

off to the house of the family... and there is a swastika in the window and an old lady watching them. typical welcoming house features! /s

so they're talking to mom and dad, when the child enters the room and the fire roars, which is not at all suspicious! we also see the old lady draw a swastika on his hand

(at this point, the child's powers somehow make the smoke detector go off, and i almost ran out of bed to flee what i thought was my OWN smoke detector going off because my house might be on fire... what a fool i was!) 

when the power gets knocked out as well, the old woman says that the mother married a devil and that the child is a devil. which is tea, honestly.

back at the office, mulder is staring at a swastika “do you recognize this”, he says holding it up to scully. “yeah, it’s a swastika” she says. wow.

(i get that they are making a point about it being a symbol of protection in this context rather than a symbol of hatred, but that exchange was still so funny to me. he is always asking her random questions. it is 24/7 quiz time with this dude)

he proposes that the old woman was trying to protect her grandson, and scully hands over a file to him so he. pops his pen in his mouth. which is so silly. that is a silly man. he is hard at work.

ohh, she says the situation here could be munchausen by proxy. the dead little boy was admitted every 3 months into a new hospital, and no one thought it was weird because they moved around a lot, so how would anyone know? a compelling theory, in my opinion!

the older boy had the same problems, which began around the time the mother moved in!! and scully explains that in these cases, the perpetrators often see the child as evil! well, we saw him be called evil!!! it's beginning to add up. maybe.

they go to talk to the dad at the state department. scully has the chair and he sits in the couch. i'm not sure why this is so funny to me but it is.

so, dad explains that the old woman/grandma/golda does a lot of superstitious stuff and when she moved in the kids started getting sick!!!! interesting... they wish to talk to the boy with a social worker present

cut to the agents standing in the kitchen while the parents fight. such is life on the job for them. the old woman is putting spice in their food. 

the dad is going to take the boy off to speak with the social worker, but the garage won’t open. dad gets on a ladder to fix the garage door opener. and it turns on and he is being choked by his tie!!! kid is screaming... implying he doesn’t want this to happen? so is he evil or not...?

also, the car window burst open during all of this. interesting… at first i believed the child was evil, but at this point i was wondering…. rip to this kid's dad :(

time to investigate the home. what is found? a room full of candles. dead chicken. potions and liquids. it feels like the halloween section of a joann fabrics. and i'm rocking with it, minus the poor chicken.

mulder is up in the garage thingy looking for clues. he finds something that is like ash, and says it's everywhere. perhaps the same stuff put into the meal, i wonder?

(we get no answer on that. golda probs just was seasoning with herbs the american mind is too dull to comprehend idk)

scully still thinks her hypothesis is correct, and as they discuss, the old woman says stay away from our house! it is not looking good for miss golda

(mulder enters a dark room) hey you wanna see something weird? <- always. literally always.

turns out the ash isn’t organic or inorganic so it doesn’t technically exist? going to get a second opinion…… is it FROHIKE TIME??

no, it's not... it’s one of the many faculty members of local universities mulder keeps on speed dial for cases such as this. he keeps them busy. i hope he pays them. goodness knows academia doesn't cover the bills.

"it spontaneously exists", says this guy about this substance. okay.

scully says the whole loaves and fishes thing was a parable and not fact…. ohh we are getting an insight into her beliefs!! yeah baby I’m writing that down!!

at this point she makes some sassy remark and he laughs at it and ohhhh my goodness. it just made me giggle. she tries to fight back a smile seeing how amused he is. ohhhh man. he thinks she's funny. and she is, of course, but him laughing at her little quip has me weak in the knees.

so, this guy says the substance is holy ash. created when energy moves. need to look into this. and maybe that is what caused the garage door to open. OR a remote control, she says.

the little boy is now listening in on some occult ceremonies occurring in his home and OHHHH rooster is being bled. no ma’am, for this i do not care! ceremonies are chill, but chicken blood makes me gag. so whatever pot they are making a potion in is now smoking?? and a child is appearing in the smoke? yelling something? what.

(enter social worker)

the kid is outside of the door while the rites are going about, and is Sick as smoke billows near him. mom opens the door to reveal the people doing chanting and demands them to leave!!!!! but golda grabs the boy and shuts them out!!!

while holding the boy, golda is waving a big knife!!! and i'm scared we're about to get to see a little fellow stabbed to death!! she's waving it about in the air while the agents try to get in

wait i'm leaving this next part verbatim it's funnier that way:

"NANA ON THE FLOOR. BOY HOLDING DEAD ROOSTERS. HAVE THE TABLES TURNED? He is chanting and he throws them down and they PECK HER??? To death. And now the chickens are dead again. Boy is crying. So like is he evil or was evil thrust upon him is what I’m asking"

um anyway. few answers are provided. mulder thinks the people in there were doing some sort of protective ritual.

The chanting people are the “Calusari, responsible for the correct observance of sacred rites", which i made note of needing to look into, but after a brief search, learned it is a secret society so i'm probs not gonna find much on the subject. many such cases. sighs in eleusinian mysteries.

mulder gets one of the calusari men to talk!! he says the evil in that house has gone by many names: Cain, Lucifer, Hitler... an interesting line up that clarifies very little 

the mom says she thought her mom, golda, newly dead due to chicken pecking plus heart attack combo, was putting a curse on her for abandoning the old ways… and she was trying to cleanse the house of evil but blamed the little boy! how could a little boy be evil? <- woman asking this has clearly not seen some of the earlier episodes!

the boy says he wasn’t in the room and he didn’t hurt his grandma… and it was HIM…. It was Michael…… dramatic gasp!

“we never told him” OHHH BIG REVEAL! THERE WAS A STILLBORN TWIN SHE NEVER TOLD THEM ABOUT…. and golda warned that if they didn’t perform the separation ritual the world of the dead would follow him. damn that's a harsh curse to bear.

now boy is having seizure (scully shifting into doctor mode!)

the boy is resisting a shot. and evil ghost twin Michael shows up with a BIG METAL THING to knock the nurse out???

(girl we might need to perform the ritual that you conveniently just mentioned because he is on the loose)

after beating his nurse, the boy walks from his bed and says the doctors said he could leave. and he wants to leave NOW <- words said by a boy who is lying.

THE GAG IS… Charlie is still in bed… SO THE MOM TOOK THE EVIL GHOST TWIN HOME!!

(mulder walks scully down the hall with a hand on her back) <- i have to get it off my chest. something that has haunted me from episode 1. him walking her places with his hand on her back is an endearing habit in mister protective mulder, but if a real man ever tried that on me i think i would start biting. god bless fictional men.

back at their home, mother is very scared. and the child is asking about the balloon and riding the train. man, it would be rough to have an evil ghost child. you just never know what you're gonna get.

mom is doing some rituals to confirm that this is the evil boy and the test is positive

mulder is calling the calusari men back into the hospital!! i wonder how they all got in there.

scully at da home. all the power is off. just a flashlight and a pantsuit against the world.

back at the hospital, it's ritual time! the boy is hissing and screaming and yelling in Romanian, and i'm thinking, someone is gonna come get him if he doesn’t shut the hell up. poor mulder gets wrapped into the whole thing, being told to hold him down as he writhes and yells. BUT DON'T LOOK AT HIM! or the evil will know you.

at this point, stuff was leaking from the walls of the hospital. classic demon tricks!

back at the family home, scully enters the room and the windows blow open…. AND MOM IS FLOATING ON THE CEILING! something throws her around the damn room. yowch!

at the exorcism scene, they told mulder to look away from the boy but he is not doing that… that kid is squirming about. look away mulder you do NOT need the devil in your life! but i wonder if a part of him feels terrible for the kid. he's always so sensitive with kids. all that childhood trauma.

NOOO EVIL TWIN IS ABOUT TO STAB SCULLY when they finish painting the swastika on Real Boy Twin's belly and evil boy disappears. into ash that looks like the kind we saw earlier. whew that was a close one!

(how the hell did no one come and interrupt the exorcism in the middle of the hospital... it was a noisy event)

on his way out after exorcism time, one of the dudes involved says “it knows you” to Mulder, who wraps up the case with the terrifying observation that “neither innocence nor vigilance may be protection against the howling heart of evil” <- filed under lines that go hard

GIRL WHAT IN THE HELL. THE DEVIL KNOWS MULDER?????? not enjoying those implications!!! 

this was very much a spooky episode!!! very different from the last one. I mean fiji mermaid was just kinda silly. drastic tone shift. but now that i think about it, i do see the plot holes that the wikipedia page for the episode mentioned. like, if it was an evil stillborn ghost twin, why did the symptoms set in when golda arrived on the scene? and why did they effect the younger brother by making him sick?

well, to be honest, i'm not gonna worry about it. this episode still gave me some good things: scully one-liners, mulder laughing at these one-liners, reveal that she is NOT a biblical literalist which i find fascinating, some light doctor mode action.

but between you and me, i prefer the last style of episode- it was funny and not too serious even if it was a lil spooky. so this tone shift was a bit jarring! interesting to see what it'll look like moving forward. maybe it was the last episode that should have been the jarring tone shift, but it felt so natural that going back to Killer Ghost Time felt a bit disappointing. and i won't hold out hope for every episode to be silly time- there has to be balance, of course- but this ep was quite dark even for their standards, which i have become used to in our nearly 2 full seasons together (!!!)

[not-poignant]

From the ask meme: 7, 22 and 24 for Gary in UtB <3<3

7. What's one way your OC has changed since you first came up with them?

Hmm, I mean he's a peak alpha now instead of a doctor of psychology sdalfkja and he's the love interest instead of the clinical psychologist!

But specifically in Underline the Black, I'd say the biggest change from me coming up with him to now is that actually he's less of a sexual predator than I initially planned him to be, partly because he was SO uninterested in Efnisien in the beginning, and then because this story actually became quite concerned with consent, in its own way!

