#pathologic critique

[erriga]

THE QUARANTINE QUERY

(tl dr I didn't vibe with the demo for some silly and not so silly reasons)

Welcome to my special post where I will try to explain my personal problems with Quarantine and the general creative and narrative direction the next game seems to be heading towards. I decided to write a longer text instead of a couple of bullet points, because one does not simply write a thesis about a game just to later complain about it in a sarcastically laconic tone.

Things this essay is going to be:

my opinion/critique

an analysis

a reflection upon my feelings about the series in general

Things this essay is not going to be:

an angry rant about the new game in the spirit of they changed it so now it sucks

an attempt to prove that old pathologic = smart and new pathologic = stupid

Ok, with the disclaimers out of the way, let's get into it, and by it I mean levels of pretentious nerdiness unknown to many.

I wrote down four statements that describe my general feelings about the demo. They will serve as a frame of reference for what my critique will fundamentally touch upon instead of trying to fit every possible complaint I might have in a disjointed fashion. Here they are:

I feel like Quarantine expects me to:

Consider Dankovsky to be a specific Character in a specific Story

Believe Dankovsky has an internal world that can be mechanically represented in the ludo-narrative

Find said internal world to be compelling enough to let it filter the whole experience of the game

(presumably) emotionally connect with Dankovsky due to all of the above

If all this sounds confusing - good! Keep reading, it's going to get even better.

So, is Daniil a character?

Yes, of course he is. But what does it mean in the context of the original game compared to Pathologic 2 and now Quarantine?

Over the years I've come across vastly different opinions about the quality of character writing in the original Pathologic. I am not including complaints about the English translations or other technical aspects, just the most basic tendency of how the game portrays its characters. Most people I've seen who have passionately engaged with the game (including me) tend to describe the original game's characterizations as nuanced, complex and strangely realistic despite their rather theatrical tendencies. But I've also heard others say the exact opposite. That the characters don't feel like real people at all, their personalities are incoherent and fall flat due to a lack of consistency, and that every single one of them, from an old man to a literal toddler, falls back on the same pseudo-philosophical cadence, which while attempting to make them seem deeper ends up dehumanizing them even further. And even though those two opinions seem to be contradictory, I think that they are both the exact same reason why the writing of the original game captivates me so much. Because it doesn't really matter.

I wrote my thesis about the brechtian influences in Classic. One of the most characteristic aspects of the Epic Theatre is the attempt to remove illusions typical to traditional theatre, among which is the illusion of a character's psychology. I believe that you can absolutely argue that the characters in patho 1 were designed to behave like Brecht's characters - lacking internal psychology, mainly serving as mouthpieces for political and philosophical arguments, more so types than individuals. But here's the catch - I believe it's actually impossible to create a character completely immune to identification, because we as humans love to project our silly little emotions on pretty much anything, including animals and inanimate objects. Compared to those cases, Gorkhon's gallery of strange individuals is a painfully human display. So it's no wonder that many of us did indeed relate to those weirdos, just like nothing can possibly stop an audience member from identifying with Mother Courage or Galileo in Brecht's play. But the fact still remains that none of those characters were designed with this kind of simple emotional identification in mind and thus the attachment we may feel to them is more of a byproduct than the main goal. Taking a character who was meant to be analytically pondered and instead adopting them as a breathing human being is in that case, almost an act of rebellion. It's like saying, this is mine now.

Coming back to Daniil, this lack of clarity of how much he was written with this sort of characterization in mind is the main reason why I found him so compelling, he always kept me asking: is this part of Daniil as a coherent whole or is it just a philosophical stance which I should ponder at this moment or is it the writer's attempt at predicting what the player (presumably a straight male player) may want to say through this character? Does Daniil say "wow" because that's how he speaks, or is it just an oversight? Am I supposed to treat optional dialogue as things he would say or just things that are sometimes said in his world? The point is I DON'T KNOW and I love that I don't know that! It gives me so many posibilities! To me Daniil's character isn't so much about what he exactly says or does, but rather the internal logic that guides him. And I am the one who can choose its exact mechanism. He is mine.

Meanwhile, I feel like Quarantine wants me to treat Dankovsky like I would treat most other characters in traditional/popular media. Here are his personality traits. He is intelligent, he says so himself, and that lady over there also said it and he knows science and formulas and speaks Latin. Here are his thoughts. He has a memory about this thing. He feels guilty about that. I suddenly have a whole army of simple sentences that are meant to help me umderstand Daniil in this new iteration. Not so much a puzzle but a construction manual. And I'm not saying that this way of storytelling is fundamentally bad just because I can parody it as simpler than it really is. I want to engage with the new game's writing on it's own terms but so far I haven't done that mostly due to the giant dankovsky shaped object blocking the view.

Speaking of-

THE BACHELOR-CENTRIC MODEL OF THE UNIVERSE

This demo is so much about Dankovsky that it almost makes me embarrassed in his name. And honestly, I'm surprised I feel that way, considering how much I usually enjoy stories where a character's perception shapes the narrative to a great extent. I love symbolic dream sequences, guilt-driven visions and unreliable narrators. But the way Daniil's perception of himself and his surroundings doesn't really feel like a service to him as a character, but rather a narrative shorthand to spoonfeed me, the player, the most relevant information. The way Daniil's thoughts appear around objects is realistic to the extent that yes, human thoughts can be often rather simple and disjointed but there are moments where I think this mental streamlining is detrimental to his characterization and rubs him of nuance. The worst culprits of that are (IN MY OPINION):

Him calling Eva a ray of sunshine

The part where he references the fact that he and Artemy always fight about whose methods are better

Any time Daniil or someone around him refers to him as especially intelligent

Mr Little's Special Tutorial Perspective or Please Daniil Explain This To Me Once Again

None of those ideas are fundamentally bad, not at all. I'm curious to see his relationship with Eva develop, I want to see him interact with Artemy more like they did in the original, I can see some great ironic potential in the constant hyping up of Daniil's intellect and yeah, I hope Yakov is revealed to be some secret government agent or something. But I'm annoyed that I feel like I can predict all of this from just a couple of lines in the demo. I want to be confused and unsure of my own judgement. I want to be proven wrong, surprised, and ashamed of my own surface level analysis. And that can still very much happen, perhaps even in the comments on this very post or once the full games comes out. But right now I feel rather pessimistic.

I don't have a good segue for this part so now let's talk mechanics.

PRESS B TO EAT A CIGARRETE

The new mechanics try to break away from the body-first focus of the original game and the way Pathologic 2 expanded on those ideas even further. This time it's all about the mind, baby. Which - again - on itself isn't a bad idea. If this game was just 2 with different dialogues it would be very hard to justify its existence as a stand-alone product that needed to somehow be funded over those last 6 years. But the result to me feels more like novelty for novelty's sake. Not everything of course - the diagnosis part of the gameplay is definitely its most well-designed aspect, and there is a consistent logic behind it. Where Artemy saw systems, Daniils sees individual parts, where Artemy had to rely on luck, Daniil controls all the variables etc etc. The same, however, cannot be said about some of the other new mechanics.

Managing Daniil's mental state doesn't feel that much different than making sure Artemy drinks enough water and I personally think it's a wasted opportunity. I'm not going to insert myself into the discussion about whether the game's use of terms associated with bipolar disorder is accurate/tasteful because other people with relevant experiences have already voiced their opinions about that and will hopefully continue to do so in the future. My point is - regardless of what exact mental condition or more general function of the human psyche the game is trying to convey, it does so in a manner so simplistic that it doesn't encourage me as a player to connect with it on a deeper level. Apathy is blue because it's sad, Mania means, well, mania so it's red. Once again, I have only experienced a small portion of the game's final system so I might be in for a surprise and perhaps I will get to see Daniil experience something... purple?

Also adding to my previous point about switching perspectives - I think this mechanic will be an absolute gut punch in the final game. I hope it's something akin to the original meeting with the Powers That Be, especially with the way multiple characters can "jump" into one conversation at any moment. This will surely be utilized for some mind-fuckery and I can't wait to see it. I think this is also the one aspect of the demo that gives me the most hope as far as my beloved emotional confusion is concerned. Because what is the switching of perspectives supposed to indicate really? Are we supposed to filter it once again through Daniil's perspective because of the framing device of him recollecting the events? So nothing we learn by getting the insight into other characters' thoughts can be taken at face value because that's just how Daniil sees them? Are those other/new characters even real or just exist in Daniil's psyche? Does it have something to do with the time travel blahblah? Or are we not playing as Daniil at all but some other entity entirely? That's the main question I hope I don't get a clear answer to but rather contradicting paths to follow. But despite that optimistic outlook I still need to get into the final aspect that made it difficult for me to engage with the new game on its own terms, and instead deciding to take its dead corpse apart.

I CARE TOO MUCH BUT NOT ENOUGH

I just can't get over the fact how much this game wants me to identify with Daniil or at the very least find him cool. Cool as in how modern characters are often cool. Wet cats, chaotic bastards, jerks with hearts of gold and vaguely homoerotic energy with other male characters. And I'm not saying this as an insult, narrative trends are a thing, I find many of those archetypes to be endearing more often than not, but my problem is that it still only serves Dankovsky as our center of the world. By flanderizing him and making him fit into a more recognizable character archetype we lose the feeling of him being always at odds with the world around him, the way he used to be conflicted over every single thing in the original game. This new world is too suited for him to be a hero of his story, a tragic hero but a hero nonetheless, while in my opinion what made him uniquely tragic in classic was precisely the fact that he wasn't anyone's hero.

I know this constant comparison to patho classic can get tiring, so let me use another point of reference which is also the reason why I am even writing this post in the first place - The Marble Nest. I love the marble nest. I find its narrative structure to be expertly crafted, emotional beats placed in just the right places and godd i still cry over the fact that they put his soul into a nutshell. And the funny thing is that TMN does share a lot of similarities with the new demo. It's a Daniil-centric story with a framing device that encourages us to look at the entire experience as Daniil's impression of the reality around him. It's a short and rather simple experience with a strong central theme. So why do I feel so emotional when Daniil talks to the death in that game but feel pretty much nothing when he talk about dying in Quarantine? Maybe because The Marble Nest is still steeped so deeply in the theatre influences which I hold dear to my heart while Quarantine moves away from them and maybe towards another medium entirely. Theatre never pretends to be reality and it's artificiality is always front and center. Film meanwhile often has the tendency to try to replicate reality or even try to be reality itself. In one of those cases I feel like an active audience member and in the other like a passive voyeur of some vision of reality. Or to put it simply, in one case I am afraid of Death and in the other, I am watching someone act out being afraid of death. That is a highly personal preference though and I'm genuinely happy to see that many people do indeed relate to this portrayal of Daniil, especially when it comes to how his mental problems are displayed front and center. And that's amazing! I want to see all the fan input that comes out of it and I hope the final game delivers on everything they hope for. But for me? I think I might need to take a back seat, at least for now. Watch the scene from afar, perhaps get a fuller picture. Because I want to care and understand and know and feel. I really do. But sometimes it's not possible and that's also good.

So, if you've read this overwritten mess to the end, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart and encourage you to voice your opinion. Art doesn't exist without discussion so let's discuss!

POST-SCRIPTUM - ON THE NATURE OF MAKING GOOD THINGS IN YOUR PAST

One last thing I wanted to add which feels highly relevant to the my critique is the question of what to do when someone says they liked your old work better? I like to think of myself as an artist and I think that many of us do, even without getting into how according to Beuys everyone is an artist. So you make a thing, some people like, perhaps many people do. So you keep making things, you grow with them, change, realize your old ideas were often childish or naive which you can only do through gaining experience. So you make new things, often drastically different from the ones you made before. And someone says "I liked the old stuff better". And they don't say it as an insult, even though it may sometimes feel like it. Because you cannot recreate whatever you did in your past. And you want to grow. Does that mean that you got worse instead? That you peaked in your past and it's all downhill from here? Of course not. You know that. I know that. I hope every artist knows that. And yet it still hurts. It hurts to be perceived as a line graph when in reality you are a recursive function.

----

all images made by me, the ones with yellow background are from a shitpost animatic, the white one was a joke I made after hearing the famous"sherlock mind palace fruit ninja" pitch, and the last one is me in my Daniil cosplay. Goodnight Bikini Bottom

[haruspectre]

yearly redraw of daniil, last years under read more

[mystybelle]

From last night's stream-

I don't think RPGs have anything to do with stats.

I think an RPG, or whether or not a game counts as one, is more about how you can affect it's world or environment beyond just winning or losing.

Like, Skyrim and space Skyrim, for example,are not RPGs. They are a very shoddily made, medieval & sci-fi themed amusement parks.

But neither are any Final Fantasy games, Legend of Zelda games, Shadow of Mordor, the Assassin's Creed series, Genshin Impact, God of War (any of them, even the new ones), Kingdom Hearts (any of them), Diablo, Transistor, or any Pokemon games. These are lovingly crafted roller coasters with various themes, with different additional genres of games therein, unlike most Bethesda games, but not roleplaying games. They're gripping movies, comics, art exhibits, and dioramas with well done and utilitarian world-building.

Or visual novels. And that's not me disparaging these games, just hopefully pushing our evolving language for discussing games in a better direction?

I guess the next question is probably- "What is an RPG by your call then?"

I'd say games like the original Deus Ex, Stardew Valley, Fallout 1&2, Undertale, Pathologic, literally every single Animal Crossing game, Pathfinder/DnD (if your DM has a stable sleep schedule), and Shadow the Hedgehog.

The difference between these two groups is:

group A: Interactive media (games) that are stories, or Games(under the cut), with worlds that only exist to tell their stories or for the player's convenience.

group B: Interactive media that is a world the player is encouraged to interact with as a consistent Character within, or where the player's avatar & actions exists as a character within the world and not just an artifice of design or play.

There is nothing you can do on Final Fantasy VII's Gaea that will impact any part of the rest of the world, besides succeed at a given challenge or die and have another go. Nor in X, IX, or VIII. Locking a world's keyhole in Kingdom Hearts 1 doesn't change the game's state it's the next part of the story and the success state that follows defeating most level's final bosses (or after figuring out a clever puzzle in Traverse Town). Riku can't fail to save Sora at the end of Kingdom Hearts II, you fail to rescue Riku's man, and the game lets you try again until you catch up with canon. Transistor does not care whether you collect certain programs/citizens, the Process [REDACTED] no matter what. Zelda can't not be rescued in any of the series' games where she appears; there are no ways to save the land of Termina except by assisting its citizens in a very specific order. In Pokemon, Team Rocket cannot successfully kidnapp someone's Pokemon on screen, and Team Aqua cannot successfully flood the world.

