#potentially non-relevant information

[hannahssimblr]

I open the envelope on the stairs. The same stairs I spent six years rushing up and down, going from class to class, that was always bustling with students, bumping shoulders, swinging school bags, yet here I am, on an empty staircase in the building I thought I’d never be inside again. All the people I thought I’d never have to see again are here too, milling in and out of the foyer, collecting envelopes, telling each other about their summer. Somehow I’d forgotten I would have to do this. 

I keep to myself, wishing to minimise any conversation. Get in, get out, that’s the plan. I slip my thumbnail under the lip of the envelope and pull my results out. 

Mathematics A1 English A1 Art A1 Biology B3 Geography B1 German A2

Oh, Jesus Christ. There’s a roaring in my ears. I shove my grades back into the envelope before anyone can see them, then add up the score in my head.

Five-fifty. Is that possible? I peek inside to check again. 

Yes. Five-fifty. 

I blow out a lungful of air. How can this be? I’m famously a fucking idiot. This is a disruption to my worldview. I hardly even studied towards the end of the year, so how in the-

“Jude?” Someone steps into my space, and I have to suppress a groan as Sam from the yearbook committee stands over me, looking completely misplaced without his uniform on. It’s like the freakish experience of seeing your teacher in the supermarket. Sam, without his starched uniform shirt and perfectly knotted tie, is hardly Sam at all. Perhaps he thinks the same of me without my tie, which was always hanging crooked with a blue ink stain on it that wouldn’t come off after a hundred washes.  

The smug look, however, is Sam all over. “Looking a bit glum. Are you disappointed in your results, or something?”

I pause. “No?”

“Oh, grand. Suppose you don’t need the marks anyway, do you? You’re off to art college in Berlin, so I heard.”

“You heard correctly.”

“Surprised to see you here at all, I have to say. I thought you might have been gone already, off to the continent and all that, instead of coming into school.”

“No, my flight’s Wednesday.”

“Ah. So soon.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.” He stands expectantly, hovering, and so, with a sigh, I ask him what he is frothing to be asked. “What points did you get, Sam?”

“Five forty,” he gloats. “I’ll be off to Trinity now, all going well with the offers and all that. ‘Twas an expected result, but I’m still thrilled with myself. Just goes to show that hard work and proper study really pay off.”

“Yeah. Well done. Lucky that points don’t count for me, then, hm?”

“Well, it’s only art school. It’s not like you need to be smart.”

“Yep, that’s true.”

Sam’s head swivels like a submarine periscope. “Oh, look who’s just come in.” His mouth stretches into an unsettling grin. “Sure, it’s the lovely Michelle Tengu. You should say hi to her.”

“Right, yeah.” I say, though my fight or flight has activated and my palms prickle with sweat.

Michelle crosses the linoleum floor in the chunky black boots she’s had since fifteen. She accepts her envelope from the principal and stands to the side where she tears it open and her eyes scan the page. It’s impossible to tell how she feels.

She looks the same, of course she does. Maybe her hair is longer, maybe her makeup is different, her skin a little browner, and I have this feeling as I see her, that I am looking at a picture of a person I used to know, someone whose name I remembered, but whose face I had long forgotten. This girl I loved, or thought I did. I don’t really know that person anymore, at least not how I used to. 

She sees me and gives a hesitant wave. 

I wave back. 

“You’re still here,” she approaches me with the caution one would with a spooked cat, emotions flashing over her face, like she can’t decide how to feel. Neither can I. She’s still blocked in my phone, from that fateful night in June, but now, on the cusp of September, those heavy feelings I had seem so melodramatic. I am just Jude, she is just Michelle, and somewhere along the way, without me even paying heed to it, a storm has passed. 

“Yeah, I’m still here.”

“I expected you to sneak off to Berlin under the cloak of night.”

“That’s the plan, honestly. I just needed my results first.”

“I see. Are you happy with them?”

“Yeah. Are you?”

“I got enough for NCAD.”

“Oh, Michelle, that’s amazing. I’m so happy for you.” An odd moment follows, where I am not sure whether I should hug her. I twitch toward her, then second guess myself, and then I just freeze there, halfway lifted from the step. I slump back down onto it. 

“It, um… Well. It sounds like you had a pleasant summer, and all that.” She says. “Jen was telling me all about it.”

“Was she? Yeah, it was fine. Did she really say it was pleasant?”

“She mentioned that you two had a bit of a falling out, to be honest.”

“Ah, yeah, we did.”

She gives me this awkward smile, and it’s instantly obvious that she knows. Jen, being Jen, has told her the entire story. She’s revealed every aspect of my summer - the festival, the conflicts, and its conclusion. She knows about Evie too. It’s in her eyes. It’s that hint of betrayal she knows she’s not supposed to feel anymore. In them lies the sting of an ex moving on and leaving her behind.   

“I’m, um…” I smooth the front of my hair. “I think things will be alright with Jen, probably. I just need time, you know?”

“Yeah. I get it.” She adds delicately, “though, like, you are leaving in about five days.”

“That’s true.”

“And you were really planning to just vanish?”

“Well, yes. I just don’t know how else to do it.”

“Usually people have a party or something.”

“No, come on,” I scoff. “I’m not doing all of that. It’s so much work.”

“Hm. I just think you’ll regret not saying goodbye.”

I can’t decide whether she’s right, and can’t think of what to argue in my defence, so I say nothing. A sympathetic smile crosses her face. It’s strange. She never looked at me like that while we were together.

“I can help,” she says. “It can be low-key, just a few people. I’ll send out a text and see who wants to come, yeah? Whoever wants to say goodbye?”

“Including Jen?”

“I’ll need to invite Jen.” she shrugs, “it might be a good chance to talk. To get it all ironed out.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, I do. I think it’s best not to leave things unfinished.”

“Hm. That’s very philosophical of you.”

“Are you shocked?”

“Kind of.”

She huffs out a laugh. “Well I’ve been seeing someone.”

“A boy?”

“A therapist. I realised after we broke up that I had some things to work through. I had some… big feelings.”

“That’s great, Shell.”

I could swear that her eyes get a little misty as she inhales, as though to say something before deciding against it. She straightens her shoulders and smiles. “I’m happy you’re happy.” She says brightly. “With the Leaving Cert results, obviously.”

“I’m happy you’re happy, too.”

She glances toward the door. “Look, I better go, but I’ll text you about the going away party, right?”

“Yeah, I better unblock you.” It slips out of me before I can stop it, but to my immense relief, she laughs. “Good idea. See you Jude.”

“Bye, Shell. Thanks.”

“For what?”

“I dunno. For this.”

She just smiles. 

Beginning // Prev // Next

[clonerightsagenda]

Thank you for applying for a library card!

We are a large metropolitan library with twelve branches here in the city and a consortial agreement with ninety-seven different timelines (and counting). Your card is your ticket to our physical and digital collections, where we have something for everyone.

You’ve indicated that you are licensed for time travel and regularly travel in time or between timelines for work purposes, so you are eligible for our trans-timeline borrower’s card. Please read this document carefully to ensure you’re using your new card to its fullest potential and in compliance with library policy.

Our services:

The library has a floating collection, meaning items remain at the branch where they were returned rather than being sent back to the lending branch. However, we do return inter-timeline loans to their home universe to minimize temporal strain. If you’re browsing the shelves and see a book phasing in and out of existence, alert an employee. It’s probably misshelved.  

Our new online system allows you to keep the same login information in all timelines. No more keeping track of dozens of passwords! If you previously created multiple logins tied to one card, visit the circulation desk, and we’ll merge your accounts for you. No, this will not make you responsible for alternate selves’ outstanding fines, and any version of yourself telling you that is lying to you.

You asked, and we listened. Our new online catalog displays reviews from patrons from all relevant timelines on items exceeding a 90% similarity score. We request that patrons keep debates over the superiority of their timeline’s version to venues other than our catalog.

Although our staff members are not medical professionals, they have been trained to recognize signs of temporal instability. If you are experiencing characteristic symptoms (faintness, disorientation, physical and/or mental age changes, etc.), a staff member can administer grounding agents until emergency services arrive.

The library has a robust inter-timeline loan system. If you’re looking for a book or article not published in this timeline, fill out our online form or ask at the circulation desk. The average wait time for an ITL request is five business days. That’s shortened to three if you’re requesting an item stored at the James Patterson Interdimensional Warehouse. (Note: This estimate may change as the warehouse continues to expand under its own power, or if our courier gets lost there.)

Our policies:

We do not accept returns before the publication date (month and year). Cataloging books paradoxically created through stable time loops gets too complicated. You can check a book’s month of publication in a review journal like Booklist, which we make available online and in our non-circulating magazine collection.

We’ve recently gone fine-free in this timeline, meaning we no longer charge fees for overdue books. This policy varies between consortium timelines depending on whether certain people on the board of directors have retired yet.

If a book is damaged beyond repair, lost in a Time Hole, or overwritten out of existence by timeline changes, you will be responsible for the replacement cost or a flat fee of $30, whichever is lower. We do not recommend attempting to rewrite time to avoid losing or damaging the book, as we would prefer to purchase a new copy rather than tear a hole in the fabric of reality.

Patrons may use our computers for two hours. You can extend this time if there are no other patrons waiting. Show respect to other library users and do not abuse time travel to circumvent the policy when there is high demand. We will notice if there are two of you at our computing stations. Yes, even if one of you is wearing a funny hat.

The library values your privacy. We will not disclose account information or the content of reference transactions to anyone, including alternate versions of the account holder. The library also does not keep a record of the materials you check out. However, some of our databases do track user data. If you need to conceal your presence in this timeline to avoid paradoxes, the Time Cops, or your ex, we keep a collection of electronic resource licenses at the reference desk so you can judge which products to avoid.

Holder vs. Holder found that copyright protections extend across timelines and prior to publication, and copyright is exclusive to the iteration who created the work. Patrons attempting to copy library materials and publish them under their own name will have their cards revoked, even if they created the material in another timeline. This policy was adopted after consultation with our legal team. Trans-timeline copyright enforcement is very aggressive.

The library respects the personhood and autonomy of patrons no matter their timeline of origin. However, this respect is not always universal. If you need to know what the laws are for time travelers/alternate selves/dimension-hoppers/“timeclones”/etc. in this dimension (or the terminology used to refer to them), stop by the reference desk.

Violence is against library policy. If you are about to battle your alternate self from another timeline because you ran into each other in the cookbook section, take it to the parking lot.

In conclusion:

Libraries are committed to free access to information, and with the resources of dozens of timelines available to us, our mission has only gotten bigger. In fact, we’re hiring! If you’re looking for somewhere new to apply your time travel certification, we’re looking for team members in our inter-timeline loan department. Entry-level courier positions do not require an MLIS. Familiarity with James Patterson is a plus.

We can’t wait to see you in our library. (Maybe we already have.)  

[tossawary]

So, Force-users in "Star Wars" appear to have their telepathy and empathy powers mostly only when it's convenient for the plot. (And obviously different characters naturally have different natural talents and different trained skills.) The "Jedi Apprentice" series that I am slowly trying to read introduces more concrete telepathic elements than the vagueness of the films, such as both intentional and UNINTENTIONAL mental bonds between characters.

And it keeps making me thinking about the accidental Force bonds that must often exist between young Force-sensitives and their non-sensitive parents. (Note: This post is mainly about Anakin Skywalker and Xanatos witnessing the violent deaths of their respective parents.)

I used to do a lot of casual reading on toxic and abusive relationships, because I stumbled on a quote from some book and thought that it was just fascinating from a character perspective (I did also use that information for reflection on other stuff, but that's not relevant here). Children usually become deeply attached and attuned to their guardians, even if those guardians are intentionally cruel, or even if those guardians have toxic behaviors because they are stressed and a little self-absorbed or whatever. Children spend the early years of their life with no way out and just trying to survive by keeping their parent (who provides them with that survival) happy. People in abusive relationships are often made to feel responsible for the reactions of their abuser. They often have panicked instincts that demand fight or flight or freeze or fawn reactions to someone getting upset with them.

(I am summing up a LOT of stuff, I know! Unhealthy relationships are very complicated and varied! People all react differently. I'm trying to quickly establish a few points to make a later point here.)

Even adult children trying to establish boundaries with their toxic parents often meet a great deal of resistance, and are sometimes accused of being disloyal and ungrateful and disrespectful and sometimes even abusive themselves, just for doing things like asking their parents not to show up without calling first, because their emotionally immature parents regard any sort of disagreement or conflict as harmful to them and their authority. A lot of adult children talk about the mental struggle that comes with learning how to stand up for themselves against their parents, whether that parent has been intentionally or unintentionally abusive.

Which has all made me think about how much worse any relationship could get if one side of it has telepathy and empathy. Especially if that side of it is a child who doesn't know it! And the parent probably doesn't know about this either!

The Jedi Order is already kind of set up so that a cruel or neglectful Master could potentially do a lot of damage (a few months, at least) to a Padawan before hopefully being caught. Being able to literally feel your abusive Master's intentionally projected / focused disappointment or anger sounds nightmarish for a child. Most Jedi who are decent people shield themselves and do not project negative emotions at vulnerable / impressionable children, but we know from canon that there are plenty of Jedi who fail at being decent people.

(And oh, man, everything about Sith training sounds SO BAD. The mental and emotional damage that can intentionally be done by a Force-user projecting bad vibes is truly off the charts.)

