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tengritexas · 2 months ago

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1. Magic and Machines typically dont mix well, technomancy is a section of witchcraft and paganism that is still being studied and worked on and this reflects when the whole "emoji spell" trend happened. AI has a place with magic (quantuam entanglement number generators) things like that. But older/trad forms of magic seem to struggle with machines the most.

2. I do not believe Pop Culture dieties are (usually) literally existant. There are examples in which writers write about dieties because they are revealed to them in a dream (lovecraftian paganism) I think those examples are far more interesting to learn about. Pop culture dieties beyond that are more so images ascribed with a meaning, kinda like Icons.

3. Fantasy depictions of witches in movies and books are super cool! But they are ficition and are an exaggeration of what is the reality

4. I will be honest, Im not familiar with "astral pregnency" I do believe in virgin births, and astral travel. Do I believe in astral pregnancy? No not really

5. witchcraft is a practice but its very hand and hand with most religions

6. Who?

7. I like the wiccan folk music :> wish there was more cozy pagan folk music like it. Tengrism is very similar with umay essentially being mother nature.

8. I do loosely follow these concepts and they are important to put them in a perspective that we can understand. Strangely, colors, plants, animals all have "associated genders" subconsciously. Funny thing is they often flip flop back and forth? Lavender is a mens soap but younger men associate it with women now. Pink used to be a mens color also. So it kinda is loose and changes over time

9. No lol especially if you are kinda trail blazing your own path. If you want to follow some set path you probably should talk to others who practice that specific path

10. ....who?

11. ..... thats it Ill google this one.

After: Racial purity stuff.... ok Im not into it, its pretty silly but you and your wife want specific typa kids it doesnt involve me

12. No, paganism does have a fair recent history of becoming politically charged but people are allowed to believe things. Better yet, Gods play a role in those same politics just like people do.

13. Probably possible but def a stupid idea

14. Tengrism is different at its core from other pagan beliefs. Soley due to things like Tengei being non personifiable.

15. Yes people can go so deep into religion it consumes them in an unhealthy way. But it usually works itself out.

16. Ok uh.... googling again

After: you wanna change your gender? Yknow its a beautiful world that lets you do that :> youre allowed. Not everyone will have the same view on it as you or me but thats what makes the world amazing. Everyone has a time and a place. (This applys to literally anything)

17. Do not harm what is naturally occuring (including cities that I do not take some social part in)

It is my moral obligation to defend

Myself

My family that Im in duty to (future wife or kids)

My city

My state

My country

In that Order!

Also shake hands with people once in awhile, stir things up.

18 uh organized like discord servers, organizations and covens yes. As a formal structured religion ehhhh no. Although falling in love during a temple service sounda adorable. But lets not start that for me 💀

19 sexual? Uh, no. Im sure there are subsects of paganism that allow it and thats their thing no worries. But I see that as seriously problematic. Ive heard if godspouces but I dont see it the same. Thats a bit different.

20. Yes, I look very deeply into everyone's life experience when I get that chance. For many people thats very special and private so I take that with honor. Even if they are not pagans

21. No thank goodness Ive never got into a blog battle 😂 I dm people for free though. I love talking to people and if someone catches my eye Im DEF talking. Im a yapper

22. Yes many practices are sacred and closed behind doors with specific rites or things you must do before hand. Some you are born into aswell, I will admit I dont understand them but Im also not apart of anyrhing like that so its not like I would anyways.

23. I think people use that to explain people adopting cultures. Adopting cultural practices in the home or in fashion is shockingly normal and peoole just dont know it. I do draw a line when it is a perversion of something. Like you adopted a culture and spit on the actualt people of the culture. Yeah then youre just a dickhead

24. Omen books, friends of similar practices, life experience, shamanic trances also

25. Do you practice witchcraft? Congrats! Youre a witch!

26. Not in the typical pagan sense. I dont do rituals very often.

27. Mhm :>

28. I die, and my thoughts, and my body return to the earth. The soul shatters and my essence (largest part of my soul) reincarnated as something else. (Please reincarnate me into married man next time thanks <3)

29. Im a Tengrist because its how I relate to the universe around me. My spiritual experiences are what give me insight to my life.

30. What is a scam? When people are in my ask box luke "hey I felt a connection to your ancestors uwu" yeah ok bubba everyone loves Sam Houston here, get in line

31. Me, my posts make me wanna scream. I literally died because I made a "lol feryja devotees mommy" joke. Im still embarrased about it

32. My hottest take is that not everyone has to agree with you, and you dont have to agree with everyone. People have life experiences that shape their feelings and thoughts about issues. Its ok if they dont like your ideas or my ideas. Yall can be friends, if yall cant? Eh fuck em

33. I move out of both, I want to move out of love because I wanna be romantic. But I move outta fear often recently to guard myself ;-;

witchcraft ask game

except it's actually real fucking specific and possibly shadow work in disguise idk

What are your opinions on AI in Witchcraft?

How do you feel about pop culture deities?

Opinions on fantasy depictions of witchcraft/paganism?

Thoughts on Astral pregnancy?

Do you think witchcraft is a religion or a practice? Why/why not?

What do you think of Aleister Crowley?

Opinions on Wicca?

What do you think of the divine feminine/masculine archetypes?

Do you think they're should be a set period before someone becomes a full-fledged witch?

What do you think of Gerald Gardner?

What are your thoughts on odinism?

Do you think witchcraft is inherently political?

Do you think you can hex/curse/jinx a deity? Do you think you should?

How different do you think your gods are from other religion's gods? What work have you done to deconstruct that?

Do you believe in spiritual psychosis?

How do you feel about TERF witches?

What is your moral code? How do you justify that?

Do you wish paganism were more organised?

Do you think it's okay to have a sexual relationship with a deity? What about romantic (i.e. godspousing)?

Do you research ex-pagans viewpoints with an open mind?

Have you ever been in argument/sent hate to another witchcraft blog? What was the story? Do you still think you were right?

Do you believe in closed practices?

Do you believe in cultural appropriation?

Outside of the online space, where do you get your resources from?

What makes someone a real witch?

Are you a real witch?

Are you confident in your beliefs?

What do you think happens when we die?

Why are you a witch? What need does it serve?

What do you think is a scam in witchcraft?

What post have you seen recently that makes you wanna scream?

What's your hottest take in the witchcraft space?

Do you move out of fear or love?

---

Please feel free to reblog, and send me an ask <3

#witchblr #wicca #pagan #folk witch #witchcraft #paganism #paganblr #shaman #shamanism #tengrism #tengri #magick

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whileiamdying · 10 months ago

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Love, Iranian Style

By��James Wood June 22, 2009

Sometimes, the soft literary citizens of liberal democracy long for prohibition. Coming up with anything to write about can be difficult when you are allowed to write about anything. A day in which the most arduous choice has been between “grande” and “tall” does not conduce to literary strenuousness. And what do we know about life? Our grand tour was only through the gently borderless continent of Google. Nothing constrains us. Perhaps we look enviously at those who have the misfortune to live in countries where literature is taken seriously enough to be censored, and writers venerated with imprisonment. What if writing were made a bit more exigent for us? What if we had less of everything? It might make our literary culture more “serious,” certainly more creatively ingenious. Instead of drowning in choice, we would have to be inventive around our thirst. Tyranny is the mother of metaphor, and all that.

Among other things, Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel “Censoring an Iranian Love Story” (translated by Sara Khalili; Knopf; $25) is a tough reply to such maundering. Mandanipour, a distinguished Iranian novelist and short-story writer, was prohibited from publishing his fiction in his native country between 1992 and 1997. He came to the United States in 2006, as an International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University, and stayed in America. This novel, his first major work to be translated into English, was written in Farsi but cannot be read in Iran. His book is thus acutely displaced: it had to have been written with an audience outside of Iran in mind, but in a language that this audience would mostly not understand; it depends on translation for its being, yet its being is thoroughly Iranian, lovingly and allusively so, dense with local reference. And it takes as its subject exactly these paradoxes, for it is explicitly about what can and cannot be written in contemporary Iranian fiction.

Novelists fret over how to get their characters into and out of rooms, but what if their characters weren’t allowed to be in those rooms in the first place? How might one write a love story about a young man and woman, set in a country in which the unmarried couple is not allowed to spend any significant time together? At the beginning of “Censoring an Iranian Love Story,” two Tehran natives, Dara and Sara, meet at a student demonstration outside Tehran University, and spend the next two hundred and eighty pages attempting not so much to consummate their relationship as simply to begin it. It is like something out of Laurence Sterne, and Mandanipour, who dedicates his book to the postmodern novelist Robert Coover (among others), is playfully alive to the elasticated comedy of a digressive story that expends all its energy on failing to start.

But this narrative foreplay isn’t just play, because it is forced and not free, conditioned by Iranian political reality. Dara and Sara cannot walk along a street without attracting attention from the morals patrols. If caught, they might have to pretend to be siblings. An Internet café could be just as risky. They cannot freely visit each other at home. Where to go? The author, who likes to break into his narrative with asides and gossip, tells us that he once wrote a story in which he led his amorous couple to a cemetery as their meeting place. “At the time, the anticorruption officers’ imagination did not extend to a girl and a boy taking advantage of the grave of an unsuspecting and helpless dead mother to set the stage for their sin.” Later in the novel, for much the same reason, Dara and Sara, keeping one step ahead of the imagination of the morals police, take refuge in a hospital emergency room, where people will be too busy to notice them. And, in addition to the characters’ material constraints, there are the writer’s. Literature is, of course, censored in Iran. The author jokes about how Iran is subconsciously practicing “the late Roland Barthes’s theory of the Death of the Author,” and likens this control to political torture and disappearance: “So it is that many stories . . . in maneuvering their way through the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance either are wounded, lose certain limbs, or are with finality put to death.”

Mandanipour’s inventive way of depicting this censorship in his novel is to inscribe it, quite literally, in the pages of his novel. So throughout the book, whenever the story of Dara and Sara becomes unacceptably political or erotic, offending sentences are crossed out—not blotted out (as was done in Joseph Weisberg’s recent C.I.A. thriller “An Ordinary Spy”) but struck through with a horizontal line, so that the reader can examine what might constitute a literary offense in Iran. The text is veiled, but the author lifts the veil for his non-Iranian audience. A typical passage begins, “Sara is studying Iranian literature at Tehran University.” But the following sentence is crossed out: “However, in compliance with an unwritten law, teaching contemporary Iranian literature is forbidden in Iranian schools and universities.” When Sara goes into a store to buy sunglasses, the store owner, a man, watches her, and says, with a sigh, “What a shame for those beautiful eyes and that tantalizing face to be hidden behind those glasses.” The phrase “and that tantalizing face” is struck out.

It is an effective, simple idea that gets less suggestive as the novel proceeds—partly because Mandanipour does not much vary the kind of material that is redacted, and partly because the redacted material is, of course, almost perfectly legible. The text thus has it both ways, simultaneously veiling and unveiling itself for the Western reader, in a slightly too easy pact. More powerful is a figurative vandalism: it is the novel’s insistent argument that a modern Iranian love story can hardly be written at all, because it is contaminated not only by the fact of censorship but by the idea of censorship, and bound by literary conventions. The reader is made aware that behind Sara and Dara stands the famous twelfth-century Iranian poem about two lovers, “Khosrow and Shirin.” In one of his many mischievous authorial interventions, Mandanipour notes that ancient Sufi love poetry often likens the body of a woman to a cypress tree, her eyes to those of a gazelle, her breasts to pomegranates, and so on. He implies that this level of figurative ornament is a kind of self-censorship by simile. So the tale of Sara and Dara is not only scored by the censor’s markings; it is constantly lapsing into cliché and conventional euphemism, because direct erotic language is not possible. “Sara’s lips resemble plump ripe cherries with their delicate skin about to split from the heat of the sun,” the author writes, knowingly. This love story cannot be told naturally, only unnaturally, with much interruption and self-consciousness: “Exactly a year before the political demonstration I told you about, on a spring day—and in old Iranian love stories there is a beautiful spring day with the song of nightingales and other pleasant-sounding birds resonating from sentences—Sara appears at the public library.”

“Censoring an Iranian Love Story” is not simply prohibited by censorship but made by it. For Mandanipour, the censor is a kind of co-writer of the book, and he appears often in this novel, under the alias of Porfiry Petrovich (the detective who chases Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov). We see him squabbling with Mandanipour, chatting to another Iranian writer, plotting alternative stories for Dara and Sara, striking out offensive phrases, and finally falling in love with Sara. He is a heavy presence in the novel, and is both creator and critic; the writer is always anticipating the imagination of prohibition even as he tries to outwit it. Even more interesting, the writer, in this situation, becomes his characters; he wants what they want. Their freedom is bound up with his. This interdependency does provocative things to the relation of fiction to reality. On the one hand, fiction becomes more real—real enough to strike lines through. On the other hand, fiction becomes more fictional—multiple writers (the author and his censors) are making up a collective story as they go along, improvising, cutting, editing, bargaining with each other. One of the great successes of this book is how thoroughly it persuades the reader that a novel about censorship could not help also being a novel about fiction-making; and it thus brings a political gravity to a fictive self-consciousness sometimes abused by the more weightless postmodernism.

Since the official love story can barely get off the ground, Mandanipour supplies the unofficial version, in an essayistic running commentary that often displaces the official tale for pages on end. (The formal love story appears on the page in bold type, the authorial interpolations in roman.) This commentary, in which Mandanipour writes as himself, entertainingly informs the reader about the riskier aspects of the two protagonists, the history of censorship in Iran, the revolution of 1979, and so on. We learn that Dara, before he met Sara, was studying filmmaking at Tehran University, and was imprisoned for leftist activity. He was released, only to find that his place at the university had disappeared. He earned money by selling videos of Western auteurs (Welles, Bergman, Antonioni) but was arrested and imprisoned again, and this time was put in solitary confinement. Dara’s father suffered more acute repetitions: a Communist before 1979, he was arrested under the Shah and put in the notorious Evin prison. After the revolution, he was triumphantly released, but six years later was rearrested, once again “for the crime of being a Communist,” and sent back to the same prison. “The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on,” as Yeats has it. Mandanipour likes these politically circular stories, painful and faintly comic in their seriality, and he is often mordant about the great revolution that turned out not to be one:

At Tehran University, students demonstrated against American imperialism, and the army attacked the university and killed three students. University students and political activists named this day University Students’ Day, and every year on the sixteenth of Āzar there were demonstrations and protests against the Shah’s regime. The students would break the windows of college buildings, and the university guards would attack them. They would beat them up and arrest some of them, and in jail they would flog them or sodomize them with Coca-Cola bottles. They would then release them so that on the next sixteenth of Āzar the students could break even more windows. However, after the revolution, the Islamic Republic’s regime executed so many students and political oppositionists every day that no one could name a particular day for a particular occasion. Therefore, all our days became the sixteenth of Āzar, meaning all our days became days on which a group of people were killed for freedom. The masterwork of the Islamic Republic was that it eradicated the importance of occasions.

The first hundred pages or so of “Censoring an Iranian Love Story” are exciting. Mandanipour’s writing is exuberant, bonhomous, clever, profuse with puns and literary-political references; the reader unversed in contemporary Iranian fiction might easily think of Kundera (who is alluded to), or of the Rushdie of “Midnight’s Children” (who is not). Mandanipour is a charming and often witty guide: “Perhaps the banning of neckties in Iran—which I will elaborate on later—was because they can be perceived as an arrow pointing to a man’s lower organ.” There is a joke—one of those universal jokes which, one feels, must be popular with writers in all totalitarian cultures—when Dara is rearrested, and his young, pious interrogator asks him about his studies in film. Using the structuralist language of film theory, Dara tells the man that “the language of cinema has its own distinct codes. People have to learn these codes. Once they do, they will completely relate to the language of cinema.” The interrogator’s eyes sparkle: “Codes? There are codes in films? . . . Do you know these codes?” Dara has just sealed his fate.