22. What character alignment would you consider your OC to be?

Presumably this is a TTRPG / D&D reference! In the Fae Tales verse however, he'd absolutely be Unseelie (though I'm not sure of his true appetite).

In terms of D&D I'm not sure! I think on the Good / Neutral / Evil scale, he leans more towards Neutral or Neutral-Good!

24. What is an alternative life path your OC might have gone down? How different would their life be if they'd made those decisions?

Tbh, honestly just overworking until he dies. Gary was quite apathetic when we meet him. Like, he was working, but he had no real joy or emotion in his life except for grief, and as we saw, he was super resistant to actually opening up to emotion/s that weren't just anger/resentment for a really long time.

So I think his alternative life path would really have been just 'I work too many hours with Faber and one day I die from a heart attack.'

~

From the edge OC meme!

[hanafubukki]

Hihi ♪(´ε｀*)

I'm pretty good, actually. Just chilling today, yet i have an exam to do later aaaa. Good thing is that i take classes online, so i won't have to leave my house to do the exam hehe 🙏🙏

Yeeees, I'm almost done with the third game. I'm, uuuh, at that part when we discover the truth about Makoto's past. I didn't see that coming, for sure. Metaphormosis is the new Atlus game? I know they're about to release a new game bcs my brother was ranting how much he liked the demo lol

Actually, my first ending on persona 5 was me accepting Maruki's offer. At that time, I was dealing with a very bad depressive episode and his idea that we could be happy living inside a fabricated reality was better than getting better on my own. Plus, he seemed like a very caring and gentle psychologist, so I was just happy to let him win 🤷‍♀️

But yeah, the ✨️ parallels ✨️. I love their parallels and how similar their beliefs are; and you're so right, the people around them know they aren't evil, they genuinely just want to help people and give them a happy life, even if it's fake

Also absolutely!!!! Psychology Malleus would be so sweet with his patients, I just know. I can feel it.

Though Maruki's version is "better" imo bcs the people under his controls are awake and living, they aren't trapped into an endless dream that keep repeating itself (on another note: do the dreams keep repeating? I haven't been keeping up with the updates so I'm not sure aaa)

And yep, I'm really curious about how they're going to end chapter 7. Kinda want the diasomnia trio to show him with love and reassure him, kinda want them to fight him and tire him out so he'll realize that what he is doing is bad aaaa. So many possibilities 🫢

Hello Lorkai 🌺💚💞

I hope your exam went well 🫂💚🙏 the only good thing about online classes is being home and not leaving your bed lol 😂

Nice!! Did you know there is a girl and boy version for persona 3? But the remake only had the boy 😭 who’s your fave? I like a certain character with…a scarf cough cough.

Makoto’s and Futaba’s always hits me so deeply 😔 yes! Metamorphosis is the new game. It has a persona feel with…medieval themes, kind of gives me GOT pg13 vibes lol 😆

I would probably accept his offer too 😭 even now, I am not strong enough. If I can live in a world and be happy without much effort? I would take it lol.

Right?? And Malleus would listen too and you know he would take your wants into consideration 🥺

I’m not sure about dreams repeating 🧐 I don’t think they do? I think it’s either “happiest memories” in Lilia’s case (which is his happiest dream), where he would relive everything he goes through because his happiest moment was mal’s birth. Or their inner desires, which is what everyone else has. Which is based on their magic experience and their wants. So in a way, malleus gave them the criteria and they are the ones who makes the setting if that makes sense?

I want them to shower him with love 😭😭 he hasn’t been in his book and then he also didn’t see what his birth means to lilia. He literally just dismissed it?? And I want to throttle him ahhhh 😭😭😭

Let’s give him the chancla and then smother him with love 🙏🙏😔😔

[tasmiq]

Jumu'ah Sohbet: 27 September 2024

This week was where I gratefully realised why I have always shirked counseling from a Psychologist or even a Psychiatrist. They predominantly bring their knowledge gained from secular sources and, therefore, are perceivably hollow without spiritual insights and foresights. A flash of the obvious again dawned on my consciousness, that I have indeed gained a 'life coach' through Sufism, which has completed the jigsaw puzzle of my life in its past, present and future. Insha'Allah, this insight remains my foresight as I spontaneously reflected with your Aunty Amira, without (ego) and within (to Allah).

#1. Let's begin with our virtual catch-up with your Aunty Amira herself. Within our various different contexts, we reflected on how a socially just and progressive programme amidst humanity can almost immediately lead to its direct opposite. We were puzzling to understand what makes mankind so prone to such polarised behaviour.

Inherently, I was left reflecting on Sufi Psychology where it is testament to humanity's downfall in following their own free will. How gracious was/is Allah to have faith in us to choose Him, and how foolish we can be as humanity that fall trapped in following our nafs (lower-self / ego) and/or Shaytaan's evil will, instead!

#2. Our heartsmith Shaykh Nishaat powerfully reflected that we sometimes go through life, where nothing may change. Neither our perceptions nor our understanding. However, Allah and the Prophet (SAW) are still in charge. And, Alhamdulillah that we're programmed to be open-minded Sufis. In our lives, Allah creates certain opportunities to learn Him. For every situation that we find ourselves in, Allah is the Creator of it, and He owns it. In that situation, He also creates opportunities for us to reflect and manifest His attributes.

Allah says in the Qur'an that we can react in three ways, but forgiveness is better! It is an opportunity for us to manifest and practice forgiveness. But, most of us choose not to take that opportunity, and we focus on what has happened in front of us and judging others. We can use these opportunities to learn patience, mercy, give love, be kind, generous, and so on. Allah is the Creator of opportunities in our lives. Whether we accept or don't, is our choice or free will.

#3. Our beloved heartsmith next made a personally poignant reflection. When something happens like our accident, we cannot simply blame Allah for it as a curse! It took three years for me to see that Allah is creating an opportunity for me to earnestly learn and serve Him. After all, Allah assures us that all good is from Him, and evil and bad are from what He created in us humans. We therefore have to overcome the evil within His creation that we created ourselves. We have to use the opportunities in every moment to see what Allah is showing us. What should we be learning from it? Not what others should be learning and instead what we ought to be because it is our individual path and journey.

The Sufi path is a hard path because we face ourselves in every moment. This is why our Prophet Muhammad (SAW) said that we are moving from the small jihad (social or political struggle) to the big jihad (the struggle against one's own passions and impulses). The jihad of the nafs is the big jihad. The reality that we inevitably have to accept is that all good is from Allah, and the bad and evil is from that which He created. However, we have to foremost recognise the nafs within us before we look at the other person.

#4. Given new additions to our spiritual family, Anne (our spiritual mother) sweetly and deeply clarified some protocols and adhab (respect) in our relationship as murids (Sufi tariqa followers):

- We have a mutual understanding that we don't engage the details of romantic relationships or business matters. The spiritual emphasis is always on what we as individuals need to learn from a particular situation.

- As a later murid of Shaykh Taner, her own mother initially assumed that life was harder as Sufis. However, it is just about using our lives as a learning platform to get to know and get closer to Allah.

- In the world, we are like fish swimming in water and always wondering where Allah is and what water itself is. "That is humanity because we are literally swimming in Allah, and even that is within our unique flow in that!"

- Anne clarified that although she's friendly in nature, she can't be like a normal friend and instead a spiritual mother to us.

- We are Sufis because we want to know our relationship with Allah, where we discover a certain sweetness and healing there. It is like bees making honey from certain flowers. We Sufis make honey with certain flowers. Whatever flower we are taking the pollen out of, that is what our honey is going to smell and taste like. The miracle of flowers and bees is that there is a magnetic field around the plant, and it signals the bee that it has pollen. There are certain situations that Allah makes us live to teach us and make a certain flavour to our "honey" or purpose. Subhana'Allah (Divine glory) for such intricate and subtle realities that we share our world with!

Above: Your Nana and Nanu's (maternal grandparents) poetic tree from which your swings are hoisted to, that houses not only a busy beehive but a blue-headed lizard which we discovered. Shukran Ya Allah (Divine gratitude)!

#5. Anne declared that this year's homework is for us to familiarise ourselves with the Murids Manual. What saved me from drowning in self-pity as an accident survivor three years on and made me surrender to the natural logic of Sufism was your Abbu's same idea of reading it.

This time, I was blown away by Anne's reading of the levels of the nafs and why it is not prioritised within our Sufi Tariqa. "All seven levels of nafs have a Nafs al-Ammara (commanding ego)! Each level has the other seven levels within it. This is why we don't compare people, lessons, or dreams!" Anne clarifying the extent of complexity in dealing with nafs oddly provided a balm to my bruised spiritual chemistry because it explained how we as humanity can get ourselves in a tizzy, at the best of times!

In conclusion, Shukran Ya Allah (eternal Divine gratitude) that we have developed Sufi perception points which makes Sufi Psychology a relevant and medicine-free self-help tool.

[containatrocity]

THE CANARY: KERRY "LEX" COLEMAN

So long live the car crash hearts, cry on the couch all the poets come to life- Fix me in forty-five.

"Doctor Kerry Aleksandre Coleman. Though most people call me Lex or Doc. I'm 35 years old, and while I was born in Montpellier, France, I studied psychology and law in New York City where I would quickly make a name for myself as a capable criminal psychologist in several high-profile cases. At least, I had until three years ago when the long-distance trip I was making to testify in a case took a wrong turn and stranded me in Huntsville. The night of my arrival took several things from me, including my pregnant wife and any hope I had of leaving this place ever again. While I do not fall victim to many vices, I've been described as a harsh, apathetic man who largely cares only for results. Suppose that's good news though, given I've been one of the town's only practicing psychiatric health professionals since 2020."