Non-Force-sensitive guardians probably won't have any kind of mental shielding. Even if the guardian is outwardly the nicest parent in the world, it has to be hard that your child is (potentially) apparently constantly unhappy, and you won't know that it's because they are telepathically sensitive to all of your internal tiredness and anger and sadness. There would be no emotional privacy. And if the life situation is bad for the family, then that child is potentially going to grow up being hyperaware of the mental and emotional states of everyone around them, knowingly or unknowingly using the Force, because being able to read the room like that has been imperative to their survival.

Shmi Skywalker seems to be a remarkably even-keeled person for her circumstances. I headcanon her as being (perhaps unconsciously) Force-sensitive herself and having taught herself some degree of mental and emotional shielding due to her hard life. If someone as powerful as Anakin had been raised by someone who was constantly stressed and willing to scream about it, lash out at their child about it, then he could have been even more of a mess. He seems remarkably well-loved compared to what could have happened.

I do think that Anakin and Shmi must have had some accidental mental and emotional bond with each other. If Anakin is as gifted in the Force as everyone says he is, he probably would have naturally reached out to the minds around him, because that's what baseline senses / existence are to him. (It's fun to think about Anakin's existence being wholly unique and WEIRD, and how this causes him to clash with everyone else. It's possible that one else experiences the universe quite like he does.)

Being separated from a parent will cause anxiety in ANY child, but it's interesting to think about how things might have been heightened for Anakin, if Shmi's mind has been an unconscious cornerstone / foundation of his mental reality and his emotional keel since his birth. Due to telepathy / empathy, Anakin may have been unconsciously using Shmi as his mental and emotional ground to stand on for as long as he can remember. Losing his mother, even by separation, when he's been halfway into her head all his life, might genuinely feel like losing a piece of his mind to Anakin. He doesn't initially have the teachings to deal with this kind of catastrophe to his baseline operating system.

He DOES get teaching for these things over the course of the next ten years. (I don't think that he was too old to be trained (Luke was famously 19 in the original "Star Wars") but I do think Anakin could have probably been trained better. Anyway, if he hadn't been trained, Sidious probably would have scooped him up immediately.) But then his mother dies in a very violent and painful way when he's RIGHT THERE, when his control probably already isn't very good due to the situation, and it cannot feel good to be inside the mind of a loved one when they're dying, especially if their own mental and emotional shielding is limited.

Like, yeah, I can see why someone who has telepathy and empathy might have some kind of mental break there. Anakin is permanently losing someone who has potentially been a mental and emotional cornerstone all his life, literally. I don't think it makes his thorough massacre of the Tusken Raiders, down to the last child, in any way excusable, that kind of vengeful, murderous collective punishment is horrifying, but I understand why it might happen from a character perspective.

If were arguing that Anakin is innately more telepathic than most people, he should be able to feel the people he's attacking as well. And it's interesting to think about how someone incredibly naturally empathetic might choose to adapt an apathetic perspective to the suffering of anyone he doesn't personally care about. Yeah, of course he might try to close himself off as much as possible. The universe is already constantly screaming at him with its death and pain. If super-telepath Darth Vader cuts someone down with his own hands, then at least they're quiet now.

Anyway, this post was also about Force-sensitive children who have shitty parents who aren't in any way Force-sensitive. Which, funnily enough, brings us to Qui-Gon Jinn's other potential Chosen One: Xanatos. Xanatos even witnessed his parent's violent death, like Anakin, because Qui-Gon semi-accidentally killed the corrupt Governor Crion for trying to start a civil war and threatening Padawan Orykan.

Like, I just finished reading "Star Wars: Jedi: The Dark Side", a 5-part comic that depicts how Qui-Gon and Xanatos broke up as a Master-Padawan pair. (I wanted context for the "Jedi Apprentice" series.) They're sent there to investigate a murder and are cooperating / protecting Governor Crion, before it is ultimately revealed that Crion has been intentionally stoking the conflict and local xenophobia for his own benefit. Xanatos spends almost the entire time telling Qui-Gon explicitly that he wants to go back to Coruscant, he doesn't want to be here; all but outright saying that he's emotionally conflicted and that there's a conflict of interest here.

It's not made explicit that Crion was abusive before, but he does seem to be a little toxic, and Xanatos clearly has a very rocky relationship with this man who is trying to start a fucking war. It is very clear at the end of the story that Xanatos resents being tested like this, having watched both of his family members die violently.

And I couldn't help but relate this to Anakin: that uneven, childhood-deep Force bond with a parent (which I am presuming exists, there's no specific canonical proof of this for either Anakin or Xanatos that I have yet read) snapping back on a telepath presumably isn't great for a person's mental state. Even though he clearly wasn't too close to his sister, watching Nason die first couldn't have helped either. Merely standing in a room getting blasted with whatever bad emotions Crion is pumping out was probably bad for Xanatos. Xanatos may be vulnerable to psychic damage from this shitty guy specifically.

I get that Jedi are supposed to rise above their attachments and fears, Yoda is clear in that he thinks putting Xanatos on this mission to his chaotic homeworld is necessary to "prove" his status as a Jedi. And I get that maybe someone even presumed Xanatos's personal connections might help the bad situation, more than it might be a flagrant "conflict of interest" in any way. But MAN, does it fucking suck that the Jedi (Yoda) are kind of like, "No, you can't do literally anything else to help people in the galaxy. You have to go face your past right now or else you can't be a good Jedi. We ARE going to judge you if you bow out and cry 'personal conflict'."

To be somewhat fair to the Jedi, Xanatos WILL need to be objective to be a good Jedi Knight and they don't KNOW that Crion is a warmonger, but Xanatos is clearly not ready to see him again, and apparently only goes on the mission because he's afraid that Padawan Orykan will replace him as Qui-Gon's student. He repeatedly accuses Qui-Gon of trying to leave him on Telos IV with his father, which is obviously a fear that's weighing heavy on his mind. Usually when a kid doesn't want to go "home" that badly, it's... indicative of something unpleasant in their home life?

At the end of the comic, Qui-Gon is like, "Oh, this situation is BAD. I was wrong to bring Xanatos here. We need to get out." But Crion is killed, Xanatos apparently has a mental break, scars his own face, and then disappears into the riots? And Qui-Gon apparently assumes that Xanatos has been killed? The execution is more than a little confusing. But yeah, Jedi need to rise above their personal shit, of course, but maybe prematurely exposing this supposedly telepathic / empathetic kid to what's potentially a bunch of deep-seated triggers to "test" him was a bad idea. (And personally I think that the comic is saying that it was a bad idea. Qui-Gon clearly regrets it afterwards.)

As far as I can tell, Xanatos's main crimes here were 1) being a huge snobby brat, partially because he has glaringly obvious rejection / jealousy issues, 2) like everyone else, not really knowing what his father was up to until after things had gone to shit, and 3) having a mental breakdown and attacking both Orykan and Qui-Gon, and ultimately failing to kill or injure them.

Xanatos is flawed, obviously, but he looks pretty young thoroughout these comics. Like, he looks like a teenager? Sixteen-ish? (Every shitty thing that Xanatos does afterwards in regards to Offworld Mining and trying to kill Obi-Wan will be on him, of course!) And I keep thinking about what a child being telepathic / empathetic does to their relationship with a Force-null parent... Especially when that parent is a piece of shit. Especially when watching them die violently. Involuntary magic has really got to suck sometimes...

[horreurscopes]

So, I could be out-of-bounds here since I think you meant it as dark humor, but what did you mean in the tags of that 'israel-hamas war' post? I suspect you(and op) are criticizing that framing because Israel is obviously demolishing much more than 'Hamas'(and probably doing a terrible job of actually targeting terrorists- they seem content to reduce Gaza to rubble even if the brass of Hamas escapes). I'm guessing that by saying "joining the Israel-Hamas war on the side of Hamas" you mean, if they're going to conflate Palestinians with Hamas unilaterally, then you're saying, whatever the media wants to call Palestinian civilians- you still support them. I am asking anyways though bc, given reports of increasing antisemitic activity in the US and Europe, I am worried about the potential for blurring lines between the cause of Palestinian civilians and the alt-right individuals who are likely masking their antisemitism in the context of being anti-Zionist. Although Israel's government has been the source of Palestinian loss for decades, (it seems to me that) even joking about supporting terrorism is enough to reinforce the persuasion that Israeli/Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs must be mutually-exclusive peoples. I don't think it's fully rational per se(tho I'm not claiming to have all the relevant information myself, and I'm white US American goyim so like- grain of salt-), but I think that existential fear is the incredible hurdle facing Zionist Jews. (Idc too much about the opinions of non-Jewish Zionists bc I don't grant that they are dealing with the same emotional complications at this time, although that doesn't stop me from arguing w my acquaintances abt their callous acceptance of US/Israeli propaganda.) I just think..... isn't it overall harmful to allow anti-semitic rhetoric, even used sarcastically, to enter the genuine humanist cause for Palestinian liberation? Or, have I misunderstood, and you actually are not in opposition to Hamas, or something else I didn't think of?

hi! thank you for approaching the question thoughtfully and with curiosity, i really appreciate it. i was being kind of flippant with that meme, but this is the only ask i'm going to reply to on the matter given that i am neither jewish nor arab, so i'm going to answer in earnest:

hamas is a political resistance movement with an armed wing, much like the black panthers party was, and like the bpp, a large part of the organization is dedicated to social welfare and civic restoration.

they have stated that they are not against judaism, but against the zionist project. they openly support political solutions.

labeling hamas a terrorist group is a propaganda tactic used by the united states and israel to justify the horrors of settler colonization.

hamas is palestine, a part of it, even if palestinians like any other demographic on earth, are not a unified, single-minded people. to declare hamas a separate entity falls prey to the imperialist lie that there is an enemy to fight "fairly" within the people they are displacing and exterminating.

am i rejoicing in the deaths of israelis? of course not. killing civilians and taking civilian hostages is a war crime, whether it is committed by the opresor or the oppressed. the israeli government is not its people, and many jews, within israel as well as in the US, are bravely risking their lives to publicly dissent the criminal acts of the israeli government. all loss of human life is a tragedy.

no one should ever be faced with the choice between annihilation and murderous violence after exhausting all other forms of peaceful protest and being massacred like animals.

but why is it that we consider a resistance group formed within a population with a median age of eighteen a terrorist group, and not the IDF, a US-backed military force with an annual budget of twenty billion dollars?

i am currently reading hamas and civil society in gaza by sara roy to learn more about hamas and the history of israel in palestine. i'll remember to post more excerpts which i am admittedly terrible at.

but all of the information above can be found by reading wikipedia. investigating with duckduckgo searches (not gonna pretend google isn't prioritizing propaganda, to be fair), and reading reliable news coverage like aljazeera and the many journalists who are at risk of, or have lost their lives, reporting on the ground.

i have also appreciated reading posts from @determinate-negation @opencommunion @fairuzfan @ibtisams and @bloglikeanegyptian amongst others

in conclusion:

[gogandmagog]

✨Anne Blythe’s (Anne Shirley-Blythe’s namesake granddaughter) father is not Jem. It’s Shirley. It’s totally Shirley, you guys. It’s gotta be.✨

And like, Ieading right off by saying of course there’s no definitive answer to be had here, since Maud obviously isn’t available to confirm or refute any hypothesises, but I do big persist in suggesting that a very rational case can be presented for Shirley... one that at least outweighs what I now see as the generally baseless widely accepted assumption that Anne is Jem’s daughter. Keep in mind, I’m in no way trying to dog on this. The assumption is ready and easy to make, and I’d accepted fully this theory too, until about a week agooo.

ABOUT A WEEK AGO, I was poring over various Wikipedia entries for the Anne book series, and inevitably also ended up looking through the edit history of those pages. While sorting through the edit history (super extensive and interesting, by the way), the username ‘blefebvre’ popped into the archive, contributing a ton of information to the Anne pages overall, around 2008 and 2009 particularly. And literally, who else could this user be besides THE Benjamin Lefebvre? Brilliant Maud scholar and essayist, inexhaustible editor and publisher of ‘the Blythes are Quoted’? Welllll, one of these edits, a written family tree of Anne and Gilbert’s grandchildren, mentioned Anne Blythe... and pointedly noted that she was either the daughter of Jem or Shirley.

Reading that? Already a huge jump-scare surprise to me. This immediately challenged what I thought I knew about the third generation of Blythes. I sat straight up in bed, brain doing a nosedive, like wait wait wait wait wait… hold on, what? We don’t know for sure? We don’t know for sure? 

Guys. We don’t know for sure. 

Whichhhhh sent me on an immediate hunt to gather up what we do know for sure. The facts we do have. And it wasn’t a huge task, either… there’s really not a lot to collect.

But here it is:

In ‘the Blythes are Quoted’, Anne Blythe is mentioned in only one story, titled “The Road to Yesterday” (not to be confused with the TBAQ abridged predecessor book of the same title 😅).

All we really have of her is her name, and a couple of superficial second-hand anecdotes from a guy named Jerry (who is impersonating a fellow named Dick, but more on this a little later).

Her paternity is unconfirmed, but because her surname is Blythe (not Ford or Meredith), we can logically eliminate the possibility of her belonging to Nan, Di, or Rilla. Walter was, of course, lost in France. This leaves Jem and Shirley. 

Tiny details about Anne.

As a matter of housekeeping, let me try to get the jump on any potential counter-arguments, and clear the air.

The only reason I’ve seen Jem credited with Anne is because…

1. Jem was married.

That’s the entire basis.

And I’ll grant you that. This is more than we got for Shirley. But let’s remember that at the end of ‘Rilla of Ingleside’, we only had a canon engagement between Jem and Faith... it takes getting around to ‘the Blythes are Quoted’ to absolutely conclude that their marriage went through. With the added extra bonus of finding out that they have children.