One problem with the form of the novel, however, is that Mandanipour’s unofficial authorial commentary is soon of greater interest to the reader than the official love story. A novel in which the informal, uncensored critique gradually overwhelmed the formal, censored story would have been fascinating, and gripping in its way. Instead, Mandanipour perseveres with the formal tale of Dara and Sara, who are interesting whenever the author writes unofficially about them, and boring whenever they are participants in “an Iranian Love Story.” This is partly because their role is didactic: they are there to show that an Iranian love story can barely be written, and have no quiddity as literary characters. But the larger problem is that Mandanipour overwhelms his young protagonists with self-conscious literary references and metafictional high jinks. Mr. Petrovich makes too many appearances in the story. We get the point that he is a co-creator of the tale, and we also get the point that Mandanipour, who communicates with his characters (for instance, it is he who whispers to Dara that he should go with Sara to the refuge of the emergency room), is their ultimate manipulator, their God. “I have tried to dissuade Dara from what he is planning, but I have been no match for him,” he writes toward the end of the novel. “I see clearly how my love story is moving in a direction that I never intended. The story is falling apart.” Indeed it is, and it is both unaffecting and heavy-handed when, on the next page, Dara grabs the author by the throat and complains, “You shouldn’t have written me like this. You shouldn’t have written me as browbeaten and pathetic. . . . You wrote me like this to pass your story through censorship.” Meanwhile, a hunchback from “The Thousand and One Nights” is making regular appearances, and Mandanipour tries to spice up the love story with a rival suitor, named Sinbad. The book’s lowest moment is reached when Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich, the clerk from the story “The Overcoat,” turns up in Tehran, and asks Mandanipour, who is standing on a street with Mr. Petrovich, “Have you seen the thief who stole my cloak?” Even Robert Coover might itch to delete such a scene from one of his students’ fictions. There are some good forms of censorship.

The novel’s uncertainty is strange, not just because Mandanipour has confidence and authority to spare but also because his novel refers to a shimmeringly beautiful Iranian example of how to tell a blocked love story—Abbas Kiarostami’s film “Through the Olive Trees.” As in everything he does, Kiarostami narrates a complexly self-conscious tale with the utmost simplicity: an Iranian director is making a film, in rural northern Iran, and needs a leading man and woman. The young actor who is eventually selected turns out, in his ordinary life, to be in love with the woman who is playing opposite him. He has asked her to marry him, but she has refused, because he has no house and is illiterate. On the film set, however, the couple must act as husband and wife. Kiarostami wrings the most tender comedy out of such small things as the woman’s refusal to address the actor, on set, as “Mr. Hossein,” as she would do if he were her husband. The actors have to do a scene in which the husband asks his wife where his socks are. They are not very good at it, and numerous takes ensue. Off the set, the young man, filled with ardor, assures the skeptical young woman that if they were really married he would actually know where his socks were.

It is this luminous film—not named, but clearly recognizable—that Dara and Sara watch, in a Tehran cinema, in “Censoring an Iranian Love Story”: “During the final scenes of the movie, they even have tears in their eyes.” Where Mandanipour’s love story fails to generate any great interest of its own, the two young actors in “Through the Olive Trees” are utterly solid and realized; and, paradoxically, their solidity is not softened by Kiarostami’s postmodern self-consciousness but magically enhanced by it. (One would happily forever watch the two of them rehearsing the scene about the socks.) Kiarostami’s fascination with fictionality—his films often collapse the theatrical fourth wall—emerges naturally from his great interest in the real, as one might be very interested, say, in colors because one loved flowers, or in angels because one believed in God. To complain that Mandanipour does not equal Kiarostami’s almost Chekhovian humaneness and delicacy would be unfair; for one thing, Mandanipour is politically much more savage than the wily neorealist survivor, who has lived all his life in Iran, and has different ambitions. But Kiarostami’s film does demonstrate that one can beautifully combine the telling of a love story with a deep inquiry into the artifice of telling such a story—and, indeed, that the two concerns belong together. ♦

Published in the print edition of the June 29, 2009, issue.

James Wood, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2007, teaches at Harvard. His latest book is “Serious Noticing,” a collection of essays.

#Abbas Kiarostami #Censorship #Iran #Iranians #Knopf #Novels #Postmodernism #Tehran #Writers #James Wood #The New Yorker

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sajaffery · 1 year ago

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3...

i have to come up with a different proverb. maybe a new one. this is harder then i thought. but im really enjoying doing it. it feels like a wrting exercise. shit! it is a wrting exercise and i hate those. i absolutely hate them because they feel gimicky and unimaginative. but i came up with this on my own. so is it unimaginative? wait isnt there something called free association writing? is that what im doing right now? im not sure. i dont think youre allowed to think in that you’re just supposed to write and write and write and write. but how can you write without thinking? okay charger has been plugged back in and i can stop and think again. full disclosure by the way i am cheating to a certain extent because i keep editing every fifth mistake i make. im still leaving a lot in there to make this feel authentic. i felt like adding an emoticon there. cue self loathing. but no wait. old white men dont like emoticons do they? that good we like that. but young white girls do like emoticons. and justin bieber. dont know which way to turn now. lets move on. and i’m blank. i cant get justin bieber out of my head. good thing its not young white girls because that would be creepy. andd liable. is liable the right word. i want to google but i cant. new rule! no googling allowed. just train of…no no no. we cant use that either no trains allowed. old white men use trains. river of thoughts? cheesy. to similar to stream of consciousness, which isnt so bad because Virgina Woolf is a dead white woman. and i hate to love joyce. Love Dubliners. Love the idea of Ulysses, despite never getting past page 50 and not understanding what the hell happened in the forty or so pages i do read. except a young jesuit was or wasnt shaving. no word count either. new rule. im always checking word count to make myself feel good but we wont be doing that anymore. but i cant do this in the mornings anymore. not when i have to write. i mean seriously write because i would like to get published one day. read my name on the cover of a book. a hardback thak you very much because i do still love those (dead white men be damned) even if i dont particulalrly like paying for them. 15.99 for a book is ridiculous. especially when you can get it for 1p plus shipping costs in a few months time. i just cheated again. i deleted a whole paragraph i dint like anymore. its just felt repetitive like i was just telling you the same thing all over again in different word. filler. and we don’t like filler. its something EL James would use. i’m so glad EL James has become the by word for bad literature. she fully deserves it and im not just saying that because shes made a shit load of money. it does help though.it also helps that everyone seems to know who she is. James Patterson is equally shit, actually hes a different kind of shit. those alex cross books werent too bad to begin with. they certainly made good movies. anything with morgan freeman is a good movie. i hope if god does exist he does look like him. i wouldnt mind listening to him for all off eternity then. but then he started buying up unpublished manuscripts, polishing them up and printing them as his own with the real author getting a co-write. that fucking pisses me off. and he has the nerve to defend it by saying that he’s helping young unpublished authors. no you’re not asshole youre just printing money and using struggling authors just like every other arsehole looking to make a quick buck is. but you cant badmouth patterson because most nonreaders don’t know about him. but everybody knows EL James. god bless anal beads. okay im back. its the same day but i just posted this went downstairs to make some more green tea and came back up to add a little more to it. had two slices of chocolate cake too. i thought i was eating more because i was having a hard time writing but apparently i just like cake. and stuffing myself to point of explosion. edited slices and explpsion. there must be a way to switch off the squiggly lines that come up while im wrting this. typing. i’m only typing this.

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somerandomhuman080 · 1 year ago

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self diagnosing is a-ok btw. it can take years of research to fully understand and know for sure but self diagnosing is fine do not worry! Take some time to research each concern you have and do not get attached to a diagnoses until you hit the "nothing else explains me/ these are symptoms are separate and I just need a second diagnosis"

One thing I can say for sure is that things like ADHD, Autism, OCD, etc. can have very similar symptoms but you gotta research HOW these symptoms arrive and HOW they effect you. I highly highly recommend following many tumblr users who are diagnosed or long time self-diagnosed who talk about their struggles and explain symptoms. You don't have to follow everyone, follow the tags, look through them, see what people have to say. Biggest thing you need to do: read articles! Google questions you have and see what shows up. Read multiple articles on each thing to check for accuracy etc etc.

if you are specifically researching ADHD right now, I recommend learning about executive dysfunction and see how much you relate to it from there. Also read the criteria of an ADHD diagnosis here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t3/ (pay extra attention to things you relate to and try to find/ ask questions on these things specifically. Like what causes this in you? how does it present? Does it affect your other symptoms? Does this specific symptom show up in separate ways? etc.)

and to start, if you want to ask questions to people here on tumblr I recommend the account autistic-af (she is both autistic and has adhd, she takes in asks regularly but right now they are closed...follow and check in every day or so! Highly recommend) another blog you might want to try is my-autism-adhd-blog (they take in asks and give a lot of direct links and excerpts of articles if you do not know where to start. and I believe they will also help you find articles on OCD and anything else neurodivergent as well!) Remember to scroll down and look through tags! You might have some questions answered already. (but its okay to ask them again if they have, don't worry!)

self-diagnosing is a long road, but it helps to know yourself more and is very helpful for if you are able to get formally diagnosed in the future. also very very very important to remember... even if you are incorrect, if any accommodations you may ask of people around you helps you, please do not be afraid to continue those accommodations. If you are afraid of being wrong when mentioning these things just say that you suspect *diagnosis* and you think this would help you or you want to see if it helps you. Since you know you experience anxiety/depression then you damn well deserve accommodations already! Look for some tips for those conditions to help for now.

just to add some points i may have missed: many of symptoms you posted in your post are traits you may find in someone who has ADHD but they can also be found in someone who is autistic, who has ocd, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression etc etc. You will have a lot to research do and a lot of deep diving in yourself to come to a conclusion. (or conclusions) Start with learning more about ADHD then go to the next that you relate to. Learn about comorbidity and see how conditions look combined. Give yourself plenty of time and ask questions to people who have known you for years. You don't have to tell them why if you are uncomfortable with them knowing and if they think you don't have these problems and refuse to help, move on to the next person who is willing to help and take you seriously.

lastly, i wish you good luck in all this!!!! Genuinely!!!! For me, I grew up in a toxic environment and wasn't allowed to even see a doctor growing up. I had to learn everything on my own and it was difficult and sometimes scary until I learned about the communities here on tumblr who talk about their experiences day by day. It helped. A lot. And now i'm working towards finally and officially getting diagnosed with (quite a few) conditions! Self diagnosing saved my life, kept me going, kept me safe. don't be afraid to ask questions and give yourself any help you need. don't be afraid to self-diagnose. in time you will learn which diagnoses you can confidently say "i have this!" and which ones you will need to say "I need professional advice to confirm this but I want to let you know I heavily relate to this condition" just don't be afraid of getting to either! <3

Oh! and remember to take breaks if it gets overwhelming or frustrating! its definitely a lot to learn. and sometimes discourse can be hard to read.

( sorry for the very long ask! just wanted to help out on a day I am able :3 )

thank you so much for your advice! this is really helpful, i’ll definitely be doing more research :) i really appreciate it. also i literally got tumblr the other day and i have no idea if i responded to this right, please let me know.

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schneesisterss · 3 years ago

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Do you have any head cannons for the other Dimitrescu sisters? I loved your takes on Cassandra!

thank you! <3 and Of Course I have headcannons for the other two. (though not as extensive as the ones I have for Cassandra bc you know... brain rot) BUT HERE:

Daniela:

ADD/ADHD representation

stims include, but not limited to: jumping, hard blinking, leg bouncing, word/phrase/noise repetition, and fidgeting with her clothing

and i’m also CONVINCED she gets the zoomies at random times of the day

Alcina, hearing loud and fast footsteps up and down her hallway at 3am: *sigh* “Daniela! Take it outside!”

followed by a loud THUMP and painful groan (she definitely ran into a wall)

hates loud noises but simultaneously has no volume control

especially when she gets excited

Cassandra has to constantly remind her to lower her voice

“AND THEN I TOOK MY KNIFE AND STABBED THE LYCAN IN THE NECK AND IT WAS SO COOL—”

“Dani, i’m standing right here, why are you yelling?”

she loves play-fighting with her sisters

Cassandra is more willing to entertain her than Bela but the both of them like to see their sister happy. so whenever they recognize Daniela getting antsy they’ll wrestle with her a bit

(Cassandra gets way to into it sometimes and makes Bela be the referee lol. Cass always ends up pinning her younger sister with a proud, competitive smile on her face. Bela let’s Dani win, but we don’t tell her that)

has the keenest senses of the three which makes her the best at stalking/killing pray

and since she can hear the best out of all of them, she unintentionally eves drops on conversations

so Daniela, bless her, has all the tea

tactile learner

will just. touch things

“Life hard, Mothers gown soft”

can get trapped in her own head and doesn’t know how to express to her family what’s bothering her

this can make her very reserved at times and she’ll distance herself for days on end

her mother is really the only person who knows how to get her out of that state. Alcina walks up the long flight of stairs to the highest point of her castle. her youngest daughter likes to come here sometimes when she needs the quiet. “Daniela? Are you up here?”

“Hello, Mother.” Alcina looks up to see her daughter lounging on a banister high up on the ceiling.

“What are you doing up there, my love?” Daniela rubs the fabric of her dress between her fingers. “Cassandra and Bela were arguing again. I don’t like when Cassandra yells.”

Alcina shakes her head. Those two were always going at it. She’ll speak to Bela about it later. “I haven’t seen you in a few days.” Daniela then grabs a fist full of her dress and tugs at it, blinking hard. “Come down for a moment. Talk to me, baby.”

and Daniela simply rolls herself off the banister and into free fall. Alcina, already prepared, catches her with ease and holds her bridal style against her chest. Daniela runs her hands over the sleeve of her mother’s dress.

Alcina gave her youngest child time to gather her thoughts, knowing it sometimes takes longer for her to be able to understand them herself. Daniela finally spoke up: “It’s been very loud recently. Around the castle. Small things, like footsteps or glasses clicking, they sound so loud in my head.” She covers her ears with her hands. “Even now I can still hear Cassandras voice through the castle, it’s pushing in my ears. My head hurts, Mother.”

Alcina gave her daughter a quick squeeze before setting her down. “Follow me baby, I want to show you something.” Daniela followed her Mother through the twists and turns of the castle until they ended up at a door that was just like all the others. It blended in and maybe that’s why Daniela has never noticed it before. “In here.” her mother guided.

Inside was a small library and lounge room. A fire place tucked in the corner and, of course, a wall a wine next to it. Daniela looked at her Mother questioningly.

“Listen.” her mother said, and Daniela did. She heard... nothing. Nothing outside of the quiet cracking of the fire place. “This room is sound proofed. Come here whenever you feel overwhelmed.” She leaned down to stroke her daughters head. “Just don’t tell your sisters I showed you my secret getaway room.” and with a wink, the tall woman exited the room and shut the door behind her.

The next day Daniela was at breakfast like nothing had changed. She didn’t even mind when Cassandra yelled at a maiden for breaking a plate, it only made her laugh.

(if you get overstimulated you KNOW what i’m talking about)

personal space? never heard of her.

loves to cling to Belas arm and Bela let’s her bc she thinks it’s just. so cute.

will also sometimes just crawl into her mothers lap and fall asleep. then Alcinas like: “well.. i guess i’m not moving for three hours”

Daniela: “if I run an jump at Cassandra, she’ll most certainly catch me.” *takes off in a full blown sprint*

Cassandra: “NO IM HOLDING HOT TEA—” *drops tea to catch Daniela* *proceeds to cuss her younger sister out, all while Dani is wrapped around her like a koala*

(this happens a lot. Dani will just... climb on Cassandra. piggy back rides, getting on her shoulders, wrapping her hands around her neck from behind and letting her feet drag on the floor, etc. Cassandra complains adamantly but never once moves to get her off)

Cassandra: “hey Dani, I dare you too—”

Bela: “Mother said Daniela isn’t allowed to accept dares anymore.”

Daniela: “apparently I have ‘no regard for my personal safety.’”

it takes a lot for Daniela to get genuinely angry, but when she does, it’s.... bad.

Very Very Scary when mad

turns into a completely different person that you Do NOT want to fuck with

dangerous and violent

much more dark and sadistic as compared to her normal personality

came home one night covered in blood and laughing hysterically. it scared the shit out of her sisters bc if they would try and get close, she’d slash at them with her weapon.

(this was one of the only times Bela had seen Cassandra genuinely worried and afraid for their sister)

when Alcina came to see what was wrong, Daniela, still laughing madly, swung at her too. Cassandra quickly shot out her arm and grabbed Belas elbow to stop her from getting involved. Bela whipped around with a growl but Cassandras glare and squeezing nails told her to back down. Mother can handle it.

