#problematic theorizing hours

[joinmeintheweeds]

Benson/Randy is the toxic cluster b/cluster c dynamic personified

[lucystark12]

songs that should be used in season 5 and why by lucy

1- smalltown boy by bronski beat

obvious first draft pick here. genius. it's so mike wheeler coded it makes me want to die. for this song, i'd either like to see it used in a very very dramatic physical fight scene with vecna ala running up that hill or playing very faintly in the background of an important scene like the fight at rink-o-mania. i think the song sounds just eerie enough that it could work in that context but the instrumental is just so badass fight scene coded.

2- operator by jim croce

hopper canonically listens to jim croce!! you don't mess around with jim!! this song has been loved by my family since decades before i was born. it's such a sad but beautiful song and really gives almost a lettergate situation of one side of byler trying to reach the other during the months they spend apart between season 3 and season 4 and if they did use it i would lose my shit.

3- alone by heart

people are theorizing in favor of this song being a part of the season 4 soundtrack and i mean it when i say that if i heard that opening piano of alone i would die. it would be the end of my life. i used to listen to this song on my ipod as an eight year old. it's always been one of my favorites. i don't really know how they would use it and i almost feel like the sound of it doesn't fit in with a lot of the other music in the show in regards to that 80s music sound, but i would die if they did.

4- africa by toto

AFRICA PLEASE COME BACK BABY I MISS YOU!! another song that's easily in my top ten favorite songs of all time, i think this would be such a cute callback to season 1 and would be the equivalent of hedwig dying as far as childhood-ending-events for me because it would just be such a beautiful full circle moment. i would scream.

5- summer of 69 by bryan adams

if we get to see anything taking place during summer (which, problematically, i kind of hope we don't) i need this playing on every radio in town. it just gives such it 2017 stranger things season three in a way that would break (and fill) my heart in such a beautiful way for the last stranger summer. i also think that if this was the song we decided to make viral from the new season's soundtrack that we'd all have a lot of fun.

6- take me home tonight by eddie money

i love the intro to this song like no other. it's tense and weird like the into to sunglasses at night which was used in season 1 in such a perfect way that also reminds me of the vibe of the show. a little tense and scary sounding, but at the heart (or chorus) of it a fun show about positive and beautiful characters.

7- heroes by david bowie

duh.

8- CRAZY TRAIN BY OZZY OSBOURNE!!!!!!!!

DUFFERS. MASTER OF PUPPETS AND NO CRAZY TRAIN? i fuck with crazy train like no other. i'm fully convinced that if i listened to that song on repeat for a few hours it would inspire the willpower in me to climb all of mt. everest in a day. it's such a perfect song for a show like this. i can picture nancy shooting something to crazy train in the background. somebody is frantically running around too. i think they should have just used this instead of master of puppets because the guitar in crazy train is way better (sorry not sorry) but it's never to late to right your wrongs, duffers!

[sin-cognito]

Kustard week 2023 day 2: the Little Mermaid

Wordcount: 1739

~The little mermaid left her life and fortune behind so she could be with the Prince~

@kustardweek

READ ON AO3

Being a scientist at SOUL, Sans had theorized a formula to calculate the mathematical relation between wealth and his numerous fucked up relationships.

Sans himself wasn't rich per say, but his father was. Obscenely so. Sans had thus experienced from a relatively early age what it was like to try to date when you are the heir to one of the top 10 richest families in the country. He could do a whole presentation about it, with excel sheets and google docs and all. First there were the wealthy datemates. He naively thought that money wouldn't be a problematic topic if he was to date someone from the same privileged background as him. So wrong. So many of them were stuck up assholes who didn't have an inkling about their own privileges. With them, Sans couldn't even go buy a bottle of ketchup at the grocery store, they always had the urge to flaunt their (usually parents') wealth and hire a professional cook to fix Sans some high quality ketchup sauce made from scratch, when all he wanted was to go grab a burg from Grillbz'.

Then he naturally turned his attention to people from a more regular background, trying not to worry about the influence his overwhelmingly bigger wallet could have over them. He very quickly realized this was a mistake, as he was either seen as a walking ATM machine, or as a condescending asshole, no matter what he did. If he hid the fact that he was rich, his date would be mad, and if he was open about the sum of money that was in his bank account, his date would get insecure about their own lack of money and end up resenting him for it. It was a lose-lose situation for him.

Around the time he reached 20, Sans decided to go for a third option: anonymity. He began to hang around dating sites and forums about science, and found actual friends who would appreciate him for himself, regardless of who his father was. And boy was that nice.

It turned even nicer when he 'met' Red, another science aficionado with whom he got along very quickly. They would spend hours and hours chatting about science, shows, their lives, and it was no surprise to anyone in their friend group when they developed feelings for each other and started dating, even if it was strictly online at the beginning.

Red lived on the other side of the country and had a demanding job. He was high hierarchy in a big company that he was legally forbidden to tell Sans the name of, but that was enough to assuage Sans' fears: finally he had met someone like him. Red was wealthy but down to earth, and learning that made Sans all the more eager to meet him.

Finally one day Sans summoned the courage to ask Red if they could meet, and he was elated to learn that Red had already started making plans to be able to visit Sans before the end of the year. They met during the Gyftmas vacations for the first time, and those memories would live forever in Sans' SOUL. Everything was perfect. Red had booked a suite in a fancy hotel that even Sans was impressed by, they went to the best fine dining places in the city, did shopping in high end stores where nothing's under the 5 digits price tag. But more than that, Sans enjoyed listening to Red's voice for real, feeling his hand in Sans', abandoning himself to a night of burning passion with Red. Sex had never been as amazing as that night and Sans knew then that Red was the one.

That trip was unfortunately too short, and Red had to go back to work, promising he'd do his best to find a way to take another vacation together the next year. It unfortunately didn't happen, but they managed to find a good time to see each other the year after that. This time, Red took Sans abroad for a trip that he entirely covered. Sans suspected that, had they not met, Red would've become a sugar daddy to a low income student or something, seeing as he always rushed to pay for anything Sans expressed the faintest interest in. Honestly it was cute.

When their 5th anniversary approached, Sans decided that he didn't want to live away from Red anymore. Even if he had to drop his career, family and everything else, he was determined to move with Red on the other side of the country. He wanted to wake up in his bed every morning and make him burnt pancakes before sending him off to work with a kiss on his teeth.

Sans' father made a big deal out of this decision. He wanted his oldest son to take up after him in running the family company, and he was distrusting of a skeleton monster that his son had met online, even though Sans had already met Red twice by that point. Gaster was just from another generation. He kept reminding Sans that he was making a mistake and that he would not contribute to this silly idea, and even promised to cut Sans off and write him out of his will, but Sans had made up his mind. He would be with Red, even if that meant cutting off his father from his life. Announcing his plan to Papyrus had been much harder, but there was nothing that would deter Sans.

On his 26th birthday, Sans packed his bags, said goodbye to his disapproving father and hugged his brother, before he made his way to the airport.

After a long flight, he finally arrived in the city Red lived in. After a lot of digging and asking around, Sans had figured out where Red worked, one of the tallest building in the city, made of glass and steel and that reeked of wealth. Just like the kind his father worked in. Sans made his way inside and went straight up to the reception.

"hi, i don't have any appointment but could you tell Underfell Red that Undertale Sans is here?" He asked the employee. "he'll know who i am."

The employee's smile twitched. "You're here for Red? I don't think you need an appointment to see him... Would you like me to page him for you?"

Sans was taken aback that she'd so casually drop a higher up's last name like that, but he shrugged it off and nodded. She invited him to get a seat by the waiting area and he thanked her. He only had to wait a couple minutes before a back door opened and a familiar skeleton made his way to the receptionist to ask why he had been called. The employee replied something but Sans couldn't focus on much of anything when he saw what Red was wearing: dirty beige overalls with a belt packed with all kinds of tools, hammers and screwdrivers mostly, as well as a couple rags that were loosely tied around the belt. Sans could see dark stains of what seemed to be some sort of oily stuff all across the back of his skull, like he had had his head stuck in a piece of machinery all morning and hadn't had the time to clean it up.

Red was very much the opposite of the elegant prince he had been when they had met irl a couple years back.

"red?" He asked in a small, broken voice.

Red startled and whipped around, only now noticing his small boyfriend. Red's mouth worked in silence for a few seconds before all life seemingly left him and his shoulders sagged in the most depressed and resigned stance Sans had ever seen.

"i'm sorry..." He blurted out before grabbing Sans' hand in his and pulling him quickly through the back door.

They went through a few corridors, until they reached what seemed to be a small and stinky break room.

"red, what's going on?" Sans asked, utterly confused.

"i lied to you. i'm not a ceo or a higher-up, i'm not even a real employee here. i fix the lights," Red blurted out, looking at anything but Sans, who blinked a few times while Red's words sank in.

"so you're... not... rich?" Was oddly the first question that came to mind.

"no. i lied because i wanted to impress you."

"but... when you visited..." Sans started, unable to finish his sentence but Red apparently didn't need him to.

"i worked my ass off to have enough money to spend on you," he sighed as he collapsed on a chair. "i borrowed money, from the bank, from friends and relatives, from anywhere i could. put a mortgage on my home too."

"why?" The single word was breathed out so quietly it was a wonder Red heard him at all.

"because i... i just wanted to give you nice things..." Red replied before he bent forward and took his skull in his hands. "but now i'm struggling to give back all the money that i owe, i have nothing to my name and i sleep in my car," he grunted. "just, give me like, a couple more years and i can get more money, and then we can pretend you never saw me here and i'll be able to get you everything you want."

Sans went to stand right in front of Red. He knelt down before him and gently pried off Red's hands from his skull. He needed to see Red's face and eyelights for his next question.

"red, be honest. you lied about your situation. did you also lie about your feelings for me?"

Red's answer was immediate and final. It left no room for debate.

"no. i love you. i would've never done this if it wasn't for you."

Red's deadpan reply and his honest expression made Sans chuckle, before he threw himself into Red's arms.

"you idiot. i love you too," he said, his SOUL beating happily in his chest when Red returned the hug. "i left my father and his fortune behind so we could be together. i don't care that you have no money, red. i don't care about anything as long as i can be with you."

Red's embrace tightened around him and Sans realized that his love formula had been wrong all along.

All he needed was Red.

[gorehound-darkshipper]

INTRODUCTION!

Do not follow if you are 15 or under. Do not follow if you are 20 and over. Both of these are for my own comfort and safety, thank you. OP is a proshipper and darkshipper. If that isn't fine with you, either block or scroll away This account will explore dark and sensitive themes through the limitless playground that is fiction. These themes include but are not limited to - sexual abuse (including rape, csa, and possibly cocsa) - incest - abusive relationships in general - sexual themes - obsession + the yandere trope - mindbreak / mindrape - if its not allowed to be discussed in church but probably happens behind closed doors of said church, it'll probably be discussed here PLEASE do not speculate, theorize, or discuss who I could be. If you do find out who I am, which I know will happen eventually, please do not connect that blog to this one. Thank you.

Actual Introduction ↓

Hello hello! I hope you're having a good day. My name, or at least what I go by on here, is Hound. But I'll accept any name that can be vaguely linked to a canine, honestly. this is a side account that I travel to in the wee hours of the night to dump all of my freakish thoughts and horrifying situations I put my favorite characters into, because the average lifespan of a human being is 77 years and you might as well subtract that by 30 for my dumbass, and life is too short for me to keep all of these thoughts to myself. That, and I wish to make friends with fellow freaks. I will not disclose my age for my own privacy. All I will give away is that I am old enough to drive and get a job, but I still have a 'teen' at the end of my age. You can refer to me with they/them.

MY LABELS

As I said before, I am a proshipper and a darkshipper. Being a proshipper simply means that I believe harassment is not okay, especially over fiction, especially over shipping. It means that I believe that fiction is not 1 to 1 with reality and that most forms of fiction do not hurt anyone and should be allowed to exist. For more information on what exactly proship means, I'd recommend checking out the caard below. It's very concise and well written :)

And as for darkshipper, it means that I take a liking to dynamics in fiction that are abusive, contain dark subject matter, or are otherwise problematic in nature. These can include, but aren't limited to: - abused x abuser / abusive ships in general - incestuous pairings - child x adult / teen - ships that break canon sexualities - ships that contain heavy or triggering content Minus the fourth one, you can basically expect to see all of these on this account.

Being a darkshipper does not mean you approve of these things in real life, obviously. Just that you find them interesting to explore in fiction for whatever reason. (there's also comshipper, which to my knowledge means basically the same thing, but darkshipper sounds cooler >:) lmao)

If you have a problem with me or the content that I post, I suggest that you block my account, block the tag "hound barks at the wall", or simply scroll away. If you are rude, ignorant, and accusatory, I will simply block you. Mind your own business and I'll mind mine.

As these labels suggest, I am also anti-harassment and anti-censorship. Which should speak for themselves I am still very new to the proship/darkship community, so if I make any mistakes, please (politely) let me know. Above all, I am a fucking freak and this account can be summarized as the living embodiment of all of your worst intrusive thoughts. So this is your last chance to back out lmao.

MY INTERESTS

I like a lot of things! Most of which I'll probably post eventually on this account, but my main two fandoms that I'll post about here are Danganronpa Despair Time and Milgram. They are my two biggest hyperfixations and I don't think I will ever shut up about them. And I love to put the characters from these pieces of media into horrific situation. A few of the ships I'll probably post about here:

cuevascest - charles cuevas x elliot cuevas (drdt) elliwhit - elliot cuevas x whit young (drdt) xanvid - xander matthews x david chiem (drdt) (actually probably any ship involving david or whit) 0310 - fuuta kajiyama x kotoko yuzuriha (milgram) *my interpretation of their relationship is very very abusive lmao 0006 - es x mahiru shiina (milgram) (this list will be updated as time goes on)

if you like any of these things (even if its just the fandoms), please interact with this account!! I don't bite (probably)

EXTRA NOTES

- despite my name I probably wont be posting gore here lmao, I just wanted to connect with the harley poe song + veronika since she's my mascot - Nothing I post is going to be outright smut because I'm not comfortable writing that, but my posts will often cover themes of sexual abuse and the ways sex can turn unhealthy and toxic as I find it incredibly interesting in fiction. Said posts will more so be about the psychological side of said themes rather than actual sexual action. - posting will probably be very inconsistent, since this account is mainly for my freakish thoughts, and I can't control my thoughts - I have said this like five times already but I cannot stress enough if you are uncomfortable and/or triggered with what I post please please please block me, block my tag, or scroll away. I really do not want to ruin someone's day. - and also once again, please do not speculate, theorize, or discuss who I am. Please. This is an anonymous account for a reason. That should be it, methinks! If any of what I said sparked your interest, feel free to stick around!

[heartofanenigma]

I've missed you toooo :( I don't know what came over me yesterday - I somehow got knocked out for 14 hours straight and ended up waking up at 3p.m. (don't ask how). Sorry for not sending an ask sooner :(( hehehehe I'm sure you bake amazing cookies!! You're too sweet and lovely for your creations to not be the same.