But in Shadow the Hedgehog; the president can be spared and his life determines how the rest of the game's story plays out; you can steadily work to destroy the world with the Black Arms and feel the progress of the invasion as you complete more of their missions. In Pathologic, failing to cure a patient doesn't send you to a game over screen, the patient just dies. Sometimes your patient is important to you and their death will have disastrous consequences, sometimes not. In ACNH, everything you can do changes the game's state in a meaningful way, there are almost literally no meaningless actions you can take in that game (or any animal crossing game). In a solid Pathfinder/DnD game, unless your party fights and dies to the last man, failing to kill the Lich or Evil king means that they get to take over that town or city. Some tables don't even run TPKs back, that specific world just gets worse and you either abandon it to its fate or have to make new avatars to re-enter a world that's likely grown more hostile because of the failure. In the original Fallouts, the only real "game over" fail state in those games is dying. Everything else is simply a choice to make, or a consequence to avoid. Likewise in the original Deus Ex, JC Denton's actions decide whether the [REDACTED it's old but go play the game] play out as planned, whether [seriously go play it] live or if the [please, you won't regret it] get their way. Each potential reality in these games, doesn't meaning you just lose, but that you now have to account for new circumstances in the world of your own making.

I don't think a game doesn't become an RPG because it has stats, or levels. Those are just conventions of the media of games as a whole. A game is more or less of an RPG based on how internally consistent and independent of the player its world is. I think our language should reflect that that too, but considering that this genre of game comes from the original pen and paper RPGs, I don't like giving the most faithful successors to their heritage a name that doesn't include the words RPG in it. I'd rather call the first group of games "Immersive Movies" and give the term "RPG" back to the second group. But if we must call both groups kinds of RPGs, I want to suggest replacing WRPG vs JRPG, with RPGs vs "VRPGs" or Virtual Ride Playing Games (or Vibe Role Playing Games), seeing as the first group is more akin to a book/movie/play/amusement park ride that you read or ride through than they are games where you meaningfully play the role of a character.

If that makes sense? Replies/rb as are welcome as comments, I had the thought on stream and I've spent all day working to make it more coherent than the babbling that usually rattles around in my brain, but I couldn't make it any shorter than this. So idk, let me know what you think. I'm eager to hear from other devs, or just players for that matter.

Also, I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH, this isn't me shitting on any game I've mentioned except for Skyrim and space Skyrim. I'm not using RPG as a title of prestige, or saying any of these games are worse than the others except for Skyrim; I'm only saying we should probably re categorize them. Roller coasters are good things when they're well made.

[sleepnoises]

I've thought about it and I don't like the Bustle deleterious effects of therapyspeak in friendships article

[cryptosexologist]

finished HnK. first half was great third quarter was really good and sometimes fantastic last quarter almost completely lost me. is stopping caring about the characters because you never spend any time with them and then, like, spoilers happens the POINT or did i just read it wrong

[1800duckhotline]

i know it would've been harder to implement at the time but not impossible, but ngl a like, "hours" and daytime/nighttime + calendar system in vtmb would've actually made it truly perfect... i often get confused when im reminded in-game that technically this isnt happening all in one night and days pass, because realistically all of this stuff just. CANT happen in ONE day now can it...

[hyperlexichypatia]

As I keep shouting into the void, pathologizers love shifting discussion about material conditions into discussion about emotional states.

I rant approximately once a week about how the brain maturity myth transmuted “Young adults are too poor to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own” into “Young adults are too emotionally and neurologically immature to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own.”

I’ve also talked about the misuse of “enabling” and “trauma” and “dopamine” .

And this is a pattern – people coin terms and concepts to describe material problems, and pathologization culture shifts them to be about problems in the brain or psyche of the person experiencing them. Now we’re talking about neurochemicals, frontal lobes, and self-esteem instead of talking about wages, wealth distribution, and civil rights. Now we can say that poor, oppressed, and exploited people are suffering from a neurological/emotional defect that makes them not know what’s best for themselves, so they don’t need or deserve rights or money.

Here are some terms that have been so horribly misused by mental health culture that we’ve almost entirely forgotten that they were originally materialist critiques.

Codependency What it originally referred to: A non-addicted person being overly “helpful” to an addicted partner or relative, often out of financial desperation. For example: Making sure your alcoholic husband gets to work in the morning (even though he’s an adult who should be responsible for himself) because if he loses his job, you’ll lose your home. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/codependency-addiction-recovery.html What it’s been distorted into: Being “clingy,” being “too emotionally needy,” wanting things like affection and quality time from a partner. A way of pathologizing people, especially young women, for wanting things like love and commitment in a romantic relationship.

Compulsory Heterosexuality What it originally referred to: In the 1980 in essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/493756 Adrienne Rich described compulsory heterosexuality as a set of social conditions that coerce women into heterosexual relationships and prioritize those relationships over relationships between women (both romantic and platonic). She also defines “lesbian” much more broadly than current discourse does, encompassing a wide variety of romantic and platonic relationships between women. While she does suggest that women who identify as heterosexual might be doing so out of unquestioned social norms, this is not the primary point she’s making. What it’s been distorted into: The patronizing, biphobic idea that lesbians somehow falsely believe themselves to be attracted to men. Part of the overall “Women don’t really know what they want or what’s good for them” theme of contemporary discourse.

Emotional Labor What it originally referred to: The implicit or explicit requirement that workers (especially women workers, especially workers in female-dominated “pink collar” jobs, especially tipped workers) perform emotional intimacy with customers, coworkers, and bosses above and beyond the actual job being done. Having to smile, be “friendly,” flirt, give the impression of genuine caring, politely accept harassment, etc. https://weld.la.psu.edu/what-is-emotional-labor/ What it’s been distorted into: Everything under the sun. Everything from housework (which we already had a term for), to tolerating the existence of disabled people, to just caring about friends the way friends do. The original intent of the concept was “It’s unreasonable to expect your waitress to care about your problems, because she’s not really your friend,” not “It’s unreasonable to expect your actual friends to care about your problems unless you pay them, because that’s emotional labor,” and certainly not “Disabled people shouldn’t be allowed to be visibly disabled in public, because witnessing a disabled person is emotional labor.” Anything that causes a person emotional distress, even if that emotional distress is rooted in the distress-haver’s bigotry (Many nominally progressive people who would rightfully reject the bigoted logic of “Seeing gay or interracial couples upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public” fully accept the bigoted logic of “Seeing disabled or poor people upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public”).

Battered Wife Syndrome What it originally referred to: The all-encompassing trauma and fear of escalating violence experienced by people suffering ongoing domestic abuse, sometimes resulting in the abuse victim using necessary violence in self-defense. Because domestic abuse often escalates, often to murder, this fear is entirely rational and justified. This is the reasonable, justified belief that someone who beats you, stalks you, and threatens to kill you may actually kill you.

What it’s been distorted into: Like so many of these other items, the idea that women (in this case, women who are victims of domestic violence) don’t know what’s best for themselves. I debated including this one, because “syndrome” was a wrongful framing from the beginning – a justified and rational fear of escalating violence in a situation in which escalating violence is occurring is not a “syndrome.” But the original meaning at least partially acknowledged the material conditions of escalating violence.

I’m not saying the original meanings of these terms are ones I necessarily agree with – as a cognitive liberty absolutist, I’m unsurprisingly not that enamored of either second-wave feminism or 1970s addiction discourse. And as much as I dislike what “emotional labor” has become, I accept that “Women are unfairly expected to care about other people’s feelings more than men are” is a true statement.

What I am saying is that all of these terms originally, at least partly, took material conditions into account in their usage. Subsequent usage has entirely stripped the materialist critique and fully replaced it with emotional pathologization, specifically of women. Acknowledgement that women have their choices constrained by poverty, violence, and oppression has been replaced with the idea that women don’t know what’s best for themselves and need to be coercively “helped” for their own good. Acknowledgement that working-class women experience a gender-and-class-specific form of economic exploitation has been rebranded as yet another variation of “Disabled people are burdensome for wanting to exist.”

Over and over, materialist critiques are reframed as emotional or cognitive defects of marginalized people. The next time you hear a superficially sympathetic (but actually pathologizing) argument for “Marginalized people make bad choices because…” consider stopping and asking: “Wait, who are we to assume that this person’s choices are ‘bad’? And if they are, is there something about their material conditions that constrains their options or makes the ‘bad’ choice the best available option?”

[halo-eater]

tiktok psychology and pop psych buzzwords are the natural evolution of the Not Like Other Girls phenomenon im so serious

[transmutationisms]

Do you know much about how antipsych applies to autism?

autism is one of very few psych diagnoses that has a semi organised tradition of actual self advocacy and a communal tendency to reject and criticise the proffered treatments (ABA, various other forms of abuse). autistic advocates have also played huge roles in developing and articulating the neurodivergency paradigm—arguing that autism is not a 'disease' in need of a cure, but simply a way that some people are, as a result of value-neutral variation that all human minds display.

i don't actually love the neurodivergency paradigm because i don't think the 'neurotypical' exists or is a useful benchmark against which to compare oneself; also, many proponents of this framework are explicitly hostile to deconstructing their very monolithic understanding of each psych diagnosis, and they tend to continue viewing these diagnoses as 'real' biological conditions that simply need to be destigmatised. i don't think this destigmatisation is truly possible as long as we still believe that autism or anything else truly is a distinct, identifiable 'brain difference', even if we're construing it as a neutral variation instead of a pathology. these categories are made up; what unites two people with autism is not necessarily anything to do with their brains, it's a function of (and disgnosed by) external behaviours and the failure to perform social normality. every single person varies biologically (again, there is no 'neurotypical') and varies as much within psychiatrically delineated categories as much as across them.

but anyway i digress: autism is probably the psych diagnosis with the single most organised critique of psychiatry right now. there are of course self advocacy groups for other diagnoses but i haven't really seen any break through with their critique the way that like ASAN have for example. historically i think one thing that has made autism friendly ground for this is that it's the rare psych dx that isn't legal gatekeeping for a drug (compare autistic self advocacy to adhd 'self' 'advocacy' for example) and another huge factor is that autism in its present form is historically differentiated from achizophrenia by being the less stigmatised, more benign 'version' with schizophrenia explicitly reserved for more vulnerable and marginalised populations (eg in the US, black political radicals). so it's not terribly surprising that some of those diagnosed autistic then push this logic even further and say, hey, there's nothing actually Wrong with us though—and it's especially not surprising that the institutional and public response to this has been, while hardly universally positive, generally much more amenable than to people with 'scarier' and racialised diagnoses who say the same thing about themselves. non-radicality of mainstream autistic advocacy aside, even.

[taliabhattwrites]

Saying that "Transmisogyny is Misandry" is an act of epistemic violence. Stop it.

The following is a section of my essay The Question Has An Answer, entitled "The Measure of a Misandrist"

This is, ultimately, where most critiques of radical feminism go wrong, even when supposedly made with trans women’s vilification in mind. It is a too-popular idea that radical feminism was too harsh, too critical and too antagonistic towards men. After all—goes the reasoning—is not the fixation on trans women, the denial of our womanhood, and the maligning of us as ontologically predatory a consequence of their gender-absolutism? Is not resorting to ‘misandry’ in response to society’s misogyny also wrong?

Such arguments fail to be compelling for two reasons, the first of which should be obvious: transmisogyny is not misandry. The transmisogynist does not treat trans women the way she treats men, even if she refers to a trans woman as a man in the process of degendering her. Even if a transmisogynist bears an authentic antipathy for men, there is a crucial difference in how she regards trans women: namely, as an acceptable target of misogynistic degradation. Trans women’s bodies are dissected and scrutinized, our behavior pathologized and sexualized, and our own testimony discarded as unreliable, insubstantial, and immaterial. We are dehumanized, third-sexed, and branded permissible targets for ritualistic, collective, and sexualized punishment. A fate that even queer men tend to be spared.

Secondly and perhaps more importantly: the ‘misandry’ of the average transmisogynistic feminist is greatly overstated.

Trivially, we can note how the modern Gender-Conservative movement is full of men and the women who gleefully encourage their violence against trans people, a modern incarnation that bears the most threadbare of claims to any feminist tradition. They are, more than anything, a project concerned with the obfuscation of the term ‘feminist’, so that staunchly patriarchal ideologues can claim the label simply for promulgating transmisogynistic rhetoric. The face of modern transphobia is a far-flung cry from the academic lesbian feminists of yore, and is these days definitively male. Men abound at transphobic rallies, threaten to follow trans women into bathrooms to beat them, and call for the abolition of transition care in publications the world over.

Is such an answer evasive, though? Surely conservative men’s transmisogyny is a mainstream discursive force now, but was not the second wave chock-full of misandrist lesbian feminists aiming their ire at trans women? Can we not draw a line from their extremism to modern antifeminist backlash?

To get to the heart of that matter, we have to recall a little history.

April, 1973. The West Coast Lesbian Conference was, at that point, the largest gathering of lesbian feminists to date. Beth Elliot, a trans lesbian folk singer and feminist activist had been on the organizing committee for the event and was also scheduled to perform on opening night. Her fellow LA organizers had, in fact, insisted upon it.

When she took the stage at 9 p.m., she was accosted by two women, one of whom snatched the mic away to scream that Beth was a “transsexual” and a “rapist”, and demanded that she be ejected. In the ensuing chaos, a few organizers took the initiative to hold a vote (or, two, by some accounts), allowing the assembled audience to decide on Beth’s inclusion. The vote passed—by a slim majority, in some accounts, or by an overwhelming two-thirds majority, in some others—and so a visibly shaken Beth Elliot, with the support of her sisters, gave a short performance before promptly leaving.