Insane Laugh™️

thinks it’s funny to intimidate the maidens by showing her fangs and snapping her jaw

she often likes to find Bela when she’s reading a book to convince her to read to her (Bela almost always complies)

that’s it for Daniela. just a hyperactive baby with a murder streak <3 ONTO THE FINAL SISTER

Bela:

Mama’s (and I cannot stress this enough) Girl

needs constant reassurance that’s she’s doing a good job and yes this reassurance can ONLY come from her mother

INSOMNIAC

this girl never sleeps, pls baby you need some rest

she spends the time she should be sleeping reading books or running errands for her mother (whether Alcina asked her to or not)

she has read almost every single book in their giant library

Cassandra doesn’t understand this at all

“Why are you always cooped up in here?” Bela glanced up over the pages of her book at her younger sister. “This is the library Cassandra. Take a wild guess.” her voice was completely level and had no inflection. Cassandra gritted her teeth, “You think your so much better than me.” Bela sighed and closed her book. She didn’t want to do this again. “No. I don’t.” she said seriously. Cassandra eyed her for a moment then looked away, Bela saw the guilt on her face before she turned on her heal. “You’re so boring.”

because she reads so much, she is incredibly smart and just knows facts about random things

Daniela, daydreaming: “I wonder why grass is green.”

Bela, immediately: “the pigment that most grasses produce, Chlorophyll, absorbs almost all blue and red light and reflects green light which is why we see green. so I mean, technically grass is every single color EXCEPT for green.

Dani, confused as fuck: ....

Cass: “Bitch, how do you even know that?”

Bela’s sisters just end up using her as Google

“Hey Bela, how far away is the moon?” “238,900 miles.”

“Hey Bela, how many different climates are there?” “Twelve”

“Hey Bela, what’s the worlds deadliest poison?” “Botulinum... why?” “No reason.” “Dani. WHY?”

“Hey Bela, how much can I sell a human skull on the black market for?” Bela, concerned: “Cassandra why would—” “HOW MUCH?” “Well... are all the teeth still in tact?” “...No.” “Than only about $500.” “FUCK.”

“Hey Bela, I have this weird rash on my back and—” “Daniela. Do not finish that sentence. Go ask Mother.”

she is so quiet

and not just because she doesn’t talk very loud or even much at all. she’s just So. Silent. when she moves

just pops up in random places without anyone hearing her approach

even Daniela can’t hear her coming, which is saying something

Cassandra, minding her own business, drinking blood tea: .....

Bela, suddenly right next to her: “Hey I was wondering if— stop screaming, it’s me— have you seen Mothers lipstick? It’s missing.”

refuses any type of help with anything or else she feels like she failed that task

Never asks for help, Never asks for favors, and Never Ever will burden her Mother with any of her problems. Ever.

(Alcina thinks this is ridiculous. her eldest daughter pushes herself too hard.)

Anxiety™️

sometimes when her anxiety becomes too much she shuts down and becomes very indifferent to things around her. this has caused many fights between herself and Cassandra because Cass will get really fired up when all Bela does is respond with a monotone voice and blank stare.

overthinks literally everything and is a perfectionist

this makes her prone to panic attacks :(

when this happens she shuts herself in her room, not wanting to bother her Mother or sisters

Bela closes her bedroom door behind her and stumbles to her knees. she can’t seem to get air into her lungs no matter how hard she tried. she had failed. Mother asked her to bring her the head of that stupid man-thing, but somehow he knew their weakness.

how could he know? are Cassandra and Daniela ok? where are they? where is Mother?

Belas breathing was shallow and short, her chest burns as she presses her forehead into the ground. She claws the skin of her chest raw, leaving angry, red marks behind, desperately trying to open her lungs.

she stays as quiet as she can, only gasping few and far between. she will not be a burden. she should deal with the consequences of her failure. alone.

a sudden knock on her door makes her scramble backwards on her bottom till her back hits the opposite wall. then Belas worst nightmare, her Mothers voice.

“Bela?! Bela, is that you?” Alcinas words were rushes and worried. the door handle jiggled. “Bela, baby the door is locked, please let me in.” Bela covered her mouth and cried silently while her Mother begged to be let in.

the sound of snapping wood had Belas eyes flying open, her Mother had broken down the door. Bela shrunk into herself. She’s going to be so mad. I’m a failure. the ringing in her ears became so intense she couldn’t hear anything else.

large, soft hands cup her cheeks and a muffled voice through the air: “Bela, my love, you’re alright thank god. Are you hurt anywhere? Let me see.”

Bela pushed weakly at her Mothers arms and said between sobs, “I-I’m sorry, M-Mother.”

Alcina looked at her eldest daughter with confusion, she had no physical wounds, but the look on her face was heartbreaking. “What are you sorry for, my love?” this only made Belas breathing spend up even more, her face red from the lack of oxygen. Alcina quickly pulled her in close.

“Now Bela, listen to the sound of my voice,” she said it gently but just hard enough to grab her daughters attention. “I need you to copy my breath. Do it now, love, listen to me. Do what i’m telling you to.” Alcina took exaggerated breaths and noticed that instantly after her command, Bela had tried to follow, but the smaller girls breath was still choppy and small. Alcina rubbed a thumb across Belas cheek. “You’re doing so well baby. Keep going just like that. Good girl.” a smaller hand was placed on her arm and grabbed at her sleeve. “Good baby, use me to ground yourself. Keep breathing now, you’re doing so good.” Alcina kept whispering soft encouragements and praises until her daughters breathing was back to normal and she was laying limp on her chest.

Alcina moved the hair away from Belas face. “What a good girl, you did so well.” Bela squeezed her eyes shut and pushed into her Mother until her face was hidden. “I’m sorry Mother.” came a muffled apology, though her voice was much more steadier than before. “I failed you, I couldn’t stop the man-thing. He shot at the windows! He knows our weakness, Mother. What are we going to do? Where’s Daniela and Cassandra, are they ok? I should have stopped him for you I’m so sorry I—”

“Quiet.” Bela immediately seals her lips and looks away, already extracting herself from her Mother’s arms. She probably hates her. Alcina simple tugs her back and forces Bela to look in her eyes with a quick tap to the forehead. “Bela, I need you to listen to me very carefully.” Her daughters eyes go wide and she nods. “You have nothing to apologize for. This is not you’re fault and I will not allow you to think that way. Plus, the man-thing won’t bother us any longer, I took care of it.”

“But—” Alcina raises an eyebrow and Bela gives in, nodding hesitantly. “Good girl.” Bela exhales through her nose at the phrase and squeezes her Mother’s sleeve again. They sit like that for a few more moments, calming down.

Bela suddenly shoots up. “Daniela, Cassandra, are they—” “They’re fine my dear, Daniela got a little banged up, but Cassandra was already patching her up before I could even get close. We didn’t know where you were, that’s why I was so worried.” Bela relaxed and again nuzzled her nose into her Mother’s chest, took one more deep breath, then stood. “I’m going to go check on them.”

She steps through the now empty door frame and pauses. She spoke without turning around: “I won’t fail you again, Mother.” and shifts into a cloud of flies and disappears.

(am I projecting again? idk help)

can play the piano

no like you don’t understand, she is so good at piano

this girl has mastered songs by composers like Liszt, Beethoven, and Ravel

she’ll play for hours on end, if she starts a new piece she Will Not get up until she can play it through perfectly

she pretends not to notice Cassandra secretly listening to her play, hidden behind a nearby bookshelf

while her younger sisters always jump head first into a fight, Bela takes a more calculating approach. learning her enemies movements from afar before advancing and ending it in like 3 quick moves.

“Well Bela, if Mother asked you to jump off a bridge, would you?”

Bela, already climbing over the railing: “Hm?”

and there you go for Bela! my sweet child.. please learn self-care.

*ahem* I went overboard again didn’t I? WELP. I regret nothing. Give me more headcannons.

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snifflesthemouse · 4 years ago

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Harry’s the Problem. His wife is the symptom. He is the real Diana 2.0 Wannabe...

Since the Oprah interview aired, my whole perspective regarding the spare and his spouse has shifted. It would seem that I’m not alone in my thought process as more and more media outlets start reporting similar stances. Just recently, there was an article suggesting Harry didn’t change; but rather, he is only finally revealing his true self. The more I think about it all, the more I’ve come to the realization #6 is the real culprit behind everything.

I’m not saying that his wife doesn’t have her own agenda or shares responsibility for her part in all this. Her hands are far from clean. What I am saying is it’s finally time for all of us to consider the cold, hard truth. Harry is his mother’s child. Harry is the bad egg, and his wife is only a side effect of the real problem here.

Had it not been for the Oprah interview, I would have never put it all together. The problem with oversharing is too much information gets put out in the public. Most assume PR firms would worry about oversaturation in the press, but the real problem comes from personal interviews they cannot control in real-time. Puff pieces can be edited before publishing so facts and statements align; live interviews cannot. Over time, one of two patterns form from this oversaturation. Consistencies, repetitions, and similarities can be found in oversaturated truth-telling. Inconsistencies, changes, and huge differences result from those like Harry who prefer their trousers scorching hot from bursting into flames from deception. When you consistently lie, the only constant is the inconsistencies.

Now, those of us who have been following these two already know by now inconsistencies and changing stories should be expected. But the Oprah interview really highlighted some interesting things I had previously missed. The interview with Dax Shephard only solidifies my theories. Up until lately, those two have been together through most everything. Very seldom have we seen Harry alone in an interview or speech. There’s never a time where the missus isn’t popping up. James Corden proved that. Then we have the Oprah interview where she was supposed to be the star of the show. But, that was the moment it all changed. That interview was the moment she became the understudy.

Think about it. Who is the one being used in the media lately? Most people would suggest that the impending delivery of child number dos is why the missus is absent. One would then argue the Apple + special with Oprah started production well before the second child was a topic for discussion. The missus is being used less and less on camera or in the media. Everything is all about Harry. Forget about when Harry met Sally; Harry Met Hollywood!

Harry is the one doing the interviews, dropping projects, and talking with big Hollywood names. Even their announced Netflix projects are focused on one of Harry’s pre-married concepts. All the wife has going for her is a book that’s only number one in the “Books written by ex-Royals who couldn’t hack it” category. Seriously though, as of this posting the Bench is #2130 on the Amazon Books list, #12 in Children’s Black and African American Story Books, #73 in Children’s Emotions Books, and #167 in Children’s Family Life Books. Being pregnant isn’t a disqualifier for being interviewed. But, apparently being just the wife is.

So, if it was his wife’s plan from the beginning to marry Harry, get him to abandon his family, move to California, and become a big star with a Prince for a husband, her plans have been ruined. And if you think about what she said in the interview with Oprah, you can actually see the moments she told us all exactly that. She clearly tells Oprah Harry was her direct link and source to the Royal Family and everything she needed to know. She didn’t misspeak or misunderstand a thing; she was telling us that Harry’s next to be markled. In every weird answer or revelation where she gave her versions for why their child(ren) were without title, saying they wed three days before the chapel, or having to cry out to HR since Harry failed to help her while she was so depressed she wanted to kill herself and her unborn child... all of it. It was all just the beginning. It may seem like she is attacking her husband’s family, but Harry’s the real target now.

In just a couple sentences, she managed to reveal who Harry really was. Harry, of all people, should (and does) know how to navigate the press. Clearly, he failed to not only help her acclimate to Royal life, but it could also even be argued he set her up for failure for the get go. Let me give you an example. When my husband introduced me to his family for the first time, he told me little tidbits of information he found important for me to know. He essentially prepped me for the meeting so things went well. He wanted his family to like me because he loved me. I wanted them to like me because I loved him, too. So, I took to heart everything he told me. Yet, Harry’s wife shared with the world how little Harry cared about that. She credits Fergie with teaching her to curtsey, google for teaching her the National Anthem, and even said Her Majesty made her feel especially welcomed. So how did Harry not do more? If they started seeing one another in the early Summer of 2016, how is it Harry failed to teach or explain anything to her prior to meeting his grandmother, the Queen, when he had months and months of time to do so? How is it he failed his wife so miserably, she didn’t even understand basic UK custom, laws, or protocols? Why might you ask?

Simply put, Harry is so much like his mother, all he knows is how to play the victim narrative while using the link to the Royal family as a nonstop ATM machine. Many people aren’t honest with themselves when it comes to Diana. She wasn’t the Mother Theresa everyone makes her out to be. Mother Theresa wasn’t a Mother Theresa either, though. Did Diana do some great things? Absolutely. Did she do them only because they were nice or great? Absolutely… not. Diana’s PR team would even have her switch up her charity causes whenever they felt it was getting to martyrdom level. They’d refer to her PR stunts as flavors. Does that sound like an innocent woman?

Not to me. This whole time we all have seen his wife as the root of all issues, but she’s the side effect. It’s becoming more clear by the day that Harry searched out her. He wanted someone with the basic Hollywood connections that he could capitalize. Someone that seemed so controlling and ambitious it would be easy to believe they were controlling him, too. Of course he knew she would invite all the celebs she did. He probably inspired that guest list. Instead of guiding her in the press and in British society, he leads her to slaughter. He hides behind her repeated gaffes and wokeness to keep on his own mission.

You see, Harry is obsessed with his brother eventually becoming king, being the “Second Son of Diana” and being the misfit. He is obsessed with his brother and father. They are all he talks about. When you obsess on something like that, it is more revealing than anything you say. Harry’s true motives aren’t protecting his wife and children. His real motive is making a name for himself like his mother did. If he can manage to get some revenge by making the Firm feel some backlash, hey that’s a bonus.

While his wife may think in her mind she will be the next Diana 2.0, the truth is we all missed who really will be. Harry is the one wanting to be Diana 2.0. If that’s the case, then that means the much older spouse for whom there are two children with, aka the wife, would be his Charles. Remember, Diana lost her HRH and titles. And we have Harry being very aggressive and pushy, to the point it seems he is trying to get ahead of a Palace announcement of them losing their titles. But it makes sense now.

They aren’t trying to lose anything, but instead Harry keeps opening his mouth to create pressure in the media. He knows his wife does not want to give those titles back. But if he himself keeps saying outrageous things, then it would put everyone in ultimatum mode. Either Harry will push hard enough that Parliament and the Queen will have enough, or the press will get so critical of the two, Harry will push his wife to agree to returning the titles.

Harry is following the Diana business model. While in the Royal Family, they both were seen as rock stars who had more star power the the Sovereign, which was an issue. Then, they couldn’t take all the abuse, coldness, and inhumanity, so they bolted for freedom. Instead of putting the past behind them, they use the past to monetize grief and trauma in such a way, they become their own brand. Right now, the trauma being monetized comes from the past, but the problem will soon come when that trauma is tapped out. He will need a source of new pain or victimhood. Enters the wife stage left.

The wife is a tool. She of course has her own plans and thinks she is the one in control or the genius. She thinks she is the one everyone wants to work with. But it’s becoming clear to her that isn’t the case and she’s been played by her elite buddies. They all want him, not her. They all duped her for him. If I can see it, and I can see her already finger pointing that Harry is the failure here, then she can see it. And that means paradise will soon be lost in those Montecito hills. His wife won’t go down without a serious fight here. I wouldn’t even be surprised if she eventually causes him to lose his special visa.

Overall, Harry hides behind his wife like a beard or shield protecting him from the press’s glaring lens. He lets her do and say whatever she thinks is great so he can keep plotting his own plans. He allows her to take the fall, look stupid, pull stunts people can see through, etc. for a reason. He isn’t completely sure he can make it in his new California life. He knows he can’t if he keeps her for too long, but he also knows he needs an exit strategy in case it blows up. So, he pins the press to attack her as the true culprit. If they split and he has to, he can return home and play the victim of her. If they split and he is doing okay in Hollywood, she can be the reason he plays victim to big named people like Oprah and Gayle.

I can see it now. An Oprah Special with Harry tonight on Apple +. Something cheesy or corny that is almost plagiarism. Like Narcissus and the Prince or something. Watch. Mark my words. Oprah talking to Harry about surviving the marriage while trying to rescue two small kids, being in the spotlight as a Royal while being gaslit by a narcissistic wife… yes I can see the green screen set up now.

I know this is difficult to digest, but I do ask you to try. While his wife is not innocent, she clearly is guilty for her own part indeed, his wife isn’t the true problem. The true problem here is a man who has a serious issue with living in the shadow of his future-King father and future-King brother, and his future-King nephew, that he has chosen to use the same exact attack model his own mother used to merch and marginally disrupt the institution that made her a star. Harry and his mother both wanted the entire spotlight, but both knew they could never have it the way they wanted it. So, they wrote their own victimhood narrative.

And here we are now. Mark my words. Harry will keep pushing until those remaining titles are removed by them forcing the hands of Parliament and the Queen. Or, they’ll push and push in the press so much the outrage and hypocrisy will leave them no other option but to renounce and re-gift those titles and rights to the line of succession. That is what he wants, even if his missus doesn’t. Also make no mistake about it. Harry is the real Diana 2.0 wannabe, not his wife. Keep an eye out. I have this gnawing feeling that soon enough, there will be plenty leaks from the wife about the husband. She won’t go quietly into the Beverly Hills… but neither will he.