Name: Dr. Kerry Aleksandre Coleman

Aliases: Lex, Canary, Shrinky Dink, Doc, Ker-bear

Age: 35 (December 31st)

Sexuality/Gender: Bisexual Demiromantic Cis (?) Man he/they

Personality: Lex is a hard man to love. Apathetic, harsh, and short in temper, his tendency to tell people what they need to know but don't want to hear has made him little more than a necessary evil to the people of Huntsville. He is good at his work, sessions with him regularly setting heads back into place on shoulders in a place where it's easy to spiral. A logical, intelligent sort, it's easy to forget he's human, sometimes, speaking in large words and difficult terms when he's in 'work mode' and unwilling, truly, to let that part of him slip, he is sardonic even beneath it, blessed with a cutting wit and a head like a steel trap, mentally sound- but wounded, nonetheless, a grief looms below the surface- he suffocates it under other people's problems and the promise that someday he'll die too.

Occupation: Criminal Psychologist, currently serving as a psychotherapist in Huntsville for the... hard cases.

Affiliations: Mostly just police departments outside of Huntsville, and various reporters who use him as a source.

Scent Profile: Something expensive and musky, used sparingly as he's been stuck here for some time. The cloying smell of oil used to ensure the joints in his hand function correctly, cigar smoke, biting and sharp, flowing with sandalwood and real, rich leather. Sweet mint on teeth and tongue, fresh and bright to mask nicotine and coffee.

Aesthetic: A perfectly pressed suit and a cup of to-go coffee from the corner shop- a stop in your favorite bodega, for something bad for you from the heated cabinets. An analog watch on the wrist of a prosthetic arm, set perfectly to the second- time is money and he won't waste a dime. Man's best friend with a leather collar hand-stamped with his name, fluffy white hairs clinging to clothes betraying a harsh demeanor with something soft. Metal on metal, glass floating in the air- the screech of tires, the smell of gasoline and the whole of your world ending, right in front of you- rising to your feet and dusting off- you were not raised to quit.

The only thing I haven't done yet is die- And it's me and my plus one at the afterlife.

CHAPTER ONE: LIFE IN HUNTSVILLE POST ARRIVAL

Regarded largely as a necessary evil in town, Lex hasn't made many friends in Huntsville in his 3 years there since the car accident that inadvertently saved his life and ended three others. He is a capable doctor, with a vested interest in improving the lives of the people who come to see him, even those most others would deem hopeless, but it's at a professional distance, not friends to be helped or people to be cured, but case studies to be completed, something to sign, seal, and deliver to the desk of the next person tasked with their existence. He can't do much for some people- certain disorders would mitigate with medicine, others are tied to the town itself, but therapy sessions are oddly gentle, albeit blunt, when helping people is all he has left, it's become his entire existence, jaded and cold as he may be. He spends much of his time in the diner, drinking coffee and going over patient files, or simply people-watching, with Baguette the corgi set obediently beside his feet, the only other survivor of his arrival- the dog he 'didn't want.'

His habit of sleeping with the 'exceptionally hard cases' isn't common knowledge, but it's whispered- those he can't seek to fix in a 45 minute session, with a similar arms-length approach to others invited as temporary salvo on the ache in his heart and mind, his whole life was ripped away upon arriving, craving physical intimacy and emotional distance with the ability to read people well enough to find those just broken enough to provide. He's made his home and office in a small townhouse in the middle of Huntsville, living above his place of work, "Dr. Kerry A. Coleman Psy. D." on a front window in careful penmanship, his office hours in similar gold strict and unwavering, as are most things about Lex.

[ws20m]

I look at careers I think are great but I would hate doing any of them for example programming pays a lot but I despise it and everything about it and what everyone who likes it stands for,

philosophy is basically dead in the sense that everyone who has ever been born is a YouTuber and think they're the next greatest philosopher and are blowing up with the world for saying shit like "write down 3 things that you liked today",

barista is great because you learn to make your own drinks and you can talk to your customers in a relaxed way with no pressure or want to pursue friendships and from what I've heard the pay is alright but it's so fucking unfulfilling except for the drinks knowledge you might as well quit after perfecting your preferred drinks and then what after that,

film director aka the most fulfilling thing one could ever do for 8-10 hours a day (well more but that's not the point rn) but you need a crew and you need good equipment and for all of that you need tons of money then once it's done in order to actually make money with this as your job/career you actually need a ton of people to watch it but for that you need connections or money and so on also the crew actually needs to gaf about their job and not just be a group for degenerates who got into acting or whatever else because they're attention seekers who think that portraying basic shit in a degenerate way is groundbreaking they need to actually gaf about the artistry of cinema and love and respect it which is rare,

high school math teacher you're stuck in a room with self proclaimed "math hating" degenerates who think that hating math is cool and hip and they're "different" for it because they're "creative souls who the school system isn't made for" when in reality math is so insanely beautiful and amazing but you can't explain that to them because it's fucking high school math class and you need to stick to the curriculum or else there won't be enough time left to teach them how motherfucking division works because their elementary school math teacher was too fucking arrogant to teach them and the students didn't wanna put in any extra work when doing their homework because they were too busy looking for the perfect €200 sneakers to show off with at school,

elementary school math teacher no kids above the age of 5 and below the age of 16 are evil I would jump out of a window if I was ever forced to go near an elementary school,

college professor honestly is what's kinda most interesting to me right now but idk if that's because I've romanticised it so much in my head or if it's actually the only good normal career that exists in the world,

psychologist I wanted to mention because I adore psychology but hell no I don't want idk fucking degenerates to come into my office crying about how his girlfriend left him because she caught him wearing his underwear or something, I'd kill to do psychology research tho but how do you even fucking get there?

etc etccccccccccc so on so on so on

Literally every job fucking sucks ass if you're doing it as a job but you gotta do SOMETHING unless you wanna be fucking homeless because you have no money. And so on and so on literally choosing what to do with life is fucking insane and doing anything is fucking insane I wish everyone could just do what they liked and the day had like 50 hours instead

[penna-nomen]

February Reading Recap

I did a lot of reading in February, as a set of intense work projects wasn't conducive to having the mental bandwidth for writing. Here's the recap.

Fantasy: all with a theme of who is really evil vs. who gets called evil

Assistant to the Villain, and Apprentice to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer - My main regret is that I read them out of order, so I had lots of spoilers for book 1.

Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan - darker than the series above, but with an acerbic humor I appreciated. This was more along the lines of a portal fantasy, where a girl from Oklahoma dying of cancer has the chance to step into her favorite fantasy series. Very eager to read the next book when it is released.

Nimona by ND Stevenson - I loved the shapeshifter and the relationship between the good guy and the bad guy. I haven't seen the movie version yet, and I hope to get around to that soon.

Children's: Sometimes I motivate myself to do housework by listening to a short, fluffy children's audiobook and seeing how much I can get done before the story ends. These two were both fun, but the Princess in Black series is still my favorite to accompany housework.

The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson

The Library Dragon by Carmen Agra Deedy

Non-fiction:

Nothing to Fear by Julie McFadden - this is about what to expect if you or someone you know is dying. I wish I'd read this before my mom died, and I definitely made notes of what I want to include in an advance directive.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott - interesting thoughts about writing, although at times outdated. Overall, I'm enjoying Never Say You Can't Survive by Charlie Jane Anders more; you'll see that in my March recap.

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl - this was recommended to me because I have an interest in psychology. The author was a psychologist with ideas about how to be resilient in difficult times -- with a focus on his experiences during the holocaust. It's interesting, however I just didn't have it in me to spend so much time in such darkness, so I put it aside about halfway through. I hope eventually I'll be in a better place to finish reading it.

Re-reads:

Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells - I love the Murderbot stories. Artificial Condition is my favorite of the novellas, and for some reason I hadn't reread Rogue Protocol since first reading it in 2022. Coming back to it after having read the full series, I appreciate it more. In fact, I read it twice in February just to catch all of the details.

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman - this was a reread to get ready for the newest audiobook in the series that was released on February 11. This is a series that continues to keep me engaged and entertained, and I have to be careful about starting one of the audiobooks because I find it so hard to stop.

[inhiswordihope]

What is Biblical Counseling - Sin and Secular Psychology (Part 2)

Part 1 What is Biblical Counseling?

An article published February 20, 2004 from Ligonier Ministries states, “Romans 1 is one of the most important texts that deals with general revelation. General revelation is the revelation that God gives to all people, sinner or saint, in creation. The created order clearly and loudly tells all men about God’s power and divine nature (1:20). But though all men clearly know there is a God, they do not honor or give thanks to Him (1:21). The fall into sin has caused mankind to ignore and deny their Creator. Sin has affected our minds and causes our thinking to become futile apart from Christ. This effect of sin upon our minds is known in theology as the “noetic effects of sin.”

Sin is defined as missing the mark and a transgression against the law of God.  More importantly, missing the mark in terms of conformity to moral law and perfection expected by God.  Nous is a Greek noun that means mind. Noetic refers to the action of thinking.  Sin is defined as missing the mark.  Therefore, the definition of the noetic effect of sin is how sin effects and distorts humankind’s intellect and ability to reason.  Because of the sinful nature of humankind, we have a foggy and distorted view of all things.  We also do not have a clear-cut capacity to reason due to the futility of the mind and hardness of heart (Romans 1:21).  Sin effects and weaken the mind which in turn draws upon useless facts and manmade ideologies which breed disbelief, distrust, and unbelief.  The heart is deceitful above all things and who can understand it (Jeremiah 17:9).  The noetic effects of sin have distorted our understanding of all truths. Our hearts are deceived in our thinking and motivations.  Humankind does not do the good they want to do even though man desires the will to do good to please God and follow the law of God.  Sin indwells and is also at work in humankind waging war against the law of the mind to the law of sin (Romans 7:21-23). Humankind tries to rationalize the good things we do, but unto a holy God, all the good man does is considered filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6).        

Scripture is sufficient and should be the only lens through which we view the world.  The Scriptures reveal to us that man is created in the image of God with purpose.  Man is created with a material (physical) side and an immaterial (spiritual) side.  Man has a conscience, heart, will, and mind which can reason, think, and discern.  These innate abilities were gifts instilled by Creator God to perceive and answer the effectual and irresistible call of the Holy Spirit.  The Word of God must be the lamp to our feet and a light for our path (Psalm 119:105).