But even allowing that, ‘the Blythes are Quoted’ as an epilogue isn’t all inclusive. It isn’t a complete picture. It’s half a picture at the very best. Maud, pressured greatly, basically dumped all her disorganised, non-chronological and unedited Anne relevant WIPS + short stories + poems on her publisher's desk two days before she died. This is not a book that Maud put together, as a tailpiece collection. It was an assortment of partial works and in-character conversations that she’d tinkered with over decades. Works she never intended to see being published. They were vague ideas she was forming, little seeds. (It took a lot of effort from Benjamin Lefebvre to put TBAQ together in a readable way that made sense.)

Maud was over Anne. Over Anne by twenty years, at this point. So much so that noticeable character details and world building started slipping in Ingleside and Rilla… for obvious instance, in the lack of continuity around Shirley’s birth year, and the way readers saw almost no closure/representation for Shirley and Di, with varying degrees of near erasure in the original books. 

But this doesn’t mean that Maud didn’t have plans for these two characters... their incomplete or unsatisfying stories certainly weren’t nefariously intended to be that way (there’s no secret meaning to the exclusion); Montgomery was just depleted and had been feeling ruinously dispassionate about the Blythes stories since ‘Anne of the Island’.  

In ‘Reading Rilla’ we see in Maud’s many pages of left-out notes, that an ultimately scrapped journal entry from Rilla indicates that Diana Blythe wrote to their mother of her engagement to a foreign overseas officer. It’s unclear if this officer is the same ‘Austin boy’ that an older Glen woman in ‘the Blythes are Quoted’ privately wonders about (if Di 'really is engaged to him or not'), but this contradictory bit is probably just erroneous gossip from an unreliable narrator.  

Anyway. All of this to say... that just because we don’t have a canon marriage for Shirley, it doesn’t disqualify him from having had a wife and kids in Maud’s post-war Four Winds. TBAQ stories were, to reiterate, half-pictures. Pictures that did/could drop a plot bomb in a single sentence. Looping back to Di, canonly we don’t have a marriage for her either... and yet, we do have two engagements that half-register. One engagement was definitive, reported by Di herself. The other a passing curiosity from someone not close enough to the Blythe family to know.

So... clearly, Maud had active intention, a plan, for Di and her own little happy epilogue. The same can be believed for Shirley. (I’m dying for the day the ‘Rainbow Valley’ and ‘Ingleside’ manuscripts get published, I’m convinced there’s more Shirley be found in the notes.)   Now, let’s dig in to Anne Blythe herself.  

‘The Road to Yesterday’ is a short story about a woman named Susette (a spinster at 28), who is on the brink of an engagement to a wealthy man named Harvey Brooks. She expects the next day to be proposed to. On a whim and feeling nostalgic, she drives to Glen St. Mary, where she lived in her girlhood, for the evening. While there, she runs into a fellow, whom she believes to be Dick, her childhood bully who she hated profoundly. Except now, they’re grown and capable acting chummy over their shared memories. The weather takes a bad turn, and they take shelter and a meal together. Susette spends most of the time, all their ‘do you remembers’, being irritated by Dick’s constant name-dropping of the Blythes. He claims to have been kind of secret friends with Anne Blythe, which is contrary to Susette’s memory that Anne hated Dick. (In the end, it turns out that Susette was right… this isn’t Dick she’s talking to. It’s Jerry Thornton, Dick’s cousin.)

For the official record every Blythe mentioned in ‘the Road to Yesterday’ is as follows: Doctor Blythe, Mrs. Doctor Blythe, Rilla Ford, Jem Blythe [Jr.], Di Meredith [Jerry and Nan’s], and Anne Blythe.

It’s mostly a bunch of school yard talk, but the big takeaway for this purpose is that the Blythe/Meredith cousins all hung out together as school children.

Here’s some direct examples:

*****

*****

*****

The cheap boiled-down version of this exchange, for those who haven’t ‘the Road to Yesterday’ is basically: Susette is having strange feelings during this interaction with ‘Dick’, she’s attracted to him, declaring to herself that she won’t fall in love with him, and is clearly irritated with the near constant Anne Blythe (especially)/Blythe references. Though she herself was very fond of Jem Blythe Jr. herself, during their childhood, ‘Dick’ mentioning Anne Blythe so fondly is increasingly Not Cute to Susette. Meanwhile, ‘Dick’ is enjoying this kind of teasing, and is lowkey successful at getting a rise out of Susette, not matter how determined she is to look unaffected.  

But here’s the kicker... when ‘Dick’ finally leaves off mentioning Anne Blythe, guess what topic he moves on to? 🥁

The Royal Canadian Air Force.

And just who do we all know that was in the Royal Canadian Air Force?  

Shirley.

Only Shirley.  

First, it tracks that ‘Dick,’ soon enlisting (we’re on the brink of WWII timeline-wise), and thinking himself funny, would choose to move on from Anne Blythe to instead a subtler rib… what he, as a once good pal of Anne’s, would know was Anne’s dad’s war faction. It’s also in the realm of possibilities that thinking on Anne so much drew up this correlation. I also ALSO think it’s worth mentioning that the only other time that the Canadian Air Force is mentioned in TBAQ is a very passing drop for Rilla, thinking of her son Gilbert Ford enlisting with the CAF. That’s it. Just those two times.

Additionally important to note is the overall subtext tone in TBAQ, which is Maud’s very greatest collection of double-vision, double-speak and intertextual reference works. There’s a beautiful scholarly essay on this, in relation to TBAQ particularly HERE.

This doesn’t only apply to cultural references in TBAQ. It also adds layers to Maud’s own existing Anne series. It really could be considered a companion piece, with X-Ray vision, e.g. how we got a ton of ‘missing’ insight into Anne and her children’s lives and minds, during the Rainbow Valley era, in Part 1 of TBAQ.

Part 2 of TBAQ (where we find ‘the Road to Yesterday’) asks us to apply what we already know to the new text we’re given.

So, understanding this … if we’re going off what we already know from ‘Rilla of Ingleside’…

What’s the reason we have the Canadian Air Force mentioned in the same story that we learn of the existence of Anne Blythe? The connection?

It’s Shirley. 🥹

A weaker argument that I’ll only mention in mild passing, because it is very weak in terms of convincing evidence, is that the text unambiguously tells is that Anne Blythe has taught ‘Dick’ from Susan’s famous recipes. Susan is another Shirley tie. It’s there to be stated. BUT. I do admit that I think Susan would’ve taught every willing Blythe grandchild with the same zeal, maybe some partiality given to the Little Brown Boy’s kid(s).

BUT, for me?

I’m properly convinced here.

Shirley was a dad, ya’ll.

[childotkw]

Hi Jordan, I'm just starting out writing my fic and I am a bit stuck so I'm seeking for some advice. How do you plan your fics? I have a few specific scenes in my head and I'm not sure whether I should write those and build my fic around it? Or I should plan out all the vital plot points

Hello darling! Sorry about the delay in getting to you!

Most of my stories are born out of one cool scene or concept, and then I create the branching storyline for either direction from that one moment in the plot.

I don’t have a specific method that I follow - each story’s development is different and I’m very much at the whim of my muse and imagination. But one structure that I have found helpful is this:

Identify your main characters and their details (e.g., their backstories, their traits, their flaws relevant to your fanfiction world / environment / AU). For example - in a non-magical AU, how would this impact the lives of character who were canonically magical?

Order your current scenes into a rough timeline and identify the gaps between them. For example - label them ‘Scene A’, ‘Scene B’ and ‘Scene C’ once you know what you’re working with.

Starting with your earliest scene, figure out how much build up you want until you reach it and then start working backwards until you’re satisfied with your story’s new initial starting point. For example - your original ‘Scene A’ might end up becoming your new ‘Scene H’. Relabel and reorder them as you go!

Think of potential in-between scenes that could occur to propel the story and characters along, and mark them down (these in-between scenes don’t have to be super detailed, but it will help you to flesh out your order). For example - “I know that at some point before ‘Scene F’ I want these two characters to have a fight, so I’ll just put it down as ‘Scene D’ for now”.

Repeat the above steps for all of your original scenes, until you have a tentative sequence of events between all of them.

Once you have a rough outline, identify your moments of conflict - and outline how these moments will impact the growth of your character. For example - ask yourself things like: Will they grow stronger or weaker because of this conflict? Will their previous progress continue or will they be stalled? How does it affect them emotionally as well as physically? Does their flaw play into this conflict at all? Have I foreshadowed things to my satisfaction?

Characters drive your story events forward, so consider what their motivations are at each point in the story. For example - ask what they want and how you, as the writer, can stop them from getting it.

Start planning how each conflict will be resolved. For example - did the character’s growth from a previous moment of conflict help them learn a new ability or piece of information that lets them overcome this next challenge?

These are just some small tips but I hope they help! The important thing about setting out your plot is understanding that everyone’s process is different, and that even if you don’t know all of the in-between moments just yet, you’ll discover them along the way.

Some people are super detailed in their outlining, others figure it out mid-way through. I had the ending of CS planned out pretty much from the beginning. The plot-twist to ybtm only came to me as I was writing it, and I had to go back and rewrite the first chapter to make it make sense.

Writing is very fluid, and you shouldn’t be afraid to start just because you don’t have all the pieces perfectly arranged.

[makeyoumine69]

Destroy Me

◥ PAIRING: Patrick Bateman x Innocent!Fem!Reader

◥ SUMMARY: Your first interactions with Mr. Bateman, your potential owner, made you sure that he's a sick dangerous man.

◥ WARNINGS: 18+/ NSFW │dark content, non-consensual touching, kidnapping, misogyny, human trafficking, Patrick grabbing a handful of reader's p*ssy, teasing, nipple play, toxic and obsessive behaviour, swearing, humiliation, dirty talk, pet names.

◥ WORDCOUNT: 2k

◥ A/N: The dark vibes of Mr. Kitty's songs seem like paradise to me. I hope you like this chapter, thank you for the reading! Big thanks to my dear @lissasharp for the help!💞

◥ SONG REC: Mr.Kitty - Destroy Me🖤

◥ LINKS: [Shadow Lady Masterlist⛓] [Main Masterlist]

A dark desperation occupied your mind, not giving you even a chance to think about any viable options to run away from this place.

With your hands pressed against your chest, you heard the door closed behind your back, that sound remained in your head for a long time. Shaking like a leaf, you were following the ‘boss-lady’, moving through the barely lit corridor to the place where that awful man was waiting for you.

“Now, listen here, (Y/N),” she paused near the big wooden door. Her face looked so tense, when she turned to you and added: “If you don’t want to get into trouble, you better behave yourself.”

“Or what?” you questioned, curling your fingers into a fist. “You will kill me like a dog?”

The boss-lady just giggled in response, and there was something really evil in the way she did it. Slowly, she opened the door before you; the dark smirk never left her face. “Come on, get in.”

With a sharp breath, you made one step into the void, sensing millions of shivers running down your spine, and it was not because of the cold. To your surprise, the room turned out to be a marvelous place, you could even say it was pretty luxurious with all of this expensive furniture and big antique lamps. 

Pulling yourself together, you looked over the people, sitting in the leather armchairs and smoking their cigars. One of them was that ‘customer’, who just bought you, but this thought still couldn't implant within you; it never would. Another guy looked much older compared to the other, his eyes were shamelessly gliding all over your body, and that made you almost cry out in disgust, as you wanted to run away from here more than anything in your life.

“You have a great taste, Mr. Bateman.” The old man asserted, puffing on his cigar and crossing his legs.

“I know,” he replied before taking some papers. “Can’t see any dates though…”

“Don’t worry! These documents are most recent, and the information is beyond relevant! We just used some… Well, a friend of mine did it to avoid any problems with the law…”

“Uh-huh,” Bateman nodded, inhaling the smoke of his expensive cigar. For all this time, he didn’t even glance at you. “If any of these aren't true,” he pointed at the documents as he put them back on the small table between the armchairs. “I think you already know what will happen to all of you. Don’t cha?” Patrick smiled and looked at the man next to him, and then at the boss-lady; she was obviously so scared of him–you could hear her rapid breathing behind your back.

“O-of course, Mr Bateman…”, the old guy swallowed hard, losing his tie a bit and kept blubbering: “But I assure you! We care about our customers, therefore ensure you high-quality service and-”

“I got it,” Bateman cut him off, taking the last sip of his whiskey. Only now, his hazel eyes found your lost ones, and the picture of your frightened face caused his lips to curl into a pleased smirk of satisfaction. “Now, I want to finish things and conclude this transaction.”

“I brought the girl!” The blue-eyed woman suddenly blurted out, and you almost flinched in your place.

“Thank you, but I’m not blind,” Bateman chuckled, turning to the old man once again. “Can everybody just get out of here, please? I don’t want to make my girl embarrassed.”

My girl?

Hugging yourself, you shriveled from these words, expecting nothing but the horrible things, which were going to happen so soon, you didn’t even have time to prepare yourself, but was it even possible to be ready in such a situation?

“I’m sorry, Mr. Bateman,” the guy paused as he was so afraid to say what he was planning to. “But according to our rules we can’t leave you alone to avoid any accidents and-”

“I’m ready to pay half of the price right now,” Bateman almost spit in the old man’s face as he picked up his case to get the money; you’ve never seen such thick wads of cash. “Besides, I don’t want anyone to gawk at her. Is that enough?” Carelessly, Patrick threw a few wads of cash on the table, waiting for the answer.