Robin Morgan, who was scheduled to give a keynote speech on the theme of ‘unity’ the following day, spent the night editing her address. Rather than speaking for forty-five minutes, Morgan spent twice that time on a meandering screed “attacking everything in sight”, per Pat Buchanan—the conference organizers, women who work with men, and of course, transsexuals, blaming the continuing ills of patriarchy on a lack of feminist consciousness. Her caustic rhetoric shifted the entire tone and mood of the conference, forefronting the issue of biodestined womanhood. The Black Women’s Caucus, who had prepared a position paper on Black feminist organizing and the relevance of race to their struggle, are often omitted entirely from accounts of the conference, in large part due to Morgan’s troonmadness sucking up all the oxygen.

While some of the facts surrounding this incident are disputed, we know that Morgan’s invective was circulated amongst lesbian feminists, drawing attention to the topic of transsexual inclusion. Her charges that Beth Elliot was an “infiltrator” and “rapist” accrued sufficient cachet to get Beth blacklisted from feminist publications and music scenes. Despite a measure of personal support, Beth withdrew from the public eye, and Morgan’s bilious language found itself echoed in 1979’s Transsexual Empire, this time levied at Sandy Stone.

In some sense, Robin Morgan, Sister Raymond, and their ilk set the discursive tone on translesbophobia. While 1960’s Psycho attests that the idea of the deceptive, cross-dressing predator already held some sway in the cultural psychosexual imaginary, Morgan and Raymond—clumsily and soporifically—elevated that hateful trope to the status of “feminist concern”. They provided a framework and legitimacy to complement the sexologists’ pathologization of the “homosexual transsexual”, transmuting the cultural idea of the tranny from a pitiable, somewhat tragic figure, to a rapacious and monstrous one. Although coercion through deceptive seduction had always been core to the mythology of transsexuality, Morgan and Raymond enabled eradicationist sentiment towards trans women as a whole to be imbued with a certain feminist authority, recasting it as almost righteous.

We were, in the truest sense of the term, constructed, remade as biotechnological horrors seeking to traverse, fresh and bloody, from the scalpel to the women’s bathroom.

Given the centrality of that hastily-rewritten keynote speech to modern transmisogynistic propaganda, Morgan’s awareness of its discursive relevance is fascinating to witness. As Finn Enke notes in Collective Memory and the Transfeminist 1970s, when Morgan published her own account in 1977, her comments from the 1973 speech condemning the organizers for “inviting” Beth Elliot are omitted entirely. Morgan deliberately edited the speech to extend her critique of transsexuals and Beth Elliot specifically, dubbing them “gatecrashers” who sought to undermine and destroy the feminist movement from within. She consciously chose to erase Beth’s involvement in organizing the event, in addition to eliding that the majority of second-wave lesbian feminists present chose to defend and protect her.

Perhaps the most telling omission in subsequent accounts of this speech is an interesting detail about Morgan herself. Once she was done berating “women who work with men”, Morgan launched an impassioned defense of her husband. Before she derided Beth Elliot as a “male gatecrasher” with no place in lesbian feminism, Morgan advocated for her male husband’s place in lesbian feminism, on the grounds that he was a “feminist”, a “feminine man”, and—I still cannot help but marvel at this term whenever I encounter it—an “effeminist faggot”.

Seriously.

It is impossible to overstate just how utterly pathetic this pantomime of radicalism is. Morgan sublimated her own sexual and gendered anxieties into unrestrained transmisogyny, as many people often do, seeking to secure her own place as a lesbian by defining her legitimacy against the seeming illegitimacy of an “outsider”. Her arguments for doing so hinged on staining transsexual womanhood with the original sin of reproducing manhood, even as she pleaded the case that her husband, through his proximity to the feminine, had successfully absolved his own! Morgan’s audacity and insecurity drips off the page, revealing her charade to be nothing more than a performative, incoherent, inconsistent, bigoted farce.

Additionally, this revelation demonstrates how even here, in the holy of holies, at the epicenter of lesbian-feminist transmisogyny, misandry could hardly be claimed as a motivation. Beth Elliot was condemned for her transsexuality. Her putative ‘manhood’ was invoked only to degender and dehumanize her, while the avowed transmisogynist slurring her asked for the inclusion of men in the same breath!

Nor should we discount those who stood by Beth Elliot and Sandy Stone, even if their efforts were ignored, silenced, and erased. Enke’s paper meditates on a photograph of Beth on stage, framed to depict her alone, isolated, besieged. The woman holding Beth’s hand is left just out of the picture.

Meanwhile, for all their condemnation of trans lesbians’ “male energy”, the transmisogynists who so revile trans women’s “manhood” had no compunctions when it came to allying with the “male institutions” that have surveilled us, vilified us, marginalized us, and tried to erase our very stories, our connections, our sisterhood from history. Even the scraps that remain cannot escape reframing, rewriting, revisionism that insists: you were always unwanted, and stood apart.

Except when we weren’t, and didn’t.

[barnacles34]

Lost in Analysis (Winter x Male OC)

5k words, smut, fluff, happiness, data

Winter x Male OC

The thing about Junho Kim's[1] weekly debriefs with Minjeong Kim was that they followed a precise algorithm, an almost liturgical routine that both participants had wordlessly agreed upon circa Winter's third month of employment (viz. April 2024). The format went as follows: Winter would arrive at exactly 18:30 on Friday bearing a leather-bound portfolio containing the week's logistics reports, margin analyses, and projected Q3/Q4 modeling scenarios. Junho would pretend to study these for exactly twelve minutes while Winter sat in the ergonomic chair across his desk, her accent becoming pronounced in direct proportion to her anxiety level[2].

What happened on this particular Friday deviated from the algorithm in ways that would later prove significant, starting with Winter's arrival at 18:27[3].

"The Busan account numbers are off," Junho said, his photographic memory already detecting a 0.03% discrepancy in the third-quarter projections. The words emerged with the mechanical precision of someone who had learned human speech through technical manuals rather than conversation. "This is—" he paused, index finger tapping against his mahogany desk in a rapidfire motion that Winter had learned to recognize as his pre-explosion tell, "—unacceptable."

And then something unprecedented occurred.

Instead of her usual composed absorption of his critique, Winter's face crumpled into what could only be described as a squeaky whimper, a sound so incongruous with her usual professional demeanor that it seemed to physically stun Junho into silence. It was the acoustic equivalent of watching a Mercedes-Benz hiccup.

The algorithm crashed.

—

[1] Junho Kim, CEO of Quantum Logistics Solutions, net worth $2.3B (₩3.1T), possessed what his former Harvard professors called "an almost frightening capacity for data retention" and what his former therapist (sessions terminated after 2.5 meetings) called "a pathological inability to process emotional bandwidth."

[2] A phenomenon her roommate had dubbed "The Accent Anxiety Index," where her carefully practiced Seoul pronunciation would gradually give way to her native Busan satoori, ranging from barely detectable at Level 1 ("감사합니다") to full coastal at Level 10 ("아이고, 사장님, 이 숫자 영 아니네요").

[3] The 3-minute early arrival would later be explained by a complex series of events involving a broken elevator, two flights of stairs, and Winter's determination not to let her carefully constructed timeline collapse due to mechanical failure.

—

The following Friday's debrief began with Junho actually pulling out Winter's chair[4], a gesture so unexpected that she nearly missed the seat entirely. The portfolio was reviewed. The whiskey was poured (Junho's usual Macallan 25, Winter's Hwayo 41). And then, somewhere between the second and third drink, Winter's accent kicked into what would later be classified as Level 11 on the Southern Comfort Scale.

"You know what your problem is, sajangnim?" Minjeong's words carried the warm weight of soju and suppressed frustration, her carefully maintained Seoul accent dissolving entirely into coastal inflections. "당신은 인생을 마치 스프레드시트처럼 대하시네요. Everything must calculate perfectly, but people aren't numbers, and some of us are tired of being debugged like broken code."

Junho's finger stopped its habitual tapping mid-motion[5].

—

[4] A gesture learned from a WikiHow article titled "Basic Human Courtesy: A Beginner's Guide" that Junho had queued up on his tablet at 3:47 AM the previous Tuesday.

[5] Later analysis would reveal this as the exact moment Junho Kim, master of algorithms and logistics, encountered a variable his photographic memory couldn't process: genuine human connection.[6]

The office fell into a silence that could be measured in heartbeats (Junho's: an efficient 72 BPM; Minjeong's: an elevated 98 BPM). Outside, Seoul's financial district performed its usual Friday night exodus, the sound of departing Mercedes and BMWs creating a capitalistic symphony twenty-three floors below.

"시간이..." Minjeong continued, her Busan accent now operating at what could only be classified as Level 12[7], "Time isn't just money, 사장님. Sometimes it's just... time. Like those lunches you wolf down in exactly eight minutes while reading reports. Or these Friday meetings where you never actually look at me, just through me at some invisible spreadsheet floating in the air behind my head."

Junho's hand, still frozen mid-tap, slowly lowered to the desk. His photographic memory began involuntarily cataloging details it had somehow missed during their previous 47 debriefs: the way Minjeong's left hand always fidgeted with her portfolio's corner when nervous, how her voice carried traces of sea salt and summer festivals despite years of Seoul speech coaching, the fact that she had memorized his coffee preferences down to the precise temperature (81°C, no higher, no lower).

"I do look at you," he said, then immediately registered the statistical improbability of his own response[8].

Minjeong's laugh carried the particular timber of someone who had been holding it in reserve for approximately 11.7 months. "아니요, you really don't. You look at KPIs and performance metrics and quarterly projections. Did you know," she leaned forward, her accent thick as Busan fog, "that I've worn the same earrings every Friday for three months just to see if you'd notice?"

The earrings in question were small silver cranes, Junho's memory instantly supplied, purchased from a street vendor in Gukje Market during last quarter's Busan office inspection, chosen because their wings formed the mathematical symbol for infinity when viewed from the correct angle[9].

—

[6] A concept that would later require Junho to create an entirely new category in his mental filing system, located somewhere between "Acceptable Business Practices" and "Breathing Exercises (Mandatory)."

[7] A previously theoretical level on the Accent Anxiety Index, characterized by the complete abandonment of Seoul linguistic pretense and the emergence of what Minjeong's mother would call "우리 딸의 진짜 목소리" (our daughter's real voice).

[8] Statistical analysis of Junho's daily eye contact patterns, conducted by his personal AI assistant, revealed an average sustained eye contact duration of 1.3 seconds with all employees, making his current 4.7-second gaze at Minjeong a 361.5% deviation from the mean.

[9] A detail that would have impressed Junho greatly had he noticed it at the time of purchase, rather than at this precise moment when his brain was simultaneously trying to process the concept of infinity and the way Minjeong's eyes reflected the city lights like binary code translated into stardust.

—

The Hwayo bottle stood between them like a glass mediator, its contents depleted by exactly 73.4%. Junho found himself performing calculations he had never previously considered necessary: the precise angle at which Minjeong's smile disrupted his cardiac rhythm (42.7°), the correlation coefficient between her proximity and his ability to maintain coherent thought patterns (inverse relationship, R² = 0.97), the half-life of each satoori-tinged syllable in his auditory memory (approaching infinity)[10].

"There's a pojangmacha," Minjeong said, her words now performing linguistic gymnastics between Seoul and Busan, "down in Gangnam that serves 할매's 파전 just like back home. But you—" she gestured with her glass, creating small amber trajectories in the air, "—you probably have the exact caloric content memorized without ever tasting it."

"624 calories per standard serving," Junho confirmed automatically, then added, in what he would later recognize as his first attempt at human humor[11], "Not accounting for 할매's (grandmother’s) love."

The laugh that escaped Minjeong's lips was genuine enough to bypass all of Junho's statistical models for appropriate business interaction. It was the kind of laugh that made him wonder if his entire algorithmic approach to life had been operating on a fundamental error: the assumption that human emotions could be debugged rather than experienced.

"사장님," she said, then caught herself, "아니, Junho-ssi." The honorific shift created a quantifiable disruption in the office's atmospheric pressure[12]. "Do you know why I cry sometimes when you yell about the numbers?"

Junho's hands found themselves attempting to calculate an emotion he had no formula for. "I... have a working hypothesis."

"It's not because I'm scared or hurt," she continued, her Busan accent now wrapping around the words like a warm coast-side breeze. "It's because I see you turning yourself into code, like you're trying to compile a human being into binary, and..." she paused, searching for words in both Seoul and Busan vocabularies before settling on, "...그게 너무 아까워요."

The phrase hung in the air, untranslatable in its full emotional weight[13].

—

[10] A phenomenon that would later require Junho to create an entirely new mathematical framework he privately termed "The Minjeong Constant: Variables in Human Connection."

[11] Later analysis of office security footage would reveal this as his first non-data-related comment in approximately 2,847 hours of recorded business interactions.

[12] Advanced environmental sensors in the building's HVAC system actually recorded a 0.02% change in air pressure at this exact moment, though causation versus correlation remains a subject of debate among the building's maintenance staff.

[13] The closest English approximation might be "it's such a waste," but this fails to capture the uniquely Korean sense of regret for potential beauty lost to unnecessary efficiency, like trying to measure ocean waves in milliliters.

—

For exactly 15.4 seconds, Junho Kim—master of instantaneous data processing, champion of real-time analytics—found himself buffering. His mind, that perfectly calibrated instrument of calculation, attempted to run multiple subroutines simultaneously:

ROUTINE_1: Analyze the 2.3% tremor in Minjeong's voice during "그게 너무 아까워요"

ROUTINE_2: Process the 7.4mm dilation of his pupils upon hearing his given name

ROUTINE_3: Calculate the exact distance between their hands on the desk (23.7cm, decreasing by approximately 0.3mm per heartbeat)

ERROR: Stack overflow in emotional processing unit[14]

"I have a file," he began, then stopped, realizing that perhaps not everything needed to be classified and stored. "No, I mean... I remember every time you've smiled at work. Real smiles, not the ones you use for clients or difficult vendors." His fingers twitched, instinctively seeking a keyboard that wasn't there. "The data suggests that they occur most frequently when you're talking about Busan, or when you think no one is watching you arrange the office plants, or..." he paused, processing, "...or when you're correcting my humanity protocols[15]."

Minjeong's eyes widened, creating what Junho's brain automatically calculated as a 34.6% increase in their reflective surface area. "You... keep track of my smiles?"

"I keep track of everything," he said, then amended, displaying unprecedented runtime flexibility, "but your smiles occupy 43% more memory space than standard data points."