Scripture

Secular psychology does not have a high view of Scripture.  They do not have a clear view of anthropology.  They seek to define man apart from a high view of God.  They even view self differently and therefore sees the desires and will of man from another lens.  They see man for himself and not man in relation to a Holy God. The soft sciences such as sociology and psychology observe humankind based on theories and principles, which do not analyze or examine man with the correct lens.  Secular psychology is a worldview which should be ignored when compared to the Scriptures and a correct view of the doctrine of man.  In comparison to the noetic effects of sin, secular psychology only sees an outer man and do not see the inner man. Secular Psychologists do not see sin has corrupted humankind, infected, and polluted the minds of all.  Woe to those who call evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20).  Integrationists who hold to “The Flea Market” understanding believe man needs more love.  They state a lack of self love leads to sin and distress.  Secular psychology again, fails to see the effects of sin on humankind.  This distorted view of humankind does not see sin having any effect on the mind. 

Anthropology

Secular psychologists do not see the human condition in the same light.  They only see man as a physical body.  Biology is the authority and using natural science and reasoning of man is the sole theory on which they base their assumptions.  Their understanding is manmade and does not come from a truly biblical and anthropological view of doctrine. Secular Psychologists fail to correctly define the human condition.  Freud claims man is driven by an unconscious mind and is not responsible for what he does.  He believes man is influenced by what the people around him have befallen on him.  Therefore, humans are victims, and one must dig into the past to overcome.  Skinner states humans are animals and unaware of his actions, therefore we must control and reward man. There is much fallacy in the views of these men.  As stated, they do not see sin as the barrier to which we can be reconciled with a Holy God. This view will only lead man to view their environment and circumstances as the reason for their pain. 

As biblical counselors, we must see the noetic sins and counsel others to take thoughts captive and make them obedient to Christ (2 Cor. 10:35).  Those called unto the Lord are to die to self and transform of minds and not conform to the world (Romans 12:2).

[mmmmalo]

Slurquest

This is an exploratory post proposing several approaches for apprehending Homestuck (Alternia in particular) in terms of racism and homophobia. Results vary.

For various reasons, I feel the frameworks are best introduced through analogous microcosms. I have a nascent personal canon of films which are not* referenced in Homestuck, but which nonetheless function as potent paratexts for the apprehension of its narrative constructs. The foremost member is Forbidden Planet, a film involving a machine that draws the violent fantasies of a man's dreams into reality, creating monsters that enact his otherwise repressed anger. SBURB deploys a similar mechanism: the game's boot log concludes with the phrase "launching manifestation systems", and accordingly we later see that imps, ogres, and trolls are all born from psychological fissures in a given player, manifesting from the emergent anxieties of the people they target. Comparing the content of an altercation with the (apparently traumatic) event that preceded it (and therefore induced it) offers a peek into the pathologies of the triggered**/accosted characters. Eg ogres climb up the side of the house immediately after John experiences vertigo, indicating a deep-seated fear of falling.

* afaik

** No, we are not using "triggered" as a pejorative. Not yet at least. And when we do, it won't be the way you think.

Recently my canon gained another entry: John Carpenter's Halloween. It share with Homestuck a love of "misrepresentation", in both its playfully duplicitous and racially fraught senses, as well as a certain preoccupation with paranoia.

Halloween (1978) is about a masked man (Michael), recently escaped from an insane asylum, stalking and killing the suburban teens of his hometown. Michael's former psychologist (Loomis), firmly persuaded that Michael is the very embodiment of Evil, refashions himself as a hunter and lies in wait with a gun at Michael's childhood home. The home, abandoned and left to rot after a young Michael murdered his sister there on a past Hallows' Eve, has come to be regarded by locals as a "spook house"; trick-or-treaters dare eachother to brave its haunted steps. The unseen Loomis seeks to deter these tiny trespassers for their own safety. But the deterrence method Loomis chooses is strange: he puts on a Big Black Guy voice and, feigning ownership of the homestead, tells the kids to get lost. Elsewhere in the film, a bit of set dressing echoes this choice: in the midst of an otherwise pristine suburb of green grass and bleached white houses, we glimpse of a patch of black graffiti on the sidewalk that simply says EVIL. An impression begins to form that the metanarrative rationale for describing Michael as a bogeyman, for insinuating that beneath his white mask is a formless shadow, is that despite Michael's whiteness, he functions as a vehicle for racialized fantasies of invasion. The insane asylum, seen only at night, represents the chaotic city. Michael's presence brings the night to the suburbs, and with it all the urban terrors (black) from which the suburbanites (white) thought themselves insulated. Spooky!

While there might be an edifying function to this deception (I came away from the film with a deep contempt for the fear mongering psychologist, personally), I mostly tend to think of Halloween as a good, mean prank: like Caliborn disguising his king as a queen and relishing Calliope's outsized responses to its impotent threats, Carpenter crafts a black killer ensconsed in white and proceeds to giggle at the viewership's unwitting investment in a racist narrative for which Carpenter himself holds no sympathy -- or so I imagine, believing as I do that such a game would be in accord with the spirit of Halloween's mischievious namesake.

( I sometimes wonder if James Cameron was playing a similar game when he cast a white man named SCHWARZENEGGER as the face of an imminent genocidal uprising of once subservient machines. But anyway )

Betty Crocker is only the surface of Hussie's engagement with conspiracy. Homestuck, like Halloween, is built upon veiled allusions to reactionary paranoia. John's vertigo is relative; what John perceives as a "fall" can be fruitfully reframed as "the ascent of that which was once below". John takes note of an increasingly grim Rose's ascent to power and roleplays a return to gender norms ("ironically" of course), soothing the vertigo of social mobility with the image of Sleeping Beauty. Alternia, though ostensibly located in the unthinkably distant past, in turn functions as a reactionary nightmare vision of the future: it is a world dominated by BLACKS and HOMOS, and therefore post-apocalyptic. This is evinced by Homestuck's playful self-censorship: the story contains various euphemisms for n*ggers and f*ggots, through which the racism and homophobia become associated with a more familiar medium for paranoia, the casts' anxious regard toward the fourth wall. The denotation of slurs, therefore, will be our organizing principle.

Part A: Racist Slurs

Gamzee uses "ninja" as a sugar free "nigga" in the Epilogues; terms of endearment like "my ninja" and the like. As it turns out, this usage can be projected backward into the early acts: the phrase "NINJA SWORD" acts as a euphemism for "N-WORD", such that Dave hurling his blade at a crow can represent hurling slurs at a black person (It just slipped out. Dave is distraught). That a flock of crows would later, in a dream, represent for Dave the innumerable portals of the 4th wall through which he observes himself is thus consistent with the racial connotations of the term "peanut gallery"*, which was invoked in Act 1 to describe John's "allergy" (ie fear) of the judgemental gazes of others. The allergy joke is followed by an early hint of Her Imperious Condescension (a "Hi-C" commercial), a villain with black speech affectations whose title connects her to the peanut gallery's scorn, and who is eventually defeated by a NINJA SWORD**.

* The peanut gallery is also racialized via allusions to Charles Schultz's Peanuts: Snoop Dogg's visage watermarks the proceeding when John is commanded to Snoop on Rose (1693), and the resident Brown Charlies (Barkley and Duttle) are presented as a philosophical visionary and a dreaming prophet, respectively (1706, 2988).

** Technically it's Dirk's UNBREAKABLE KATANA, but the pejorative-encoding of "ninja sword" transfer to the "anime sword" preferred by Act 6.

So racial minorities are associated with the gaze of the audience, peeking in from the 4th wall -- a motif originating in Problem Sleuth, where the literal 4th wall of Problem Sleuth's office was peppered with the eyes of minorities, faces on a mural celebrating racial diversity. The veiled pejorative of NINJA SWORD channels aggression (and other emotions) towards both concepts.

Another paratext, this time embedded in Homestuck: Deep Impact, for which John has a poster, is about fears of white replacement. An early scene takes care to associate the word "waves" with both the soundwaves of black musicians (Elle Fitzegerald, Duke Ellengton [sic]) and tidal waves (yet another ELE, the "Extinction Level Event" which drives the film). The film's black president and his prodigious voice* are thus presented as existential threats on par with the imminent flooding of the Earth, recontextualizing various responses to watery doomsday as abstracted reactions to the rise of black people in America. Homestuck draws upon this association of blackness and water, beginning with the Lalonde household (where the lights are out and the air is filled with the sound of running water), continuing in Barkley's association with oceans and "dunking", and perhaps culminating in the black-affecting Condesce's flooding of the Earth. In the middle though, we have Alternia, which is a somewhat drier fantasy of a world overtaken by blackness. 3 points:

1. The highest echelons of Alternian society are black-coded, and rap is an aristocratic art form.

Gamzee and Equius makes this difficult to miss, but a subtler point is that this cultural ascendance makes blackness aspirational: Karkat, for example, seems to express racial envy (like gender envy, but for black people).

Gamzee manifests after Karkat looks over his Thresh Prince poster, implying that Gamzee's presence as a black-ish voice is an elaboration on Karkat's feelings toward Troll Will Smith. It might seem odd that despite Karkat calling Smith his hero, he expresses nothing but contempt for Gamzee's mode of speech. But admiration and hostility are reconciled by envy*. Karkat's irritation towards Gamzee's miracles (ie being dazzled by the richness of sensation) is underlaid by a sense of injustice, that Gamzee (by merit of his "blackness") has access to sensational joys that are inacessible to Karkat. Gamzee protests that explanations steal the magic from his miracles; Karkat on some level agrees, and exists in a state of feeling robbed.

* Another reconciliation, and one that we'll see a lot of, lies in the simple fact that this world of black predomination is conceived as a racist construction. Therefore, anti-black sentiment persists within it. Even so, envy is a useful paradigm.