Awww nooo don't talk about your hamster eyes like that :(( you're seriously offending the hamster community right now you know. Tsk tsk. You're going to be canceled at this rate.

Also PLEASEEE TELL ME ABOUT THE ANONYMOUS CAKE CURIOSITY WILL KILL THE CAT

Sometimes I feel like i could just yap for hrs with you (my friends love me but by god i yap too much, a certified yap machine). Hey it happens, once you start doing the eepy, you just eep. That's axiom of eepy theorized by yours truly. I hope you feel refreshed tho!!

There you go again being an absolute smooth criminal. No actually once I tried to bake a cake (which was perfectly sweet according to me ok) but some complained it could use more sugar.

Sigh they're gonna cancel me and bully me off this app I know :((.

Finneeee I'll tell you about the cake, on Wednesday during lunch break a classmate of mine brought me this melty choco chip lava cake and told me someone asked her to give it to me? And me and my best friend thought maybe people are done with my problematic ass and poisoned it. But I ate every single bit of it anyway cuz tough luck trying to kill me with poisoned food. But no whoever sent that cake i hope they know that shit made me bawl at night and now that incident is a fond memory and a beloved journal entry.

[sophiapathic]

Sk8: The Infinity - A Take on Love

Because my six unfinished assignments can wait until I throw this into the void, scream for five hours and after my voice gets hoarse, I resort to watching the beach episode on loop until next Saturday.

This was entirely sparked by the recap episode, which really pressed the reak havoc and theorize button in my brain. I am truly losing my grip on reality. Help. I apologize in advance, creatures of Tumblr. 

Me right now:

Anyways... 

I saw people mention here and there screaming that “we need canon relationships and they will get trust issues if a romance isn’t confirmed by the end of the series”. I think that mindset is harmful to have in this case. You can’t really avoid being disappointed if you get into the series expecting it to deliver on your wishes of gay romances. So, this might be controversial, but stay with me please. The anime and manga are both confirmed to be based primarily about the characters themselves and of course the sport -skating. I was hoping to take a closer look at what the series intends to do with certain dynamics and relationships according to yours truly. I also want explain my reasoning behind it not being queerbaiting, though it being inherently queer-coded, through the current lense of the canon.

Sk8: The Infinity is unquestionably a love story.

We need to state the genres this series is in, because some of us tend to forget. It is in fact not a shounen-ai, not a yaoi, not a romance, not even a josei. Say it with me it is a series in: COMEDY and SPORTS.

(Source is the official US Sk8 website.) The spotlight is udoubtedly on skating and what it means. Another important highlight of the show is how the definition of the sport relates to the characters, and how vastly different they are from what we expect. For example, when we see Shadow first, we pigeonhole him into this vulgar indecent rock and roll persona, only to find out later that he is actually a stweetheart at a flower shop. Joe is another very good case study. When we first see him we think of him as a womanizer muscle-head, later we find out he has a heart of gold and is very emotionally intelligent. We’re also quick to judge Miya as the cold, unfeeling prodigy then we discover how lonely and normal he is on the inside. And so on and so on. 

The show continues to defy our expectations of what each character should be like. In a way it is about breaking the conventional stereotypical roles we subconsciously assign to certain looks. We see that even in anime, multifaceted characters can exist without distrupting or damaging the delicate dynamics of a traditional sports anime. We successfully established the second focal point of the series as disproving stereotypes and presenting strong, diverse and unexpected personalities.

How about the defition of skating? What does it mean in the context of Sk8: The Infinity then? Where does a love story come into the picture? Skating is repeatedly described as a ritual of love within the anime, an idea that our villian, Ad*m, is obessed with. In a sense skating is a language of love canonically.

Then skating itself is love. Throughout the series we see varied styles of skating therefore different ways of expressing love, affection. We get to experience several metaphorical ways of “being in love” through characters skating with each other. Each dynamic shows us a type of love. Healthy, disfunctional, outright abusive. 

The way Reiki teaches Langa to skate can be interpreted as a direct metaphor for someone learning to love again after losing a person close to them. Langa’s father has died and Reiki literally brings him out of his shell again. It can also be interpreted as a queer kid’s experience of a world of romance that feels similar to his previous one, that being snowboarding, yet it still being new and different. Skateboarding. When due to Reiki Langa’s potential is discovered and his hunger for more and more develops, especially next to Ad*m, Reiki’s main frustration stems from them not being well-matched or on equal footing anymore. He feels like he cannot give Langa what he needs anymore. Which would obviously go againts the literal description of a healthy romance. Two people with mutual respect who both bring equal assets to the table. He feels like he needs to catch-up to be with Langa again. The only thing he doesn’t consider is Langa’s deep appreciation of him and the fact that literally he was the one who helped Langa experince the feeling of love again.

Kojiro and Kaoru’s relationships, to me, is very much representative of two people  wanting to be in each other’s presence, but due to their different language of love, miscommunicating horribly. Them bantering and insulting each other is the only way they know what to do with the other. The only way they can ensure the other’s attention and eyes are on them. This has worked so far. They are literal opposites, but both have a very clear definition of their form of love. To Joe skating, or love itself, is about the feeling and going with the flow. Being spontaneous. Whereas for Cherry, every move needs to be calculated and executed perfectly in order to be “efficient”. Their frustration comes from both wanting different things from the other, but not communicating their need properly. Despite this, they stick together due to a magnetic pull they obviously feel towards the other. The attraction is there, the trust is there, they are even well-matched in skill as we see them neck-to-neck constantly. They could give each other what the other wants. Only if they could express themselves well... This is why Joe pushes Reiki towards reconciling with Langa. he wants them to not fall into the same trap of not stating their  needs and thoughts properly.

Now Ad*m and Langa are obviously problematic and I don’t really want to have to explain, honestly guys. I really don’t  (since I have trauma regarding this subject), but I need to go into this a little bit. This is a textbook toxic predatory relationship. Where the older, twisted, damaged person, has an obsession with a young, outstading child. He wants to lead him into “Paradise” and show his “Eve” what love is really about. (Ain’t that disgusting you guys...) His form of love is inflicting pain, so I really can’t imagine a scenario where he and his “Eve” live happily ever after and everything is fine and dandy. He needs someone who he can torture. He literally is looking for someone who can handle his way of expressing affection, his “love hug”, who has the same type of crazy eyes for adrenaline and danger. His Eve. In his distorted mind, this all makes sense and Langa is that someone he was looking for thoughout the years. The problem is, he disregards Langa’s side where the relationship becomes problematic.

Cherry and Ad*m during their younger years seems to be a very innocent infatuation on Kaoru’s end. It is a one-sided relationship where someone is in love with the idea of a person long gone. They were discovering the world of skating, or the world of love together with Ad*m taking the lead. Cherry immediately became infatuated with him, wanted to learn his love language, wanted to be at the same level he was. It probably started very innocent. At first, Ad*m being gentle, because that’s how Tadashi was with him too, then after whatever happened between those two, Ad*m, disappointed in the way of love, or skating, Tadashi showed him, returned to what his aunts taught him. Maybe after injuring Kaoru with the “love hug”, therefore eliminating him from being his potential partner, started looking for his “Eve”, gradually became more agressive in love as in skating. Kaoru was distraught and wanted the Ad*m he originally learned love from back. Holding out some hope even years after. Trained to get used to his “love hug”, to literally condition himself to be able to get close to him. Ad*m, however showed Cherry brutally that he truly cannot handle his way of love.

Ad*m and Tadashi. *sighs* As of this post, I don’t really have enough information to give you a good overview of what I see this relationship representing. As far as I can tell Ad*m was abused horribly and to ease the pain and make him forget, Tadashi showed his another way of expressing affection. Skating or love. Basically a first love gone horrible bad, scarring an already abused child and turning them into a monster. Tadashi himself reinstates this during one of the episodes. It was his fault that Ad*m turned out the way he did. Their love slowly became strongly abusive throughout the years. Tadashi is stuck in it because he feels like he deserves it. This is a metaphor for  dangers of an emotionally and physically abusive relationship, where one person feels responsible and the other is using power. Tadashi’s guilt keeps him next to his master and he even endures abuse, now he is trying to break out and show Ad*m he messed up and I think this could potentially be a good representation of how difficult that process truly is. 

As far as Reiki’s, Miya’s, Shadow’s skating goes. Their main arc relating to love is first and foremost learning to accept themselves and aprecciating their uniqe way and style of skating. Only after can they become people who can truly be accomplished in love/skating (in Miya’s case I’m obviously talking about platonic feelings). Each of them had a preconception of their persona in love/skating, which gets questioned heavily throughout the series. Miya gets defeated, Shadow’s soft side gets discovered, Reiki... well. I get sad. :c Even though he taught someone to love again, to appreciate life again, he ended up discovering how dissatisfied he truly is with himself... These three all need to learn to love every aspect of themselves to reach fulfillment and to really experience healthy human relationships.

Sk8: The Infinity is unquestionably a love story, without explicitly being a romance, meaning that it is a tale about love, both romantic, platonic and everything inbetween through a queer-coded lens, showing both dysfunctional, abusive and healthy relationships, ways to express emotions and even delves into self-love and the idea of nature versus nurture in the villian’s case.

That is why I, personally don’t scream for a canon couple. To me, the show gets its main point about affection and love across, without making any of these relationships explicitly stated. Not to mention that it does justice to both of its assigned genres. Comedy and Sports as well. Yeah sure, I wouldn’t complain, but I think these dynamics are more than satisfying to watch, and much deeper than bishounens wanting to bang each other, which is, in my opinion, inherently sexualized. If they want, yeah they can confirm, make it canon without forcing it to be a center storyline. Hell, I would even be happy about it. I would clap with all of us. BUT, as the series currently is, I really see it taking the other route because of the above. This way audiences who want a yaoi or ikemen going at it, won’t be disappointed with the series when they find doesn’t revolve around that, straight viewers will just find it flamboyant, and people who look for subtext and want to read between the lines will certainly do that with the amount of crumbs and hints the writers gave us. 

We don’t need outright, written in black and white gay representation in Sk8 to experience very real types of love. The queer theme is secondary to me, just like queerness is, in most people’s lives. Yeah sure, it is a big thing, but not the only attribute a person has. My life doesn’t revolve around my queerness. I rarely talk about it. If I was a main character this would be a side-arc. Just like Sk8 doesn’t revolve around the characters coming out. It’s just them living their lives and possibly being queer while doing so. If you look at it this way, it is almost normalizing attraction between same-sex people by just showing it as regular love. If you can, why not interpret it this way, so it can be a liberating experience instead of a disappointing one.

Please don’t attack me! I am fragile and this is only my opinion. c:  *crawls back into her hole*

[this-user-is-always-bored]

Thoughts On The Snowgrave Route

[ spoilers for deltarune chapter 2 !!! it’s free go play it smh my head ]

i know i haven’t been active much recently, but my finals’ve been really fucking me up, so i just spend any free time playing games tbh. which lead to me getting my ass up to actually finish playing the snowgrave route at chapter 2. i’m still reeling from the afterglow of it, so words might go a bit funky

firstly, i LOVE this route. unlike the genocide route in undertale, where the game actively punishes you for even attempting it in the first place (heavy-grinding enemies for LV, sans’ fight and chara’s speeches) the snowgrave route though may give you tons of chances to abort it, it doesn’t truly try to guilt trip/shame you for playing the game this way, at least in my opinion. you mostly spend time running around just freezing enemies, which ends up being more rewarding in retrospect because it makes your playthrough a lot faster- therefore being a viable speedrunning technique. yes, there are true route speedruns out there, but said speedruns usually average out to almost an hour, whereas snowgrave cuts down 15-20 minutes for the run. and so, this route is actually more useful than the true route in terms of gameplay.

in terms of story, though ? depends on who you ask, but personally i find it so fascinating. as a writer, i always try to dip my toes into unfamiliar territories, and remove my own personal judgement against what said territories are. which often means i dive into topics which i can’t portray, simply because it’s out of character. but i really love to just explore concepts of psychological horror, manipulation and overall problematic concepts in fiction- as it shows what the human mind is truly capable of conveying in art, no matter the shape or form. still, there are something i generally object to, of which i will not name here for appropriate-content rules. ah right, back to deltarune-

here’s the thing, the snowgrave route doesn’t actually change much (plot-wise, anyways) for the chapter in generally. other from berdly possibly being dead/comatose, the ending largely remains the same, which ties into the ‘two paths, one destination’ theme Toby’s working towards. the reason i find snowgrave to be a ‘better’ story is not because it’s more ‘happy’ or ‘good’, but because it brings more complex concepts to the table. if the player/soul and kris are separate beings and the soul can seemingly talk without need for a vessel then how did they get bound together in the first place ? was the empty vessel created in chapter 1 related to this ? what happened to des/december, and why was her disappearance traumatic for noelle ? what is ralsei planning, and why is he finding time to tell only kris and not us ?- these questions raise discussion and theorizing, which makes a story feel that much more alive and mysterious. i’m not sure if every other party member is going to get their own ‘weird’ route, as there are already theories of either toriel or undyne joining you in the Dark World. along with this, i wonder if these developments would change the party members in the next chapters, since if you attempt all ‘weird’ routes, your team might be changing to fit how your relationships’ll morph.

okay okay. here’s the long as fuck analysis of snowgrave kriselle and how they got forcefully married to eachother- in which would probably not be that long since i usually overestimate myself. as i said, the snowgrave route revolves around kris being controlled by the soul to manipulate noelle into committing mass murder. aside from that, this route actively focuses on kriselle (or player x noelle) as a relationship more than the true route (which has suselle as the main ship) and the way that relationship is portrayed is incredibly fascinating. it’s clear that no party want into this relationship, but a force beyond their understanding forces them together, and ‘marries’ them off. it’s not much of a literal sense, but more of bounding to fearful souls together. we know that kris is often portrayed as a ‘knightly’ type, with their Dark World outfit having a sword, the plated armor, the fakeout that tries to trick players into thinking they’re literally ‘The Knight’ at the end of chapter 2. and what do knights do ? they go save princesses. noelle is made to be a damsel in distress type when you first find her in the Dark World, having to rescue her from Queen’s grasp. along with her being the only character so far that has a long dress often associated with royalty/angel imagery, you can see how kris and noelle feel like a duo of ‘knight and princess’ from a designing and story standpoint. this makes it so that the soul forcing kris to manipulate noelle is that of a twisted version of a king marrying his son off to a princess. this gets shown more and more as ‘marriage’ imagery appears in the route (the addison calling them ‘something else’, the constant appearance of rings and how they work as the push from the player to force kris closer/manipulate noelle further)- it’s a pretty clear way of showing that kris and noelle are now ‘bound’ to eachother, almost like how the soul is bound to kris’ body. i’d imagine this route might lock suselle out of the game later on, but who knows with Toby, honestly.

wow, uh. that’s.. really long lmao- anyways thankers for reading my midnight ted talk see you next week !!

