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theboombutton · 8 months

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Spoilers Ahead

OK let's talk about the lore implications of The Magnus Protocol episode 4's statement.

Timeframe

The Mannheim School was founded in 1741-1742; and the Royal Court of the Palatinate left Mannheim in 1778. This gives us a roughly 35-year timeframe within which which our violinist could have made his initial carriage journey to Germany - barring timeline differences.

This absolutely destroys my theory that the Fears arrived here from the TMA universe, found a universe without Fear, and broke through in East Germany during the Cold War. This episode firmly establishes that there were Fears in the Protocolverse in the late 18th century, and that they were well-established at the time - established enough to have a guy giving out cursed artifacts in the woods of Baden.

Were they the Archiverse Fears, that just happened to arrive earlier than I thought? Were they Protocolverse Fears? Were they Fears from yet another universe, escaped from their own Fearpocalypse?

The Fears

So this is a really fascinating statement because it seems to marry our old friend TMA Slaughter Classic, with whatever the fuck Ink5oul was doing in TMAGP episode 2, with just a mention of the Archivist-associated power to elicit an unintended confession.

The Slaughter connection I'm sure I won't have to argue - it's straight out of TMA. In fact, it's so straight-out-of-TMA that to me it suggests that this is almost certainly the Archiverse's The Slaughter. If we were dealing with an artifact of a different universe's Fear of violence, I wouldn't expect it to be so connected to music. There's nothing about music that inherently connects it to horrific violence, and yet Bardwell jumps out of a carriage and dashes his skull on the rocks because of what seems an awful lot like the Piper's Song. Violin Audrey Two goes full Grifter's Bone when it's unable to get blood.

The interesting part though is that these incidents are the exception to the rule of the violin's favor. At first it seems happy to make small, flesh wound mutilations of its player, which doesn't sound like the Slaughter at all. Yes, he moves on to serial killing, but it's a very methodical, planned kind of violence - not at all what I'd expect from the Archiverse Slaughter. And the theme of an artist mutilating themselves in service of their art seems very similar to Daria in Protocol episode 2.

Of course, the art connection might just be a coincidence. There is a disproportionate amount of art about art and artists, just because it's high on the list of things artists tend to think about. It's the same reason there's not a whole lot of art about septic tank maintenance*.

I doubt it, though.

Here's my working theory: I think there are at least two universes' Fears at work here, and there wasn't enough room in the Fear-Space for two full sets of entities to represent and feed on essentially the same fears. So they got smooshed together.

The Archiverse Slaughter got smooshed with a close equivalent - a fear that included Archiverse-style violence, yes, but also included a significant element of self-harm, and was culturally wrapped up with artistic performance in the same way that the Archiverse Slaughter was wrapped up with the sound, but not always the performance, of music. The Smooshed Slaughter teeters between its aspects, showing one face or the other depending upon the situation.

OK but what was with the Archivist powers?

idk tbh. I can think of two theories, neither of which I find particularly compelling:

The guy in the woods wasn't actually an avatar. Instead, he was a Salesa type, a distributor of supernatural trinkets. He had some kind of artifact of the Eye on him that gave him archivist compulsion powers.

All of the Archiverse Entities were changed by their time under the rule of the Eye, so being strongly-enough touched by an Archiverse Fear gives you mild Eye Powers for free.

Augustus

Yes I know everyone thinks this is Jonah, and I admit there is a good chance it is Jonah. But I don't like it, and I hold out hope that it isn't.

Personally, I like the idea that the Fears were specifically attached to the voices that told the stories in TMA, in which case Jonah wouldn't have been dragged along; but, if it was based purely on the physical presence of the people in the top room of the Panopticon, then yes, Jonah could have been brought along. To our knowledge nobody ever went after Jonah's body down in the labyrinth, so his eyes would presumably have been left alive in Elias's head for like, the whole episode.

I still hold out hope that Augustus is an Archivist-equivalent from another universe that also went Fearpocalypse and also released its Fears to the multiverse. While I'm pretty certain we're dealing with two sets of Fears here, possibly combined into one set of Smooshed Fears, I'm not at all certain that the non-Archiverse Fears are originally from the Protocolverse.

Conclusion

It's 3 AM and I have to go to bed. I think I've properly scheduled this to post an hour after the episode drops; if I'm wrong about the episode timing and accidentally spoil someone, I'm very sorry.

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* yes I know there's septic tank dive fetish photos, I said "not a whole lot" not "none whatsoever."

#tmagp spoilers #tmagp 04 #tmagp s1e04 #the magnus protocol #the magnus protocol spoilers #tma spoilers #the magnus archives spoilers #tmagp meta #tmagp theory #tmagp speculation

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momowho34 · 4 years

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Here are some jewish myths you might still believe!!!!

(Pls read and reblog I’m tired of people echoing shit like this)

Jesus was not a rabbi. He lived a hundred years before rabbinic judaism even started to develop. Please stop saying this as if it lends him credence in our religion, because no. It doesn’t.

Yeah, Jesus was jewish, but he also rejected mainstream Judaism and hated it. Stop pretending he means anything to us. Idk if you guys have even read your own books, Matthew is like 60% about how the Pharisees are bad and wrong and evil for sticking to the traditions that have kept them alive for 100s of years. It’s also, y’know, historically inaccurate to the actual behavior of the Pharisees in that time period. Seriously man he is not ours and means nothing to us, keep your Jesus and stop trying to shoehorn him into judaism.

Our god is not yours “minus the Jesus.” In trinity terms; divide the Holy Spirit by the Father and then subtract the Son and that is a bare bones grasp of what god appears as for Jews.

Jews are not white as a whole. Are there white Jews? Yes. Are there jews who are literally every other skin tone? Also yes!! We are all over the place. India, numerous Middle Eastern countries, Morocco, Spain, and a lot more I can’t be bothered to list. You are actively hurting poc jews by pretending that all jews are European, holy shit stop doing that please!!! Most white jewish people are Ashkenazi, which is just one type of judaism.

Actually, the historical relationship between Jews and Muslims is a lot more complicated then you think it is. Sometimes we got along, sometimes we didn’t. Some would argue that Jews were treated better by Islamic caliphates in the Middle Ages then they were by Christian kingdoms. Stop trying to pretend we are and have always been “arch nemeses” or some fucking bullshit (that would be the Amalekites for us, actually, and not the Muslims) Also we’re honestly more similar to them when it comes to traditions then christians so like take that into account thanks

Hey guys listen to Romani when they talk about the Holocaust too!!!!! Please, they have a different experience/perspective and deserve to have their voices heard. Don’t pretend they don’t exist and that it didn’t effect them because uh.... it did. To a degree that I don’t think I can properly explain. Do not overlook them and then pretend it’s just because ur a “jewish ally” or whatever the fuck.

Stop pretending that we’re the same as Christianity. We aren’t. Stop stop stop holy shit stop. That’s not how any of this works at all. Christianity is so so so different, it takes like a handful of jewish beliefs and runs with them. Christianity is its own thing and so is Judaism, stoppp.

Not all Jews are zionists. some are explicitly anti-zionists. Not all zionists are anti-Semitic, but some of them are. Basically, jews aren’t inherently zionists and anti-Zionism isn’t inherently antisemitic. That being said, some people do use anti-Zionism as a cover for their anti-semitism. Watch out for those people, they’re not that hard to spot. That’s all I’m going to say about that, don’t want to start on this issue because it isn’t what this list is about.

Jews never actually lived by the literal laws of the Torah. We did not stone people. There is no archeological evidence of that and actually more evidence pointing to the opposite. jewish communities actually held capital punishment as being inherently immoral and was very very very rarely used in some communities. Understand that. Don’t ever say shit like “but the Jews used to live by the Bible too, and they stoned gay people!!!” No. No we didn’t. Ever. Nobody did that in ancient times.

Guess what, jews are not rich or greedy! what the fuck are you talking about??? Quit it please. This stereotype has literally been used since the Middle Ages to alienate Jews as a more privileged “other” that deserve their prosecution. Stop stop please stop, please!!!!! People actually believe this shit and commit hate crimes, stop, even as a sarcastic joke.

The Old Testament is not the same as the Torah/Tanakh. It’s just not? For one thing, the Old Testament is a translation of a cut down version of a translation of a different modified version, so no. Not the same. Also the books are ordered differently and the sections are mixed up.

God does not abandon the Jews in the Tanakh or the Old Testament for that matter. It’s like... sort of implicated to happen between the two testaments in Christianity. The Old Testament basically structured the books non-chronologically so that the last one would be Malachi because his prophecies are supposed to echo Jesus. We end the Tanakh on Nehemiah, and there is no “New Testament” for us because there’s only one and it ends at the end of the story.

Antisemitism is definitely still a thing. I don’t know who the fuck told you about this one? The Jews got treated like shit after the holocaust, and some of the few survivors 70 years later got reparations so now everybody’s acting like antisemitism doesn’t exist. It does. It really, really fucking does. Please listen to us.

Holocaust denial isn’t “a fringe conspiracy theory,” it’s genuinely awful and dangerous and hurts real people. I’m serious about this one, holocaust denial (and any genocide denial for that matter, whether it’s talking about the Armenian genocide or Holdomer or any others) is legit dangerous. Pay attention to it and have 0% tolerance for that shit

You are allowed to be invited to a jewish event if you’re not jewish! We literally do not care. Respectfully participating in traditions if you’re invited to is fine! The issue is when people take a jewish tradition and twist it into something for them. That’s a no-no, but getting invited to a seder/bar mitzvah/bris is fine. just show respect to traditions you see, even if you don’t entirely understand them. Do that and you’ll be fine.

Jews are a ridiculously diverse group of people with a lot of different beliefs! We all have vastly different ideas of fucking everything from god to the purpose of pomegranates (not a joke). Accept that we think differently form eachother and aren’t a monolith please

These are all the ones I could think of lol, jewish friends add more if you can think of some. Ok and encouraged to reblog for everyone.

#jews and judaism #judaism #jewish #jews #antisemitism #antisemites #christanity #not a shitpost #ok to reblog #ok to rebagel #xtianity #xtian #be respectful in the notes pls #it’s cool if you didn’t know this stuff before I was surprised at how many ppl didn’t #keep it in mind now though #common myths #myths and facts #pls reblog

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dilfdoctordoom · 3 years

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On Tom Taylor, the Current Nightwing Run & Ableism

I did mention I was gonna do a post about it, so here we are. There are some things I want to make clear before we begin: the issue exploded on Twitter on the very first day of disabled Pride month; disabled people have been discussing the ableism in Taylor’s Nightwing run since it began; nobody has blamed Taylor for what happened to Barbara in 2011. We are, however, blaming him for the way she is written in his series during 2021.

I am also going to be discussing the ableism in the fandom in this post. The reactions I have seen, from here to Twitter to TikTok, are showing not only a great misunderstanding of the situation, but a purposeful misunderstanding. The very real reasons disabled people are angry right now have been twisted to make us seem ridiculous and overly sensitive and I cannot help but feel that is very intentional.

Another quick addition: disabled people are not a monolith. Barbara Gordon spent over 20 years as a paralyzed wheelchair user. Stating (and I would like to note, never truly showing) that she is a part time cane user now is still erasing her disability. These things are not interchangeable.

So, with that out of the way, let’s begin.

Tom Taylor’s run is ableist. That is a fact of this situation. He made the active choice to include a version of Barbara Gordon that is ableist caricature. Story wise, the role that Barbara plays could have easily been filled by anyone else. There is no real season, within the narrative and outside of it, for Taylor to include this version of Barbara Gordon, who has received a decade of criticism from disabled people. It’s very well known that this iteration is problematic, to put it kindly, and Taylor is aware of that.

He made the active decision to include her, anyway, showing, at the very least, that he is passively, if not actively, ableist. Passive ableism is still ableism and disabled people are allowed to take issue with that.

That alone is reason enough for disabled people to be angry. But that’s not why things exploded on Twitter.

On July 1st, the very first day of disabled pride month, the new design for Barbara was dropped. After months of teasing Barbara’s return to a wheelchair using Oracle (see: Last Days of The DC Universe, Batgirl (2016), etc), they debuted... a new Batgirl costume that the artist has openly said draws inspiration from the Burnside suit.

There’s a lot of issues to unpack here, so let’s start small: the issue with consciously calling back to Burnside. The Burnside era of Batgirl stories was... beyond awful. The villain of the series’ first arc, was an AI based on Barbara’s brain patterns when she was disabled. It was evil because of all the rage and pain Barbara felt. The actual Barbara, on the other hand, was good -- because she was able bodied. Because her PTSD had been tossed aside. It was a horrifically ableist era that drove the idea that Barbara’s life was terrible when she was disabled; that it was some horrible, twisted secret.

Comics have kept that narrative going. Barbara is seen hiding books on chronic pain; she reacts aggressively to the mere idea that she could be in a wheelchair again, acting like it would be weakness. Whereas Barbara had once been Oracle not because of, but in spite of, her disability, who was fantastic representation for the disabled community, she now acts like it is the most shameful thing in her life.

To call back to Burnside is to call back to that ableism and make no critique of it. If anything, it’s to embrace the ideas of that era.

There is also the design itself to consider. Many people have pointed out the inclusion of a back brace, as if that saves it from ableism -- it does not. Any person who has ever worn a back brace can take one look at this design and know that they did not consult a disabled person. Hell, by how impractical that thing is, I doubt they even Googled a picture of a back brace.

It’s a superficial acknowledgement that Barbara is supposed to be disabled. Something that was apparently thrown in to appease the numerous complaints of Barbara being able bodied; something that no one working on it put any effort into.

When it comes to aids, this is not a new thing for Barbara in Infinite Frontier. She’s said to be using a cane occasionally, that we got a better look at in Batman: Urban Legends, and as any cane user can tell you... that is not a cane that could feasibly be used. It’s another pathetic attempt to acknowledge that Barbara is supposed to be disabled, without actually doing anything of importance.

[IMAGE ID: A segmented cane with a tri-pointed handle with a wrist strap. There is a stripe across the sections to connection them, labelled “solar battery charger buttons”. The text reads: “telescoping antenna doubles as cane or weapon if needed”. END ID]

Dropping this design (which we have now established to be problematic) on the very first day of disabled pride month is a sickening move. The very first day, and DC has doubled down on their disability erasure, thrown in superficial things like a back brace to act like it’s fine.