Over the course of the story, we can see hints that Karkat wishes to reclaim that "stolen" blackness: finding identification with a "black guy" through Will Smith's sickle and Jack Noir's shared blood; Karkat assuming the mantle of his ancestor, who Suffered in chains; Karkat dressing up as Geromy for Halloween ("karkats problematic nobody tell him" says Dave); Karkat regarding* Dave's assertion that he is "so much more than Obama" as an insurmountable expression of love... but more on Karkat later.

* Dirk was narrating, but his words are bound to the thoughts characters were already going to think, much the same as Vriska's timeline interference in Act 5 asserts responsibility for things that were already going to happen.

1a. The apparent esteem for hoofbeasts is a subset of black cultural ascendence; horses are yet another veiled pejorative.

Dirk draws attention to the proximity of "nicker" to "nigger" in Detective Pony by injecting the phrase "vile slurs omitted" afterward, a gag echoed in the mosaic that fails to obscure a highly offensive horse dildo belonging to Horuss, who similarly observes that "Trigger" sounds like a wonderful name for a hoofbeast. Equius is obsessed with submission, but Zebruh is an outright slaver. We might in this vein construe John's traumatic fall from the slime pogo (the probable origin of the fear that manifested as ogres) as a racist's reframing of the end of slavery, a sense of having been unfairly bucked off one's horse. For illustrative purposes, I've taken the liberty of replacing the word "niggers" with "horses" in an old comic of Hussies:

The original joke being that the speaker's enthusiasm is tethered to a sense of domination. As a followup, here's an excerpt from page 7689, in which I've taken the liberty of replacing the word "horses" with "niggers":

(Vriska): What do you think, Meenah?

MEENAH: aboat what

(Vriska): Niggers!!!!!!!!

MEENAH: ummmm

MEENAH: they ok

MEENAH: kinda dumb and smelly

MEENAH: be makin like

MEENAH: fucked up sounds out their big ass snouts and floppy lips

Meenah here distances herself from black speech and bodies. It bears repeating that our cast subsists within a racist world; even "black" characters can express racism.

2. Miscegenation is a central paradigm of Alternian sexuality.

Anxious allusions to race-mixing have come up before: John's books make short disparaging references to "listless octoroons" (69, 629); Lil Cal manifests three panels after we see naked black & white puppets chained to each other (448); and ICP's depiction as evil (literally the result of combining Laurel and Hardy with the ecto-essence of Hitler, according to the cursed lore) is a result of their being the exemplar of whiteness "tainted" by blackness, a cultural spin on miscegenation. They are evil /because/ they are white rappers, their monochrome facepaint emphasizing the admixture.

I could go on. But the main point is,

"White" + "black" = gray, hence the trolls.

2a. "Slurry" was a hint. Troll reproduction is described by the phrase "incestuous slurry" not only because trolls impart their genetic material to their own mother, but also because "motherfucker" is used near exclusively by characters affecting blackness. The Freudian Oedipus is black, and mother he fucks is paradigmatically white: in one case, following the conclusion of WV's chess game, black's resounding victory over white is immediately provided a natal counterpart in the form of BROWN liquid erupting from the belly of a PINK can of Tab*. This association of childbirth/hatching with (racial) uprising later returns via Tavros, a brown-blood whose game of Fiduspawn (which spawns a horse, appropriately enough) prefigures his links to the Summoner's rebellion.

* As though in reaction to WV, the white-carapaced PM carries two letters bearing the postage marks of Rhodesia, the defunct colonial government of what is now Zimbabwe (896). There are two colored stamps bearing the name to her right, and a notice regarding "Southern [Rhodesia] Stamps" to her left.

2b. The example of WV and the racial polarization of mother & child inform us that miscegenation is being construed in terms of black men acting upon white women. This arrangement suggests the possibility of latent racial tensions in the mother/child dynamic of Porrim and Kankri, and we find them: within Porrim's critique of Alternian patriarchy, there are traces of antiblackness. When Porrim encourages Latula to cease performing for the public gaze and "be herself", she singles out Latula's black-flavored speech affectations for elimination, first striking at the proliferate 'yo' and Latula's use of zees for pluralz, then expressing contempt for the phrase "all up inz". Explaining Kankri's racial entanglement requires a digression.

2c. In another point of commonality, horses and black men are both sexually stereotyped by prodigious cock size -- modern miscegenation porn often advertises itself under the label BBC, "big black cock". In MSPA, the racialized gaze of the 4th wall is itself construed as a phallic intruder, a BBC. One example of this is in the Intermission, where Snowman weilds a whip called "Black Inches", a euphemism for dick borrowed from a black gay porn magazine*. Snowman seizes Spades Slick's arm with the whip and leaves him humiliated. This scene functions as a violent repetition of a prior humiliation, in which Snowman does no more than observe Slick goofing off: in this instance her very eyes are the Black Inches**, and the embarrassed Slick relieves himself of the horse hitcher between his legs in the emasculating gaze's wake.

* The magazine Black Inches shows up in Jail Break (50).

** Since the zigzag of a lightning bolt is used to represent the scratch of a disk, and the tendrils of the Red Miles represent tears in the fabric of reality, it seems likely that Black Inches would in some sense be yonic as well as phallic -- but one thing at a time.

A still earlier example is found in Problem Sleuth, where the massive eye of a horrorterror peeks through the 4th wall, its massive tendrils probe Ace Dick, and the violated AD walks away in shame, recalling the shame he was made to feel for being fat in his youth. The idea is that the probing tentacles ARE the judgemental gaze. The outer gods in Homestuck are similarly racialized. The brown skin of the Duttle (alchemical fusion of Charles Dutton and Squiddles) perturbs Jade because the tentacles now look like black dicks. Rose borrows a fear of water from Deep Impact*: Rose's "avarice for the inscrutable", her interest in drowning amid the Deep Ones, becomes associated with Charles Barkley via the "Chaos Dunk" John performs in her slumber. Later, the reference to tentacle rape in Rose's chumhandle is made manifest when Doc Scratch "smothers [her] with surprise noodles" (3632), his barrage of inscrutable question marks teasingly sexualized, after which the now-darkened Rose gets rendered as the basketball player from SBaHJ. Again, both Brown Charlies are associated with the Peanut gallery. And the gaze of the Horrorterrors is further racialized by a name: "Oglogoth" as in "gothic ogle" as in "dark leer".

* Is the aversion to water also part of Rose's cat motifs? The phobia was initiated by Jaspers' apparent drowning after all...

The etymology of Darkleer is our path back to Kankri: the omnipresent glare of the red sun is synonymous with the dark, leering ogles of the 4th wall. This is likely why Gl'ybgolyb has the title "the Rift's Carbuncle", the carbuncle being a mythic, glowing ruby. Latula's black affectations are referred to as "rad" to emphasize the link between redness and blackness. Porrim tells Latula to stop performing and be herself, but the red blooded Kankri (who finds fault in all) embodies the judgemental gaze to whom performance is addressed, a point underlined when Kankri informs Latula that he is ALWAYS WATCHING HER, even in moments she believes to be totally private. This gaze is, again, phallic: Dave, the first to be haunted by the red glow of endless webcams, rejects the criticism of the readership by slicing apart the phrase "insufferable prick". This literal reading of "prick" (and its connection to judgement) is one justification for transforming the Kankri's mythic title of the Sufferer into the Insufferable -- he is the prick. For this all these reasons, we can assert that all the terms emphasizing the length of Kankri's judgemental red diatribes ("prohibitously loquacious harangue", "enormous in progressive virtue") are coded references to Big Black Cock*. Poor, innocent Karkat takes the brunt of it.

* One wonders if Horuss's usage of "Trigger" as a minced oath retroactively casts the n-word over all of Kankri's meticulous content tags. "Nigger warning"

3. The elimination of the limebloods was white genocide*.

The blood of the cherubim establishes that lime is the opposite of candy red, so if red=black, lime=white. The racial element of black/white is emphasized by Caliborn affecting black speech (eg KNIFE A BITCH, eg MONEY AS FUCK)** while Calliope is an avowed teaboo (how convenient that the chief pejorative for English people is "limey"). Caliborn kills Calliope, breaks his chains, and escapes to a freedom encoded by decayed Statues of Liberty, lying in the sand -- a reference to the Planet of the Apes, yet another movie about black ascent in the social order (and the fear that this consigns whiteness to oblivion). It follows that the elimination of the limebloods, retroactively framed as Lord English repeating his predomination over Calliope, his "mating" her, likewise encodes a triumph of black over white (which again is also a central paradigm of Alternian sexuality: miscegenation).

* At the risk of contradicting myself, I should note a reservation here: if Caliborn relishes painting his words in Calliope's blood, and ICP is characterized a white affectation of blackness, would it not be sensible to regards the death of lime as a black genocide, after which black speech was appropriated? As though, in the spirit of the "I LOVE NIGGERS" comic, laying claim to group-exclusive language and asserting dominance over that group go hand in hand? I suspect that the lime-as-black account might be superimposed on lime-as-white, as though the reversal of Halloween's Michael were here bi-directional -- colonization likely being the framework in which masculine-white acts upon feminine-black. But we'll talk about bivalent cocks and James Cameron's Avatar shortly.

** Caliborn-as-black grounds his claim (leveled at Jane) that "bitch" and other pejoratives are actually terms of endearment in a distorted understanding of AAVE, as though the use of "bad" to mean "good" were a universal principle. Jane listens to rap music and cries dot jpeg.

Part B: Homophobic Slurs

THEY'RE ALL MEN. BECAUSE I SAY THEY ARE. AND I WANT THEM TO BE.

IF I BELIEVE HARD ENOUGH IN THEM BEING MEN.

THEN THAT FACT BECOMES ABSOLUTELY INDISPUTABLE AS A PERMANENT MAN REALITY.