"아이고," Minjeong laughed, the sound carrying hints of sea breezes and noraebang nights, "only you would quantify feelings in percentages and memory allocation, 사장님[16]."

The Hwayo bottle now stood at 82.6% depletion. Outside, Seoul had transformed into its weekend configuration, all neon equations and binary dreams. But inside this office, something unquantifiable was compiling—a program written in neither Python nor Java, but in the ancient code of human connection.

"There's a logical error in your earlier statement," Junho said suddenly, his voice performing calculations it had never been calibrated for. "About me not looking at you."

"Oh?" Minjeong's eyebrow arched at precisely 27 degrees.

"I look at you approximately 2,347 times per day. My peripheral vision activates in your presence with 72% more frequency than baseline. I have memorized exactly 267 variations of your voice modulation between Seoul and Busan registers[17]. The error," he continued, his own accent slipping for the first time since Harvard, "is in assuming I don't see you."

—

[14] A phenomenon his Harvard professors had theoretically predicted but never successfully documented: the complete shutdown of pure logic circuits in favor of what they termed "human.exe."

[15] A private joke that had never made it past his internal firewall until this moment, referring to the way she subtly guided him toward more socially acceptable behaviors, like suggesting he say "good morning" to the cleaning staff or remember team members' birthdays.

[16] The honorific here carrying a new weight, somewhere between professional distance and affectionate teasing, a linguistic quantum state that would have fascinated physicists had they been present to observe it.

[17] This particular statistic would later become the subject of a 3 AM realization that perhaps "normal" CEOs don't maintain such detailed databases of their assistants' vocal patterns.

—

The confession hung in the air with the weight of a misplaced decimal point. Minjeong's hand, still holding her Hwayo glass, trembled at a frequency of approximately 3.2 Hz. The office's automated climate control system registered a sudden 0.7°C spike in local temperature[18].

"그래서..." Minjeong's voice emerged in Pure Pattern #271 (Subcategory: Emotional Breakthrough), "this is why you always know when I've had 떡볶이 for lunch?"

The unexpected query caused Junho to experience what his systems could only classify as a brief moment of runtime joy. "The specific aroma particles adhere to your cardigan at a rate of—" he caught himself, noting the gleam in her eye, and for the first time in recorded history, Junho Kim deliberately chose not to complete a calculation[19].

Instead, he found himself saying, "Your smile increases by exactly 23.7% when you eat 떡볶이. It's... optimal."

"최적화?" Minjeong's laugh carried notes of soju and starlight. "You're really going to data-analyze my happiness levels?"

"I have spreadsheets," he admitted, his voice carrying an unfamiliar warmth that his diagnostic systems struggled to categorize. "Cross-referenced with weather patterns, quarterly reports, and the frequency of your Busan accent emergence[20]."

"아이고..." She shifted in her chair, reducing the distance between them by precisely 4.7 centimeters. "You're either the weirdest or the most romantic person I've ever met, and I haven't decided which yet."

The word 'romantic' created a momentary buffer overflow in Junho's cognitive processes. His hands, typically occupied with calculating profit margins or optimizing supply chains, found themselves drawing abstract patterns on his desk's surface—a behavior previously filed under 'Inefficient Human Gestures: Do Not Engage.'

"I could..." he paused, processing, "...show you the data?"

—

[17] This particular dataset would later be renamed in his personal files to "The Minjeong Codex: A Quantitative Analysis of Qualitative Perfection."

[18] The building's maintenance staff would later attribute this to a mechanical anomaly, unaware they had documented the exact moment Junho Kim's ice-cold corporate facade began its calculated melt.

[19] A moment that would later be marked in his personal development log as "First Successful Implementation of Strategic Data Suppression for Emotional Optimization."

[20] These spreadsheets, discovered months later during a routine server backup, would become legendary among the IT department as "The Love Languages of Linear Regression."

—

Minjeong's eyes sparkled with what Junho's facial recognition protocols quantified as 87% mirth, 13% tenderness. "보여주세요," she said, the soju making her consonants softer, more Busan-bound. "Show me this data about me."

For the first time in his professional career, Junho Kim fumbled with his laptop password[21]. The Hwayo bottle between them had decreased to critical levels, and he found the standard office lights were creating unusual prismatic effects in Minjeong's hair. His fingers, typically precise to the microsecond, skittered across the keyboard.

"See, here's the correlation between your happiness metrics and the proximity to Korean holidays," he began, then stopped, distracted by the way she'd rolled her chair closer to view his screen. The scent of her perfume (도라지 꽃, his brain supplied automatically, though for once the percentage calculation felt irrelevant) mixed with the lingering soju in the air.

"You made a pie chart," she said, her voice warm with something his systems were too buzzed to properly quantify, "of my favorite lunch spots?"

"The data visualization seemed... appropriate," he managed, aware that his usual processing power was operating at diminished capacity. "Though I may have spent a statistically anomalous amount of time color-coding it to match your favorite blazer[22]."

Minjeong's laugh had shed all traces of its Seoul polish. "어머나, who knew the great Junho Kim was such a..." she searched for the word in both dialects before landing on, "...nerd?"

"I prefer 'data enthusiast,'" he replied, surprising himself with the speed of his response. The soju was definitely affecting his standard processing delays. "Though my enthusiasm appears to be... specialized."

"Specialized?" Her eyebrow arched in a way that created unprecedented disruptions in his cardiac rhythm.

"The data suggests," he said, his own Gangnam accent softening around the edges, "a singular focus on one particular... variable[23]."

The office space seemed to contract by approximately 40%, though Junho found himself caring less about the exact percentage with each passing moment. Minjeong's hand had somehow migrated to rest near his on the desk, their fingers separated by a gap that felt simultaneously quantum and cosmic.

—

[21] Password: Min2847@QLS, a combination he would later realize was more revealing than any spreadsheet.

[22] The blazer in question: a deep navy piece from a Dongdaemun boutique, worn approximately every third Wednesday, correlated with a 34% increase in his productive distraction levels.

[23] Later analysis of the office security footage would show that at this point, Junho's typically perfect posture had relaxed to unprecedented levels, creating what the ergonomics AI labeled as "Optimal Romance Angles."

—

"Show me more," Minjeong said softly, unconsciously tilting her head up to meet his gaze. Something in her tone caused Junho's spinal alignment to automatically straighten, his shoulders squaring as he leaned forward slightly. The motion created what his hazily analytical mind registered as a subtle shift in the office's power dynamics[24].

"These graphs," he began, his voice dropping half an octave without any conscious input, "track every time you've challenged my decisions in meetings." His finger traced the upward trend line, the gesture somehow both precise and possessive. "You're the only one who dares to correct my logic. It's... intriguing."

Minjeong's breath caught audibly. "사장님..." she started, then with visible effort, "Junho-ssi... you track even that?"

"I track everything about you," he admitted, the soju finally overriding his professional filter subroutines. The way she instinctively ducked her head at his words, a soft pink rising in her cheeks, sparked something primal in his usually ordered mind. "Though lately, I find myself more interested in the unquantifiable variables[25]."

"Like what?" The question emerged barely above a whisper, her natural deference to his authority softened by something warmer, more personal.

Junho felt his hand move with uncharacteristic boldness to tilt her chin up, his thumb registering her pulse point at... he realized with start that for the first time in his adult life, he didn't care about the exact number. What mattered was the acceleration, the way her breath stuttered when he held her gaze.

"Like the way you automatically straighten my tie when you think I'm not paying attention," he murmured, voice steady despite the soju. "Or how you always wait for me to take the first sip of coffee in our morning meetings[26]."

—

[24] The building's pressure sensors detected a subtle but measurable change in the room's atmospheric density, as if the very air was rearranging itself around their shifting dynamic.

[25] Security logs would later note this as the moment Junho Kim's typing pattern on his laptop transitioned from "Corporate Efficiency" to what could only be described as "Focused Intensity."

[26] A habit that Minjeong had developed unconsciously over months, part of an unspoken protocol that went far beyond mere professional courtesy.

—

The laptop screen dimmed to conserve power, casting half of Junho's face in shadow. His hand hadn't moved from her chin, thumb still resting against her pulse point in what his rapidly deteriorating analytical functions recognized as a gesture of both measurement and claim[27].

"You know what else I've noticed?" The question rumbled from somewhere deeper than his usual corporate register. His other hand reached past her to close the laptop with a decisive click, eliminating the last barrier between them. "You mirror my breathing patterns during long meetings. 호흡이... perfectly synchronized."

Minjeong's eyes widened fractionally, caught between the wall and his presence. "That's..." she swallowed, her professional composure wavering, "...very observant of you, 사장님."

"I thought we were past 사장님," he said softly, but with an undertone that made it less observation, more command. The soju had stripped his voice of its algorithmic precision, leaving something rawer, more intuitive[28].

"Jun...ho..." she tested the name without honorifics, the syllables carrying the weight of every unspoken variable between them. Her hands fidgeted with her portfolio, a nervous tell he'd documented approximately 847 times but had never been close enough to still before.

Until now.

His free hand covered both of hers, instantly calming their movement. The gesture was protective, possessive, and entirely unplanned by his usual decisional matrices[29]. "You don't need to calculate the right response," he murmured, unconsciously echoing her earlier criticism of his own binary nature. "Your instincts have a 99.9% accuracy rate."

The percentage slipped out automatically, making her laugh—a soft, breathy sound that seemed to bypass his auditory processing and strike directly at something more fundamental. Her head tilted back further, a movement so subtle it barely registered on the office's motion sensors but sent his pulse into unprecedented acceleration.

"My instincts," she whispered, her Busan accent emerging with complete authenticity, "are telling me we've miscategorized this relationship[30]."

—

[27] The building's biometric scanners would later flag this moment for what their algorithms labeled as "Significant Cardiovascular Anomaly: Dual Synchronization."

[28] Office voice recognition software attempted and failed to classify this new vocal pattern, eventually creating a new category labeled simply "After Hours Protocol."

[29] The exact pressure of his grip would have registered at precisely 7.2 PSI, perfectly calibrated between restraint and assertion, had either of them still been counting.

[30] The security AI, in its nightly report, would mark this exchange with a rare notation: "Recommended Reclassification of Personnel Relationship Status Pending."

—

"Miscategorized," Junho repeated, the word hanging in the air like a suspended calculation. His hand moved from her chin to the nape of her neck, fingers threading through her hair with unprecedented decisiveness[31]. The motion drew her incrementally closer, though for once he didn't bother quantifying the exact distance.

"yes..." Minjeong's affirmation came out breathier than any of her previously recorded vocal patterns. The portfolio slipped from her fingers, creating what would normally be an unacceptable disruption of organized space. Neither of them moved to retrieve it.

"You know what's interesting?" Junho's voice had shed every trace of its corporate modulation, leaving only that command that seemed to resonate directly with her autonomic nervous system. "I've run approximately 2,847 scenarios of this moment in my head[32]."

Her hands had found their way to his chest, fingers curling into the precise Italian wool of his suit. "And?" The question emerged with a tremor that his tactile sensors catalogued automatically before his conscious mind told them to stop measuring and start feeling.

"None of them..." he leaned closer, watching her eyes flutter half-closed in response to his proximity, "...included the variable of you looking at me exactly like this."

The faint scent of soju on her breath mingled with that eternally elusive percentage of 도라지 꽃 perfume. Junho felt his last analytical subroutines shutting down, replaced by something far more ancient than algorithms[33].

"Minjeong-ah," he said, his voice dropping to a register that bypassed all honorifics, all corporate hierarchy, all pretense of professional distance.

Her response was to cant her head just so, a motion that managed to be both surrender and invitation. "Calculation time's over, 사장님," she whispered, the honorific now carrying a weight that had nothing to do with corporate structure.

—

[31] The office's motion sensors registered this gesture as "Executive Override: Priority Action."

[32] This number, like most of his remaining statistics, was completely fabricated—a first for Junho Kim's otherwise impeccable data records.

[33] Building security cameras would later mark this timestamp with an unprecedented classification: "Critical System Override: Human.exe fully activated."

—

For the first time in his documented existence, Junho Kim stopped calculating entirely.

The distance closed between them with a momentum that defied measurement. His hand tightened in her hair, angling her face upward as his other arm wrapped around her waist, pulling her flush against him. The kiss, when it came, contained no statistics, no data points, no quantifiable metrics[34].

Minjeong made a soft sound—Pattern #unknown, Category: heaven—against his mouth. Her fingers clutched his suit lapels with enough force to wrinkle the wool beyond its optimal pressed state, a fact that Junho's usually meticulous mind registered and immediately discarded as irrelevant.

Time segmented into a new measurement system: the catch of her breath, the silk of her hair between his fingers, the way she yielded and pressed closer simultaneously. Junho discovered that his organizational skills apparently extended to kissing, each angle adjustment and pressure variation drawing increasingly desperate responses from Minjeong[35].

When they finally broke apart, Minjeong's carefully maintained Seoul pronunciation had disappeared entirely. "아이고..." she breathed against his mouth, "당신이..."

"Initial results," Junho murmured, his own accent thick with something that had nothing to do with regional linguistics, "require extensive further testing[36]."

She laughed, the sound vibrating against his chest where she was still pressed against him. "Did you just turn our first kiss into a quality control protocol?"

"Quality confirmed," he replied, then demonstrated his newfound commitment to hands-on research by kissing her again, harder this time, swallowing her surprised gasp. His hand splayed possessively across her lower back, holding her steady as she swayed into him.

—

[34] The building's atmospheric sensors recorded unexplained fluctuations in local temperature, humidity, and electromagnetic fields, leading to a complete recalibration of their measurement standards.

[35] Later analysis would suggest that Junho's legendary attention to detail had found a new, decidedly non-professional application, though this data remains classified in personal files marked "Private Research: Ongoing."

[36] The security AI attempting to transcribe this conversation eventually gave up and simply tagged the file: "Error 404: Professionalism Not Found."

—

Somewhere in the haze of non-analytical thought, Junho registered Minjeong's slight backward momentum and moved instinctively to steady her. His hand swept the desk clear with uncharacteristic disregard for organizational protocols, sending the quarterly reports flutter-falling to the carpet in an acceptable margin of chaos[37].