Tom Taylor is definitely involved in this, whether you like it not. No, he is not in anyway responsible for the events of the New 52 and what they did to Barbara Gordon, but that does not absolve him of blame for what is currently being done to her in his run.

When the design dropped, it started trending due to disabled fans reactions. To be clear: we were directly calling out the ableism in this design. This was Tom Taylor’s response:

[IMAGE ID: A tweet from TomTaylorMade that says: “Hey, @Bruna_Redono_F I think our new Batgirl suit is getting some attention.” He then adds a winky face emoji and tags @jesswchen and @drinkpinkkink. Attached are a screenshot showing that Batgirl is trending in the United States and a picture of the design itself. END ID]

This is him, bragging about how the disabled community reacted. Perhaps before this tweet, you could’ve made an argument that he was not ableist, but after he flaunted the fact that disabled people were rightly furious over this, like it was something to be proud of? No. If you are defending him, you are a part of the problem.

Taylor has included ableist writing in his Nightwing run, beyond the inherent ableism that comes with the current iteration of Barbara Gordon (whose inclusion, yet again, is his decision).

[IMAGE ID: A panel from Nightwing #79. Barbara and Dick are standing in his apartment. Barbara is saying: “I have some pretty new technology holding my spine together. I’m happy to do most things -- eat pizza in the park, take down low-level thugs -- but leaping from rooftops seems... unwise.” END ID]

What Barbara says in the panel above has bothered a lot of disabled people. The implication that she couldn’t “eat pizza in the park’ and “take down low-level thugs” without a spinal implant that conveniently erases her disability is... fucked up, to put it mildly. Those are both things that Barbara has done in a wheelchair. The first one is something wheelchair users can do and the implication that it’s not is beyond offensive.

But, let’s leave Barbara behind for a moment. I have previously mentioned that disabled people have been discussing the ableism present in this run long before July -- and that ableism is not only centred on Barbara. Dick is also a player in all this.

Dick Grayson was shot in the head. I don’t believe I need to retread the story, but just in case: Dick was shot in the head by KGBeast, developed amnesia from the event, and went by Ric Grayson for a long enough period in comics. If you have been active within the DC fandom for the past year or so, you know all about this controversial storyline and its fallout.

The Ric Grayson arc concluded itself the issue before Taylor became the writer for the series and ever since his tenure has begun, Taylor has completely ignored the reality of Dick being a disabled man. We understand this is comics, that things do not function the way they do in our world, but still -- it is clear that this gunshot wound to the head has affected Dick massively. We had an entire arc dedicated to how he struggled to find himself in the aftermath.

Taylor is choosing to write Dick as an able-bodied man, despite his canonical injuries and how they would impact his life.

This man is choosing to give empty gestures towards Barbara being a disabled woman (as discussed above, the completely dysfunctional back brace, etc) whilst writing her as able-bodied as possible. He writes both Dick and Barbara as able bodied as humanly possible. That is ableist. He is ableist. This is the same man that said he made a dog disabled ‘in honour of Barbara’. I do not think I need to elaborate on why that is bad.

The least he could’ve done, was get a sensitivity reader. We know that Taylor is not beyond getting people from marginalized communities to consult on his work (see: Suicide Squad), so why, when writing two characters that should be disabled, one that the disabled community have been criticising for a decade, does he not reach out to a single disabled person? A mere Google search could’ve improved the situation massively. In both the new design and the current writing, it is beyond clear that this is not just an able-bodied person writing it -- it’s an ableist person.

He could have listened to the numerous disabled fans that spoke out. Instead, he chose not only to refuse to do that, but to describe justifiable anger as ‘raging’. He treated us like we were crazy for daring to speak out about blatant ableism being parading around of us in our pride month.

Tom Taylor has failed to do the bare minimum and in doing so, he is, at very, very least, guilty of complicity. Again: passive ableism is still ableism.

The argument at hand is not just about Barbara Gordon and the continuing ableism that shines out from her current writing. The argument is about the treatment of disabled characters in his run. It has also become about the way he treats physically disabled people.

We also can’t have this conversation without acknowledging the fandom’s role in it all. I waited a day to write this up, to allow all the reactions to flood in... and I am sickened.

We have everything across the board. Able-bodied people that have actually listened to disabled people, who have supported us (which is deeply appreciated). Able-bodied people who may have had good intentions, but a skewed sense of the situation and perpetuating some of the more insidious lies being spread around (IE. that this is only about the new costume).

There are, obviously, the ableist reactions, though, that we will be discussing here. People deeming the current issues as ‘crazy’, calling disabled people ‘overly sensitive’ and ‘delusional’. Many people have completely glossed over the examples given for why Taylor, specifically, is ableist, and instead have resorted to telling disabled people that we are wrong and should be mad at DC instead.

It’s important to note that Tom Taylor is an adult man. He doesn’t need a fandom to attack disabled people for daring to call him out. He is not the victim in this situation; he has, for quite a few disabled people, been the aggressor.

I have seen claims that Infinite Frontier is a ‘slow burn’, implying that disabled people need to patient... as if we have not waited a decade for less ableist writing. There is a complete refusal from able-bodied fans to actually listen to what disabled people are saying. They would much rather rush to the defence of the (honestly rather mediocre) current Nightwing run.

Disabled fans know that comic book spaces are ableist. We know that both DC and Marvel and many of their writers are ableist. We are still allowed to be pissed as hell about it and acting like the current reaction being had right now is disabled people being ‘overdramatic’ is yet another example of how the able-bodied side of the fandom both refuses to listen to and undermine disabled people when we call out ableism.

We know it when we see it. We always do and we always will and we will always be able to recognize it far faster than an able-bodied person. If this many disabled fans are coming out and talking about an issue, calling it ableism, then it’s time for you shut up and listen.

Stop being a part of the problem and start supporting disabled fans for once.

#barbara gordon #dick grayson #nightwing #batgirl #tom taylor #tw ableism #okay to rb

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jianswordbi-sokka · 3 years

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I’ve been thinking an awful lot about Sokka’s meteorite sword lately (like, a lot a lot). Since it happens to fall at the exact intersection of my areas of interest, I thought I’d put together a bit of an analysis on said sword, the meteorite it came from, and the implications it has for the broader Avatar universe.

First things first let’s clarify a couple terms here: a meteorite is, technically speaking, a particle of solid material that has fallen to the surface of a planetary body from space. A meteoroid is that same fragment of rock before it reaches the ground. A meteor is the light created by the meteoroid as it transits through the atmosphere, otherwise known as a fireball or shooting star. If we’re being totally accurate, Sokka’s sword would be referred to as a meteorite sword, not a meteor sword (I’m looking at you, atla wiki).

Now let’s consider the actual fall of the meteorite, and what the atla team got right and wrong:

1) The meteor shower: meteor showers occur at specific times of year when the orbit of a planet passes through an area that is relatively dense in particle which burn up in the planet’s atmosphere. Most of these particles are quite small, usually no more than the size of a grain of sand, and meteor shows are not specifically associated with the fall of meteorites, although it would not be impossible for a meteorite to result during a meteor shower. Interestingly, during a meteor shower the meteors will all appear to originate from a single point, while the meteor which produced Sokka’s meteorite did not originate from the same place as the other meteors – which would suggest it came from another direction and location, and its fall at the same time was merely a coincidence.

2) The dark flight stage: Smaller meteoroids which do not produce large craters when they impact, but they will produce a fireball as they transit the atmosphere and are heated and ablated. However, the atmosphere slows them as they transit, and once they reach terminal velocity, where ablation stops, they enter a stage know as dark flight, where the stone continues to fly through the air for a period of time, but no more light is produced. This is more common for smaller stones, which are more easily slowed by the atmosphere, but large meteorites, including the largest single meteorite ever recovered, Hoba (which interestingly does not have an associated crater despite its large size – perhaps as a result of its shape causing it to slow significantly during its fall), may have experienced a similar effect. The reason I think this meteorite should have had a dark flight stage is because it remained intact upon impact.

3) The crater – this meteorite did not, however, have a dark flight stage – rather, it produced a crater. Whether or not an impacting meteorite will result in a crater depends on a variety of factors, primarily its velocity and mass, but also affected by its makeup, what it is impacting into, the gravity of the planet (which primarily determines the shape of the crater for a particular impactor), etc. A general rule of thumb is that a stone larger than 10 meters in diameter and 100 tons will likely produce a crater. That is obviously not the case as shown here, but that does not necessarily mean this meteorite could not have produced a crater. The Whitecourt meteorite, for example, is believed to have been only ~1 meter in diameter, and produced a crater 36 meters in diameter and 6 meters deep (the crater pictured above). However, what is wrong here is that generally meteorites which produce craters will vaporize, melt, or fragment on impact, which is not the case with Sokka’s meteorite. Meteorites which remain intact tend to be traveling much slower, and so do not generally produce craters – hence either this intact meteorite should not have formed a crater and would probably have experienced dark flight, or else the crater should not have a single intact meteorite like it does.

4) The strike: meteorite strikes are violent processes which excavate material surrounding the strike location – this is what forms the crater depression. This material then falls back to the ground, forming what is called an ejecta blanket around the crater, which is not observed in the show. But, meteorite impacts certainly can cause fires – returning to the Whitecourt crater, above the layer of its ejecta blanket is a layer of charcoal thought to have formed as a result of a forest fire started by the impact!

But could Sokka even have made a sword out of the meteorite material? The simple answer is yes – there are numerous historical cases of meteoritic iron being used to make blades (such as the dagger pictured above), including, interestingly enough, by people living in the Canadian arctic and Greenland, and there’s even a replica of Sokka’s sword forged using meteoritic iron (in part). This is due mainly to the fact that meteorites are an easy source of native iron, while other sources of iron such as the minerals magnetite and hematite require significant processing such as smelting to recover their iron components.

The more complicated answer is a heavy maybe, for a few reasons: While it is true that some meteorites are primarily composed of metal – which are called iron meteorites (top image), although they contain a fair amount of nickel as well, and often contain mineral impurities – these make up only about 5% of all meteorites ever recovered. The remainder is mostly what are known as stony meteorites (bottom image), and although these tend to have higher proportions of metal and iron-bearing minerals than many Earth rocks, it would not be nearly enough to forge a sword from. So, in other words, Sokka would need to be incredibly lucky.

The other reason has to do primarily with the nature of iron meteorites compared to most steel. Namely the mineral inclusions previously mentioned would likely constitute impurities in the metal which would actually weaken it, rather than strengthen it. Additionally, most steel contains at least some quantity of carbon, which helps the blade hold an edge and increases its strength (although it also contributes to brittleness).

But, is Sokka’s sword even made out of iron at all? Meteoritic iron doesn’t have any special properties compared to terrestrial iron that would make it stronger or able to cut through other metals, and nothing that would inherently produce the characteristic black colour of Sokka’s sword. So maybe in the Avatar universe, their meteorites are not made of iron-nickel metal at all, but some other kind of metal…

Take zirconium on the other hand. When heated to high temperatures (as is presumably the case during forging), the oxidation of the outer surface of the metal does produce a black layer, like we see on Sokka’s sword, and zirconium oxide knives do exist – of course, zirconium oxide is actually a ceramic, not a metal (the making of which is more complicated than just heating the metal), and so while its hardness is greater than that of steel, and reportedly zirconium oxide knives appear to hold their edge better (which has to do with the way ceramic blade wear in comparison to steel blades), they are also far more brittle than steel. Still, a zirconium blade could potentially explain some of the interesting properties of Sokka’s sword.

What, then, does this say about the Avatar world? Well to discuss that you need to know a little bit about iron meteorites. These meteorites are sourced from the metallic cores of fragmented planetesimals in the asteroid belt. Just like the core of the Earth, they are made up mostly of iron and nickel, because these are two of the most common heavy metallic elements, which separate as a result of gravitational forces because of their mass during planetary differentiation (when planetary bodies segregate into layers of crust, mantle, and core). So perhaps in the atla universe, zirconium is in high enough abundance that it could form at least a portion of the cores of planets there.

Which is weird, to say the least. Not just because its inconsistent with our own solar system, but because in the universe in general, the abundances of elements heavier than iron tend to drop off quite sharply, because they’re not generally produced during the normal life of an average star. Since zirconium (Zr) is heavier than iron (Fe), it should be far less common. But if it really were what was making up the metal in Sokka’s sword, their solar system would certainly be quite a remarkable one.

Of course, its far, far more likely that the look and properties of Sokka’s sword, and its meteoritic origin are just an excuse to give him a badass weapon. And honestly, he deserves it, so we can overlook the inaccuracy, even if it is fun to think about…

#atla #sokka #avatar: the last airbender #this got longer than I was expecting and there are still so many fun facts I didnt even talk about!!!!#i definitely put more effort into this than i have been to my actual work haha yikes but oh well #miranda talks

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swinging-stars-from-satellites · 3 years

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idk how many people would even want to see this BUT i wanna yell about Leela and Brax so here's a list of all their scenes togethr/scenes pertainng to them that i can recall (pLEASE add on if i missed anything/ you have any additional thoughts!! i could talk about these two all day!)

right off the bat in Weapon of Choice when Leela is on the outskirts of the Citadel and Brax goes to bring her back (which is interesting in and of itself, bc usually i would imagine a chancellery guard would go do that so what made Brax decide to instead??), Leela kinda goes off at him bc she's hurting and instead of trying to actually explain what's going on Brax doesn't even try to argue he just says "we need you" which is great bc Leela has that instinctive desire to be needed and to help people and he's speaking right to that -- also as far as we know, this is Leela and Brax's first actual meeting in canon? it's implied that they know of each other, which makes sense, but it doesn't seem like they've ever directly interacted before: Brax seems almost slightly uncertain, and Leela is combative, but when he's gentle with her she's actually quite receptive

the literal next scene after that, where the OT4 is all in one room for the first time (they still kinda hate each other at this point but still !!!). Narvin explaining Gryben and being a real jerk about it and Leela (understandibly!) questions if Gryben is a prison world, and Brax (who to this point has been mostly quiet as Narvin and Romana brief Leela) jumps in to both clarify Narvin's previous xenophobic statements while also maintaining the inherent questionable/negative connotations

(btw it's actually pretty important to note that Romana self-edits herself a lot when talking to Leela, especially in the earlier seasons; you can actually hear her revising the things she says to put it in terms that she thinks Leela will better understand. and i mean she does it out of genuine consideration for her friend associate but it often comes across as varying levels of patronizing. Narvin also obviously "dumbs things down" when dealing with Leela early on, but like... Brax never does that on any level. the only difference i can tell in how he addresses Leela vs how he talks to anybody else is that he seems much more kind with her than almost anyone else???)

their conversation about the Matrix in The Inquiry: this is REALLY important (and if you've ever talked to me on ao3 i've probably gone off to you about it lol) because it's layered. they're talking about the Matrix but they're also not because in answering Leela's question Brax is making a very thinly veiled allegory (which he outright states a minute later) to Time Lord society/politicians/most importantly HIMSELF -- he's actually strangely open about his morals/beliefs in this scene and i'm living for it tbh -- and i find it very interesting that even though he does directly explain what he means ("how do you know all this?" / "because i am a politician.") he also leaves it for Leela to work out the implications. like it's a very nuanced conversation bc there's double meaning in it and most people on Gallifrey seem to think that Leela is tone-deaf and can't pick up on that stuff (even Romana sometimes oversimplifies things to her) but Brax totally just lets her take from it what she will bc he believes her intelligent enough to understand. he doesn't think her any lesser because she's human.