The boss-lady and the unknown guy looked briefly at each other, before he consented: “All right, but you have limited time-”

“Leave already.” Patrick husked and puffed on the cigar, his lips tensed around it from anger, so you could almost see his white teeth. 

After a while, there were only two of you in the room. 

Trembling, you couldn’t look at anything but the floor, as your heart was beating so fast, it was almost painful.

“What a bunch of stupid dicks,” Bateman laughed abruptly, leaving you completely confused. “Doll… You can’t even imagine how lucky you are… That I’m going to take you out of here. Trust me, this place is worse than hell.”

Did he really expect you to fall on your knees and kiss his feet for his generosity? Arrogant son of a bitch…

“All right, (Y/N). Let's forget the formalities,” Patrick sat himself more comfortable in his armchair, throwing his one leg on another. “Take your clothes off. Let's see what you got.”

You had to clear your throat before speaking, as it felt like your mouth was full of sand: “Excuse me?”

Patrick let out a tired sigh, rubbing the bridge of his perfectly shaped nose. “Do you want me to do it myself?”

“No!” you almost screamed, when you watched him standing from his place. “I’ll do it… Just, don’t touch me, please…”

Saying nothing, he put on that devilish smile again, leaning on the back of his seat, his hands were thrashing around his knees in undisguised anticipation. 

Timidly, your shaking hands reached the clasp of your bra. Before you eventually undid it, you cast a scornful gaze at him, sensing how anger and despair were mixing up in your blood. It seemed like your heart fell down on the ground along with your bra, when you heard his deep exhale.

“Mm-mh, keep going, doll.” His voice definitely got lower on some octaves.

Totally embarrassed, you were trying to convince yourself to do what he ordered, with no reflection or sorrow–your life was in danger, that was the actual point.

With one quick motion, you pulled down your panties, leaving yourself fully exposed in front of that smug bastard, whose eyes now were dark as the midnight sky. But, despite your sudden surge of boldness, your hands were instinctively trying to hide your naked body from his vision, inducing the corners of his lips to twitch in amusement. 

Scoffing haughtily, Patrick shook the glass to make sure it was empty, asserting: “You don’t need to be ashamed in front of me, honey,” Bateman opened his arms expansively and finally smiled with his usual delight. “(Y/N), you belong to me now,” he directed, looking into your scared eyes. “Every little piece of your body belongs to me. So, be an obedient girl and turn around.”

“Just turn around?” Why did you even ask that, damn?

“You can bend over, after you turn around. I want to see what I’m paying for.” All of your insides seemed to tighten like a string and your knees nearly buckled. 

Breathing sharply, you spun around and did what he told you to, with your eyes watering by the second.

“Spread your legs wider,” Patrick pressed his elbows against his knee, leaning on them, as he couldn't stop looking at your luscious unused pussy. When you did so, he claimed: “Such a good girl… Can’t wait to find out how it feels to be inside of this innocent little hole.”

By saying that, Bateman stood up and got closer to you, right when you turned around, so you nearly bumped into his solid frame. 

“A-ahm, Sorry… I…” You froze, with your hands pressed against your breasts and your mound, as you were trying to cover yourself. Goodman, he was so tall and broad, he was towering over your like a fucking skyscraper. 

“It’s okay, Sunshine,” he carefully stroked your cheek, wiping away your tears. “We’ll have a lot of fun together…” slowly, his finger traced down to your clavicle, and then you flinched from the feeling of the soft fingertips, brushing along your cleavage. “And, I promise, I’ll make you happy...”

“Please, d-don't…” you sobbed out loud, when he possessively took your hands away to touch your taut nipple. “S-stop!”

“Such a subtle blossom,” Bateman was about to kiss your lips, but he stopped himself. Instead of it, he pinched your engorged peak, making you moan barely audible. “No one ever touched you like that?”

Breathless, you wanted to grab his hands and push them away, but you were too scared of him being angry. Desperately stifling the upcoming nasty sounds, which were languishing in your chest, you had to sink your nails into your delicate skin almost till the blood. 

Meantime, Patrick seemed not going to stop his ravenous assault on your quivering little body, as he pressed his other palm against your belly, tickling you a bit, making you wince and he couldn't help but snigger in enjoyment. All of your coy reactions were turning him on like nothing else in this cynical corrupted world. 

“Mr. B-Bateman…” shivering under his touch, you felt yourself so abashed by how your body was responding to his caress. “Enough… I… I beg you, ahh-”

A strange, but insufferable blissful sensation hit your mind like a lightning strike, when Bateman reached your sensitive clit, giving it several rubs. With every second, his ministrations were becoming more and more persistent, inducing you to close your eyes and bite your lip to suppress a loud moan from the longing feeling in your lower belly.

“You like it, don’t you?” Patrick asked, watching you struggling with yourself.

“No…” you whimpered, but he only simpered in response, before trapping your blushing nub between his sneaky fingers, rhythmically massaging it. “Aa-aww… Mr. Bate-”

Selfishly, he shushed you with a palm, leaning over to your neck to inhale your sweet scent and lick your touchy skin. And then, Bateman suddenly blabbed:

“What is that?” squinting, he traced a thumb along the artery on your throat. “A scar?”

Vexed, Patrick removed his hand from between your legs and you could finally heave a sigh of relief. “Yes… I've got a couple of scars…”

“Couple?” he issued in a stern voice, looking at you from above. “Who dared to touch such a sweetheart like you-”

“Mr. Bateman, are you done with inspecting?”

You both recoiled from unexpectedness, before he retorted: “Yes, come in.” 

When the door clicked, you watched him concisely sucking up his fingers, which were slightly covered in your juices–that scene made your cheeks inflame with humiliation.

“So… What do you think?” The bitch with blue eyes asked, staring at your naked body absolutely emotionless. 

“I’m not gonna pay twenty-five thousand for her, cause she has several scars,” Bateman stated, strolling away from you to take his cigar. “Let's make a deal. Twenty thousand.”

“Twenty-three-”

“Twenty thousand, that’s my last word.”

For some period, they were looking at each other like two predators before their deadly jump, but then you heard the boss-lady’s lament. “Argh, all right! Twenty thousand…”

“Wonderful,” Patrick exclaimed, opening his case once again and taking out the rest of the money. “That’s all?”

“Yes, Mr. Bateman… I’m glad we negotiated,” right after her words, you saw a group of unknown men, entering the room. Then, one of them handed her a thick folder with some papers. “All information about her is here.”

She came to the table, took the money and put down the folder. Everything that happened next, you didn’t remember, as someone pressed a cloak of fabric to your mouth, making you black out and limp.

“Hey, careful!” Bateman shouted, pointing at your direction with a finger. “Was that necessary?”

“She’s very troublesome, it’s for her own good. Believe me.”

“Wait, I will carry her…” overprotectively, Patrick reached your unconscious body and took you in his arms, before musing: “Don’t worry, Dear. Soon, you will be at home.”

[moongothic]

This is gonna turn into some Crocodad Propaganda eventually but putting the man aside for a little bit

Let's be real for a moment. Regardless of who Luffy's other biological parent is, regardless of if they're relevant to the story or not, no matter what has become of that person, if they're dead or somewhere out there alive, etc-- I believe Oda "knows the truth".

Although it took One Piece until post-Enies Lobby to reveal some of Luffy's blood relatives to us, Oda had technically introduced both Garp and Dragon to us all the way back in the East Blue saga. And Ace was introduced not too long after in the Baroque Works saga, along with his tattoo which held that secret tribute to Sabo all along. (Also he was introduced as "Portgaz D. Ace" meaning Oda must've intended to make the two non-blood brothers from the get-go.) All this means that Luffy's family, both adopted and blood relatives, have been in Oda's mind from the very begining of the story. And so if Oda had figured out Luffy's grandfather, father and at least one brother (if not both) from the begining, then why would he not have decided what became of the person who gave birth to the idiot as well? Like considdering how detail-oriented and meticulous Oda can be, would it not be unusual for him to essentially forget about a character that important (in the sense that Luffy literally would not exist without them) and just handwave them away without much thought? Would that not be out of character for Oda? As such, I don't think it is not unreasonable for us to believe that Oda would know what happened to Luffy's other bio-parent. Mind you, it really could be just something like "Luffy's mother died of The Disease when Luffy was a baby", or "the mom fell down the stairs" or "was eaten by a bear in the woods" or something, anything, whatever. Even if it truly does not matter to the story one bit, I'm sure Oda knows the truth of what happened and why that character wasn't a part of Luffy's life.

But at the same time, if the identity and the fate of Luffy's birthing parent truly did not matter to the story at all, then why wouldn't Oda just tell us who that was and what happened to them? In an SBS or an interview? It's not like people haven't been asking about it, because fans and staff alike have been asking about it for years. If the information really would not change anything, be it the direction the story will take or how we view the characters, if it really is just worthless trivia, then why keep it away from us?

Now of course, I'm sure you'd want to point out that one time Oda told Mayumi Tanaka that "A young boy's adventure begins after he leaves his mother's arms. I want to tell this young boy's adventure story, so his mom is not part of it." And Oda isn't known for lying, we do kind of want to take what he told Mayumi Tanaka at face value. At the same time though. If Luffy's other parent did become a plot relevant character in like the final 200 chapters of the story, after a 1100 chapters, they and their potential connection to Luffy would not have mattered to the story for 90% of its run. For an overwhealming majority of Luffy's adventure, that person would not have been a part of it. So if that character did become relevant, and Oda was lying, then it'd be a white lie at worst. But also, if Oda did intend to reveal that other parent eventually, when the time was right, then surely he wouldn't want to get people hyped up about it way ahead of time. If it did turn out to be a big plot twist or an otherwise important plot point, Oda would want to keep it under the wraps and a secret until the right time, you don't want to spoil something like that. Not to mention it could end up working like a distraction and make people not focus on the more important things happening in the story currently. So really, I think we'd all forgive him for a white lie there. Not to mention, technically speaking, if Luffy doesn't even have a mom but two dads, then Oda wouldn't really be lying either.

But that does bring up an important thing to considder.

If Crocodile does turn out to be Luffy's other dad, when did Oda get that idea, and when would he have committed to it?

Because, keep in mind, One Piece began back in 1997. Twenty seven whole years ago. Which means there's two things to considder; the evolution of queer rights over the past near three decades, as well as the fact that One Piece has more than surpassed Oda's original plans for the series. We must not forget how for a manga to remain serialized in Weekly Shounen JUMP, you need to perform well in the popularity polls consistently; if your manga starts dropping in popularity, JUMP can cancel it and force you end it prematurely. Of course, Oda arguably does not have to worry about those polls anymore after all these decades, there's no way in hell JUMP would ever cancel fucking One Piece in this day and age. But that might not have been the case 15 years ago, that was not the case 20 years ago, and that was absolutely not the fucking case 25 years ago. Like we all famously know that Oda originally planned One Piece to maybe run for like a year, then five years, then ten etc etc. That really is because at the begining of his career he had no quarantee he'd be able to tell the full story he was slow cooking at the back of his mind. Back in the early days, One Piece could've been canceled and ended prematurely, so Oda smartly chose to write it focusing very specifically on what mattered to the story at that moment, in the short term. Yes, he did start laying out the groundwork for things to come, but he did it so subtly that had OP been forced to end early, the series wouldn't have been left with too many massive, gaping plotholes or unresolved sidestories. Another thing to keep in mind is how comic artists for JUMP do have editors etc who can have a say in what goes into the manga (famously, Sasuke only existed because Matashi Kishimoto's editor suggested it). So again, while Oda might be able to do whatever the hell he pleases in One Piece at this point, that wouldn't have been the case 20+ years ago. He would have been more or less at the whims of his editors back in the day.

So would Oda have thought about giving Luffy, the main character of the series, a transgender father back in the year 2000? Could that really have been the secret plan from the start? And would Oda's editor(s) at JUMP have allowed that? Or, did Oda maybe come up with the idea later?

Now just so we're clear, I am NOT suggesting Crocodad was Oda's original intent and that his editors didn't let him do it or anything like that, my tinfoil hat isn't on that fucking tight. What I do want to suggest, is that it is plausible Crocodile being Luffy's other dad was an idea Oda was playing around with at the back of his mind from the begining, but wasn't sure he'd ever get to, mainly due to the uncertainty of series' future and partially because he could've been unsure if his editors would even allow him to write that story. And IF this was the case, Oda may not have even started committing to to the idea until around the CP9 saga. Or, it's possible Oda only got the idea sometime after the completion of the Alabasta arc/during Skypiea saga, and started laying down the groundwork for during Summit War so that, if he ever got around to it, he'd be able to commit and tell that story.

Regardless, let's be real.

It is interesting and kind of suspicious how Crocodile does just happen to be introduced around the same time the rest of Luffy's family was first shown to us, even if we didn't know Garp and Dragon were Luffy's family yet (this was also the same time the first canon queer character was introduced; Oda was playing around with queer characters during Crocodile's introduction, possibly testing the waters to see what he could get away with?) During the CP9 Saga we got the Miss Goldenweek cover story, where we see what's become of Crocodile after the fall of Baroque Works. This is of course adding to the world building of the CP9 Saga (where we're told the criminals who go through Enies Lobby are either sent to Impel Down or to Marineford; so us finding out Crocodile's gone to ID is playing off of what we knew would become of Robin and Franky and the Strawhats not come to rescue them. AND it's foreshadowing for the Summit War Saga), but also, soon after we were reminded of Crocodile and told where he's been sent off to, we were finally formally introduced to Garp and Dragon (Garp having already been mentioned by Aokiji at the begining of the Saga). And we close off the Saga watching Ace and Blackbeard have their fateful match. So again, Crocodile was on Oda's mind around the same time the rest of Luffy's family was. And indeed, after Thriller Bark we then move onto Summit War proper, where Oda does all The Things we would considder The Groundwork for Crocodad, most important being the introduction of Ivankov and their Devil Fruit. But again, just like before, Crocodile just happens to be there at the same time as this saga, which really heavily focuses on Luffy's family, plays out. While we learn about Dragon's secretive nature and connection to Iva-chan, Garp's feelings for the boys, Ace's struggle with his heritage and Luffy's love for him, Sabo and Garp... Yeah, Crocodile's just... Also there.