#megxit #6 #harryswife #yankeewally #murky meg #diana2.0

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fearlessinger · 3 years ago

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So, a little less than a month year ago (this is all my fault, I take sole responsibility for this loooong delay), I got roped into reading The Trials Of Apollo by @flightfoot’s amazing meta. I loved it more than I could have ever anticipated, and I’ve been gushing about it non stop to her on discord. We had a lot of fun reviewing the series and taking it apart to overanalyze bit by bit, marveling at the way it keeps growing layers and dimensions the longer one looks at it. Finally, we took out a google doc. The following is result n.3 of our combined excited ramblings, and... well it sort of turned into a full on dissertation. Whoops.

"You must make your own choice."

Reconstructing Apollo’s Journey within Riordan’s Narrative

Much too self aware to be egotistical (read on ao3)

This is as much a story about redemption as it is a story about surviving abuse. It could not have been any other way, because for Apollo these two things are, in almost every way that matters, one and the same. Yet Apollo claims for himself only one of these two story arcs. He takes the redemption, as he rightfully should. He leaves the survival to Meg. She’s the one who should not be held responsible for what she’s done on Nero’s orders. She’s the one who didn’t – couldn’t – know better. She’s the one who could not have tried harder. She’s the one who has a chance of getting free.

‘I don’t blame you for anything. [...] The fact that you left me alone in the Grove of Dodona, that you lied about your stepfather –’

‘Stop.’

I waited for her faithful servant Peaches the karpos to fall from the heavens and tear my scalp off. It didn’t happen.

‘What I mean,’ I tried again, ‘is that I am sorry for everything you have been through. None of it was your fault. You should not blame yourself. That fiend Nero played with your emotions, twisted your thoughts –’

‘Stop.’

‘Perhaps I could put my feelings into a song.’

‘Stop.’

‘Or I could tell you a story about a similar thing that once happened to me.’ (TDP 163-164)

I could tell you a story about a similar thing that once happened to me, Apollo says. But he doesn’t. Not to her, and not to anyone else. Not even to us, the readers, the only people to whom he eventually finds the courage to admit what he’s known all along: that he’s been a victim for at least as long as he’s been a villain.

In the centre, behind a marble altar, rose a massive golden statue of Dad himself: Jupiter Optimus Maximus, draped in a purple silk toga big enough to be a ship’s sail. He looked stern, wise and paternal, though he was only one of those in real life.

Seeing him tower above me, lightning bolt raised, I had to fight the urge to cower and plead. I knew it was only a statue, but if you’ve ever been traumatized by someone, you’ll understand. It doesn’t take much to trigger those old fears: a look, a sound, a familiar situation. Or a fifty-foot-tall golden statue of your abuser – that does the trick. (TTT 94-95)

It is a costly admission for him. It takes him 3 books to get there. Oh, he’s joked about it before. He’s complained. Apollo LOVES complaining. Never let it be said that he missed a chance to loudly and dramatically whine about a minor inconvenience. He’ll happily tell anyone who’ll listen how hard and cruel and unfair his life is... so long as there’s no chance of being taken seriously.

Apollo tells his most convincing lies simply by making the truth sound laughable.

Zeus seemed to consider egotism a trait the boy had inherited from me. Which is ridiculous. I am much too self-aware to be egotistical. (THO 31)

But he is, indeed, much too self aware not to know what he’s doing. Which is why his rather unconventional redemption arc involves so little actual soul searching. He never has to look very far. Once he finally resolves to stop lying for good, he doesn’t have to look at all.

It’s precisely the act of finally recognizing his wrongdoings for what they are, and resolving to take responsibility for them, that at long last allows him to acknowledge the evil that has been done to him.

He only ever voices the first of those two confessions in front of his companions. He knows he has no right to make excuses for himself, no right to ask for sympathy. He sees the similarities between himself and Meg, but he knows he is not like her. Despite the child-like body he’s been forced into by his father, he is an adult. He does not get to claim ignorance, or impotence, even though he’s tempted to, even though, by some standards at least, he could. It doesn’t matter. His shortcomings may not be entirely his fault, but his surrender is.

Because that’s what he had done. He had surrendered.

The Apollo we meet at the very beginning of this story, before he is cast out of Olympus and trapped in the dreadfully normal mortal flesh prison that is the body of Lester Papadopoulos, is a fully grown man, father and grandfather and great grandfather hundreds of times over, still living at home with his abusive dad and his wicked stepmom. He is fine with it. More than fine, in fact! As he tells us repeatedly, he can’t wait to get back to that life. So what if that life kinda sucks? What if he has to live it according to his father’s dictates rather than his own? What then? There are no better options. None that he’s been able to find, and he has been looking. He has been looking for a really, really long time. So maybe, as pathetic as the notion is, this is the best he can do.

The Apollo we meet at the beginning of this story is fully determined to believe it. After so many attempts, after so many failures, he has found an incredibly shitty but incredibly solid way to cope. And he has settled. He has decided to settle. Even though, deep down, he still feels that this is far from what he should be able and willing to aspire to. He has surrendered. He's found comfort in surrendering. An incredibly shitty kind of comfort! But comfort all the same.

The Apollo we meet at the beginning of this story is the empty husk of a person who's given up on everything that ever mattered to him. He’s a pretender. A showman. An aged comedian with a stale act and an astounding inability to read his audience. He shamelessly tells us of his humiliation and his blunders, brags about how little he thinks of us without a trace of embarrassment, painfully confident that even at his worst he deserves our attention. How could he not? He’s the lead actor on the world’s stage, the main character of Life.

And yet, he’s very clearly not the character he’s supposed to be: “the handsomest, most talented, most popular god in the pantheon,” he helpfully reminds us, and as ridiculous as that sounds, especially coming out of his own mouth, he may as well be quoting the introductory section of his own Wikipedia page.

The Brilliant Apollo, the crown prince of Olympus who far outshone all his siblings, who amassed talents and domains beyond those of any of his brethren, to whom so many heroes owed their success or demise, whom so many emperors and kings wanted to emulate, and who, yes, may have been kind of an asshole at times, but a competent asshole who got things done.

This guy? He is, at best, a parody of his fabled namesake. He’s a small, petty, ineffectual loser desperate to be liked but unwilling to do any of the work that would make that possible. He can’t wait to get someone, anyone, to fight his battles for him. He’s all too happy to take credit for others’ accomplishments to make up for the fact that he has none of his own.

It’s very easy to laugh at him. He seems like he had it coming. The more he keeps lamenting the injustice of his punishment, the more he convinces us that he deserved it. Sometimes he almost seems like he himself might be conscious of this:

I stared at my battered face in the bathroom mirror. Perhaps teenage angst had permeated the clothes, because I felt more like a sulky high-schooler than ever. I thought how unfair it was that I was being punished, how lame my father was, how no one else in the history of time had ever experienced problems like mine. (THO 30)

But immediately he rushes to disabuse us of that notion:

Of course, all that was empirically true. No exaggeration was required. (THO 30)

I’m not joking, he insists while delivering his lines like he expects there to be canned laughter at the end of them:

If I didn’t know how much Percy Jackson adored me, I would have sworn he was about to punch me in my already-broken nose. (THO 26)

And he shows us enough of his real vulnerability that it’s easy to believe him.

I took a deep breath. Then I did my usual motivational speech in the mirror: ‘You are gorgeous and people love you!’ I went out to face the world. (THO 31)

After all, what kind of depth can a person who unironically does that have?

‘I’m fat!’

‘You’re average. Average people don’t have eight-pack abs. C’mon.’

I wanted to protest that I was not average nor a person, but with growing despair I realized the term now fitted me perfectly. (THO 20)

He’s convinced he’s so much better than us, he takes our sympathy for granted. He trusts we will believe his obvious lies because he’s too taken with himself not to realize how transparent they are. And even if we don’t, even if he isn’t, does it really matter? Are we not entertained?

If there’s one thing Apollo is confident he can do – the only thing Apollo’s still confident he can do – is put on a show.

And he does. He makes us wince and cringe at his awfulness, marvel at his obliviousness and ineptitude, see through his obviously fake brags so clearly and so often in the span of the first handful of chapters, that by the time he finally, actually, has to do something we are fully ready to believe it’s an accident he happens to do the decent thing. He’s so quick to declare any good deed of his was not his intended result, and simultaneously pat himself on the back for doing the bare minimum, that for a ridiculously long while the idea that he can actually be relied upon to do what’s right, that this is in fact a pattern of behavior and intent for him, keeps seeming just implausible enough to be disbelieved.

“You saved me,” Meg interrupted. “I was going to die. Maybe that’s why you got your voice back.”

I was reluctant to admit it, but she might have been right. The last time I’d experienced a burst of godly power, in the woods of Camp Half-Blood, my children Kayla and Austin had been in imminent danger of burning alive. Concern for others was a logical trigger for my powers. I was, after all, selfless, caring, and an all-around nice guy. Nevertheless, I found it irritating that my own well-being wasn’t sufficient to give me godly strength. My life was important too! (TDP 204)

I’m a good person, he says in the tone of someone who knows that statement to be false and is trying to delude himself into thinking it isn’t. And yet he prefaces it with “I’m reluctant to admit it.” If Meg hadn’t voiced the idea in the first place, Apollo would not even have considered it, even though it is, in fact, the obvious explanation. But that can’t be, because Apollo is not selfless, caring, or nice. To really drive that point home, with his very next breath he rushes to recenter the conversation on himself. “Why can’t I also be powerful for MY sake?” he whines.

Apollo wants to believe he’s a good person. But he is not a person. He’s a god. And gods don’t want, can’t want to be good. Gods are perfect. They don’t doubt. They don’t feel guilt or remorse. They don’t change.

Sally Jackson crossed her arms. In spite of the grim matters we were discussing, she smiled. ‘You’ve grown up.’

I assumed she was talking about Meg. Over the last few months, my young friend had indeed got taller and – Wait. Was Sally referring to me?

My first thought: preposterous! I was four thousand years old. I didn’t grow up.

She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. ‘The last time you were here, you were so lost. So … well, if you don’t mind me saying –’

‘Pathetic,’ I blurted out. ‘Whiny, entitled, selfish. I felt terribly sorry for myself.’

Meg nodded along with my words as if listening to her favourite song. ‘You still feel sorry for yourself.’

‘But now,’ Sally said, sitting back again, ‘you’re more … human, I suppose.’

There was that word again: human, which not long ago I would have considered a terrible insult. Now, every time I heard it, I thought of Jason Grace’s admonition: Remember what it’s like to be human.

He hadn’t meant all the terrible things about being human, of which there were plenty. He’d meant the best things: standing up for a just cause, putting others first, having stubborn faith that you could make a difference, even if it meant you had to die to protect your friends and what you believed in. These were not the kind of feelings that gods had … well, ever. (TON 45-46)

“These were not the kind of feelings that gods had” he thinks, still, at the beginning of the very last book. And yet, here he is, having them. He’s had them his entire life. He’s had them since he set out to slay Python the first time, a newborn god brimming with power and a good dose of cockiness too, eager to prove himself, to be of use, to make a difference.

“I was the worst of the gods,” he says, dropping all pretenses as he sings of his failures to the myrmekes. Because I loved too much. Because I felt guilty. Because I kept trying to do more. Because I kept changing my mind.

These are unforgivable sins for a god. That’s what Apollo and all of his divine siblings have been taught. That’s what they’ve all, in time, learned to believe. Good people don’t survive on Olympus.

And Apollo is, above all, a survivor.

So Apollo doesn’t want to believe he’s a good person.

This is incredibly uncharacteristic of me, he makes sure to specify every time he does something kind, every time he finds himself unable to hide his shame or guilt or doubt, to hide how much he cares, well past the point where we start realizing that it is, in fact, perfectly characteristic of him.

I’m totally gonna throw my companions to the wolves any second now, he says while moving to stand between them and the danger. I’m tired of listening to mortals talking about themselves, he says, having just finished needling them with questions about their circumstances and their feelings and the wellbeing of both them and their loved ones. I did the right thing so I could call myself right, which makes it a selfish thing, actually. I did the right thing but I was thinking about not doing it for a moment there, so really, it doesn’t count. I did the right thing but look, I had no choice, I was coerced, they offered me a musical instrument, that’s practically blackmail!

For someone who appears so eager to boast about his legendary past, he doesn’t seem to be able to recall any of the actual good things he’s done. He won’t even admit to having killed Python the first time until he’s very nearly forced to. Even then, what looms big in his mind is not his success but the fact that he struggled to achieve it. And what is even the most impressive achievement worth, if it’s not effortless? Gods shouldn’t struggle. Only the weak do.

‘Apollo,’ she said, ‘those shots were fantastic. A little more practice and –’

‘I’m the god of archery!’ I wailed. ‘I don’t practice!’ (THO 141)

So Apollo lies. He lies about being better than he is. Stronger. Immovable. In control. He lies about being worse than he is. Ignorant. Unfeeling. Cruel.

He’s as determined to misread Percy’s annoyance toward him as adoration as he is to misread Chiron’s faith in him as an insult.

It occurred to me that I’d seen that keen look in Chiron’s eyes before – when he’d assessed Achilles’s sword technique and Ajax’s skill with a spear. It was the look of a seasoned coach scouting new talent. I’d never dreamed the centaur would look at me that way, as if I had something to prove to him, as if my mettle were untested. I felt so … so objectified. (THO 104)

Chiron’s not the one who thinks Apollo has anything to prove. In fact, Chiron has the highest possible expectations of him. Chiron, who owes Apollo everything he knows, everything he has, still believes Apollo capable of great deeds like the ones recounted in his Wikipedia page, the ones we all know from the storybooks.

“Wikipedia,” says Apollo, “is always getting stuff wrong about me.” And as for the storybooks? They’ll make “good tinder for a fire.”

Apollo knows the truth. He isn’t a hero. He isn’t great. He isn’t even good. A good person would not have to worry about forgetting his children’s names. A good person would not stand by as little kids get enlisted to fight their parents’ wars. A good person would not let them die. A good person would not take out his anger on people he knows to be without fault, no matter how rightful that anger is, or how unreachable the real target of it is.

And if he’s a bad person, then he has no reason to try and push back against a status quo where kids are seen as fodder for the gods to use and discard as they see fit. No reason to risk his neck by challenging his father’s rules. No reason to risk anything by trying to do better. If he’s a bad person, then he can claim all the actions and, even more, the millennia of inaction he so regrets were his choice rather than his failure, or worse, something that he had no real say in at all.

I turned my face to the sky. ‘If you want to punish me, Father, be my guest, but have the courage to hurt me directly, not my mortal companion. BE A MAN!’

To my surprise, the skies remained silent. Lightning did not vaporize me. (THO 252)

There’s a long stretch of book 1, immediately after Kayla and Austin get kidnapped, in which all of the bullshit abruptly disappears and we get Apollo’s almost completely unfiltered, genuine pov. It is a noticeable enough shift that it’s impossible to miss even on first reading, but at the time it happens, we don’t know enough about who Apollo really is as a person to know how to interpret it. “It’s all my fault,” Apollo states, even though it clearly isn’t. He takes the blame for his enemies targeting his children. He takes the blame for Meg being captured by the ants.

And it was easy, in light of what we knew about him at the time, to view this as more proof of Apollo’s egotism. Of course he’d think that. He thinks everything is about him. But look: Zeus did not in fact vaporize him. Apollo’s just being his usual overly dramatic narcissistic self. He’s cracked enough jokes about being fried by his father’s lightning that we know not to take that seriously. He’s just being a comedian.

Granted, not a very original or funny one. He keeps recycling the same tired punchlines. For example, he keeps making a production of anticipating cartoonishly violent responses from people whenever he says something he knows they’ll dislike. That routine got old fast, but he seems to be really fixated on it for some reason.

It takes us a long while to realize what the reason is.

But it’s not actually for his own sake that Apollo fears the most.

“How could I have been so foolish?” he berates himself. “Whenever I angered the other gods, those closest to me were struck down.”

It’s only in this moment that he finally allows himself to call Kayla and Austin “my children” out loud. He’d explained his reluctance to do so before:

My eyes watered. Not so long ago – like this morning, for instance – the idea of these young demigods being able to help me would have struck me as ridiculous. Now their kindness moved me more than a hundred sacrificial bulls. I couldn’t recall the last time someone had cared about me enough to curse my enemies with rhyming couplets.

‘Thank you,’ I managed. I could not add my children. It didn’t seem right. These demigods were my protectors and my family, but for the present I could not think of myself as their father. A father should do more – a father should give more to his children than he takes. (THO 115)

And then, of course, he’d instantly rushed to cover up the shame of having shown some decency. “This was a novel idea for me,” he’d said, lying through his teeth and at the same time wholeheartedly believing his own lie, as all the best liars do.