ALSO on a secondary note to the above: the fact that Leela has a question/needed clarification (sorry, haven't listened to this in a while i forget how it actually happened) and actively sought out Brax to talk to about it?? like she knows Romana better she could have gone to her but i feel like Leela kinda imprinted on Brax and someone she can go to for help if she needs it; maybe it's partly bc she knows he's under marginally less pressure than Romana is but also the truth of the matter is that Brax was the most genuinely helpful person to her in the previous stories and that probably means a lot to her (esp. bc he acts like the essence of everything she hates about Gallifrey but he doesn't treat her the way she would expect from that). btw this topic is gonna come up again in a hot minute

that part where Brax gives her that information that might help her re: the Andred thing, even though he really probably shouldn't have done that -- it kinda makes me think about what he must have been like with Theta tbh???

actually this is mostly my own conjecture but there's some neat stuff in Spirit bc during the *waves hand vaguely* bodyswap dream sequence thing, Romana is very "!!!! Brax can help us !!!" which is tecnically Leela brain talking, so like there's the implications of the stuff i've said above about Leela having this idea of Brax where she knows he's someone she can go to for help

can u tell i'm soft for them

Leela sounding really sad/distracted when she talks about how Brax isn't there YES i'm grasping at straws but a lot of this relationship really is conveyed through the voice acting bc of how little direct focus there is on the characters. there's actually several scenes in Mindbomb where she mentions him and she outright says that she misses him during her discussion with Matthias

that implied scene with them in Mindbomb!! i have a Lot of thoughts about that!!! it's all conjecture and fanfic fodder!!! but the reason i mention this is because it seems pretty meta that out of the whole Gally Gang, it's Leela who first sees Brax when he comes back to Gallifrey and in turn she's the first person (besides Matthias, i guess) that he sees upon his return?? idk i just feel like that's somehow a meaningful detail??? also her reaction of utter shock after spending the entire episode missing him and how worked up she is when she tries to tell Romana, like I desperately need to know what happened in this missing scene MR RICHARDS PLEASE TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED

Leela insisting on going with Brax when Pandora starts hurting him and their whole conversation there is just. so good. like they're both just so soft and then when Darkel comes in Leela instantly goes into protective mode. like they just have such an open relationship bc Brax doesn't even try to be all pretentious with her, like he doesn't even try to keep up any facades when he's with her he's just very genuine and it really says a lot about both of them -- Leela is so good at seeing people, like getting down to the core of who people are and what makes them them (which is why she's good for Romana, btw, bc Romana has a lot of identity issues) and Brax is so tangled up in who he presents himself as that he barely knows who he actually is anymore but Leela can see that and she makes it so he can truly be himself and he doesn't have to hide. also she's so gentle with him when they talk about Pandora, she's very caring and empathetic and wants to make sure he's okay and i am WEAK

it's been a hot while since i listened to Panacea but I think i remember Brax being really soft with Leela when he first brings the gang to the Axis, like just sounding really glad to see her

ok other than the fact that Brax is lowkey relatable in Reborn (daydreaming fanfic about yourself/people you know? simping for Mary Tamm Romana? yeah mood, my man) there's that scene where they're first appraoching the Citadel on the alt!Gallifrey and it seems like none of them, and Brax specifically, have seen it from the outside in a good long while bc he's very in awe and he tells Leela that he wishes she could see it and he sounds sO hEcKiNg sOFT oh my word-

and once again with Leela thinking of Brax as someone she trusts for help: in Dissassembled when everything is going to crap she straight-up says that she wants to go find Brax bc he'll know what to do/be able to help

at the beginning of Annihilation when Romana is depressed and questioning if Brax truly was her friend and Leela INSTANTLY, NO HESITATION assures her that he was; i lost where i had her exact lines written down but she actually kinda goes off to make sure Romana gets the point

literally forcing myself to talk about this bc it makes my brain stall out but like,,, the Brax Hound in Annihilation,,, Leela being like "goodbye, Braxiatel... again" she sounds so sad and like UGH i always kinda forget how sad it actually is for them to lose Brax in Dissassembled bc like, it was so sudden and they didn't get to say goodbye and Leela is always losing people and i have many many feels about this scene and how all that emotion is made very clear in how they each respond to the Hound (might make a separate post abt this later if anyone is interested ::eyes::)

Enemy Lines is utter bullcrap about these two and I will never stop being salty about how they not only sidelined the very good, very subtle friendship they had in s1-4, but they??? made Leela acutally not trust Brax??? when literally this entire time she's been the one person who probably genuinely trusts him the most?? what the heck, David

I haven't heard TW3 or 4 yet but i'm assuming there's nothing worthwhile in those with regards to this duo (correct me if i'm wrong tho lol, i would love to be mistaken in this assumption)

TL;DR Leela and Brax mututally imprinted on each other and have probably the most open and healthy relationship within the OT4 and it is an absolute CRIME that nobody besides Gary Russell and Justin Richards cared enough to actually build on it in canon

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ihatebnha · 3 years

Note

Okay but I’d like to know your explanation on bakugo babes🥺🥺♥️

(Ref your last ask & if you want to share it that is)

AHHH DSD please, you’re so sweet for asking wtf, thank you so much…!!! And I want to apologize in advance bc ... whew this is a lot that no one (not even u) is obligated to read!!!

BUT (and for those confused, the question is... can you explain why you think bakugo would be soft with a lover?)...

I feel really bad about my depictions of Bakugo a lot of the time, especially when I read things by my moots that I find to be… extremely in character as well as something I never would’ve considered for him in the first place… and I think this is because I lean really heavily on both domestic tropes and a Bakugo who’s rather soft with his partner…

But its really just because of a couple of incidents in the manga that have really lead me to believe that Bakugo… would honestly create a home life for himself that isn’t based on or reliant on his brash personality…

Like for as argumentative and rude as he is… there’s a certain facet to his character that reveals his desire for… I mean, for becoming number one, right? But also… success in other areas, as well. Such as we see with his chopping skills, garbage cleanup... etc.

I also think a lot about his relationship to his parents… and while I know a lot of people find Mitsuki to be somewhat …abusive *cough*, my understanding of her is based on Masaru’s relationship to everyone… and I really don’t believe that a guy like him would either tolerate abuse, nor raise a son in a dysfunctional household.

Especially when you tack this onto the idea that YEAH, Mitsuki (who is inherently similar to Bakugo) wanted to be with Masaru, we can assume (yelling at Baku aside) things aren’t exactly AWFUL… and that Bakugo is as much mom (personality) as he is dad (domesticity).

Plus, since I’m not a subscriber to the abuse theory… which no hate if that’s you, ofc… I argue that because Bakugo grew up in a stable home with parents who loved each other, that could be the cause of two things: 1. his general… lack of appreciation for his mother, but more importantly, 2. the idea that he knows what a happy family looks like and would want to replicate what they have since he’s seen it.

But this… isn’t just an assumption, because my all time favorite lines of Bakugo are (click on right for entire text, I can transcribe if needed❤️):

And literally… I would say, 75% of my characterizations of him are based on this single line ALONE… because while I realize that’s sorta bad… at the same time, there’s so many different implications that this line brings up, mainly revolving around ideas of how Bakugo functions in the household…

Like obviously, someone inherently vicious would be hard to court and love, right…? But that doesn’t mean Bakugo wouldn’t know to treat a lover kindly and with respect once he’s finally found one… the same way he expects to be treated as a guest at a friend’s family dinner.

It’s just, UGH… I can’t even fully express how much these two single sentences mean to me… as someone (Bakugo) who wants to have a nice dinner party isn’t someone who would argue with their spouse til the world ends. In fact, someone like that would probably, in fact… seek and desire moments of peace and calm with a significant other.

Like, Bakugo is a lot of things, and I get that and really do love the interpretations of others… but I also don’t see him as an idiot who would think to spit in the face of love once he’s found it, but rather choose and value gentleness specifically because he knows the opposite.

I think as BHNA progresses, we’re going to see different sides to Bakugo that revolve around him reconizing the roles of other in his life, which would, by extension, later include in romantic aspects as well. I don’t know.

Basically, in short…

Someone: Bakugo is an angry bastard! Annoying gremlin!!!

Me:

#bakugo #my theory is that bc deku is reverting to the original design of himself #were gonna see a bakugo that tries to be nice but ends up being way too honest all the time #love it #anyway yea #i hope this makes sense and is ... in depth #and expresses what i mean and how i think abt him #idk i just feel like... as nice as i make... some people really ignore his character development and how personalities work anyway #like im sorry bakugo treats YOU bad bc he treats me good as all heck #ask #caitie chats #bakugo thoughts #definitelysleepdeprived #🔥#fave

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onebillionstarsff · 3 years

Text

if you think c!dream deserves torture, you don’t know what torture is

alrighty, it’s time for me to do annoyingly in-depth lore analysis again because i have seen way too many people on my dash and twitter timeline saying that c!dream deserves to be tortured.

i don’t really think people have a comprehensive, reality-based understanding of what torture actually is, what it can do, and the motivations behind it. i, unfortunately, do: i’ve done extensive professional-level study on torture, so i’m going to do my best to put out some knowledge into our little dsmp-related world.

obvious content warnings for references to torture and to violence below the cut (nothing too graphic, though; i know this isn’t an academic forum or government work)

all of this is /rp /dsmp

i’ll also list some sources at the very bottom if you want to learn more

alright then, let’s start: what is torture, anyway?

there are two types of definitions, general and legal. i’ll reference both, but the message they carry is essentially the same, so i’ll just paraphrase the united nations definition that’s party to (read: supported/enforced by) 170 countries:

torture is any act that intentionally causes SEVERE harm to someone, physical OR mental, for the purposes of extracting information or punishment for failure to do so, with explicit consent from an acting public authority.

i’ll break down those components in the context of the dsmp in a second, but i first want to make it very clear what torture ISN’T. torture is not manipulation, it is not "trauma” in the way trauma is broadly conceived, it is not even direct physical abuse. you can suffer abuse from, say, a parent or a partner, and that abuse is about a power dynamic, where one person is being forcibly subordinated to the other. torture, on the other hand, is not necessarily about power, and it’s definitely not ONLY about power dynamics; torture, by its very definition, has to be intensely and officially coercive, and it has to be SEVERE. there are not degrees of torture, like there are degrees of abuse: being deprived of sleep for days or even weeks at a time is just as psychologically impactful as losing a limb or being waterboarded (simulated drowning- a common torture method that the us has been known to employ).

this is my first major issue with the way some viewers of the dsmp approach this whole debacle. i constantly hear c!tommy’s manipulation by c!dream cited as a perfect justification for c!dream’s torture. what c!tommy, and others on the server- particularly the kids- went through is horrible, and intensely traumatic. i will never deny them that, especially as a survivor of abuse myself, but torture is not just another form of trauma. that’s a very important distinction that we, as viewers, have to draw: torture is considerably worse because it is sanctioned, it is coercive, and its explicit goal is not just to cause pain or make someone feel powerless (common goals of abusers), but instead to shatter someone.

in more specific terms, the mental goal of torture is to completely unmake someone’s conception of the world, how they interact with it, and their basic sense of identity. if you read accounts or speak with survivors of torture, it is frequently mentioned that their very way of processing everything in life was destroyed by pain and had to be rebuilt, completely different, after escape. by destroying one’s individuality, will, and their most integral of processing abilities, you destroy their grasp on the world; and, to put it lightly, such a breaking event is awful enough that, in an effort to make it stop and regain some sense of normalcy, the victim will tell their persecutors what they want to hear. it’s the reason why confessions obtained through torture are notoriously not admissible in courts of law. this goes far beyond abuse or manipulation, and i need everyone to understand that.

now, let’s get to c!dream’s situation. did he do awful things? yes, undoubtedly. i’m a c!dream apologist, but his manipulation of c!tommy and c!tubbo was very fucked up. beyond that, his notable “crimes” that others on the server aren’t also guilty of committing (e.g., murder, theft, arson, to name a few common ones) really just consist of especially massive destruction of property (people leave c!techno and c!phil out of this equation, much to my chagrin, but i won’t get into it here). punishment for his actions is understandable, and is typically what justice systems aim to do. but, even if we completely ignore the inherent inhumanity of pandora (HOOO BOY that’s a lot to ignore but i digress), c!dream is not being punished, he’s being tortured.

going by the definition i used, let’s break it down:

c!sam knows what c!quackity is doing to c!dream, allows it, and even encourages it. as the warden, he is the person in an official, authority position giving their consent.

c!quackity is, by his own admission, doing what he is to get information out of c!dream. it’s not a confession in this context, but very specific piece of knowledge, with the promise of death also hanging right above it.

list of extreme psychological abuse: long-term solitary confinement (torture if it’s more than 22 hours. c!dream has been in solitary confinement for more than 60 days now), deprivation of the passage of time, general verbal abuse, incredibly limited social contact (people start to fray without basic interaction after a while).

list of extreme physical abuse (god where do i start): prolonged starvation, malnourishment when he isn’t being starved (you will die without protein intake); use of Warden’s Will Breaker pickaxe (it can hack through obsidian, so i think that’s all i need to say), shears (can be used to do things like pull nails, break limb’s bones, amputate toes/fingers/a whole arm in c!ponk’s case), and an OP axe (a sharp blade capable of slicing easily through wood with brute force, and bone is significantly easier to crush than wood).

so, we have consent of authority, coercion for the sake of extracting information, and severe physical/mental abuse meant solely to cause extreme pain. c!dream is being tortured according to the proper, internationally-sanctioned definition of the term, and that is not okay in any circumstances whatsoever.

if you haven’t ever read survivors’ accounts (or the accounts of their victimizers), it’s difficult to understand just how uniquely despicable torture is, and the lifelong effects that remain after it’s over and done with. i honestly recommend you read some testimonials, because it absolutely changes the way you view authority and the world in general.

no one is deserving of this treatment, no matter what atrocities they may or may not have committed.

it’s a basic tenet of human rights, and i don’t think it should be a hard pill to swallow that it’s never excusable in any circumstance. so, defend c!tommy & co. and criticize c!dream’s actions all you want, but please never say that torture is alright. that statement has real consequences, and real moral implications. don’t be an asshole, and don’t be disrespectful to people who have survived it.

if you’re curious, look into these events:

The Argentine Dirty War

Chicago Police’s Jon Burge and his torture regime

Abu Ghraib prison

Extensive torture by Pinochet’s regime in Chile

Guatemalan Civil War

Ugandan policing in the 21st century (Human Rights Watch report here)

if you want some reading, i recommend the following. tumblr will probably nerf this post because of links, but oh well.

Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (very important work in the literature on torture)

John Conroy’s Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture

Levenson (e.d.) Torture: A Collection

#mine #text #jfc this ended up being LONG #sorry about that #long post #dream smp #dsmp #dsmp analysis #dsmp meta #prison arc #pandora's vault #dreamwastaken #dream #torture cw #abuse cw #c!sam critical #i doubt this will go anywhere lmao but it's nice to get my thoughts on (digital) paper

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not-all-dead · 3 years

Note

"It’s not a surprise when the Chief of Police comes out. There have been betting pools for years, and the announcement is met with mostly indifference. What is a surprise, however, is the interview that comes out alongside the announcement. The interview that is complete with a photoshoot of Lin Beifong in civilian clothes, talking about the challenges of her position. No one can remember the last time the Chief has given an interview, and the photo becomes the talk of the town."

How do you think the interview goes? What would Lin say?

link to (what i believe was) the original post of this! with some amazing art that VERY much helped me write this :DD (by @mgthejerkbender)

i was originally just gonna write a dialogue or notes for this but uh- i got a little carried away so here’s a 3687 word fic of the interview oops

CW: implications of past trauma (mentions of r@pe/s*xual assa*lt, public humiliation, not graphic at all), homophobia, sexism

fic under the cut :)

Lin walked into the room in a soft green turtleneck and dark brown pants that almost looked black without the light. There was sound equipment set up all over the place, with two armchairs in the middle of it all. A desk sat over to the side, a typewriter and paper sitting atop it. Quite a few people were rushing around, making sure that everything was in place for the broadcast. She watched a young woman sit at the desk, prepping the typewriter to transcribe the entire thing.

“Oh good, you’re here,” Lin turned to see a man in his early forties standing with a small journal behind her.

He wore a plain suit with a pale orange tie, his greying hair slicked back neatly. His eyes flitted around the room, checking things briefly for himself before focusing on Lin. He opened the notebook to a page about a quarter of the way through and smiled at Lin, nodding at the chairs behind her.

“Care to sit?” he asked, moving toward the chairs.

She took the seat farthest from where they’d just been standing, shifting to get comfortable while she waited for him to sit and get things rolling. She didn’t want to admit it, but her heart was racing. She hadn’t done anything like this is ages, especially not so casually. The topic of discussion also made her nervous, both because her job was something she rarely spoke of with anyone outside a professional context, and because of the announcement that would come with the interview. She’d encountered plenty of bigoted people in the past, and had no doubt that her officially coming out would only press them to question her position more than usual.

She picked idly at the fuzzballs on her turtleneck until the man sitting beside her cleared his throat. Her head snapped up to look at him, her body tensing briefly before seeing that he was testing the microphones. She sighed and relaxed slightly, speaking into the microphone placed before her when the sound technician prompted her to do so. Once everything seemed to be in place and ready to go, the broadcast started.

“Welcome, listeners, to tonight’s special program. I’m your host, Kaja Posicopolis, here with our esteemed Chief of Police, Lin Beifong. So, Chief, how are you on this fine night?” he started, putting on his radio voice.

“Good, I’m good,” Lin responded, leaning slightly forwards in her seat.

“That’s good to hear. I think I’ll launch right into our questions if you don’t mind, we’ve got a lot to get through tonight,” Lin nodded when he looked over to her, giving him the go ahead.

“Why don’t we start with something positive. What’s your favourite thing about your position as Chief? What about the job brings you the most joy?” he turned to watch her while waiting for her answer.

She looked at the floor for a moment, thinking before speaking.

“I think I’d have to say getting to help people. Ever since I was young I’ve wanted to protect others as much as possible, and being Chief makes that a lot easier and a lot more… legal,” he joined her when she chuckled lightly, but her smile only lasted a moment.

“Of course, I’m not perfect, and there are always times when things go wrong. I can’t say that those times don’t affect me, but I try to think of the people we as a force have helped over the years and that keeps me going,” she took a deep breath and looked to Kaja as he glanced at his notepad.

“That leads right into my next question; how do you do it? Not even your infamous mother was Chief for as long as you’ve been, and her time was already impressive. You’ve given so much to Republic City already, why, and how, do you keep giving?” there was a look of wonder and admiration on his face when he finished the question.

“I grew up in Republic City. It always has been, and will be, my home. And who doesn’t want to protect their home? I think that as long as I live here, I’ll be working to do anything in my power to help the city. I hate watching neighborhoods suffer… actually, I’m working on a plan with President Moon at the moment with the hopes of helping out the poorer parts of the city, providing homes for the homeless, all that good stuff. I just want to see Republic City thriving, and I want to help it get to that point. As I said before, it’s my home; everyone here is part of a community, a family, if you will, and that means everything to me,” Lin leaned back, resting against the cushion behind her, setting her right foot on her left knee.

“That’s a beautiful sentiment, thank you. I love the idea of the city being one big family, and that project sounds like it’ll be very good for the future of Republic City,” Kaja turned his gaze back to his notes, stopping the conversation briefly.

“The next question I have here is less uppity; what has your biggest struggle been with regards to your job?”

“That’s a hard one,” she paused. “I’ve had many struggles with work over my years as Chief, but I think of everything that’s happened… being a woman, and a queer one at that, has definetly taken it’s toll. Other things have been more directly challenging, but that’s been present since day one.”

“Would you care to elaborate on that?” he prompted leaning slightly towards her.

She inhaled and held her breath for a split second before sighing lightly.

“Sure, why not,” she gave a small smile to Kaja before starting.

“When I was much younger, just starting out in the force, I could already see the inherent bias against women that so many male officers held. My mother wasn’t immune to their verbal attacks, though she would give them a good… sparring match, lets say, if they ever so much as laid a finger on her. After a few times, that generally stopped happening, but people would still talk. The number of disgusting, awful things I heard coming from some of those men…” she huffed and shifted in her seat, putting one elbow on her armrest and resting her head on her hand.

“Anyway, I started to pay attention to every little thing. I noticed how many male politicians talked down to my mother, and not because of her blindness. Even a few of the men on our own council at the time would treat her as less-than for no apparent reason.

“I saw it happening in my own life and career, too. How my male counterparts got the promotion before I was even considered, despite performing just as well as them, if not better. How I was never asked for input on supposedly collective decisions or plans, and if I was or tried to interject, I was almost always dismissed. It seemed like any man of higher or equal rank to me thought I was some… assistant to bring him coffee and reports and not do any actual work.

“Seeing that attitude so often pissed me off. I made it my mission to prove myself beyond what was necessary. I wanted to show them that I could do anything they could just as well, sometimes even better. My work paid off eventually and I began to climb the ranks, not letting myself rest for a second. And I wanted to help people as well, of course, but it started out more as wanting to teach those bastards a lesson,” she moved again, uncrossing her legs and leaning forward on her elbows.

“Once I became Chief, a lot of people seemed determined to put me down. Practically every man, be he politician or merchant on the street, told me something insinuating that I was handed the position just because my mother was Chief before me. Every time I wanted to yell at them, to show them records of how hard I’d worked to get there, how much harder I’d had to work than most of my colleagues. With the politicians and other major figureheads, how much harder I’d had to work than they probably had.

“It was frustrating, but I got used to it. It was a constant that came with working a so-called, and I’m not making this up, it’s been said directly to my face before, ‘Man’s job’,” she stopped for a moment and looked over at Kaja, who was staring at her in disbelief.

She couldn’t help but let out a small laugh at his expression before looking back down and continuing.

“There was also the issue of my queerness,” she shook her head and took a deep breath, sitting back as she continued.

“I started working as a proper officer when I was about eighteen. Within my first year working, I was-,” she closed her eyes and clenched her teeth for a second.

“I had an encounter with a man, an older officer who was overseeing the training group I was a part of. He tried to initiate certain… activities with me, none of which I wanted to partake in. I did manage to get rid of him and filed a report against him, but it wasn’t the last time it happened.

“I was a pretty regular customer at a few of the underground bars for people like me at the time. I did my best to hide my face when I left, but there were always times I was careless, or somebody saw me in the seconds I let my guard down. Usually it was no big deal, but occasionally it was someone from work. Once, it was that man.

“He found me at work the next day and asked me about it. Yelled at me, really. He tried to make it seem like that’s why I’d denied him, and the names he called me weren’t pretty to say the least. He started to physically attack me, throwing punch after punch and not giving me the slightest chance to fight back.

“After that day, I stopped going to those bars altogether. The first time I went back to one was actually just a few years ago. I started dating Tenzin a few years later, and though people weren’t so outwardly expressive of their opinions on my relationships, the disapproval was still present.

“By the time Tenzin and I split up, I think some people still suspected my queerness, but it wasn’t a widely adopted theory. I had my fair share of men approach me, some with better intentions than others, and turned down most of them. Some of them didn’t react all that well, and I ended up filing several more reports. I don’t think any of them actually got charged, though.

“I entertained short romances with some men, some women too. Nothing stuck, not really anyway. I kept every relationship very quiet, including those with men, just for the sake of privacy. When I was with women, it was also to avoid getting hate-crimed, but I really did prefer to keep at least some things private.

“In the context of work, there were also challenges. That first superior to try getting at me like that must’ve talked, telling anyone who would listen about my excursions to the underground bars. People looked at me oddly in just about any shared workspace there was, though a few times I made friends because of it. Those were always good times, even if few and far between.

“Some people just gave a judgemental stare or vaguely rude comment every so often, but a few others took it further. Much further,” she looked up to the ceiling as she recalled another story.

“I had a supervisor when I was probably about, oh, twenty seven or so. He was a few ranks below my mother, and I one below him. He decided that one day it would be absolutely hysterical to cover my desk in obscene printed images of women I didn’t recognize, along with toys of a certain nature. I was mortified when I came in and saw the spectacle. The worst part was that almost everyone working in that part of the building at the time laughed with him, and those who didn’t weren’t exactly helpful.

“I didn’t come back to work for a week after that. It was awful, his stupid prank making me so shamed of who I was, who I loved. I know now that my loving both women and men isn’t a bad thing, and is simply part of me. It was harder to accept that, to accept myself, when I saw people like him in positions of power over me.

“I kept working though, and there was never an incident quite like that one again. A few others were more directly hateful than most, but it was easier to deal with. As with people treating me as less because of my gender, I got used to it,” she turned to Kaja, a hint of guilt on her face after talking for so long.

He shook his head, disbelief still spread across his face. His eyes flitted back and forth between floor tiles as he searched for the right words to respond.

“That sounds awful. I’m so sorry you had to deal with people like that,” he looked back up at Lin.

“So am I,” she scoffed, her fingers picking at her turtleneck again.

There was a small silence before Kaja looked back down at his notepad and then at the clock on the wall.

“We’ve got enough time for one last question, so is there anything you’d like to tell young women and queer people living in the city?” His expression was almost hopeful now, desperate to end off on a lighter note.

Lin smiled in amusement at him before looking down at her hands, fiddling her thumbs in her lap. After a moment, she looked back up at him and started speaking again.

“Absolutely,” she began, her gaze drifting around the room and landing on each individual at least once.

“To all the women working your asses off in the workforce: stand up for yourself. Don’t let any man devalue you because of your gender. Be the best you can be and wipe the smiles clean off their faces as you do it. Start your own businesses, get that promotion, set goals for yourself and fly past them. You can do just about anything you put your mind to, despite what many men might say,” her voice was strong, almost commanding as she began her final statement.

“And to all the young queer people out there; you are so, so strong. Keep loving each other, keep being yourselves. I know how awful people can be, but their opinions do not define you. You are perfect exactly as you are, and nothing can change that. It might seem like it’ll never be true, but I believe we will live in a time when acceptance is the norm. I believe that that time, with hard work and patience with those who need teaching, will be here soon.”

“Perfect. Thank you so much for your time, Chief,” Kaja said, looking at the clock again.

“Thank you for having me,” Lin replied, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath.

“And with that, folks, we wrap up today’s special broadcast. I’ll be back in the studio tomorrow resuming our usual radio program. Until then, I’m Kaja Posicopolis, and this is eighty six point four, your favourite music station,” Kaja finished, staying silent for a few seconds until a man from across the room nodded at him.

He rolled his head around and got up from his chair, setting his notepad down behind him.

“How are you now?” he asked Lin as he stretched his arms out and cracked his back.