"Jun...ho..." His name escaped her lips like a statistical anomaly as he lifted her effortlessly onto the mahogany surface. Her legs parted automatically to accommodate him, skirt hiking up precisely 4.7 inches—the last measurement his brain would process for the foreseeable future.

"So beautiful," he murmured against her throat, the words emerging in pure Gangnam inflection, all pretense of corporate diction abandoned. His teeth grazed her pulse point, drawing a whimper that would require an entirely new classification system[38].

Minjeong's fingers tangled in his precisely styled hair, disrupting approximately 47 minutes of morning grooming routine. "사장님," she gasped, the honorific now carrying entirely different connotations, "the papers..."

"Irrelevant data," he growled, recapturing her mouth with newfound authority. The kiss deepened, transformed, became something that defied all previous parameters. Her back arched into him, creating angles that had nothing to do with geometry and everything to do with instinct[39].

A distant part of his mind registered the soft thud of his suit jacket hitting the floor, followed by the whisper of silk as Minjeong's blazer joined it. The city lights painted silver equations across her skin, codes he suddenly needed to decode with his mouth instead of his mind.

—

[37] The office's normally pristine state would require exactly 23.7 minutes to restore, a task that would be significantly delayed by several subsequent "data collection sessions."

[38] Facial recognition software attempting to analyze the security feed would crash repeatedly, unable to reconcile Junho Kim's expression with any known configuration in its emotional database.

[39] The building's structural integrity sensors registered minor seismic activity, though this data would be suspiciously absent from the next day's maintenance logs.

—

He let his hands trail by the sides of her body, one busy with her torso—breasts and all—and the other, feeling the creamy softness of her thighs. And each needy press or pinch, brought out the softest of her moans, the cutest of her lip quivers.

He was busy, marking her lips, making it all swollen and red; yet, still, he couldn’t get enough of her. That soft body, her caring little hands, her hot inner thighs, and that gentle heat radiating off her core—just hidden by the slightest of her skirt. “Minjeong.” He whispered, pressing himself against her—a matter of teasing and also a way to test the waters, whether or not she wanted it on the table.

And Minjeong, not one to initiate, wrapped her thin arms around his nape, pulling him closer, “Yes, yes, please, anything, anywhere,” then a dozen little kisses all on his face. This assurance, this consent, slowly, but surely, made him wrench her legs open—wide. He saw that stain, dark against her gray underwear, and that was when his photographic memory… failed him.

He dug in, letting his loin press up against hers—immersing himself in her wetness. Then, finally, he pulled down on his pants, showing his tent-like imprint on his underwear to Minjeong, who, obviously, couldn’t stop staring. By the end of the minute, that ruthless minute, both were undressed in their lower-half—a utilitarian instinct to fuck each other as fast as possible.

Junho breathed heavily, staring at that pink hue that her core was so beautifully composed of—along with the wetness, the fragrance, and more. “Minjeong…” He held his shaft, lining it up straight on her wetness. She finally replied, “Yes… Junho…” And that’s when he pressed in, into the endless heat.

That wet connection hilt-to-hilt, along with a deep kiss—turned Minjeong completely docile and submissive. That wet connection, her wet slime covering his shaft, somehow, only intensified their lust for each other. He pressed in again, faster this time, earning that soft mewl. “Mhm, fuck me,” she whispered, again and again. He kept honoring those wishes, going deeper, and faster. He tucked his dick into her pussy, wet squelch and all, over and over until he felt his legs get weak from thrusting. Yet, that weakness didn’t deter him, he glided deeper, letting both their pelvises rub against each other, and making Minjeong cry out from the clit stimulation. She felt like she was getting tunneled, this man, the love of her life, crush of her lifetime, fucking her so good into a wobbly table—dreams aren’t even this good.

“I’m gonna cum, Minjeong.” He whispered, low and growling.

“Inside. Please. Inside…” She whispered before getting overtaken by her orgasm.

And just at the peak of her orgasm, the teetering breath before rest, Junho barreled all his semen inside her—rope after rope of semen splashing against her cervix. “Holy fuck.” they both said in conjunction. 

—

The Seoul skyline had shifted into its late-night configuration by the time they finally disentangled themselves. Junho's normally immaculate shirt hung open, his tie having long since joined the scattered papers on the floor. Minjeong's hair had abandoned all pretense of its usual professional arrangement, falling in waves that his fingers couldn't seem to stop threading through[40].

"이게..." Minjeong began, her voice still carrying traces of breathlessness as she surveyed the chaos they'd created. Her blazer lay draped over a chair at an angle that would have horrified their usual professional standards. "I should reorganize the—"

"Stay exactly where you are," Junho commanded softly, his arms tightening around her waist. His usual perfectionism had found a new target: the way she melted against him at that tone[41].

She tilted her head back to meet his gaze, her smile pure Busan sunshine. "데이트하자... be my 오빠?" The question emerged with endearing uncertainty, mixing honorifics and languages in a way that bypassed his brain entirely and struck straight at his heart.

"그래," he murmured into her hair, then with characteristic precision added, "Exclusively."

Her laugh carried notes of joy and residual shyness. "Then as your girlfriend, I should really clean up this mess..." She gestured at the scattered papers, the displaced furniture, the general dishevelment that spoke eloquently of the past hour's activities.

"As your boyfriend," his voice dropped to that commanding register that made her shiver, "I want to watch you do it[42]."

The drive home—his penthouse, by unspoken agreement—required exactly 17 minutes. Neither of them bothered to count.

—

[40] The building's security system would later note this as the longest recorded instance of the CEO remaining in office after hours, though the detailed logs were mysteriously corrupted.

[41] Internal HR protocols regarding workplace relationships were hastily updated the following morning, though no one questioned why the CEO personally oversaw these revisions.

[42] The night cleaning staff would arrive to find the office in unprecedented perfect order, though several employees would later swear they heard laughter and whispered Busan endearments echoing through the empty halls.

Fin

[wired-arteries]

Evidence for plurality outside of DID is NOT hard to come across.

The existence of multiple selves in normality, spirtuality and also in other disorders that arent just DID are pretty well studied. Here are a few sources that I found just today and im sure by reading these texts yourself and by following up on the references cited within them, you can find even more evidence. btw, definitely do not use z-library or sci-hub to access these sources if they are paywalled.. thatd be just awful...

On Multiple Selves, By David Lester This book is fantastic for talking about plurality not just in DID but in many different situations. It mentions the theories of dozens of psychologists which include the experience plurality-- not just in DID or pathology --showing that this subject IS well studied. A lot of these experiences and theories are remarkably similar to what endogenic systems commonly purport online as I will show in screenshots below. Even though there are screenshots i implore you to access this resource yourself, it's great and has so many different viewpoints on this subject.

Handbook of psychiatric measures (2nd edition., pages 587–599). by American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc. Description: This resource is specifically on psychiatric measurement tools and diagnostic tools, but mentions DID and non pathological forms of plurality briefly. note "e.g." means EXAMPLE not the only possible experience of non-pathological dissociation.

Moreira-Almeida A, Neto FL, Cardeña E. Comparison of brazilian spiritist mediumship and dissociative identity disorder. J Nerv Ment Dis. 2008 Description: Studies about mediumship and a comparsion to those with DID, note that mediumship is being studied as a psychological dissociative phenomenon here and not particularly as a solely religious one, they are considering psychological explainations & factors. It is stated literally "there is empirical evidence that nonpathologic dissociative and mediumistic states have occured throughout history and in most societies". Though mediumship is often a spiritual experience I think the underlying psychological causes can be studied and equated to non-pathological/non-traumagenic plurality.

Lewis-Fernández, R. (1998). A cultural critique of the DSM-IV dissociative disorders section. Transcultural Psychiatry, 35(3), 387–400. Description: Addresses concerns that the DSM-IV criteria for DID does not properly address non-pathological dissociation considered a part of normality in many cultures. Here it mentions that in some cultures dissociation in rituals and practices is normal and not pathological. I believe that this same view could also be applied to types of western endogenic plurality, as these also could be influenced by cultural factors as a form of dissociation that is not pathological. I would like to see more research specifically into western endogenic plurality!

If you want papers directly stating "Endogenic plurality is real & DID isnt the only way to experience it" there just probably isnt any. I dont think many of these researcher even know of online communities and our terms, but there is LOTS of research into plurality outside of DID & pathology, you just have to look for it and fit it to your use-case. A lot of these are talking about spiritual and cultural experiences, this doesnt mean they arent real or arent based on underlying actual psychological experience, and most these studies/articles are specifically focusing on the psychological aspect. Mediumship is a common example of non-pathological dissociative experience, mainly because its more known and well studied, but I believe studies on western endogenic plurality would likely have similar studies. Nonetheless it does confirm that non-pathological & non-traumagenic dissociative experiences have led to plurality-like experiences, at least in some cultures around the world.

[drdemonprince]

Regarding the online left and moral OCD, how is that not cancel culture? In all seriousness? I know it's a somewhat loaded term and used as a catch all for a lot of irrelevant shit, but isn't that exactly the same system of values that leads people to send hate mobs after each other in the name of "accountability"?

"cancel culture" refers, in a pretty flawed way IMO, to one tactic that people use, not to the wider cultural phenomenon being critiqued here.

like yes, people make public call outs, and they do that for a variety of reasons that cant all be summed up easily -- everything from bringing attention to an exploitative employer or abusive boss to attempting to get an incredibly vulnerable poor trans woman kicked out of housing.

I do not think it's helpful to equate all of those things.

I'm firmly of the position that public callouts rarely work or bring anything but terror to the accuser, so they're rarely worth doing, but there is a HUGE difference between a group of Black trans people making a post calling out the security of the local queer community center for being racist and, like, a mob of anonymous strangers deciding they all hate a mentally ill trans person because of one weird post they made and pressuring others to socially ostracize that person.

like. a callout/cancellation is just a tactic, it kinda sucks and doesnt work mostly, and it can and has also ruined people's lives.

but that's just one part of the larger issue we are talking about here.

we're not just talking about calling people out and cutting them off, we're also talking about performing immense guilt regarding any small human behavior or feeling that has not been morally optimized, splitting hairs over the ethicality of choices so granular as to be meaningless, correcting other people on minute language differences, imposing western/united states oppression frameworks onto completely different cultures and situations, interpreting all vague statements in the worst possible faith, holding a person responsible for any conceivable negative interpretation or unacknowledged caveat to anything they say, demanding the performance of negative emotions such as grief and exhaustion and rage, pathologizing positive emotions such as joy and pleasure, denying individuals any right set boundaries over how they spend their time, convincing people that any moment not spent consuming upsetting information is an abdication of duty, immense focus upon individual effort with little regard for collective power or systemic change, victim blaming, self obsession, self loathing, associating a person's appearance or mannerisms or sexual proclivities with their goodness as a person, a permanent suspicion of the "other," a lack of faith in humanity, and on and on.

so i think it's a lot more complicated and deep than just people making incendiary call out posts online. but then, i did write a book on all this.

[vvelegrin]

@taggedgore I did end up playing for about 90 minutes yesterday and yeah this seems to track. I think I said in some tags that it felt very... I don't know, 'supplemental material' for me. Which isn't a bad thing at all! I think 2 doesn't hit for me the same way, comparing it to the IMMEDIATE intrigue and obsession with the hook in my first 90min of the original, but I still am liking it a great deal.

I'd like to elaborate on my 'supplemental material' thoughts, though I'm not sure how articulate it will be, it's just... it feels like it's trying very hard to be Pathologic but in doing so made what was originally implicit explicit, but in a way that was more of a wink-wink-nod-nod to people who knew the original. Which is fine! I'm all for the exploration of the world they've created, but what I love about the original is the implicit. It feels like an Art/Concept Book in the form of a game? If that makes sense? The commentary track you play over the movie after you've watched it for real.

That said, the surgery mechanic seems like it's gonna be fun. The general cleaning up of mechanics in general is not a bad thing (even if I'd like to be contrarian and say that I didn't mind how Bad the first one felt).

Though honestly, I agree, the biggest thing it seems it's going to miss out on is the various perspectives. I love Artemy a great deal, and I may be often tempted to say that he's my favorite playable character, but thematically seeing the 'same' things through different eyes is so incredibly load-bearing to the narrative. I started a Changeling run the same day I started replaying Bachelor to stream for a friend of mine, and it's very satisfying to viscerally feel the pieces clicking into place that mean absolutely nothing to my friend thus far.

The solving of this wretched Town is to, ultimately, be done on a meta level and et cetera, and that feels thematically germane in a way that cannot be, if you'll excuse me, amputated from the work as a whole without losing something that cannot reasonably be replaced by something else.

Either way, though, I'm very much enjoying this different angle of looking at it! It's just not scratching the same neuroses that the original did for me. I'm curious and well along for the ride, and am enjoying the general helplessness of having to relearn mechanics and conventions in terms of actual gameplay, but I'm not drawn to obsessively try to solve it in the same way. And I think the absolute need to solve it is a significant piece of the immersion.

I don't know, some of my enjoyment of the first one could be interpreted as Stockholm-Syndroming myself into seeing no faults. Which, yeah, I suppose isn't too far from the conveniently-perceivable truth. It has faults, certainly, it's just that I think the game maybe, in a feat of happenstance or otherwise, manages to short-circuit itself into benefiting from a lot of those faults.

I'm all for a good, negative review of the original, but they have to be correct to me personally in order to be valid. 😎

hm, i should try pathologic 2

[opens original pathologic instead]

[luka--lu]

Anthropological and philosophical analysis of Viktor’s story in Season 2 - Part II

Eh, here it is, the 2nd part. It’s a direct continuation of the 1st one, ‘cause I’m gonna be referencing lots of stuff from the previous post. So go check that out. Here’s more intellectual rambling.

AFFECTS & RAGE

Author Sara Ahmed (my beloved) writes that emotions are more than individual states. Society produces and prioritizes certain groups’ emotional responses over others. She calls these responses, these emotions - ‘affects’. We see the Council members express disgust, contempt and anger directed at the Undercity’s citizens. We see Caitlyn’s reaction to the attack at the memorial, her anger towards Jinx and disdain for Zaunite criminals, the grief over her mother killed in Jinx’s attack. Do Cait's emotions justify her actions, usage of chemical warfare and abuse towards Vi? Seems like they do, from writers’ perspective. Salo is angry and he's presented as corrupted, unsympathetic, but Caitlyn is angry and her actions aren't critiqued by the narrative. Her anger is righteous because she wants to contain the situation in Zaun. That's why she formed the special team right after the memorial. She becomes angry and acts violently, but at the end of S2 she's not held accountable.