(Caliborn, concerning the Felt)

If the paradigm of miscegenation dictates that men are "black" and women "white", it follows that the white genocide of the limebloods was also a mass femicide -- yet another retroactive repetition of Caliborn killing Calliope. Every motherfucker on the planet submits genetic material to the Mothergrub, not a soul gestates, and therefore everyone on Alternia is "male", just as Caliborn desires. The castes adjacent to the missing lime might gesture at the womb (Nepeta's bloody cave, Kanaya's midwifery), but all reproduction occurs via "gay sex". Male-on-female miscegenation is abstracted into a paradigm of gender relations, only having any bearing on material relations by way of analogy. The world has been overcome not only by blackness, but by gayness.

A consequence of the above is that EVERY GIRL ON ALTERNIA IS A TRANS GIRL. Roleplay is coded as a feminine activity not only in replication of real world perceptions of rp communities, but to associate Alternian women writ large with performance. FLARP is a "game for girls" not (just) because girls are more dangerous but because girls roleplay, categorically. Feferi describes her cuttlefish rescue as a roleplaying scenario, Nepeta is Nepeta. Kanaya... is perhaps best approached by contrast with Karkat.

Karkat is likely the only exception to the all-male rule: his status as a mutant lime blood implicates him as Alternia's only surviving female, and thus its only trans man*, red concealing lime. His aforementioned race envy would then double as gender envy, blackness being the Alternian paradigm of masculinity. Karkat chose his sickle in imitation of Troll Will Smith, later emphasizing the connection with the sickle HOMES SMELL YOU LATER, likewise a Thresh Prince reference. Kanaya's love of fashion (of "the aesthetic over the utilitarian") is a statement of her transfemininity, while Karkat's utilitarian insistence that trolls think fashion is stupid becomes an anxious assertion that his masculinity in non-mediated, as though a hint of performance in his demeanor would out him. The nubby horns, the suggestion of menses from the Blood aspect symbol, the jokes about hysteric fits, & the love of romcoms... they all begin to seem like tells. Does Porrim insist Kankri wear a sweater in order to censor the female presenting nipples, I wonder.

* I've heard Sollux was presented as a trans man in his Pesterquest route (I haven't played Pesterquest). I think Vriska route's presentation of her as a trans girl was correct, so the Sollux route makes me wonder if this approach is wrong-headed. OH WELL

Karkat shoosh-papping Gamzee (the sound effects are in lime) becomes an image of "white female" soothing the "black male" -- "pap" as in pap smear, mother's offering the baby milk. I'd even guess the entire "pale" quadrant is a pun on the pacifying power of whiteness (dairy and racial, but they've been equated through the paradigm of white motherhood) -- this becoming the reason why Equius, our leading example of moirallegiance, loves milk. Does "filial pail" mean "white mother"? Is the powerful horseman shattering the milk container a violent miscegenation joke, as though he breaks the mother? Is that why Karkat (potential white mother) of all people voices the concern (twice!) that contact with Equius will shatter him? DON'T TOUCH ME. Anyway

1. "FAIRY" IS A SLUR

In the wake of Vriska's pesterchum route, tumblr user abraxasgrip posited that Karkat referring to Vriska as FAG (the seemingly accidental acronym of "Future arachnidsGrip") and Vriska's general status as a blue "fairy" should be considered parcel to a trans narrative*. She was right! The entire notion of trolls pupating into butterflies upon ascension is in part a trans allegory, not unlike the modern designation of nascent trans people as "eggs", waiting to hatch.

* For that matter, I half-wonder if "Vrissy" was chosen for its proximity to "sissy".

Earlier I mentioned a racial dimension to the paradigm of birth in Fiduspawn, but here we can focus on the gender. The fairy girls on Tavros's wall are an extension of the urge to fly, as though fairy girls are the butterflies unto which Tavros intends to pupate. Tavros being unable to sink into his cocoon (ie unable to iniate metamorphosis) because of his HUGE HORNS functions as metaphor for bodily dysphoria. Vriska is introduced as one of Tavros's poster made manifest, the fairy ideal to which he aspires, and she denigrates Rufio because his red hair represents a bloody stump, a point of castration*. The ideal feminine dismissing Rufioh as fraudulent and fake emulates taunts that trans women, even following bottom surgery or what have you, will never be "real women". It bears repeating that this Alternia-as-paranoid-fantasy is arose from a homophobic/transphobic world view (one that slurs together all it would describe as feminine men), so characters tend to express the prejudices that drove their own creation.

* In Openbound, Rufioh attempts to "break up" with the dick-faced Horuss 8=D in service of a dysphoria metaphor. Damara, taking a role akin to Vriska's above, locked away Rufioh's "happy thought" to illustrate the corresponding lack of euphoria.

Also, if Karkat is female, "STOP PLAYING GAMES FOR GIRLS" functions not only as one of Karkat's defensive assertions of masculinity, but as yet another example of "real women" denigrating "imitations".

It should be noted here that chasing after the butterfly entails chasing after the cocoon, which bears connotations of death (eg the cherubim use a magic tomb, the sarswapagus, to turn from boy to girl and back). In some cases the objective (the feminine) collapses into the mediator (death), such that femininity is construed as intrinsically morbid. Mommy becomes a mummy, pregnant with scarabs. Jake's interest in blue girls intersects with his love of skulls: When Aranea asks "Do you want me to talk until I'm blue in the face?" Jake gulps not only because of the thought of literal blue skin, but because exhausting one's Breath means death.

We'll talk more about Jake later, because the narrative insinuation of necrophilia that follows him is channeled into a very particular homophobic/transphobic construction, but for now let it suffice that the butterfly Grandpa shoots has the colors of the trans pride flag.

2. HIS HONORABLE "TYRANNY" MEANS "TRANNY"

The Condesce attempted to recreate Alternia on Earth, implementing blood castes and installing (black-tainted) clown presidents in imitation of the Grand Highblood. What then is Guy Fieri supposed to emulate? The cursed lore alleges the name to be a mispronunciation of "guy Feferi", but what does that have to do with his position as a Supreme Court Justice? How is Fieri related to His Honorable Tyranny? The answer is as simple as the names: "Tyranny" means TRANNY*, and "Guy Fieri" sounds like GAY FAIRY.

* I talked about Kankri as a figure of judgement earlier -- I wonder if his status as a trans man has anything to do with the nickname "Kanny"

Terezi is likewise a trans girl, and her kangaroo court functions as a castration fantasy: dragons are phallic, she strings them up. "LEMONSNOUT" means "PISSNOZZLE". ("Lemonsnout represents Vriska!" you protest, "we see Lemonsnout on Terezi's desk when she informs Doc Scratch of the cueball!" To this I reply, "The design of Vriska's dotted eyepatch is lifted from the Goonie's 'One-Eyed Willie', who represents a penis!")

Terezi wishes she could have a baby, you see. When Terezi says her lusus dreams about babies, Karkat says "I thought you didn't have one", and Terezi replies "I don't yet, I'm not allowed to." The omitted subject is doubled: Terezi is allowed neither a lusus nor a baby. This motif plays out again in Terezi's roleplay with Nepeta: the phallic dragon (Terezi refers to the dragon head as her "alarming and splendiferous girth") attempts to steal and consume the child, representing the assumption of pregnancy. Cronus (named after a god who consumes children) similarly has a seahorse lusus in reference to male pregnancy.

Earlier still, this wish is encoded in the crime of Senator Pissnozzle, dipping his snout into a "beetle coffer". The invocation of scarabs implies that the Pissnozzle poked into a mummy, meaning that Terezi (whose name invokes Tiresias, the blind prophet of the play Oedipus Rex) is simultaneously punishing incestuous access to the death-mother and the intrusion of the masculine into the domain of the feminine. As with Terezi and her desire for baby: NOT ALLOWED. This society is at least as homophobic as it is gay.

To wit: when Terezi notes the "unmitigated cheek" of the Senator strutting around with pilfered scarabs beneath his clothes, she is complimenting the Senator's ass. Terezi then recommends the court take recess to puke. This is a compliment of sorts, because vomiting blood is one way trolls produce genetic material: the conversation prior to the trial feature Karkat summoning the image of girls "erupting like a vomit volcano" at the sight of Sollux; this image of bile and fire is followed by a dragon drawn by Terezi, who retches with a BLAR; and the phallic status of dragons informs us that vomiting amounts to ejaculation. Anyway,

When Karkat responds to Terezi's cryptic baby talk with "WE NEED TO GET YOU OUT OF THAT FUCKING TREE AND INTO A PROPER GODDAMN LAWNRING," what we should hear is "GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE CLOUDS." It's an early iteration of the infamous "STOP PLAYING GAMES FOR GIRLS" that accompanies Tavros's attempted flight. (Another instance of Blood pulling down an ascendant trans girl: Dave offering bloody bro fistbumps to keep John from blasting off.)

3. "HUMAN CIGARETTE" MEANS "FAG"

Cronus ostensibly couches "human cigarette" in quotation marks to signal that he is introducing new terminology to the conversation, but in much the same way as Caliborn would describe his King as "Queen", readers can take the quotes as indication that some manner of substitution is afoot. The suggestion of euphemism (and the fact that Cronus doesn't smoke the cigarette) doesn't just offer a joke about how Cronus likes putting sticks in his mouth -- it's a comment on Mituna.

"Human cigarette" is a rephrasing of TROLL CAEGAR, Terezi's two headed coin. The precedent of G substitution in TROLL JEGUS allows the cigar pun to slip by unnoticed. The two heads of the coin, and its scratched/unscratched eyes, are quickly embodied in the form of Sollux, who likewise has alternated eyes and two-headed motifs. He even carries on Terezi's abuse of the pissnozzle by slicing through his BEEHOUSE MAINFRAME tower -- the yellow MIND HONEY represents piss. The taste of piss turns Sollux into a vomit volcano, a grandiose iteration of the (imagined) spittake resulting from John drinking pee disguised as apple juice. BLUH! The eruption of lasers from his hivestem resembles ejaculation, again pointing to the reproductive function of disgust.