Whenever Oda starts dwelling into Luffy's family, Crocodile is always there. It's a bizarre coincidence if nothing else.

(And oh won't you look at that, Crocodile has once again become a plot relevant character, just in time for The Final Saga where Dragon has also started becoming actually plot relevant as well)

All of this to say, again.

The fact that Oda has refused to tell us anything about Luffy's other parent is sus, and to me indicates that either although unusual for him Oda genuinely just doesn't give a damn about Luffy's other parent, or he's been trying to play it safe for years so that if he ever got the opportunity, he could give Luffy two dads. (Or maybe there's some other twist that has nothing to do with Crocodile, that is possible too, I just feel like if that was the case then why hide it for 27 years?)

Whatever the case, I'm sure Oda knows the truth.

And I'm sure we will find out the truth eventually, be it on the pages of the comic or in the SBS.

[scenikeight]

What My Father Wanted was to Kill God: Reflecting on the cycle of Rebuild of Evangelion

It's been two years now, since Evangelion 3.0+1.0 hit Japanese cinemas for the first time.

I think many of us chose to say goodbye to Eva on that day, too, leaving satisfied. I can't fault anyone for this. But there's a part of me that stings knowing that 3.0+1.0 has been left relatively un-combed-through in comparison to the other films, and I don't feel right leaving it this way. Today, I want to dissect "loop theory" - what it was before 3.0+1.0 came out, in what ways we missed the mark back then, and finally, what the resolution of 3.0+1.0 meant for the story. I want to understand what it meant to kill God.

This article was heavily inspired by "What was loop theory? Investigating the truth after Evangelion 3.0+1.0", by Japanese fan-channel Eva Fan. If you want to understand the meta angle of Rebuild better (i.e. "why does Rebuild even exist in the first place?"), please watch the NHK Professional documentary on Anno and the production of 3.0+1.0 (not "The Final Challenge of Evangelion" version on Amazon, although you should watch this one too because they're both great.) The meta of Rebuild is outside the scope of this article.

SECTION 1: WHAT WAS LOOP THEORY?

If you're already familiar with the basis of loop theory, you can probably skip this section and head to section 2. This is gonna be a lot of recap. I, for one, have never been a huge fan of the idea of "loop theory". This isn't to say that I've ever disagreed with the conclusion that Rebuild's world is stuck in a loop, more that I felt like painting it as a "theory" is seeding more ground to bad faith actors in the fandom than necessary. However, I'm using the term here to refer generally to different theories about the loops, namely those regarding Kaworu and potential connections with End of Eva. Now that all of the disclaimers are out of the way... ESTABLISHING OUR BASES, PART 1: THE MESSENGER

From the moment he's introduced, Kaworu's entire purpose in the first two films seems to be establishing the loop to the audience. His familiarity with previous versions of Shinji is front and centre in the very first line he speaks.

Some relevant lines from Kaworu in 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. Full sized image here.

While at this stage, we lack information on how much Kaworu knows, we are at least aware of his knowledge of previous iterations of the Eva world in that first line there: "The Third one again". This is compounded at the very end of 2.0, in which he declares that "this time" (as opposed to previous times, presumably failed attempts), he will make Shinji happy. In 3.0, there's a moment in which he seems to confirm to himself his musing in NGE of having been "born to meet" Shinji (notice the lack of のかもしれない "probably"), and following some more ambiguous lines we'll skip over, at the end of a long speech about parts of ourselves remaining in the world even after we're gone, he suggests he and Shinji will see each other again just before he dies.

These lines lead some fans to believe that the loops were in some way or another, under Kaworu's control. This iteration of loop theory suggested that the loops exist so that Kaworu, who remembers the events of NGE, can achieve his goal of "making Shinji happy".

ESTABLISHING OUR BASES, PART 2: THE RED SEA

Non-exhaustive chart of potential connections between Rebuild and NGE/EOE, compiled by users on /a/ board in 2011. Full sized image here.

There are several environmental aspects of Rebuild's world that seemed to suggest a connection to The End of Evangelion, most obvious amongst these being the red sea. As Kaji explains in 2.0, the seas were blue prior to Second Impact. Flashbacks to this event reveal that it bore slightly more in common with EOE's Third Impact than NGE's Second; note the presence of the Black Moon in the comparison above. Early on in 1.0, there's a shot that shows cross-shaped white outlines in the red sea, that appear to be remnants of EOE's crucified mass production units. The moon in Rebuild also has a large, red streak on its surface, that could be the bloodstain that was left there by Lilith in EOE. Additionally, Shinji's SDAT in NGE always looped the same two songs, shown under the track numbers 25 and 26. In Rebuild, Shinji's SDAT's track number begins at 27, and goes up from there (it seems to represent the relationships he forms with other people). Some iterations of loop theory suggested that Rebuild was set directly after End of Eva, and that the events of Second Impact as remembered by the cast were actually EOE's Third Impact. Additionally, though its relevance to any canonical NGE content is tenuous (tenuous, but not irrelevant when it comes to Rebuild; see the bonus chapter), Sadamoto's NGE manga also ends with a kind of timeloop.

From the epilogue chapter of Yoshiyuki Sadamoto's Neon Genesis Evangelion manga. Full sized image here. After Instrumentality, the epilogue flashes forward to a long time in the future, where the crucified Evas are seen as some kind of relic from an unknown time. We see Shinji, Asuka and Kensuke reincarnated, and Shinji and Asuka meet for the first time, with some sense that they've seen each other before.

Full sized image here. This ending could be seen as an explanation of sorts of what's going on in Rebuild; the characters have been reincarnated a long time after the fact, while elements of the old world remain as part of the environment.

ESTABLISHING OUR BASES, PART 3: DOUBT

It should go without saying that, even at the time, these particular conclusions had holes in them. (This is to say nothing of the hundreds of other iterations of loop theory; if we went through every whacky headcanon explanation people posted on Reddit under the guise of it being any kind of genuine theorization, we'd be here all day)

Sequel Theory, especially past 3.0, required you to ignore contradictory information being presented in the same scenes the evidence being drawn on was. The comparison image I included earlier (it pre-dates 3.0's release, but was certainly spread around long after the fact) suggests that the Four Adams as they appear in 2.0's flashback could have been the Mass Production Evas (of which there are 8, not 4!). Two of the lines from Kaworu it included also don't support this line of reasoning; both "This time..." and "You don't change" imply multiple previous loops, not a singular. And while we haven't mentioned them so far, the coffin he emerges from in 1.0 being one of several was also something people were aware of back then. Speaking of Kaworu - Shinji's Happiness Theory doesn't seem to line up with the way he goes out in NGE, either. He asks Shinji to kill him with the goal of achieving true freedom; it doesn't seem like he's looking for a next time, but rather an ending, away from his destiny as an angel. It doesn't really follow that Rebuild's loops would be a journey he'd set himself on willingly, rather a circumstance he's put into by some other force.

SECTION 2: PAYOFF

3.0+1.0 responds to the foreshadowing of previous entries in a way that's kind of inconclusive, on its face. I'm going to save the potential answers for the next section; for now, let's just go over the information we did get, including some things you may have missed. PAYOFF, PART 1: OUT IN THE OPEN

Kaworu describes Gendo as being the origin of the cycle. Full sized image here.

Our first piece of confirmation, and first in-universe mention of the loops (or "cycle"/"circle"), is this line. "Gendo was the center of Instrumentality this time", the "this time" implying there have been other Instrumentalities with other person/s at the center. "Origin of the cycle" may indicate that Gendo is in control of the loops as a whole, or it may instead indicate that different people start them, perhaps through Instrumentality.

Asuka wakes up on the beach. Full sized image here.

After coming to terms with her feelings, Asuka "wakes up" in the same spot she was lying at the end of EOE, wondering if she was asleep. This is still in the anti-universe, but as was established by Gendo earlier on in the film, the Evangelion Imaginary and the anti-universe as a whole manifest as parts of one's memory. Asuka is our POV character for this section with her, so she must recall having been here. Maybe you could interpret "was I asleep?" as Soryu, specifically, having woken up.

Selections from Kaworu's Instrumentality. Full sized image here.

Anything that focused on Kaworu here was always going to be the juiciest in relation to the loops, but it's surprisingly upfront even then: There have been multiple previous loops, and Kaworu is not in control of them, he just continues to exist without agency over them like all of the other key players do. (That's both of our aforementioned Theories disproven in one scene!)

Kaworu introduces the "Book of Life", Kaji clarifies the details. Full sized image here.

We're also introduced to a new concept here, the "Book of Life". There's very limited information on what this does, but at least Kaji is here to fill in some details Kaworu conveniently leaves out, as he likes to do (that, if nothing else, Shinji and him meeting over and over again is something Kaworu has power over.)

Rei and Shinji discuss the birth of a new world. Full sized image here. Most of Rei's instrumentality scene exists to wrap up the other aspect of Rebuild's narrative we're not talking about here, so I'll skip past all of that to this: with Unit-01 and the Spear of Gaius, Shinji is capable of creating a new world, through a power known as Neon Genesis. It may be worth noting that Shinji has to clarify that he isn't going to rewind time or revert the world, just create a new one on top of the existing. This may establish a precedent for characters in control of Instrumentality being able to do both of those things.

PAYOFF, PART 2: A CLOSER LOOK NGE has a LOT of references to the years its set in. Even beyond the on-screen text, there's plenty of instances of plaques and other signs with the 2015 date on them. Rebuild, however...

Yui's grave as it appears in 2.0. Full sized image here. The only time we ever see a date in the first three films is here, on Yui's gravestone in 2.0. It's partially obscured by flowers, and may appear at first to read the same as her NGE grave did. On closer inspection, though, you can clearly see there's a 0 in front of 2004.

This could be what the gravestone has written on it. Full sized image here. One time could mean anything, but it becomes a pattern when we see more dates in 3.0+1.0...

The manufacture information on the railway track turntable in Village-3. Full sized image here.

The plaque on the AAA Wunder. Full sized image here.

Looking at that date given on the railway turntable, the earliest date 3.0+1.0 could take place is the year 12001. This, combined with the physical evidence present in the first two films, seems to imply that Rebuild follows the same rules established in the Sadamoto manga, that the loop isn't necessarily a reset of the world, but rather a continuous stream of time in which the characters are reincarnated. It makes sense Sadamoto would use this as the basis for his ending, too - he worked on the first two films, and the Mari bonus chapter clearly demonstrates that certain aspects of Rebuild were solidified during their production. Furthermore, the scene in which Shinji asks Gendo what he wishes for has more visual references to EOE than you might think...

Gendo grasps his right arm, as if he remembers the time he lost it. Full sized image here. The arm thing is obvious, and the line he says there could be about EOE, but you might notice something else in that image on the left there. There's a picture of Shinji in the background. That image comes from one of the flashing sequences in EOE's Third Impact, in fact, the entire sequence is overlaid on top of that shot of Gendo.

This shot in 3.0+1.0 versus the same sequence in EOE. The encode of 3+1 I was using was dropping frames here, so I had to cut some of it out. Video mirror here.

By the way, adult Asuka's official name, as used in every piece of merchandising she's been in so far, is just "Asuka Langley", not "Asuka Langley Shikinami" or "Asuka Langley Soryu".

Good Smile Company's "1/7 Scale Figure: Asuka Langley". She has a fair few figures, all of them with this name. Other merchandise never calls regular Asuka this. Full sized image here.

Rei holds a doll of Tsubame. Full sized image here.

The same thing ends up happening with Rei in-universe. The version of her with long hair is clearly Rei from 2.0, who has been inside the entry plug this whole time, but when we see her on the stage, she's holding a baby doll. It has Tsubame (Hikari and Toji's daughter)'s name written on it. It seems to follow that different versions of the same character end up re-joining into one during instrumentality, be that cross-loop like Soryu and Shikinami, or in-loop, like Rei and Sokkuri (Lookalike). This would appear to go beyond just regaining memories of previous loops, as Rei and Sokkuri existed in the same loop independently of one another.

SECTION 3: A PROPOSAL

And now, to get into the real meat of the issue. ...Whose doing was this, exactly?

Here's the thing: Kaworu, we can already rule out. We know it wasn't him. The next most likely candidate you might think of is Gendo, but... is he, really? Because Gendo died in EOE (perhaps not physically, but regardless), killed by Yui, but ultimately of his own volition. He had come to terms with himself when he died. He doesn't seem like someone who would have still had unfinished business. Then, what of Shinji? Well, I think it's the same deal with him, too. Shinji might not have found his place in life at the end of EOE, but he also doesn't seem like he was clamoring to start over, after all of that. In their video, "What was loop theory? Investigating the truth after Evangelion 3.0+1.0", Japanese Eva fan, Eva Fan (lol), of Minna no Eva Fan fame, gives us a different answer:

It was Yui.