[familyagrestefanblog]

Me having a very emotional journey this morning and rationalizing my feelings about the “Strike Back” trailer through rambling:

~No seriously, I mean it. This post is gonna be a whole short emotional roller coaster I wrote over the course of 2 hours. It starts out very negative and bitter (and I legitimately apologize for the parts that are salty but I feel like I should keep those included because its not too much imo and it was simply part of my emotional process through all of this) but I open up more and more the longer  this goes and I kinda came to terms with my emotions regarding the trailer and my actual problem with it. I feel MUCH better after writing this hence why I don't wanna delete the beginning and just shear this emotional journey I had this morning. Maybe it helps other people as well:

Okay, apparently there are only 4 scenes left of "Strike back" that haven't been spoiled yet and at this point I don't even dare to hope that Adrien/Chat Noir will have some kind of actual relevance beyond being Ladybugs emotional support kitty again like always.

I swear to God I have never seen a piece of media (besides Marvel with Loki) that hated its deuteragonist so much. Every motivation I had to analyze, theorize or engage with these characters is just gone right now.

I honestly really kinda don't know what to do right now. I've been taking such a huge interest in Adriens emotional connections with his villainous/questionable family for almost 5 years now that now the possibility of all of it being rendered absolutely meaningless, because I guess Ladybug girlbossing herself through this family's story when she barely has any relevance to it or any interesting or deeper emotional connection with any of them is just so much more meaningful for this show than Adriens story.

This is honestly leaving me really empty right now. The possibility that this fascinating, messed up family, with Adrien as it's emotional heart piece to connect them all in a legitimately meaningful way, could get reduced to nothing but bland seperated tools for Marinettes/Ladybugs story to push around and only engage with them on like the most shallow levels imaginable is just leaving me. so. fucking. EMPTY. Right now.

Somebody please talk to me about this and give me some kind of legitimate hope to hold onto. I feel like I wasted 5 years of emotional investment just for cheap female empowerment I've seen so much better and MUCH less problematic in so much other media to punch me in the face and say "no <3". I'm a woman too, where is MY empowerment in all of this???

I just don't know right now. On the one hand I wanna lay down, come to terms with this and start grieving these positive emotions and fulfillment the Agreste family gives me when they are actually utilized PROPERLY so I can move on hopefully soon, but on the other hand I'm of course very much aware that the episode hasn't aired yet and that I absolutely should not be laying down this kind of judgment just yet.

I have still something at the back of my mind I will hold onto til next week that could legitimately save this show for me, but I just feel so drained, empty and lied to that Im not sure how much I can actually engage with this hope on just a theoretical level til then. I need some damn Canon validation and while up til "Risk" I still absolutely SAW all the gigantic puzzle pieces fall into place, everything that "Strike back" seems to be about now just pulls the rug from underneath my feet in a way that leaves me so shell-shocked that I feel like I'm legitimately giving into delusions trying to mental gymnastic everything I saw back into this theory. Which, dont get me wrong, would actually not be as irrational of me to do as I definitely make it seem right now. Look, if I have an overarching theory for who knows how long already to which everything from episode 1, both specials, on several meta and show structure levels, all through all of season 4 and ESPECIALLY "Risk" just leads up and builds up 176% PERFECTLY to, then I have the feeling I wasn't being fucking delusional about all of this!

I don't quite understand why the "Strike Back" trailer just breaks me so much right now. It is not rational of me now to emotionally just throw all of this away before the episode has even aired. I guess it's just the fear of everything I worked on and was invested in for the last 5 years of Miraculous turning out to be... wrong with "Strike Back". Which everything currently just makes it seem to be the case. That I WAS just highly delusional this entire time and I spend YEARS of emotional investment into something that wasn't there all along. Which is honestly irrational of me to think right now. Because the fact that I have been able to keep this theory since 2017 before the Queens Battle or Frozer even aired, because even though I had to make huge adjustments to the theory as the show went on (which is natural, this is how theorizing works) nothing in the show and the narrative each and every episode portrayed ever, and I mean EVER, has EVER invalidated me in the game changing CORE of the theory. And ESPECIALLY "Risk" along with everything that happened in season 4, even though it was painful and infuriating for me to watch this season play it out like this til "Risk", has EVER validated me more in my Theory! I'm being very emotional and highly irrational right now omg. I'm legitimately scared of the possibility of how heartbroken and disappointed being proven WRONG after all of this would make me huh? This is legit fear im dealing with right now huh? Oh my God. Is this a good or a bad sign? I don't know it feels like both lol

I don't know how to end this. I'm just going through all the stages of grief and like... mental rationality right now. Send help and milk please.

[redrobin-detective]

Side Effects of ghost powers

Hey all! I’m writing a DP fic called Side Effects exploring the physical and later mental/emotional impact of Danny initially getting his ghost powers. As an ICU stepdown nurse for 3 years, I wanted to view Danny’s accident through a slightly more realistic, medical lens. 

Note: I had to fudge a good amount because Danny really should have fucking died and there’s no getting around that.

I do recommend you read the fic first before reading this as there’s some spoilers. Or if you don’t care you can read on. So! The two factors we are looking at regarding the accident are: ecto-contamination secondary to electrocution. 

Electrocution

I was forced to downplay a lot of the severe symptoms of electrocution because, again, a bad enough shock will kill someone. My hand-wavey explanation is simply that the portal didn’t activate at a deadly voltage so he got a good shock but not enough to be fatal. I guess.

Muscle weakness/spasms: intermittent muscle spasms are common from shocks, muscles being activated by electricity and reacting to the lingering impulses. Danny’s is transient but quite annoying for a time. But his muscles are gonna be weak and achy af for days if not weeks after from the massive contractions caused by the shock and the after effects. Sensory issues: lots of things can cause nerve damage, including electrocution so Danny is experiencing some pretty severe neuropathy primarily manifesting with numbness and tingling throughout his body. His entire skin and peripheral nervous system got fried so while its mostly numb it’s also super sensitive for a bit of time causing massive pain and discomfort from your body tingling like a thousand bee stings. It’s worst in the hours after the accident but is something that never quite really goes back to normal both from the electrocution and his ghost half taking over and generally dulling his sense of touch.

Hearing/Vision loss: Like skin/nerves, your sensory organs in your eyes and ears would be affected by such a severe and allover electric shock. Danny has some blurred and occasionally double vision from his eyes not properly receiving/understanding input. Hearing loss is common following electricity given how delicate the inner ear is but I just give Danny some nasty tinnitus (ear ringing) for a bit. This inner ear problem also massively throws off his balance when he’s trying to move post accident. These factors are exacerbated by the ecto-contamination and mostly fade in the days following the accident before going away as his superhuman healing kicks in.

Heart Arrhythmia: an irregular heartbeat caused by the electrical impulses that control basal heartrate not coordinating they they should for a variety of reasons, in this case, massive electric shock. Danny would be somewhat aware of it, its not exactly painful exactly but you can just feel that your heart isn’t beating right. Secondary side effects are dizziness, chest pain, fatigue and shortness of breath. This resolves almost entirely when Danny stabilizes

Cognitive issues: Danny got his brains a little scrambled in addition to his molecules being rearranged. The first third of the story Danny is very clearly NOT thinking straight and Tucker/Sam should not have left him alone. Shocks can cause things like irrational emotional behaviors from hormone release along with memory loss and depression. He constantly waxes and wanes in mood and opinions on what to do in the story and never comes to a true decision that, damn lucky for him, worked out on its own.

Ecto-Contamination

Alright so Danny got massively shocked, sucks right but people live through that all the time. Ecto-contamination is more tricky (not only cause its made up and I had to think about what symptoms it would theoretically produce) but because the effects are more life threatening. It’s also irreversible, once he was contaminated it was only something that could be survived not cured. 

So I theorized that Danny got shocked by the accident and was slowly dying of ecto-contamination and was pretty much clinically dead for a brief moment there, the death was enough for the large quantity of ectoplasm in him to immediately coalesce into a ghost (Phantom). So Danny was mostly dead but not quite, I’ve coded and brought back enough people to know it can be reversed somewhat. Danny becomes Phantom but the sudden stable formation of the ectoplasm into what its supposed to be, a ghost, caused his body to stop fighting the ectoplasm as a foreign invader and become part of the self. His core finished forming in his chest and his body started back up again, his ghost safely nestled in his once again living body as he slowly comes to grips with his actual death experience. 

Nausea/Vomiting: I likened the idea of ecto-contamination to radiation poisoning, something that is essentially the antithesis to life. One of the first symptoms of radiation is n/v which is also why it’s one of the first overt symptoms Danny has. He was heavily electrocuted/irradiated and his body wants to expunge it all. As for the ectoplasm/blood he vomits, that’s the next section. 

Gastrointestinal (GI) Bleed: So I was a little mean here. When one vomits up blood (or in this case ectoplasm/blood mix) it has to come from somewhere and a lot of the times it’s a GI Bleed. These are nasty, they need to be either cauterized or surgically repaired not to mention replenishing the blood lost. Fanon says that ectoplasm is at least mildly corrosive to humans so it is here, as it’s bonding to him, it’s literally eating him very slowly from the inside out which is causing a great deal of his internal pain. It’s not enough to be immediately life threatening but would kill him eventually. He developed some nasty bleeding ulcers in his stomach which let in blood and ectoplasm which were expunged. Danny’s core formed overnight and began healing the damage it had previously been causing but Dan is still gonna be vomiting excess blood/ectoplasm not to mention having black, tarry stools for at least a few days afterwards.

Hypothermia/Tremors: Hypothermia is when the body hits 95F/35C which Danny is just above at the start of the chapter. Danny initially starts shaking really bad (rigors) but as his body temperature cools further his shaking slows and eventually stops, a sure sign that the body is rapidly losing the fight to hypothermia and will likely die soon without immediate intervention. This is caused not only by the ectoplasm but his ice core shakily starting to form inside of him. Once he fully turns half ghost his hypothermia doesn’t change but it just no longer negatively affects him (I say Danny hovers naturally around 96-95F/35-33C getting much colder as Phantom at baseline. His body still can be damaged by going too cold but that’s a whole other post.) 

Incoherency/Hallucinations: I mentioned in the electrocution section that Danny is more than a little addled and the contamination didn’t help in that regard. Not only is he not thinking clearly but he’s also getting a little delirious and seeing things. Common hallucinations I see are: someone in the room watching you, things crawling on the walls, creeping shadows, you’re in the wrong place. I think its a solid 50/50 as far as Danny straight up hallucinating but also becoming more aware of natural ectoplasm that hangs around in the atmosphere. (And before anyone asks, yes Clockwork did come and visit, Danny just doesn’t remember)

Pain: Being electrocuted, irradiated, being dissolved slowly on the inside is enough to cause massive amounts of pain. Danny is 14, he doesn’t understand true pain and probably underestimated how much it would hurt. Once it got bad, it was almost paralyzing so it got to the point where even when he wanted to call for help, he couldn’t move or think past the horrible pain of his every molecule slowly dying and rearranging itself.

Weakness/Fatigue: I don’t really have anything much to add for this section that hasn’t been said in the others. Just the combination of all of the above meant Danny is so incredibly weak and fatigued, this will be problematic in the days and weeks following the accident as his body heals from the stress put on it. Poor boy was probably just getting past the worst of his symptoms by the time of the Lunch lady attack one month in.

Ghost instinct: Going off the medical rant for a minute to go into another aspect of the contamination present in the story, the idea of ectoplasm adding inherent ghostiness to Danny. Its common fanon that all ghosts (through ectoplasm) have their own unique code and language that is just omnipresent and instinctive. Such a massive, body altering dose of ectoplasm saw those things start to leech into Danny even before he became half ghost. The biggest is his fear of being seen, majority of ghosts are completely invisible and don’t want to be seen by the living. As Danny’s suffering and literally dying, he can’t bring himself to confess to his loved ones for very understandable reasons but also this ghostly instinct in the back of his head telling him to hide and get away. Other instincts are a strong attraction to the portal/Ghost Zone, lowkey being able to sense living people around him and a bit of an emotional dampener when Phantom. 

[wereallylostnowbois]

The Mei Hou Wang & Mordecai Connection

What follows is a theory I’ve been forming for some time on the nature of fiends, spoilers for the main quest up to Chapter 25 (part one) and events I'll warn of as I go (it's gonna be a lot of them).

In the first part of chapter 25 Mordecai reveals himself to be the "heart" of Xenos, removed and having formed his own consciousness and personality. I have personal suspicions about where this may be going plot-wise but I will spare you for today. I should note before continuing that the specific word Mordecai uses in the jp version is kokoro, which refers less to the actual organ and more to the spiritual "heart" (the ability for compassion and empathy or however you choose to interpret it). So, yknow, with this information no wonder Xenos is Like That. This is something intriguing that meshes well with a mystery I've been picking at for awhile.

Raid Bosses:

Excuse my jumping from idea to idea with little explanation, its the mental illness, I'll tie everything together in a bit.

Theres something thats been bothering me for a long while about raid boss fiends and it's quite simply how... Sentient they seemed by comparison to your average fiend.

Its well established lore at this point that fiends are just coalesced black mana, and that creatures that can generate black mana can create new fiends (most notably Xenos, Satan, and Morsayati), however theres an alternate manner in which fiends can be formed.

Spoilers for the events Loyalty's Requiem and Kindness and Captivity ahead!

(yeah i know these are old events but there's really no predicting)

In Loyalties Requiem its established (explicitly stated by Pele) that if exposed to black mana for long enough a person can transmute into a fiend, in this specific case the transmutation of King Archeole into a Cyclops fiend. We see a few other instances of this throughout various events but I'll refrain for now.

In Kindness and Captivity its further established that this same phenomena can occur in dragons, with Harle (the fake one) explicitly stating that he utilized black mana to transform the peaceful village protector Sylvia into the living weapon Hypnos.

Now with this out of the way we can sit for hours and theorize about the specific origins of each and every fiend raid boss, however there's one in particular that seems a bit... Off? More so than the others.

See, regardless of how it may or may not have been made, the base factor that connects fiends is their "fiendish" nature, they cause problems, they attack people, they're usually outright violent or, barring that, problematic.

Enter the anomaly: Mei Hou Wang.

Spoilers for Timeworn Torment ahead!

Mei Hou Wang is an interesting case being a peaceful fiend, he's what I'm actually here to talk about today. See recently I've been rereading events so that I can have a better grasp of the lore before it all goes down the drain, and most fiend raid bosses make sense in the context of either being coalesced black mana or a creature corrupted by it, but one so far has stood out to me, that being Mei Hou Wang.

For those of you who haven't read the event and didn't heed my spoiler warning, let me catch you up. Mei Hou Wang is the fiend trapped in the Jin Gu Er, a Qilin relic seen previously in Echoes of Antiquity, at the beginning of Timeworn Torment he breaks loose of the relic, though his memories remain sealed, and he behaves in an overall peaceful and empathetic manner (even going so far as to throw himself in front of a fiend to stop it from hurting a squirrel). Later in the event the seal is fully broken and his memories and powers return, causing him to once more become violent.