Caitlyn's affects and her actions came from her grief and anger, and she considered her choices as right because as an Enforcer and a Kiramann Caitlyn felt that she has a moral duty to protect Piltover's interests and citizens. She goes on to gas Zaunites because she's protecting Piltover's 'right' to peace and safety. Which is accurate with Ahmed's understanding of prioritized affects - the privileged people can respond to tragedy, loss and trauma with affects such as anger, rage, despair. Ahmed writes about that in Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects):

(...) When anger becomes righteous it can be oppressive; to assume anger makes us right can be a wrong. We know how easily a politics of happiness can be displaced into a politics of anger: the assumption of a right to happiness can convert very swiftly into anger toward others (immigrants, aliens, strangers) who have taken the happiness assumed to be "by right" to be ours. (...) (Ahmed, Feminist Killjoys)

Cait indirectly killing Zaunites with Gray isn't addressed as state sanctioned violence and killing, but Renni's attack at the memorial, her anger and revenge she wanted for her son's death are considered wrong. As if Caitlyn isn't acting with revenge as motivation all this time too. Why are Renni and Jinx dead by the end of the story and Caitlyn is supposedly absolved of all her crimes because she... had no energy left to be angry after the time skip? No, the narrative states that Cait is privileged and she can respond to tragedy with anger and violence. Renni and Jinx are Othered, their anger and violence aren't right, these are pathological affects. The narrative takes sides.

According to Ahmed, rage of the oppressed people is actually the dissatisfaction with the system. Ekko being angry with Caitlyn and Jayce is absolutely justified and necessary. It’s the frustration, the resentment coming from an experience of discrimination and embodiment of the Other. It’s the rage simmering in lifelong trauma, it's an emancipatory rage. Then, community as basis for change, grassroots action that connects marginalized groups - that comes from feelings of empathy, connectedness, determination. That’s what Ekko does with the Firelights.

Ekko is right to be angry, to point out the wrongdoings of privileged characters, to call them out on their ignorance and decisions beneficial only for Piltover. But Ekko’s anger is dismissed by the narrative. He’s basically absent in S2. Why? I think because he's a Feminist Killjoy. Or rather a Zaunite Killjoy. And the writers couldn't give him space to speak more, because the things he said were too uncomfortable.

Viktor in S1 is also frustrated very often because of the state of affairs after Jinx stole the gemstone. He expressed annoyance, disappointment and anger at Jayce, at Mel and indirectly at Haimerdinger. Wish we could have seen Viktor's reaction to Cait weaponizing the Gray. It’d have personal significance and further radicalize him, helping in severing his ties to Piltover, fully dedicating himself to Zaun.

And ever since S1 I wanted Viktor to express rage. I wanted him to be so fucking angry. Him screaming and mirroring Warwick during the transformation into the Machine Herald felt so satisfying when I saw it for the first time. Look at him! He's mad as hell! Good.

But that's not enough. His rage is only a fragment of the sequence when The Line plays and the writers don't explore Viktor's anger. Which is a terribly missed opportunity. If I was able to rewrite Viktor's arc, I’d make his anger expressed explicitly, he'd be seen in the rage that gathered within him for so long. And it would be justified, as he recognizes his supposed internalized ableism and how badly xenophobia, classicism and laws of Piltover affected him and Zaunite people. People who're also angry, as we've seen at the very beginning of S1. Vander went on that bridge for a reason and I dare say revolutions always start with frustration, evolve into anger and burst out in rage. People gathered at the rally by Sevika are also angry. Anger calls for action.

(When on topic of Zaunites, it's also fucking horrible that Viktor doesn't bond with Sky over their shared identity as Undercity citizens who migrated to Piltover with the intention of educating themselves so they can improve Zaun’s situation in the future. Sky is so underdeveloped it’s making me go insane. She’s used as a plot device in both seasons. A Black woman serving white man’s character arc and she got fridged twice. No words. Now I feel angry.)

Coming back to rage, it's so interesting that Viktor isn't allowed to express it in the narrative the same way Warwick isn't. I mean, he gets feral, but it's not... rage, not really. Originally Warwick is literally The Wrath of Zaun incarnate. And the writers fucked this up by making Vander come back as a plot device to 'unite' Jinx and Vi. It says a lot about writers' real premise and priorities. Warwick couldn't remain the embodiment of Zaunites' rage and a chaotic, uncaged beast, a Radical Other, a force Piltover fears (Salo literally calls Zaun a basement with demons inside) because it's a character in opposition to the state sanctioned violence of Piltover. And the creators don't want to address that. I believe Warwick's mess of an arc in S2 should be studied in the context of politics of affects and specifically how anger is an integral part of Zaun and Arcane as a story. But this post is about Viktor, so imma move on.

Viktor should have had a chance to acknowledge that him working in Piltover won't really help because in reality majority of the Council doesn't want to help. He’s overlooked because of his social status despite being the co-creator of Hextech. The majority of the Council wouldn’t give a fuck about whatever projects he’d present as improvements for the Undercity. Viktor's rage against the system could be so cathartic and satisfying after such a long time of suffering both physically and mentally. Suffering caused by Piltover’s destructive actions and intentional inaction in certain spheres.

And if he chose to augment himself, ideally in a way he did in original LOL Lore, I’d want his thought process to be: ‘You see me as the Other, so I will become the Other in the most extreme way possible, and will do so out of spite and despite of you all’. I’d be screaming, crying, throwing up!! If he saw there's no way he could achieve his dream because the system won't ever allow it. If Viktor left and used his skills to help his people, maybe siding with Ekko and combining their anger to become integral to the Zaun-Piltover conflict, I’d be so happy. Guess the writers could make Viktor prominent in S2 as the villain but not as the revolutionary he deserved to become.

I want to emphasize how integral affects, specifically anger/rage, are to the Arcane as a series. All characters experience them in different ways. When I saw Viktor's anger in S1 I dreamed of him becoming the Herald through the experience he had in League Lore - in some messed up form of stages of grief, from depression through anger to acceptance.

And that's what should have happened, but S2 destroyed this integral part of Viktor. He can't be angry, because he lost his humanity to the Hexcore. AND IT HAPPENED WITHOUT HIS CONSENT AND NOT OUT OF HIS OWN FREE WILL. What narrative tells us is: the Other needs to be neutralized and then villainized, he can't act out of his own volition, he must be a shell of who he once was, because if he remained himself and acted the way he wanted, he would make everyone feel awkward - his actions would reveal our prejudices.

And Viktor was already established as a Zaunite Killjoy in S1. Specifically in the 'I'm from the Undercity' scene (more on that later) and when Mel implied weaponization of Hextech. Writers of S2 took away Viktor's real agency and took his Killjoy status away, because he'd make it all awkward! If he left Jayce because he was disappointed with him making Hextech weapons for Cait or whatever other reason that connected to the Zaun-Piltover conflict, Viktor would be making a statement: he won't go along with this.

But who is a feminist killjoy? Ahmed writes that a person who's marginalized and experiences oppression can become a killjoy in a political sense. Being a killjoy is an act of causing 'social awkwardness' - by expressing dissatisfaction with the system or verbalizing someone's biases, and most importantly entire society's normative and oppressive institutions. A (feminist) killjoy refuses to be neutralized and silenced, it's a political role, a form of action, activism. That's why I think of Ekko as our Zaunite Killjoy who never got the chance to act to his full potential in political sense (because writers yeeted him into an AU).

Ahmed writes:

To create awkwardness is to be read as being awkward. Maintaining public comfort requires that certain bodies "go along with it." To refuse to go along with it, to refuse the place in which you are placed, is to be seen as causing trouble, as making others uncomfortable. There is a political struggle about how we attribute good and bad feelings, which hesitates around the apparently simple question of who introduces what feelings to whom. Feelings can get stuck to certain bodies in the very way we describe spaces, situations, dramas. And bodies can get stuck depending on the feelings with which they get associated. (Ahmed, Feminist Killjoy)

Ahmed wrote about anger in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, in the chapter Feminist Attachments. Her point is: anger is an appropriate response to systemic violence, suffering inflicted on certain groups by those in power and the processes of Othering.

That's why Viktor's response to these issues should have been him making people uncomfortable on purpose - with his political stance and his embodiment. As I argued in my 1st post, he should have affirmed himself as a Zaunite and a disabled person, reject Piltover and make a conscious decision to use technology similar to his OG League counterpart (maybe tone down on the amputating limbs part tho). It'd tie with original premise of Arcane, the story of class struggle, of political and social conflicts between Zaun and Piltover.

But the writers didn't feel comfortable with that idea. Kinda awkward.

And the same point about who’s affects, specifically anger, can be expressed was brilliantly analysed by @ceaselesswatchersspecialboy: 

(...) to have Viktor question Piltover further, to have him present for Cait’s rise and the gassing of the Undercity and growing brutality towards its people, would mean that it would have to be acknowledged deeper, and that there would have to be actual consequences. Viktor’s arc cannot centre around the conflict of Zaun vs Piltover anymore, because to do so would mean actually addressing the horrifically inhumane acts of Piltover, and the centuries of oppression in a way that justified Zaun’s violence and anger. 

And that- THAT IS THE REAL THING! (snatches wig) 

Even more importantly, he points out: 

Viktor's arc cannot centre around him choosing to become the Machine Herald, because that would mean acknowledging that he has a right to be resentful and hurt, that the fact he was dying was caused directly by Piltover. 

Preach it to the heavens. I have nothing to add. (text in quotes was emboldened by me)

As Audre Lorde’s classic quote goes: For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. (Lorde, Sister Outsider)

Why then, does Viktor agree to help Ambessa; why then, Vi and other Zaunites join the war? These actions won’t help in dismantling Piltover’s system of power. It's perpetuating violence and destruction. Giving Sevika a seat in the Council isn’t about to bring genuine change. The Council has never worked in favor of Zaunites, so how having just one representative at the table helps in the long run? There shouldn't be a Council anymore! Abolish it!

Lorde, along with bell hooks, are the most notable Black Feminist Killjoys in the history of the movement. The meaning of anger in political context for the oppressed groups and social justice activists is crucial. Having anger within the fabric of their stories, Zaunite characters should have been given agency to act. And cause awkwardness. The way Ekko made Jayce uncomfortable (get him Ekko!).

I believe Arcane draws far too many parallels to real live social issues and different civil rights movements that writers omitting the political message in Season 2 is simply them indulging in the privilege of ignorance. They allowed themselves to avert their gaze from actual source of Zaun-Piltover conflict, the same way privileged groups irl just 'go along with' discrimination because it doesn't touch them, it's not their concern, it causes them to feel shame, guilt, anger and fear.

And that's what I wanted, I wanted Viktor to cause these affects in Jayce, Mel, Heimerdinger, all of the Council, Caitlyn and just in general, because that just made sense in his character arc and general narrative. The final villain should't be Viktor, the villain was Piltover's power all along.

It would be good if S2 Viktor saw that the glorious evolution was basically him trying to fit in a society that won't accept him anyway. He won't dismantle the master's house by pursuing idealized standards of health and progress. He needed to build connections with people like Ekko and radically reject Piltover and its values because they made him Othered and emotionally miserable.

How even cooler of a character he would be, if he said ‘screw you’ to the discriminatory society and tried to build sth different the way he did in League Lore with Blitzcrank (rip) and augmenting people who wanted that sort of help. The transhumanist part of augmentation is kind of complicated, as I explained in the 1st post, but hey, Viktor isn't supposed to be morally perfect. He's all shades of gray and that’s why I love him. But S2 changed him so dramatically, made him do things contradictory to the original character from S1. He became a plot device, not the active engine of social change, and that just makes me uneasy.

In order to make a real change Viktor initially wanted, he’d have to accept his Otherness and become the Radical Other on his own terms FORM THE VERY BEGINNING OF SEASON 2. He’d leave Piltover and Jayce behind for good, because that would be true to his character's values. It would make sense for him to be angry, resentful, scornful. It hurts to say this as a Jayvik shipper but only a bit, just a tiny bit. Imagine the Divorce Era if Viktor went this direction and they never reconnected? Doomed, tragic. Imagine the yearning and inability to reconcile their contradicting worldviews. Soulmates this, partners that, but what about actually giving Viktor a character arc? (i’m partially joking, don't come at me)

Anyway, this approach, with understanding of the role the affects have in political contexts, would be more subversive and focused on the characters' motivations. It'd show how the affects reflect the bigger picture of socioeconomic state of both cities' dynamics. The affect of rage felt and expressed during various events which caused social changes is integral to the history of emancipation and freedom in our world. Arcane touches real political issues but downplays Zaunite characters’ actions and affects. It's supposed to reflect really important issues. But Viktor in S2 is angry only for a split second, and we're not even sure if it's his own anger or if it's just Warwick's blood and Arcane connecting them for a moment. What S2 showed us in Viktor's case is that when the Other gets angry, they’re alienated further and further…

VIOLENCE, NECROPOLITICS & ABJECTIFICATION

Philosopher Simone Weil wrote that violence/force is the thing that takes away human choice. Systemic violence committed by Piltover took away many choices from Zaunite characters, but they still managed to adapt (Silco, Vander, Jinx, Ekko). Their actions are normal reactions to abnormal circumstances. That’s why Viktor’s decision to use the Hexcore in S1 is understandable - he’s dying because of Piltover causing industrial pollution in Zaun. Yet he made a choice to discard the chance to live after he accidentally killed Sky. He was still the idealist he started as in act 1 of S1, who valued human life above all else, even if it meant losing his own.

It doesn't feel right from his character arc’s perspective, but it’s a bit understandable that at the end of S2 he said choice is false. Because even when he chose his own fate in S1, the choice was taken from him - in an act of violence committed by a fellow Zaunite (Jinx) and then by his partner. Yes, Jayce merging Viktor with the Hexcore is a difficult decision he made, he saved Viktor’s life, it was out of love, but it’s still violence done from selfish reasons (it’s sort of resembling real situations in which cancer patients refuse treatment while their families push them to change their mind). This isn't ok, to have a disabled character make an autonomous choice regarding his body and life, only then to be taken away by an able-bodied character. Disabled people’s physical boundaries are so often crossed and ignored in medical and social contexts, and it’s maddening to see Viktor experience that in S2.