Lin scoffed and stood, going through a couple of her own stretches. She straightened her shirt and tucked a few stray hairs back before responding.

“I feel like I just stood naked in front of the entire city,” she said, unable to hold back a small smile when Kaja laughed.

“Well, we’re about to expose you even more. You ready for the photo shoot?” he grabbed his notebook and pen and closed them, watching Lin for an answer.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Lin sighed before following him out of the room.

They walked down several long hallways, eventually coming to a large open room. The walls and floor were a pale grey cement, and there were expensive looking lights set up all over the place. A dark green upholstered bench sat to one side of the room, a tall light shining down on it. A few people saw them coming in and rushed around, turning off almost every other light. One of them knocked on a door that was on the other end of the room, calling for someone inside.

“This seems a bit excessive,” Lin muttered, her eyes wandering the room.

“Only the best for you, Chief,” a man said from somewhere in the shadows.

Lin glanced behind her only to see Kaja talking to someone near the door. When she turned back to where the voice had come from, she had to bite back a laugh. She tried not to, but couldn’t help smiling at the absolute glow that radiated from the man in front of her.

“You like my outfit?” he asked with a grin, twirling around for her.

He had on bright red fit-and-flare pants with a stripe of gold sequins down their side; a matching red low-cut tank top; a purple feather-covered knee-length jacket; gold sparkly platform shoes that made him tower over Lin more than he already would have; and a top hat that belonged with a businessman’s black tie attire.

“It’s incredible,” Lin chuckled, crossing her arms casually over her chest.

“You look sharp yourself today, Chief,” he said with a grin, taking a few steps towards her.

Before she could object, he pulled her into a tight hug. His arms squashed her face against his lower chest, making Lin painfully aware of the extent of their height difference. She laughed and patted his arm, thankfully getting him to release her.

“I’m assuming you’re the photographer, then?” she asked, grinning up at him.

He nodded enthusiastically and spun on his heel, walking back into the darkness. She heard a couple of small crashes and a string of profanities before he came back, a large camera and it’s stand filling his arms.

“Uh- where am I going?” he asked Lin, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye.

She let out a small laugh and stepped towards him, placing her hand on his arm. She guided him towards the bench setup, stopping them near where the light stood.

“Thank you, thank you!” he exclaimed, setting down the camera’s stand first and then fastening the camera to it.

“Of course,” Lin breathed, suddenly nervous to have her photo taken.

The photographer immediately noticed her mood change and put his hands on her shoulders.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make you look,” he closed his eyes and blew a chef's kiss to the side.

Lin nodded and took a deep breath, filling her lungs as much as she could before letting it all out. The photographer made a few adjustments to the camera stand, making sure it would stay while he got her in position, and then led her to the bench. He sat her down in the middle of it and walked back to his camera, dragging the stand loudly over so he was more to her right.

“Don’t be so stiff,” he called, looking at her through the viewfinder and flapping his hand in the air.

“Just- pretend I’m not here, you’re just sitting at home listening to the radio.”

He stepped back from the camera and watched Lin as she settled her head on her left fist with her right elbow on her knee. The photographer gave her a big thumbs up, calling “Much better!” and going back to looking through his camera.

He shifted it a few times before taking any photos, wanting to get it right in as few shots as possible considering the price and rarity of film in stores. Lin looked at the camera for the first few, looking away because of her boredom growing steadily. When he seemed satisfied with the shots, he took the camera off the stand and walked over to the bench.

“Room for another?” he asked, not letting Lin answer before settling himself beside her.

The images printed slowly, one at a time. After each was out, he placed them in the shadow under the bench to protect them from overexposure. Once the last one printed, he reached down and grabbed the first. It had settled well, the colours coming out nice and bright.

“It’s perfect,” Lin gasped, staring in wonder at the photo that managed to make her alright with how she looked out-of-uniform.

The photographer grinned at her, holding the photo up.

“I agree,” he said proudly, forgetting his other photos and standing.

Lin watched as he brought the photo to Kaja, engaging the shorter man in a quick and lively discussion before handing off the photo and walking back. He grinned ear to ear at her, and she sighed before relenting and giving a small smile back.

“Nervous, Chief?” he asked, standing before her with his hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket.

Lin chuckled and shook her head.

“I just haven’t done something like this in ages… or ever, really,” she said, her hands moving to grip the edge of the bench.

“Hey,” the photographer moved to place a hand on her shoulder, prompting her to look up at him.

“You’re doing great, Chief, trust me,” Lin let out a breath and really smiled at him this time.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, meaning it with every ounce of her being.

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enderspawn · 3 years

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I know the discussion is 6 hours old at this point (I'm going through my dash) but as someone who's really good at manipulation and persuasion (old bad habit and defense mechanism, I don't do it anymore). Theyre--- they're literally the same skill set.

I've tried to say that before but other people never Get It???? But it's the same???? Aaaa???? It's the same words, terms, tactics????

exactly my point! however, depending on the term used peoples view of it varies wildly. manipulation is considered inherently bad while persuasion isnt, but there's NO real clear line between them and the situation is always too nuanced for one strict definition (especially one that also includes morality). I could describe a character as "cunning and manipulative" or as "smart and persuasive" and they are the same description/the same character. two synonyms, but two very different take aways. maybe you could try for the more neutral "silver-tongued", but even then it has its OWN implications.

like... lemme run through a scenario: someone tries to use your emotions, tug at your heartstrings, in order to get you to give them money and/or go out and do a very specific action they want you to do. Possibly even implying that preventing bad things, those things that are making you sad, is your responsibility. The use specific music and images to get you to sympathize and be more likely to comply as well. Sounds like an awful horrible act, right? What I just described is an ASPCA commercial. They use sad images of animals in cages, sad music, and urge you to donate to their cause and/or adopt an animal yourself.

IS that manipulation? Textbook, emotional manipulation specifically. It's also just persuasion, using an appeal to pathos. They are the same, but trying to assign morality to one and not the other is a fools errand. No one is going to try and cancel a charity for trying to raise money, even if without that context they agree its manipulation or bad.

thats WHY a lot of definitions of manipulation that include it as a moral bad ALSO include some form of specific and planned intent (often even malicious intent, or lack of care for the well being of the target). In these cases, just trying to get people to do something they might not otherwise is not manipulation. Not caring for the target or even trying to harm them IS.

again! thats not even a universally accepted definition of manipulation tho!! its not specific and the issue of if its right or not varies on a case by case scenario!!!

tldr; ur right 100% but ppl view them differently anyway and it makes me mad FJDKSLFJ

#og post #personal #answered #anon #(jeb bush voice) please clap #i didnt tag this w dsmp bc it doesnt mention it but its inspired by dsmp discourse so :thumbs_up:

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crockersbian · 2 years

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Experience the true horror.... Zanathan refusing to edit and proofread her work more than once

people talking about the intricacies of discussions surrounding the heinous shit some of the homestuck characters do versus their ages and lack of chances for self-improvement due to homestuckmurder (especially regarding eridan and equius, since vriska despite technically qualifying does actually manage to have opportunities to learn narrative-wise TWICE) is a fuckin attract'r beam for my own homestuck discourse brain. its like. on one hand i think people are completely correct to point out that characters being 13 and coming from a hellplanet does in fact mean that they cannot be held to the same standard as grownass adults. and that really should fuckin inform a lot of discussions about their behavior! trying to understand and still somewhat sympathize with a child in that situation is perfectly reasonable. Anything that i say past this isn’t *actually* disagreeing with that btw i’m just. spouting my own @#$#

Those conversations ignore the fact that they’re.... all fucking aristocrats. Literal blue bloods two of ‘em, the other a purple bc blue wasn’t even high-class enough. Vriska’s the only of the three (/four counting gamzee ig) “main” shitkids with a direct external force making her participate in The System*. Eridan’s implicated in lusus-killing for the sake of ol’ Glubby but that does NOT excuse his classism and generalized incel barely-even-crypto-fascist shtick. Equius has so few exterior reasons for his cultural attitudes aside from general conservatism that he doesn’t even *follow* his own cultural attitudes most of the time. If they actually got to live full lives outside SGRUB they’d be insulated from the harm they were responsible and any character growth they had would be incidental from that point onward bordering on unlikely. even presuming an alternative homestuck where they lived, i struggle to imagine PLAUSIBLE FOR HOMESTUCK development where they meaningfully develop away from their shitty shitty SHITTY attitudes given... well, Vriska got two chances and she got there halfway once and then the powers that be decided that a better outcome would be her NOT getting the (death-based) punishment

--------& then further dumpster fire plans (that yes hurt a lot of people but they’re plans that retcon vriska literally approves of. retcon vriska even buddies up with the pedo and actually-literally-a-fascist fake punk that was ghost vriska’s buddy-in-arms on that) and that her continuing to vriska all over the place while purporting personal growth (personal growth not shown + her guilt-tripping tavros over deciding to sprite-revive him when SHE. KILLED. HIM. is just. jfc people who think retcon vriska is the moral and characterization superior to dead vriska are assclowns falling for a character comprised mostly from reappropriated extremely online niche quasifascist talking points). ZAN SHUT UP ABOUT THE RETCON

*cough* anyways. i forgot what i was saying. damn it. Eridan wouldn’t ever get better and its profoundly out of character to think he would i guess. While Equius has that strange inherent out-of-character soft(?)ness to him (ignoring the weird romantic shit he pulls which.... is probably linked to his strict hierarchical thinking regaurding castes -Aradia being a burgundy isn’t a coincidence- but frankly would take another fifty paragraphs jesus) and Vriska has the mountains of characterization dedicated to how she can do better and is aware of it, and Gamzee’s worse traits are buried in the arcane clusterfuck that is comprehending his “true” motives, eridan’s just... a piece of shit. even his moments of going-against-his-own-fascist-narratives are built integrally on *other* ways he’s basically entirely awful. the softer parts of his personality are used narrative-wise to further highlight the way he sucks like... *always*. Also the fucking insane person theories regarding his tranfem coding (that despite recognizing are.... fucking absurd I still willfully buy into bc they’re both interesting, about as credible as most homestuck meta, and fairly horrifying to contemplate considering his blithering incel shit and attempting-to-insert-himself-into-a-lesbian’s-quadrant-life but in the same grotesque way that i find yoshikage kira’s narrative parallels to The Closet compelling in a horror context. *ANYWAY*) and his actually goddamn official fucking pesterquest gender arc (seriously?????) that actually lends credence to the Magical Use As A Universal Feminine stuff leading him to be just... jfc this is the worst girl-thing ever created. I don’t even wish hate or anything on people who like Eridan than aren’t sex pests or nazis, that isn’t my point in this, i just think anyone who looks at canon eridan and goes “oh that can be redeemed” are fucking fools and people who look at equius vriska or gamzee and think “they just need to get older they’ll know better we all were bad as teenagers” are entire royal courts of jesters fsjlkfkldjsjfklds.

#title added in post #ALSO SORRY FOR CALLING THE WANDS THING INSANE I MEAN IT IS BUT I UNIRONICALLY BELIEVE IT THINKING BACK #LIKE IT SUCKS I CANT WRITE ABOUT IT WITHOUT GETTING SELF-CONCIOUS BC ITS FUCKIN FREAKED BUT????#ITS FUCKING CONSISTENT???? AT LEAST WITH THE ADDITIONS POSTCANON MAKES?????????????#admittedly the guns half of the symbolism is. a bit murkier. but no magic is a girls club in homestuck no amount of girls using rifles and t #then stopping will change that

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mermaidsirennikita · 4 years

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bridgerton--the good, the bad, the ugly

The short of it: Bridgerton excellently captures the tone of Regency romance novels and offers a lot of escapism and great sex scenes, but could definitely use some serious work in terms of how it depicts race and it should have made some further alterations to the dated and flawed source material. Definitely loved a lot of it and am hotly anticipating the second season, but I want to see more work done and I HOPE that this encourages the adaptation of better (and less inherently flawed) romance novels.

Now for the longer take.

The Good

Bridgerton depicted sex and romance in a way that is totally different from anything I’ve seen in period dramas, for sure, but possibly different from anything I’ve seen on TV. The romance of it all was woven into almost every aspect of the show. There is the handsome and seemingly severe but extravagantly wealthy and sexually adept duke sweeping into town. The (multiple) rakes who just want to have fun while also being hot messes. The awakening of female sexuality and the copious use of the female gaze. (Note the pretty modest and minimal focus on female nudity, while we get plenty of lingering shots on Simon.). People want love! There is pretty minimal violence and perhaps the most physically violent scene involves Simon beating a man up because HE IMPEACHED DAPHNE’S HONOR~.

The sex scenes themselves focused on Daphne’s pleasure for the most part, and were probably among the best I’ve seen since Outlander in terms of chemistry, in terms of the visuals, in terms of focus on sex as an act of emotional connection and FUN. Yes, there was some Unlikely Vaginal Orgasming, but we also saw Simon tell Daphne about masturbation. On the wedding night, he was pretty clearly touching her to help her enjoy it. He ate her out... a good bit.

And aside from that, we got all of the grand speeches, the stolen glances and touches, an excellent buildup of sexual tension that led to some pretty hilarious moments.

I also really enjoyed many of the performances on this show. Rege-Jean and Phoebe had great chemistry and excellent back and forth. Jonathan was a GREAT Anthony. I would argue that as lackluster as I found his relationship with Siena (more on that in a minute) it largely existed as a way to set him up for his romance with Kate. He now has even more of a reason to be down with love, as opposed to solely relying on a kind of flimsy tragic backstory. Additionally, his overprotectiveness of Daphne added tension to the story and made him a source of comedic relief for me? I loved it. Give me disaster Anthony all day; can’t wait until he falls to the enemies to lovers trope just like Simon fell to his FLAW-FREE fake dating plan.

A lot of the changes I found were really good. Obviously, it was important that the show incorporated greater diversity (though they need way more). Benedict was INFINITELY more fun and interesting than he was in the novels, and acted as another standout for me. As much as I hate Portia Featherington, I think that the elevation of her to a proper villainess is probably necessary and Polly Walker excels at those types of roles, though they need to maybe have her be less like, actively racist. I adored the addition of Queen Charlotte; she was excellent comic relief. Lady Danbury’s expanded role and relationship to Simon was one of the best moves they made. It touched my entire soul.