This isn't base fiend violence, though.

Long ago, (presumably a few thousand years, seeing as he was sealed in a Qilin relic) Mei Hou Wang was a peaceful fiend, though he had the unfortunate ability to spawn more friends, whether he desired to or not (my working theory on this is that he's just continuously generating enough black mana to make fiends). With this ability he posed a threat to civilization, despite his peaceful nature, and was sealed within the Jin Gu Er, where he began to harbor a hatred and desire for vengeance. Ergo, in both ancient times and in modernity when he's an amnesiac, Mei Hou Wang defaults to being peaceful. This is noted, even in game, to be highly unusual.

So what is Mei Hou Wang really?

Well, my personal theory is that he's another entity like Mordecai, created from some other aspect of Xenos and gifted with some of his ability (Xenos has the ability to generate black mana and create fiends, though he seems to prefer the "terminals", yknow the cube things that are now plot relevant, and I believe its been said now that Xenos is the origin of black mana).

Now my evidence for this comes mostly from Morsayati, who you'll recall is an entity that split from Mordecai and harbors the ability to generate fiends (this ability that persists even after it is sealed and its body strewn across the land, and being the entire reason that Euden goes to fetch a Sacred Shard at the beginning of the game). They share the same ability set which, yeah, I'll admit, there are other fiends out there that can spontaneously generate fiends, but with Mei Hou Wang and Mordecai both originating from the space between worlds and defaulting peaceful but having these abilities at their disposal anyway, I think it's fair to at least insinuate they're connected.

Let me know if I got anything horrifically wrong in my details.

[st-just]

A Setting: The City of Sethennai

Because I’ve spent long enough tinkering on this that I might as well share it with a population of more than a half-dozen potential players. Also it could almost certainly use an editing pass, and I don’t want to lose it all next time my computer dies.

So, a collection of densely packed plot hooks in the shape of a city

City History

The City of Sethennai is quite possibly the oldest city in the world, or at least the oldest still inhabited. When the first Dwarfs and Goliaths fled the Titans for the coast, they found ziggurats already rising from the water and tunnels dug beneath their feet, ruined by some already ancient cataclysm. Supported by fertile soil and full waters, they built their own city over it, and welcomed their own gods to it, a center of resistance to the Titanomarchy that became an empire in its own right.

Centuries passed and power drifted inland, to the mountain palaces of the Titans’ Giant heirs and the divinely appointed heroes who sometimes overthrew them. The City was rich, but peaceful, its soldiers only raised when one princess or another took it as a capital during a civil war. Such was the case when the first ships appeared from the East.

The adventurers from the League of Free Cities had been spurred across the sea by visions of fortune and glory, overwhelming the defenders with armies of goblin slaves and the ability to evoke demons far beyond what they could deal with. Their leader Sethennai proclaimed himself Emperor and renamed the city in his honour, taking it as his capital. After his assassination some years later the ‘empire’ fell into an anarchy it has never quite recovered from, but the name has stuck, and for the two hundred years since wonders and riches have flowed across the eastern ocean while mercenaries and adventurers have poured west in ever greater numbers.

The city’s ruler for the last fifteen years has been Prince Cael, an adventurer universally believed to be supported by the League’s political rivals back East. If so, they got what they paid for – experts and financiers have been imported and sponsored, and trade opened to anyone capable of paying the reasonable import duties.

Until two years ago, he had been the picture of brutal decadence, rousing himself from luxurious hedonism only to brutally deal with any threats to his power. Recently though, he changed – sponsoring vast expeditions into the ancient palaces of the interior and the ruins buried on the city’s outskirts, and installing a self-proclaimed Hierophant whose heresies had earned her a death warrant back East in the city’s grandest temples (violently banishing the cults which had held them since the Conquest in the process).

One week ago, at exactly noon, the sun vanished from the sky for one minute, and the entire city was filled with a deafening scream. Since then, the Prince’s grand palace has been sealed tight, with ingeniously horrifying magical defences ensuring that anyone who tries to force a door or window isn’t around to try again. Everything’s very rapidly falling apart, and the city’s traditional power brokers are reacting like so many rabid weasels in too small a cage.

It is, then, a perfect opportunity for people with the will to seize it.

Districts

The Palantine

If Sethennai is the oldest continually inhabited city in the world, the vast palace complex which crowns its central hill is probably likewise the oldest building still in use. Its foundation is burrowed deep into the hill on which it stands, to the point that some delvers and historians have theorized that it was once a truly massive pyramid now mostly buried by the ages. Rising out of it are two great peaks - impressive ziggurats in their own right - of obvious dwarven make, fashioned to house their ancient Ancestors-Kings and gods in suitable splendor, and since renovated and built over to house the city’s rulers and most favored priesthoods. Surrounding them are a dozen smaller peaks, each the estate of one of the city’s foremost patrician families, teeming with retainers and servants. The land around them is pristine and perfectly manicured, full of wondrous botanical gardens and menageries for the amusement of Sethennai’s greatest citizens.

Location of Interest: The Throne 

A palace built on the ruins of a palace built on the ruins of a palace. The grand ziggurat which the city’s rulers have called home since time immemorial is built into and sits at the peak of its highest hill, the highest point in the sky for dozens of miles in every direction. Its labyrinthine apartments, kitchens, vaults, galleries and corridors house the Prince and his family, dozens of favorites and notables, and hundreds of guards, servants, retainers and entertainers. 

Or, well, housed. 

One week ago, the sun vanished from the sky, and a scream echoed through the city. Since then, the palace complex has proven impenetrable. Every door and window is closed, and attempts to open them by force have fared...poorly. In a ‘never going to walk again’ sort of way. Scrying and other means of magical surveillance so far attempted have simply failed. No one has tried to escape, and no noises have been heard - the whole complex is simply silent. 

Of course, that means that all its secrets and riches are there for the taking. Or that’s the growing consensus - at least three separate groups have camped out near various gates and major entrances, each preparing their own scheme to break in and seize everything within. There’s no fighting between them. Yet. 

Faction of Note: The Hierophant 

    Yri Cenred is many things. A self-proclaimed ‘experimental theologian’. One of shockingly few mortal humans to piss off the Illyrin clergy enough to be specifically declared Anathema. A member of the Commonwealth’s very exclusive list of ‘Enemies of Reason’. Empirically immune to thunderbolts from cloudless skies and most other signs of divine disfavor. Easily one of the most powerful mages in the city. And, for most of the last two years, its High Priestess and Hierophant. 

    No one knows quite how her first meeting with Prince Cael went, and whether she was responsible for her change in personality or if he sought her out because of it. All anyone knows is that shortly after she arrived in the city a few days ahead of Imperial Witch-Hunters looking for her head on a pike, Cael forcibly expelled the Khasali cults which had occupied the Palantine’s grand temples since the Conquest, and installed her in their place with the newly minted title of Hierophant for the city. Since then she and her growing coterie of acolytes (bright-eyed, motivated and young, though you can flip a coin as to whether their hands are stained with ink or blood) have been extremely busy, though no one can say exactly what with. Certainly they haven’t held any public rituals or services. Despite the costs - both political and monetary - in protecting and sponsoring her, Cael never seemed to question whether it was worthwhile. 

    The general opinion on the streets is that she’s probably to blame for anything and everything worth complaining about. The only real divide is between those who think she bewitched the Prince and turned him into her puppet, those who think she’s the one who killed him, and the moderates who think the correct answer is probably ‘both’.

Foundrytown

The New World is absolutely full of exotic reagents, fuel sources, and materials to craft and invent with. It is also absolutely full of people who will pay in your currency of choice for finished goods, armor, weaponry, and whatever nasty alchemical tricks you can keep from blowing up in their face until they want them to. Foundrytown is the sprawling mass of smokestacks, workshops, factories and markets that has spilled to the north of Sethennai’s walls, exploiting both opportunities to the fullest while limiting the chance that some idiot will burn half the city down (again). Robber barons, militant workers, loose fraternities of tinkerers and half-trainer artificers, and the occasional rogue clockwork or alchemical monstrosity all jostle for space and control of the beating heart of Sethennai’s economy. 

Faction of Note: The Grand Bazaar 

    Official Imperial theology accords true dragons a place of honour - the Princes of the Earth, entrusted by Heaven with containing the fury of the elements within themselves so as to render the world peaceful enough for cultivation by the younger races - and forbids very few things to wyrms willing to play the part. (Principally, do not become undead, a god in your own right, or an archdemon of the elements. Though some justification can usually be found for how any sufficiently problematic dragon is actually doing one of those). 

    And Tyramara the Magnificent, the Fire of the Deeps has not technically done any of those things. Still, the ancient wyrm has little interest in allowing the wasting disease which has crippled her continue to spread, and her solution is unorthodox enough that she thought it prudent to abandon her palace-lair in Imir and relocate to the New World, six treasure galleons worth of her hoard in tow. 

    One of the city’s wealthiest residents from the moment she landed, she has bought a plaza in Foundrytown and offered her sponsorship to nearly every tinker and engineer who cares to set up shop there, provided they help sustain and improve the mechanical and hydraulic prosthetics that supplement and replace her dying organs. She has promised a full half of her hoard to any who can permanently deal with her condition, a fortune men have killed for in the past, and certainly will again. 

Faction of Note: The Hellworks 

They’re not officially called the Hellworks - there are, in fact, absolutely no devils involved. Still, between the billowing clouds of soot and steam pouring from their chimneys at all hours of the day, the severe architecture, and the bound spirits who keep the looms running at all hours of the day and eagerly take any opportunity to leave anyone who gets too close crippled or maimed to vent their anger - well, the name stuck. 

One of the most obvious consequences of Prince Cael’s turn towards the esoteric these last years, the ' ‘Royal Sethennai Weaver’s Trust” is the brainchild and absolute domain of the Lady Binder Katerine sol Dalme sol Telrin ir’Paimon. An Illyrin magister with heterodox opinions on the proper uses of magic, popular opinion is divided on whether it’s more accurate to say Cael invited her to reside in the city, or just offered her asylum before her elders had a chance to properly condemn her. 

Regardless, after six months of operation she - and her half-dozen strictly bound and extremely unhappy ifrit, and several hundred eminently replaceable more mundane workers - are already well on their way to supplying all the clothing and textiles Sethennai’s teeming masses require single-handedly, produced at a scale and speed far beyond what any traditional artisans guild could hope to compete with. 

Crossroads

Dominating the Old City - synonymous with it, really - that the district is called the ‘Crossroads’ is often considered something of a cruel joke by new arrivals. The ‘Labyrinth’ is usually offered instead. Ancient stone tenements and storehouses are basic facts of geography, surviving through conquest and fire, and over and around and through them are generations of newer building - mansions of imported oak and marble, shantytowns of cannibalized carts and derelict ships built on rooftops, and nondescript inns and stores conveniently built on top of trap doors and tunnels leading to much more exciting locales. Natives of a neighborhood who know all the secret passages and blind alleys can quickly get to anywhere they like. New arrivals are strongly advised to pay well for a reliable guide. 

Faction of Note: The Dreamers 

    There’s something under the harbor. There always has been. There probably always will be. Most people can go their whole lives without noticing it, but a certain few find living in the Old City a haunting experience, their nights spent dreaming of drowned palaces and impossible angles, their days spent lost in alleys and markets that have never existed. Inevitably, they come out of a daze and find themselves perched on the waters edge, staring into the filthy, polluted depths with an intense sense of longing. 

    Called the Dreamers, they’re an eclectic and informal fraternity, living in makeshift houseboats or the cheapest tenements that press against the water. Quite a few simply sleep on the streets. They’re something like a religion, and something like a guild - the most personable and talkative are merchants, selling the fish that others catch, the strange relics and minor treasures that their divers retrieve from the harbor, and the often beautiful - if always uncanny - art they produce. They take care of each other and, though no one has ever seen a dreamer raise a hand in anger, every attempt by syndicates or rival cults to extort or expel them has ended with their opponents going mad, screaming and clawing at their flesh in the middle of the night, or found poised in some elaborate and improbable suicide. After the third time, everyone more or less got the idea. 

    No one knows who leads them - if anyone does. Insofar as they have a public face, Zoe Alvane is it - a street urchin who ‘found the sea’ before she had hit puberty, for the last few years she has been the one who spends seemingly every hour of the day ensuring her ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’ have food and shelter, and looking after the other beggars and poor in the neighborhood while she can as well. She’s also the one outsiders deal with when they come looking to buy information - it’s a disquieting fact of life in Sethennai that the Dreamers’ know almost everything there is to know about almost everyone. They are generally content to be left alone, and Zoe is very sympathetic and willing to offer personal advice and play the part of fortune teller to anyone desperate and willing to trade or do a favor - but it’s generally agreed that trying to force information from them is a bad idea. 

Faction of Note: Ironfang Mercenary Company 

    When Prince Cael seized the throne, he didn’t do so single handedly. He needed trained, disciplined soldiers to seize the Palantine and coastal forts, ensure no one escaped the palace, and keep order on the streets while the messy business of extinguishing the previous dynasty was carried out. For all this and more, he relied on the professional expertise of the Ironfang Company. 

    Formed around a core of hardened hobgoblin veterans of various border wars and colonial filibusters in the Free Cities, the Company has for the last fifteen years been the Prince’s favorite tool for securing his interests, keeping order, and bloodily making examples of any threats to his rule. For their trouble, they’ve grown fat and happy - a steady paycheck and yearly bonuses have left every officer with a townhouse, and most common soldiers with coin for families and apartments for them to live in. 

    Despite the lack of real combat - and the need to take on locals as new recruits, as more and more soldiers retire or die over the years - Captain Azaersi is a leathery old warehouse who has never let her troops grow soft. Even week the grand parade ground in Crossroads echoes with screaming drill sergeants and the crack of muskets, and it’s an open secret that the Prince paid to import stocks of grenades and munitions from Quepta for her arsenal. No one knows quite how she plans to deal with the sudden disappearance of her patron and employer, but for the moment the Ironfang seem content to keep order in the corner of Crossroads around the arsenal and parade ground that they call home. 

The Ruins

The ruins are not, legally, part of Sethanni, and absolutely no one with anything resembling sense would ever actually choose to live there. No one actually knows where the eponymous ruins come from - or at least, no one can agree which section is from where. Shantytowns of the most despised and desperate and built on top of their predecessors, which are built on top of battered and broken pre-Conquest ziggurats and homes, which are built on top of - well, some of it is just a natural cave system, and no one is sure about the rest. Or ever found just how deep it goes. Aside from the casualties of the Prince’s attempts to map it, the Ruins are inhabited exclusively by those that would be strung up or burned alive if they tried to live anywhere else, or those sufficiently dedicated to their greed or ambition that they’re absolutely certain they alone can unlock the secrets and find whatever wonders are buried beneath all the traps and monsters. Not great company, either way. 