Now we need to superimpose several points:

a. The blast also signals that "Sollux Captor" (sunlight capacitor) can function as a store of energy, a battery. This was the use to which HIC put the Psiionic, using him to power her ship, a cruelty that Cronus (speaking to Meenah) deploys to defend his own abuse of Mituna. This is one point of convergence between batteries and cigarette/cigar: posing a person a fuel, a resource to be burnt out (hence the emphasis on Mituna being brain-fried).

b. Rose has a small tirade in early act 6 about cigars being a phallic symbol, and we should take her word for it: when Meenah goes to take a bathroom break during the interfission, its not until a newly blind Sollux stumbles into the ship's hold with Meenah that her bladder meter starts to decrease. This is another reference to the Psiionic, posing the yellow-blooded Captors as a pissnozzles awaiting depletion. Meenah quips "like captor like captor" afterwards to underscore this parallel (though she formally only refers to Sollux falling down, as Mituna is prone to do).

The dick is a synecdoche of the boy, and as the GameGrl theme tells us, GIRLS RULE & BOYS DROOL. Which is to say, girls and boys are posed as defacto mother/child pairs, because children (being black boys) are all "motherfuckers" in the Oedipal sense. But on Alternia, access to the mother is mediated so the little gay babies (to borrow Meulin's turn of phrase) all have to fuck eachother instead. Hence, "human cigarettes" (ie troll caegars, ie batteries) are fags.

4. "FAYGO" ALSO MEANS "FAG"

Drinking Faygo is synonymous with kissing a dead head, such that Gamzee's soda habit prefigures his attempted revival of Tavros. A shot of Aradia decapitating a frog statue (2065) cuts directly to Eridan picking up a red Faygo. Later, Gamzee advises Eridan to "chug that shit like you and the bottle was reunited lovers", invoking a passionate kiss. Eridan does so, upon which we see Feferi revive Sollux (the Caegar) with a passionate kiss. Eridan demurs on the spittake, but Karkat gags, and Spades Slick consummates the gesture with a reference to puking blood.

Later on, the most dramatic boy-on-boy kiss of the story replicates this structure: Jake takes the bleeding head of Dirk and kisses him to life. Onlookers gag, and a vomit volcano erupts in the background. Bluh.

But hey, on the subject of Jake breathing life into dead people,

5. "WINDBAG" ALSO ALSO MEANS "FAG"

Here we'll need to be familiar with an aspect of Homestuck's metaphysics again, so let's proceed from Jade's fear of lightning:

a. Jade's first imp manifests after she spies a yellow aurora coursing through the sky in the shape of a lightning bolt. Since imps appear in response to psychic turmoil, this establishes that for whatever reason, lightning is a source of fear for Jade. Furthermore, the imp arrives in a reproduction of Bec's introduction, associating Bec with this fear of lightning.

b. Elaboration on the phobia arrives in the form of 1. the image of Johnny 5 being struck by lightning and assuming consciousness and 2. the corpse of dream!Jade being animated by the infusion of Becsprite, after which she immediately requests death. What Jade fears is no less than life itself: life is regarded as a coarse intrusion upon the serenity of death.

c. Another way to put it: in conceiving of her very life as originating from a numinous elsewhere, Jade becomes terrified that the will coarsing through her body is not her own, that she is an automaton, a puppet. But the terror is selective. Note that during her introduction, Jade only attributes her failures to alien wills: the discordant flute play and botched memory game are framed (by Jade) as reader interactive segments, while kickass bass solos and success with the modus are framed (by Jade) as a consequence of Jade assuming total control.

d. The flute example is instructive: another name for the spark of life, the divine pneuma, is Breath. Hence when Tavros attempts to revive Vriska, we see the Breath aspect symbol flow from his mouth. For whatever reason, Jade seems to regard Grandpa as the source of her (unwanted!) Breath, despite his being dead: she disparagingly refers to him as a "bag of wind" while recalling one of his old tirades. When Jade nearly shoots herself but instead shoots Grandpa, suicide and murder are rendered synonymous insofar as Jade is striking out at (someone presented as) the source of Breath. The puppet cuts its strings and is motionless forever.

e. Corpse kissing arises from more than necessity: rescuscitation has apparent overtones of necrophilia. Caliborn illustrates this when he claims Calliope will leave a truly "breathtaking" corpse. Jake's intro drags him into this paradigm with a joke in which the phrase "beating a dead horse" is twisted into the visceral "assaulting the mushy carcass of a horse who passed away long ago", playing upon the sexual dimension of "assault". Blue girls are beutifully dead and the pneuma is seemingly phallicized. Grandpa had Jade's corpse sitting around for a long time.

f. So it came to seem that Jade's relationship with Grandpa had undertones of sexual assault. It became unnerving that Jade seemed to go grimbark at the sight of Jake's banana hammock, that Jade's corpse fell from the sky in Candy at the mention of rape, that another will takes over Jade's body when Meat!Roxy muses that ectobiology did not require their consent to make them make babies. Jadesprite's desperation to die, to empty herself of Pneuma, obtained a connotation of uninvited semen, the memory of which could trigger extreme responses. It seemed frivolous that Jade's dreambot beat up Grandpa's effigy while dream!Jade pummeled the Courtyard Droll, but the association turned ominous when CD killed Jade with an explosion of white goop as a lightning aurora coursed overhead... in short, all signs seemed to indicate Grandpa was a rapist. I'm still somewhat convinced this is true.

But its also true that Homestuck is a conspiracy theory, self-consciously depicting homophobia. A nudge towards a paradigm shift arrives when Jane compared Jake to Arrested Development's Tobias Funke: "How could he not see the pain he was causing with his oblivious demeanor, his repressed feelings of attraction toward men, and his total inability to understand other people's feelings in spite of his credentials as an analrapist?" The message being, much as ICP is framed as evil by dint of being "tainted" with blackness, a Grandpa might be framed as a rapist by dint of being gay. Suddenly the ominous pneumatic dimension of Jade calling Grandpa a "bag of wind" seemed to be a consequence of the more readily apparent contempt Jade has for Grandpa's overwrought manner of speaking. Jade (or else the narrative to which both Grandpa and Jade are subjected) uses "bag of wind", and the elaborate metaphysical assault narrative it invokes, to call Grandpa a faggot.

This filter can superimposed on much of what seemed ominous. The impression that grimbark Jade was triggered by traumatic memories of Jake's groin wraps back around to her open contempt for the garments: she responds negatively to Jake's undies because they're REALLY FUCKING GAY (derogatory). Jade spurning the gift of Ahab's Crosshair (a symbol of lightning, and thus phallic life) becomes inseperable from Eridan's contempt for human reproduction (ew! pussy is gross!)... and speaking of lightning, we've discussed the pneuma's relation to life but less so it's relation to will.

6. "COLONIZER" MEANS "SODOMIZER"

Emphasis on "colon". The gist is that fags, in their femininity, are conceptualized as tresspassers upon the virgin land of womanhood. Recall a dream Jake had, remixing a scene from James Cameron's Avatar, a film in which a colonial soldier is able to assume the body of the blue skinned natives. Jake speaks exploitation and condescension: "Ooh Neytiri, I'm learning so much about myself through your primitive culture." Jake awakens to find Neytiri replaced with Aranea, another "blue girl" upon whom the fantasy of bodily possession is transferred, presumably possessing as much sexism as the quote had primitivism.

A more involved example would be Damara, and her apparent possession by arch-colonist Lord English:

a. Rufioh's use of "doll" in reference to Damara implicitly compares her to the host plush of Fiduspawn, suggesting that she is in some sense a lifeless vessel through which some other thing perpetuates itself. (Which applies to literally everyone in the story, this being fiction, but it becomes a point of focus here.) Damara speaks in staccato bursts like Caliborn, which in light of the above could suggest she is literally "possessed" by Lord English, being puppeted around by an alien life force that moves through her (again, Fiduspawn)

This sense of possession is compounded by Damara being "fake" Japanese -- per tumblruser fishmech, her Google-translated speech is likely diegetic, meaning Damara's sloppy Japanese is acquired and she's what might be called "Japanese kin" in the context of Openbound's various otherkin characters and internet archetypes. Alternatively, we have the standard understanding that Beforan Japanese is intrinsically a “fallen” form of the Japanese that exists as-we-see-it on Alternia, with the caveat that Caliborn is the demiurge responsible for the generation of this degraded form -- and that Caliborn is the one who kins sexy anime girls (his admiration of the self-creating girl on the How To Draw Manga Cover comes to mind), making Damara his avatar/self-insert, and leading us back to the motif of possession.

But this could be folded back into the subjective experience of a Japanese-kin Damara, as though she perceives her seeming inability to be “authentic” as the fault of a cruel and/or incompetent God -- or rather, it is only through the eyes of God (the reader) that Damara's language is degraded, but since Damara sees herself through our eyes, the apparent inauthenticity of Damara's Japanese communicates a subjective sense of inauthenticy which Damara feels towards her own speech. Sometimes the gap between character and authorial voice in Homestuck is brought to attention to underscore a feeling of profound alienation in a given character, a sense of not belonging in their own skin... dysphoria, in other words.

b. As mentioned earlier, the paradigm of colonization also has a racial element to it, seemingly reversing the black/white coding of masculine/feminine as explored elsewhere. "Damara is Japanese tho" you say. "Ninja means nigga" I remind you.

Conclusion

God I wish I knew how to conclude this. The organizing principle of offensive puns is all that kept this profane intersectionality together. My only real thesis is that I believe we've been pranked, and that the ability to recognize the discursive twists that constitute the deception (or rather, our collective misreading) seems broadly useful. Beyond that, I don't know. I'm not even certain I've done an adequate job separating the metaphorical from the literal on Alternia, to whatever degree those two things are distinct. My head is swimming. I believe some things of substance have been expressed here, but time will tell what details survive subsequent sifting.