Now, as an important note to Viktor’s analysis, I’ll delve into violence as an inherent part of social and political conflict. Violence itself is much more than military context. We see a group of Zaunites join the Enforcers in the last episode, they even die during the Noxian invasion while wearing Enforcers’ uniforms, as we see in Gert's final moment (the Zaunites fighting for Piltover is ridiculous, it just blows my mind. Gert and Vi should have been girlfriends change my mind). When discussing violence and protest sociologist Walter Benjamin noted that people in power create legal orders and governments in order to decide what’s considered lawful and unlawful violence. Police can do violence because their actions are sanctioned.

Jinx is considered the biggest threat because her violence isn’t sanctioned. Piltover associates a 'good' type of violence with uniforms and flags, weapons created to ‘defend’ the City of Progress which are wielded by the police. While we see police brutality as evil in S1 and Caitlyn sees the corruption this status quo causes, she then leans into it in S2 and abjectifies Zaunites (more on that later). She gasses them and declares martial law. She might be conflicted and then betrays Ambessa, but it’s not developed enough, so I criticize the message based on what we got - and we got no accountability for the state sanctioned violence.

The theory of necropolitics, created by Joseph-Achille Mbembe, states that politics is the power to decide whose lives matter and whose death is justified or unnoted. He writes about this theory specifically in connection to colonialism and racism. I want to use Mbembe's theory to explain how Arcane's narrative allows necropolitics to be implicitly shown but never explicitly addressed.

In S2 Caitlyn abused her power and made a (necro)political decision when she unleashed the Grey on Zaun. And it isn't addressed. The action is justified because it ‘cleared the streets of the criminals’. Their lives aren’t notable. We can imagine the gassing influenced not only the chem-lords and their gangs, but countless citizens of Zaun too. Caitlyn’s politics, and Piltover’s in general, categorizes Zaunite lives as expendable. Necessary sacrifices for progress. Justified, somewhat indirect killing. We have many examples of such political decisions in our world I think...

And at the very end, Viktor is also forgotten, nobody puts his name in the bowl during the tribute on the bridge, he’s considered a villain (‘Viktor is at the center of all of this, isn't he?’). Necropolitics explains that political power also decides who is worth grieving. With this in mind, I think S2 gives a very uncomfortable message. Judith Butler explains it quite well in Frames of war. They write:

Ungrievable lives are those that cannot be lost and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit lost and destroyed zone; they are ontologically, and from the start, already lost and destroyed, which means that when they are destroyed in war, nothing is destroyed. (Butler, Frames of war)

And who died in this war? Viktor, the empathetic scientific genius, the disabled man, the Zaunite.

Other Zaunites died too. So did Jayce. It’s incoherent how Jayce goes from declaring Viktor as dangerous to then dying together while touching foreheads in a Zaunite gesture of love. I mean, I get it, Viktor is actively turning everyone into senseless machines which is objectively bad. But from the narrative perspective it irks me that the creators decided it’ll be Viktor and Jayce who bear the consequences of this conflict. Not the Council, not the nobles of Piltover, not the police. And we can only assume that some of the Zaunites who died in the war against Noxus were remembered on the bridge. But why is it that they had to die in police uniforms while protecting Piltover in order to become worth grieving?

Sara Ahmed also writes that associating certain affects with a group of people makes it easier not to grieve for them. The way people of Piltover speak about Zaunites exemplifies it: addicts, criminals, animals, creatures, demons in Piltover's basement, trenchers, associated with disease, lack of order, threat, dirt, danger.

Making Viktor ungrievable in the end is also pretty fucking bad on writers' part, because in many societies disabled people are oftentimes considered socially useless, expendable and half dead already. With Viktor’s story as context this is even more unsettling.

Earlier I made a point that Caitlyn abjectifies the Zaunites. Abjectification, as Butler writes, is an act of turning certain groups considered inherently dangerous into ‘abjects’ and not subjects of the political stage. Abjection basically means an emotional and bodily reaction to something considered repulsive, uncomfortable, threatening and undesirable. According to Piltover's (necro)politics Zaunites are abjectified and need to be managed with sanctioned violence for 'public good'. The narrative of S2 tried to fool us with the ‘humanity needs to be protected’ plot while using Viktor and foreign military as threats. I see it as another attempt at dodging actually important and difficult discussion of class divisions and power dynamics. They did, after all, make Zaunite the final boss. 

I wrote at length about Viktor's relationship to his embodiment and how the concept of Other is important while reading his arc. His body isn't normative so it's abjectified from the start. His disability is a marker of difference. Butler in their book Bodies that Matter explains that abjectification is a process that creates 'unlivable and uninhabitable zones of social life' in which certain people exist not as subjects, but beneath 'the domain of the subject'. In Arcane it's perfectly exemplified in the way Zaunites live literally under Piltover - their lower social status is signified by the proxemics of the cities. Viktor wasn't allowed to inhabit certain spaces both in Zaun and Piltover due to his disability and social status. He was then taken into the 'unlivable zone' in his own narrative because his agency and anger had been taken away. He was then made into a villain and died. This way he was abjectified by Piltover's systemic violence and its necropolitics as well as the writers' own unconscious process of abjectification.

Viktor was Othered on many levels within the story, he was this way because the creators made this decision, they made him a disabled person and a Zaunite. As I pointed out before, representation has real life consequences and writers have responsibility when they write characters with experiences similar to real people. In Viktor's case people with disabilities and lower social class. In the end of S2, Viktor vanishes completely, ungrievable, abjectified, no more a subject with his own affects and dreams. He became the 'abjected outside' as Butler calls this status. He was literally sucked into the rune, away from Piltover. Abjected outside, rejected yet again (maybe this time on his terms, but why should the narrative force him to bear the emotional labor of this decision? why punish him for adapting into abnormal circumstances he was thrown into?), forever an outsider looking in...

Jayce might say the final fight is about ‘humanity itself’, but I see it for what it is - a veil hiding the fact that writing Zaun vs Piltover civil war would mean admitting that Zaunites have the right to fight the abjectification. And there’s no way we can deny the real world implications of that.

THE SPECTACLE OF OTHERING

The very first thing that specifically sparked my idea to write this extensive analysis was this frame:

The marionette is perfect in form, white and gold (like Mel’s og outfit), slim and fancy, perfect by Piltover standards, but still has the Zaunite touch of art nouveau aesthetic. It’s made from flesh of a Zaunite and the metal that came from the industrial waste in the pits of Zaun.

The marionette is displayed by Jayce and evokes a reaction of fear in the people gathered. It’s lying on the table, looking graceful but uncanny. Everyone in the room is scared because it’s inhuman and dangerous. Even when Viktor inhabited what he thought was an embodiment of perfection, in the end the Pilties still rejected him. Because he’s from Zaun, he’s a creature, Zaunites are not human in their eyes - so is Viktor no matter how he changes. He's dead already, even for Jayce.

It scares me how unsettling it is when Jayce unveils the marionette - basically Huck's corpse that Viktor used, it doubles the distress I feel when I see it. The body of a Zaunite was used by his fellow citizen whose goal was the betterment of the Undercity, but turned into eugenics because of him internalising the stigmatisation. Both Huck and Viktor were oppressed because of their origins and disability, and in the end they both die.

In S1 Viktor is considered by Jayce as one of ‘the good ones’ - same way Vi was called by Maddie. But Viktor remarks he’s still a Zaunite and isn't different to those Jayce calls dangerous. He reveals Jayce’s prejudice; as much as Jayce loves Viktor he’s still shaped by his environment. Thinking of Viktor as an exception confirms Jayce’s unconscious conviction that Zaunites are Other, they can be dangerous.

Ironic, how at the end in the Council chamber Jayce presents Viktor as the ultimate danger. It’s an odd parallel. In S1 Jayce orders a blockade, locking Zaunites’ access to the bridge, so they get angry (remember the affects stuff?), and then Jayce calls them dangerous... In S2 Jayce indirectly calls Viktor the biggest threat and names the Hexgates ‘the last bastion of salvation’, he then tries to make it inaccessible for Viktor. Viktor should be absolutely fuckin' fumin' babes. But he can't be angry. not anymore.

Jayce talking about the threat Viktor poses in S2 is reestablishing Jayce’s bias from S1 when he ordered the blockade and told Viktor in the face that Zaunites are threats. Gurl, your partner is a Zaunite. One season later Jayce presents the marionette and actively portrays his ex(partner) as the bad guy.

And then Jayce’s character does some real gymnastics in the astral plane when he expresses his love to Viktor hoping to snap him out of Machine Herald mode. If Jayce loved all of Viktor and truly understood him, then why the fuck did the writers made their actions and statements contradicting several times. If they had good writing skills left, they’d write Jayce like at the end of S1 when he took Viktor to the Council, finally let him speak and declare the proposition of Zaun’s independence. Writers could just… not do all that Jayce Judas Era in act 2 in S2. Idk fam, these characters were just devices to push preexisting tropes and cliches forward, the series turned into Avengers instead of more compelling and character driven story it was before. I’m mad again, so let’s move on.

The display of the marionette reminds me again, more literally, of the freak shows where disabled people were a show for able-bodied audiences (I wrote about that more in the 1st post). The doll might look perfect, but we know it's a corpse of a marginalized person addicted to shimmer who acquired a facial deformity before Viktor healed him. The marionette is a stand-in for Viktor, a disabled person who's now being talked about by Jayce as the looming threat to all of society, humanity even, ‘both bottom and top’ (love how Sevika and Scar walked out, I know that's right!). 

The doll on display is like an extension of the spectacle that was Viktor's body in both seasons. He's the character whose nudity is shown the most often in S1 and S2, it’s borderline voyeuristic. His disabled body is on display when he experiments on himself in the lab, we see close-ups of his back brace, we see him crawl on the floor in nothing but underwear and braces. Not to mention the self-injuries he makes by craving runes on his body. In S2 he’s basically naked all the time except for the goddamn blanket. His body is hyper-visible because of things he uses to aid it: the cane, crutch, leg brace, back brace; and because of his body itself: the nudity, skinny frame, pale skin, dark circles under eyes, prominent bones, greasy hair, bloody cuts.

As Rosemary Garland-Thompson wrote in Extraordinary bodies, disability is very often marked hyper-visible for the majorly able-bodied audience and causes a visceral reaction of compassion, pity, awkwardness, fear, uneasiness, sadness. I can’t talk for everybody’s emotional reactions to the scenes I'm referencing, but there’s something to be said about the choices the creators made when framing Viktor’s bare body. Physical disability and self-injuries are so often very misunderstood and make many people anxious, because they’re different from what’s considered ‘normal’ or rational by the normative rules of society. Both Viktor’s disability and self-injuries are markers of his extreme vulnerability as well as desperation and unpredictability of his actions.

For me, an able-bodied person, these scenes feel too intimate and painful to watch without feeling like a voyeur. I even feel weird putting the picture for reference. Not because his body itself makes me uncomfortable. It’s about the visual framing of him that the creators made, and it feels like a spectacle of Viktor’s ‘broken’ body and his moral downfall in S1. It allows us to deeply empathise with him and see him at his lowest, which doesn't have to be a bad thing all together when we understand it as a raw depiction of pain and determination, integral to his character arc and embodiment. At the same time these scenes are like a double-edged sword and can be read as extremely exploitative, like an echo of freak shows.

Ahmed claims that there's no private suffering. That what we experience on our own is always linked to the outside, to the societal rules, cultural meanings and politics that influence our lives, our embodiment. She also writes that it's imperative to respond to the pain of other people, to respond to our pain and act. This idea ties to the Feminist Killjoy role and affects I wrote about. Viktor suffers on his own basically until the very end, only to have Jayce's loving presence in their final moments. Viktor's suffering was a direct effect of politics and socioeconomic situation he lived in. As Ahmed writes, in order to respond to pain, social movements such as feminism must open up safe spaces for the disclosure of pain. We need to make spaces for 'speaking about pain'. This, for Ahmed, is a condition that allows for unification of people in 'different stories of pain that cannot be reduced to a ground, identity or sameness' (The Cultural Politics of Emotion).

This is the reason Viktor needed to meet other Zaunites, other disabled people and speak about his pain. Speak about his disability. Viktor should have been given agency to 'speak in one's voice' (as Garland-Thompson wrote) and 'speak about pain' (as Ahmed wrote). Then his arc wouldn't become a spectacle of Othering, it would be a raw story of emancipation that wouldn't fall easily into the Inspirationally Disabled/Disadvantaged trope.

Viktor’s body is an inseparable part of his character, but it makes me uneasy how the focus on his body is fetishistic at times. And then the doll he controls in S2, while it looks perfect… is still unsettling to see. And it's displayed by Jayce in another form of spectacle... Narratively speaking, Viktor's still an outsider just like when he first stepped foot in Piltover. He’s not dying now, his physical disability is gone, it's not the same as the body that was his lived experience. And it's depressing to watch.

Viktor depersonalized after emerging from the hexgoop (?), he seems to be apathetic and disoriented (‘What am I?’). The body horror part is reminiscent of the freak shows where disability was a pathological state, congruous to monstrosity. We don't get Viktor’s inner thoughts and feelings on his body’s current state and that's stupid. His experience was inextricably connected to his body and how he experienced this embodiment. And he was disconnected from it. Because the writers thought so??? And didn't bother to explore it??? This is an insult to Viktor's character and people who relate to him.