Faction of Note: The Weavers’ Masquerade 

    Sethennai never really followed its ‘sister cities’ in the League in religion, with a sort of tolerant anarchy of different gods and sects almost always predominating over the gleefully blasphemously sublime demon-cults that the conquerors originally brought with them. But the small cultists that did exist at least enjoyed a luxurious, privileged irrelevance, with sanctums in the city’s grand temple. That finally changed when Cael seized the temples for his new Hierophant - and every relic and sacred text in them, as bloodily as necessary. Which with demon worshippers meant a massacre - letting one escape and beseech their patron for aid in crafting some horrible vengeance being generally agreed to be a terrible idea. 

    Not that that actually worked, of course. One acolyte managed to escape - no one’s quite sure how, but then, probably best not to ask unless you’ve got a particularly strong stomach. Well, that’s one of her stories, anyway - she goes by Maia Dayal, Beloved of the Architect, Wearer of Ten Thousand Faces, and sometimes she prefers to say she’s a recently arrived priestess from Celmy, or a street urchin who found enlightenment entirely on her own. As might be expected by the self-proclaimed title, she also changes her face (and build, age, species…) about as often as everyone else bathes. 

    While she has shown no interest in actually taking bloody revenge on the Prince, Dayal has done plenty to earn the price on her head. The Masquerade that has grown around her is a carnival of wonders and horrors, where all manner of temptations are offered to the truly desperate, debauched and vile. Skinweavers and facetakers always need raw material, and secrets and deaths can both be easily bought for the right price - though in keeping with their patron, the Masquerade is hardly a safe or stable place to do business, and offending the wrong cultist can easily lead to a shift from ‘visitor’ to ‘canvas for artistic expression’. 

Faction of Note: The Keendream Expedition

    Over the last two centuries, the actual facts about the pre-Conquest city has (with few exceptions) been buried under the weight of legends, rumors and (when necessary) several tons of rock. Despite this (or because of it) whenever things get bad (...worse) for the original population of goliaths and dwarves who can trace their lineage back to that time, stories about some hidden savior or buried relic that will free them spread like wildfire. This is just such a time. 

Ilidak Keendream Kathu-Viano is an explorer from a family with some grounds for its claim of being pre-conquest nobility. For the last year he has worked on commission for the Prince, leading a large and incredibly well-armed expedition into the ruins across the water from the Old City, digging into them in search of..something. No one who knows the goal has been willing to talk, but certainly it has involved hiring every historian and scholar with anything like knowledge of the city before it was Sethennai (not to mention half the charlatans and rumor mongers who might know something). 

Once news of the Prince’s disappearance reached Kathu-Viano, work shifted from its previous sedate pace to something much more determined. Certain paranoid minds have said it’s almost like he was waiting for this. Other, moderately less paranoid ones have pointed out it’s a bit odd that the government-sponsored expedition is so short on patricians and city notables and so high on mercenaries form the interior and goliath clans with far more reason to listen to Kathu-Viano than the Prince, should some conflict break out. 

The Stacks

Museums, exhibitions, satellite campuses, mystical archives, storehouses of eldritch knowledge, and one actual wizard tower - if the faint taste of ozone in the air doesn’t warn you what you’re getting in for leaving the city’s eastern gates, then the architecture certainly will. Wedged between variously reputable bookstores and inquisitives, different formalized and longstanding campuses are dedicated to the arts of conjuration, enchantment, sparkcraft, and practical cosmology. Competition for new discoveries and to fully unlock ancient secrets are good natured and nonviolent - at least, that’s all you can get out of anyone left standing once the smoke clears. 

Faction of Note: The Bookhounds 

    The Bookhounds aren’t any sort of formal organization - and at least half of them would roll their eyes at the name - but rather a loose network of gutter mages, disreputable academics, private inquisitives and researchers for hire, and people with a little talent or cash to burn and far too much curiosity for their own good. They act as a sort of volunteer police force in the Stacks, passing each other clues and leads and doing each other favors to track down stolen (or escaped) relics and curses, stop idiots from unleashing anything really dramatic, and generally help people and save the day. Not to mention accumulate really impressive bags of tricks and rare books themselves in the process. 

    While they don’t have anything like a real leader, the group’s beating heart is Nikos Roth, an Esheri academic who arrived in the city as a fresh-faced student on a three month expedition a decade back and who never intends to leave. Running a small, incredibly ramshackle-looking secondhand book store wedged between two tenements, he nonetheless has one of the more impressive collections of occult lore in the city, and is more than happy to trade for more of it, or connect anyone in need with a specialist who can help them. As more than one would-be thief has discovered, he’s also a fairly talented mage, and for all that being entirely self-taught has left him with some obvious holes in his training, it’s also left him with some tricks that basically no one comes prepared to counter. 

Redgate

Once, Redgate Prison stood alone, a fearsome warning of the Prince’s power to anyone looking south from the city center. Eighty-some years of steady urban sprawl later, most of its inmates would probably just need a running start from the prison walls to land back home. Filled mostly with those whose dreams of a new world fell flat, but with too little cash or too many enemies to get home, the slums of Redgate are a natural habitat for street gangs, drug peddlers, flesh traders, and everyone else looking to take advantage of the desperate and vulnerable. The prison itself - and its infamous and heavily armed wardens - has stumbled into being the center of law writ large, dealing out summary justice for criminals that are (correctly) assumed to be beneath the Prince’s notice. 

Faction of Note: Regate Prison 

    Sitting on a steep hill across the water from the Old City, Redgate prison was at one point a fortress, but for generations has been put to use housing the city’s worst, most dangerous, and most profitable criminals. Given the sprawling, crime-ridden slums that now surround it, its wardens also work as a sort of brutal police force, keeping the pretence of order on the street and preserving the Prince’s Peace. Usually. 

    The problems with discipline start at the top, really. The Prison’s infamously brutal First Warden is also its oldest and most dangerous prisoner. Before the Conquest, Vrocdruk was one of the city’s lesser gods, enthroned in one of the Palantine’s grand temples. When Sethennai - the man - defeated him, he chose to pull his demons away before they could tear the god into so much bloody aether. Instead he was crippled, lessened, and bound to a new home in the fortress and a new purpose; defending the city and its rulers. Later, less skillful, princes altered the binding, making him responsible for most crime and punishment and hoping that his sacred nature would make the native dwarves and goliaths more obedient. 

    Vrocdruk is still crippled, still bound to the prison, still forced to obey the orders of the city’s acclaimed ruler, and still extremely unhappy about it. He takes any excuse to work out his unhappiness on criminals or troublemakers with the incredible bad luck to catch his direct attention. His wardens largely follow his example, often acting less like agents of justice and more like a particularly well armed gang - to the point of semi-officially collecting fees for ‘security’ from nearby businesses, supplementing the cash extorted from prisoners and their families for both necessities and luxuries while incarcerated.

Sootcliff

Trailing south of Foundrytown, on and under the steep slope beneath the city’s western walls, the densely packed tenements of Sootcliff are certainly stained grey enough to earn the name. Existing primarily as a source of blood and sweat to feed into the ever-hungry foundries and assembly lines to the north, The buildings are cheap, massive, and constructed at the lowest possible cost, with all the consequences you would expect from that. With easy access to weapons and alchemical supplies from Foundrytown and (literally) beneath the notice of the Old City, Sootcliff is famous as the home of militant bands, revolutionary conspiracies, disgraced artificers, and generally anyone who has a dream for a new world and a plan that will require a lot of explosions to get there. 

Faction of Note: The Painted Doctors

    Less a single organization and more an extraordinarily loose confederation of - often feuding - crimelords, the Painted Doctors are a fraternity of (largely half- or self-) taught alchemists who have over the last year grown to be the dominant criminal guild in Sootcliff. The name sometimes refers to the incredibly distinctive tattoos each ‘Doctor’ has covering much of their body, universally agreed to be somehow enchanted or cursed. Otherwise it refers to the incredibly alien and vibrant skin tones that their test subjects and muscle develop after repeatedly ingesting their ‘miraculous’ potions and tonics. 

    While possessing remarkably little actual magical talent among them, the Doctors have perfected the recipes for several extremely useful potions - several incredibly addictive drugs, a half dozen forms of acids and grenades, and a dizzying variety of enhancing tonics to improve themselves and distribute to their thugs - and have managed to keep both the recipes and their sources for the necessary reagents entirely secret. This has left them in the enviable position of being able to promise anyone signing on with them that they’ll be able to more or less become a regenerating ogre for an hour whenever they need to fight, while their opposition has had to settle with advising their men to stock up on fire and acid. 

    The leading light of the Doctors is one ‘Dr’ Fadre - almost certainly not his real name - an alchemical savant whose ‘miracle cures’ are bought and resold across the city. A flashy and well dressed sort whose patronage has turned several of Sootcliff’s most prominent dens of vice into something close to palaces for those who can afford it, he’s said to be far less interested in the nuts and bolts of running a criminal empire than enjoying its fruits and indulging his passion for the Sciences. It doesn’t hurt his reputation that he doesn’t look a day over thirty, and has for as long as anyone has known him. 

Chance

Facing Oldport from across the river’s mouth, the docks of Chance are significantly new, cheaper, and altogether more ramshackle. Not really a part of any conscious design, Chance grew organically as the city sprawled beyond its original walls, essentially smuggling docks so successful it was easier to legitimize and start taxing them than it was to hang everyone involved. They now provide the city with a constant infusion of nerdowells and fortune seekers, and the district around them takes great pride in fleecing new arrivals of every penny to their name by the end of their first night on land. Hostels and boarding houses are usually safe, traditional vice dealers less so, and anyone selling treasure maps or magical amulets not at all. Still, they’re probably more harmless than the various mercenary recruiters and ‘exiled princes’ promising to give new arrivals exactly the thrill and fortune they came searching for. 

Faction of Note: The Red Ocean Trading Company

    What is now the Red Ocean Trading Company has gone through several dramatic changes over it’s eighty years of existence. First a privateer fleet hired by the Free City of Celmy during the First Armada War. Then eventually growing strong enough to seize several islands as an independent pirate state, before being crushed by the Esheri Navy during the Second Armada War. It’s remnants learned a bit of humility from that, and it is now seemingly content with its existence as either (depending on who you ask) a obscenely profitable shipping firm, or one of the most widespread criminal syndicates in the world. 

The Company’s significant interests in Sethennai - nearly half the docks in Chance, guides and guards for anyone heading into the Interior, and fingers in quite a few less legitimate pies as well - are ably represented by Captain Arun Prem, a(n in)famous adventurer and scoundrel in his own right, apparently enjoying his semi-retirement behind a desk by getting outrageously drunk with his favorite mercenaries and criminals every night and swapping incredible (and implausible) old war stories. 

There’s plenty of rumors, of course - that he’s here in de facto exile after angering the Company’s mysterious senior leadership. That he’s a thousand-year-old vampire and is the Company’s mysterious senior leadership. That he ate a kraken’s heart, and is immortal as long as he doesn’t lose sight of the water. That he’s biding his time to prepare an army before heading inland to carve a new kingdom for himself. That he’s only in the city for as long as it takes to carry out some truly spectacular heist. That he killed Prince Cael in a secret duel and trapped his soul in the pocketwatch he wears at all times. And so on. Of course, other rumours say that he started all of those himself to preserve his mystique as he grows fat in his old age.

Oldport

Facing out to the harbour but safely ensconced within the city walls, Oldpot is, as the name implies, one of the oldest ports in the new world - and certainly one of the busiest. Fully loaded merchant ships arrive daily, their cargoes emptied and replaced with the plunder of the New World almost overnight so they can return home on the next turn of the wind. Beyond the grand ports themselves, this district is home to all the most respectable shipping companies, merchant banks, hotels, and townhouses and apartments, as well as all the official consulates and embassies that Sethennai plays host to. 

Faction of Note: First Bank of Sethennai

    Despite only being as old as Prince Cael’s reign, the Bank already feels like an eternal and irreplaceable part of Sethennai. This isn’t something people are necessarily happy about, but its leadership had done a truly amazing job at keeping dissent to grumbling and resentment of the inevitable, and not actual resistance. They’re good at that sort of thing, even when they used Prince Cael’s (and, thus, the City’s) massive debts to his foreign benefactors as justification for taking control of the city’s tariffs and tolls, and began rigorously enforcing them, possibly for the first time ever. 

    Combined with a legal monopoly on the ability to mint coins, this has of course made the Bank incredibly wealthy. But not to the degree that might be assumed - the riches collected are to a large degree shipped back east to foreign creditors. Of the remaining, quite a bit is invested with as much an eye for politics as strict profit. 

    Executive Director Salman Ticaret, like most of his staff, is a Sethennai native who sought education in the Commonwealth (like most, he took a new name on gaining citizenship). Along with modern accounting and investing techniques, he came home with a firm grasp of political economy - and so for the last decade and a half has been more than happy to offer favorable rates to well positioned patrician and merchant houses, in exchange for their own favors and consideration in turn. The result is that the bank’s marble halls and adamant vaults house information as much as money. And Ticaret is perfectly willing to invest both, if the opportunity is promising enough. 

Foreign Interests

The League of Free Cities

The League of Free Cities is not so much a single power as a collection of fiercely independent deomcratic city-states held together by the intertwined private empires of their leading citizens, deep and interdependent trading relationships, and a common religion that the rest of the world calls demon-worship - they view this as deeply offensive. Also they’ve been doing it for hundreds of years and they’re not all dead yet, so clearly everyone else is just doing demonology wrong. Politics are a mess of knives in the dark and openly bribing the voting populace with feasts and spectacles, with glory and riches to anyone who can hold the mob’s favor for long. 

Demonic evocation - and the arts learned as a result of it, like fleshweaving, orienomarchy , breaking reality down into elemental chaos and shaping it to your whims, and so on - are in the rest of the world generally met with very thorough execution, making the freethinkers of the League the world’s bleeding edge in magical innovation. The entire culture of the League is also nearly custom-made to produce bold idiots willing to do what it takes to get rich or die trying, and the various Free City’s Adventurers Guilds are (in)famous the world over. 

Until recently, the Free Cities considered Sethennai, if not one of them, then at least a younger sibling or benevolent dependency. Prince Cael’s coup has been taken as something of a wound, and the merchant interests who have lost out as he opened trade have made sure that in the decades since his name has become synonymous with bloody-handed tyranny. The first broadsheets celebrating his death will sell out in moments, and the acclaimed merchant adventurer Vyas Asraya, said to be en route to the city, is said to be very optimistic about future trading opportunities. 

Holy Illyric Empire

Technically speaking a vast and sprawling feudal state unified only in the person of the Sovereign (Empress of Illyrin, Queen of Belthaya, Defender of the Hierophant of Imir, Grand Duchess of Abhari, etc, and so on, and so forth), the Empire dominates the better part of two continents, and in terms of size and prestige is unquestionably the foremost state on the globe. It is also a bureaucrat’s nightmare, its aristocracy distracted from their internal feuds only when they need to defend their ancestral rights from central overreach. 