Buuuut....

The Bad

The show needs to work on casting more men that are frankly on Rege-Jean’s level. It feels a bit awkward to see a guy that is by most people’s standards kind of stunning and then.... Colin looks twelve. Lord Philip is like... a farm guy. Get rid of the sideburns, we’re in romance novel territory.

In the same note, the girl who played Siena wasn’t a great actress and wasn’t super stunning, so even though I’m fine with her being a placeholder.... Eh. Go for better casting. The woman playing Madame Delacroix would’ve played that role so much better and I really enjoyed her dynamic with Benedict because she was just fun.

Frankly, I don’t know what the fuck they’re going to do to make me want to watch Penelope and Colin fall in love. Their book was already a bit basic--fun, but far from revolutionary. I don’t really get why they would receive attention similar to that of Kate and Anthony, basically. The issue is that Colin, again, looks and sound rather young and twerpy. It obviously wasn’t great for him to be tricked into raising another man’s child, but.... For fuck’s sake, how much would that have affected his life on a practical level. He’d never know unless he was told, thanks to the lack of DNA tests. He was marrying far out of his league in terms of attractiveness. He’s a rich white guy in England with a supportive family.

I really disliked the fact that Colin told Marina in his huffy little tantrum that he would have married her anyway--because would you have, buddy? Really? The thing is that Marina had no way of knowing that and her entire life (and the reputations of her cousins) was on the line. She didn’t know if she could trust Colin to keep her secret. They barely knew each other. He basically came off as a whiny child and I’m fine with him staying in Greece if that’s the plan.

Penelope was just... psychotic. And that was really disappointing, because I love Nicola and would love to have loved to see the fat girl get her sexy love story. But first off, lol, it wouldn’t have been sexy because Colin was miscast. Second, she basically tried to destroy Marina’s life and that of her sisters? And herself? Because Colin? Because Colin, a guy who hasn’t even shown any amount of attraction to her at this point? Her tears, her whining, it was all too much. Penelope was dealing with a crush and Marina was dealing with the real Grown Woman issues of a child out of wedlock and as it turned out a dead lover and they were not on equal footing.

I mean, Penelope could very well make a great villainess at this point, and if done well I’d embrace it. But I do not know how the fuck they can make me interested in her love story. And the idea of her basically being launched into villainy because she was this chubby white girl obsessively jealous of a beautiful black woman...... not a great look.

The show definitely needs to explore diversity in terms of sexuality too--I don’t think it’s correct to read Benedict as straight because he still seems to be open to exploring. Once he has more screentime, I think he could totally end up being bisexual, and it’s possible that the writers were trying to feel the audience out in terms of their receptiveness to taking a straight character who has a big straight love story in the books and making him LGBT+. Eloise could also easily be a lesbian, and I’d be thrilled to see that happen. They need to do something to expand the world, and if there are 8 Bridgerton kids, all of them being straight as an arrow seems SO unlikely.

The Ugly

Obviously, the rape scene was bad and should have been written out. Simon could have gotten caught up in the moment and blown up at Daphne after he accidentally didn’t pull out in time. Men.... accidentally don’t pull out in time... a lot. That’s how babies happen. It would’ve been believable, and due to our sympathies being with Simon largely, I don’t think he would have become irredeemable if he was more at fault than Daphne.

As it was, I will say that the scene was somewhat better than it played in the books because Simon was conscious and totally sober, and it was a bit? Confusing? That he didn’t just roll Daphne over and pull out? Because she wasn’t really clearly trying as hard as she was in the book to wrap her legs around him and hold him tight. But it remained a rape scene. The show also did a better job, I think, of establishing how fucked up it was that Simon took advantage of Daphne’s lack of knowledge. Whatever he said about thinking she knew what was up--he knew she didn’t even know about masturbation. He had to know she wouldn’t understand what pulling out meant. He did very clearly mislead her to think that he was sterile and therefore denied Daphne her ability to give informed consent. Did that justify what Daphne did? Nope. Two wrongs don’t make a right. But both of them did a fucked up thing and I think that we honestly could’ve stopped at Simon’s misleading.

The issue too is that this leads into a bigger problem the show had. It wanted to include diversity (yay!) but did not consider the total implications of what was happening (not yay). Daphne and Simon’s dynamic is inevitably influenced by the fact that she’s a white woman and he’s a black man, regardless of whatever handwaves happened. This influences the sexual assault and makes it even more messy.

Speaking of mess, I’m not sure what exactly would have fixed the “we don’t want this to be a colorblind casting” issue... but the explanation they came up with wasn’t good. Never mind that this makes everything SUPER confusing (racism is over like..... maybe 50 years MAX after Queen Charlotte’s marriage if we assume she was a teen when she married and is in her 60s now?) but Lady Danbury’s dialogue explaining this was HORRENDOUS. “One of them fell in love with one of us”. The implications are awful. I don’t know if perhaps setting back the integration of society centuries earlier would have helped? But this wasn’t it.

Additionally, the writers and casting directors didn’t seem to get that diversity is all well and good, but what about the fact that almost every black character has a light skin tone? Why are there so few black female characters? Why is Marina, the most prominent woc on the show, given the “pregnant and desperately trying to trick a man into marrying her until her jealous white cousin fucks her life up and she is humiliated into settling for a loveless match” plot? I desperately hope we see her next season, falling in love with Sir Phillip or perhaps having experienced a plot twist that gives her someone else... And she better not die. Eloise can find someone else if Marina really ends up with Sir Philip.

Ultimately, again, I really loved the show. But it needs to work on some things. I think that a lot of its issues can be addressed and fixed in a future season, and I HOPE they do that.

#bridgerton #but fuck polin for life lol

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elyvorg · 4 years

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Remember that analysis post of mine debunking the ridiculous myth perpetrated in this fandom that Kaito never apologises, in which I discuss how he actually apologises way more than he should? Well, while thinking about and writing that post, I also got curious. What’s the cold, hard data on that? What if I just straight-up counted every single instance of each character apologising throughout the main story of DRV3, in order to be able to indisputably prove at a glance that Kaito is actually one of the most apologetic characters in this game?

…I wasn’t willing to go so far as to play through the entire game again just for the purpose of counting every time a character apologised, mind you. But several months ago, I began watching yet another V3 Let’s Play – and since I was already committed to watching said LP all the way through, I figured I could count all the apologies as it went along and collect that data with minimal extra effort on my part. So here’s the full dataset, at last!

There we go. It is objective and indisputable that Kaito apologises the third-most out of any character in this game, behind only the incredibly insecure Gonta and the still-rather-insecure-and-has-the-most-lines Shuichi. And pretty close behind them, at that!

I noticed a bunch of interesting things while doing this, though, so I can’t resist the chance to break this down and talk about it in some more detail.

Data collection criteria

For the sake of Scientific Thoroughness, I should explain my exact criteria for counting these. Every way of phrasing an apology, be it “sorry”, “my apologies”, “my bad”, etc, was counted. I also decided to count statements along the lines of "I need to apologise for this", because that itself is essentially already expressing the apology, too.

If a character apologises multiple times for the same thing, each of those times counts separately. This isn’t a measure of how many individual things each character apologises for, but rather of how inclined they are to apologise. Even if multiple apologies are grouped together, such as “Sorry… I’m so sorry…” or “sorry, my bad”, those still count as two, because that’s essentially a double-strength apology.

I did not count optional dialogue that was mutually exclusive with other optional dialogue. Which is to say, I didn’t count any FTEs, since you can’t get all of them in a single playthrough, and as much as I might like to insist that Kaito’s and Maki’s FTEs with Shuichi should definitely be considered canon, I’m trying to be unbiased here. I also didn’t count any FTE invitation dialogue, even though you technically can get all of the first parts of those (the lines before you actually make the choice to invite someone) in a single playthrough, mostly because it’d have taken forever to go through them for absolutely everyone.

However, I did count optional dialogue in those bits where you’re free to talk to everyone in the room before advancing the plot by talking to a specific person, because that can all be assumed to be canon. The bonus item scenes also count, because they should be assumed to be canon, too. There may have been some apologies that I missed here, because the LP I was watching occasionally missed these bits of dialogue, and while I tried to check myself for these missed bits, I may have overlooked a few. But if so, it was definitely only a few and not enough to significantly affect the overall picture of the data.

I only counted Shuichi’s and Kaede’s apologies when they were spoken out loud. It’d be unfair to count their inner-monologue apologies as well when we have no idea how much any other character might also be apologising in their head.

The pregame characters’ apologies were not counted, because they are not the same people. I would have counted Tsumugi’s and Rantaro’s apologies prior to the “reset” if they’d had any, since they are already themselves from the very beginning.

Obviously there’s still a lot of inherent bias here towards the characters who get more screentime and more lines, such as especially Shuichi. There isn’t much I can do about that, short of counting the exact number of dialogue boxes that every single character has throughout the whole game and using that to normalise things. As you can imagine, I don’t want to do that. (Though, on the extreme off-chance that someone does somehow happen to have data for that lying around somewhere that they can access with minimal effort, I’d love for them to send it my way.)

Characters who totally never do anything wrong

I was not at all surprised to see that Kiyo and Angie never apologise for anything at all, sincere or not, warranted or not. Psh, what do you mean they might have done something wrong, of course they never do anything wrong ever.

Miu almost ended up on the zero-apologies list, too. Interestingly, the four times she does apologise in canon dialogue are all during the Virtual World trip. Three of them happen when people are frustrated that she isn’t telling them stuff about the Virtual World sooner, and one is for being about to murder Kokichi in the flashback to that. Since she never apologises at all the entire rest of the time, this is a neat sign that she actually does feel pretty guilty about deceiving everyone and plotting to get them all killed.

In another effort to be as objective as possible, I also counted every apology regardless of how sincere it was. However, in Kokichi’s case, I did keep a track of how many of his apologies were actually sincere, out of curiosity. (Other characters may have a few insincere ones here and there, but it only felt worth my time keeping track of that with Kokichi, because he’s obviously the biggest offender for this.) I included this information on Kokichi’s bar of the graph, because I feel that the implication otherwise given of him being the fifth most apologetic character in this game is deeply misleading. If you discount all of Kokichi’s screamingly insincere apologies, suddenly his apology count is just unremarkable background noise on par with most of the others.

It is notable – and also very unsurprising to me – that Kokichi’s five actual sincere apologies are all for things that, according to Kaito’s principles on this, he doesn’t really need to be apologising for at all. They are all within chapters 1 to 3. He never sincerely apologises for any of the many things he actually does wrong that really do warrant being apologised for, because Kokichi is totally never in the wrong about anything, you guys, and he definitely doesn’t ever murder anyone.

Three of those five sincere apologies happen when he’s hit his head during investigation 3 and is dazed and disoriented. Apparently Kokichi needs to be literally injured in order to be made to feel like anything is his fault for more than a brief moment. …That said, that evidently only works for accidental slip-ups that aren’t really his fault at all. Kokichi’s totally-never-in-the-wrong-about-anything defence mechanisms work full time to protect him from ever having to acknowledge and feel remorse for any of his many very real and deliberate misdeeds, even when he’s painfully poisoned and dying.

Kaede

Kaede’s apology count is very notably high for someone who was only alive for one chapter. If she’d stayed alive for longer, she’d almost certainly have rivalled Shuichi for total apologies. (So, technically, Kaito is probably only the fourth most apologetic character in this game. Still, though.)

You might assume that Kaede’s high count here is because of the murder she does, but actually only like two or three of them are related to that. Most of her apologies are evenly spread throughout the entire chapter. Some of it’s just general politeness, but an awful lot of it comes from her being too inclined to feel bad over not being as good a leader as she wishes she was, when she really hasn’t done anything wrong at all. Kaito is right to try and encourage her not to apologise when things aren’t her fault! She of all people needs to hear that!

Chapter-by-chapter

The majority of the rest of the characters aren’t that interesting to talk about. For the most part their low counts are basically just, like, background noise politeness, a vague measure of how polite that character is and nothing more. Very little of those counts has anything to do with how insecure that character is, or any actual things they do wrong that genuinely warrant apologising.

But for the other three of our most-apologetic characters, since they’re alive for several chapters, it’s kind of interesting to look at how their counts fluctuate from chapter to chapter. So here’s another graph, to help me break their huge counts down a bit more.

Shuichi

Despite him obviously having the most lines, I was pretty surprised that Shuichi ended up with the highest apology count overall. I wasn’t even expecting him to top Kaito’s count, let alone Gonta’s.

This conclusion did, however, seem a lot more likely once I’d made it through chapter 1 and seen just how much he apologised during that time. Geez, is that one hell of a headstart for even Gonta and Kaito to catch up to. My surprise over this was probably because, when I think about Shuichi, I usually think about the post-Kaede protagonist-Shuichi (perhaps especially because I usually think about him in a Kaito-centric context, whoops). So it’s easy to forget just how incredibly insecure – and also apologetic – he was in the very beginning.

Shuichi apologises exactly as horribly much as Kaede during chapter 1. Again, this is partly politeness, but also far too much of him having an inclination to feel bad over things that aren’t his fault because of how insecure he is. Kaede and Shuichi basically spend most of chapter 1 constantly apologising to each other for existing, and it’s heartbreaking. Every time I had to add another of theirs to my spreadsheet, I was all, “No! Stop it!”

What I find really fascinating about Shuichi’s count, though, is that he pretty much loses this bad habit entirely after Kaede’s death. Despite him still kind of moping around and struggling to know what to do until Kaito steps in to help, it seems like Shuichi’s resolve to carry on Kaede’s wish and believe in himself more really had already had a tangible positive effect on his confidence!

This also means that Kaito never has any reason to give Shuichi advice telling him not to apologise if he hasn’t done anything wrong, which he absolutely would have done if he’d spent more time with Shuichi in chapter 1 when he was apologising so much. As I mentioned in my original post about this topic, this fact is important.

Shuichi’s counts in chapters 2 and 3 are especially low. This is what background noise politeness from a character tends to look like – and it also pretty clearly proves that his and Kaede’s huge apology counts in chapter 1 are down to way more than them just being generally polite people who are getting the most screentime.