Yui entered the Eva experiment for Shinji's sake. Full sized image here.

Yui's motives in NGE may have been left mostly up to the audiences' interpretation, but I don't think there's any doubt she loved her son more than anything.

As Unit-01, she becomes God at the end of EOE, accepting the burden of being the eternal proof of mankind's existence. She leaves Shinji behind, knowing that he still hasn't found his place in life.

A PROPOSAL, PART 1: YOU WERE WAITING FOR THIS MOMENT

Yui leaves Shinji as he comes into his own. Full sized image here.

The end point of the loops and emergence into the new world: Shinji makes the decision to create a world that doesn't need the Eva. Shinji and Yui, previously one being, separate. Shinji breaks the curse of the Eva, becoming an adult, and now away from his mother, emerges into the real world.

As explained by Gendo, the anti-universe, the end point of Rebuild's story, is also the beginning, and somewhere Yui, at one point, resided.

The beginning and the end are one in the same. Full sized image here. The anti-universe is "the one and only place fate may be bent to one's will". Shinji, in his parting words to Yui in EOE, tells her he thinks he'll keep making the same mistakes over and over. To quote Hideaki Anno: Eva is a story that repeats. In the aforementioned Eva Fan video, they suggest that the anti-universe may in fact be the world of NGE (perhaps, the world inside of Unit-01). Yui creates a new world through Neon Genesis, one which resembles the old, to tell the story of Shinji anew. To give him another chance to grow. For as long as Eva is Shinji's story, it is Yui's; her goal was to bring Shinji a bright future, after all. The act of piloting the Eva sees the child return to the place they resided before birth; back into the comfort of their mother's womb. In Rebuild, the “mother” seems to become all but irrelevant - Yui Ayanami may reside inside Unit-01 but this is never touched on in the same way; Asuka’s mother doesn’t seem to even exist, and her original seems to reside inside Unit-13. The existence or non-existence of a mother’s soul inside of an Eva dictates nothing about who can synchronize with it (see: Unit-02, Unit-08, Unit-13, etc). However, taking a step back, it’s almost as if the reason why the presence of the “mother” is missing from the material world of Rebuild is because the entire series takes place within the world the mother created. If Shinji entering the cockpit of an Eva unit in NGE is returning to the womb, then what is Shinji doing by existing in the world of Rebuild?

In deciding to create a world that doesn't need the Eva, Shinji is accepting life without his mother. The parting of mother and son represents the break in the loop. He emerges into the new world, reborn as an adult.

INTERJECTION: WHAT’S IN A NAME?: YUI IKARI/YUI AYANAMI

Rebuild’s Yui’s name isn’t Yui Ikari (at least, her maiden name isn’t) - It’s Yui Ayanami. In NGE, Gendo took her surname when they married. In Rebuild, Gendo already had the surname Ikari, and Yui Ayanami took his.

I think fans have been generally puzzled by the purpose of this change, but this interpretation - that Yui Ikari from NGE is the heart of the loop, the God that created the world and the God that Gendo would kill at the end of 3.0+1.0 - would seem to explain why this is the case. She’s Yui Ayanami because she’s a copy - like Rei is - of the original Yui. A Yui created by Yui Ikari. This also may explain why the date on Yui's grave says "02004" - after all, it's the grave of Yui Ikari, not the grave of Yui Ayanami.

Rei of NGE is more than just a clone of Yui, she also holds a piece of Yui’s soul (in the form of emotional memory), while Yui herself resides in Unit-01. Therefore, it stands to reason that Yui Ayanami is not really an individual, but rather someone who holds a piece of Yui Ikari’s soul - I think even more so than Rei (who undeniably is an individual). Yui Ayanami may function as a kind of messenger for Yui Ikari, who holds the knowledge she has and steers the story in the direction it needs to go. There are many players in Rebuild who are more like symbols than characters, and I think this is a huge part of why Yui Ayanami is not a character like Yui Ikari was.

For the sake of brevity, I’m going to use “Yui Ikari” to refer to Original Yui, and “Yui Ayanami” to refer to Rebuild Yui, unless stated otherwise, for the remainder of this post.

A PROPOSAL, PART 2: ...WERE YOU THERE THE WHOLE TIME?

Kaworu himself wasn't brought into Instrumentality in EOE directly. Rather, the fetus of Adam was, through Rei intaking Gendo's hand. If souls like Rei and Sokkuri are capable of rejoining into one in Instrumentality, I wonder if the presence of Kaworu in Instrumentality can be explained by his soul rejoining with that of the Adam fetus. He definitely appears as Adam there, the same way Rei is Lilith. Which brings us to this:

Shinji and Gendo upon seeing familiar souls: "Were you there the whole time?". Full sized image here.

Gendo offers Shinji the apology he never got to hear in EOE, and then realizes: Yui's soul was residing in Shinji. Instrumentality likely reconciled the souls of Yui Ayanami (the individual who became Unit-01 in this timeline) and Yui Ikari (the soul who lived on as God, and in her son), the same way it may have reconciled Kaworu and Adam's.

For as long as Yui's soul resided in Unit-01, and in Shinji, her story was not over. For as long as Shinji was stuck in his loop of making the same mistakes over and over, Eva's story was not over. For as long as the Eva exists, Yui will, and End of Eva leaves Yui there, in space, as the eternal proof mankind existed at all.

If 3.0+1.0 says "goodbye to all of Evangelion", it must be the end of Yui Ikari's story, too.

INTERJECTION: WHAT’S IN A NAME?: “SHIN EVANGELION”

The Japanese title of Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon A Time is シン・エヴァンゲリオン劇場版𝄇, (Romaji: Shin Evangerion Gekijouban𝄇, English: Shin* Evangelion Theatrical Edition𝄇”).

There are three points of interest in this title:

Shin - The use of “Shin” here falls in line with the titles of Hideaki Anno’s other recent films: Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman, and the upcoming Shin Kamen Rider. While I’m not really the best person to explain this as I’m not really familiar with the source material, the other Shin films are based pretty heavily on earlier works in their respective franchises (I believe both Shin Godzilla and Shin Ultraman have sequences that are recreations of scenes from the original movie/series). Shin Eva also, obviously, does the same thing with NGE and EOE scenes. *According to an interview with producer Akihiro Yamauchi on Shin Godzilla, the title of “Shin” was chosen for the film due to the variety of meanings it conveys. In all four titles, it is written ambiguously, and could be read as “new”, “true”, or “God”, amongst other things.

Evangelion - NGE’s title and Rebuild’s title are actually spelled differently. エヴァンゲリオン is the spelling of Evangelion used in NGE, ヱヴァンゲリヲン is the spelling used in Rebuild’s title (not the in-universe machines, for the record). They’re pronounced the same way, but Rebuild’s spelling uses characters that are a little archaic (if you want to get technical, it could be romanized as “Wevangeriwon”; note the use of “wo” instead of “o” just like in Kaworu’s name, and you probably get it.) Shin Evangelion uses the NGE spelling, not the Rebuild spelling, which makes it sound like “Shin Neon Genesis Evangelion Movies”, not “Fourth Entry in the Rebuild Franchise” (in fact, “Evangelion Gekijouban” comes from Death and Rebirth/End of Eva’s Japanese names). Earlier posters for this film in English gave it the NGE font rather than a Rebuild style logo, which pretty accurately represents how this looks.

The symbol at the end - The symbol at the end of the title, is a symbol that’s used in sheet music. This could be read two ways - “Shin Evangelion Gekijouban: End”, or “Shin Evangelion Gekijouban Repeat”; If you assume 𝄇 is one symbol, then it’s a “repeat” sign (tells the player to repeat a section of the sheet music). If you assume it’s a colon and then a subtitle, then it’s an “end” sign (𝄂, signifies the end of the piece.)

A PROPOSAL, FINAL PART: TO KILL GOD

Full sized image here. Gendo's goal in NGE and Rebuild is the same: To be reunited with Yui. In Rebuild, he will become God through the use of the Key of Nebuchadnezzar and trigger the Additional Impact with himself at the center, so he can see her again in Instrumentality. But there's a second aspect to this plan... Killing God.

Gendo lays out his intentions. Full sized image here.

I think it would be naïve of me to suggest that Gendo had any intention of ending things when he said this. These lines obviously pertain to something else (I think all of this is covered in the process of beginning the Additional Impact anyway), and it's made clear that he goes into Instrumentality as stubbornly as he always is. He fully intended to destroy all of the spears, so nobody would have any way of manipulating or ending Instrumentality, so he could live peacefully with Yui for the rest of time.

Whatever it might have meant there... "Killing God" takes on a completely different meaning by the end of the film. Yui Ikari is an existence that will live on indefinitely; someone who will never die, even long after humanity is gone. In becoming Unit-01, she alone will wait in the universe forever. She once resided in the anti-universe; the Promised Land, the one and only place fate may be bent to one's will; she created the world of Rebuild of Evangelion, the beginning of everything. Yui did all of this to give her son a better life. To let him try over and over again until he broke the curse of the Eva, and emerged into a brighter future.

She, Unit-01, Evangelion as a whole, could not rest until Shinji grew into his own. Gendo comes to the conclusion during Instrumentality, after bleeding his heart out to his son, that he isn't any closer to reuniting with her.

Full sized image here.

But after acknowledging Shinji's adulthood, accepting his own fragility, and resolving their story...

Full sized image here.

Full sized image here.

...He realizes she was right in front of him this whole time.

Full sized image here.

With this, Gendo exits the train - the same train his story began, the train station he abandoned Shinji at all of those years ago - his story is over. He no longer seeks eternal life with Yui. As Shinji breaks his own curse of Eva and is reborn out of the comfort of his mother's world, and into a world of his own creation, he says goodbye to all Evangelion.

Full sized image here. Gendo, in peace at the end of his own long journey, is willing to let Yui sleep. And so, he kills God.

Full sized image here.

[theresattrpgforthat]

Hey! I've gotten super into solo rpgs but I tend to find combat boring. Are there fantasy themed rpgs with less focus on combat that you would recommend? (If they are soloable, that's also a win!)

THEME: Fantasy Solo Non-Combat.

Hello friend, thank you very much for your ask! I'm going to direct you to two Solo-themed game recommendations first, before I dive into today's recs.

Character-Focused Solo Games: Games that focus on character-building. Lighthearted Solo Games: Fun, non-serious solo games.

A Year in the Spirit World, by ToriBee.

The wind rustles through the emerald canopy above as you open your eyes to an unfamiliar world. You're lying on a bed of lush moss, the gentle warmth of the Spirit World sun caressing your face. Around you, a forest of towering ancient trees, each pulsating with an otherworldly glow. It's ethereal, enchanting, and unlike anything you've ever seen.

Drawing from a deck of fate, you'll encounter spirits, creatures, and natural phenomena as enchanting as they are daunting. Each encounter might test your spirit, challenge your harmony with this world, or tempt you to act against your values.

There is some combat in this game, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be the focus. The game is about survival, but you’re as likely to be navigating social situations as you are to be fighting enemies. What I like about this game is the spirit companion who will travel the world with you: there are four different options, each of them cute and enchanting. If you love Studio Ghibli films, you should definitely check out A Year in the Spirit World!

The Goblin Thought, by Kai Medina.

The goblin hoard - a pile of goods and trinkets - is a place of greed, yes. But it's the same greed that thrives throughout this land of men and beetles. It's the allowed selfishness that helps us learn and grow, walk and run, screech and scramble. The hoard is the goblin's memory.

The Goblin Thought is a unique and engaging journaling game that combines chance and narrative to create a compelling story. Players take on the role of a goblin, collecting memories and items in their hoard as they navigate through a world of wonder and danger, allowing for growth and change. With a deck of cards and a six-sided die, each turn presents new challenges and opportunities for creative storytelling, drawing, and reflection. 

This game is placed in a fantasy setting, but with a larger purpose. It’s both a journaling game and a thought experiment, a chance to place yourself in the shoes of someone whose history exists within the hoard they have accumulated. Each card you draw from a deck has three prompts attached to it, so you have the potential to play this game (and build a history) for a very long time.

Little Shepherd, Little Spy, by @psychhound.

You try to keep out of the whole war business.

It’s just not really your thing. There are more important things to worry about, like Gethin, your biggest ram, getting stuck in the fence again, or Ffion rubbing against the raspberry bushes and getting her wool all sticky.

Life is pretty simple for a humble shepherd such as yourself.

Little Shepherd, Little Spy is a solo journaling game about being a spy in the fairy war. Choose which side you're on, then draw tarot cards to interpret the messages coming through the information ring. Your tarot card tells you what book to look at and what page. Then you copy down all the relevant information on that page and consult your spy codebook.

I absolutely love fairy games and the premise for this one is super interesting to me. Your character will be interpreting messages that take the form of books that you have on your shelf, and you’ll determine which book to look at (and which page to read) by drawing tarot cards from a deck. If you look into this one I definitely recommend setting aside some time, and perhaps selecting a few books for each category to have on hand, to ease the cycle of play.

The Wandering Library, by AP.

You are the proud owner of a Wandering Library. Whether you bought, built or inherited it, it is your home. Travelling as far and as wide as you desire, your days are spent encountering an assortment of customers, exploring new locations, and tending to your beloved home of books.

This is a a game designed to generate prompts for you to answer in as much or as little detail as you would like. All you need is two six-sided dice and your preferred method of journaling. Using the tables provided, you will explore locations and meet different people, recording your adventures and encounters as you travel in your Wandering Library.