Ancient controls and long established relationships make Imperial binders the most fearsome conjurers and thaumaturges in the known world, a process not at all hurt by the wholesale incorporation of any powerful spirits or terrestrial god who will sign on the dotted line into the official pantheon. Illyrin Paladins are also easily the most storied heavy cavalry the world has ever seen, and Abharic necromancers are generally held to be the heirs (or direct pupils) of the inventors of the craft. 

Illyric interests have prospered under Prince Cael’s reign, but the last years have seen Sethennai become a haven for heretical priests and radical binders, something Ambassador Konrad Reingard has been rumored to be increasingly frustrated with, though no one heard a word from his Oldport estate since the chaos began.

The Sublime Esheri Commonwealth

A thoroughly modern and enlightened state, the Commonwealth is history’s gift to the cartographer, an empire with firmly delineated borders and clear, rationally determined administrative divisions. Governed by a Janissary Corps educated and conditioned from childhood to put principle above self interest and the good of the Commonwealth above friends or (nonexistent) family, the Esheri control far less land than the Illyrin Empire, but has been able to fight it to a standstill and even force it to abandon certain far flung dependencies over a series of wars across the last century. 

Beyond a ruthlessly efficient system for taxation and conscription, the Commonwealth’s military might is credited to two sources - on the one hand, its marines are the finest and most disciplined line infantry anyone is likely to ever see, experts in the use of gas and artillery and famously cool under fire. One the other, their heavy automata are an answer to any conjured devil or bound beast, enlightened clockwork providing enough force to cleave through scales and enchanted plate without missing a beat. But the Janissaries are as happy as their enemies to admit that they prefer unfair fights - though they credit their infamous spy network to the fruits of their scientific studies of society and history, while their enemies instead blame the corrupting effects of gold, blackmail, and a complete indifference to the morals of those they work with. 

While the Commonwealth does have an embassy in the city, it mostly exists as an appendage of the First Sethennai Bank, the private institution responsible for printing and guarding the solvency of the city’s currency, its entire upper rung staffed by experts trained in the Commonwealth and generally considered Prince Cael’s way of paying back their support for his coup. More recently, it has been rumored that the Secretariat has taken an interest in the struggles in the interior. Coincidentally, an ‘Academic’ has been seen floating around various less than reputable bars in Chance, ostensibly as part of a project to record the city’s myths and folklore. 

The Warlord States

For the last two hundred years, the interior has been an evershifting patchwork of successor kingdoms, native revolts, monstrous empires, released horrors, and stranger things besides, the unending tide of weapons and adventurers ensuring that no single player was ever able to secure dominance (and the various rulers of Sethennai have certainly played their part in keeping things that way). At the moment the foremost powers are a giantblooded kingdom led by a messaniac priest-king claiming to be the reincarnation of a Titan, a personal union enforced at sword point between a Khasli pirate queen and a goliath ‘emperor’, a red dragon who has claimed an old giant palace and forced the dwarves living in the mountains around it to provide tribute and worship, and several dozen more minor principalities. It should go without saying that war is the natural state of being, and soldiers are sucked up like ships in a whirlpool.

Adventurers are the lifeblood of Sethennai, and they don’t only flow one way. A constant stream of veterans - either enriched or embittered - skulk, limp or run back once they’ve had their fill of the wonders of the new world, usually missing something important or carrying something priceless - sometimes both. The courts and inner circles of every powerful warlord are composed exclusively of this sort of hard, tricky and generally insufferable type of rogue, and they’re often the only agents trusted enough to be dispatched on delicate missions. The line between warlord and criminal kingpin or pirate magnate is also extremely thin - sometimes nonexistent - as smuggling, sabotage and assassinations are simply basic tools of statecraft in the ruthless arena of the interior. More than once, an ambitious Prince of Sethennai has attempted to recreate their ancestor’s short lived empire, only to be found butchered in their bed but the agents of one warlord or another.

The Warlord States view Sethennai as a vital artery for supplies and funding, and for manpower to refill their armies with disposable bodies for their constant border wars. On a grander scale, those with ambition view it as either a crown jewel and future capital, or a bleeding ulcer on the land which needs to be razed to its foundations. In either case, few are interested in a strong, stable government for it. Regardless of their opinions, sending emissaries and embassies to the city is the first (and often only) diplomatic initiative of every new warlord state - though in truth their role is often closer to mercenary recruiter and fundraiser.

[ghost-wonder]

Why Oliver March is My Current Top Suspect for the Leader (Even though I love him)

Buckle your seatbelts kids and get ready for my hot mess of a PH theory. I wasn’t sure where to put this and I just wanted to get my thoughts out. I’m in the last year of my media studies and production degree so I’m putting my 3 years of tears to use and have been brewing this theory since reading 85. Now let me clarify: I adore March, but the more we see, the more suspicious I become (especially with ep. 82 & 85), and while many think this may mean death or something tragic, I’ve been thinking of the possibility it’s something much bigger (Note: lots of speculation here so prepare for a lot of what if’s and I’m only using content up to ep. 85).

My thought process regarding the leader:

The leader is a rather dehumanized villainous entity. With them being anonymous and the reader not having a face to place with the actions, it’s easier for us to take the leader’s actions at face value. We are provided no means of sympathizing or empathizing with their actions and instead, our story follows characters who have been traumatized by said actions.

Therefore, to provide readers with the greatest impact, the leader would likely be a character who up until the discovery of them being the leader, the reader viewed them positively. A character already humanized. Already trusted. And this would be both in terms of how the reader views that character, as well as other characters in the story. It would leave the reader reeling, trying to figure out why such a character would be the leader.

And keep in mind: PH has used this approach with Harvey; the audience liked him for the short time he appeared before being caprisunned and we were shocked to discover his involvement in the PS. Additionally, we’ve had characters dehumanizing and humanizing with Kieran. He’s introduced as this deadly assassin who kills brutally, with the greatest death toll in the PS. But he becomes humanized through his interactions with Lauren, so much so that both the reader and Lauren forget his occupation and are provided a chilling reminder in ep. 43. However, even after those horrible events, as we learn more regarding his character in season 2, we begin to empathize with his actions and reactions (though we don’t condone them). It demonstrates a duality, a mix of light and dark, seemingly contradicting one another. Because people are complicated.

This is also why I can’t buy into the idea that Tristan or Stefan is the leader, in fact, I don’t think either one is even involved with the PS. For Tristan I think he comes off suspicious because A) he’s meant to be a red herring but B) LAUREN’S PARENTS WERE APOSTLES AND YOU CANNOT TELL ME HE DID NOT KNOW. THEY LEFT AT ODD HOURS OF THE NIGHT ALL THE TIME AND LIKELY GAVE LAUREN TO TRISTAN TO PROTECT HER FROM THAT LIFE. HE PROBABLY THINKS LAUREN IS PS. But anywho. As for Stefan, he’s already been villainized through his treatment of William. The audience doesn’t like him for this reason and is then inherently suspicious of him because they dislike him. So for me, it feels too obvious. (I have an additional theory that he was involved with the print shop shooting, assisting Lizbeth (from what’s alluded in 64 with Lauren’s parents and 68) as chief of police but that’s for another place another time.)

What we know about the leader:

- It’s a he

- Has to be part of the older generation (would have needed to be an adult about 15 years ago)

- Was a member of SD

- Knew Lauren’s parents

- According to Hecate, he is closer and more similar to Lauren than she thinks

So why March? (It’s not just the villain scar)

- His speech to Kym and Will in 60 had me SUS. It felt very contradicting (he acknowledges the flaws in the system while saying they must continue their jobs, which is valid, but his phrasing was still off to me) and generally in any mystery drama if I see a character go on a moral rant of sorts, my sus radar is dialed up to 11. Unfortunately, we don’t know how much of it was true and lies because Lauren wasn’t around but if he is the leader I’d find it so fascinating if everything he said is the truth. The idea that this terrorist does have sound morals would be SO INTERESTING and kind of fitting? The leader having a strong sense of justice or strong morals would make him more similar to Lauren as Hecate said. But more on Hecate later.

- As confirmed by 85, he knew Lauren’s parents. He even says they worked together on cases. Through their work together, did they start to realize the flaws in their system? Was there a case that was just too much? SD formed?

- The death of his daughter does kind of fit the SD timeline. (She died in xx11 the pamphlets are dated xx14 but SD was likely formed slightly before the release of the pamphlets but that's not yet really confirmed). We don’t know how her illness killed her (could be class-related. Like because of their class status perhaps they didn’t have access to the resources that could have saved his daughter? Who knows. He said they did all they could. March is likely middle class similar to Kym but we don’t know for sure. And even if he is middle class we don’t know if this was always the case, like if he was middle class at the time of his daughter’s death.)

- Additionally the death of his wife. The date is blocked and as others have theorized I find it very possible it could have been SD related. But this sentence is chilling: “She fell into the bloody hands of criminals that have been plaguing Ardhalis for too long.” March doesn’t specify these criminals as the PS. So could he mean the royals? (Literally everything he says to Lauren in ep. 85 could have a double meaning and it bugs me so much like he never specifies the criminals he’s referring to. And everything he says sounds like the monologue of a villain who sees themselves as a hero because they haven’t realized how far gone they are. But that’s just me. ) If she died in the print shop shooting could this have been the catalyst to drive March to become the leader and start the PS? Losing your daughter and wife is a lot to take and could drive anyone over the edge. Point is: if any of this speculation is true, it would give March motive for becoming the leader.

- Also March mentioned how Lauren reminds him of his daughter which could then explain why Lauren hasn’t been touched by the PS cause at this point the girl should have been caprisunned a while ago if she wasn’t being protected from the inside.

- To build on that as well, if March is the leader then he has kept an eye on Lauren since she joined the force aka since she would have become problematic for the PS (cause you can argue being the daughter of apostles may not automatically make her a threat since she was a child at the time. But being the daughter of apostles and joining the police force to take down the PS? Now that’s an issue). March says in ep. 60 that Lauren was one of his recruits meaning the leader could have had his eye on her the entirety of her time in the APD. Just something to consider.

- And going back to Hecate's words, he’s more similar to you than you think. March and Lauren share (seemingly) similar morals and additionally he is close to her just as Hecate claimed. Also if any of my speculation regarding the deaths of his wife and daughter are correct it would have put him in a similar position to Lauren, the difference being her enemy is PS and his being the royals (but also as we’re starting to see with Lauren learning more information, I think the royals are starting to become an enemy in her eyes the same way PS is. Again if any of this is correct it just furthers similarities between the two).

- This could then also be the betrayal alluded to in the cards; one of Lauren's mentors has been the leader this whole time. The betrayal is either past or future but March being the leader could count as both. He betrayed her in the past by ordering the death of her parents and may betray her again in the future as he continues to play the role of leader

- Plus this would also mean the leader has been present in the story FROM THE VERY BEGINNING MARCH WAS IN EP 2 HOW WILD WOULD IT BE IF WE’VE KNOWN THE LEADER THIS WHOLE TIME

- AND IMPORTANT NOTE: WHY IS MARCH NOT ONE OF THE PEOPLE LAUREN SUSPECTS DURING EP. 82 YET HE HAS HER BACK SIMILAR TO WILL AND KYM. "LAUREN OPEN YOUR EYES" BLINDEST OF THEM ALL TYPE STUFF. (Also with Lauren being the blindest of all, it led me to believe anyone Lauren is suspicious of, is not the one to betray her. I feel like it would have to be someone so unsuspicious, Lauren doesn’t even think of them. Which can be said of March; we literally have a whole scene in ep. 82 demonstrating how close they are and how a level of trust exists. Yet panels later, it doesn’t even cross her mind that he could betray her).

Now possible flaws in this theory (there are more I’m sure but here’s a few):

-Why voice support for lune and their actions: Lune’s actions have yet to affect the leader (at least to our knowledge) and have technically been helping the leader. The leader views Apostle 7 as an issue so obviously whoever the leader is, they won’t take issue with Lune taking down this problem for them. When first telling Lauren about McTrevor, Kieran said he was surprised he hadn’t been sent by the leader to kill him off yet. And when the 11th precinct received that first Lune letter about him, March was the one to voice that they should follow Lune’s orders. If he’s the leader, this could explain why he wanted to follow Lune’s orders and dispose of McTrevor without PS means. This is a possible explanation anyway.

- Why send moles into the 11th precinct if the leader himself is already there: I boil this down to a matter of seeming less suspicious. Like why possibly risk the exposure of your identity if your organization consists of hundreds of potential puppets who are easily disposable?

-Why place the PH in the 11th precinct if the leader is there: Okay this plays into another theory I have regarding Kieran. We know there are boatloads of parallels between Lauren and Kieran which left me thinking Kieran has had a similar Tim Sake type incident. What I mean by this is that Lauren’s whole deal with Tim Sake was heavily guided by her personal anger and resulted in distrust from her superior, Hermann. I think Kieran had a similar incident with killing that one person without orders, in which his actions were guided by his personal anger and resulted in distrust from his superior, the Leader. So we know from 83 Kierans been overseas for a while (Why? Was there a mission or did the leader need Kieran out of Ardhalis? Both?) and his comment in 64 (“I wonder how much longer his patience will last”), as well as the comments made by Bella and the messenger at various points regarding Kieran following and not following orders (ep 5 and 72-73?), further my thinking that the leader may be SUS of his best player. So what do you do with someone you’re suspicious of: you keep them right where you can see them.

- The one flaw I have yet to work out an explanation for is why order the death of lune? Regardless of who the leader is, this is a question I’ve mulled over since the end of season 1. J’en sais rien mes amis mais on verra.

Closing Thoughts:

Hopefully, this didn’t sound like the ramblings of a sleep-deprived senior (even though that’s exactly what this is haha) and hopefully, it gave you some stuff to consider. Up until this point, I never spent much time contemplating the leader, partly because I didn’t feel like we were far enough in the story to have enough evidence against one person. While much of this is speculation, I still think it’s the soundest case I have for any PH character we’ve met thus far being the leader.

[aion-rsa]

Why Jack Bauer Is America’s James Bond

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Despite what Marvel might have you believe, not all film franchises are perfectly serialized.

Take, for example, another kind of cinematic superhero: James Bond a.k.a. 007. The MI6 spy created by Ian Fleming and brought to screen by Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli is timeless in the most literal sense of the world. Since Sean Connery passed the role of James Bond to Roger Moore for good in 1973’s Live and Let Die (Connery previously gave way to George Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service before returning in Diamonds Are Forever), James Bond has become unstuck in time. 

As played in subsequent films over several decades by actors like Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig, Bond remains the same while the world around him changes. Some fans like to theorize that “Agent 007” and “James Bond” are aliases used by different MI6 spies throughout the years. But within the context of the series, there is only one Bond…James Bond. Bond is always middle-aged, looks good in a tux, enjoys stiff drinks and beautiful women. 