It might look like Shuichi gradually gets more insecure again as the killing game goes on, but that’s not actually quite why his count goes up again like that. Instead, it’s that, when something particular does go wrong, Shuichi still feels inclined to apologise for it a lot more than most people would. Turns out, most of his excess apologies in chapters 4 and 5 are spurred by very specific incidents involving Kaito.

Literally five of Shuichi’s apologies in chapter 4 are over the cell phone incident with Kaito during the investigation. That genuinely did warrant an apology – he should have thought to warn Kaito that he’d be logged out beforehand so he wouldn’t be so startled – but even then, apologising that many times was still rather excessive. Shuichi evidently felt really bad about startling his friend like that in the first place. But it also doesn’t help that Kaito reacted more strongly to it than he should have done, for reasons rooted in his own issues that Shuichi was completely oblivious to, which is probably a lot of why Shuichi felt he had to keep apologising.

Three of Shuichi’s apologies in chapter 5 are over the awkward situation between him and Kaito, albeit directed at Maki and not Kaito. This is despite Shuichi himself asserting that he doesn’t believe he should apologise for his actions in trial 4. Even then, he’s still feeling insecure enough about the whole thing that some unintentional apologies slip out of him anyway, not precisely about Gonta’s trial, but about not being able to fix the rift between him and Kaito. He seems to feel like that’s meant to be his responsibility, when he should be able to realise himself that it isn’t. The real responsibility to fix this is on Kaito. Once again, it’s Kaito’s issues – and Kaito not talking about his issues – that causes Shuichi to apologise for something more than he ought to.

Another three of Shuichi’s apologies in chapter 5 are over lying to his friends at the end of the trial in a desperate attempt to protect Kaito. (…Well, technically all of these apologies are part of the lie and therefore not really him apologising for lying – but his inner monologue confirms that he really is sorry for lying, which is almost certainly why he ends up fake-apologising so much within the lie. More on this principle in a bit when I talk about all of Kaito’s apologies in trial 5.) Again, this is another thing that does genuinely warrant an apology, but probably not three times? And while this one isn’t related to Kaito’s issues, it is still because of Kaito that Shuichi needed to try and lie to everyone in the first place.

(One more of Shuichi’s apologies at the end of chapter 5 is for Kaito’s death, because in his grief he’s hurting enough to have slipped back into feeling like everything is his fault. At least this is just the one, and Maki manages to talk him out of blaming himself any more than that.)

Without these specific incidents that he’s still a bit too inclined to feel bad about, Shuichi’s count would be three in chapter 4 and five in chapter 5. So, basically just background noise politeness again. Maybe he’s being slightly more generally insecure in chapter 5 than usual, perhaps due to Kaito not quite being there for him, and/or the whole despair thing. But he’s no longer constantly apologising for existing to nearly as much of an extent as he was in chapter 1.

Delightfully, in chapter 6, with Kaito’s death spurring Shuichi’s determination into overdrive, Shuichi’s count goes right back down to insignificant background noise politeness. Nothing at all happens to make him feel like he needs to apologise way too much.

This is exactly how I hoped it would end! He is being a hero and none of his actions here are anything for him to make himself feel bad about. Kaito would be proud.

Gonta

Gonta’s background-noise politeness in the earlier chapters is noticeably higher than everyone else’s, because there’s also quite a bit of insecurity and apologising-for-existing going on with him. But it’s still not, like, super high on its own. It might not even be quite as bad as Kaede, even accounting for him getting way fewer lines than her?

His somewhat higher count in chapter 2 could be because of the Insect Meet and Greet, but it could also be because the way Ryoma’s body was discovered made Gonta feel especially strongly that he should have been able to prevent Ryoma’s death.

But then, of course, there’s chapter 4. As you’d imagine, almost all of those are in the trial, and almost all towards the end of it. Poor Gonta. It also doesn’t help that there’s two Gontas in the room for the trial conclusion, and naturally I included Alter Ego Gonta’s apologies in Gonta’s count, too.

Kaito

For the first two chapters, when he doesn’t have any sidekicks and therefore no expectations to live up to as their hero, and/or when he’s not struggling with weakness and worrying that he’s failing those expectations, Kaito’s apology level is just unremarkable background noise like most other characters.

(Well, one of them is actually not background noise and is a meaningful, warranted apology for punching Shuichi at the end of trial 1. But because he correctly doesn’t apologise for this any more than he needs to, it kinda blends in with the background noise.)

Then chapter 3 happens, and, predictably, his count shoots way up. All but one of Kaito’s apologies in this chapter are over being sick due to his phobia. (And if I’d been counting the free time invitation dialogues, there would be another four added on here, again for being too sick to hang out with Shuichi.)

Of his five in chapter 4, one is genuinely warranted (for laughing at Maki’s katana story), and two are over being physically sick, goddammit, Kaito. The other two in this chapter are for letting Kokichi’s taunts get to him, which is also not quite a thing he should be apologising for. Kaito can’t help it if his emotions react in a certain way to Kokichi making him out to be worthless. He can control how he responds to it, but not how he feels over it.

Then there’s chapter 5, which somehow manages to even eclipse Kaito’s chapter 3 count – but most of this is about the trial. Only three of his apologies in this chapter are from the Daily Life. (Naturally, two of them are still over being sick. No, Kaito, stop it.)

Literally half of Kaito’s fourteen apologies in the trial boil down to being sorry for tricking and deceiving his friends. This is something that warrants an apology, according to Kaito’s principles, even though he’s doing this deliberately for the purpose of hopefully saving everyone. He is still choosing to hurt them as part of that, and that hurt deserves to be apologised for.

What’s interesting about most of Kaito’s apologies for this, though, is that they’re technically insincere. He’s apologising for tricking everybody while he’s still tricking them, which sure makes it sound like he doesn’t mean it. This even applies to the majority of these apologies that happen during the bits where he’s speaking in his own voice. Because “Exisal Kaito” is a fake and overexaggerated version of himself that he wants everyone to conclude was really just Kokichi pretending to be him, anything he says during those moments is never going to come across as genuine.

But obviously, there’s not a shred of doubt that Kaito really is sorry for tricking everyone the entire time he’s doing this. It says a lot that during those bits where he’s being himself, Kaito just so happens to have a particularly high density of apologies-per-line. He feels awful for being this insincere and deceptive towards his friends, and he really wishes he could just communicate to them how genuinely sorry he is for all of this. But because he can’t, the next best thing to try and scratch that itch is to just apologise anyway even though he needs them to assume it’s all fake.

Kaito even apologises a couple of times as Exisal Kokichi for lying to them! This is absolutely categorically not something Kokichi wrote into his script, because Kokichi never apologised for lying, not even in a blatantly-insincere-sounding way. Kaito’s desperate desire to express how awful he felt about this was just so strong that it even accidentally slipped into a couple of his ad-libs as Kokichi.

However, while Kaito apologises so many times for this, it’s not because he’s blaming himself a bit too excessively much for his wrongdoing like Shuichi was still liable to do at this point in the story. The only reason Kaito apologises this much for tricking everyone is due to how insincere he was forced to sound almost every time. He kept apologising again and again because each insincere apology never felt like enough, and he desperately needed them to know that he meant it.

When Kaito reveals himself at the end of the trial, he pretty much immediately apologises again for tricking them – once, and that’s it. This time, they know he means it, and that’s all he needs. He’s not going to wallow in his bad feelings any more than that.

This is also the case for the other genuine wrongdoings he goes on to apologise for in the conclusion. Kaito gives a double-sized but still concise apology to Shuichi for lashing out in trial 4 like he’d needed to give this whole time, and then one single apology to his friends for lying to them about his illness. He gets those apologies out like he should, but once he’s done so, he doesn’t linger on them and mope any more than he needs to.

Which is good! Look at Kaito finally following his own advice again and being emotionally healthy about this!

…Except for the part where he then goes on to apologise twice for dying on them. That one is still not his fault.

#danganronpa v3 #danganronpa v3 spoilers #ramble #kaito momota #shuichi saihara #gonta gokuhara #kaede akamatsu #kaito's hero issues #i may be just a little bit bitter about this ridiculous myth #i am also fully aware that i'm preaching to the choir here in terms of people who read my blog #but shush let me geek out about this data anyway

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backofthebookshelf · 4 years

Text

One of the nice things about the way the TMA fandom has reached full large-fandom levels of toxicity is that I no longer care if people get mad at me for my opinions on characters! So, some Georgie meta.

(Because fandom is and always has been Like That, I do feel the need to clarify here that I love Georgie, she's one of my favorite characters, characters are more interesting because of their flaws, and I have no investment in the idea that women or female characters are inherently better or more emotionally competent than men or male characters. If I talk a lot about her relationship with Jon, it's because Jon is our point of view character and also the person she interacts with the most. Also, this rambles, sorry.)

I've been thinking about the Season 4 Jon Trauma post and how much I liked the way it talked about Georgie, and it's convinced me that if Georgie could feel fear, she's the one who'd be most afraid of Jon out of all of them. She's the one protagonist we have whose only interaction with the powers has been as a direct victim of them. She doesn't know what they feel like from the inside, like Jon and Melanie; she doesn't know what they're like when they're someone you love, like Basira; she doesn't even know what they're like as petty middle management, like Martin and Tim. What she knows is that one time a monster ate her (only) friend and traumatized her so badly she spent a year in a suicidal depression.

And now her ex - and yes, Jon and Georgie have a remarkably comfortable relationship in the beginning of season three, but they're still exes and they broke up for reasons, even if we don't know exactly what they are - has turned up on her doorstep, shaking and possibly bloody, with nowhere else to go and no access to his home. He's clearly lying about what's going on. He repeatedly violates her house rules. And then he tells her that he's turning into one of those same kinds of monsters that traumatized her and ate her friend. It's clearly enough to override any remaining affection she had for him, and by any definition he has now positioned himself as a trigger.

(Through no fault of his own: the only real response he has to Georgie's statement is "I can't believe you didn't tell me." She's the one who assumes that he Knew, somehow, that she also had a statement; she's the one who suggests he had alternatives. Both suggestions are plausible but we don't actually know for certain that either are true.)

But Georgie isn't afraid of Jon because Georgie can't be afraid -at least, according to her. I'm not sure how much I believe this in the grand scheme of things; it seems like an extremely unlikely mechanism for one of the fears to have. It seems much more likely to me that she's just never met anything as terrifying as that encounter was, and her subjective sense of fear has been massively recalibrated. In which case not only meeting but having hosted in your home another monster who self-describes as similar to the one that was so terrifying that literal threats to your life are no longer distressing would...probably ping. But she's conceptualized herself as a person who doesn't feel fear; it's even possible that was part of her recovery, identifying this as a possible benefit of what would otherwise have been a universally terrible, soul-breaking experience. She looked existential terror in the face and survived, and came out of it a person who cannot be afraid of anything left on this earth. That's kind of a superhero origin story, and I can't blame her for it. I think anyone with a mental illness has at least tried to find ways in which their suffering has made them a better, stronger person.

But whether she's suppressing and rationalizing away any fear she feels or she genuinely doesn't feel any of it, she does frequently behave as though her lack of fear gives her a more objective view of the situation than anyone else. I don't believe she actually uses the word "just," but it drips from her every interaction with Jon after Dead Woman Walking. Why doesn't he just stop reading the statements? Why doesn't he just quit? And, in Zombie, I honestly can't interpret her reaction to Jon when he wakes up from his coma as anything other than, Why doesn't he just die? If he hates being this so much, if he really doesn't want to be a monster, why doesn't he just die?

I really would like to think that it goes without saying that this is, at the very least, a massive failure of empathy, but she's so explicit about it and fandom spent so much time basically agreeing with her that apparently it doesn't. Not only is Georgie not afraid of the situation, but (and this is the part that makes me wonder if she's not rationalizing, rather than being supernaturally unable to feel fear) she can't possibly fathom how afraid everyone else is, and she never tries. She persists in treating the whole awful situation, as @findingfeather's post says, like this is a mundane problem with people who are refusing to help themselves, rather than a supernatural trap that has been specifically built to be inescapable.

Now, let me be clear, even if she were talking to, say, a drug addict who nearly killed themselves because they were in denial about how much of a problem they had, her attitude would be unforgivable. But in this case Jon had no choice in whether or not to become addicted to statements; it was done to him in such a way that he didn't notice it was happening until withdrawal was already incapacitating. He also didn't have the option to leave, as Tim's extended vacation made clear. And, on top of all of that, the whole reason he was in a coma in the first place was that he was trying to save the world. (Neither he nor she knows at this point that he was doing nothing of the kind, so that's really not relevant.) And - look, when Jon came to her after the end of season two, he was asking for help. When he rejected the kind of help that she offered it was because he knew it didn't apply to the problems he actually had, but she treats that like it's his problem, which is something like offering a leg splint to a person bleeding out from a gunshot wound and getting offended when they tell you that won't work. He was very clear that what was happening scared him and he didn't know what to do about it, and her only suggestion was "walk away," which he literally could not do, for multiple reasons.

She's lucky Jon has pretty much precisely zero self-worth at this point, because anyone else would have cut her off completely for behaving like a fucking asshole.

I say "she's lucky" because frankly, even though she says that she wants nothing more to do with him, she turns up at least twice in the Institute after that, with the excuse that she's picking up Melanie to take her to therapy. I don't know about you, but I have never once gone to someone's workplace to pick them up and gone snooping around inside, and no matter how fascinatingly weird that workplace is, I definitely can't imagine doing so when I know that workplace also contains a person I have definitely decided I never want to speak to again. She goes into the Archives, for Christ's sake, and she listens outside Jon's office door for long enough to catch a bit of the recording before letting herself in (so it's very clear she knows who's in there).

Now I'm not trying to paint her as a monster here; Georgie would hardly be the first person to have second thoughts about cutting off someone they still care about, or to break that boundary that they set themselves when they realize they do still want to know how that person is doing. But the fact is that she positions herself as having the moral high ground in every single discussion they have and that's just not true. She is not literally a supernatural monster, true, but if season four did anything with the concept of monsters it was breaking down the difference between "supernaturally driven no-longer-human" and "person capable of caring and empathy." (That's a whole different meta, though, one that I will get around to someday.) Not that Jon is any better, in that encounter specifically, at dealing with a complicated and contentious relationship - he deliberately goads her, even if he doesn't use compulsion. But that's the thing, they're both exes who have had a falling out and aren't handling it very well. Neither of them is in the right.