Sometimes a decent, moral notion just springs up in your brain fully formed and perfectly articulated like that. You never know when it might happen! It’s not weird. It must be the mortality, actually. That pesky mortal conscience side effect that people get together with their ability to die. It’s totally a thing.

But the second Kayla and Austin are in danger, his hesitation suddenly evaporates. They are his children. They are his responsibility. “I should’ve done more to protect them,” he says.“I should have anticipated that my enemies would target them to hurt me.”

Nero wanted Meg to depend entirely on him. She wasn’t allowed to have her own possessions, her own friends. Everything in her life had to be tainted with Nero’s poison.

If he got his hands on me, no doubt he would use me the same way. Whatever horrible tortures he had planned for Lester Papadopoulos, they wouldn’t be as bad as the way he tortured Meg. He would make her feel responsible for my pain and death. (TDP 194-195)

Apollo immediately understands Nero’s game. He knows how this works, because he’s living within a scaled up version of it. It doesn’t matter that he isn’t a child. That he’s a god. Zeus is a god too, and he’s more powerful than him. There is no questioning his edicts. There is no escaping them either. No matter how much distance Apollo can put between himself and his father, he’ll still have the same amount of privacy and freedom as a kid whose parents won't let close the door to his own bedroom. Zeus just has to take one step forward to be instantly breathing down his subjects’ neck. It doesn't matter that he doesn't always do it. What matters is that he can, if he wants to.

All the gods live in fear of the day Zeus will decide that he wants to. They’d do anything to redirect his wrath from themselves. They have no one save their own family, high on top of the Empire State Building, walled off from the rest of the world, forbidden from having any kind of meaningful interaction, from building any kind of lasting connection with the mortals down below, and they are ready to throw one another into the jaws of the Beast at a moment’s notice.

“If I gave up on everyone who has tried to kill me,” Apollo tells Meg, trying to make her understand why he’s willing to put his faith in Lytierses, “I would have no allies left on the Olympian Council.”

Apollo doesn’t hold it against them. It’s just how it is.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.’

‘What could you have done?’

‘I mean at the Parthenon. I tried to talk sense into Zeus. I told him he was wrong to punish you. He wouldn’t listen.’

[...]

My first thought was to scream, ARE YOU INSANE?

Then more appropriate words came to me. ‘Thank you.’ (TBM 216)

The tragedy of Jason Grace isn’t that his death is unfair, though it is. It’s not even that his death was preventable, because it wasn’t. It’s that his death, ultimately, was not necessary.

This right here is the turning point for Apollo. Not Jason’s death, but Jason’s willingness to stand up to Zeus for him, even though Jason barely knew him, even though it provided Jason nothing, when nobody else, not even Artemis, would. It’s Jason’s willingness to do for Apollo what Apollo had long lost the courage to do for anyone, including himself.

But Jason has no way of knowing that, and all Apollo can give him is his word. That’s when Jason’s fate is sealed. The moment he decides that Apollo’s promise is worth more than his life. The moment he chooses to sacrifice his last few precious seconds to remind Apollo of it once more, one final time, to stake everything he has on this crazy gamble, believing – or at least hoping, even against all hope – that Apollo will follow through.

“It’s all my fault,” Apollo says. But Meg disagrees.

‘Jason made a choice,’ she said. ‘Same as you. Heroes have to be ready to sacrifice themselves.’

I felt unsettled … and not just because Meg had used such a long sentence. I didn’t like her definition of heroism. I’d always thought of a hero as someone who stood on a parade float, waved at the crowd, tossed candy and basked in the adulation of the commoners. But sacrificing yourself? No. That would not be one of my bullet points for a hero-recruitment brochure.

Also, Meg seemed to be calling me a hero, putting me in the same category as Jason Grace. That didn’t feel right. I made a much better god than a hero. (TBM 316-317)

I’ve always hated thinking of heroes as expendable, Apollo admits, finally, after almost 3 books spent lying to both us and himself about it, and by the time he does, it doesn’t even feel like a revelation anymore. He’d told us, didn’t he? He’d shown us. He is the worst of the gods. But still, a much better god than a hero. Because heroes are willing to risk it all for what they believe is right. And Apollo? He just really, really doesn’t want to die. “I was,” he says, “a coward that way.”

And yet, by the time he says this, we’ve witnessed Apollo’s willingness to risk and sacrifice himself for his children, for the people he keeps insisting he finds so annoying and yet he’s always so eager to start calling friends, multiple times already.

But he’s never actually wanted to die. He just can’t bring himself to. He is a survivor. And survivors can’t be heroes. Good people don’t survive. Only the bad ones do. That’s what his experience has taught him, again and again and again, even though the notion goes against everything he feels, deep down, is right.

When he meets his children in person for the first time and they are far more concerned about the prospect of losing their talents than of losing their father, he is relieved. He wants them to be selfish, just like he is. He wants them to survive.

But as it turns out, his children aren’t selfish. They care so much, so deeply and fiercely, about so much more than just themselves. They grow attached so quickly. They are eager to help. They are just like him, in all the ways he never would have wanted them to be.

Looking at them, he can’t help but feel ashamed.

Apollo has done many, many bad things in his long life, and not all of them to survive. If there was any justice in this world, he would not be the one still here, still standing, still alive, instead of all the far more deserving people he’s buried.

But still, he does not want to die. Not even now, at his absolute lowest, not even now that he’s lost everything he’s ever had, up to and including his own name.

So he can’t think of himself as a hero. He does not want to.

“I had stabbed myself in the chest fully expecting that Medea would heal me,” he says, to explain why that does not count as a proper self sacrifice.

In his mind, intent seems to matter as much as actions do. The truth is, for a god? It probably does. For a god, wanting to do something might as well be the same as having already done it. Apollo is not a god anymore, and yet, still, he desperately wants to survive. He keeps surviving despite all odds. He keeps surviving stuff that by all rights should have killed an average mortal human a hundred times over.

But what good is it to survive, if it benefits no one? What good is the power of a god, the power to do anything you think of the moment it crosses your mind, if it can’t be used to do what’s right?

She fixed her eyes on me. Her lips quivered. I could tell she wanted a way out – some eloquent argument that would mollify her stepfather and allow her to follow her conscience. But I was no longer a silver-tongued god. I could not out-talk an orator like Nero. And I would not play the Beast’s blame game.

Instead, I took a page from Meg’s book, which was always short and to the point.

‘He’s evil,’ I said. ‘You’re good. You must make your own choice.’ (THO 290)

Apollo immediately understands what Meg is silently asking of him. He recognizes that she is looking for an excuse, a stratagem, a ruse that will let her do the right thing without setting off her abuser, because it’s what HE always does too.

He does it even now, even within the confines of his own head, arguably the only place that’s out of the reach of his father’s all seeing gaze.

His whole life and sense of self have been consumed by the hopeless search for the exact combination of words and behaviors that will let him act according to his own morals without putting into question Zeus’ judgement, without challenging Zeus’ rules, and by his increasingly despicable attempts to fool himself into thinking that that isn’t true.

But it is true. Deep down Apollo knows it is. Even when he manages to score a point, to win a round... he is still always playing his father’s game.

This is the awful reality he has resigned himself to. It’s the best he can do. He is convinced of it. He has accepted it.

But he can’t accept that the same is true for Meg. So he gives her the advice he refuses to take for himself.

“He’s evil. You’re good. You must make your own choice.”

He’s able to state it in such simple, clear terms for her. He’s light years away from being willing and able to believe that it applies to him too.

He doesn’t want that kind of responsibility. He can’t trust himself with it. He can’t even bring himself to admit to the choice that he’s making in this very moment, has to make up a half hearted excuse about suddenly lacking the ability to spin a yarn, for reasons, despite the fact that he’s been bullshitting us for almost an entire novel.

But he can believe in Meg, because she is not like him. She is strong. She is good. She deserves a chance to do better.

“You, Meg, are powerful,” he tells her on their first morning together at camp. “You will do well,” he tells Lityerses as they part ways. “We can trust him,” he says, introducing Crest to the residents of the Cistern. Despite all of his protestations to the contrary, against his own better judgement, he can’t help seizing every chance he gets to lift up the people around him, to put his faith in them, to give them his trust, even and especially when nobody else will.

“I believe in second chances”, he says, “and thirds, and fourths.” But not for himself. Never for himself. He knows himself too well. He is not strong, nor good, nor deserving.

#trials of apollo #toa #toa spoilers #ton spoilers #rrverse

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criticallyacclaimedstranger · 3 years ago

Text

Fic: What We Don't Know Can't Hurt Us

Fandom: Triple Frontier

Pairing: Frankie Morales x Librarian!Reader (cishet female) meet-cute

Warnings: No warnings really, some language and mention of masturbation and sex. Reader doesn't like kids. Yearning. Frankie is a TOTAL DILF SWEETHEART. Sad ending.

Summary: Reader is a librarian who has to temp at the kids' section desk from time to time which is a pain because she doesn't like kids. And who is a regular if not a very hot, scruffy-looking dad with the very polite and mild-mannered daughter? Sparks fly but some things maybe aren't meant to be.

Words: 5,155

a/n: Just to be clear, this one doesn't end well. I just wanted to write something sad, I guess.

Oh, shit, there he is again. The Hot Dad.

You straighten a little in your chair and once again curse the fact that you’re working in the children’s section at the library: the only desk that isn’t adjustable. You prefer to do your service desk duties standing up, not only for ergonomic reasons but because you hate how patrons look down on you – literally – when you’re seated by the desk. Also, you tend to slouch and it’s not an attractive look. And at the kids’ section, you’re all supposed to work on the same level as the little tykes. And you’re not particularly keen on those.

You are, however, keen on hot dads. God knows you only get them once in a blue moon and if they show up, it’s usually in tow of a whole clan of children and a wife. But this dad has been in once before when you’ve had desk duty and you saw him stop at the shelf for picture books about divorce and pick out a few. You also heard him tell his little girl that she shouldn’t bring the books she chose to her mom’s. Divorcee, so fantasizing was even more allowed – although he probably had a girlfriend. Guys like that always do.

“You don’t want to lose them, sweetie,” he had explained patiently to his daughter. “You can keep them in your room at my place but if you take them to your mom’s there’s a risk you lose them and that means I have to pay for them. You see, we’re only borrowing these books, that’s what you do in a library.”

You had smiled an inwards smile when listening to him. There was nothing you loved more than parents who actually seemed to understand that all the material in the library was free at one simple condition: return it in time, in the same condition as you borrowed it. A lot of people did not seem to grasp this and made a huge deal when they failed to meet these conditions and were faced with late fees or even had to compensate for lost books. But when parents who knew how to use a library include their offspring, explain how it all works for them, well, that’s how you foster a new generation of good library patrons.

This dad did just that. And he was very careful with the books, prompting his daughter to be the same. Every book she pulled out of the stacks, he helped her put back in the right place. That’s practically marriage material right there and it was enough to make you weak at the knees, to be honest. After almost ten years working in a public library, you were disillusioned about people in general and their intelligence in particular. Sure, you liked your job enough to not cry in the mornings when you had to leave bed, and you did enjoy the work itself (mostly), but… having to deal with people was exhausting. Having to deal with little people even more so, and the worst was having to deal with adult people who had little people with them. Parents.

Hence your absolute obsession with Hot Dad who was soft-spoken, really good with his kid, understood to appreciate the library and its services, nodded his hello to you when passing by the desk, didn’t make a mess, clearly read to his kid regularly and encouraged her to read for herself. You just didn’t get to see people like that so often, and it triggered your interest. You allowed yourself to daydream about him.

Francisco Morales. You remember his name from his last visit, when he and the kid came up to the desk with their haul. You always encouraged patrons to use the self-service check-out (the less you had to do deal with them, the better), but for this guy you were more than willing to go the extra service mile, even with the kid staring at your every move from across the desk as you registered all the loans. You silently gave her plus points for not trying to “help” like some kids did, and for the quiet but clear Thank you she gave you without prompting from her father.

You’re busying yourself with the returns, loading them onto a cart, when you hear a soft, deep voice go Excuse me behind your back. You twirl around and see Morales, pulling his baseball cap off his head to reveal curls that would make any hair model cry of envy.

“Sorry to bother you,” he offers. Take me now, you think to yourself but instead, you give him your brightest customer service smile, the one you rarely give patrons.

“No worries, how can I help?”

“We’re looking for picture books about farm animals. You don’t happen to have those separated? I noticed you have some subject areas separated.” He gestures back towards the picture book stacks where his daughter is quietly perusing.

“We don’t, but I think we have some Julia Donaldsons available, let me come and have a look.”

You don’t always offer. With most patrons, you’d tell them to look under D for Donaldson and then smile sweetly and ask them if they’re okay to do it themselves. You can’t do everything for everyone, that way they’ll never learn. But for Francisco Morales and his well-behaved little girl, you’re absolutely willing to make an exception.

There are some Donaldsons that the girl, whose name you learn is Sofia, eagerly accepts when you present her with them.

“I love fawm animals,” she sighs happily as she browses the first one. “Do you?”

“Who doesn’t love animals?” You make the effort to small talk although communicating with kids usually makes you awkward.

“What’s youw favowite? Mine is bunny. And howses. And lambs.”

“Goats! I love goats, they’re so cute and sweet and playful.” You almost add something about goats being the devil’s favorite animal as well but manage to stop yourself in time.

“Is there something else you want to ask the librarian?” Morales asks his daughter. “If not, I’m sure she has a lot of work to do, and we shouldn’t keep her any longer.”

“I’m here to help,” you shrug and give him a little smile: not a polite, impersonal one that you’d give a patron, but a more intimate one. A flirty smile. “You just need to ask.”

The smile he gives you back is warm and grateful, and you realize that he doesn’t have different facial expressions for different people. He doesn’t work in customer service because if he did, he’d know the difference. Not that you ever thought he worked in retail or anything like that, well, maybe a hardware store, but no. He just doesn’t seem like the type. The way he moves his body suggests something a lot more physical.

Oh, you’d like to get physical with him, alright…

All the sucky library-themed pick-up lines flash through your head. Can I check you out as an overnight loan? Can I insert my private collection into your empty stacks? My reference desk or yours? Am I being too loud, well, you’ll just have to shush me with your lips. You’re like an overdue library book because you have fine written all over you.

Worst part is, if Hot Dad Morales tried any of these on you, you’d probably forgive him and go for it. Maybe. You’re really not that simple, but a girl can dream, right?

The kid thanks you and you return to the relative safety of the desk and the mundane task of alphabetizing returns. You need to calm the fuck down and act professional. Daydreaming is fine but you’re barely toeing the line.

God, you need to get laid. As if that’s something that one can remedy just by walking into a store and ordering a medium dick with a side of hands and tongue.

📚📚📚

The next time you see Francisco and Sofia Morales, you’re taking your lunch break in the small park outside the library. It’s a sunny day and you didn’t fancy sitting in the breakroom with your salad, listening to colleagues talking about who cares what. So you took your lunch box, fork, and water bottle, and went to sit on the park bench the furthest away from the swing set and sandbox. The weather is nice and you enjoy yourself and your break from the library’s chat service. You never know what you’re gonna get when you work the chat: a stupid question about opening hours which anyone could google the answer to, or something more complicated like requests for books with partial or no titles, rarities, or subject areas that you don’t know much about. That’s when you get to use your whole competence and really dig deep, think outside the box, solve problems. You love it but it’s challenging at times, and takes a lot of energy. Your outdoor break is welcome.

“Hi!”

You hadn’t noticed the girl walking up to you and the greeting startles you.

“Oh, hi.”

“We’we wetuwning the animal books,” Sofia informs you seriously. You have to smile.

“Good job. You want more of those or something else this time?”

“Mowe. Will you help me find some?”

“I’m not working the desk at the children’s section today but my colleague there will absolutely help you. Just ask her.”

Now you see Morales walking towards you from the swing set, carrying the large, flowery canvas tote that says “book bag” he always brings to the library.

“Hello,” he nods with that warm smile that he definitely gives everyone. “Sofia, don’t disturb the lady on her break. I’m sure she wants some peace and quiet before she has to go back to work.”

Jesus fucking Christ. How does this man just know shit like this?

“I’m sowwy,” Sofia immediately offers. “I wanted to say hello.”

“Don’t worry, it’s okay,” you allow, although technically, he’s not wrong. “I’m almost done. It was nice to see you. I hope you have a good visit to the library.”