Read more

Movies

James Bond Movies Streaming Guide: Where to Watch 007 Online

By Don Kaye

The Cold War ended in the ‘90s and yet Bond, perhap the ultimate cinematic representative of its aesthetic, just kept calm and carried on as usual. Save for a handful of Craig’s latter year depictions, James Bond rarely learns any new tricks. He doesn’t develop. He is what he is – a hero of espionage and action. In that regard, the James Bond series is a surprisingly honest exploration of the occasional propagandistic aims of major blockbuster filmmaking. Bond isn’t a character in a story. He’s the United Kingdom’s idealized version of itself writ large on a canvas widescreen: a suave spy who is welcomed into every country to get laid and save the world. 

But what about the United States’ idealized version of itself? How has the Cold War’s lone surviving superpower let itself go without a similarly iconic (and occasionally nakedly jingoistic) cinematic creation? The answer is that America already does have an outsized action icon…he was just on television. 

Jack Bauer of early 2000s Fox thriller series 24 is American James Bond whether we want him to be or not. Just as Bond is the idealized Englishman, with his martini lunches and quick wit, Bauer is the America’s warped ideal of itself: angry, merciless, focused, and unfailingly effective. 

As portrayed by Kiefer Sutherland (who won an Emmy for the role), Jack Bauer started off as a fairly three-dimensional character in 24’s first season. That season picked up with Jack as a family man and a glorified pencil pusher at the fictional Counter Terrorist Unit’s Los Angeles office. Over the span of the first season’s 24 hours (24’s hook, of course, is that each season takes place over the span of a 24-hour day in real time), Jack slowly lost grip of his humanity, culminating with his friend Nina Myers turning out to be a mole and murdering his wife Teri. 

The death of Teri fundamentally changed Jack. For eight subsequent seasons and a movie, Jack became an Uncle Sam-style cartoon character obsessed with protecting his country from terrorists all over the globe, because his family was already taken away from him. Elisha Cuthbert as Jack’s daughter Kim was a prominent character for a few seasons, but as she was phased out so too was Jack’s grip on reality.

Unlike the James Bond series, 24 was particularly devoted to its chronology, with the very premise of the show meaning it had to have a close relationship with time. Jack Bauer would in theory grow as a character from season to season. But rather than developing, he mostly devolved into the most base version of himself. 

It’s in this way that Bauer actually became more like James Bond than one might initially expect. Regardless of who is playing him or what time period a particular film is set in, Bond’s characteristics remain static. By the end of 24’s run in 2014, Jack was similarly a Bond-ian relic of the past. Though the country was still feeling the effects of it, “The War on Terror” seemed as dramatically quaint for 24 as the Cold War did for James Bond. And yet here was this rugged American in the miniseries 24: Live Another Day, gripping the life out of a pistol and barking at perceived London terrorists in a gravely timber like a psycho.

24: Live Another Day was the last appearance for Jack Bauer and rightfully so at the time. The character had become a bit too anachronistic and his show, quite frankly, was frequently xenophobic. Still, as the continued success of Craig’s Bond films indicate (with No Time to Die finally set to arrive this October) perhaps there is still room for walking anachronisms in the entertainment world, as long as they’re approached correctly.

Fox has repeatedly attempted to rejuvenate the 24 brand. In 2017, the network greenlit a spinoff starring Corey Hawkins called 24: Legacy. Like its forefather, 24: Legacy, utilized a real-time format, only condensing 24 hours into 12 episodes like Live Another Day did. The spinoff was not successful and was quickly canceled following the conclusion of its first season.

Ultimately, Fox (now owned by Disney) hasn’t made any subsequent reboot attempts work yet because it has misidentified the appeal of 24 as a franchise. While the ticking clock aspect of telling a story in real time is novel and interesting, it wasn’t the reason the original series lasted for nine seasons. The real reason for 24’s success was Jack Bauer. Viewers are typically attracted to characters, not concepts. In Jack Bauer, many an American viewer likely found the embodiment of a paranoid nation they recognized.

There’s an undercurrent of anger and indignance in the American psyche. Exactly why is a question best left for sociologists. Perhaps it’s misplaced guilt over displacing a society to create a new one, or maybe it’s just the disappointment of being promised a Manifest Destiny and getting Wyoming. But whatever the reason, Jack Bauer is as apt a cartoonish American avatar as James Bond is a British one.

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So why then doesn’t 20th Television (again, now owned by Disney) just formalize the comparison and make Jack Bauer literally American James Bond? Just as Connery once handed off the baton to Lazenby and Moore, have Sutherland hand the role off to someone else. That actor would preferably represent the American physicality that Sutherland brought to the role (despite Sutherland being a Canadian, which is somewhat fitting given that the Scottish Connery was the first to play Her Majesty’s favorite spy). The new Jack Bauer would be played by someone who is short, stubbly, and angry rather than Bond’s tall, dark, and handsome. Throw the new Jack back into the field in a modern day ticking time bomb plot without bothering to explain why he is still middle-aged after 20 years. 

The answer to why Disney wouldn’t want to do such a thing is almost certainly all that aforementioned racism and torture. That is admittedly a, uh…roadblock. It really can’t be overstated just how xenophoci 24 was at times and how cruel it could be to characters and actors of Middle Eastern descent. Jack Bauer’s reliance on torture wasn’t just a dramatic crutch, 24 co-creator Joel Surnow genuinely believed in the value of torture as a foreign policy tactic. 

Suffice it to say, the series has not aged well. Then again, however, neither have many of the earlier Bond films. To a certain extent that’s the point of the Bond franchise. It understands that making movies is making myths. James Bond is every bit the mythical figure that Captain America or Iron Man are. The fact that Bond is so obviously an exaggerated character now has helped soften some of his more problematic edges. 

Bauer, on the other hand, comes from an era where Americans were both terrified of the looming threat of terrorism and were starting to invest in television as a more “serious” art form. As such, not everyone of the time was prepared to accept Jack Bauer as American James Bond, that is to say a cheesy cultural figure, not a vital supersoldier of freedom. 

In The Atlantic’s 2007 article “Whatever It Takes” about the politics of 24,  U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, recounts Jack Bauer’s effect on enlistees.

“The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about 24?’ The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.”

The world has changed since then, obviously. But even now, it feels like it hasn’t fully set in that Jack Bauer is the American James Bond and should be treated with the same amount of reverence, which is none at all. Perhaps the only responsible move left is, in fact, to continue the increasingly ridiculous stories of the character with new actors.

In the right hands, Jack Bauer could be put to use as a blockbuster magnet and an appropriate critique of American foreign policy. In the end, icons don’t matter so much as what you do with them. 

The post Why Jack Bauer Is America’s James Bond appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[architectuul]

Let's Build Pyramids: Why to Destroy Cities and Capitalism!

“We must fill our eyes and ears with things that are the beginning of a great dream. Someone must shout that we’ll build the pyramids. It doesn’t matter if we don’t. We must feel that wish. We must stretch the corners of the soul like a sheet.”  — from Domenico’s speech, Nostalghia

For a series of different reasons, Andrej Tarkovski’s Nostalghia seems very actual as it portrays the image of the cities during these days of lockdown. In the most emblematic scene of the film, Domenico, the old madmen who enclosed his family at home for seven years attending the end of the world, gives a public speech from the top of the Equestrian Statues of Marco Aurelio in the Campidoglio square in Rome. Listening to him are a very few groups of mad, foolish and ordinary people standing on the different monumental stairs of Michelangelo’s piazza. In the scene, actors are symmetrically positioned on a precise and identical large-distance from one another echoing, in some rhetorical but also poetical terms, a sort of future scenario on how we’ll have to imagine one of the most crowded spaces in Rome and elsewhere if social distancing becomes a new way of living.

Apart from the poetics of social distancing and its anticipation, what emerges from Tarkovski’s film is also a different perception of space and time opposed to our everyday-life habits: namely when Gorchakov, the protagonist, steps in his large hotel room, where it is shown only the bed and the sink, when he meets Eugenia in the hotel hall and when he visits the thermal bath of Bagno Vignoni. In two hours of film, all these few passages and dialogs are shown very slowly, slow shootings with only a few actors, offering a sort of dilated space, which again recalls how cities and metropolis have been spatially transformed from when silence and emptiness reigns supreme since Covid-19 spread globally. In these days, which seems that will last for a long time, seen from the point of view of domestic segregation (mediatically called quarantine), comes clear on how much we are used to and educated to live in cities and how we suffer it now. We all work in offices, study in schools and universities, consume in supermarkets and shops and do travel for all these reasons abroad, away from home, which we use only as a sleeping-place when we turn back from outside by car, tram or bus.

Assuming all these activities and rituals as fundamental aspects for reproducing life, while thinking also to the urban form of contemporary towns, historical centers, metropolis and megalopolis, it clearly emerges that the very reason behind these common rituals are mobility and circulation. As we all can observe, without working infrastructures, without metros, tram-lines, car roads and highways, cities would have no sense. I thus argue that this is related to a contemporary crisis of space, which is a very tangible condition in actual problematics such as climate change, pandemic crisis, scarcity of land in cities as also in the countryside, as well as the property issue and housing shortage, the problem of minimum dwellings and high rents, conditions that are strongly related to the existence of the city and its urban form.

Wuhan: No One Cares

Who did theorize well the dialectic between circulation and the crisis of space was Karl Marx. In his Grundrisse Notebooks, Marx argues that within the circulation process, which is part of the whole process of production, Capital through the concept of time destroys the concept of space itself: “Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus, the creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time– becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.” [1] The circulation process, namely the process of exchange of goods, labor force, money and capitals, is the process where products are transformed into goods and this takes place within the so-called global market. 

As Marx put it out, in order to surpass any barrier, the production of cheap means of communication and transportation is fundamental to capital, that is why their realization is promoted by capital itself: “The sea route, as the route which moves and is transformed under its own impetus, is that of trading peoples ϰατ᾽ ἐξοχήν [pur excellence]. On the other side, highways originally fall to the community, later for a long period to the governments, as pure deductions from production, deducted from the common surplus product of the country, but do not constitute a source of its wealth, i.e. do not cover their production costs.” [2] To say it in more simplistic words, it is capital alone or through the intervention of the State that needs to build streets and communication routes connecting cities (market centers) through the territory, and doing so as quick as possible.

As we think to the form of the city since its origins, as highlighted by Henry Heller in his book The Birth of Capitalism: A 21st Century Perspective, the urban fabric of the medieval town was a fundamental apparatus in accelerating the passage from feudalism to capitalism. Collecting different arguments of historians and researchers on feudalism, Heller tries to explain the role of the formation of towns in a passage that coincided with the rise of the town both as a marketplace and as a terrain of class struggles. 

From the contemporary point of view of its most sophisticated form that is financial capitalism, David Harvey have always asserted that this aspect of accumulation and exchange is embodied in the ideology of the political agendas of growth. As highlighted by Harvey in one his lecture at Harvard Senior Loeb Scholar, after the 2008 crisis, while the UE promoted austerity policies, on the contrary, countries like Brazil or China pointed towards extreme growth (and urbanization) implementing large investments in order to increase employments and escape from economic depression. Examples like the Chinese project launched in 2013 to merge together Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei into a megalopolis of 130 million people called Jing-Jin-Ji, demonstrates not a mere imperialistic geo-strategic plan, but it also reconfigures the logic of financial capital applied to an archetype which does exists as capitalism does too: the city. In such a context, criticizing the city means contemporarily criticizing capitalism and its logics of production and reproduction. For this reason, through the history of architecture and urbanism the unbearable aura of capitalism and its logics has produced many alternatives by proposing models that served as attempts to escape from, to govern and to destroy it.

University of North Carolina Campus (1860). | Source: Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition

Escape was one of the main reasons behind the invention and ethos of campus planning in the USA in late 1700s. When university and education in the United States became a political project, for many campus planners the only way to make education efficacious was to build them far away from the city, in order to avoid its corruption, distractions, profligacy and chaos. The word campus, coming from Latin campo that literally means an open field, according to Paul Venable Turner was first used at Princeton College in the 1770s referring to the property land of its first college building [3]. 

From then, putting a group of buildings within the idyllic nature enhanced an alternative to organize life differently. Eliphalet Not, president of Union College during 1804-66, became popular through college pioneers for having invented a way of living and a new governance based on family life principles. During Nott’s governance, each professor was responsible of his class and had to consider it as his enlarged own family. This model of less-control over students structured a new democratic life that corresponded also to the architectural form of the college designed by French architect and landscaper Joseph-Jacques Ramée: a rotunda at the center of the campus and symmetrical wings of dormitories and classes limiting a natural common space where students and professors could live and work together as members of a large family. 

Union College, Schenectady (NY), Project and drawings by Joseph-Jacques Ramée (1813). | Source: Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition

Revisiting the same architectural and organizational model, the spread over the American territory of almost identical models such as Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia University, first projects for the Davidson College in North Carolina, plans for a National University near Washington and the Stanford University, echoed in certain ways Robert Owen’s parallelograms for a socialist utopia where mutual-cooperation based on living, working and centralized education could be organized within self-sufficient bodies spread over a farming landscape [8]. Everything but socialism, American university campuses however represented a dilated spatiality inhabited by students moving around in groups, social distanced or close to each other, and with buildings placed here-and-there into an open field full of trees, lakes, forests and idyllic green.

Ville Contemporaine. | Source Der Stadtstreicher

Fascinated by this same depiction of university campuses, yet operating through the same ideals of nature, but more perverse and decisive, Le Corbusier’s plans of Ville Contemporaine for three million inhabitants of 1922 and Plan Voisin of 1925, strongly opposing urbanism as we are all used to know it, can be considered as one of the most radical attempts to destroy the city and its historical aura. 

Plan Voisin. | Source Charnel House

While in both the two proposals the Swiss architect insisted on demolishing an entire piece of historical Paris for erecting his prototypical settlement with towers and low-rise buildings into an enormous park, the very response to the logic of capitalism was his Industrial Linear City elaborated together with the CIAM-France group of the ASCORAL in 1942-43 [5]. In the latter, Le Corbusier imagined a series of territorial strips (with highways and railways) connecting European most important historical centers through horizontal and vertical territorial axis containing housing, productive buildings and free-standing agricultural settlements. 

Diagram of the Industrial Linear City through Europe and fragment of the linear city connecting two historical centers (1942-43), Le Corbusier + ASCORAL. | Source Le Corbusier - Œuvre complète Volume 4: 1938-1946

In his vision he literally stretched the typical industrial city assuming the highway, that became a greenway, as its structural form: thus, historical centers in Le Corbusier’s vision were reduced into ordinary administrative bodies and exchange hubs—likely in the same way we intend Amazon distribution centers operating today—connected to each other by highways bordered with a green belt and rhythmed through factories and isolated Unité d’Habitations, horizontal garden-cities and facilities. The linear form assumed the infrastructure by explicating it in a new architecture dispositive for a new dilated city, the habitability of which could be imagined by thinking to the point of view of an adventure foreigner-guy traveling and sleeping in highway motels when stopping in filling stations.Though, rather than a real alternative to the capitalistic city, Le Corbusier’s linear city can be considered as a design diagram to control and govern accumulation and to give a specific form to the logic of growth against that neoliberalist laissez faire model that came after Le Corbusier era.