All of which makes me really wonder what her relationship with Melanie is actually like. We don't actually see hardly any of it directly, and of what we do, well, Melanie sounds like she's still high on painkillers, so it's hard to take that as an indication of anything. But given that people (who are not intentionally trying to manipulate those around them) tend to, y'know, be fundamentally the same person in their various relationships, though it may manifest in different ways, we can probably make some guesses.

I have always been bothered by, and I really can't ignore, the fact that they were getting together at the same time that Melanie was doing what Georgie has been demanding of Jon since season three: she did whatever it took to get out. I have to wonder if Georgie knows about the nonconsensual surgery part of Melanie's process of getting out, and if she does, if she understands how vital it was. I certainly wouldn't be surprised, if she does know, that she's managed to compartmentalize it: Jon inflicted this terrible trauma on Melanie, Melanie escaped the entity that took her over. (Subconscious implication: Jon is a monster; Melanie is better than him.) I would be very surprised if Georgie is interested at all in the fine distinctions between entities; she's shown no interest in learning what is actually happening to anyone in this situation beyond "it's bad and they should get out of it." But it's relevant, because by the time Melanie makes the decision to blind herself, she's in a much different position than Jon, enslaved by an entity but not consumed by one. She herself admitted to Jon that she would never have voluntarily escaped from the Slaughter.

And given how difficult Melanie finds it to talk about any of this - you can hear her dragging the words out from behind her teeth in her conversation with Jon in Flesh, truly incredible acting by Lydia Nicholas, my god - if Georgie doesn't want to hear it? I can't imagine Melanie insisting. Yes, Melanie is going to therapy, but let me tell you, I've been going to therapy for twelve years now and I have yet to have several of the important conversations my therapists have insisted I have. That shit is hard. But I can imagine a scenario where, having been told by her therapist (who, remember, doesn't have the first idea what Melanie is actually going through, because Melanie isn't telling her about the supernatural so she has to leave out a lot of really relevant details) that she ought to tell her friend/potential girlfriend/new girlfriend about these things, Melanie attempts to bring it up, Georgie says kind and reassuring things and refuses to let her clarify any of the details, and Melanie gives up in relief, thinking, well, I tried. Super valid all around, but it doesn't mean that Georgie has any clearer picture of what Melanie's traumas actually look like, never mind Jon's. There's no world in which I can imagine Georgie actually internalizing the idea that Melanie loved the Slaughter when it had her, and she would gladly have stayed with it if Jon and Basira hadn't intervened.

In Georgie's eyes, Melanie is being a Good Victim. She was hurt but she was strong; she fought it until she won; now she's going to therapy and setting boundaries and trying to heal. She got away.

(Except, of course, she didn't, because as of The Eye Opens no one has gotten away, because this is the entire world now. We have no idea how this has affected Melanie. Presumably she's out of reach of the Eye, given that Jon can't see her or Georgie (and there's some evidence on the side of Georgie's encounter genuinely having stripped her of fear, if she's also invisible to the Eye), but she spent a long time under the influence of the Slaughter. It had her firmly enough that her attacking Jon was enough to give him his Slaughter scar. If nothing else, Melanie certainly hasn't had her fear removed, and talk about a situation bound to retraumatize someone who had such a visceral revulsion to being trapped that Elias chose it as his mechanism of control over her. Melanie probably doesn't look like a Good Victim any more, and I'd bet her relationship with Georgie is suffering some serious strain because of it.)

We don't know when exactly Melanie and Georgie got together; the last time one of them mentions the other is, I'm pretty sure, when Georgie tells Jon that Melanie is back from India. So we know that Georgie and Melanie were friends; that's good, that's a good foundation for a romantic relationship. At the very least they know each other, they have some idea of what to expect. I'd be surprised if they were dating during that season 3/4 hiatus period, though, or frankly any time before Melanie's surgery, just because Melanie seems much too consumed with rage to have room for any other emotions, and I can't imagine Georgie putting up with that.

What seems way more likely to me is this: Melanie comes back from India, arranges to meet Georgie for drinks. Probably they don't talk about anything serious; possibly they talk about Jon, honestly, since we know Melanie was looking for him and Georgie talked to him about Melanie, but very likely in the same "stuck-up pompous ass" way that Melanie talks about Jon in early seasons. (I bet Melanie's roasts are amazing.) Shortly after that Melanie joins the Magnus Institute and then, very likely, either she never tells Georgie about it and therefore they don't talk much or she does tell Georgie about it and Georgie tells her that place is bad news and she won't have anything to do with it and they don't talk at all, until, whichever way that went, the Unknowing happens and Tim dies and Jon winds up in a coma and everything goes to shit. We know Georgie visits Jon in the hospital; we don't know if Melanie does, but frankly it seems unlikely. If they did cross paths during this time, it was probably very brief and superficial. Then: the surgery, and Melanie's recovery.

I'll be honest, I have a hard time imagining Melanie deciding on her own that she should go to therapy. It's possible Basira suggested it, but it really does sound like a Georgie thing to do. So I picture something like this: from the way Basira talks it sounds like they've all been pretty much living in the Archives for a while, and on top of that everyone in the Archives has just badly violated Melanie's trust, so Melanie pulls up her Facebook DMs and talks to the only other person she has. You were right, she says, this place is terrible, I can't handle it, there's no one here I can trust and I'm so alone. And Georgie, who is generous with help and advice (so long as it's accepted) and (like anyone) weak to being told she was right about something, starts talking to her. We know Georgie's got good boundaries, and we know she doesn't want to hear details about what's going on in the Institute, so I can see her saying, I can talk to you, I would love to talk to you, but not about this. For that you need a therapist.

So Melanie gets a therapist, and the prospect of going out amongst the monsters they know are stalking the Institute without that protective shield of rage (never mind the emotional vulnerability of going to therapy in the first place) makes public transit an unthinkable option, so she asks Georgie to take her, and she does, and she keeps taking her to therapy, which is, as far as we know, the only time Melanie leaves the Archives in season four, until she blinds herself and escapes it completely.

And so they have this relationship that's built up almost entirely around Melanie's trauma - with a foundation of friendship, certainly, so I do think that if they are willing to work through it they could make it a working, healthy relationship, but (and again this isn't stated in canon but is my speculation based on what we know about these characters) it is a romantic relationship that's built around the process of Melanie recovering from multiple traumas. Ones that we know that Georgie a) doesn't know many details about, and b) more importantly, refuses to know any details about. Now, I have no experience with romantic relationships and serious trauma; I might be wildly off base here. But. I know that boundaries are important and I know that trust is also important. And if Georgie is holding similar boundaries with Melanie that she has with Jon (and, as I went into excruciating detail about earlier, she has very solid emotional reasons to protect herself with those boundaries), that's drawing a hard line around what's basically the past two to three years of Melanie's life, and undeniably both the worst and most important things that have ever happened to her. That seems...difficult to manage in the long term.

(This is a bit more of a stretch, more of the germ of a fic idea than an argument I'm prepared to defend, but I also would not be surprised if Georgie told Melanie that she wouldn't date her while she was still working at the Institute. That's a very reasonable boundary, and it's good motivation - and probably healthy motivation, I do like the idea that Melanie had something to reach toward in escaping the Institute, not just the desperate flight from - but it's also something of an ultimatum. Which is not inherently bad, but it is the kind of thing that can fester, given other problems.)

Now it's entirely possible that Georgie isn't that internally consistent. People aren't! (See: Basira's attitude toward Daisy vs her attitude toward Jon in season four.) Maybe she's more flexible about being willing to listen to Melanie, maybe she's starting to understand some of what was happening and how genuinely impossible a situation it really was. But that has to be a struggle for her, too; it's not a perfect, sweet, unconditionally good situation that teaches you that you've been unfair to the point of cruelty to someone you used to care about. And by the time the apocalypse rolls around, Melanie is, if she's lucky, just barely able to say she's healed from the plain physical trauma of blinding, never mind all the other baggage. They've got to be having a rough fucking time of it, at the very least, even if you assume that they're suddenly both the kind of people who will sit still and listen supportively and talk honestly about their own messy and complicated emotions, when neither of them have been that kind of person before.

(Another disclaimer because Fandom Is Like That: This is in no way a condemnation of or argument against fluffy What the Girlfriends fic; fic is for making fluffy things that you want to happen to your faves, or building fluffy content that you desperately need for whatever reason. Gods know there are plenty of unhealthy parts of Jon and Martin's relationship that I ignore in most of my fluffy fic. This is me attempting to work through my thoughts and feelings about the relationship I see in canon in the hopes of actually being able to write some fic about these girls myself someday, because I personally can't write fic until I understand canon, and so much of them happens offscreen because they're not main characters, and they're written with such depth and complexity that you can't just slap a stereotype on them and call it good. Which is awesome! But it means I gotta do the work, and I post it because a) it's work, and this is fandom, and I want validation; and b) I'm hoping other people have insights that might also help me clarify my thinking.)

#the magnus archives #tma #georgie barker #jonathan sims #melanie king #long post #real fuckin' long post #sorry #it's a meta party #cw suicide #cw addiction

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we-are-the-amb · 4 years

Text

This is awful, but I feel like nothing will ever get posted, if I don’t post this now. How parental neglect factored into the Frog brothers’ hatred of vampires, in bullet points, because my powers of expressions and sense of flow are broken.

- I believe that, consciously, or subconsciously, there are two elements of vampirism that feed into the Frogs’ distrust of the family unit and subsequent fear of emotional honesty. These are the intimacy of the bite, and the concept of the vampiric family. I shall attempt to explain.

- A common idea regarding the vampire’s bite, is that it bonds people together. This is something that can be interpreted in many ways, but I am talking here about the idea that siring someone, makes them your kin and you responsibility. Practiced with intention, and on a broad scale, this can create a vampire pack, or family. TLB shows presents such a family, in the form of Max and his boys.

- Another thing to remember about a vampire’s bite, is the inherent intimacy of it. Physically, you have to be very close to someone, in order to sink your teeth into them. Such sensuality is part of the reason for the sexual dimension in vampire folklore and literature. However, lust is not the only emotion that is conjured at the idea of being fed upon, or turned. Barring the event of an attack, there could be numerous reasons that one would allow a vampire close enough to bite them, and numerous emotions realised during; fear, fragility, loneliness, kinship, empathy, and trust. Whatever the case might be, these feelings are doubtless as raw and visceral, as the bite, itself. It is an exposing event, one that demands emotional honesty, by it’s sheer, life changing intensity.

- I believe that Edgar and Alan are more disgusted by vampires, than any other supernatural creatures, because they themselves are most vulnerable to them. Not just because they are young, but because they are emotionally compromised.

- In a post I wrote regarding the missing posters spread around Santa Carla, I noted the age section of the people in them. A lot of them appeared to be very young. I said that if these children had not been killed, then there was also the possibility that they had joined vampiric families, as Laddie and his brothers all did. Why would this be? There is the likelihood of their sires feeling guilt for having taken them, and keeping them as a result. However, there is also the common theory of escaping to a better life. Running away from a bad family, or lifestyle, to one off perpetual childhood, and super powers. The lost boys from the Peter Pan novel, after which the film was named, are all children from unhappy homes who wanted something better. Perhaps this is why kids like the Boys, Laddie, or the ones in the missing posters would consent to being turned.

- Think about the implications this would have, to Edgar and Alan. To be a vampire, is to live off humankind. It is the necessity to commit serial murder for the rest of an immortal life. This is an extremely brutal lifestyle to ask anyone to commit to, never mind a child. Even if a child claims to know what they are in for, before turning, it would be rare that they really would. This puts the whole weight of responsibility onto the sire, the one who does know what they are in for. The child is trusting them to give them a better life, but does the sire wholeheartedly believe that it will be? To kids like Edgar and Alan, this would look like trust betrayed, in the worst possible way. Promising to free children from misery, only to make them bloodsucking monsters. And the film actually shows us that this can be the case, with Max and his boys. Max obviously had the desire for a family, but not really for the kids he ended up with. And his lack of care got them killed.

- And why would any of this cross Edgar and Alan’s mind? Because they know what it’s like to want to escape to a new life. As the film never lets us know how the Frogs came to believe in vampires, they end up looking like fantasists, regardless of being correct is their belief. And why wouldn’t they be? Everything we see of their lives, though it is little, implies isolation and too much responsibility. Clearly, them working the shop is not a “cover” as they claim. Unless you want to believe that the whole Frog family are vampire hunters, which I find doubtful, then they literally do just have to run the family business for their lazy, inattentive parents. Their awkward, almost desperate interactions with Sam imply friendlessness, again possibly due to overwork, or lack of guidance in terms of communication. There is no interaction at all between them and their parents, who seem to wear dark glasses for the sake of blocking out their environment, and by extension, their sons. Their distrust of adult authority is prominent. Apart from believing that high ranking citizens of Santa Carla are monsters, they seem nervous of adults who are neither, like Lucy Emerson. They do not speak to her, upon meeting her. And when Sam confirms that they will have to work without her, they are glad, saying they prefer to work alone. Bu they are not alone, they have Sam. So what they really mean, is they do not trust adults to help them. Not once do they ever appear worried about getting home to their parents, or what they might think, if one of them is hurt, or killed. Possibly, because they are too confident to consider such an event. Vampire hunting excites and energises them, in a way we never see witching the walls of Frog comics.

- They know what it is to want to escape. So the idea of trusting someone to give you escape, only for them to drag you further into the dark, is terrifying to them, and it enrages them. It is possible, as well, that they once trusted their own parents to care for them, only for that trust to be broken. So this thought probably also gives rise to bad memories.

- To finish, it is worth noting that this image of the vampiric family is destroyed before their eyes, during the battle at the Emerson house. Then they are left with the Emersons. The Emersons being possibly the first stable family they have ever come into contact with.

#edgar #edgar frog #alan #alan frog #awesome monster bashers #frog brothers #the lost boys #lost boys

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