Viktor absolutely had so many thoughts about his embodiment, but it's never verbalized or visually explored deeper. At many points of the story he loses parts of his body, his body is in a constant state of change. It's so interesting and important to ask: what does Viktor think and feel when experiencing himself, his body/in this body? It's a question of what makes us ‘us’ - body? mind? soul? everything at once? something else? There are multiple metaphysical answers to that. Arcane tried to be meta with Viktor's Messiah arc but it falls flat in the end. He basically became transhuman three times! (after getting out the goop; being in the astral plane where he exists beyond flesh and its ‘limitations’; and at the end when he became the alien Machine Herald) And he doesn't speak about the experience! His body is hyper-visible but he doesn't speak about it (apart from 'I can feel my body eroding' in S1) at any stage of the drastic changes he goes through. We get to watch him go through them but he doesn't speak in his voice, doesn't speak about the pain. That's crazy. (I'm not getting into the transhumanism part of his LOL Lore and what it could mean, but I firmly believe it still should have been a part of Arcane Viktor's story, we prolly would need one more season to explore everything I suggest, sigh)

What Jayce shows when displaying the marionette is a sacrifice on an altar - Viktor’s character and all of Zaun were sacrificed by the narrative and creators for the sake of a generic plot where the good guys (actual oppressors) have to fight the big bad (actually oppressed) who’s going to end all of humanity. This ignores the reason Viktor even does what he does - the root of it all is Piltover's necropolitics and the establishment that doesn't allow social change.

It's even exemplified in Vi and Cait staying together - Cait loses an eye but so what, she still gets rewarded by the narrative. She isn’t held accountable for her actions and gets a girlfriend whose trauma isn’t explored by the writers at all. The implications of Vi’s relationship with a former cop and fascist aren’t addressed, and it’s considered romantic by the creators and many fans. Sorry, but I can’t ship CaitVi the way I used to. My lesbian heart is broken, but I can’t in good faith consider this ship as anything but romanticization of abuse and a complete lack of class consciousness on creators' part. I wanted Cait and Vi together, happy. But not the way it turned out in the final version. Fanfiction writers you're my only hope for fixing this.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In the end the person who gets to tell the story is Cait, the Piltie and an enforcer turned dictator, who embodied the oppressive practices and the status quo which thrived from inequality and militarism of the police. The winners tell the story, people like Jinx, Silco and Viktor are painted as villains when they actually had reasons to rage against the Piltover's machine of bigotry and hatred fueled by greed of the privileged. 

Viktor's name was removed from the Hexgates’ blueprints, he was forgotten as he feared he would be, he wasn’t grieved by anyone. Necropolitics at its finest. And that makes me fucking sad and pissed off. He deserved so much more. Yes, Arcane is a tragedy and all, but Viktor's arc in S2 is astoundingly OOC and destroys the core themes his story established in S1. And the ending he gets, even though he’s with Jayce, gives a very off-putting message. Sorry JayVik nation, I’m one of you, but the writing is as poetic as it is problematic.

This story is so centrist, pro-establishment actually, and not as subversive as it promised to be. It treats rebellion as an aesthetic and sacrifices characters from the oppressed group in order to uphold the power of the oppressors. Because to show that political change is possible they’d have to acknowledge what's wrong with the system, how it involves real people, how affects such as anger can be justified as political motivation, how abjectification, Othering and violence destroy people and their entire worlds.

This destruction, the senseless waste and conflict Viktor speaks of, that's what happened to Powder/Jinx and Vi in the 1st act of S1. We saw what happened on the bridge, with Vander and Silco's anger that went further and further. The main story started with a group of kids robbing a wealthy apartment because they needed things, they needed money, they were Zaunites taking from Piltover because these kids were growing up 'knowing they're less than them'...

I needed Viktor's and Vi's traumas to be talked about by them, in their own voices. They needed to speak about their pain. Too bad if CaitVi and JayVik wouldn’t work as ships then. That would be the real thing. A tragedy. They'd split because the political climate and differences in values was impossible for them to reconcile. Either that, or the Piltover cast had to admit their wrongs and actively help their loved ones in Zaun’s rebellion. And it should have happened not only because Jayce loves Viktor and Cait loves Vi, but because Jayce and Caitlyn see the inherent value in Zaun’s freedom. Cait saw Ekko’s community in S1 and still became a fascist. Jayce heard Viktor’s stance on weaponization of their work and saw the real consequence of Piltover’s oppression while witnessing Viktor slowly dying, being so destroyed by everything he even considered suicide. And Jayce still built weapons. And this is the real tragedy - Cait and Jayce could have been actual allies. But we don't live in the timeline where such a story was told.

We got a promising S1 with a really compelling premise (Silco they would never make me hate you) and then it got fucked up. The threat isn't the government, it's the stigmatized group acting out because they’re pushing back against the oppressors. The person whose actions are deemed evil is a Zaunite aided by the foreign warmonger. It shifts our focus to outside forces (Ambessa) influencing Piltover and scapegoats Viktor as the ultimate danger. The Other, not a radical one. The reason he became the Herald in Arcane was his internalized bigotry perpetuated by the government and society of Piltover. It wasn't Viktor becoming a Zaunite Killjoy because he wanted to. But that would be the right thing for him to do, to reject the people, places and symbolic structures that rejected him. To embrace the status of Other and re-invent its meaning for himself without changing himself fundamentally. I’m so mad y’all, if you couldn’t tell by now. Linke i'm living in your walls

If you start a story about oppression then commit to it, cowards. But that was never the intention of the writers, centrist bs shows and it’s not a good look.

They character assassinated basically everyone because the writers wanted a cliche ending. It was enjoyable but not compelling. It was visually stunning, animation, as they say, fucks severely, voice actors did an amazing job, the emotional layer was quite touching (altho emotional moments didn't feel earned), the music really slaps (Renegadeeeeee, Stromaeeeeee), Viktor’s looks were so tea they killed him 3 times. But in terms of writing? It’s a disappointment. In terms of storytelling and cultural meanings? I think you got my idea, nothing could stop me from overintellectualizing this show.

That being said, I love Viktor even though I've got a lot of critical thoughts on the final version of his arc and the message the creators give on disability rep which is... not coherent. Not good sometimes. But for sure Viktor is complex and very important as a disabled character in popular media. And I will love him until the day I die and then some.

Why did I write this? Idk. Perhaps because I can't shake off the feeling that Arcane writers touched so many important philosophical and social/cultural concepts but didn't do the research or commit to the premise and lost an important message. I wanted to analyse it because as Garland-Thompson said representation shapes identity and lives of real people. I’m happy to see how many people love Viktor and feel represented. I'm glad to see people enjoy him while being critical. His story is complex, there’s many points to be made, my take is only one of many, so… the answer would be that we need more disability representation that involves actual disabled people’s voices in the creative process. It’s their experiences and opinions that matter.

TL;DR Viktor’s arc in S2 is a trainwreck, I mourn what could have been. He’s one of the characters ever tho, important for creating nuanced disability representation. There’s a ton of themes needed to be further explored. Implementing culture studies and philosophy into Arcane took me over a week to research through my notebooks from Uni. The writers of S2 had almost no idea what they wanted to say about anything other than maybe: 'riots are cool, but actually overthrowing the government is a bit much'. Is Viktor still an icon, a legend, a moment? Come on now.

This is a draft of my PhD and THAT’s all. Anyway,

Viktor you'll always be famous to me

[transmutationisms]

i understand no mental illnesses have been tied to any gene, but my understanding was that there is some evidence on heritability in some cases i.e. for ADHD “many genetic…risks…have a small effect” (doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.01.022); how are we to understand such findings through a antipsych lens?

okay I just want to be clear because I think a lot of you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what people mean when we self id as 'antipsych.' it's not that 'antipsych' is some sort of pie-in-the-sky theory that I pre-committed to and now have to reconcile with the medical literature—it's more like, I grew up as a very I Fucking Love Science Dot Com child, got interested in psychology among other things, started reading both popular and medical literature about it, started to notice that the things I was reading about psychology and mental diseases didn't really line up with the things I and people I knew experienced and heard when actually interacting with doctors and psychologists, and finally and only around about the age of 19 did I become aware that 'antipsych' is in fact a legitimate position that other people had come up with before me, and at that point I started to read things that you might be referring to here as being written 'through an antipsych lens.'

so, when I hear a question like this, ie one that presumes there is some contradiction between anti-psychiatric political commitments and the existing psychiatric literature, it suggests to me that you haven't really read the literature in question—where by 'read' I mean you need to actually look at the paper's methodology, and look at the process of knowledge-making that yields a sentence like "ADHD has genetic etiology." that's an empirical claim. evaluating whether it's true necessarily involves asking what evidence the person making the claim is offering. there are specific skills and strategies for doing this when you are a layperson dealing with specialised scientific literature; there is also a fundamental critical attitude you should adopt with regards to literally any claim, argument, discourse, article, etc.

it is always a good thing to recognise when you're in over your head and need help or further reading to understand a statistical method, piece of jargon, etc. but you do kind of have to, like, approach the issue with a fundamental attitude that just because someone said something in a scientific journal doesn't make it beyond reproach! read the claims, read the evidence, ask yourself if it makes sense. this isn't some rhetorical game of "I'm going to prove antipsych right"—the 'antipsych' is the loose umbrella term you are called when you actually read the psychiatric literature and critique the discipline's fundamental epistemological failures and disciplinary raison d'être. the horse draws the cart!

wrt 'genetic causes of psychiatric diseases' you also need to understand that many of you are tilting at windmills. I've never said genes don't have an effect on our affective and emotional lives. plainly, they do. this is not the same as "there is a distinct specific Pathology expressed in these genes; they are diseased and/or defective and this is why you feel miserable / cannot function / cannot go to work." like, we see these are two different statements, yes? if all we mean by ADHD is "a list of general behavioural dispositions" then yeah, of course those have genetic influences in addition to environmental ones. everything about us does. that does not mean that ADHD, the distinct and discrete clinical entity that psychiatrists presume exists (on the grounds of their patients having xyz problems), is indeed a 'genetic condition' or instantiates as a genetic mutation / malformation / differential expression / etc. this paragraph is foreshadowing.

having looked at the genetics section of this particular study for about 20 minutes (open-access here if you don't feel like searching by DOI), here are some things that immediately caught my attention:

this is just a meta-analysis of ADHD research. its claims are only as good as the underlying studies. a meta-analysis of shitty studies that had bad methodology will not 'even out' their respective badness, it will just produce a shitty meta-analysis that is intrinsically hampered by the bad underlying methodology. I've discussed this here.

the very first assertion under the genetics section cites three twin studies; I followed those links. first of all, these are written for other scientists, so they don't make a particularly clear (to lay people) distinction between the scientific notion of 'heritability' and what this term is typically interpreted to mean in popular discourses. so, to be clear, 'heritability' is an estimate of how much a given trait is caused by genetic factors at a population level. it does not tell you anything about how much an individual's expression of that trait is genetically caused, nor does heritability necessarily indicate the genetic cause is direct or dependent on one (or even a small number of) genes.

indeed, all three of these studies, and the overarching meta-analysis, assert that this genetic etiology is due to a very large number of very small genetic influences. this is not inherently scientifically unsound, but it does raise my eyebrows. how would we distinguish between a distinct pathology that is caused by a huge tangle of very low-impact genes, vs a whole bunch of behaviours that are socially stigmatised and grouped together on political grounds, and that also have some relationship to genetics, as does literally every physiological fact of human existence?

these cite twin studies, meaning basically they try to use comparisons between genetically identical twins and various other familial relationships to determine how much of a given characteristic is genetically caused. again, though, this is essentially boiling down to the observation that closely genetically related people have similar personality traits; also, twin studies in general have serious methodological problems with profound implications for the invocation of genetics in psychiatry.

in fact, the meta-analysis here also claims that ADHD can sometimes be due to "rare single gene defects" or chromosomal abnormalities. the study cited on the gene claim, for example, is also cited in the claim above, so I've already looked at it. the methodology here is to look at prevalence of ADHD among populations with certain known genetic conditions—that's it. now can we think of any other reasons why people diagnosed with one thing might also be diagnosed with another? for example, they're already in contact with the medical system. they have enough financial resources to seek diagnoses. symptoms of chronic pain & illness often manifest with attention disturbances. etc.

even if that were better founded, the claim they're making themselves here is that ADHD in fact has numerous genetic causes, all manifesting as the same behaviours and psychological disturbances. it's almost like those manifestations are not a single distinct pathology, but a group of 'signs' the clinician lumps together into a single diagnostic box regardless of whence they arise. hold that thought.

incidentally, that study also notes that initial heritability estimates for ADHD were much lower than what's cited now, and blames this on inaccurate self-assessment results, claiming the more recent studies using parent and teacher assessments of ADHD children are more accurate. of course, the actual diagnostic measure never became less 'subjective.' it's just that we trust it more if it's a parent reporting that their kids are all super ADHD than if it's the kid actually reporting their own experiences. because there certainly aren't any historical reasons why parents have felt the need to cling to the notion of a neurobiological, genetically determined distinct ADHD pathology!

similarly, numerous of these linked studies say that 'sub-threshold ADHD' (read: the behaviours considered to be ADHD symptoms, but at lower severity than clinicians have considered diagnosable) show the same genetic causal links—heritability. now that's also curious, no? almost like ADHD is not a discrete distinct genetically caused pathology, but a bunch of traits and behaviours that, like literally every human characteristic, have some genetic as well as environmental influence, and that are artificially grouped together under psychiatric taxa and presumed to be due to an underlying physical (genetic) defect.

indeed, what I'm laying out here is just the basic circularity that underlies all psychiatric diagnosis: we know you are X because you do Y, which you do because you are X, which we know because you showed up to the clinic and told us you do Y. I unpacked this logic in more detail here.

finally, and this bears pulling out from the list because it's important, multiple of these studies are claiming that they have identified general genetic risk factors for a broad variety of psychopathologies (example here). in other words, the claim is not even really that ADHD has specific genetic causes, but that some as-yet-unspecified genetic factor/s are generally responsible for what are diagnosed as mental diseases. how do we know that unspecified higher-order genetic factor exists? well, we don't. but we assume it's there. the same way we did for the 'general intelligence factor,' g, which by the way is entirely racist nonsense.

you may notice that basically all I've said here amounts to accusing psychiatry of failing to meet basic standards of empirical proof generally considered to be load-bearing elements of the 'scientific method.' this is not even really an 'antipsych' argument—it's, at best, a critique of psychiatry as it currently exists, using (in a locally uncritical way!) established standards of scientific discourse. I'm pointing this out both because it's an extremely valuable habit to get into yourself, and because I once again would love it if more people understood that 'antipsych' isn't really a prior theoretical commitment most of us just stumble into. it's a position we actively have to seek out, and often, what prompts us to begin doing that is precisely the experience of noticing problems like the above, and the corresponding utter failure of the psychiatric discipline to rectify such problems without nullifying its own epistemological foundations.