Detail of the Industrial Linear City (1942-43), Le Corbusier + ASCORAL. | Source: Le Corbusier - Œuvre complète Volume 4: 1938-1946

What Le Corbusier presented as a mere opposition, the disurbanization of the world imagined by the Italian collective Superstudio with their Continuous Monument, an enormous infinite white-grid element cannibalizing the city, to quote a very potent expression used by the Italian architectural historian Roberto Gargiani, collects all the frustration of an entire young generation emerging from the political struggles between 1968 and 1977 against industrial capitalism in Europe. While in the first collages of 1969-70 this imposing element cannibalizes the city in the sense that it really penetrates it by destroying emblematic landscapes such as Graz, Madrid, Rome, Florence and New York, in the latest collages of 1970-72 this immense monument could finally run through in full liberty: into world’s nature, canyons, deserts, valleys and rivers [6]. 

As Gargiani and Beatrice Lampariello have carefully narrated in their book Il Monumento Continuo di Superstudio, tracing its origins, infrastructure highways and viaducts were crucial references on the Superstudio research discourse by images as these infrastructures really addressed them on how to use one of the most emblematic inventions of capitalism for circulation in favor to a new spatial alternative. Inside the Continuous Monument, echoing Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace interior,—there have to be no rooms, no labor-division, no hierarchies, no typology and no program—just a free and pure envelope of nothingness. Rituals and forms of life had to take form in the same way urban communes and hippies did and, perhaps, life inside has to be governed in the same way the Italian autonomists were politically organized: through their same historical effort that helped to understand and made visible the inhabitability of the city.  

Fragment of the Continuous Monument entitled Manhattan Empire State Building, Superstudio (1969-70) 

It was nevertheless auspicabile that such critics emerged in times of gran abundance, on the apogee—to put it with Adam Smith terms—of the wealth of the nations. Although during modern and post-modern history of architecture there were many other examples going on the same direction, even more radical and polemic (i.e. soviet disurbanism linear aggregation of individual cells with episodic collective buildings is the most emblematic example towards the destruction of the capitalist city) [7], the three strategies analyzed above should tackle not a new projective aura, but, on the opposite, a ferocious critic to what have been done till now. The point is not to advance specific solutions but to raise questions and to address a hysterical reaction to everyday obviousness: Why are we at this point? Why streets and squares are there and we cannot reach them? Why did we all build them if, in a snap of fingers, they become inhabitable? Perhaps, because they have always been inhabitable—inhuman.

Fragment of the Continuous Monument On the River, Superstudio (1969-70) 

Going back to Tarkovski’s message, the invitation to build Pyramids should be read not as a mere nostalghia of how we were living before the global lockdown. It should rather serve to think on an historical moment that is yet to come and could give the possibility to share that common anger that lays in our souls and spirits; to finally express it in the form of a common effort for destroying the command of capitalism and building marvelous pyramids for a new form of democracy.

- Marson Korbi

---

[1], [2] Marx, K. (1073). Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, London: Penguin, 442, 449.

[3] Venable Turner, P. (1984). Campus: An American Planning Tradition Cambridge, MIT Press, 47.

[4] Benevolo, L. (2005). Le origini dell’urbanistica moderna,  Laterza.

[5] Le Corbusier, eds. Willy Boesiger, Oeuvre Complète (1991). Zurich: Les Editions D'Architecture, 72-75.

[6] Gargiani, R., Lampariello,B. (2019). Il Monumento Continuo di Superstudio. Eccesso del razionalismo e strategia del rifiuto, Genova: Sagep Editori.

[7] Aureli, P. A., Martino, T. (2018). The Forest and the Cell: Notes on Mosej Ginzburg's Green City. Harvard Design Magazine, no. 45.

[thealpacalypse-archive]

A handy guide to avoid accidental transphobia

For cis people in the Druck fandom who write fic, headcanons or meta and don’t wanna mess up 

Including questions like: Is David trans? Is he beautiful? Is he wearing a binder this whole damn time?? What’s his story?

hey everybody, I’ve debated making this post for a while now because I don’t want to seem ungrateful to the people who are already trying, and I know that there are other trans people in this fandom who are already doing a pretty good job educating people, but then again, why not share my thoughts as well. 

In this post, I’ll collect a few headcanons, meta, and other discussions that i’ve seen around here and that made me personally uncomfortable - now be aware that i’m only one trans person and that other people can have other opinions on this, but also i’ve done trans activism for a few years now and i’m a gender studies major, so I definitely know what i’m talking about. also, a fair warning: this is gonna get long as heck. okay, let’s go.

Is David trans? The truth is: We don’t know yet. We only know that the actor who plays him, Lukas Alexander, is a trans guy. Now I’ve seen various people speculate if that automatically has to mean that David is trans as well, and obviously, no. David could be cis for all we know, and yes, casting trans actors in cis roles can be a pretty cool thing. However, if you’re cis, it would be cool if you reblog trans people’s opinions on this instead of shouting loudly about your own opinion, especially if it is that David should be cis for whatever reason. Why is that problematic? Trans activists are currently fighting for representation in media. There aren’t many trans characters we can look up to, especially not such young characters in a show that has such a big impact on a generation of young people. Many trans teenagers have never seen themselves represented in media, and many trans adults like myself are still craving for that good, good representation. Most of the time when we get trans characters, they’re played by cis actors - and because it’s mostly cis men who play trans women and cis women who play trans men, it perpetuates the idea that trans people are just especially well dressed up men and women who trick people into believing they’re ‘the other sex’. (ugh) Even though that’s a different problem, it links to this one as well, because trans stories in media are rare, and it’s even rarer to have them portrayed by trans actors. Yes, it would be revolutionary and gender-redefining if trans actors could play cis characters (or just characters whose cis or trans status is never brought up in the first place), but that’s one step ahead of the game in my opinion and tbh, cis people saying that they want David to be cis for whatever reason is just... suspicious.

Is David beautiful? Well, I’m sure we can all agree that this boy is a sight for sore eyes, and i’m pretty proud of this fandom for weeding out the transphobic assholes who called him ugly at the beginning of the season. I’m sure by now they’ve all seen the error of their ways because HECK, in levels of attractiveness, David is a king. Though it might not be the best to call him ‘beautiful’, ‘pretty’ or other usually female-gendered words when you’re cis and describing him. Why is that problematic? Listen, there’s absolutely nothing inherently bad about calling boys pretty or beautiful or whatever - I personally am an absolute goner when it comes to soft boys™ and their aesthetics, and I also think that denying boys to be soft and pretty is misogyny in a way, because it’s implying that female-coded things are bad. However, there are many trans boys (and other trans and nonbinary folks who were assigned female at birth) who feel uncomfortable when these words are used for them because it can be linked to misgendering or remind them of times before they were out. Trans people are often highly aware of their body and looks, because the way we look is heavily observed, judged and policed by society, and most of the time, being seen the (gendered) way we identify is the only way we get respect and basic decency. We don’t know yet if David personally has a problem with being called beautiful or whatever, but we also don’t know how the actor who plays him feels about that, and there are a couple of trans boys in this fandom who’ve already expressed their discomfort with these words. So in order to protect them and make this fandom safe for them, it seems like a small price to pay to consider our choice of words more carefully when we describe David, and try to avoid female-coded words.

What about David’s chest? Now this one is tricky. I’ve seen discussions about it a lot: Does David wear a binder, did he wear it the whole time he was with Matteo, does he maybe not even bind, did he have a mastectomy? The underlying tone of these discussions is worry - we all want David to be safe and comfortable, and seriously, let me tell you once and for all: a binder shouldn’t be worn longer than 8 hours a day, it shouldn’t be worn when sleeping, and it shouldn’t be worn when doing sports (also relevant for our jock boy). It’s not safe and it can heavily damage the breast tissue, ribs, and lungs - it can be literally life-threatening. It’s perfectly fine to worry about this, but it still feels uncomfortable to watch cis people debate the state of a trans boy’s body in such detail. Why is that problematic? Trans people’s bodies have always been scrutinized and judged - by medicine, by the state, by society as a whole. We always have to prove ourselves and our bodies, and convince people that we’re not just tricking them into believing we’re someone we are not. A lot of ‘true womanhood’ or ‘true manhood’ apparently revolves around genitalia, at least cis people seem to think so. Which is why so many trans people (and let’s be real here, especially trans women) have to deal with the question: “Have you had the surgery yet?” - meaning, did they already undergo the one surgery among the various ones trans people might consider, that reshapes their genitalia in a way that is acceptable to society. Cis people often use these questions about our bodies and the way we change them to delegitimatize us and take away our status as a ‘real’ man or woman. Other than that, trans people’s bodies often get portrayed as something freakishly exotic by cis people; there’s a certain voyeurism about it, and it often gets sexualized - just look at the way trans women are treated in mainstream porn. Cis people examining our bodies, theorizing about what kind of operations we’ve had or haven’t had yet, and possibly sexualizing or belittling/dehumanizing us for it, that will always be very thin ice, because it comes with a lot of emotional baggage for trans people individually and as a community.

What’s David’s backstory? We’re all wondering that, especially since Druck is mixing up the whole Skam setting so much and we really don’t know what they have in store for us. Obviously I’m just as thirsty for theories as the rest of the fandom, but I’ve also read a few things that kinda irked me.  Here’s what to avoid: Referring to David as a girl or female in any way, speaking about him in the past with “she/her”-pronouns or coming up with a deadname for him. Oh lord please don’t. It’s nothing but misgendering and it’s so, so wrong. If you’re cis, also please reconsider posting headcanons for his backstory that contain heavy transphobia. Not only can that trigger trans people in the fandom (please use trigger warnings for that stuff, okay?), but there’s also a long history of cis people taking trans narratives away from us and making them only about suffering and pain. Sure, dysphoria sucks, the discrimination sucks, but me, a trans person, complaining about these things is WAY different from a cis person fantasizing about a really painful, possibly violent life for a trans character. Sure I want realism and I want a platform where we can discuss the truly awful experiences many of us have because we’re trans, but I wish that cis people would boost trans voices for that instead of coming up with their own fucked up fantasies about how badly a trans character might have been treated. If you’re writing fic or meta and you want to find an explanation why David changed schools so close to the end of the school year, you don’t have to dig deep into the trans pain to explain it. It’s not that uncommon for trans people to change schools, work places, etc. once they’ve transitioned far enough to feel comfortable - a new start makes the stuff like name changes, new gender presentation, etc. easier. And even if David’d move is related to transphobic experiences, I don’t really need to read detailed descriptions of it. You wouldn’t want to obsess over someone else’s trauma in vivid detail in front of them, so please be cautious when writing about something that’s seen as traumatic by many trans people.

Other useful pointers: There are trans people in this fandom who voice their opinions - seek them out, listen to them, boost their voices, don’t speak over them when they talk about trans experiences. Don’t focus too much on the fact that David is (or might be) trans. Like sure, include that in your writing, but make sure you know that it’s not the only and not the most interesting thing about him. In most regards, he’s just a boy, and he has a lot of character traits that tell us just as much about him, like the fact that he’s really closed-off, competitive af, artistic, a music lover and a complete emo dork, seems to have an active flight-or-fight response,... you see what i’m getting at. Let’s obsess about David on these terms, and I’m sure we’ll get a whole lot of new and interesting meta and fic about him that all of us can enjoy. 

[wallofweird]

It’s canon that that is why they slept together though. Kevin told Kate that he slept with Madison because he was heartbroken over Sophie, and “hey at least I get points for not having sex with her right?” and then he told Madison it was a stupid thing. But I think that’s the charm, it’s not romantic.... yet. It’s an anti love story that turns into something so real. I can’t wait to see it unfold

I get that, but I wouldn’t accept or rule out any motive just yet. The characters can be in denial, lie or be overall unreliable sometimes. We’ve seen it and I believe Kevin is the worst of them in this aspect. I mean, the guy thought he was falling in love with a woman he spent a few hours with and the next day Kevin was convinced he’d never stopped loving his ex-wife (that after falling in love with Zoe and dating her for a whole year). So, since we don’t have any idea of what exactly happened between the time they had tea and he woke up at Madison’s place, I think we can all theorize a little bit.

Personally, I hate the idea of Kevin sleeping with her because they were both upset and alone. I wouldn’t mind if that wasn’t such a common for him, but since it is, I find it a little frustrating that he has slept with almost every woman he’s interacted with that wasn’t part of his family. Even more so when it is out of sadness and loneliness. I’ve always wanted to see a situation where he would handle these things in a healthier way. Specially if the other person is feeling as down as he is, I’ve always wanted to see him not taking the opportunity and being there for them instead.

That said, I really expect we get flashbacks of that day. I hope we see them having a good time and forgetting about their problems for a second and sleeping together because they felt like it. It doesn’t have to be a fairytale thing, I know they’re not in love, but for me it would be utterly disappointing if his children had been conceived in such a meaningless and sort of problematic way. I’m already a little let down with the fact this was an accident, I was really rooting for him to settle down and the pregnancy to be something planned, specially since he’s matured so much over the last couple of seasons... Anyway, I just hope there can be a good story to come out of this and I also want him and Madison to become friends first, because another thing I’ve always hated is how Kevin simply jumps into relationships. I’d like to see every single step of their story.

Regarding Kevin telling Madison it was “a stupid thing”, I don’t take that way too seriously. He was overwhelmed. Rebecca had decided to undergo a treatment (basically) against her will, he was having this terrible fight with his brother and even though he is handling Rebecca’s health condition a little better, it is still heartbreaking. He had a lot on his plate and Kevin looked like he didn’t want any company, so he said something to make her go way. However, I believe he wouldn’t have tried to dismiss her if none of those things had happened. Because it was obvious she wasn’t there to make a move on him or anything, her facial expressions and body language were serious and it was clear she had something important to tell. If the situation had been different and lighter, I believe Kevin would’ve connected the dots and listened to what she had to say immediately. I also think he would’ve reacted better to it, I’d say he would’ve even gotten a little happy. Sure it wasn’t the way he planned, but it’s still what he wanted and under different circumstances I guess Kevin would’ve gotten excited. Not excited to the point of jumping around and screaming because the situation is still a little weird, but at least excited enough to show a little bit of enthusiasm and smile right away.

You could see that when Kevin went back to the house he was already a little lighter. Kevin talked to Madison in a more understanding and soft way and refrained himself of saying anything that might would’ve hurt her, like when he said “I want this and maybe I didn’t think it would b...”. Kevin stopped right there, he didn’t want Madison to think he would love their kids any less just because the pregnancy was accidental or the result of a one-night stand. Kevin wanted her to be sure he wanted the children and he will be around for her too if she needs it.

Anyway, we can’t really know for sure what has happened and what’s yet to come, we have to wait, but it is nice to theorize about it and see everyone’s take on it as well. I’m positive it will be enjoyable, specially because Justin is excited and the stuff he teases never disappoint. :) x