This is a simple one-page game that presents you with a few starting questions, and the supplies a grid of prompts that you’ll roll 2d6 for. Each prompt is a new event, complete with a question, asking how your character reacts. There’s plenty of room for your own imagination. The house is a travelling library, which feels pretty fantastical to me! This game will likely last a few hours or so; it’s not really built for extended play.

Fetch My Blade, by Ethan Yen.

For years you have served your Master faithfully. A loyal companion, you accompanied your Master through the difficult times, and the good times. Now, you are called in a moment of dire need: a Stranger has challenged your Master to a duel, alluding to time before you. Your Master rises to the challenge, calling you forth. This is your moment. You have trained for this. It is time to do your Master proud. 

FETCH MY BLADE is a solo journaling roleplaying game where you play as the dog of a retired legendary master of the sword, tasked with a quest of your own: retrieve your master’s fabled weapon in time for their final duel. On your quest, you will uncover and explore your Master’s guarded past-- transforming your character, deepening your relationship with your Master, and ultimately influencing your Master’s fate.

This is a lovely little game of exploring a dog’s relationship to their Master, and developing a backstory as you play. I don’t think there’s specifically a setting in place for this game, but the presence of swords certainly points towards the fantastical. There doesn’t seem to be any specific combat in the game, but violence is considered to have happened in the past, as the game provides a content warning regarding a war that has already happened.

[zahri-melitor]

Blade Runner, The Matrix and Robins: if you want to run a conspiracy in your story you need to put in the work

One of the central conspiracies people like to speculate about in Blade Runner is the theory of whether Deckard is a Replicant. It's a high-context theory woven into the plot and cinematography of the film. (I'm aware various people, decades on, have 'confirmed' it's true; I don't think that's particularly relevant to this).

The reason why the theory is so compelling for audiences to discuss is that the film in itself poses the question 'what is a human' and sends the main character, Rick Deckard, on a hunt for those clues and mistakes that give away the Replicants he is looking for. Things like Deckard's evasion over whether he's ever taken a Voight-Kampff test, and moments that suggest implanted and shared memories make for a fun second level mystery for viewers to think about and solve. The unicorn dream sequence, with both the dream and silver foil unicorn, provides another pointer for audiences to consider the idea. Even the Replicant Red Eye moments are subtle clues that get called out via the broader focus on eyes.

What also helps the debate and hunt for this potential symbolism is Ridley Scott's reputation as a director who heavily goes for visual cinematography hints and altering stories by changing them in Director's Cuts.

Similarly, The Matrix has a conspiracy that the real world is another level within the Matrix. This one is easy to understand how it developed. The Matrix, as a film, invests a substantial amount of its runtime teaching its audience the clues used to distinguish the Matrix from the real world. We get explicit scenes like The Girl in the Red Dress and explanations of how déjà vu works to demonstrate alterations in the Matrix. We see how characters can alter the Matrix to their own ends, leading into moments in the trilogy where Neo appears to use those skills in the real world being able to be read as 'are we still in the Matrix?'

The thing is: neither movie fully commits to these readings. They're possibilities that audiences can read in, that feel like they've been woven into the plot for people to consider. The audience is drawn to ask the question via the way the hints/clues are found in things the audience is already directed to consider. At their worst, they're artefacts of the audience taking the themes of those films and extrapolating too far.

My feeling about Robins as a comic is that Tim Seeley and Baldemar Rivas want to suggest one of these conspiracy theory stories, but did not have the skill to convincingly pull it off.

One of my difficulties the entire way through the comic was that the story did not know when it was set, and indeed repeatedly suggested via both dialogue and art that it was set in very different periods.

Robins takes place at least partially in a generated overlay from information based on Bruce's notes on the five Robins and also on various criminals. It's trying to take the log entries from Gotham Knights #1-11 and extrapolate that concept out to 'what if having this went wrong for Bruce'. (And I shouldn't really be surprised that Seeley chose to do this: Seeley is very big fan of Devin Grayson's work in the Bat books and frequently chooses to reference it)

The markers used for this simulation are firstly the level reward bonuses, and secondly the singing robin (that apparently uses the wrong call).

In that light, you could argue that problems like characters wearing the wrong costumes, from non-matching eras, and holding views that don't really accord with those characters is supposed to be a series of hints about the resolution of the title, rather than a set of weird screw ups that involve suggestions that the team didn't both checking details.

My issue is that it doesn't feel earned. If Seeley and Rivas really did want to hint and direct their audiences into reading that the presentation, comments and impressions of each of the Robins in their story were wholly based on Bruce's conception of them, then I think those discontinuities should match each other more clearly within each character.

Take Tim for a moment: he wears his original 1990s Robin costume; is the opponent of Damian's 'gauntlet' (a period in which he was wearing his all red Robin costume); has his overlay stolen for a rant about how Tim things the Obeah Man and other villains should die in a way that explicitly references Red Robin #26 (his post-Crisis Red Robin period); and gets specifically removed from the story and trapped in a way that he has to direct others to find him and try to escape himself (suggestions of both the Ünternet and more specifically Mr Oz during Tynion's Tec run). These do not match. If we're supposed to think Bruce is hung up on a specific conception of Tim, and a particularly backward-looking one (which you would assume, given he's put in his earliest Robin costume), why don't the other elements match? Why not put him in his all-red Robin costume to hint that he's Damian's gauntlet? Why not put him in one of his Red Robin costumes if you're going to keep referring to him as Red Robin, and that Bruce's worries about him relate to specific events in that period? And why, if the early Robin costume is supposed to reference Tim's own 'gauntlet', then is he the only character wearing his original costume from the storyline?

And what does not help with this is that Seeley has several obvious screw ups. The most prominent one is he conflates Rite of Passage with Batman: Identity Crisis. The Obeah Man was the villain of Rite of Passage for Bruce, where he was hunting him down to save the Drakes. Tim's personal combatant during that story was tracking down Lonnie as Moneyspider. The storyline where Tim showed the skills and personal judgement that made Bruce decide that he was ready to be Robin was in Identity Crisis, which was a story rescuing Bruce and Vicky Vale from Scarecrow. While the stories are sequels to each other, they're not a contiguous whole: they take part in different titles, with a gap in time between them. Similarly, Seeley places Felipe Garzonas' death as Jason's first case as Robin, rather than his last case.

The whole concept of the 'gauntlets' is the underlying thread holding the story together, the aspect on which Bruce's analysis of each of the Robins and whether he wants to work with them is based, leading to the computer files, leading to the entire plot.

If you mess up like that, audiences are less likely to grant that you're trying to build hints in that something is wrong by having things be noticeably mismatching, because you've also screwed up the ground on which you're trying to construct the story. You cannot fairly claim that the incongruities you put in to hint at your plot are something that should be analysed as clues when you've already primed your audience to think that you're just a hack making blatant mistakes.

And this problem extends to all of the characters, not just Tim. Tim's just the easiest for me to pick apart because I know the references made so well (and Tim Seeley clearly doesn't actually care as much about Tim as several other characters, making the oopsies more obvious).

The issue with this story isn't simple single-panel moments like "And I need to hear it from you, Tim, because Jason and Damian lie through their teeth" or Tim saying he "demanded" to be Robin where people can dunk on it by showing another panel like the Teen Titans 2003 "I lie to Batman" panel or ALPOD. It's in the fact it tries to be clever but doesn't earn audiences' trust to do that analysis. And it doesn't earn that trust because you can't pick apart what's a deliberate incongruity as a hint from what's a general mistake from the team, and if you do pick at elements that look like outright mistakes, the whole thing comes tumbling down.

Blade Runner and The Matrix train their audiences from the very start of the story to look for these incongruities and hints and showcase what problems to look for openly in the plot, leading to people to heavily analyse background details for further suggestions of these hints. They earn the buy in that leads to the elaborate fan theories.

Tim Seeley forfeited his audience's buy in to the story he apparently was trying to tell by not being exact enough about the details in a story where he wanted them to pick at those details, and not showing early enough that the audience is expected to be picking at those details. And that's just poor writing and biting off more than you can chew.

[intermundia]

i'm curious, have you ever talked here about your opinions on star wars' politics and the jedi involvement with it? if not then i'm very curious about your thoughts on it. i understand star wars' politics are quite basic and non-radical (republic good dictatorship bad) and i don't necessarily disagree with it but i wonder if the jedi shouldn't have been more involved and possibly more radical (to the left) instead of just, idk, not giving their two cents on it. i know it's a hot take but it seems to me they would benefit more if they were more into politics. i would love to know your thoughts on it.

So, I think the answer depends on if you want a Watsonian or Doyalist explanation. If we’re looking though the lens of fictional in-universe reasons, we know that the Jedi HAVE tried being directly involved with running the government—it led to thousands of years of destructive civil war in the galaxy, with splinter groups of dark side users attempting to seize supreme executive power, and the Jedi militant about preventing it. They willingly surrendered power to the representatives of the people of the galaxy for a reason, not out of negligence or indifference to galactic suffering, and we should always remember the history.

The Jedi chose to work inside the guiding structure of a sovereign civic government, outside the Order and answerable to the people as a check on their power, as they are not democratically elected. It takes strong democratic civic institutions to fight against greedy corporate ownership of society. Would the Jedi’s direct, undemocratic lobbying or enforcement have been enough to change the minds of everyone and reinforce community bonds? I simply don't think it would, and the risks of them trying are unacceptably high. The Jedi are powerful Force users, and that’s always relevant to consider.

You have to be careful when what you Can do becomes what you Should do becomes what you Must do, despite any collateral damage, especially when the range of your potential is broad. The Jedi know intimately that the more powerful you are, the easier it is to feel entitled to interfere and impose your own judgement, which is dangerous, as it will always be based on partial information and informed by unconscious bias. If you do not stay impartial or only help in limited ways, you can begin to lose your sense of perspective. It is also a self-reinforcing behavior, and the consequences rise for getting pulled into a control loop that dives into the dark side out of greed can lead to considerable fallout for you and society.

You can easily begin with good intentions but be corrupted over time by even the smallest original selfish impulses snowballing on each other when the consequences don't stop you but instead encourage you to further exert control. There’s a children's story about not giving a mouse even one cookie, because it will always take more afterward. The wisdom of the Jedi is in their restraint. It may seem frustrating that they don't interfere whenever and wherever they see fit, accepting that they cannot stop some particular injustices, because their intentions are to prevent a worse evil from happening later.

It's hard to appreciate counterfactuals, like yeah the galaxy fell after a thousand years, but we have no way of knowing what suffering would exist in those same thousand years if the Jedi had not surrendered large parts of their political discretion to the Republic. When they did, there followed a golden age of peace that it flourished for a long time before undergoing a crisis where a Force user took over again, before returning to civic governance with a New Republic. If we look to the OT and beyond, that's what the division of Luke and Leia represent, in a way. Leia has a different perspective and priorities and channels of power. Luke should be a warrior monk who occasionally touches the divine in his quest for peace, not involved in politics.

If we’re looking at it through the lens of the author, I think you have to resist the urge to try to make the Jedi into some real-world equivalent religious paramilitary force, or leftist group despite caring a great deal for those values. You have to remember that it's space opera, it's myth. They're theatrical characters demonstrating the ideal of public service without recompense, an impossibly good group of people with legitimate and earned moral authority, who act in the best interest of peace and collaboration, as inspiration to children to model in their interior lives and moral understanding of the world. They're conceptual of pro-social hopeful generous spirit in our hearts, glorious moral knights with glowing swords, not politicians at desks yk.

They're an icon of something that every person can choose to do in their own lives, not just something we can demand from public servants. I know this may be a bit unsatisfying intellectually, but you have to keep the genre of Star Wars in mind, the space opera has mythic logic and operates in the realm of symbolism. When Lucas uses scientific sounding and political sounding language, he's still trying to communicate with the 10-year-olds who don't care about the complexities and nuances of the real world. It's about narrative shorthand and moral signaling that symbiosis, mutual thriving through selflessness, is better than greed, selfishness, and cruelty. That's the genre, you know? Making the Jedi into politicians wouldn't serve the narrative purposes of Lucas's epic story.

[dandelion-wings]

Hello! Love your fic and blog. I would love to hear your thoughts on something. There's a thing I sometimes see people say...that like Kaeya should have told Diluc his secret earlier than he did. (And I agree that he should have told him at a different time. And I do think it is generally a good thing that would strengthen their relationship, after they work through it, and it gives Kaeya a confidant.) Idk, it's complicated because I kind of feel like Kaeya doesn't really owe anyone the truth until such a time that he is put in a position of potential or active harm to Mondstadt. But I am generally of the opinion that people are way too harsh on most of the characters that keep secrets, as if that in itself is a moral wrong.

Hmmm. I had to think about this a little, anon, because "should" is such a loaded term here!

I think so much about evaluating his choices here depends on context we simply don't have in canon. Is Kaeya actually in Mondstadt for any malicious reason, or did his father leave him there to protect him in some way (and if so, did he justify it with a false mission to make Kaeya cooperate, or is Kaeya fearing a war that isn't actually likely to come)? If there was a reason, was he an active agent (spy, saboteur, what have you) or a helpless pawn (c.f. this post)? If there was an actual plot, has his loyalty changed and he doesn't have to do anything for Khaenri'ah going forward, or does he fear some kind of secret trigger word or magical control that would make him a danger to Mondstadt no matter what? Is "Khaenri'ah" only the Abyss Order at this point, or are there actual non-Order Khaenri'ahans still around that Alberich Sr. is trying to save? (Or, in between the two, is he on the "save/purify the hilichurls" boat with Caribert, but is taking a different tack than the Order, or working with them only reluctantly?)