“Thank you!” She skips along and Morales chuckles as he takes off his baseball cap and scratches his head, swipes his long locks out of his forehead, then puts the hat back on.

“You’re her favorite, you know,” he tells you. When you raise your eyebrow, not comprehending, he hurries to elaborate. “Of the librarians. She says you’re the best.”

“Thank you, but whatever for?” You know you do a good enough job at your usual position and that your regulars appreciate you, but you are also very aware of not being at your finest in the kids’ section.

“You have to ask her,” Morales grins as he looks out for his kid, who has returned to the swing set and is pumping her legs on the swing, brows knitted in concentration. “But she’s very taken with you. I think it’s because you’re very calm and focused with her.”

Calm and focused??? You almost laugh out loud. That’s everything you’re not when you’re at the kids’ desk.

“Thanks,” you manage, because you have to say something.

“She’s also really interested in your tattoos and I definitely think she wants to get her nose pierced now,” Morales goes on. “I told her that we don’t comment on people’s appearance, but just a heads up, she might ask you about those.”

Ah, the unpredictability of children.

“I appreciate it.” You really do. You don’t mind talking about your tattoos or the septum ring you have but if a kid suddenly asks about it, you’d rather be prepared.

“Anyway, sorry to intrude on your lunch.”

“No worries,” you reassure him. “You can… sit down for a while if you want to? I have ten minutes left.”

Your heart beats faster at your proposal. It’s not exactly appropriate but you just want to enjoy his company for a moment. And discreetly sniff him because he smells so fucking good, woodsy and smokey but with a hint of… vanilla? You’re terrible at recognizing smells but it reminds you of some aroma reeds you had a couple of years ago that smelled like a wood cabin with vanilla sugar spilled on the floor. You loved it but like everything you love, it was discontinued.

Morales looks over at his daughter before nodding, the book bag slipping down from his shoulder as he places it next to the bench.

“If you’re sure?”

“Wouldn’t offer if I wasn’t.”

He likes your straightforward answer, you can tell from how his eyes crinkle a little and how relaxed his body language is when he sits down.

“I’m Frankie, by the way,” he says, like he just remembered that introductions are a normal part of human interaction. He extends his right hand to you and as you accept it and tell him your name, you can’t help but marvel at how huge his hand is. Big, warm, slightly damp but not in a weird way.

“Nice to meet you, Frankie.” Frankie. Francisco Morales is Frankie. It suits him better than Francisco, to be honest.

“And that’s Sofia.” He points to the girl who seems content swinging by herself. You realize you’re expected to say something nice about her to the proud dad.

“She seems sweet.”

“Yeah, she’s awesome. And she loves coming to the library, it’s all she talks about when I have her.” He clears his throat and adds: “Her mother and I got divorced quite recently. I only get her five days every other week.”

“Sorry to hear that.” Shit, it’s divorce and custody talk from the start. You have no idea how to respond to that.

“That’s life,” he shrugs, “but I figured that going to the library every time I get her could be a good routine to ground her. And then we have books that we can read together for her entire stay.”

It’s definitely a good routine as far as you can tell.

“When I was between nine and thirteen years old, my dad would take me to the local library every Monday evening,” you tell him, smiling at the memory. “My dad never opened a book in his life but he patiently read the auto and tech magazines while I collected half the kids’ section with me. When I went to tell him that I was done, he always pretended to object to the amounts, but then he’d help me carry it all to the car.”

As you tell him this, you’re looking at him, no, staring at the patchy, grey-splashed beard he’s sporting. It’s the most fascinating thing you’ve ever seen. What’s the story there, why doesn’t it grow evenly? Is this a thing? You don’t have enough experience in the field of facial hair. Is it genetic? Is it always like this?

He keeps looking at his daughter as he listens to you with a small smile on his face, clearly enjoying your little anecdote.

“That’s lovely,” he says, turning his attention back to you when you’re finished. “Dads and daughters, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

You pick up your phone to check the time. Shit. You have to return to the chat.

“I gotta go. Lunch break’s over.”

You collect your things and stand up, brushing off your skirt. Frankie stands up as well and picks up the book bag.

“I’ll see you in there?”

“I’m not a the desk today.”

“Oh.” He seems disappointed, his eyes flickering from you to the ground. “That’s too bad.”

“And the kids' section isn't my primary department.”

“The bad news just keep on coming, don't they,” he jokes as the two of you start to walk towards the entrance. Sofia jumps from the swing and comes running.

“She's not at the desk today, daddy,” she tells Frankie precociously.

“I know, mija. We'll have to ask someone else about the animal books, okay?”

Sofia doesn't seem too happy with this solution but nods. You take your leave before she has the opportunity to ask about your body modifications, and disappear through a door marked “Staff Only”.

📚📚📚

The following weeks you seem to see Frankie everywhere. You run into him at the supermarket and get drafted into advicing him on what cereal to buy for his kid. “Something healthy, but good so she'll actually eat it.” How the hell should I know? you want to scoff, but you're simping for him enough to help him choose something you'd never in a thousand years touch yourself. You see him in town one afternoon when you're running errands and he suggests you grab a coffee - holy hell, in your book that's a fucking date - but you decline as kindly as you can, citing a busy schedule when in fact you're mostly just scared out of your mind. The daydream is becoming a little too real and you're absolutely not ready for that, especially not because of the kid. If it wasn't for Sofia, you could have dared the leap, but dating a guy relatively fresh out of a marriage, and with a kid to boot? No, that's asking for trouble and you don't want trouble.

One afternoon at the kids' desk, you once again get to help Sofia find books, this time on sharks.

“She went from farm animals to sharks in one week,” Frankie confides in you when the girl is sitting quietly in a reading nook, carefully studying every page and occasionally widening her eyes at what you suspect is pictures of shark teeth. “It's sharks this and sharks that. She asks if there are sharks in every body of water she sees, from the pond in the park to the ditch outside my parents' house.”

“Have her watch Jaws and she will never want to think about sharks ever again,” you suggest, earning a laugh although the idea was probably a little bit on the morbid side.

“Maybe, but that would probably scar her for life. I actually want her to learn how to swim.”

“Then best not.”

You pick up a couple of books someone else left behind on a table and make a gesture that says I have to re-shelve these, come with and Frankie follows you to the right shelf.

“You know, she talks about you as her friend at the library.”

Now, some people would find that adorable but you don't. You're not friends with this kid, you're in a position where you could possibly influence her keenness to literature and literacy but you will always risk critique from her guardians. Being a children's librarian is like a hybrid between being in customer service, and being a teacher. You get to form young malleable minds but you are always subjected to criticism, even when you've done nothing wrong. Kids are patrons, like adults, and to have them see you as friends is only going to complicate things.

“That's nice,” you reply carefully, not really sure what else to say. It's so hard to talk to parents sometimes, one wrong words and you're basically Satan, you can't know because you don't have kids yourself, how dare you not worship the ground my offspring just vomited all over?

“You're definitely her favorite librarian.”

That you can take. You have a couple of adult patrons who come in regularly and prefer to get their reading recommendations from you. They always have time to discuss literature and they bring you a box of chocolates for Christmas.

“Well, she's easy to help. She always knows what she wants and she's polite. And quite easy to please,” you smile, meaning every word. You don't mention that the only time you like kids is when they're like Sofia is right now: reading quietly in a corner, handling the books with care.

“You're my favorite librarian as well,” Frankie adds, and now that sweet smile he's always wearing when you see him is shy. There's definitely a red tinge on his cheekbones as well and it makes you want to lean forward and kiss him on his goddamn mouth with that goddamn full lower lip that he sometimes sucks into his mouth or fucking licks...

“How many librarians do you know?” you ask and manage to sound easy-going, or at least you think so. The laugh Frankie produces is low and rolling and it makes your stomach coil in on itself. Fuck him and that deep voice he rode in on!

“Got me there. It's basically you and Mrs Wilkerson, the school librarian who scared the shit out of me when I was in elementary school. She made sure I didn't step foot in a library until, well, now.”

“Oh, I so wanted to be a librarian like that when I was a kid!” You grin at Frankie's horrified expression. “No, no, hear me out! I always had this idea that those librarians led these super rich, fulfilling lives as night-time vigilantes or that they were actually millionaires who spent their free time floating around in pools with fancy drinks in hand.”

“Were you... a normal child, besides these illusions?” Frankie teases you and before you can stop yourself, you're slapping his arm playfully. Like a girlfriend would. Or someone more intimate than a Favorite Librarian, at any rate.

“I'll have you know that the voices in my head are saying that we had a very normal and healthy childhood,” you reply with as much dignity as you can muster, while desperately wishing for the phone to ring or another patron to ask for your help. But no, the ones present seem to be managing on their own - except for one mom who seemed to have overheard your joke because she is now staring at you with hesitation in her eyes.

It's Sofia who comes to your rescue with her request of being taken to the bathroom. By the time she and Frankie are done there, your colleague has come to relieve you of your duties at the children's section.

📚📚📚

You knew of course that it was coming. You may not be that experienced in the terms of dating and relationships but you weren't stupid and you had some experience: Frankie was going to ask you out. It had to happen. Technically, it had already happened that afternoon in town when he asked you out for coffee. He maybe didn't see it as a date, but you certainly did.

It happened when you had just started your shift in the children's section and it was a fucking mess. A class of kindergarteners had just left and the teachers hadn't bothered to keep them in check, so there were not only books on every available surface, they were also put in the wrong way and in the wrong places. Your colleague who you were relieving stayed behind to help you, feeling too bad to leave it all to you.

That's when Daddy and Daughter Morales showed up. You weren't really happy about the existence of kids in the first place but made an effort for Sofia, who brought you a drawing she had made in preschool that day. It featured some figures in green, slightly reminiscent of animals and one human but you wouldn't be able to tell. Luckily, Frankie explained it to you.

“She's waited all day to give you this drawing of you with goats.”

“Wow,” you manage. “Thank you, Sofia, this was so kind of you.”

The girl is beaming with pride. “Will you put it on the wall?”

“Super probably!”

“I can see you're busy,” Frankie notes and ushers Sofia along. “We won't distract you. Come on, honey, let her do her job now and maybe you'll get to talk to her later.”

You nod your thanks and focus on cleaning up the entire department before you colleague leaves and Frankie and Sofia come to the desk to borrow this week' picks. Sofia seems uncharacteristically giddy.

“Do you want to come with us to the awbowetum?” she asks with a wide, expectant smile. Fuck shit ass hell.

“We're going on Saturday,” Frankie fills in, “and we were both hoping you'd want to join?”

Saturday. Thank goodness.

“Sorry, I work on Saturday,” you say, trying to sound rueful. It's true and you're relieved about not having to lie. “But thanks, it's sweet of you to ask.”

Sofia is clearly disappointed and so is Frankie, but he masks it better.

“Some other time, yeah?”

If it were only him, you'd tell him it wasn't a good idea. But you can't say that with the kid right in front of you. You may not like kids but that doesn't mean you want to scar them for life.

“Yeah, maybe.”

You loan them the books and as they leave, Sofia waves happily at you and Frankie shoots you one last smile that makes you press your thighs together in your seat.

Come Saturday, you're by your usual desk in the section for adult fiction and you almost fall off your chair when you see Frankie come up the stairs and straight up to the desk.

“Hi.” He's had a haircut and a shave and looks different. Still good, but very different. The dark locks of his hair are more tamed. The mustache is still there but you miss the patchy beard.

“Um, hi? Where's Sofia?”

“In the car, with a friend. We're going to the arboretum.”

“Right. I hope you have a good time, the arboretum's lovely.” You still don't understand what he's doing here and he seems to have some difficulty in telling you. Moving his weight from one foot to the other, he scratches his neck and looks down - why does he have to be so freaking cute? - before looking up at you.

“About that... I wanted to apologize. I wasn't sure it was a good idea to ask you to come with, but Sofia was so persistent. She likes you so much. I didn't mean to put you on the spot like that. I'm sorry.”

“That's alright,” you brush it off because there's not really anything else you can say. “Don't think about it, just go have a good day.”

“I also wanted to ask if you wanted to go grab a drink with me. Just me. Maybe next week when Sofia's at her mother's.”

Fuck, there it is. His hopeful face makes you hate yourself for the answer you have to give.

“I'm not sure that's such a good idea, Frankie,” you begin carefully. “I'm really flattered, but you're... recently divorced with a kid. That's a lot of baggage and things could get complicated. I don't want to get caught up in that.”

You've practiced this speech at home but it still breaks your fucking heart because Frankie is so good-looking, kind, funny, and sweet. You would've asked him out yourself already if it wasn't for the baggage. Fuck, you masturbate to the thought of him, for crying out loud! You imagine what it would be like to be with him, to make dinner together and watch movies and go to bed and wake up in each other's arms. You think about sex with him a lot. You make an effort with your appearance those days you know he'll show up at the library, you don't even mind the kids' section that much anymore because you get to talk to him.

You are fucking in love with him, or at least the idea of him because you don't know much about him, only that he used to be a pilot in the special forces but now he trains new pilots, he has best friends who are like uncles to Sofia (and who have been asking about this mystery librarian she always keeps talking about), he likes cooking and loves baking with his daughter, he hates working out but knows he should take better care of himself, hell, you even know what brand of milk he buys.

He's clearly disappointed but keeps a brave face, one that you can see right through because he wears his heart on his sleeve.

“I understand that,” he says quietly, mildly. “I'm sorry, I hope I didn't embarrass you.”

Jesus fucking Christ can this man not???

“No, don't worry. I'm sorry I couldn't give you the answer you wanted. It's just... not a good time.”

Shit. You shouldn't have said that. Now he might think it could be a better time later.

Frankie nods and smiles sadly. “Yeah, you're probably right.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Yeah, me too.”

He clears his throat and nods. “I better be going. You have a good weekend now.”

“You too.”

He shoots you one final smile before he turns around and leaves. As you watch him go down the stairs to the exit level, you just want to call his name, do your run through the airport and hurry after him, throw yourself into his arms, kiss him, Jesus, imagine that somewhere there's someone who'll get to kiss him some day, tell him that you made a huge mistake and you want to go out with him, you want to have drinks with him and dinner and breakfast and lunch for the rest of your lives because nothing would make you happier than making him happy. You want to be the reason his eyes crinkle and his cheek displays that little dimple that makes you lose your train of thought every time you see it.

But it's not for you. People with kids need to prioritize their kids and you know that you can't be anyone's number two. You don't want to get caught up in custody disputes, you don't want to be "your father's new slut", you don't want to be anyone's stepmom. You don't want to have to spend five days a week in the same house as a five-year-old. Being in a relationship is difficult enough as it is and if you can make choices that avoid some of the problems, you're going to make them, no matter how much it hurts.

And it hurts. A lot. But so much in life hurts and you've made it through before.

He must already be out the door, probably in the car. Does he say something about this to his daughter and friend? Is it a female friend? No, it must be one of his army buddies, probably one of the brothers.

You pull up Frankie's profile in the library database and see his phone number. You could call him anytime. Or send a text. Keep talking to him, flirting.

Shit. It's a bad idea.

A patron approaches the desk and you force yourself to look mild and service-minded.

“Hi, do you have Hate To Want You by someone called... Ray, I think?”

“Please hold a moment, I'll check.” You stifle the sigh that threatens to escape you and hope that the day will be busy so you won't have time to think about Francisco Morales again.

#my fic #triple frontier #francisco catfish morales #francisco frankie morales #frankie morales #frankie morales x you #frankie morales x reader

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dreadfutures · 3 years ago

Text

aight let‘s talk ao3 tags again

the very nice tag wrangler I’ll be quoting from has given me permission to share their kind and thorough responses (all bolding/emphasis is mine) without identifying information. and we very nicely go through some of my own tags from my long fic Dead Pasts, Dread Futures. Many, many thanks to this wrangler for explaining so much to me.

Anyway. I present these discussions as a peacable offer of: these are many writers’ concerns, and they are valuable, and worth considering. don’t dismiss concerns about the tag limit off hand, and don’t insist that edge cases don’t matter.

tldr; at the moment, after all this discussion and back and forths and bullying, I still believe that having 75 tags, period, as the limit across ALLCharacters/Relationships/Fandoms/Additional Tags penalizes longfics. Period. If it were even a limit of 100 tags, or broken down by Tag Type, it would be a little more forgiving. For advertising and for content filtering purposes, it only helps writers and fic visibilty to be specific and thorough in tags. A limit like this just so clearly has the potential to negatively affect large fandom/large ensemble/long fics.