I guess as a closing note I'll just mention that before June clicked, I was pretty convinced John was gay. Now remaining traces of that gay reading seem to have been slurred into superposition with the trans reading? Feels kinda nice somehow

[nevergeneralize]

Albert knitting is such a good detail!!

A) It’s a little bizarre and quirky, which makes it great already, but also

B) I like it when the men of Team Moriarty are given domestic/traditionally-feminine traits/hobbies (even the profiles telling us about Patterson caring about skincare and thus being assigned an overwhelming beauty routine delights me so much)

C) James Moriarty is “like a spider,” per The Final Problem:

“He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans.”

Knitting isn’t exactly weaving but it’s similar enough if you squint, so Albert has a spider-ish hobby appropriate to being 1/3 of James Moriarty, that’s fun!

D) He uses his talents for textile creation to needle (get it????) Moran, and this is the noblest art

E) He’s bad at it and he knows that but he’s doing it anyway and that’s basically therapy for Albert!!! Overcoming perfectionism and learning to be proud of the things he does/makes is so healthy we love to see it!!! (I know this omake is perhaps more of a throwaway joke than serious character exploration but I’m choosing to read into the fact that) He apologizes or feels guilty or unworthy constantly, but he’s absolutely not apologizing for these strange, ugly sweaters

Look how pleased he is, hush Moran!! We’re so proud of him for being proud of himself! You really did outdo yourself this time, Albert!!!

Interesting that we get some of the same energy here, in the actual manga, with regard to his (also evidently pretty bad?) cooking:

Fifty chapters later and he’s back at it, practicing being bad at hobbies, eagerly sharing the imperfect fruits of his labor with his loved ones! That is genuinely hard emotional work and he really should be smug about it! Go Albert go!!!

I say “eagerly” but both scenes could also be read as sort of sarcastic; maybe he’s more proud of inflicting his hilarious knitting/cooking failure on his family than proud of each outcome as a creative achievement, but I think that’s still pretty cool? I’m no psychologist but I think if Albert ends up doing what is essentially CBT for OCPD just for the lulz/because he’s trolling Moran, that is A) hilarious, and B) still making him Do The Thing and probably is accidentally great for him. “Acting as if” is a real strategy of modern behavioral psychology used for managing anxiety, low self-worth, etc: the idea is to act as if you are proud of your creative output and eventually you can learn to actually feel that pride. And anyway, sharing amateurish creative work is pretty vulnerable, especially when you can see its amateurishness for yourself; Albert being willing to make a joke out of failing to do something to an ideal standard still seems like a very significant step beyond his usual abjection in the face of imperfection. Basically this is great for him any way you look at it. Keep knitting badly, Albert!!!

(Oddly when I looked up “acting as if” to make sure I had the name of the CBT skill right, I learned that CBT owes much to William James, one of the founders of modern psychology. Also lots of results citing Alfred Adler. This was a slightly confusing search-result-skimming process.)

[aidanturnerstuff]

Exclusive ITV screening shares first look at new thriller, The Suspect, featuring Aidan Turner

by Yasmin Turner [X]

We joined other members of the press and media who gathered at the Soho Hotel in London last Friday 8, July for an exclusive preview of ITV’s new psychological thriller, The Suspect. Following the screening, some of the cast and production attended the event for a Q&A. Those in attendance included cast members Aidan Turner (Poldark, Leonardo, The Hobbit Trilogy), Shaun Parkes (Small Axe) and Anjli Mohindra (The Lazarus Project, Vigil, Bodyguard), as well as screenwriter Peter Berry (Gangs of London), director James Strong (Vigil, Liar, Broadchurch) and executive producer Jake Lushington (Vigil, Born to Kill).

The first episode that was screened at the event introduced the leading role Doctor Joseph O’Loughlin (Aidan Turner), a man who on the surface seems to have the perfect life – a loving wife, daughter and successful career as a clinical psychologist. The series opens with a dramatic scene that sees Doctor Joseph standing on a ledge of a tall building to save someone who’s considering suicide. But all it takes is a murder victim, a troubled patient and one monumental lie, for him to go from rooftop hero to likely sick killer.

Speaking to us about the leading character who undergoes a huge change in the first 50 minutes of the show, Turner revealed, “He’s a complicated person. But that’s what was interesting about it.

“His recent diagnosis [of Parkinson’s] is something that when I first read it, as a reader I was qualifying the decisions he was making because of that,” he said. “But then you’re thinking is it just an excuse, is that problematic for him, would he have done this anyway. He’s just a very interesting character. Very layered. He makes some decisions that are very questionable. I think it’s interesting to have a protagonist that’s so flawed and for me to play someone like that.

“In recent past, with other characters I’ve played, it’s been that there’s a moral centre and a compass, and that’s the direction we go in,” Turner added. “Not to say he’s not a good guy. But he feels real and layered and difficult. What was really interesting for me reading the character, was the ambiguity around good and bad. Is he good or evil? Is he both? Can you be both? Where’s the lie and is there some truth in that lie?”

X

[the-stage-manager]

Love it when non-trauma victims gatekeep what survivors are and aren't allowed to do. I'd LOVE to see these people's psychology degrees. Oh wait! You can't! Because any psychologist worth their salt would tell you that there is no wrong way to grieve or process feelings, as long as your coping mechanisms are not dangerous to yourself or others. Playing the "evil" path or whatever of a single player video game isn't hurting anybody. I personally, am not even that big of an Ascended fan, but the sheer audacity and ignorance of some Spawn Stans is staggering. Y'all are essentially the obnoxious, preachy Christians of this fandom—there is a "right" way and a "wrong" way and for some reason you think you're entitled to stick your nose in everybody's business to shove your doctrine down people's throats. Discourse and debates about morality and philosophy are fine. But as soon as you start making moral judgments about how somebody plays a video game, you need to turn off your device, take a deep breath and remember that you're speaking to a real, human being with thoughts and feelings, you know literally NOTHING about them, and you have NO RIGHT to determine whether or not they are a good or bad person. I get it, these characters are important to you, and you feel strongly about them. They're important to me too. I love them and I want to defend them, but not at the cost of bullying other people, calling them names, and telling them that they're evil and shouldn't be playing the game.

"Survivors are allowed to be upset that people glorify ascended astarion" weird that you assume there's no overlap between survivors and ascended fans when literally every ascended fan I know is one

[chibashoya]

Vyn in the Language of Flowers

While we do know Rosa is often compared as his rose, Vyn does have his fair share of comparison with his flowers! The most explicit comparison was based on the red and opium poppies, but poppies in general, often go hand-in-hand with Vyn's artwork:

Another proof of Vyn having poppies as his flower is his birthday gift when the player celebrates their birthday in-game: the gift is entitled “Coquelicot Blessings Giftbox”. The word coquelicot is a French vernacular name for corn poppy. There are more samples that are too subtle to put in the analysis, such as when Vyn and Rosa are biking during the SR: Cool Summer (the flowers in the lower left corner of the CG are poppies) and other backgrounds with poppies (though I doubt this has any meaning).

What is most interesting though is that Vyn subconsciously compared himself to a poppy, as seen in his SSR: Blazing Colors video call:

“Whereas red poppies are as pure as their appearance, opium poppies can be seen as a sinful flower donning a cloak of innocence. In a way, this dichotomy is similar to human nature.”

He doesn’t explicitly compare himself to the poppy, but I would argue he subconsciously does from his previous line before the photo: “In the language of flowers, poppies mean “peace”. It really is something befitting of one’s image of a psychologist. Also have you noticed? Red poppies are very similar to opium poppies in appearance.” It was Rosa who gave him a red poppy because of his profession but it was Vyn who brought up the comparison between red and opium poppies. Considering Rosa’s knowledge in gardening, I would say she is not able to immediately distinguish the difference between these flowers.

Another reason why I think Vyn subconsciously compared himself to the opium poppy is that the flower has medicinal uses. The flower is a principal source of opium, a class of naturally occurring alkaloids, which include the following: morphine, codeine, papaverine, and noscapine (Singh, A., I. M. Menendez-Perdomo, et al., 2019). I think it’s a nice touch that while he seems to think that he is sinful (actually it’s the Church who thinks he’s sinful for practicing psychology considering he’s a noble), he is still able to help people in need by providing the mental health assistance they need.

A flower that is also prevalent in some of his stories is the white lily. For those who have yet to read SSR: Medieval Suspense, white lilies are the Vatican’s flower, which was the decisive evidence that made Vyn lose in the game he participated in with Rosa.

White lilies also appear during the last part of the SSR: Between Good and Evil

Interestingly enough, the story is most likely based on Eirik Haspran and Jill Richter’s romance, which is why Rosa and Vyn had to be in their shoes, respectively (a possibility that Vyn is gauging Rosa’s choice should a similar situation arise in the future). Unlike Eirik, Rosa is decisive and willing to brace herself through the consequences as long as her convictions are right. Vyn, on the other hand, has given up on the Church and explicitly expresses his dislike on numerous occasions.

Vyn is almost always conscious of his choices, but for him to compare himself to a poppy is actually almost the opposite of the lady viscount’s favorite flower, the white lily, and it feels like a pretty hidden easter egg (or, I could’ve been overanalyzing him and his storyline, but oh well). While white lilies mean purity and rebirth, opium poppies are regarded as sinful and red poppies are often used to represent remembrance and consolation. Although poppies could also mean hope for a peaceful future and even resurrection, which manifest in Vyn's gradually changing behavior of hoping for love, a phenomenon he believes is a miracle for him to experience, and opening up about his past so he could face the future with Rosa.

Perhaps Vyn with gardening as a hobby is a deliberate choice, as he often makes comparisons of his and Rosa’s circumstances in terms of flowers. I think metaphors like these are nice to explore.

REFERENCES:

Singh, A., I. M. Menendez-Perdomo, et al. (2019). "Benzylisoquinoline alkaloid biosynthesis in opium poppy: an update." Phytochem Rev 18(6): 1457-1482