An important question for me has always been whether the fanon that Kaeya is "a prince" is true because, if he is, and there is an actual plan, and there are actual Khaenri'ahans this plan was meant to save, then morally speaking I don't think he should have told at all. I tolerate royalty even in my fiction only and exclusively on the premise that they serve their people No Matter What (this is why I still hate Ei >> ), and I would lose all respect for him if those three conditions obtained and he still chose Mondstadt.

But like... my insanely high standards for fictional royalty aside... Kaeya was a kid abandoned in a foreign land. That's the one thing we know for absolute certainty. Even if he was around Diluc's age of eighteen, and even if Mondstadt definitely gives responsibility to kids way younger than in our world, to me that's still a kid. "Should" seems to come with moral judgement here that's pretty harsh, given that, and I say this as someone who does judge Diluc around the same events--but with the same ambivalence, for the same reasons, of him being a kid in a tough spot. (I did not make better decisions re: sibling relationships than either of them at that age, let me put it that way.) Also, honestly, if Kaeya had confessed earlier, I don't think Diluc was the person to initially do it to--leaving aside all moral questions, I think the smart person to tell would have been Crepus, an actual adult who, while not perfect as a parent by any means, I feel likely would have chosen to protect his adopted son from blowback. He almost certainly had the experience as a businessman to control when and how that information was disseminated to any relevant parties, including Diluc himself.

I honestly don't even think Kaeya "owes" anyone the truth even if it does put Mondstadt at risk, though that comes from the premise that he still feels conflicted somewhat (which canon has drifted away from somewhat but I do stubbornly cling to, because it's spicier, and I don't love them blandifying my boy >> ). He gets to make his own choices. And then he gets to deal with whatever consequences fall out for them! And honestly, while I feel like the morality of secret-keeping in the real world depends very much on the secrets and their impacts, and can often go horribly wrong, in fiction it leads to some of my favorite kinds of narrative drama. So I guess that's my takeaway!

[sunsetshifting]

Important Things to Script For Your DR!

Now above all else, safety is the most important thing to script. ‘Safety’ is, of course, also quite relative to one’s DR, so when examining this list, please keep in mind what is and is not relevant to you.

That said, here’s my list of 20 important things to script for your reality shifting journey!

You cannot die - Arguably the most important one to script, unless you’re experiencing some sort of Minecraft hardcore-esque DR. Dying in a DR is no less traumatic and terrifying than it is in your Original Reality, so please exercise caution and remember to script that you cannot die.

You have a high pain tolerance - This one is a bit of a matter of preference, but is generally a good idea to script in. Some people script out pain entirely, but this generally makes the DR feel less ‘real’, and so the safest bet is to simply make sure your pain tolerance is high.

You will never be tortured or kidnapped/You will never be SA’d - This is a given. Even if it seems unlikely in your DR, this is still good to have just in case.

You cannot lose any teeth or have them knocked out - I don’t really see this aspect talked about much, but I would personally prefer to err on the side of caution, especially considering just how likely I am to be punched in some of my DRs (MHA, for example.)

Time pauses when you are not in your DR - This one is easily within the top 3 of most important things to script. You certainly wouldn’t want to return to your DR after a shifting break only to discover that several months had passed without your knowledge!

You cannot be dragged out of your DR against your will - This is a good one for making sure you don’t accidentally shift back to your OR. Of course, it may still happen if you haven’t properly grounded yourself (don’t worry, it’s easy, you just have to touch and look at things around you) but this is still a good measure to take.

Nobody will know that you’re a reality shifter unless you tell them - This is a good one to have just in case. You never know how someone might react to this information. On that note…

The people in your DR are accepting of shifting - Another good bit to include if you plan on telling anyone (not necessary, but some people like to.) This ensures that nobody cuts ties with you or freaks out on you!

Everyone around you has good hygiene - This one is deceptively important. Whether you’re attending UA or slumming it in TWD, you definitely want to avoid as much rank smell as you can.

You cannot be maimed or permanently injured in your desired reality beyond scars that do not impede your ability to perform any sort of task - This is entirely personal preference. This just sees to it that you don’t suffer a non-fatal injury that debilitates or disables you in some fashion (such as losing fingers or an eye.)

You cannot be brainwashed or otherwise forced to forget how to shift out of the DR - Another safety precaution, just in case you come into contact with someone or something that can change your memories or take over your mind.

You will be safe from all potential diseases and illnesses/You will never be arrested or sent to prison/You will always have enough money to purchase whatever you want - These are moreso to fluff up and boost the experience of your DR, but some people choose to avoid these for the sake of a challenge or realism. I, personally, enjoy them. :3c

There will never be natural disasters or a risk of tragedy such as shootings or fires - As someone with a severe fear of both thunderstorms and shootings, this is essential.

You will remember everything your clone experienced while you were in your DR - This is a good measure to make sure that things are perfectly in order when you get back^^

You will never be involved in a car crash or plane crash - Good to make sure your DR experience doesn’t end prematurely/randomly, as well as to avoid unneeded trauma.

You will not remember the plot of your DR - This one is only relevant if your DR is based off a fictional piece of media. This helps to prevent you from 1. messing up the plot, 2. revealing things before you should know them.

People respect your name/pronouns - As someone who’s trans, this one is completely necessary regardless of where I shift.

You automatically know everything your DRself knows - Just a bit of insurance to make sure that there’s no problems with you slotting into your DRself’s position!

Your eyes open automatically once you arrive in your DR - This helps take away the guessing of when to open your eyes for awake methods, as well as comfort for other methods.

A SIGN! - This one is more abstract, but this generally just means something to make yourself aware that you’ve shifted! Generally, people will script that they either hear birds chirping, smell coffee, or taste something bitter. The key here is to use one or more of your five senses! Anything goes, beyond that point!

[jewish-vents]

It's honestly depressing how many of us have to start treating our fellow leftists the way we treated the average centrist when the problem was trans rights. Because we have to pull out our charts and stats and endless patience for misinformation to debunk, and we have to grit our teeth and watch as people we trusted cozy up to people who are VERY LOUDLY dogwhistling for the removal of the group we belong to from society and politely explain to them why their friends aren't the best, and it's the exact same story all over again, except now we have to do that with politically informed people who should, at least in theory, know better, and who we had a reasonable basis to assume had our backs. But, like... We should've seen it coming, shouldn't we? We always knew Jews aren't safe anywhere. That we're treated as a minority by the right and an elite by the left. I guess this is really something we should have expected.

(I'm not saying criticism of Israel by leftists who aren't Jewish is inherently bad, but, like... so far, the only leftist non-jew [this is how we call them in my family so this is how I'm gonna call them here] with a large platform I've seen who was critical of Israel and also had relatively reasonable attitudes towards potential solutions and human lives was John Oliver, and even his recap of the relevant historical context was pretty biased and selective)

.

[iepurasdepraf]

Lights Out Pt. 2 - Enjoy

"The elaborate branching structure of the dendritic tree allows a neuron to receive inputs from the other neurons through synaptic connections. The cortical pyramidal neuron of figure one point one A and the cortical interneuron of figure one point one C each receive thousands of synaptic inputs, and for the cerebellar Purkinje cell of figure one point one B the number is over one hundred thousand. Figure one point one does not show the full extent of the axons of these neurons-" 

You had to blink. Hard. Had he breathed in the last thirty minutes? You weren't sure. You weren't sure if you had either. 

Initially, you'd managed to understand what he was talking about, but over time that had slowly waned and been overtaken by a sea of information that just kept rising. It started bleeding together in your head and your eyes were burning from squinting at his cracked phone screen where he was showing the arithmetic and diagrams. You’d gotten at best a D or C in math. You couldn’t remember anymore, but you’d passed. That said, you certainly weren’t built for this. 

“The electrical signal of relevance to the nervous system is the difference in electrical potential between the interior of a neuron and the surrounding extracellular medium-”

Not wanting to be rude since he was paying for your time, you raised your hand and were quickly called upon by your impromptu professor with nothing, but delighted glee on his face that you were even listening “Yes!?” "Whereabouts in this presentation are we?" "We're just about through the first half." "The first half?" Dear God in Heaven. 

His nose scrunched up a little exposing his buckteeth even more, he must have caught on that he was frying your brain in its pan. Maybe he found it funny. "How many parts are there?" You asked, trying your hardest to sound amused and not tired. "Five! Well, five and a, ah... sort of post note." You laughed a little restlessly and sat up on the sofa. Legs long having gone numb from being in one position for so long. 

He held up his flashcards, smudged as they were from his sweaty hands. "I felt like I needed at least eight parts to fully explain, but I ran out of cards." "Why not buy more cards?" His hand lowered as he thought about it "I- Well, I suppose I... didn't want to admit my poor foreplanning?" You press your fingers to your eyes for some relief. It didn’t help and that didn't make sense, but nothing had since he stopped stuttering. Sure, the words were coming out now, but that didn’t mean they made sense even with his extensive explanation. If anything it was making it worse.

Your hands fell to your lap as you asked “Who are you giving this presentation to, Jervis?” He turned red when you said his first name. You could tell it was that by the way his eyes fluttered. It was like every now and then he remembered you were a pretty lady giving him the time of day and it staggered him a little. “The-The board. Well, I- let me explain.” He sat on the edge of the small stage you’d made him stand on when he started this whole thing. “I don’t do things like this, you see. I’m a lab rat through and through. I haven’t given a-any kind of presentation since I defended my thesis for my doctorate.” 

There was something wrong with you. That was actually impressive and you nearly asked what his thesis was about, but you also wanted to go home before five. “I work for Wayne Enterprises and normally I’m kept down in the basements- they keep all the non-theoretical work in the basements for security reasons... I shouldn’t have told you that.” He laughed his anxiety spike off in a concerningly manic way again and all you could think to do was nod in response, nearly used to it at this point. That or you were so tired you were just accepting it for the sake of what was left of your mental bandwidth. “Recently, I don’t know why for certain, but they’re- Oh, how did Dr. Kates put it? Doing an internal audit of ongoing research to access security, costs, and productivity. I suspect someone was caught misusing grant money or they suspect someone is.”

“Is someone?” “Heavens no!” He dismisses the very idea with a flick of his wrist. An oddly elegant gesture for someone so tense, but that was likely the liquor in him. “They barely give us enough to keep the power on in the labs. If someone was doing that the flickering lights would have surely let us know long before accounting noticed.” Jervis rolls his eyes grumbling, “Useless things they are. Still haven’t approved of my new slides.” He was getting distracted so you lean forward to get his attention. “Why would them thinking someone’s stealing money have you doing a presentation?” 

He blinks like a toad, eyes unable to settle on just one part of you until he registers you are looking at him and you know that so he looks away instead, fumbling with his cards to try to get his train of thoughts back on the rails. He didn’t succeed right away. “I…They-well, they- um…Hm.” Jervis clears his throat “T-t-to prove I am making progress.” Your head tilts slightly to the side “Would they be able to tell?” “What?” Your simple question seems to knock him out of his self conscious stupor. “Well, you’ve written a really detailed presentation, but are the people you’re going to be presenting it to, will they understand what you’re saying and showing them? Are they scientists too? It sounds more like it’s going to be to a committee.” 

“They… are not scientists.” You saw the cold realization washed over him. They’d have no idea what he was talking about and the way he looked at you nearly made you feel guilty. All that work and they’d never understand it. Christ, that was brutal. It nearly made you feel bad for not getting it either. He was clearly onto something he desperately wanted to share, but it was like he couldn't simplify his ideas enough to explain what they were to anyone with a room temperature IQ.

You bounced your leg trying to think up a solution even though you still weren’t entirely sure why you gave a shit. You should just get up and go home. Tell him it’s late and you have to get some sleep. But no, you sat there puzzling trying to help this total stranger. You stood up, unable to sit anymore. The digging drive to pace while you thought winning out as it usually did so back and forth in front of the despondent scientist you went. “Ok, we can figure this out.” You assured, sounding more confident then you actually were. “You’re smart. I’m…well, I’m smart too. Just… not as smart.” You laughed, but he looked like a kicked puppy. Maybe you were the only smart one right now. 

You told yourself that was fine while you gnawed on your thumb nail. Chipping the black fingernail polish off with your front teeth. You were so tired. Your eyes hurt, your back hurt, your legs hurt, and you smelled like a sweaty ashtray full of cheap beer. You weren’t getting anywhere with this tonight. “When are you giving your presentation?” “Next week. Tuesday of next week.” It was only Monday, well, Tuesday now. You had time. 

“I’ll tell you what,” You turned to him with a clap of your hands that made him jolt to attention. “We’ll keep working on this. We’ll figure this out, but not tonight. I have to work today, but after that I’m free until Friday. Meet me here after work and I'll give you your money’s worth.” You winked at him “I owe you for what you paid me for, don’t worry. You still have,” after checking your watch you confirmed “Two hours and forty five minutes.” 

Jervis stood up, only coming up to the very bottom of your ribs “You promise?!” What a pathetically endearing man. “Promise.” You presented your pinky finger and he gasped like you’d presented you with a diamond ring, but he puffed himself up and raised his own pinky to interlock with yours. “Pinky promise, Dr. Tetch.” “I-I- Hehehe-” He wriggled like a worm on a hook. Turning red as the perfect shade of lipstick making the pale dusting of freckles over his nose and cheeks stand out. “I’ve never- ah… No one’s ever pinky promised me anything. Jolly good.” 

You couldn’t help, but snort. With a shake of your hands the pact was made.