It feels like this decision is being very broadly based on a "for the majority" mindset, which has never been what AO3 is about, without actually physically looking at the kinds of fics it will affect. The tag system on AO3 has been able to give fic filtering and reader-judgement a nuance that no other platform has accomplished, and longfics and large ensemble fics still, I think, depend on that as both a courtesy and necessity. I saw the rough math someone did and know that almost all fics currently on AO3 are <25k or something like that, and sure, for the average oneshot, or for even a fic <100k, a tag limit that's very strict across all tag categories probably won't be felt at all. But it's clearly something that people who write certain types of fics, and take them very seriously, will feel. Like I genuinely don't want to have a million tags. I want to tag relevant content that allows potential readers to filter & include & exclude my fic as they so choose, but also, if it does show up in their search, I want to give them the information they want to be able to decide if they want to read my fic or not. I don't want to have to put all my content warnings into a giant summary, or into a giant author's note that grows and grows. The tags have been a very helpful way of accomplishing those. Being able to cut down on parallel/synned tags is great, but it still seems like longfics that deal with multiple fandom entries, large casts, and require content warnings will butt up against that limit very quickly.

tag limit discussions:

- long fic writers adding tags as they go

- writers of franchises with many installments and ensemble casts

- writers with extensive content warnings

- use of tags to clarify a filtered tag

- use of tags to demonstrate how content is handled

off the bat - stop being jerks

look, I know objectively fics don’t need to be tagged at all. I lived in the wild west, too, when “lemon” meant anything from the merest mention of arousal to an explicit vanilla sex scene to all out dead dove craziness. a large part of me still is of the opinion that readers should just read shit, and if they decide they don’t like it, just dip. but that’s not what we’re about here. tagging is a kindness that we voluntarily undertake, and it’s also a form of advertising.

tags are useful for their specificity, for filtering and exclusion purposes

(that’s one of the cruxes of the arguments both pro-shippers and antis make: you can filter things! But you can only filter things if they’re tagged.)

I also understand that a few asshole writers have ruined this for all of us by purposefully adding so many tags it slows down the site and makes pages fail to load and hides other fics because the tags take up 10 pages. i also am frustrated with kinkmemers who just have prompt fill fic dumping grounds that span multiple unrelated fandoms and are impossible to navigate.

...the answer is not to suggest to writers that we put all our content warnings and pairings and etc. in our summaries, or our A/Ns, or to insert a first chapter that is a placeholder summary/tags page/world state. tags are useful for their specificity, for filtering and exclusion purposes.

I also have been dealing with people being murderously angry, and super self-righteous and targeting and mean about my own tags, and tags in general. people who are anti-tag are being giant fucking dicks about it. like get over yourselves and let’s just talk about a website function lol. tags are useful for their specificity, for filtering and exclusion purposes.

THE ANSWER IS NOT TO GET RID OF TAGS.

Alright, so now that we’ve gotten that flippin’ straw argument aside.

The next thing anyone has been doing is going to my page and critiquing my tags. Let’s address redundant tags.

(the wrangler has done this nicely! no ridicule necessary!)

using my fic as an example:

If you tag your fic Female Lavellan/Solas (only), it will show up in the following searches: Inqusitor/Solas, Female Inquisitor/Solas, Lavellan/Solas, Female Lavellan/Solas. If you tag your fic Inquisitor/Solas (only), it will show up only in the Inquisitor/Solas search and in none of the others. If you tag with the most specific version, it will show up in the more general versions, but not the other way around. So there's no real reason to tag with the more general tags.

Though I will point out that if you don't use the canonical tag and tag your character or relationship with a custom name it will be synned to the nongendered version, because at some point the DA wranglers decided that they didn't want to make gender assumptions. So "Annabelle Lavellan" will be synned to "Lavellan (Dragon Age)" rather than "Female Lavellan (Dragon Age)", and someone searching for works with specifically "Female Lavellan" won't see it.

Response: In the fanfic writers server I'm in, we've talked about how tags work and are supposed to work extensively in the past. There's just always been a lot of confusion, which I think has been added to when people go and try to double-check for themselves and find instances where this treeing/synning is broken. Someone put out this guide (also here) for AO3 meta text this year, which has been referred to by multiple people in the server, and it says:

What if you wrote a fic for something where there's a movie based on a book, but the movie's really different, and you've used both things that are only in the movie and things that are only in the book? In that case you either tag your fic as both the movie and the book, or see if the fandom has an “all media types” tag and use that instead of the separate tags. If the fandom doesn't have an “all media types” tag yet, you can make one! Just type it in.

“All media types” fandom tags are also useful for cases where there are lots of inter-related series, like Star Wars; there are several tellings of the story in different media but they're interchangeable or overlap significantly, like The Witcher; or the fandom has about a zillion different versions so it's very hard, even impossible, to say which ones your fic does and doesn't fit, like Batman. Use your best judgement as to whether you need to include a more specific fandom tag such as “Batman (Movies 1989-1997)” alongside the “all media types” fandom tag, but try to avoid including very many. The point of the “all media types” tag is to let you leave off the specific tags for every version.

Which I believe is in direct contradiction to guidance to use the most specific tags, so that's definitely one source of confusion. The most recent ao3 meta text guide (https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/2 I think this one) doesn't present itself in a way that makes this clear for writers tagging their own works. The way authors usually go about tagging things (and what's in the FAQ) is to start typing into one of the boxes and look for what populates the drop down, which doesn't lend itself to knowing that there are trees, or knowing what tags are interrelated (it seems like a whole grab bag of tags get suggested, some in-fandom and some outside of fandom, some canon/parent/meta and some children/random freeform, in just about any field you start typing in).

I'm not sure what can really be done about this. Many of us have turned to ao3-comment-of-the-day and their posts about using Tags, and various sources on google, and have clearly come up with a whole load of conflicting advice.

Fundamentally, finding parent/meta tags for a tag as you’re tagging a fic is NOT clear to writers. The fact that a nested and a meta tag can both be suggested one after the other when filling in tags largely contributes to redundant tags.

Writing for Multiple Fandom Entries

Here’s what a tag wrangler had to say about my fandoms:

As with the relationship tree, you can look at the fandom tree here: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Dragon%20Age%20-%20All%20Media%20Types and see how the fandom tags are related. Going back to your story Rogasha'ghi'lan as an example, it's tagged with Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: The Last Court. But as I said, you only need to tag with the lowest relevant level(s) on the tree in order for your fic to show up under the higher levels. So if you tag with Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dragon Age: The Last Court, it will show up not just under those categories, but also under Dragon Age (Video Games) and Dragon Age - All Media Types. And of course because you've tagged with the specific, if someone searches under, say, Dragon Age (Video Games), but doesn't want Inquisition or Last Court fic, they can use the exclude filter to show only the earlier games.

(So that's two more tags you can remove with no effect on searchability!)

In my (but not only my) own case, I am indeed writing for Origins, DA2, Inquisition, and Last Court extensively within the same fic, so I should be tagging for all of those, specifically, still. In order to make sure my fic is seen by the correct fans, I need multiple specific tags.

Longfic Tag Bloat (adding tags as you write a fic)

And like many other longfic writers, even if I narrow down my character tags only to those with dedicated character arcs longer than 5 chapters, I still have Loads & Loads of Characters (including Dalish from the Chargers!).

A lot of longfic writers I know add characters, relationships, and content warnings as they go along.

At 170 chapters/580k words, Dead Pasts had a ton of important relationships (for example, like Vivienne & Lavellan), and as a story it's nowhere near done. I found myself planning an arc from 171 onward that would introduce a very important relationship (Felassan & Lavellan). This is how longfics end up with so many, many, many character tags and relationship tags, which is another major criticism people seem to have about "people who abuse tags."

A solution that people propose online is "split your fic." Which is actually what I ended up doing...but the old relationships and fandoms from DPDF still apply to Rogasha'ghi'lan, so Rogasha'ghi'lan will have the same number and more tags than DPDF.

If I hadn't split the fic, I would have just kept adding tags to Dead Pasts...and still had the same problem of continually adding tags. They're not superfluous tags: someone who wants to see a plot that is deeply influenced by Vivienne & Lavellan will find that in my fic; someone who is looking to see a major Felassan & Lavellan friendship grow and drive plot will also find that in my fic.

My fic is long; there are other fics that are longer, or are going to be longer, with casts that are just as large or larger, with many relationships, and that's not even talking about content warnings.

Polycule / Relationship Tags

"Tagging a polycule like Iron Bull/Dorian/Lavellan requires four tags: Bull/Dorian/Lavellan, Bull/Dorian, Bull/Lavellan, Lavellan/Dorian"

This assumes that people who like Lavellan/Dorian will want to read Iron Bull/Dorian/Lavellan, which is often not the case. If your story Is Iron Bull/Dorian/Lavellan, tag it that way! It doesn't make any sense to me to tag with the pairs as well unless the story would be of interest to people who read for that pair, or unless that pair relationship is a big step in the story (like, if you have established Lavellan/Dorian, and then they bring in Bull, you might tag for both that pair and the trio). I mean, you can tag how you like, there's no requirement that tags correspond to content. But for me, personally, if I search on Dagna/Lace Harding (I am weak for dwarf women!) I do not want to get a Dagna/Lace Harding/Sera fic.

My personal tastes don't include poly fics, but several writers I know who write poly fics are adamant that: tons of readers will not know of the possibility of the poly fic until it shows up in a search result, and the individual relationships often are significant to the fics, especially in fics that are not oneshots. For example, a great number of "fav fics" are stumbled-across! We aren't interested in the Sera/Dagna/Lace polycule ourselves, but someone might not have considered it, found it, and said, "Hey! That's my new favorite." But if polycules are segregated and only searchable by the polycule itself, alas, what's the option for visibility at all if not tagging it as Lace/Dagna in addition?

Additional Tags

Knowing when something is a "character" and when something is "additional"

Knowing that "Warrior Lavellan" (or the [Name] Mahariel) would be more useful in an Additional Tag vs. a Character Tag is also something I'm not sure how we're supposed to know? Like, I'm glad to know it now, but it's definitely not at all obvious without you telling me why it would be more useful in Additional vs in Character. Especially when to me: Warrior Lavellan is a character, and the fact that it populated the Character tag for me says that it's a Character. Because like I said, the guidance has been: start typing, and if it appears in the drop down, use it. Or, for example, my friend has the Well of Sorrows personified as a Character. Like an actual character. Does that have to go under Additional Tags, or as a Character? How do I know?

Additional tags as tone/content indicators

A lot of writers / readers have approached the Additional Tags as a surface-level overview of understanding how an author is approaching many topics concerned in the fic. Like, Vivienne is a character in my fic, but specifically I am Vivienne-positive, which I feel is important to denote because she's important to my fic, and she's a divisive character. Mood/tone/theme indicators like "Pro-Vivienne" or "we are Vivienne-positive in this house" (or like Male-Female Friendship, or "Expansive Lore" vs "Lore - Freeform" which denote different things to me) in tags (which in the comments section on the ao3 blog post get derided as "chatty tags") are still important to me, though they're useless or far less likely to be used for filtering. (I had the thesis of the conflict of my fic: “empathy is the enemy of free will” “but hope is a choice” as “chatty tags,” among some that were more mundane but important: “sera shows up late in fic”)

More seriously, there are fics that have content warning tags for filtering purposes but also clarify those content warnings to give context to readers and allow them to make a decision whether or not the content actually fits their preferences, ie, one that specifies domestic abuse as a tag (which would be in the Additional Tags) for filtering purposes but also specifies "domestic abuse not present in x relationship" (which would also be in the Additional Tags, but is useless for filtering purposes, but is immensely helpful and demonstrably used by readers to decide if they're going to even bother reading the author's note of that fic).

People are also nervous that not being able to thoroughly tag content warnings is going to end up with unhappy readers amid all the purity culture flaming that's going on lately.

Like, personally I err on the side of "suck it up, reader, and just read and find out," for a lot of things (not talking about content warnings, but talking about mood/tone additional tags), but also, given that there is already a venue here to let readers know what they're in for...taking that away sucks.

I hate a giant fic summary as much as people hate 10 pages of tags, but at least one can hide tags in their preferences, and likewise the thought of starting a fic up front with a giant author's note that gets continually updated with content warnings also isn't super appealing. Leading with a giant author's note that lays out: this is my world state and this is my character's spec and this is my character's background so you know how I'm going to approach this and these are all of the content warnings for the fic as a whole, just feels like getting into "My Immortal" territory. There's definitely a balance to be had between the art of writing a summary, what to include in an author's note, and what to include in tags, but this still seems like it's going to be fairly limiting for writers in these large franchises, especially for longfics that span a lot of topics.

Like I genuinely don't want to have a million tags. I want to tag relevant content that allows potential readers to filter & include & exclude my fic as they so choose, but also, if it does show up in their search, I want to give them the information they want to be able to decide if they want to read my fic or not. I don't want to have to put all my content warnings into a giant summary, or into a giant author's note that grows and grows. The tags have been a very helpful way of accomplishing those. Being able to cut down on parallel/synned tags is great, but it still seems like longfics that deal with multiple fandom entries, large casts, and require content warnings will butt up against that limit very quickly.

#ao3 #ao3 tags #long post #writing #look i really don't want to engage with anyone else but the amount of dimissive takes #and bullying #i see on my dash / have been targeted by / my friends have been targeted by #when we're trying to be conscientious?#is ridiculous #i'm just going to leave this here

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steve0discusses · 4 years ago

Text

S5 Ep 14: So If You Put a Fraction Into a Duel Disk, the Card Explodes

We left on quite the cliffhanger last episode, so I’ll fill you in:

I did not get the haircut.

Like I seriously considered getting a Zigfried for a cool 3 or 4 minutes there, but then I decided to wait a couple of days and I basically forgot.

But, back to the arc finale, Seto has decided to walk, not run, to the Kaiba lab in order to fix the virus rapidly eating his entire company.

I just want to point out that Zigfried went through a LOT of work to get Seto Kiaba to go “uggggh” turn around, and pretend to calmly walk away. I’m used to Seto losing his nut kind of a lot and blowing things up but this season he’s like “be chill be chill be chill” so that the entire world doesn’t think he’s a spaz on TV.

And little aside about Seto’s design choices here, I fell down a hole of interior design videos, and can I just say: apparently these wood frame things on the wall are back in style? Good on you, 2002(3?) Seto Kaiba. Don’t think that current designers are painting them purple but...we’re halfway there to Yugioh fashion.

Meanwhile, Pharaoh decides to remind everyone that these stakes are hella low. The worst that happens is that Zigfried deletes the plane that Yugi needs to fly home...which would be an impressive virus.

Like it’s hard to tell if Yami even has a solid concept of “capitalism” and whether or not he cares about or understands the makeup of Seto’s company (which up till now has operated like a small country and not a business...which is a little more Pharaoh’s understanding. Either way...hard to tell if Yami would shed two tears for the loss of Kaiba corp.)

And, despite what I say in the caps, I feel like Leon and Zigfried are the first villains we’ve ever had that Yugi and Pharaoh didn’t unintentionally disclose that they are 2 people to. Zigfried and Leon are just...completely oblivious to how effed up Yugi’s bean is. They think that’s just a normal kid and lol no dudes...y’all got distracted by Seto Kabia but you have a literal Egyptian God just hovering around in the background and dating 3 people by accident.

Like when the show shelves the main storyline, it is very funny how it’s all “And we’re gonna put the Pharaoh crisis on hold--just put a pin in it. No one will notice this child is two nervous wrecks stitched together” and then Yugi and Yami just kinda hold it in and watch all patiently until it’s their turn to get off the bench.

(read more under the cut)

In the giant computer tower, Seto Kaiba shouts out a string of orders and numbers, admired the many sonar detector looking windows open on every monitor, and then sat down at his desk to like...check the firewall, I guess?

The virus is past the firewall. It’s um...it’s inside the firewall, pretty sure that was the point, but youknow, it’s a kid’s show so they’re just throwing out computer stuff that has no meaning to the writers of this show.

Mokuba thinks fondly of how Seto Kaiba has never screwed him over (which I mean...maybe not on purpose, ((except for that one time he did screw him over on purpose to get Gozaburo Kaiba to accidentally give Seto Kaiba the company, but you could say that was a grander scheme that he knew Mokuba would see through, which...)) but Seto certainly has screwed Mokuba over accidentally. At least once.)

And meanwhile, Yami fixes everything through card shenanigans.

So here’s the shenanigan this episode: I don’t go over cards here but this one requires a limited amount of explanation.

So every round the golden castle deletes half of Yugi’s cards. So he was like...I’ll just draw down to one card. They can’t delete half a card...so that means the card must delete one of the two cards on the field which means it must delete itself.

...which is like the closest Yugioh will probably ever get to abusing a glitch to do a speedrunning tactic like GDQ.

Anyway, like I stated in the title: there are no fractions allowed in Yugioh. If you do that to your priceless one-of-a-kind card you got from winning one of Pegasus’ murder tournies, it will irreparably bust the card.

I’m sure at least one of you will correct me with the proper way to insert a fraction into your duel disk. Cuz like...as I say multiple times so we never forget, I barely pay attention to this card game and I’m just flying by the seat of my pants.

I want to say Seto and Mokuba were in the hacker chairs for like...3 minutes maybe before they realized “oh...Yugi fixed it...” and walked the half a mile back to the duel arena.

and also, as I’m looking at Seto’s glasses here, I just realized...all of Kaiba’s team wears sunglasses all the time. Inside, outside, night, or day...

They haven’t outright said this...but what if those aren’t sunglasses?

Is Roland and that other Roland wearing fancy cyber glasses? They are, right? Because they wear them indoors?

Damn, they can’t take a piss without being on call with Kaiba Corp, can they?

Now the problem is...Yugi played all of his cards (he has two in front of him face down, but none in his deck) and after milling himself, this means he’s now basically a sitting duck for Leon to take the title of “King of Games.”

Leon insists that he defend whatever scraps are left of his card honor and not duel a person who is carrying no cards and Yugi was like “COME AT ME BRO THIS IS THE ONLY WAY I KNOW I’M ALIVE.”

He didn’t even have to do a horror on Leon, he just...played cards good? I skipped it, I’ll be honest, but overall Leon’s card honor was...saved? Maybe? I mean he also go destroyed when his competitor had not a single card in his duel disk so...

...Leon will have to work on his card honor off screen because he’s pretty well humiliated at this point.

But stumbling onto the playing field like he’s half dazed/daydrunk, Zigfried is like “You forgot I already won, bastards!”

Which is when we find out that Zigfried’s “delete all” virus failed to press “enter” and deleted basically nothing. Just like when my Mom attempts to send something in Gmail but doesn’t press “Send” and tells me that Google is down and broken.

Sorry my bro has informed me that he ALSO has had to help my Mother locate the “Send” button and I just...I know she absolutely did that but I’m in denial that this Riddle of the Sphinx has happened to her multiple times.

Honestly, the pep talk we get from Leon at the end to cheer up his bro was a whole lot of “we will pick ourselves up and we’ll do better next time. Together.” and sure you can translate that as “we’ll be honest next time” or you can translate that as “next time we will be not nearly as obvious about inserting a virus into their computer until it is done doing the job, bro.”

Just like Dartz, we didn’t really get a whole lot of retribution or closure when it comes to Zigfried. But, unlike Dartz, Zigfried didn’t do too much murder, so I guess this is fine. He tried to cheat in a card game...

...and I guess tried to delete Kaiba Corp but youknow...

...people let him have that. The police saw the ticket of “this man tried to delete Kaiba Corp” and they just...didn’t arrest him. The judge saw that ticket and didn’t put out a warrant. They just let Zigfried have this, almost like “better luck next time, ya?”

And then Roland clocked out for the day and went home, thus ending this arc.

Look at all these characters, most of which we never saw duel even one card.

We also got one shot of Mai for some reason although she was not in this arc.

AAAHHHH. Every time I’m like “the show is done screwing geography” we get another freakin geography spook!

But we went back to California in order to get a scene of these guys in an airport to get a flight to Japan...

which means Rex and Weevil just...were they shipped home by the Kaibas? Because way to ditch getting arrested by the American Government, hot damn. They are...literally terrorists who destroyed a Caltrain in a plot to kill everyone in the world so like...really surprised Rex and Weevil are in public...but maybe all the FBI were dead at the time so they just didn’t know?

Meanwhile, Duke has to go back to Death Valley and call a tow truck for his car, RIP.

I sure hope he got PTO during this stunt and isn’t going home to a pink slip.

I’m not sure of Dukes life or anything going on with Duke. I’m sure the thing about Serenity is him joking because we have all forgotten about that girl by this point...but also...is Duke...still living in the Tenderloin? The crime rate is very, very high and the ground isn’t solid, so it will liquefy if there’s an Earthquake, but it is one of the few places in the Bay Area that doesn’t light on fire every year. He has that going for him.

I just really hope Duke moves out of the Tenderloin one of these days, he needs a better life.

Meanwhile, Rebecca does one last crime.

This is like a post-epidemic reaction to a hug, but in 2002(3?).

I don’t think I’ll miss Rebecca too much. Wanted to like her more, but she was under-utilized, like most of the characters on Yugioh. Not even just talking girl characters here--most characters on Yugioh are super under-utilized, just Tristan Wallflowers doing nothing, but also being selectively OP as hell about very specific things they never, ever need to do.

Speaking of the devil:

Yugi...just saved his entire company...

But Mokuba is just has to make sure to make it seem like they owed Mokuba and not the other way around. Just in case.

So off they go on this massive plane. It’s probably more to do with the length of the trip as to why the plane is so big but also...

This plane is overcompensating.

But before we analyze that, lets close the book on Seto Kaiba’s very short therapy arc. Overall, it was a nice distraction, but I can see why people call it a filler arc, as it really doesn’t affect...anything going on in the major plotlines, which makes me think it could have been a movie or a game or something. But overall, it’s not bad, it’s just not what you’d expect if you were a Western audience.

Like I’m preaching to the choir, but typically, Western stories are entirely plot focused, and so our arcs always give or take away from that plot. But in a Eastern story arc, it may instead be character focused, where the climax is a character evolving or coming to some sort of cathartic realization, which this arc was, in a big way. We still had some plot, because this is a Shonen, but overall it was about characters, and specifically whether or not Leon and his bro would reconcile or change--which they did.

We did get to see a little more growth on Seto in that he...didn’t go bonkers and hallucinate during a card game. It’s been a while since we’ve had him not do that. Seto was very chill this arc, which makes sense, it was a very chill slice of life arc for everyone involved.

So, next we move on to the next one, which bro has informed me...is

still not Bakura.

According to Bro, the next arc didn’t even air in the Japanese version of the show? Like he’s got a lot of spicy Yugioh headcanons so he could be wrong (He did tell me that he thought that Zigfried was Seto Kaiba’s ex boyfriend when he saw this as a kid which...that sure is a way to interpret this arc, and it probably wasn’t just my little brother who went down that thought tube there...)

(Bro Note: To be fair, I didn’t watch much of this arc as a kid.)

But he says the next arc was originally a movie. But they released it in the States as episodes to be part of S5, just to put more episodes in there. Which, if he’s correct, makes it seem like we’re getting like the Mulan 2 experience kind of shoved in between this arc and the next

But um..

according to bro it has virtually no card games.

.......

I’m so used to only capping 10 minutes an episode, what?

Anyway, until then, here’s the link to read the rest of these from the start in chrono order:

https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono

I’m kinda itching to do a Season Zero, it’s been a hot minute--so those take a little longer to do, especially since I need to go to a different site I haven’t...checked out yet...I’ll be back...eventually? I just know that at some point in Season Zero they fight it out with yo-yo’s and I want to see it.

#yugioh #yu gi oh #ygo #S5 #Ep14 #Seto Kaiba #zigfried von schroeder #leon von schroeder #Yugi Muto #Joey Wheeler #Tristan Taylor #Mokuba #Tea Gardner #Duke Devlin #Rebecca Hawkins #recap #photo recap #episode recap

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queenlua · 4 years ago

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hey, i started following you recently and ur bio says ur a hacker? any tips on where to start? hacking seems like a v cool/fun way to learn more abt coding and cybersecurity/infrastructure and i'd like to explore it but there's so much on the internet and like, i'm not trying to get into anything illegal. thanks!

huh, an interesting question, ty!

i can give more tailored advice if you hit me up on chat with more specifics on your background/interests.

given what you've written here, though, i'll just assume you don't have any immediate professional aspirations (e.g. you just want to learn some things, and you aren't necessarily trying to get A Cyber Security Job TM within the next three months or w/e), and that you don't know much about any specific programming/computering domain yet.

(stuff under cut because long)

first i'd probably just try to pick some interesting problem that you think you can solve with tech. this doesn't need to be a "hacking" project at first; i was just messing around with computers for ages before i did anything involving security/exploitation.

if you don't already know how to program, you should ideally pick a problem you can solve via programming. for instance: i learned a lot back in the 2000s, when play-by-post forum RPGs were in vogue. see, i'd already been messing around, building my own personal sites, first just with HTML & CSS, and later on with Javascript and PHP. and i knew the forum software everyone used (InvisionPowerBoard) was written in PHP. so when one of the admins at my RPG complained that they'd like the ability to set multiple profile pictures, i was like, "hey i'm good at programming, want me to create a mod to do that," and then i just... did. so then they asked me to program more features, and i got all the sexy nerd cred for being Forum Mod Queen, and it was a good time, i learned a lot.

(i also got to be the person who was frantically IMed at 2am because wtf the forum is down and there's an inscrutable error, what do??? basically sysadmining! also, much less sexy! still, i learned a lot!)

the key thing is that it's gotta be a problem that's interesting to you: as much as i love making dorky sites in PHP, half the fun was seeing other people using my stuff, and i think the era of forum-based RPGs has passed. but maybe you can apply some programming talents to something that you are interested in—maybe you want to make a silly Chrome extension to make people laugh, a la Cloud to Butt, or maybe you'd like to make a program that converts pixel art into cross-stitching patterns, maybe you want to just make a cool adventure game on those annoying graphing calculators they make you use in class, or make a script for some online game you play, or make something silly with Arduino (i once made a trash can that rolled toward me when i clapped my hands; it was fun, and way easier than you'd think!), whatever.

i know a lot of hacker-types who got their start doing ROM hacking for video games—replacing the character art or animations or whatever in old NES games. that's probably more relevant than the PHP websites, at least, and is probably a solid place to get started; in my experience those communities tend to be reasonably friendly to questions. pick a small thing you want to do & ask how to do it.

also, a somewhat unconventional path, but—once i knew how to program a bit of Python, i started doing goofy junk, like, "hey can i implemented NamedTuple from scratch,” which tends to lead to Python metaprogramming, which leads to surprising shit like "oh, stack frames are literally just Python objects and you can manually edit them in the interpreter to do deliberately horrendous/silly things, my god this language allows too much reflection and i'm having too much fun"... since Python is a lot of folks' first language these days, i thought i'd point that out, since i think this is a pretty accessible start to thinking about How Programs Actually Work under the hood. allison kaptur has some specific recommendations on how to poke around, if you wanna go that route.

it's reasonably likely you'll end up doing something "hackery" in the natural course of just working on stuff. for instance, while i was working on the IPB forum software mods, i became distressed to learn that everyone was using an INSECURE version of the software! no one was patching their shit!! i yelled at the admins about it, and they were like "well we haven't been hacked yet so it's not a problem," so i uh, decided to demonstrate a proof of concept? i downloaded some sketchy perl script, kicked it until it worked, logged in as the admins, and shitposted a bit before i logged out, y'know, to prove my point.

(they responded by banning me for two weeks, and did not patch their software. which, y'know, rip to them; they got hacked by an unrelated Turkish group two months later, and those dudes just straight-up deleted the whole website. i was a merciful god by comparison!)

anyway, even though downloading a perl script and just pointing it at a website isn't really "hacking" (it's the literal definition of script kiddie, heh)—the point is i was just experimenting a lot and trying a lot of stuff, which meant i was getting comfortable with thinking of software as not just some immutable relic, but something you can touch and prod in unexpected ways.

this dovetails into the next thing, which is like, just learn a lot of stuff. a boring conventional computer science degree will teach you a lot (provided you take it seriously and actually try to learn shit); alternatively, just taking the same classes as a boring conventional computer science degree, via edX or whatever free online thingy, will also teach you a lot. ("contributing to open source" also teaches you a lot but... hngh... is a whole can of worms; send a follow-up ask if you want that rant.)

here's where i should note that "hacking" is an impossibly broad category: the kind of person who knows how to fuck with website authentication tokens is very different than someone who writes a fuzzer, who is often quite different than someone who looks at the bug a fuzzer produces and actually writes a program that can exploit that bug... so what you focus on depends on what you're interested in. i imagine classes with names like "compilers," "operating systems," and "networking" will teach you a lot. but, like, idk, all knowledge is god-breathed and good for teaching. hell, i hear some universities these days have actual computer security classes? that's probably a good thing to look at, just to get a sense of what's out there, if you already know how to program.

also be comfortable with not knowing everything, but also, learn as you go. the bulk of my security knowledge came when i got kinda airdropped into a work team that basically hired me entirely on "potential" (lmao), and uh, prior to joining i only had the faintest idea what a hypervisor was? or the whole protection ring concept? or ioctls or sandboxing or threat models or, fuck, anything? i mostly just pestered people with like 800 questions and slowly built up a knowledge base, and remember being surprised & delighted when i went to a security conference a year later and could follow most of the talks, and when i wound up at a bar with a guy on the xbox security team and we compared our security models a bunch, and so on. there wasn't a magic moment when i "got it", i was just like, "okay huh this dude says he found a ring-0 exploit... what does that mean... okay i think i got that... why is that a big deal though... better ask somebody.." (also: reading an occasional dead tree book is a good idea. i owe my firstborn to Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development, as outdated as it is, and also O'Reilly's kookaburra book gave me a great overview of web programming back in the day, etc. you can learn a lot by just clicking around random blogs, but you’ll often end up with a lot of random little facts and no good mental scaffolding for holding it together; often, a decent book will give you that scaffolding.)

(also, it's pretty useful if you can find a knowledgable someone to pepper with random questions as you go. finding someone who will actively mentor you is tricky, but most working computery folks are happy to tell you things like "what you're doing is actually impossible, here's why," or "here's a tutorial someone told me was good for learning how to write a linux kernel module," or "here's my vague understanding of this concept you know nothing about," or "here's how you automate something to click on a link on a webpage," which tends to be handier than just google on its own.)

if you're reading this and you're like "ok cool but where's the part where i'm handed a computer and i gotta break in while going all hacker typer”—that's not the bulk of the work, alas! like, for sure, we do have fun pranking each other by trying dumb ways of stealing each other's passwords or whatever (once i stuck a keylogger in a dude's keyboard, fun times). but a lot of my security jobs have involved stuff like, "stare at this disassembly a long fuckin' time to figure out how the program pointer got all fucked up," or, "write a fuzzer that feeds a lot of randomized input to some C++ program, watch the program crash because C++ is a horrible language for writing software, go fix all the bugs," or "think Really Hard TM about all the settings and doohickeys this OS/GPU/whatever has, think about all the awful things someone could do with it, threat model and sandbox accordingly." occasionally i have done cool proof-of-concept hacks but honestly writing exploits can kinda be tedious, lol, so like, i'm only doing that if it's the only way i can get people to believe that Yes This Is Actually A Problem, Fix Your Code

"lua that's cool and all but i wanted, like, actual links and recommendations and stuff" okay, fair. here's some ideas:

microcorruption: very fun embedded security CTF; teaches you everything you need to know as you're doing it.

cryptopals crypto challenges: very fun little programming exercises that teach you a lot of fundamental cryptography concepts as you're going along! you can do these even as a bit of a n00b; i did them in Python for the lulz

the binary bomb lab is hilariously copied by, like, so many CS programs, lol, but for good reason. it's accessible and fun and is the first time most people get to feel like a real hacker! (requires you know a bit of C beforehand)

ctftime is a good way to see when new CTFs ("capture the flag"s; security-focused competitions) are coming up. or, sometimes CTFs post their source code, so you can continue trying them after the CTF is over. i liked Stripe's CTFs when they were going, because they focused on "web stuff", and "web stuff" was all i really knew at the time. if you're more interested in staring at disassembly, there's CTFs focused on that sort of thing too.

azeria has good ARM assembly & exploitation tutorials

also, like, lots of good talks out there; just watching defcon/cansecwest/etc talks until something piques your interest is very fun. i'd die on a battlefield for any of Christopher Domas's talks, but he assumes a lot of specific x86/OS knowledge, lol, so maybe don’t start with that. oh, Julia Evans's blog is honestly probably pretty good for just learning a lot of stuff and really beginner-friendly?

oh and wrt legality... idk, i haven't addressed it here since it hasn't come up in my own work much, tbh. if you're just getting started you're kind of unlikely to Break The Law without, y'know, realizing maybe you're doing something a bit gray-area? and you can cross that bridge when you come to it? Real Hacking TM is way more of a pain-in-the-ass than doing CTFs and such, and you'll learn way more with the latter, so who cares lol just do the fun thing

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